Thursday, May 7, 2009

Terra Incognita 84 Durban II, Hindu Nationalism and Alistair Crooke

Terra Incognita
Issue 84

“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

May 7th, 2009

1) The truth about Durban II: People complain that the U.N anti-racism conference called Durban II was ‘hijacked’ by third world countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Third world countries and their antics are merely playing within the rules, lies and rhetoric set up by the people who created the U.N. The entire day of an ‘anti-racism’ conference is a Western notion. The fact that the conference was in itself racist is no surprise, western ‘peace’ and ‘human rights’ movements have for many years championed genocide and called it ‘peace’ and championed terrorism and called it ‘human rights’. From Pol Pot to Ahmadinjed and Castro and Chavez, all the third world leaders merely learned well from the West how to exploit its rhetoric and were widely supported by leftist wealthy intellectual collaborators.


2) Why do people condemn Hindu Nationalism? The answer may be connected to a disdain for Zionism: The virulent hatred of Hindutva found among intellectuals and ‘right thinking’ individuals from India to the U.S is part and parcel of the same hatred for the existence of Israel. Is it a coincidence that Gandhi encouraged the Jews to kill themselves and also opposed Zionism only to be gunned down by a hero of Hindutva for betraying his country, authoring an introduction to the Koran and encouragint he ethnic-cleansing and genocide of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan?

3) Alastair Crooke, MI6 and the hatred of the West: Alastair Crooke, 30 year veteran of MI6 has authored a new book that brings Islamism to the West and argues that is merely resisting capitalism. Crooke is merely the latest in a century long string of members of the British elite and veterans of the secret service who have come to hate the West. From Harry St. John Philby to his son Kim a line runs directly to Crooke.



The truth about Durban II
Seth J. Frantzman
April 23rd, 2009

Reasonable people are aware of the travesty of the UN anti-racism conference entitled Durban II that took place in Geneva recently. The appearance of the nationalist holocaust denier Mahmud Ahmadinjed overshadowed the event, making a conference that was anti-racism actually a racist conference. People condemn the UN. People condemn Ahmadinjed and some condemn the Muslim and third world countries that are accused of ‘hijacking’ the organization and ‘distorting’ the meaning of human rights.
But those who condemn it are wrong. They are wrong not because they condemn the ridiculousness of it all but because they don’t understand what underpins the entire process and rhetoric. Human rights is an invention of the West. Freedom of Speech is an invention of the West. Racism and anti-racism are ideas invented in the West. Xenophobia and protesting against it are inventions of the West. All of the ideas and dialogue and conventions and panels that underpin everything that happened at the conference is part of the West. The “unacceptable behavior” that resulted in the banning of Jewish groups from the conference is part and parcel of the West. On both sides it is Western. The outburst of the protesters and the idea that there is some sort of ‘acceptable behaviour’. Who do you think wrote the rules for that behavior, the people in the Third World who barely know how to behave? No. It was people from the West who wrote up the rules about what ‘behavoir’ was acceptable.

The entire idea of having an ‘anti-racism conference’ is a Western idea. The idea of conferences is Western. The idea of a United Nations is western. The entire idea of ‘peace’ and ‘world peace’ are Western. No other tradition understands or recognizes these ridiculous ideas. People have complained that the conference only focused on Israel as a violator of human rights and that the fact that Iran and Libya chaired the committee setting up the conference is a ‘hypocrisy’. But such hypocrisy was all built into the UN when it was created after World War Two. The entire idea that some giant ungainly bureaucracy could provide ‘collective security’ is a myth of the West. No other region of the world has such as ridiculous organization, except perhaps the Organization of African States, whose creation was also envisioned by Western do-gooders.

People wonder ‘why doesn’t the conference note racism in other countries like Iran?’ What do people expect. The idea of racism is western and it was brought to these other countries by western whites. These Western whites told the natives that “the white man is racist against you.” This is the narrative that these people learned. When tribes in Rwanda massacred and genocided eachother they didn’t see it as racism. People in Iran cannot imagine that the hatred and discrimination against black Iranians in south Iran is ‘racist’ because such a concept does not exist. There cannot be racism in countries outside the West because these people, even when they are all obviously racist, cannot understand the idea. Even when the Turks were busy raping and murdering all the Armenians, or when Palestinians call Jews dogs and blow themselves up or when Arabs in Sudan call the blacks “Kaffir” there is no idea that this is racism. This is entirely the fault of the West which communicated to these people the liberal idea of ‘anti-colonialism’. The fact is obvious. Whether it is white Mexican woman, descendants of
Spaniards who deride Indians as ‘dirty savages’ complaining that she suffers racism as a ‘hispanic’ or it is white Iranians in an Iranian film trying to ‘wash the black off’ a black child from southern Iran or it is a Palestinian claiming that the fact that no white Arab will marry a descendant of slaves living in Rahat in Israel is not slavery we live in a world of the lie of racism, the western leftist colonization of our mind by the concept of racism and the forcing of the whole world to believe in a twisted concept of racism.

Durban II represents everything that underpins the West and its leftists; weakness, soft racism, bureaucracy, hate, extremism, hate disguised as ‘justice’, and appeasement. The genious of the West in creating the committees and processes and rules underpinning Durban II is that the West was able to export the extreme dictatorial ways of extremist hate regimes that are racist to the center of Europe to continue their dictatorial ways. In a ridiculous place that claims to believe in free speech, inside the UN chamber there was no free speech. There was the speech of Amadinjed and their was Libya chairing a session in which a doctor who tried to mention Libyan tortures of him, based solely on the fact that he was a foreigner. During the session the doctor was silenced and ordered to leave.

Only Europe. Only the West and all it represents could create something like this where the dictatorship that is Libya could be transported to an international gathering so it would be allowed to dictate the entire gathering, not just in its own country.
People shouldn’t be shocked by Durban II. They should look into their own souls. The Third World didn’t ‘hijack’ Durban II, it just played by the rules set down by the idealist Western leftists who created the UN in the first place. The West and Franz Fannon and Albert Memmi were the ones that wrote ‘Wretched of the Nations’ and ‘Colonizer and the Colonized’. They communicated the message “you are colonized, you are victims, you suffer racism.” The people thus received a blank check to engage in whatever evil they wanted in the name of opposing these things. They butchered, murdered, genocided, ethnically-cleansed and slaughtered and all in the name of the Western ideal of ‘justice’ and ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘anti-racism’ and ‘peace’. Albeit the savage behavior of these people palled in comparison to the West’s own Nazism and their savage behavior had existed before Fannon and Memmi. What happened is that their actions, of cruel murder and terrorism and genocided simply received an excuse in Western terms. When these people slaughtered eachother it was understood in the ‘context of colonialism’. There could’nt be racism between ‘Third World Peoples’. No. Racism only exists from the ‘powerful’ against the ‘weak’ and from ‘white’ to ‘black’. That is why Durban II could never condemn the Sudanese Genocide as a racial conflict because there can’t be racism among ‘native peoples’ or ‘between Muslims’. The West created these myths of the ‘tolerant east’ and ‘tolerant multi-racial Islam’.

To destroy Durban II and its ‘hijacking’ one need only destroy the liberalistic underpinning of the West. Remember the fall of South Africa. Remember what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated? “Racism arrived in South Africa in 1652 with the arrival of the first colonizers.” That myth of a ‘non-racist’ indigenous wonderful noble savage utopia being invaded by ‘white racists’ is part and parcel of the entire Western liberal narrative that underpins everything the collective Western peace-minded justice types believe in. Africans didn’t understand in the 17th century that these few hundred Dutch immigrants with their stone church building and boats were ‘white racists’. They understood they were different. They were busy fighting one another. When the Zulus systematically destroyed neighbouring tribes and smaller Zulu tribes that would not submit to Shaka those people being destroyed looked to the ‘racist whites’ for protection and guns. But the neatly crafted ‘narrative’ of whiteness and blackness was created in 1988 by Rhodes University professor Julian Cobbing who claimed that the Mfecane or ‘crushing period’ when the Zulus scattered tribes all across Southern Africa, was actually an Apartheid conspiracy. How could something that happened in the 1820s be a conspiracy of something from the 1960s? It turned out the Apartheid historians exaggerated the crushing in order to create a myth of black on black violence. Cobbing ‘proved’ that European slave traders forced the Zulu to engage in the destruction of neighbouring tribes, to what end or why is not clear, since there were few slavers operating in the area at the time nor did the Zulus sell their victims to Europeans. No matter. It reminds one of the riots against Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa in May of 2008. This was black on black of course. But what was the reason? Reporters and commentators noted that it was the ‘legacy of apartheid’. This is liberalism at its best. The Mfecane of 1820 can be said to be an ‘apartheid conspiracy’ even though descriptions of it are proudly related even in Zulu history from the period. The slaughter of Zimbabwe immigrants by machete wielding Zulus and Xhosas in 2008 can be said to be because of Apartheid, no matter that Apartheid ended 14 years ago and the 20 year olds engaging in the riots have no memory of it. That is Durban II. It is the creation of a liberal myth, a myth of race and racism and anti-racism. Then people wonder “why doesn’t Durban II find any racism in the world except in Israel?” Because that is what liberalism and white people told people in the Third World to find. Europe told them to find racism only in Israel. Europeans told them that there is only one racist country. No matter how many Arabs are crammed into tenaments in Paris, no matter how many blacks in Iran have their skin washed to ‘get the black out’, no matter how many ‘kaffirs’ die in Sudan, no matter how many Philipinos are beheaded in Saudi or how many Ethiopians are kidnapped to be sold into slavery in the UAE, no matter how many Han and Hui Chinese are attacked by Tibetans angry at their settlement in Lhasa by the government, no matter how many murders and rapes and slaves are sold in their world and how many people slaughter and genocide and murder eachother, there will never be any racism or xenophobia or ‘related intolerance’ outside of what liberalism has created. Liberalism created, for instance, “islamophobia” as the newest bogey-man that we all have to be worried about. The new racism of the 21st century is “islamophobia”.

Don’t blame these people at Durban II for their extraordinary racist and hateful and extremist behavior. The venue was given to it by Europeans. The money for it came from America and other wealthy countries. It is run ‘demcoratically’ so that means that it is run by Muslim countries since there are more of them and Liberalism gives it its talking points and rhetoric. Every single value found at Durban II, even some of the words and rhetoric of Ahmadnjed, were crafted and learned in the West. To destroy Durban III the entire underpinnings of the West and its ‘anti-racism’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘peace’ and ‘collective security’ and ‘talking rather than fighting’ and ‘conferences’ must be undone. The entire of infrastructure of the UN must be undone. Until that is done don’t expect Muslim nations to continue to use the tool as Muslims know how to do, to promote their nationalistic religious beliefs. They are only being themselves and playing by the rules of the West and Fannon and Memmi. They didn’t ‘hijack’ the UN, the UN should never have been allowed to grow into its present form.


Why do people condemn Hindu Nationalism? The answer may be connected to a disdain for Zionism.

Seth J. Frantzman
April 28th, 2009

In a recent book entitled The Hindus: Alternative History Wendy Doniger claims that Hinduism was invented by the British. Doniger is a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. She argues that Hinduism’s unity and its holy Vedas are primarily a myth created by Protestants who sought a “unified Hinduism”. She further argues that upper-caste Brahmins and other elites in India collaborated with the British and invented a “British-Brahmin version of Hinduism-one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries.” These ‘bad Hindus’ are accused of having an inferiority complex. She claims that the Hindu Nationalism (Hindutva) of today thus uses a fake Hinduism for its own historiography and that she seeks to tell an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they [the nationalists] tell.”

When it comes to classic Hindu texts such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata she condemns them for their violence. The Mughal Muslim emperors who colonized India for Islam for three hundred years were, according to a reviewer, “motivated by real politik rather than religious fundamentalism” when they destroyed thousands of Hindu temples and sold hundreds of thousands of Hindus into slavery. According t Pankaj Mishra, an author who has praised the book, Doniger should be admired for striding “intrepidly into a polemical arena almost as treacherous as Israel-Arab relations.” Mishra calls Hindu Nationalism the “Indian heirs to British imperialists who invented ‘Hinduism’” and accuses them of wanting to create a “culturally-homogenous and militant nation-state.”

Reading this virulent condemnation of Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism one is reminded of European-Jewish intellectual Tony Judt’s condemnation of Israel; “the very idea of a Jewish state [is] rooted in another time and place…in a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry..[it is] dysfunctional…an anachronism.” Doniger’s claim that Hinduism was invented in the 19th century bares a striking resemblance to Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand’s claim in his book When and How the Jewish People was invented (2008) that Jews are not a “nation-race” but rather a colorful amalgam of converts.

Almost every book on modern India is full of condemnations for Hindu Nationalism which is seen as the anti-thesis of Gandhi’s ‘good’ pacifism. Professors in the West are full of attempts to re-write Hindu claims that their temples were destroyed by the Muslims and either claim there were no Hindu temples or excuse the mass destruction of them and the building of Mosques atop them. Excusing the imposition of slavery on Hindus by Islamic invaders who arrived in large numbers in the 11th century under Mahmud of Ghazna is a little harder, but even it is excused.

Hindu Nationalism, like Zionism, is condemned for having a “nationalist archeology.” Critiquing Israeli archeology Nachman Ben Yehuda has described the Myth of Masada and Nadia Abu el-Haj has written on ‘reflections on archeology and Israeli settler-nationhood’. Ramachandra Guha in his India After Gandhi writes that the Hindu temple at Ayodha that was destroyed in the 16th century by the Mughal Emperor Buber to build the Babri Mosque was merely the site of “Hindu sentiment and myth” and not the historical birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.

There is a connection between the contempt for Hindu Nationalism and the disdain for Zionism that exists in many circles. They are widely condemned for similar things. Both are accused of inventing a history for their people and religion. Both are accused of inventing and perverting archeology. Both are accused of being anachronisms in a world that is supposedly ‘multi-cultural’. Both are seen as militant and anti-Muslim.
But there is another connection that is often over-looked. Both were unlikely victims of Gandhi’s sometimes misplaced pacifism. Gandhi condemned not only Zionism but also encouraged the Jews of Europe to voluntarily submit to Nazism and throw “themselves into the sea from cliffs” in order to please Hitler. Gandhi, a Hindu, penned an introduction to the Koran, a book that is deeply prejudiced against pagan Hinduism, and during the partition of India he excused the ethnic-cleansing of Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan while encouraging India to protect her Muslim minority.

But what truly unites Zionism and Hindu Nationalism is the fact that both represent the aspirations of unique peoples and states. There is only one Hindu state and one Jewish state in the world. Both are accused of daring to declare themselves Jewish and Hindu and thus seek ‘homogeneity’. This accusation is made in a world with some 48 countries with a Muslim majority and 169 Christian majority countries. India and Israel, far from being homogenous anachronisms are tiny drops of diversity in a world that is increasingly homogenous. Hindu nationalism is not a result of a British imperialism anymore than Zionism is, both grew out of a long suppressed and colonized peoples’ dreams for their own country free from foreign rule. Those who want to expose themselves to Hindu nationalism and its true underpinnings should pick up Lal K. Advani’s My Country My Life. Absent of that people should at least give Hinduism, like Judaism, the benefit of the doubt, they are based on real religions and real texts, not myths conjured up in the 19th century.

Alastair Crooke, MI6 and the hatred of the West
May 4, 2009
Seth J. Frantzman

It is not easy to find information on Alistair Crooke, not to be confused by Alistair Cooke, a well known journalist who died in 2004. He was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), studied in Switzerland and at St. Andrew’s in Scotland and received a degree in Economics. What is known is that he worked for MI6, the U.K’s secret intelligence service for more than 30 years. As an agent in the 1980s he worked in Pakistan, running guns to the Mujahadin fighting the Soviets. He was thus part of Charlie Wilson’s ‘war’ in which the U.S government helped fund Islamism’s war against Communism.

According to one biography he then became a “security advisor to Javier Solana, the European Union High Representative and Head of Foreign and Security Policy. He played a role in the negotiations to end the Siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002 and helped facilitate the Palestinian cease-fires of 2002 and 2003. He also was a staff member of the Mitchell Committee that enquired into the causes of the Intifada.” It is not clear when he left MI6, or if he ever left, but it is clear that the British government ended all official employment contracts with him in 2003 in response to fears that he had become completely partial to Islamism.

Now this confidant of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, former spiritual leader of Hamas, Yasser Arafat and Nasrallah, lives in Beirut and has penned a book entitled Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution. In this tome he argues that Islamism is merely “resisting” the West’s “market-based definition of the individual and society.” He has gone one step further than merely writing a book to bring the ideas of Islamism to the West, he has started a ‘Conflicts Forum’ in 2004 in Beirut. The Forum supposedly includes “former spies, diplomats and peace activists.” Mark Perry, a military intelligence and foreign affairs analyst, is the co-director of the forum. Crooke has made it his mission to spread the bible of Islamism in a language the West can understand. He wants to “valorize what they are saying.” He also wants to challenge “western misconceptions.” For Crooke the West’s values are no longer interesting but Islam is being revived and is “in the ascendant.” In addition the Economist’s review of his book accuses him of “1960s campus radicalism” and that he believes “the force used by Islamist movements is to be understood as an act of spiritual, cultural and social resistance.” Crooke believes that Hezbollah’s television station, Al-Manar is part of a “resistance media.”

Crooke’s hatred of the West is merely the latest manifestation of self-hatred of some British elites who have worked in British intelligence in the Middle East. Harry St. John Philby was the first. A radical socialist he joined the Indian Civil Service in 1907. Like Crooke he was not born in the U.K but rather in Sri Lanka and educated at Trinity College at Cambridge. He became an adherent and follower of the Saudi warlord Ibn Saud and Wahhabism and helped provide advice on the best way for this radical Arab family to take over what is now Saudi Arabia. He opposed British entry into the Second World War. He became a dutiful ally of Arab nationalism as well, supporting Nasser against his own country and making anti-Semitic statements.

But it was his son Kim Philby and the ‘Cambridge Five’, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. After working for MI6 and becoming a double agent for the Soviets he ended up in Beirut like Crooke. In Beirut he was unmasked for a second time (the first time prominent people had defended his good name) as a Soviet agent. But during the same time he became an adherent of Arab nationalism and wrote biased articles for the Economist as their correspondent. When he was finally whisked away to the Communist utopia he had so loved it didn’t turn out as he expected. He became an alcoholic and the Communists gave him little honour.
The other Cambridge Five didn’t have life as expected in the USSR either. One died of alcoholism and the other’s wife left him. The utopia was not as expected. One who had enjoyed the freedom of being an open homosexual in upper class British society found that Socialism in action didn’t cater to his sexual orientation as he had expected.
The modern self-hatred of Alistair Crooke and his career for MI6 should not be such a surprise. His loyalty to Islamism mirrors the former loyalties of the Cambridge Five to Communism and Harry St. John Philby’s earlier loyalty to Wahhabism and Arab nationalism. Why does MI6 produce so many people with such a virulent hatred for the West? It is not clear but whatever the problem it is clear that hatred for the West has a long and gloried tradition among certain sectors of the British intelligence community and their prestigious pedigrees. This stretches back to Sir Oswald Mosley’s Nazi-sympathizing right down to the present.

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