Breath of the Beast

Barack, The Fourth Stone Cutter

2010-08-23T17:30:00.005-05:00

The Parable of the Three Stone Cutters has been used to teach many fatuous lessons about motivation and management. I have come to assume that the great majority of the fools who write high-minded lessons around the story of the stonecutters have never done anything nearly as brutal as cutting stone in their lives. They are mainly clueless, soft-handed romantics. If they had ever had to put their lily hands on cold stone on a winter’s morning themselves, they would know that it takes something much more intrinsic- like a workman’s pride- or desperate- like a father’s urge to feed his family to keep a man chipping cold rock, breathing stone dust and splitting his raw hands to shape the stone. For those of you unfamiliar with the tale (or who have succeeded in erasing it from your memory) here is a pretty good version of it you can read without being unduly distressed by the moralizing that usually accompanies it.

Now, most of the re-tellers of this story seem to find the third stonecutter to be the very model employee. Personally, if I were make the choice to let one of these three people go, I would have fired that starry-eyed dreamer. People like that are too easily disillusioned and embittered by a real struggle. But that’s just me…

At any rate, I think there should have been a fourth stonecutter. Here is my addition to the parable:
The fourth stonecutter was the busiest of all. While he worked he talked loudly and confidently to nobody in particular about his stone and the cathedral it would some day be a part of. But the stone he was working on was very small and so jagged that it seemed suited only to be a minor detail piece or architectural bauble. When asked why he was chipping so energetically at such a small block he looked up with a smug grin and said:

I cut this stone to bring hope and change. Oh, make no mistake; before it came under my control this stone was once the largest, squarest and most durable stone ever found in the quarry! Amidst this quarry, whose stone has always been of the highest quality and repute, this one was originally hewn out of the bedrock by a group of craftsmen who came together and labored with skill and endurance to fulfill their keep safe their homes and possessions, feed their children and build an edifice made of the efforts and dreams of workers, soldiers and adventurers- each one his own master. This stone was the paragon. It was obviously a superb candidate to become the cornerstone for a great cathedral.

But I was elected foreman of this quarry last year and I have made it my business to make sure that this wonderful stone is used to the highest purpose- that it serve the greatest good for the most people. This is the reason I was elected. I have made it my life’s work to make sure that all people share equally in the benefits of the stones we quarry here.

Of course, it is true that I had never actually cut a stone before I was elected but I brought the people something more important than that. I promised them hope and change. My only real expertise and experience is in training others to demand that all our stones be used to benefit everyone, regardless of the amount or quality of stone cutting work that they do. By the shear force of my eloquence, the universality of my appeal and stalwart insistence on hope and change above achievement and labor I won the opportunity to see that the great stones of this quarry are rearranged and reconfigured for the good of everyone.

So, you see, the first thing I had to do was make this great stone into an expression of the highest ideals of equality and inclusion. That is why I am working so hard at chipping this stone up. So much beautiful stone, all in one lump, is an insult to those ideals.

As for my quarry mates:

The second stonecutter will do whatever we tell him to do because his only concern is to feed his family. He will work hard for them no matter what we do.

My friend; the third stonecutter will suffer the most, of course. Dreams, cathedrals and grandeur will have no place in my world of hope and change. We don’t need a cathedral for broken secular dreams. There is no need of big block walls for a fortress. Who would believe that we would fight to to defend a dream for which we go abroad and apologize so willingly? We certainly to not need stout stones to build strong banks when they have done their best to disburse their monies into home mortgages and other loans to people without the means to pay on them.

Hope without knowing what to hope for and change with no goal in mind become pretty stark and small after a while. The only romanticism here in my quarry is the utopia of equality and there is nothing dazzling about half the ppopulation getting things they do not work for and the other half slaving to buy them those things.

It will not be easy for him. He will have to change the reason that he cuts stone. Perhaps little, personal monuments- like polished gravestones will make him feel better. We will always need them.

But it is the first stonecutter that I worry about the most. This plain spoken man has pride and he knows who he is. He will keep on cutting true stone. He sees himself as a stonecutter and will cut on no matter what. He has the strength and the independence to know when his cutting is being ill-used. He will not adjust well to making crooked, jagged little stones and he will insist on being rewarded for his effort. Mark my words, We must keep an eye on that first stonecutter.

Pride Toronto Turns into Gay Suicide Celebration

2010-06-24T07:47:00.010-05:00

They should call it Shame Toronto! My friend Blazing Cat Fur has news from Canada about one of the most insane examples of Progressive suicide agitating you will ever see. It seems as though the folks at Pride Toronto (there is a misnomer for you!) care more about hating Jews than they do advancing the cause of gay dignity (or even survival!).

They have reversed rules for their parade that will enable gay fringe groups to demonstrate against what they call Israeli Apartheid. Blazing Cat Fur is following it in depth- Including this, my letter a version of which I have sent to every corporate sponsor of Pride Toronto with whom I do business. I hope everyone will do the same.

I know a great deal about suicide (see below) and this is surely a case.

I regret to say that I will no longer be enjoying your beer. I have been buying and enjoying your products for almost forty years. I am sick at heart to see that your Canadian company is a "Premier Sponsor" of an event that used to stand for tolerance and dignity and has now been hijacked and turned into a tool of extremists and hate mongers. I am speaking of the "Pride Toronto" event and it's board's decision to allow the expression of "Israeli Apartheid" as an acceptable message. Let alone that this is a concern that is entirely out side of the event's mission, it is actually proof that hating Jews and Israel is more important to some segment of the Toronto gay community than supporting gay pride or even gay survival.

This, after all, is a propaganda slogan designed to undermine the legitimacy of the only nation in the Middle East that does not have and actively enforce laws against homosexuality. Homosexuals are routinely beaten, stoned and hung in public squares in all of the countries that will be served best by the tainting of the only democratic, liberal, rule of law state in the entire region. In Israel, unlike its neighboring states, Muslims, Christians and Jews all share full citizenship, vote in free and fair elections and speak their minds in a legislative body which makes laws according to the desires of those voters. Any Israeli citizen may go anywhere in the country. In al Arab/Islamic countries, real Apartheid is the order. And they hate gay people so much they kill them - legally! So what other conclusion can be drawn from this action than there is some powerful faction- perhaps even a majority of people in this organization who are so blinded by Jew hatred that they will support their own enemies to hurt Jews.

Before my Jewish faith, I am the straight father of a son with whom I joined the Gay-Straight Alliance in his High School. And before that I was the nine-year-old the brother of a young boy who at thirteen years of age, took his own life because he could not face the social stigma of growing up as a gay (in 1958) in America. On my brother's grave, on my son's handsome head and on the simple grounds that the support of such an ugly and misshapen organization is offensive to my very humanity, I want you to know that unless you withdraw your support from this event or use your financial power to correct this error, I will no longer be your customer. And don't even try to smoke screen the naked facts of this with the parliamentary mumbo jumbo that announced it in on the Pride Toronto web site. It is what it is, an example of an organization whose mind was so open, its brains fell out.

Oh, and you can count on me to spread the news of this and advocate for a boycott of your products."

Regretfully,
Yaacov ben Moshe

Yaacov Ben Moshe
http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/

Note that when I sent a copy of the letter tothe letter to Pride Toronto's Marketing and Communications Manager, Michael Ain I got this message:

I am out of office until Thursday, July 24.
In case of emergency, please call the Pride Toronto switchboard,
416-927-7433 x 221

Coralee can re-direct your call as necessary.

I resent it to this address: office@pridetoronto.com

Here are the online contact forms for the two premier sponsors
TD: http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/custserv/contact.jsp
Labatt:
http://www.labatt.com/contact/index.php

UPDATE:
WELCOME SMALL DEAD ANIMALS READERS!

In case you miss it, here is a very good comment from the SDA thread:
Phantom wrote, "What this tells you in letters of fire one hundred feet high: Pride Toronto is not about being gay. Neither are most of the ostensibly pro-gay "advocacy" groups. Or feminists, or greeneis.

They are a pack of sicko, pervo Communists and don't ever forget it. Gays are the first people going under the big Lefty bus right after the Jews. Followed by "useless eaters". See Obama's health care bill and OHIP's coming "end of life" care guidelines. See the complete, stunning SILENCE from greenies in the Gulf spill.

We've seen this movie before. They never change, they always do the same sh1t in the same order."

Israel's Right to Exist- Hypothetical?

2010-06-17T22:04:00.011-05:00

It seems as though much of the world has the same problem with Israel and America today that Pope Urban VIII had with Galileo in 1632. Back then Galileo lost his liberty and died under house arrest. It is even more serious for Israel. But I am a little ahead of myself.

When I put up my last post, I braced myself for objections to my idea that “Kill the Jews” was just the next natural expression of “political realism”. Only a little more dismaying than the observations and facts that prompted me to post it is the complete lack of protest and denial with which it was greeted.

On the contrary, even though the post got big traffic, mostly due to a mention by Mark Steyn on The National Review’s web site The Corner, not one commenter or private email that I received disagreed with the idea that “Kill the Jews” was too extreme to describe the subtext of political realism. Even as I was posting it, the Helen Thomas controversy was heating up. What could be a clearer? The superannuated harpy and erstwhile laughing stock of the White House press corps proposed that the final solution to the Israeli- Palestinian problem would be for the Jews to “Go back…to Poland and Germany- the scene of the one of the most successful and recent “final solutions” of the Jewish Problem.

It was not so much what she said or how she said it - it is the fact that even as they condemned the bold-faced effrontery of her suggestion, many in the media did it half-heartedly- even with regret. She was called a pioneer and a doyen- one who locked horns with every president from Kennedy to Obama. All of which I found rather odd considering that I remember those signature exchanges between her and Kennedy and I seem to recall him treating her as a crank – whose extreme and largely rhetorical “questions he sidestepped with grace and good-natured humor. Many of the other presidents were less good-natured and shorter with her. There was, among many in the media, a pervasive sense of regret and resignation about her demise as a journalist. Not many actually parsed the logic of her fateful words and identified the “final solution” subtext of them. This failure causes me the deepest sense of alarm. In her own over-simplified way, she put into words what the cowards, charlatans and manipulators in the mainstream media, the parliaments of Europe and, alas, the Obama White House, really feel. The horror of Helen Thomas, for those people, is that she said something close enough to the little voice they hear in their own heads that they are suffering from embarrassment more than revulsion.

Then, hard on Thomas’ heels, there was the incident of The Gaza Flotilla, another example of in a long tradition of tidal waves of hatred and public condemnation for Israel. The way in which the clearly provocative and illegal flotilla of was swiftly lionized by much of the world as humanitarian and compassionate shows how very far the terror and violence of the last sixty years has perverted the popular sensibility. The prevailing language in the press of the “deadly Israeli raid” or “massacre” or the “Israeli killing of flotilla activists” proves that the media are no longer a healthy filter for our information. The unwillingness of the Obama administration, immediately to declare unequivocal support for Israel’s wholly legal and reasonable actions show how deeply compromised our moral standing is. They are all so busy being amazed and pathetically grateful for even the pretense of nonviolence that they are falling all over themselves to reward provocation with legitimacy.

This rush to judge and condemn Israel for yet another “massacre” that wasn’t a massacre is the latest and most obvious example of how the Arabs- using naked terror, guilt and outright deceit- have bullied and battered the media and elites of The West- entrained them (us) to a mass Stockholm Syndrome. The years of incessant Islamist calls for death to The West, America and Israel, the decades of outrageous rhetoric and the bloody, callous slaughter of innocents have, finally, bulldozed Europe, America and Israel so far off their foundational principals, out of their cultural perspective that it seems more important to avoid giving any offence to even the most radical Islamist than to actually look at the obvious evidence that they are totalitarian murderers bent on world conquest. The result is a mad world in which the Obama administration commits “even-handed” blunder after “impartial” betrayal to try to prove he is capable of being an ”honest broker” in a peace process in which only one of the parties is interested in peace.

Most of the European, American and even Israeli elites now hold war to be the ultimate evil and peace to be the ultimate good. All other values are, as a result, negotiable when trying to bring about peace. Every year there seems to be less and less that seems worth fighting for. Peacemaking and diplomacy become an exercise in getting everybody to quiet down and stop making trouble. The operative assumption seems to be that if you try to give everybody a “fair shake” (here “a fair shake” often means splitting the dispute down the middle even if one side is more legitimate than the other). Right and wrong matter less than peace and quiet.

The Islamists in Palestine and elsewhere hold war and religious violence to be a sacred duty- something that gives purpose to life. They view Western culture and all its liberalities as a profanity. They take particular exception to the very existence of Israel. Their clergy quote sacred verses to validate the slaughter of Jews and Americans. Their political leaders vow military action to “wipe Israel off the map” and subjugate America. They have prosecuted a sixty-year-long campaign to deligitimize, terrorize and destroy Israel.

It is a classic human tragedy, the injustice of “splitting the difference”. The Israelis are asking only for their half of the loaf- only that to which they are entitled. The Arabs are asking for the whole loaf- the destruction of Israel. To the orthodox peace-seeker who is both intimidated by violence and morally compromised by progressive ideologies such as the political realism I discussed in my last post, it seems “only fair” to split the difference and give the Arabs three quarters of the loaf. By insisting only on mere survival, the desire for peaceful coexistence and the right to protect her people while her enemies have been calling officially and working diligently for her destruction and elimination, Israel has allowed the prevailing sentiment in this debate to be pushed inexorably toward the side of her enemies.

This is the reason that Israel is the only country in the world whose “right to exist” is always in the debate. Friends constantly assert it as if it needed to be said and enemies often get away with behaving as if she doesn’t. While most people claim to believe that Israel has the right to exist and protect her citizens, more and more of them howl in protest at every attempt she makes to do so. More and more people around the world find it possible to rationalize each anti-Israel murder and terror attack as an expression of Arab passion and dedication while the bland logic and humble honesty of the Israelis are, increasingly, seen as stubbornness, bigotry and troublemaking.

Interestingly, Israel’s message has not been entirely drowned out by the Islamist bullying. It has merely been shoved aside so that there are now two completely contradictory ideas that exist side by side in the public mind. One is that most people want to believe in the illusion that if Israelis were to (magically)“go back to Poland and Germany” as Ms Thomas put it, the Arabs would be satisfied and there would be peace. They want to believe this illusion so badly that they are willing to ignore obvious facts- starting with the axiom: “If the Arabs put down their weapons tomorrow there would be no more war and if the Israelis put down their weapons there would be no more Israel.”
Holding two diametrically opposed beliefs simultaneously is not nearly as impossible as it sounds. People do it all the time. It only becomes a problem when action is required or when other people are looking (and talking). Orthodoxies have been struggling with it for centuries.

I use the word orthodoxy here with a lower case “o” without any specific religious connection. I certainly do not mean Orthodox Jews with whom I am closer in my beliefs and practice every year I live. I mean orthodox in the fascist sense of “right thinking” and quick to accuse anyone who disagrees with them as “heretics”. It is important to understand this because one of our worst problems in understanding this situation is that most people see the problem as a conflict between the left and the right ends of the political continuum. It is more accurate, though, to characterize it as a conflict between Utopian Orthodoxy and Empirical Constitutionalism.

The Helen Thomas affair is only one of many recent events that indicate that Progressive leftist doctrine is evolving into an ever more pernicious dogma that could come to resemble Hitler’s socialist Nazism and the totalitarian Communism of Stalin and Mao. The telltale marker of this evolution is the advance of political correctness, which is nothing less that “hunting for heresy” on training wheels. What is more disturbing is the alliance, even to the point of codependence, that has joined the Progressive/Socialist left with their goals of government driven change and improvement (and secularization) of social condition in an illogical alliance with Islamists and their dreams of World Wide Caliphate that would forever keep social conditions static and theologically determined.

The obvious but basically unsatisfying answer is that what they have most in common is that Western Civilization is their common enemy. The chief dissatisfaction of this answer is that it is, at the same time, entirely obvious on the face of it and just as impenetrable in its mechanics.

That is to say, while it is true that belief in either of those two competing ideologies is not compatible with sincere citizenship in any truly Western (or Civilized!) sense, each of them is so much more abhorrent to the other that in a world where the two existed without the mediating openness and tolerance imposed on them by the dominant culture of Western Civilization, they would be compelled to annihilate each other. And which ever one had the upper hand militarily they would do so summarily and without compunction- just look at the historical forerunners of the players: Mohammed, Stalin, the massacre of Hindus in the wake of the Indian Partition, Hitler, Darfur, the Khmer Rouge- the very worst of the massacres of humankind. Just as surely as the socialist Progressive left execrates all but the most liberal and agnostic religion, Islamism despises and must destroy all forms of heretics and free-thinkers. So, how to explain their support for each other? The ironic answer is that the very success and power of the Judeo-Christian civilization makes it possible for them to exist along side each other.

Their common loathing of America and Israel springs from their commonly held belief about the order of the universe, human nature and value of human life. They agree with each other and disagree with the great Western Tradition fundamentally about the very structure of the universe and the purpose of life. Both Islamism and Progressivism are communal utopian ideologies. They believe that individual human beings are given their meaning and value by the larger organizing force. Whether that force is viewed as the will of Allah, the society (as in socialism), The consensus of the “educated” and the “experts” (the ideal of the Progressives), the people or race (as in Fascism) or the proletariat (communism), the individual is expected to be subservient to it and compliant with it. The individual revolves around the polity and gains meaning and fulfillment only as part of it. The system (whatever its assumed form) is always the source of meaning and people approach perfection through compliance with it.

In America and Israel, and to a diminishing degree the rest of The West, the individual is the “center of the universe”. We grant that reality is messy and imperfect and that the best way to improve the world is to harness the energy and goodness of people while providing appropriate counter balance to their natural imperfections. It is no accident that, standing on the bloody ground of Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln called upon the unique American formulation of government, “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as the most important justification for the sacrifice of so many young men. Then as now the orthodoxies of entrenched rulers and ideologues had to be confronted to insure that to one tradition in the world’s history that so honored the individual, “shall not perish from the earth”. Nor is it any accident that America and Israel are the two most dynamic, and open societies on earth. They both embody respect for the individual and individual responsibility. It is this combination of responsiveness to the individual and openness to individual input that fosters growth, economic dynamism and political viability.

So, the argument is really about what the center of the personal/political universe is. This was precisely the problem between the Pope and Galileo. The Pope was an intelligent and educated man who clearly understood that the logic and evidence behind the Copernican view of the universe was a better and more useful model than the official version he was protecting. It predicted events with more success and presented a simpler and more accurate representation of the behavior of “celestial objects”. It was, simply, more useful and successful.

The Pope, to his credit, understood that in the long run denying the actual evidence for Copernicus’ model would have been futile. The Catholic Church was powerful but the movable type printing press was already in wide use and literacy (along with individual autonomy) were on the rise. Unable to outlaw facts and logic but he may or may not have felt loyalty to the church’s established view but he certainly also knew that allowing facts and logic to defeat church doctrine would weaken his hold on power. In any case, he needed to resolve his intellectual dilemma without seeming too dogmatically primitive, so he told Galileo that he could write about Copernicus’ solar-centric solar system model- but he had to write about it “hypothetically”. In other words, he could present the facts and the logic but he could not draw conclusions from them or apply them to our position in the universe. Nor could he use them to analyze our world. Doing those things, The Pope knew, would prove that there was a basic and fatal flaw in the church’s Cosmological frame of reference.
That ruling was, perhaps, the first recorded instance of political correctness. Just as the Islamists try to keep us from talking about the religion behind terror and the leftists try to keep us from recognizing that the redistribution of wealth is not motivated by the compassion to which they pretend, the “hypothetical” ruling was an attempt to disconnect the facts and real observations from the reality they described. Forbidden speech and conspiracy of silence are principal strategies of totalitarian regimes down through the ages.

But let’s return to the past two weeks events. It has, I think come to the point at which the world must choose whether Israel really does have the right to exist in security or not. Ruling orthodoxies (and Islamism and Progressivism are both orthodoxies that would rule) simply cannot bear the cognitive dissonance of supporting that idea alongside the Islamist desire for genocide. That would be required in recognizing the basic flaws in both world views. They are in psychic pain and furious at Israel for it. They would let Israel die to soothe themselves- Kill the Jews, kill the pain.
The left are keen to take away Israel’s moral authority and fall pathetically into every nasty blood libel their Islamist allies cook up- no matter how stupid and transparent. Al Durah, Jenin, poisoned water, Gaza Beach, stolen organs from Arab corpses, The Flotilla- they are all obvious frauds. Still, the haters of the left pile them up and through the “injustice of the split difference”, Israel gets tarred just because they have accused her, and all the while, her accusers avoid the disgrace they so richly deserve.

Just so, the cheap, clumsy deceit of the “humanitarian flotilla” which led to the justified killing of the “protestors” who otherwise would surely have finished the job of beating and stabbing the Israeli boarding party to death, has succeeded in extorting Israel once again. The government has reacted to the overwhelming public outcry from the left, the Islamist world and their ignorant supporters by “easing the blockade on Gaza”. That “public” whose outcry coerced this easing either does not care that it has made it easier for Hamas to fashion terror weapons and to harden the launching platforms that they hide within their own civilian population or they secretly harbor the desire that Hamas should just “do everyone a favor” and finish the job on Israel. For these people, the more Israel protests and maintains her modest aim of self-preservation, the more she makes a nuisance of herself. Helen Thomas proposed they “go back to Poland or Germany” what she and her fellow progressives mean is that they wish she would just disappear. Yet again, another component of Israel’s legitimate need for security has been sacrificed to the illusion that she is what is standing in the way of whatever utopian society or Caliphate they dream of that might be created on her grave.

Know this, if the Islamists and the left are allowed to destroy Israel and to make over The United States into a more leftist or Sharia friendly state, we will see a dark age fall upon the world. I quoted Lincoln above and I return to him now. In his address to congress in December of 1862, as he was preparing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said,

“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth…”

Lincoln knew that whatever its faults and even crimes, the American Republic was the only human government ever devised to that point in history that offered the breadth of opportunity, the dignity of self-reliance and the freedom of choice provided here and to let it slip into chaos would be to allow a great darkness to befall humanity. As The Union was threatened in Lincoln’s day, Israel, a beacon of democracy, freedom and success amidst an Islamic sea of countries that fester with slavery, naked genocidal hatred and endemic abuse of women and children is in danger of being destroyed.

The hyenas of Islam, in the grip of their medieval longing for world domination under a new Caliphate and humiliated by their own inability to make a living by any other means than sucking the accidental petro-wealth out of the ground lead the attack while the jackals of the left infiltrate and work on the inside while the world as we know it begins to go to waste. The Arab world squanders its easy money on terror forcing The West to spend money on defense rather than infrastructure. The left raids the earned wealth of America and Israel by creating welfare entitlements (hello healthcare) and regulations (cap and tax) that no nation could afford. The Islamists say that Israel must be destroyed and wink that Europe is next then America will be (as Mark Steyn wrote) alone. At home we cannot even speak of the problems without using absurd circumlocutions (man caused disaster, don’t point out that the terrorist is Islamic, don’t point out that the Obama agenda is socialist, etc…) let alone devise an effective strategy to combat it. Man Caused Disasters?!?! Even Pope Urban VIII would be impressed with how “hypothetical” that keeps things. And still, no one complains that “Kill the Jews” is too extreme.

Political Realism- Kill the Jews

2010-06-02T00:01:00.012-05:00

Hagyan, a reader of this blog has written me an email that has some very disquieting implications. He referenced a Palestine Post article from 1933 that mentions the thoughts of a prominent British Jew of the time. Hagyan is right, the article is redolent of the the Breath of the Beast. His message reads, in part:

What shocked me was the last sentence of the 2nd paragraph: "It was his [Lord Melchett's] impression that anti-semitism in Germany was on
the wane, as Hitler was beginning to realize that it was his anti-semitism that was keeping him from power."

I found Hagyan's message very interesting and all too apropos to our current situation. Lord Melchett's circular formulation that anti-semitism in Germany was decreasing because Hitler was moderating his Jew Hatred because it was (somehow) political liability succeeds only in dancing around the hard fact that anti-semitism was at the very core of the National Socialist movement and the even more disheartening evidence that he would eventually have his way with the enthusiastically compliant Germans.

Notwithstanding that their variety of antisemitism (or is it Jew Hatred) is smoother, less vociferously murderous and not so scabrous, Obama and his progressive elitists never could have risen to power without taking advantage of the willingness of the preponderance of Jewish Americans (along with other intellectuals and liberals) to participate in a similar soothing delusion. They sedate their consciences with the idea that Obama is a "political realist" and a reliable friend.

So many liberals, Jews and intellectuals, after all, have made a self-conscious show of their contempt for the mountains of evidence, offered on my blog and in many other places, that the Progressive elitists, Black Liberation theologians, former terrorists and assorted social activists with whom he consorts viscerally despise the middle class ideals, Judeo-Christian morals and self-reliant entrepreneurial American spirit. They practice an intentional and fatuous ignorance of the fact that it is that very set of ideals,morals and spirit that have protected and enabled Jews to become successful and even powerful members of American society in a way we have never achieved in any other country. They turn their backs on the obvious signs because, like Melchette they believe that political success depends on political correctness and it is incorrect to identify the flaws and contradictions in a coalition of ignorance once you have signed on as a member.

So, here we are, Israel is facing a perfect storm of bloody-minded terror from her neighbors while her natural supporters- Jews and political liberals are numbed to inaction by the pathetic idea that Obama is really a subtle and nuanced friend who, while he is hard on Israel to prove to the world that he is an "honest broker", would never allow Israel's destruction. We need, they think, only let him wield his subtle "soft power" unhindered by our own attempts to support or protect Israel. It is in this vein that Dershowitz can write that "Israel's Actions Were Entirely Lawful Though Probably Unwise"

Dershowitz appears to be an effective defender of Israel because he makes his legal case brilliantly. Morally and strategically, though, the wistful longing for Obama to be the benevolent but covert protector of his liberal imagination conceals from him and his readers the truth that Obama cares nothing for Dershowitz, Israel or "The Jews".

For Obama we are, at best, an irascible and untrustworthy member of the coalition of dupes and fellow travelers that got him elected and are now abandoning him in droves as he has begun to show his true colors. At worst he recognizes us better than we do ourselves as a stubborn (if still slumbering) reservoir of bourgeois dedication to the traditional values of enterprise, intellectual skepticism and sound investment that are the bedrock of America's past achievements and the single most hopeful obstacle to the progressive one-world socialism that he calls "Hope and Change". This is the hard fact that is at the core of the Progressive movement. Jews (as well as conservatives, classical liberals, religious people and small business people) are "in the way". The correctness is so bad now that in Dershowitz's circle one may not even use the word socialism as a description. In this sense Dershowitz and other liberal supporters of Obama are complicit with the Progressive agenda and, by extension, a dupe for Israel's (and all Jew's) enemies.

Since when is it not wise for a sovereign country to stop bon fide supporters of terrorists on the high seas? Since when is it not permissible for soldiers of that country to defend their own lives? Only since they are Jewish. The Jewish blood spilt by the "protesters" on the boat ( who are on record singing songs about killing Jews) as they attacked the soldiers carrying paintball guns, like the blood of the children of Sderot killed and maimed by the very "freedom fighters" the protesters are supporting must no longer be considered barter for a corrupt system of political dealing- it cheapens Jewish life and makes it expendable. Or, rather, it agrees with Obama and the rest of the world that it is expendable.

It is time for Jews everywhere to recognize and speak the truth: political realism, like political correctness cuts both ways and we are as vulnerable as we have ever been. If you do not pay attention now, if you make the mistake of Melchette in 1933, there is hell to pay down the road. Jews do not have the luxury anymore to ignore (let alone support!) the Obama administration and its Progressive agenda.

Note: My friend Robert Avrech at Seraphic Secret has another similar take on this in a very important post.

Obama and the Progressive Agenda- A Wounded Tiger?

2010-05-12T10:28:00.006-05:00

My friend ShrinkWrapped has a brilliant post up. In it he poses the idea that Multiculturalism and Anthropogenic Global Warning have sustained enough damage in recent events to set them on a course for the oblivion they so richly deserve. He is so accurate about so much that I hesitated to bring up the one big problem I see in his theory. I finally posted a comment that outlines what I see as a terrible unmentioned, terrifying danger arising from this apparent victory for good sense. Here is my comment with some edits and expansion:

Multiculturalism is to nations as the self-esteem movement is to individuals. Unless we can reclaim the principal that only people who work hard, take care of themselves, contribute something of value to society and produce something that other people will pay for, deserve to have a "decent" living and hold their heads up in society, we will never accept that the cultures that value and foster that kind of individual more effectively are, simply put, better cultures.

As to the difficulty of next few years, I see terrible danger. Fascist totalitarianism is the time-honored response of ideologies that have no other chance of success. President Obama fired the opening salvo of a campaign against free thought and speech last Sunday. It was a not so thinly veiled as a reference to ipods etc.. but clearly implied that ungoverned thought, opinion and the speed of information were problematic. In forcing the health care bill through congress he has already proven more than capable of imposing his will over the outcry of the majority. He is surrounded by people who welcome crises and turmoil as opportunities to "change" things...

In my opinion, the worst aspect of this is that there is no organized opposition. The mainstream of the Republican party, for their own reasons, are complicit with the Democrats. The corporate world will be delighted to have legions of docile, socialist drones penned up in cubicles in all the nation's offices like so many veal calves fattening in their boxes. They work a little, complain a lot and their paychecks are ample enough to bleed off and aggregate big corporate bonuses and social entitlements for the vast army of indolent voters that will continue to vote for their unearned privileges in increasing numbers. The cubicle dwellers work too hard and clear too little profit from their labor to outbreed the welfare voting block, so the power shift is on.

The corporations have it made. Every cubicle dweller is one less potential competitive entrepreneur and, anyway, they have been pronounced too big to fail by the party of the welfare bloc. The Tea Party thing is a start but there is no true leadership structure. It is a big tent and a magnet for nut jobs. The danger that one person can fatally damage the movement with one bad gaffe is huge. Leadership must be developed, entrenched and schooled and that takes time.

The Beast is strong in both parties and they are tough and ruthless. They see the folks in the cubicles and the people who make their own way in life waking up to the fact that they are caught in the pincer between the corporate oligarchs and the entitlement class. They have been wounded because the poor economy has made us think about the weight of the bonuses and free goodies we pay for. They are afraid and in pain- a wounded tiger- a whole zoo full of wounded tigers.

There are some good Republicans and even one or two good Democrats but they need to have some faith in the electorate- some where to go for support. If the real independents, the entrepreneurs, producers and creators, do not come to understand the peril before this November's elections and if they only have run-of-the-mill Republicans and Democrats to vote for, I fear that this will not end well.

The Nuance of the Nazis

2010-05-10T13:45:00.006-05:00

Via Blazing Cat Fur

Can Nazis be victims of hate?
'Nazi' listed as an identifiable victim group in Toronto Police's 2009 hate crime stats report

Speaking of the stupidity of Nuance!

Q. What do you get when you Nuance a Nazi?

A. A Victim

This really is a shocker! Bernie Farber, one of the leading proponents of Canada's Anti Hate Speech Laws, makes a career out of making sure that a person's statements are judged not by their validity and truth but rather by whether or not they cause distress or foster hatred and then he is surprised that even Nazis can have distress and be "victims" of hatred.

We are all victims now, it seems. Just think how the poor National Socialists must feel! Millions of Jews throwing themselves into trenches and shooting themselves in the back or gassing themselves and burning their own bodies in furnaces with the the poor, stunned Nazis standing by in helpless horror! And, still, sixty years later, they are blamed, even reviled and insulted, by the world for the "jew caused disaster" they were powerless to avert.

Too bad, Bernie did not see this coming. Maybe he was too busy building himself a career and a ridiculously inflated reputation on bad law and phony victimology to see where it would lead...

Personally, I got tired of the victim card in High School when I realized how unattractive and counter-productive it is. Oh well, Nuance is as Nuance Does...

No More Mr. Nuanced Guy!

2010-05-07T13:09:00.010-05:00

In my last post I noted that we are indeed fortunate to this point that the people who want to kill us are, in general, a little bit dumber than we are. This has accorded us a certain measure of safety. They busy themselves detonating small charges in their private parts or leaving the keys to their "other car" in automobiles (to which they hold title) laden with unexplodable devices idling by the curb all of which amounts to the equivalent of a set of Mapquest directions to their homes. We, on the other hand, have distracted ourselves with pastimes fit only for overeducated, self-important, arrogant imbeciles: handicapping our security forces by applying the values and protections of our republic too broadly to the entire human race in general (regardless of whether they "buy in" to our system) We chronically, overestimate our own power, while underestimating the unalterable hatred and contempt our enemies harbor for us. Many of us refuse to understand that "they" simply do not share our values or dreams. On top of all that, we insure that we can't even talk or think directly about the danger we face from them because we have outlawed the very words that must be used if we are to define and measure it.

Here below is a nearly perfect example of how invincible and pervasive the stupidity of nuance is in our media and how seductive and Imbecilic its proponents are. The quote is a part of a panel discussion of the “Mystery” of Faisal Shahzad’s sudden jihad that was moderated by the exceedingly nuanced Robert Smith on NPR. Smith is seen here doing his most nuanced “I wouldn’t recognize an Islamist terrorist if he jumped out of a sewer, shouted Allahu Akbar and sawed my head off” interpretation of the evidence.

SMITH: ,… neighbors that actually spotted Shahzad in the last few months say he was acting strange, running in the dark, blasting a radio day and night, and apparently, according to investigators, assembling a car bomb from propane, gasoline and fireworks.

So what happened last summer to Faisal Shahzad to flip him from family man to suspected terrorist?

Bruce Hoffman is a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. He says that it's become a pattern in these kind of cases for the suspect to have recently traveled back to their homeland.

Professor BRUCE HOFFMAN (Georgetown University): And then either before that trip, during that trip, perhaps upon their return, are suddenly radicalized and become involved in a terrorist plot.

SMITH: And even before the trip to Pakistan there were signs that all was not well with Shahzad. The family had been falling behind in their home payments and trying to sell the house. They were being sued for not paying an energy bill. The Wall Street Journal quotes a real estate agent who heard Shahzad say that his father was sick and he needed to return to Pakistan to take care of him.

Hoffman says that it's also not uncommon for terrorists to leave a trail of debt behind them.

Prof. HOFFMAN: Many of these individuals believe it's entirely permissible to, in essence, defraud the Western societies they live in and to use whatever money they have to run up credit card debt, to take out loans that they have no intention of repaying.

SMITH: Still, neighbors say the turnaround in Shahzad's life seemed to happen so quickly. One day the family was holding a tag sale on their lawn and soon after that they were gone. Their foreclosed home in Shelton still has trash and forgotten items strewn inside and out. I found this music CD next to their yard.

(Soundbite of song)

Unidentified Woman: Be ready for a great journey (Singing in foreign language)

SMITH: Other reporters found Shahzad's old passport from Pakistan, discarded greeting cards, and a transcript from college that showed that Shahzad apparently had a 2.78 grade point average. Now that he's in custody, all of that discarded pass is catching up to him. Investigators spent yesterday removing evidence from Shahzad's former life.

(Soundbite of song)

Smith invites Hoffman into the discussion and then completely blunts the important information that Hoffman supplies. Hoffman identifies the pattern of these deadly killers. They go back to their homelands, they feel no compunction about violating the most basic values and responsibilities of American life, they are cynical users and (by our standards) sociopathic. They are different.

Without giving any sign that he even acknowledges the dissonance between Hoffman’s observation with his own bemused, self-inflicted blindness, Smith dances around Hoffman’s statement with random thoughts thrown out, no doubt, to be evocative of mystery “he had a 2.78 gpa”, “he left trash behind”, “he had greeting cards”, there was a song about a long journey found somewhere in the neighborhood of his house. It is as if he is answering Hoffman’s, point by appealing to the canard of “we all want the same things in life”.

He seems to be saying, “Oh, the poor confused man had a soul, and a family and a numerically verifiable participation in parts of our system. How to ever understand the things people do…”

Back in 2006, when I started this blog, my very first post was my account of the event in my own life that made it impossible for me to nuance away the awareness of the hideous monster (beast) of Caliphate Islamism. In retrospect I might have been too vague in putting my finger exactly what that monster is. I was vague intentionally because I felt that if I were too direct and specific, I would risk alienating people who might be on the cusp of awareness but wary of harsh language and un-nuanced thought. I am reposting that story below be cause it is still true.

So here it is, and I will only add that now I understand that nuance is the new stupid so I now renounce nuance entirely. The Beast is Islamism. It’s way through our walls is our own nuance.

My First Encounter With the Beast

We always get a warning that is clear and unequivocal when evil is stalking us. It is up to us to notice. Warnings are all too easy to dismiss. It is a grave responsibility to pay heed to real warnings. It seems so much easier to convince yourself that the warning is not for you, or that the danger is remote and small.

When Hitler, for example, wrote Mein Kampf, in 1925. He left no doubt as to his intentions. The world dismissed the book as the ravings of a mad man. When he got his opportunity to reach power ten years later, much of the world was surprised that he actually did what he said he would. If they had believed him in the first place and acted on that knowledge with resolution and intelligence millions of lives could have been saved.

The good news is that all you have to do is pay attention, believe what you see and hear and have the strength not to deny it. Evil will almost always inform you of its presence and intentions. I was given a very personal warning twenty-five years ago by a particularly profound form of evil. That evil presence has grown and prospered in the world since then. It has grown and become powerful and menacing and yet, even today, in spite of incontrovertible evidence of its existence many people find it altogether too easy to deny.

Back in the early eighties my young family and I lived next door to an Iranian family. They were nice, friendly people. Hamid (not his real name) was a physician who was just starting out in his own practice. His wife, Haideh was also Iranian born. She was a mathematician. She taught at a local college. We moved in to brand new houses just months apart and shared the rigors of nurturing lawns where there had been only bulldozer tracks. We cooperated in the planting of trees and shrubs to define the empty expanses between our new homes. We borrowed tools from each other. Hamid and I played tennis often and even discussed the possibility of building a tennis court in the flat spot where our lots met. Our children played together and his son, Amir and my daughter Amy became very close friends. The two of them were barely more than toddlers when they first met but were soon talking about getting married the way little ones sometimes do when they find a close companion of the opposite sex.

The next summer, they went back to Iran to visit with their families. We were afraid for our friends. We knew the country was in turmoil. They were gone for several weeks. For much of the time my Amy’s days were occupied with day camp but she still missed her friend. They finally returned a week before school. The two seemed to pick up right where they had left off.

It was a sunny Sunday morning and Amy went out right after breakfast and met Amir in his backyard. We watched as they began to play and turned away to read the Sunday paper. We were surprised when Amy came back inside a short while later. She walked by us with her head down and started up the stairs to her room. We had expected to have to call her in for lunch so it was odd that she came back so early. I called after her and asked her what was wrong. She told me how little 5-year-old Amir had matter-of-factly informed my innocent 5-year-old daughter that because she is a Jew it is his duty to kill her.

I went right over to talk with my friend and neighbor. Hamid was deeply embarrassed. He hastened to explain that: “Over there, the radio and TV were full of that kind of thing - you simply couldn’t avoid it. He assumed that Amir had heard this kind of thing on the radio or TV because no one in his family believed such things. He was sure, he told me, that now that Amir was back here he would soon forget it. He assured me that he would talk with Amir and was sure that the boy didn’t even understand what he was saying.

I could see how distressed he was and told him that I understood and that I appreciated his concern. We looked at each other and shook hands and patted each other on the shoulder. I was sure that it would not change things between our families.

Remember that this was twenty years before September 11, 2001. It was a few years after the fall of the Shah so, before they had left, I had actually wondered if his kids were going to be exposed to anti-American rhetoric and how that would sit with them. It had never entered my mind though to expect the anti-Semitic to be the dominant theme. Back then many of us believed the myth of the benevolent caliphate and the benign toleration of “Dhimmis” under Muslim rule. After all, I mused, Iran was at war with Iraq. And Israel had recently bombed the Osirac reactor thereby preventing Iraq from developing nuclear weapons.

In the light of everything that has transpired since then, it now seems hopelessly naïve of me but in the dim light of that historical moment I was amazed that what had surfaced first from this child’s sojourn in his homeland was genocidal anti-Semitism. As I lay awake in bed that night I found I couldn’t get the event out of my mind. The idea that a child could have such an idea in his head was staggering by itself. What kind of madness had he been exposed too? What infernal clatter of hatred and fear was there in the streets and media over there that could make it possible for a five year old say such a thing?

I recalled the pictures from the nightly news reports on the recently ended hostage ordeal that always seemed to show dense, agitated crowds of shirt-sleeved young men with posters and bullhorns. For all that it was fascinating, the violent rhetoric and the frenetic seemed somehow so unconnected to me – motivated by such an alien animus that I had watched them with the detachment of one who had every confidence that it had nothing to do with him. Now, as I lay awake, I could see- it was very personal.

It was frightening, it was unfamiliar, it was hateful and I had no idea how big or how close it was.

Was the family back in Iran so very different from Hamid? What kind of people thought nothing of exposing a child to this? What, I wondered, could have been the state of mind of Hamid and his wife that they did not think to talk to their son about this stuff- to “deprogram” him on the way home. The more I thought about it the more it bothered me. I lay awake thinking picturing not the house next door and the people in it, but the sweating, rioting crowds back in Iran and all of their squawking radios and televisions. The morning before, I had thought that all I had to do was talk to my neighbor about this thing. Now I saw clearly that this was very big and very ugly- beyond reach of a friendly neighborhood talk. I got out of bed and looked out the window toward their house, bathed in pale moonlight. The calm fall night was filled with a new shadow- the specter of an evil that had once been faraway and theoretical and was suddenly present and breathing quietly in the dark recesses of this soft night. Just then, it felt close enough that I thought I could feel its hot, humid breath on the back of my neck.

In my innocent, pre-9/11 American way I remember wondering how close we might have actually come to tragedy. A little boy of five might have kept harboring that thought and without comprehending what he was really doing, hurt or even murdered my little girl. God forbid that he might have gotten access to a gun with that in his mind. What kind of horror might have been averted because he spoke instead of acting? I walked down the hall and looked into Amy’s room. Her soft brown curls shone in the moonlight and she stirred and sighed.

I wandered back to my bed and lay down. What kind of society, I wondered, puts ideas like this into the mind of a (rather charming) little boys like Amir? How was it, with even parents like my friends Hamid and Haideh the racket and stink of genocidal hatred could so easily stick to him and be carried so quietly and so deep into the heart of our safe little suburban neighborhood.

Now that the images of Iran I had found it easy to view and dismiss were personal and immediate, I could never again feel quite so secure that all the “Death to America” and “Kill the Jews” rhetoric was empty and rhetoric or that it didn’t pertain to me. If it is said and sanctioned, how far away is it really from execution?

Over the next few years, the war with between Iran and Iraq dragged on; reports were heard in the west of human wave assaults organized by the Islamic army of Iran. Boys as young as fourteen were roped together to prevent desertion and sent out unarmed to try to overwhelm Iraqi positions by shear weight of expendable numbers. Sometimes I would catch sight of Amir in the street and shake my head – grateful that he was here but filled with dread for all of us.

Hamid and his family moved away after a few years. Since then, there have been so many experiences and images that have reminded me of that night when I realized how close the beast is.

I have stood in one of the great central squares of Kiev where there stands a huge statue of the national hero Bogdan Chemielniki who, before Hitler, was history’s greatest slaughterer of Jews. A few miles away I visited the memorial at Babi Yar. To stand at that monument I had to walk there over the half-mile long mound that is the mass grave of more than one hundred thousand Jews.

I have also been to Israel and visited the sites of three of the most infamous suicide bombings. I watched the airplane on which the wife of a friend perished smash into the North Tower of The World Trade Center. Then, I watched the towers crumble. I have downloaded and viewed the video of the slaughter of Daniel Pearl, which is still available on the Internet. I recognized them all as footprints of the same beast. Having lived with its shadow for so long, I am often shocked when I meet people who don’t believe that it is real that it is stalking us even as you read this.

What will it take for you to understand that what they are saying and doing is personal and you need to do something about it?

Nuance: The New Stupid

2010-05-05T13:58:00.004-05:00

International Stupid Derby Latest Results:

Mainstream Press pulls ahead in the race with a monumental act of self-ridicule even as Islamist bomber manages to improve technique at least to the extent that ev en though he still botched his terror attempt, he did it without exploding his own genitalia.

This headline is popping up all over the media today on an article supplied by Associated Press:

NY Car Bomb Suspect Cooperates, But Motive Mystery

A quick Google has it on NPR, Yahoo News, ABC News and many, many others.

A Mystery? My friends, this is no mere fathomless act of willful ignorance. This is a full blown stupidity that makes even the “blow my own testicles off” idiocy of the most recent run of Islamist would-be killers look sort of bright. Even though the article quotes Attorney General Holder as saying, "Based on what we know so far, it is clear that this was a terrorist plot aimed at murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in our country," the AP story calls his motivation a mystery.

How exactly? Well I am not entirely sure because most of the story is so un-mysterious that it is hard to tell. I suspect it has something to do with this passage:

“Until recently, his life in the U.S. appeared enviable. He had a master's degree from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, a job as a budget analyst for a marketing firm in Norwalk, Conn., two children and a well-educated wife who posted his smiling picture and lovingly called him "my everything" on a social networking website.

But shortly after becoming a U.S. citizen a year ago, he gave up his job, stopped paying his mortgage and told a real estate agent to let the bank take the house because he was returning to Pakistan.

Once there, according to investigators, he traveled to the lawless Waziristan region and learned bomb making at a terrorist training camp.”

I think that if you stand back and squint at this section, you can see what they are getting at. Its very nuanced, but it is in there. The mystery in their minds stems from the pathetic notion that brother Faisel’s pre-jihad situation did not have any tell-tale triggers that would “explain” his acts. He was not a victim of the mortgage bust, he was not obviously politically readicalized or a social outcast. He was living as if he were really “just like us”.

And all good progressive liberals are compelled to believe that that is all anyone in the world is. They are supposed to want all the things we want and desire the life satisfactions that we desire. So, when they see this guy leaving all that behind, getting bomb training and making a sincere (if, fortuitously, inept) to slaughter innocent people on the streets of our cities, they are powerless to understand it. Even though the Islamist clergy has clearly and specifically put us on notice that they “love death more than we (in the west) love life” the AP and those blinded by the Progressive ideology just will not accept that those people are different from us in a very basic way.

It is this dogma that makes profiling a crime against the humanity of others. If we were all the same, with the same values and dreams, then to be aware that some nationality or religion may be more likely to cause a problem than others would indeed be counter-productive.

But we are not. They are happy to tell us so is we will only listen to them, Still the AP and it subscribers continue to make a fetish of denying the plain fact that the source of the vast majority of the terror in the world is done by Islamist radicals

That is stupid. I am talking about Darwin Award Stupid here. It is the same exact stupid that is at work when people express a fear of profiling. It was, after all, ever so smart and nuanced of The Army to ignore the anti-American ravings of mass killer Major Hassan so that they could be sure not to be accused of profiling.

Is it ever going to be a good thing, something "we all want", when a newly minted U.S. citizens gives up paying on a viable house mortgage and returns to his native Pakistan (you know Pakistan, don’t you, where Osama is hiding, where the Mumbai killers came from and where Daniel Pearl had is head sawn off?) for a six month graduate degree in bomb making? Would it not seem prudent, if noticeably un-nuanced, to keep an eye on someone like that? But, I know, this is a simplistic view- not very nuanced and progressive.

Here is the obligatory disclaimer: I am not advocating putting all Muslims into internment camps or deporting them. I am saying we need to pay attention to what they are saying and doing.

HELLO! AP! There IS no mystery here. There is no nuance that can excuse, explain or rationalize this. In fact, Nuance is the new Stupid. And it is Stupider than the old one.

Update:

Gagdad Bob appended this at the link to this article on American Digest:

"Readers and Viewers Flee MSM for Other News Sources, But Motive a Mystery"

The Earliest Lame Duck in History

2010-02-26T09:11:00.006-05:00

President Obama is an avian mixed metaphor. He has tried to be the early bird, pushing very hard on his radical agenda in the face of economic hardships. But he has only suceeded in making himself the earliest lame duck in history. Case in point is here:

The man is either living in a fool's paradise or he is just trying to do as much damage as he can before he is deprived of his minions next year and swept out of office in three years. The election is NOT over- in America the election is every day. He looks around him grasping at straws and ends up only finding Harry Reid and Chris Dodd as his examples! Hold on there, Mr. President. Chris has already acknowledged that he cannot possibly get reelected by his constituents and Harry, by all acconts, is headed for electoral elimination next year!

That is the beauty of American Democracy- the election is never over- we the people will always have our say.

Let's mix the metaphore even more, Obama's presidency has turned into an empty suit leading an army of dead-men-walking.

Note to U C Irvine: Don't Look Now But They Have Taken Your School Right Out from Under You!

2010-02-18T20:54:00.007-05:00

This video is all you need to know about both the Middle East and the challenge it presents to Western Civilization.

The problem for us in the west is that the people who come out of the Arab Islamic culture in which violence is the currency of leadership and coercion masquerades as truth, have achieved three pivotal advances in positioning, tactics and strategy.

They have achieved sufficient affluence to study at (or at least hang around) a University.

They have learned to manipulate and capture the imagination of impressionable and alienated young westerners.

They have mastered the Alinsky rule book for intimidating and perverting their host culture.

Here are Alinsky’s rules and my scorecard for this event:

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

Ambassador Oren relates that he was warned by the Foreign Minister of Israel, “Oy, are you going to have a hard time!” – an admission that reasonable people know that UC Irvine is a place that is not just intellectually opposed but so openly hostile, emotionally intimidating and aggressively closed minded that it is not possible to carry on a dialogue there.

2. "Never go outside the experience of your people.

Not that being disruptive and attempting to keep a speaker from presenting his ideas and thoughts is such an involved undertaking but you will notice that at 6:11 and 6:39 of the clip it is obvious that someone had gone to the trouble of providing at least two of the young men who got up to shout their epithets and taunts with little slips of paper from which to read their outbursts. Pathetic, I know, that those two dolts and perhaps others (we just don’t get a chance to see them as they start yelling) cannot even manage to be boorish and ignorant without a script, but the scary thing is that someone obviously knew that about them and got them prepared…

3. "Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.

Not possible in this case. If they aren’t lobbing outrageous lies, their cousins are lobbing Qassam missiles. Jews and Israelis have seen worse than this.

4. "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

Unfortunately, (probably due in large part to # 1 above) the impotent UC officials lived up to a very high-toned reading of the rules. This was obviously a very tightly orchestrated and planned disruption. After the second outburst and boisterous agitation, it should have been clear that the presumption of innocence for most of that side of the room was an example of cowardice not fairness. They should have been rounded up and arrested. They conspired to deprive Ambassador Oren of his right to speak and his sponsoring group of their right to assemble. Oh, where is the ACLU now? Must be out defending the right of Neo-Nazis to have a parade in a Jewish neighborhood…

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

Well, you can’t win them all. The protesters, in the end, didn’t use much ridicule. They showed themselves to be ridiculous (see the capering young woman at 8:41 for example) but that is not the same thing.

6. "A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

This was clearly a great success in the enjoyment department. Apparently, accusing intelligent, egalitarian and earnest people from the one country in the middle east that gives equal rights to religious minorities and women and bends over backwards not to kill people who have sworn to destry them of murder and even genocide is intensly diverting for them, They smirk, giggle and congratulate each other as if their team had just won a soccer match.

7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

They took up a lot of time here but I do think they knew when to file out en mass. Yup, they had this about right.

8. "Keep the pressure on.

This does not apply to this one instance- it is a long term goal- but this would certainly be an occasion at which they are “keeping the pressure up.”

9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

Exactly, they howl and mewl but that is not so bad. Even on campuses, though, nowadays you can’t help but wonder if there is a Major Nadal Malik Hasan or Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab in the crowd.

10. "Major premise for tactics is development of operations that will maintain constant pressure upon the opposition.

Sure, they do this kind of this thing enough and they will wear away the resistance to all kinds of little projects of theirs- academic boycotts, for example. Even more insidiously, though, it is a common ploy of radicals to take extreme positions and shout outrageous things at high volume so that people like Ambassador Oren wind up begging only to be heard. This imbalance makes the radical seem magnanimous when he allows someone else to so much as finish a sentence while Ambassador Oren looks demanding when he insists on his absolute right to express himself.

11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.

Check, here they are championing proxy armies, dictatorships, corrupt monarchies and Islamofascist regimes and making it seem as though Israel is the villain state.

12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

They utterly fail at this. Every time an Israeli tries to find a formula for Coexistence, an Arab calls for the destruction of Israel. For them killing Jews seems constructive, I guess.

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

They shout outrageous personal calumny, lies and accusations at the honored guest, but he is not even the real target of this demonstration. They identify the true victim as they file out. At 8:15 of the clip you can hear one of them repeatedly shout, “Whose University is it?” and each time they answer in chorus “My University”.

Until the administration of UC Irvine develops enough spine to take it back, I am afraid they are quite right about that.

Note: As of this posting this clip has had over a quarter of a million views on YouTube. Maybe that will embarrass them into doing something to these thugs who have shamed the school. Click on it! I always clapped my hands for Tinker-belle too.

The Biggest Freudian Slip in the History of Propaganda

2010-02-12T00:03:00.010-05:00

On one of my regular visits to Seraphic Secret (one of the finest, most interesting blogs on the internet) I was reminded that Feb. 11th is Revolution Day in Iran. Robert posted this picture which I think should get more attention so I am borrowing it and putting up here as well. I left a comment at Seraphic Secret about it and will expand on it here...

Correct me if I am mistaken, it looks to me that Obama has just beheaded Lady Liberty in that picture. If so, this must be in the running for the title of "The Biggest Freudian Slip in the History of Propaganda".

Think about it! What exactly are they saying here? Do they agree with many of our own American conservatives that President Obama's agenda is a deadly threat (intentional or not) to Liberty? Are they suddenly concerned for the preservation of American ideals? What is the meaning of an obviously verdi-copper colored statue bleeding red blood?

No, they care nothing for and know less about Liberty. The rage and pain in the Islamist soul renders them inchoate. There is nothing deeper here than hatred pure, mockery vile and fury unbounded. Poor un-manned Obama with an odd sort of orgasmic look on his face holding the desecrated female symbol of Liberty (name me one brave, important and powerful female symbol in all of Islam!) expresses their impotence more perfectly than any essay or analysis ever could. They are powerless to express the overwhelming rage. Their inability to see the real cause of the rage turns their every attempt at expression turgid and recursive.

This is why they call it Revolution Day. They celebrate their revolution with shows of irrational cascades of bloody symbolism and threats of death.

We call The Fourth of July Independence Day because something was born that day. The day that shooting started on started in our revolution, has been relegated to a second class state holiday in Massachusetts and we instead celebrate as a nation the publication of the document that proclaimed a new and unique way of organizing a government in these words:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. "

Nothing was born on Revolution Day, it was just the latest in a series of bloody events that stretch back to the origin of the species, events that promise nothing but more and bigger of the same.

It was, after all my family's intimate encounter with a distant but deadly ripple from the utter insanity of Iran's streets that gave me my first inkling of the beast that is stalking us. But this picture is really a crystal window into what a squalid dead-end Iran and the dream of the Caliphate really is. These people haven't a clear thought in their heads. They are twisted and knotted so thoroughly around the Islamist armature of collectivism, misogyny and ignorance that they are truly "beside themselves" and they just HATE the neighborhood.

As for President Obama, believe what you will about his intentions and the bankruptcy of his agenda, his apparent acquiescence in the nuclear ambitions of these people put him in danger of becoming the chief enabler of the next holocaust- the most avoidable and horrifying one ever...

All the News That's Written by Imbeciles

2010-02-09T16:25:00.007-05:00

Here (hat tip to Dan Friedman) is a new and utterly transparent illustration of how anything that is bad for Israel seems good to The New York Times. I'll quote the whole sad mess below so you don't have to increase their traffic volume.

By the reasoning in this article, it would be a good idea to bring back smallpox so we could sell vaccinations to the people we want to have beholden to us. The Times would ONLY think this a printable idea if the biggest possible loser in the scheme were Israel. Even more horrifying is that the imbecile who wrote it is a "defense analyst" at the Air Force Institute.

Update:

Friend, noted scholar and astute observer, Judith Klinghoffer writes:

It is stupid analysis as it assumes that Arabs would pay for security or that Arab autocrats will repay the American favor by becoming less autocratic and anti-American. Historically, this has never been the case. The opposite has been true. And it is even more unlikely to be the case with Obama in power. The man simply is shilling for defense contractors who worry about a decline in traditional defense spending.

Judith

Read it and be enlightened:

February 9, 2010

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Iran’s Two-Edged Bomb

By ADAM B. LOWTHER

Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.

With Iran having notified the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency that it is now enriching its stockpile of uranium to a higher level, we should admit that Washington’s approach to countering the Islamic Republic is leading nowhere. What’s needed, however, may be less of a change of plan than a change in how we view the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Believe it or not, there are some potential benefits to the United States should Iran build a bomb. (I’m speaking for myself here, and in no way for the Air Force.) Five possibilities come to mind.

First, Iran’s development of nuclear weapons would give the United States an opportunity to finally defeat violent Sunni-Arab terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Here’s why: a nuclear Iran is primarily a threat to its neighbors, not the United States. Thus Washington could offer regional security — primarily, a Middle East nuclear umbrella — in exchange for economic, political and social reforms in the autocratic Arab regimes responsible for breeding the discontent that led to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Until now, the Middle East autocracies have refused to change their ways because they were protected by the wealth of their petroleum reserves. A nuclear Iran alters the regional dynamic significantly, and provides some leverage for us to demand reforms.

Second, becoming the primary provider of regional security in a nuclear Middle East would give the United States a way to break the OPEC cartel. Forcing an end to the sorts of monopolistic practices that are illegal in the United States would be the price of that nuclear shield, bringing oil prices down significantly and saving billions of dollars a year at the pump. Or, at a minimum, President Obama could trade security for increased production and a lowering of global petroleum prices.

Third, Israel has made clear that it feels threatened by Iran’s nuclear program. The Palestinians also have a reason for concern, because a nuclear strike against Israel would devastate them as well. This shared danger might serve as a catalyst for reconciliation between the two parties, leading to the peace agreement that has eluded the last five presidents. Paradoxically, any final agreement between Israelis and Palestinians would go a long way to undercutting Tehran’s animosity toward Israel, and would ease longstanding tensions in the region.

Fourth, a growth in exports of weapons systems, training and advice to our Middle Eastern allies would not only strengthen our current partnership efforts but give the American defense industry a needed shot in the arm.

With the likelihood of austere Pentagon budgets in the coming years, Boeing has been making noise about shifting out of the defense industry, which would mean lost American jobs and would also put us in a difficult position should we be threatened by a rising military power like China. A nuclear Iran could forestall such a catastrophe.

Last, the United States would be able to stem the flow of dollars to autocratic regimes in the region. It would accomplish this not only by driving down the price of oil and increasing arms exports, but by requiring the beneficiaries of American security to bear a real share of its cost. And in the long run, a victory in the war on terrorism would save taxpayers the tens of billions of dollars a year now spent on overseas counterinsurgency operations.

What about the downside — that an unstable, anti-American regime would be able to start a nuclear war? Actually, that’s less of a risk than most people think. Unless the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and his Guardian Council chart a course that no other nuclear power has ever taken, Iran should become more responsible once it acquires nuclear weapons rather than less. The 50-year standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States was called the cold war thanks to the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons.

There is reason to believe that the initial shock of a nuclear Iran would soon be followed a new regional dynamic strikingly like that of cold-war Europe. Saudi Arabia and Iraq would be united along with their smaller neighbors by their fear of Iran; the United States would take the lead in creating a stable regional security environment. In addition, our reluctant European allies, and possibly even China and Russia, would have a much harder time justifying sales of goods and technology to Tehran, further isolating the Islamic Republic.

Iran may think its enrichment plans will put fear into the hearts of Americans. In fact, it should give us hopes of a renaissance of American influence in the Middle East.

Feb. 9. 2010: This Op-Ed has been updated to reflect the news.

Adam B. Lowther is a defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute.

Corpseman- It's No Mere Gaffe

2010-02-06T13:08:00.007-05:00

Gaffes are one thing, ignorance and dereliction of responsibility are another thing altogether. Everyone is missing the point about the President’s latest gaffe. It is more telling than Dan Quayle misspelling a food item and it is much more chilling than any of the famous malapropisms of former president Bush.

Here is why. President Obama is not just our political leader, he is the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces. He is the one we have given the ultimate responsibility to keep us safe. He has the power to send our young people into harm’s way. He can, likewise, withhold military action when Americans are in peril. Protecting and defending us is supposed to be the first priority of the President. Compelling the healthcare system to wipe more noses even if it is with rougher tissue paper, changing our national culture by weaning us away from our “bitter” clinging to God and guns and keeping industry from creating jobs by producing more than a certain quota of fossil fuel smoke are supposed to be somewhere down the list.

There is a common legend that Eskimos have a variety of words to describe snow. It makes sense for people to whom snow is important and whose lives often depend on a clear understanding of snow’s condition and appearance would have evolved sophisticated was of classifying and communicating about it. If Barack Obama were an Eskimo, he and all he leads would die in the ice.

We know that he has never served in the armed forces himself but, for God’s sake, Mr Obama walks past the Marines who guard his life every day. He flies in the helicopter Marine One to Camp David and other places constantly. The unofficial name for The Marine Band is “The Presidents Own”. He daily makes decisions in which he calls upon members of the various Corps of the armed forces to risk their own lives and take the lives of others. Do you think he might at some point have taken the time to listen to the military men and women talk about themselves?

Does he call “his own” band the Marine Corpse Band?

Is he really THAT disinterested in one of the most powerful instruments of policy available to him? Has he such a small appreciation for one of the key guarantors of his own personal safety? If so, what does that say about the priority he gives to the protection and preservation of the rest of us- our lives and livelihoods?

Calling a service member a corpseman is no mere gaffe it is one more proof that Mr. Obama does not understand his job, overestimates his own importance and has no idea what is truly important.

If you owned a cabinet making business would you hire a guy who, in the course of a job interview, called the big planer that you use to mill wood down to a smooth and even thickness a planner- confusing it with a calendar book day-timer?

Would you let a surgeon who says car-toid instead of carotid for the artery that carries all of the blood to your brain operate on your neck?

If not, then why would you want this guy to be your Commander-in-Chief?

UPDATES:

1. This was not the first time Obama has made this mistake one of my commenters on Free Republic has sent me this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxORB49KtsE

2. My friend Professor Barry Rubin writes of the Eskimo analogy:

Actually, they would develop a stiumulus package that bought trillions of dollars of refrigerators.

Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22

What's the Difference (between an Imam and a Rabbi)?

2010-02-04T19:13:00.005-05:00

Tell me again why anti-Semitism is on the rise in France?

Q: What do you call a Muslim Imam who respects other religions and believes in acting like a citizen of the country and century he actually lives in?

A: A National Hero- he gets invited to dine with the leaders of the state!

Q: What do you call a Rabbi who respects other religions and believes in acting like a citizen ot the country and century he actually lives in?

A: No Biggie- thats 99% of them.

To Annihilate Evil

2010-02-04T14:33:00.006-05:00

Ho-hum, another day, another Jew is accused of being blood-thirsty. No surprise either that another Jew is adding to the chorus. There is a gem of insight to be found here though so bear with me and slog through this hideous little example of faux journalism from Russia Today. Fellow Blogger Carl in Jerusalem, by the way, is the "blood-thirsty" exemplar here and he has blogged on the mess here.

I watch this video and the outrage I feel at the lies, anti-Semitic innuendo and the outright blood-libels is dwarfed with a kind of wonder at the utter absurdity of the Israeli woman, Inna Michaeli. Is there no limit to the venal careerism of people like this toad from "Women for Peace"? I wrote about Amira Hass as the Queen of the Toads three years ago and the same things I said about her back then apply double here to Inna Michaeli. She perverts and subverts liberal democratic ideals by implying that there is a moral equivalence between Israel's struggle to survive and protect her people and the annihilationist Arab Jihad against her, she obscures truth by inferring that Israel has not tried to achieve peace in ways other than warfare, and she betrays her own country a country which, judging by her accent, not so long ago redeemed her from the oppression of living in some part of the former Soviet Union. Now she is a professional in an organization that raises money and thrives on that betrayal, obfuscation and perversion. As with Hass, she has made her livelihood at betrayal and perversion and she takes her public acclaim and professional standing as her justification.

But who is blood-thirsty? Is it Carl who's only sin is in identifying evil and warning of its consequences or is it this fraud Inna Michaeli who pretends to want peace but who works to prevent Israel from asserting her power advantage (while she still has it) to secure her own people and survival. Who will be more responsible as the wars drag on and the land runs with blood for yet another generation?

The answer is made plain when she says “war is inevitable because ...wars and military action by our government simply goes unpunished..."?

If all military action is punished, who punishes the punishers? This is nothing less than a subconscious manifestation of the essential leftist yearning for world totalitarianism. This is the call for unending war.

Then too, Israpundit posted a brilliant speech by Spanish politician and Journalist Pilar Rahola at the Conference in the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism. This quote was debated in the comment stream, “The World is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don’t do anything about it”. I was moved to write a comment which I have expanded upon below.

The only thing to disagree with here is that she comes so close but then misses the heart of the real problem. That is that ALL people are evil. The founders of the U.S. knew, as they learned it from Genesis, that man's heart inclines toward evil from his birth. The Patriarchs were evil Thomas Jefferson owned slaves NO ONE is perfect. The genius of America is that the founders were honest about evil. They constructed the first human constitution that accepted that honest appraisal and was specifically designed to make sure that no one person or party could dominate and hold the rest hostage. They constructed check and balances so that the next ruler would not have to kill his predecessor. By making it so that we were responsible for keeping each other "honest", They gave us a reason to work with and trust each other. On the whole, it has worked. Israel's government has very similar aims.

What is so insane about the left is the utter dishonesty about evil- the pretense that the government (any government) or the financial system or bourgeois morality or organized religion or The Jews or the Republicans are the cause of evil. In "resisting" these and other "institutions of evil" they are blindly and ironically undermining the very Institutions that have evolved to control and channel ever-present human evil. The left has declared a war of annihilation against evil, thinking that that is good. It is not an accident that the greatest slaughters of human history have been perpetrated by socialists and communists. They are ready to pursue and exterminate evil right down to the last human heart in which it resides.

And, like Inna Michaeli, they all pretend to virtue and compassion...

A Jew Who Says Merry Christmas

2009-11-24T01:00:00.007-05:00

Note:

This will be the third time I have edited and posted this little essay. I feel the need to change it a little every year but this one is changed a bit more than usual. I am posting it before Thanksgiving this year and you'll have to read it to find out why:

A Jew for "Merry Christmas"

I am a Jew and I have to tell you, no one is going to discourage me from celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. No, I am not loosing my Jewish identity; on the contrary, I am very sure that it is stronger than ever.

I grew up in an observant Jewish home ( I am observant still) in which we greeted Christmas with a mixture of fascination, respect and a little irritation. At some point I became fond of expressing my ambivalence by quoting Jackie Mason, who once said:

“I don’t understand something about Christmas; maybe you can explain this to me? Why is it that this time of year you Christian people bring all of the trees inside the house and take all the lights and put them outside”

That line, for many years summed up the bemusement that I affected about the whole public Christmas celebration.

My feelings were mixed for a variety of reasons. My Dad had a retail store so the weeks leading up to Christmas were always a time of tension and brutally long hours of work. The traffic on the roads, crowds in the stores, and the saturation of television (especially in those pre- cable times) and radio airwaves with Christmas programs and music were overwhelming. I found the frenzy mentally punishing, the free-floating goodwill unsettling and the talk about Jesus (in whose divinity I was not supposed to believe) uncomfortable.

It left me very glad to have it over on December 26th.

And I was always just a little unsure of how to respond when some well meaning person would wish me a Merry Christmas. I was often caught between wanting to thank him noncomittaly, try to summon a convincing Merry Christmas in return or to say,” Thanks Very much but I don’t celebrate Christmas and then have to deal with the uncomfortable silence or explanations and apologies.

I am ashamed to admit it today but I was, at first, pleased when I saw, over the years, the ACLU and Multi-culti types pushing “Merry Christmas” out of the vocabulary of cultural discourse in favor of the more generic “Happy Holidays”.

I’ve grownup, though, and I’ve grown into a new perspective on this whole question and, today, when someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, I have a new response. It’s really simple-

I stop what I am doing

I don’t have any hesitation or second thoughts.

I wish them a great big “Merry Christmas” in return.

I would like to encourage all my fellow Jews to join me in this. Here’s why:

I have come to see quite clearly that even if there are politically correct, multi-cultural, morally relativistic, post modern progressive busybodies who would like us to believe that our Christian friends’ and Neighbors’ spontaneous Christmas wishes are somehow injurious to us and our culture, they are nothing of the kind. A sincere “Merry Christmas is more American and better for the republic and her people than the blandest, most guarded “Happy Holidays”

You see, the U.S. was founded by Christians. Not just any Christians. The early colonists were both devout and independent. They were fervent Protestants whose purpose in coming here was to leave the Kings, Priests, state religions and archaic laws of the Old World behind.

Even if some of them were supersessionists and dogmatic, they were also egalitarian and self-reliant. They came here to build a country where every man could read scripture for himself and be his own priest- where he could be free to elect political leadership that he could follow gladly. Ultimately, that experiment gave rise to the constitution and form of government we have today. At over two hundred years old, it is still the one in the entire world that best honors the individual and guarantees most rights to any individual who accepts the constitutional responsibilities of a citizen.

It was those fiercely independent Protestants who set the tone for the nation in which we now live. Their fierce spiritual presumption of the liberty of the human soul is, still today, the great central mast that lifts the canopy of democracy and holds it above us as a sanctuary from the despotism and effete decay that afflicts most of the rest of the world.

Crystallized in the constitution, the devotion of deeply religious people and spiritually awakened souls like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams are what have made it the highest standard of self rule and freedom in the history of the human race.

Among all their other unique achievements the fact that they decided that there could be no Official Religion in a country that aimed not just at physical or intellectual freedom shows that they understood that full human freedom means spiritual freedom too- Freedom of Religion.

To honor their genius fully we have to understand that Freedom of Religion must never be allowed to be a mandate for Freedom from Religion. As a Jew, I am exquisitely aware that freedom to practice my form of religion exists in this country because of those Christians and their vision of what a Christian country should stand for.

This uniquely Christian openness is why America has become the destination of choice for any one wishing to escape repression or lack of opportunity elsewhere in the world. That's why Jews have gravitated here for two hundred years. But we all (Christians, Jews, Muslims and Atheists) are in danger of forgetting how this all works and I think this whole “anti-Merry Christmas” thing is a symptom of that amnesia.

Fortunately, though, Jews do have a collective memory of stories if we just listen to them. My grandfather told me stories about life in turn-of-the(last)–century Eastern Europe so I have some idea of what he escaped by coming here. And its not just that he was not in Zhitomir, his Ukrainian home town, thirty years after he left for America, when the Waffen SS slaughtered thirty six thousand Jews there in one day! That is a gift indeed but it is in and of the past. No, it is the gift of equality and the opportunity to prosper that still lives on. It is that continuing gift that sustains the American dream and should call upon our constant love and loyalty.

The United States of America, as conceived by her Protestant founders, has been a miracle and a blessing to the entire human race. It has been especially important to the Jewish people.

We Jews are barely over one percent of the population here. We (a lot of us anyway) take pride in our contribution to America’s dynamism. We point with satisfaction to the fact that the founding fathers of this country were inspired and informed by our holy book which they called The Old Testament. Many of them read it in the original Hebrew, something few of us “modern” Jews can do.

But why do I need to explain this? Why don’t we all understand the centrality of the Protestant ethic to the goodness of America? Partly, it’s because of a lack in the educational program. But it’s also because our media, whose responsibility it should be to make us aware of the important ideas, events and issues has other agendas. Our “Mainstream” media is often found to be doing just the opposite.

In the media, America is assailed daily for her imperfections; and if not assailed, then damned by the faintest of praise. The media emphasizes the imperfections instead of the achievements- the discords not the harmony.

Historical revisionism has been used by the joyless progressives, secular humanists and multiculturalists to sap the joy and meaning out of Thanksgiving and the goodwill out of Christmas.

It has even come to pass that our President goes abroad and cannot seem to visit another country without some pathetic apology for America’s past- as if there is any country on earth whose history is so pristine that they are in a position to judge.

I am only one Jew- not a Rabbi and not a spokesman for a community organization, just a simple Jew. Nevertheless, I would like to call on all Jews, indeed, all Christians, Muslims and whoever else will standup with me and celebrate the blessing that The United States of America is to us and to the human family. Let us bow our heads together this Thanksgiving and resolve that instead of fretting about how saying “Merry Christmas” might make us an overly Christian country, we will thank our own, private God that we live in this country where “Happy Thanksgiving” and “Merry Christmas” mean what they mean here.

We need to loosen up and get a perspective on this “Merry Christmas” thing. It is not the people who say “Merry Christmas” and mean it that we need to be discouraging in America at this time. It is the people who find something wrong and suspect in the energy, enthusiasm and good-will that animates that “Merry Christmas” that we need to discourage.

We must side with our fellow Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom are warm-hearted friends with morals and ethics or we will have become unwitting dupes to heartless enemies with no moral compass who think they can rationalize almost anything and undermine our great civilization with reasonable sounding, non-judgmental sophistry. Do you need a moment to think about that?

By saying “Merry Christmas” in public we are not necessarily agreeing that Jesus was the son of God, we are just acknowledging that some very good people believe it. When we say it, that does not constitute accepting Jesus as our personal savior; it does show his followers that we see them as fellow countrymen, friends and brothers-in-arms in the defense of the highest ideals of our civil society and Judeo-Christian culture. What is the problem with that?

The first four words of this essay “I am a Jew”, are exactly the words that Daniel Pearl was forced to say on camera just before he was pinned down and his head was sawn off. I'd like you to try a little thought experiment simulating a better world here- Pretend that the next sentence that I write followed that first one and I had no need for the rest of the explanation in between...

"Have a Merry Christmas"

Progressives for Breast Cancer: A Preview of the Medical Gulag

2009-11-17T22:18:00.029-05:00

Here is a little thought experiment for you. The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force has made a new set of recommendations for the diagnosis of breast cancer that have implied that breast self-examinations are of limited value and that women should begin getting a regular mammography at 50 years of age (rather than the old recommendation of 40) and then only every two years instead of every year.

Their report states that screenings between 40 and 49 years of age only turn up one cancer for every 1900 or so women. They express concern that “false positives” and unnecessary tests are a cruel source of anxiety and mental suffering for many women and that women would be much better off if they waited another ten years before they put themselves through all that turmoil. Oh, yes, they added that hat a great deal of money would be saved along with the angst of all those hysterical ladies.

Well, ok, false positives are a problem when you do screenings but what about the non-false positives that don’t get diagnosed? If you take their number of 1900 to 1 it doesn’t sound so bad, really. Until you think a little more about it…

Just consider that detected early, the five year survival rate for breast cancer victims is in the neighborhood of 98%. Detected late, that rate falls to about 26% a decrease in survival of 72%. And that doesn’t begin to cover the additional suffering from the treatments and dislocation of families when diagnosis is delayed.

But how bad is the problem? Let’s take Gillette Stadium for an example.

Gillette is where the New England Patriots play. Like a lot of stadiums, it has been used as a venue for all kinds of events, soccer games, rock concerts- all kinds of things. So let’s make up a hypothetical event to fill the stadium. Let’s just say that in the run-up to the last presidential election, candidate Obama wanted to solidify his support among one of his best “demographics”, younger women. His staff planed a big rally to which only women 49 and under are invited.

Now, Gillette’s official capacity is 68,756 people. So at a diagnosis rate of 1900 to 1 that means that 36 women there at the rally already have breast cancer. President Obama was a great draw in 2008 lets assume he would have filled the whole stadium so we can assume that there are 68,756 women in the seats.

Ok now picture a stage in the middle of the field. As the lights dim and the applause fades, a spotlight beam centers on the thin, serious figure of the future President of the United States and he lifts the microphone and pronounces his words very carefully.

“Ok, now, I have something to tell you that is very upsetting and I don’t want you to panic or get hysterical. Thirty-six of you women here tonight, and we don’t know who you are yet, are going to agree to reduce your chance of living for another five years by 72%. That means instead of 33 of you living at least five more years, only 9 of you will live. Not only that, you are going to give your consent to putting your self through a comparable amount more suffering and pain than you would otherwise have to endure. Also you will be saddling your husbands, parents, friends and children with infinitely more sorrow and desolation than they would have had to bear if you had not come to support my presidency tonight.”

In his usual style, the President is actually understating the case by a factor of ten. An astute friend of mine has pointed out that the 1900 to one ratio is a "yearly" crop of diagnoses based on yearly screening. so the actual loss of early diagnosis will be multiplied by the ten years of delay in receiving mammograms. This makes the actual death toll from that fateful rally more like 270 women.

It sounds like a non-starter doesn’t it? Do you think he would have gotten any of those women's votes that night? But the fact is that those 68,756 women (including the 36 doomed ones) have already been hoodwinked in to agreeing to that deal. Because, if Obama has his way and forces the single payer system down our throats, government then recommendations like these will assume the force of law for all but those are so wealthy that they can pay for medical services out of pocket.

These new recommendations are draconian, not just because it reminds us of how cold and callous a bureaucracy can be in its disregard for medical prudence and the value of an individual’s life but (even more) because it has given us an ominous forewarning of what the Medical Gulag of single payer, government run health care system would look like if the Blue Dogs and Republicans in congress don’t come to their senses soon and stop Obama’s high-pressure sales blitz for his “health care reform package”. It is tragic to consider the consequences of this push for cheap health insurance.

Just to put a human face on it, I have Googled "died of breast cancer", clicked on "Images" and selected a somewhat random sampling of the resulting pictures. I have posted 27 of them below to represent the first year's (remember there are another nine years worth of death, sorrow and suffering involved!) 27 extra deaths among the 68,756 rally attendee at that imaginary rally. Imagine that they are the ones upon whose bodies and families, Obama's health care reform would save all that money.

They are all kinds of women who have one infinitely sad thing in common:

Some are mysterious and exotic.
A Daughter who Died before her mother...
Sisters who lost a mother and a sister to breast cancer
A Champion marathon runner
A newscaster
A sister who inspired a movement
A coach
Some you might think you recognize
All will be missed

They will not see their children grow
They are remembered for all kinds of things
They leave holes that cannot be filled
Some were accomplished and famous
Others never got to fulfill their dreams
Some changed whole industries
Some inspired good works in their names
Their music is stilled forever...
..never to be heard again

They are fading into memory

If only we had taken more pictures...

Their laughter still echoes

Their courage still inspires
We still smile when we remember
They are gone
No matter how alive they once seemed
They live now only for those who remember
Reminder: this represents the first year's "beneficiaries" of the Obama "adjustment" to the mammogram regime. What other horrors will they come up with to make their takeover seem affordable?

And what is the money being saved for?

Incredibly, this is little more than part of a naked attempt to make it look "budget neutral" to take some of the excellent health care away from citizens who work, pay taxes and earn the right to have their own insurance and choose their own doctors and redistribute it to people many of whom are not even legal residents of our country. It is intended to rationalize the degradation of medical service for families that struggle to pay their own way in order to give an inferior but equal care to people who don't even value enough to work for it. It has even been proposed in the Health reform bill that the savings be used to increase the linguistic and cultural "sensitivity" of health care delivery in border regions to ease the lives of illegal aliens as they resist acculturation and assimilation.

If you are a woman, or care about women at all, picture that pro-Obama rally in Gillette stadium. Look at these pictures above and imagine these wonderful, unique, and irreplaceable people sitting side by side. They would occupy a little more that one row in an average section. Imagine them all dead within five years just because they voted for Obama. Then imagine ten more deadly swaths just like that over the next ten years. And that is just from the rally In Foxboro, Massachusetts. Fill all the football stadiums in the country and imagine eleven rows of breast cancer victims whose life is unnecessarily shortened because they invited government bureaucrats to decide on their cancer screening schedule. And even that would not approximate the real toll. Whose picture do you want in that group?

Important Update:

The reader who corrected my numbers on the toll from the rally also stated this in relation to cutting the screenings down from every year to every two years:

It gets worse than that.

Half of all screenings post-age-50 would be eliminated, meaning that half of all cancers discovered post-age-50 would have been incubating one extra year (and half of all cancers would post-age-50 would be detected as early as before).

How many women post-age-50 get breast cancer and by how much would the death rate increase for that half of them with one extra year of incubation pre-treatment?

Please correct your post accordingly.

Best,
(I do not have permission to use his name yet)

Iain Levine and HRW, In Deep and Still Digging

2009-11-16T01:54:00.005-05:00

Apparently, no one ever told Iain Levine at Human Rights watch that when you are in a hole that you are having a hard time getting out of, the first thing you must do is to stop digging and he is doing his best to bring The Goldstone Report down the mine with him. It is the hallmark of poor salesmen and those who feel superior to other people that they do not know when to Shut Up. Levine, keen to discredit the storm of criticism of HRM that has been gathering force for years is running off at the mouth.

He is is trying to paint criticism of HRW as a new and sinister coordinated attack even though it has been building up for years as they have published report after prejudicial report damning Israel not just with sly, morally corrupt but superficially “even-handed” equivocation of Israeli self defense with Arabian genocidal aggression, but with the simply inaccurate and patently sloppy work of the now suspended Military “expert” Marc Garlasco. (You may remember that it was Garlasco who, back in 2006 stated publicly that it was an Israeli artillery shell that killed a family on an outing on a beach in Gaza. The accusation was picked up and touted by Israel’s detractors world wide before it was finally proven wrong- with nary a retraction or apology from HRW) .

Not content to let make arguments and try to prove his points, Levine has talked to The Guardian newspaper in England and is quoted as alleging that there is a coordinated attack being orchestrated by NGO Monitor, right wing bloggers and others, named and unnamed. He whines that those bad people are saying mean things “personally” about HRW. Here is an excerpt from the article”

Iain Levine, HRW's programme director, said that while the organisation had long attracted criticism, in recent months there had been significant attempts to intimidate and discredit it.

"I really hesitate to use words like conspiracy, but there is a feeling that there is an organised campaign, and we're seeing from different places what would appear to be co-ordinated attacks ... from some of the language and arguments used it would seem as if there has been discussion," he said."We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation."

He goes on to say that he believes that the purpose of the attacks is to distract attention from the Goldstone report:

Levine said he believes many of the attacks were aimed at distracting attention from the report of the UN investigator, Richard Goldstone, which was highly critical of Israel's killing of civilians in its three-week attack on Gaza that started last December. Goldstone is a former member of the HRW board and the group has strongly backed his report.

"We have been under enormous pressure and tremendous attacks, some of them very personal, as have been the attacks against Richard Goldstone with really vituperative language used to describe him: obsequious Jew, self-loathing Jew and all the rest of it," said Levine.

Poor thing, its odd that a guy who works for an organization that has made quite a good living out of trying to tie Israel’s hands behind her back while she is being attacked by other nations, professional terrorists, permanent refugees and proxy armies all of whom have publicly and unequivocally stated their intention to annihilate, destroy or “push her into the sea” might have a thicker skin than that. But, then, that is not the really pathetic thing about Levine.

Nor is the most pathetic thing about him that he says that because people are making similar arguments and using the same words about him and HRW that he thinks they all must be in cahoots in an organized way to attack them. Yes, it makes him sound like a kid who feels picked on by the math teachers in school because every year a different one tells him the “same thing” when he says that “one and one is three” but there is worse here.

No, the most pathetic thing is that he thinks that the fact that a number of people are alarmed enough about the damage that he and his fellow “holier than thou” protectors of the weak and defenseless at HRW have been doing to talk with each other and amass evidence and formulate logical arguments against them that that invalidates that evidence and those arguments.

Interestingly, Goldstone (don’t blame me, Levine brought him up!) has responded in much the same way, he has alleged that those who impugn his report have only attacked him personally and not made factual or logical arguments to the substance of the report. Apparently, neither Mr, Levine nor Judge Goldstone know about Google because if you google “Goldstone Report” you come up with lots of results with two of the first three being this and this, both compendiously factual, highly logical and almost strictly "not personal" in nature.

Yes, this is all quite pathetic in many ways but when Levine is quoted as saying, ."We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation." It is so very telling.

A word to Iain Levine: Think about it, Iain, your own words betray you. Facts and logic cannot be “repudiated” by honest men. To repudiate is to deny the validity or the reality of something. It may seem a small slip of the tongue but it reveals a truth. When you call what right-wing bloggers say about you, “lies, falsehoods and misinformation” it does not to prove that they are not true- Actually it is exactly what you call it- a repudiation.

“Repudiation” is empty. It is done by those who cannot refute or disprove. Much as you would like to repudiate what is being said about HRW and Goldstone, the desire to repudiate and the inability to refute is proof that a lot of it is accurate and deserved.

Heros and Civilization

2009-11-08T07:22:00.004-05:00

Kate at Small Dead Animals has posted an extraordinary piece of writing. I will only excerpt it here and you should read the whole thing. I’ll provide the link at the bottom of this post.

It is a terrifyingly real, plainly truthful and starkly beautiful account by a friend of Kate’s who was in the first wave of emergency personnel to arrive at the the scene of the Fort Hood Jihad. Here is the piece of it that hit me the hardest:

A young man walked up to me and asked if I could help him, I asked him, "where are you shot?", he told me in the chest...I directed him to go sit in my ambulance and an army medic sat with him and started oxygen and bandaging on him; in the mist of the madness I was trying to determine who would be the first to be transported still waiting on the helicopters to land so I could fly out the worst.

While getting more bandaging material off my ambulance several bystanders carried a soldier to my truck that had been shot in the head, he was conscious and breathing, he kept asking me "am I gonna die?", I told him I was doing the best I could, knowing from experience his situation appeared bleak.

Behind my ambulance several bystanders were doing CPR on a lady that had obviously been fatally shot, in a mas-cal situation you do "the most good for the most people"...that means save the ones you can and black tag the un-salvageable...it's a harsh truth but effective in this type of situation.

Amidst the horror spawned by Jihad, Kate’s friend was able to use her training, rely on her experience, maintain her presence of mind and contain her emotional response in order to play her part in the miracle of Western Civilization.

Her cool-headedness and bravery (along, of course, with that of Officer Munley and all of the bystanders whom she also praises) is the very kind of expression of the Western style of thought and values in action that has brought us to the pinnacle of human achievement. It is not the phony "selflessness" of the progressive left. It is a world removed from the human cog-in-the-machine of communism. And it is from an entirely different universe from the self-surrendered slave of Allah whom she so pointedly refers to as “the shooter”.

If the woman who wrote this account seems like a normal, everyday person to you, it is because we share with her the prototypical Western values of human life, empirical utility and intellectual honesty that she unselfconsciously embodies. If she seems like a heroine, it is because she is.

If only our leaders could summon the courage, intelligence and common sense to meet the threats of creeping socialism and the aggressively expanding Caliphate with such a cool head and clear vision.

Read the whole thing!

An Horrific Outbreak of Stupidity

2009-11-06T11:09:00.005-05:00

When it happened yesterday, we all thought the same thing. Many of us could not (or would not) speak it. Some could not even admit it to themselves that they thought it.

Hello, world, his name is Nidal Malik Hasan.

Today, in the aftermath, the news media is avoiding saying it with affected contortions of logic, pompous intentional ignorance of recent history and a bland stupidity that make “Sir Arthur” in this classic Beyond the Fringe sketch look like a forensic genius.

(There is a better, full motion version of this at YouTube that does not allow embedding)

How stupid do the media and our leaders think we are? If you are not simultaneously laughing at them and choking in outrage, you are pretty damned stupid…

Well, here, compare and contrast:

Today’s Boston Globe Headlines about the Fort Hood Sudden Jihad (FHSJ)

“Soldier kills 12, hurts 31 in Fort Hood rampage -

Military psychiatrist facing deployment abroad is accused”

Sir Arthur about the Great Train Robbery

“We believe this to be the work of thieves”

Barak Hussein Obama’s take on FHSJ,

“A horrific outbreak of violence"

Sir Arthur,

“There is the telltale disappearance of property, the snatching away of money substances. It all points to thieves.”

And why don’t they talk about Jihad and Islam and the fact that we all had, whether we admit it or not, the same thought when we heard about Fort Hood? Well no one talks about what they will not talk about but sir Arthur is not so constrained, when asked what a mindermast is, he admits,

"We don’t like to use the word Mastermind- it depresses the men."

We don’t want to think about the fact that the billions of Muslims all over the world belong to a religion and a culture that harbors and in many cases nurtures the seeds of blind hatred and coldblooded murder. We can't contemplate the implications of a guy that is described by his cousin as "a good American", a mental health professional, a physician who has taken the Hippocratic Oath could end up shouting Allah Akbar with guns blazing at unarmed by-standers. It might dishearten us. Think then, of Israel, who only wants to live in peace and is faced on all sides with the Muslim world that only wants to annihilate her.

Sir Arthur has one last caution for us, when asked by his interviewer

"Who do you think is behind the criminals?"

He answers:

"We are - considerably."

At least he knows he is losing and perhaps doomed by his ignorance. If we do not wake up and stop pretending that we are not facing a threat that we refuse to understand, we will be just as lost and possibly even more doomed.

History is NOT Religious Fanaticism

2009-11-04T22:21:00.006-05:00

Post Removed at author's request

Jews are Always Settlers

2009-11-04T10:00:00.002-05:00

There is yet another example of an ordinarily pretty good news organization (The Washington Times) going brain dead and printing verbatim a terrible, biased, anti-Zionist slur from the AP. I wasn’t going to bother posting about it because I am so tired of having to exhaust myself on this stuff and I have come to the conclusion that the newspapers are just too short-handed to read this stuff carefully before they call is “content” and give it space. As I posted a comment on the article and began to move on, though, I could not get over the use of the words “settler”. It is a pejorative now, used to paint Jews as aliens and outsiders, but I have a different emotional attachment to the word.

Whether he was placidly agreeing with my mother during one of her extended tirades (he called them lectures) or concluding a business deal, my dad would often say, “I’ll settle for that. I’m one of the early settlers.” He was a very gentle but effective negotiator. He always did his best to make every situation a “win-win”. I have always thought that this was not just his way but the Jewish way. After all, when the Romans destroyed our temple and we began our two millennia of wanderings, expulsions and holocausts, we had to get into the habit of settling. In all that time there was only one place on earth we were not settlers, Jerusalem. We were beleaguered there, by the Romans Arabs and Turks, persecuted and often murdered but it was always our home. That is why the use of the word “settler” bothered me so much. The Washington Times article is here.

Here is my comment as I posted it at the Washington Times web site:

This is so obviously badly slanted as to be almost unbelievable. Even so, there is enough information in the article to get to the truth. Key Phrase: "Mr. Grenimann said 29 members of the al-Kurd family lived in the house evicted on Tuesday. Some of them had settled there after they were evicted from another house in the same neighborhood, following the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to uphold the settlers' claim to the ownership of that building." Translation: They are illegal squatters that the Israeli government is unable to screw up the nerve to deal with directly, nearly forcing the legal owners to do stupid stuff like this. The pathetic case went all they way to the SUPREME COURT OF THE LAND and the so called journalist who wrote the article still calls it a "claim." The truth is that the Israeli courts bend over backwards to uphold "Palestinian rights". Would a squatter case ever get argued in front of the US Supreme Court? When the Jordanians overran West Jerusalem in the 1948 war for independence, they massacred a Jewish population that had inhabited the Jewish quarter continuously for more than three thousand years and blew up ancient Synagogues and community buildings in order to expunge all trace of Jewish life there. Now Jewish people are referred to as "settlers" and Arab squatters are portrayed as "Palestinians". They are not "Palestinians", they are Arabs. They are of the same Arab tribes that compose a majority of Jordan. There was never such a thing as a "Palestinian" until 1968 - the name is the single biggest triumphant lie foisted by Arafat on the conscience of the world. When Israel left Gaza, all Jewish "settlers" had to leave because to stay would have been a death sentence. If East Jerusalem ever does become the capital of a previously fictitious state, all Jews will be forced out by violence and/or death. The Arabs living in Israel are the most secure, wealthiest and healthiest in the world and all the Washington Times can do is run obviously scurrilous trash like this. The great injustice here is not that the Jewish people who did this are not being “nice people”, it is that the very fact that they stand up for their property rights makes them villains.

It goes on and on. German Jews in the 1930’s refused to believe that they were not Germans, just as the Spanish Jews before them they learned that they were all too easily turned on as “settlers”. But, it is always easy to call Jews settlers. We are. We lived in Germany for four hundred years among settled Germanic tribes that had lived there for a thousand years- making them the early settlers. In that sense, very human being on earth is a settler. But in Jerusalem, in Judea, Samaria, Tel Aviv and Sderot we are the Early Settlers. This was recognized in modern times by the creation of the modern state of Israel. If we allow the world to forget our place and our rights, if we allow the newly invented Palestine to squat on our property, who will find a place for us?

Israel has proved time and time again that she will “settle” for peace with a Palestinian state that does not pose a mortal threat. Israel is, in that sense too, an early settler. Over and over the so-called “Palestinains” have proven (Fatah, Hizballah and Hamas even publish it in their charters) that they are not going to settle for anything less than the annihilation of Israel. That makes them very late settlers indeed- maybe even squatters.

Nobel Prize? Why?

2009-10-09T14:53:00.004-05:00

There could be no better proof that the left is racist. The guy who was elected President of the United States because he was articulate and available while black has now been given a Nobel Peace Prize for being the first apologetic, bereft of statecraft and black President of the United States.

He was nominated for the prize less than two weeks after his inauguration. You simply can't tell me that it was anything other than his race that was behind that. Now after only 9 months in office , without any actual results, how could he deserve so much as a Kewpie Doll at the state fair?

The Senator who voted present (although infrequently) is now the peacemaker who has not made anything. Why don't they wait a year or two to see if anything works out? Maybe they don't any faith in him either...

It is true that alienating your allies and laying down your defenses to your enemies will lead surely to peace, but I fear it is likely to be the kind of peace the peoples of the Soviet Union had for all those blissful Communist years- or even worse a millennium or two of Pax Islamica under the promised Caliphate.

Richard Goldstone- Don't call him "Justice"

2009-09-29T10:11:00.005-05:00

Even as I am working on a more in-depth piece on him, "Justice" Richard Goldstone has been fighting back against the rage of Israelis, Jews and moral people everywhere. As often happens when the ethically blind and the morally crippled try to dance around the havoc they create, Goldstone has stepped right in a big smelly one.

The tip-off line in Goldstone's statement is: "The lack of justice for victims was "undermining" chances for peace in the region, he said." This guy thinks it is about justice!?!?! Or at least that is how he couches it. Jews are not asking for justice- just the permission to defend ourselves against terror. The Palestinians are not looking for justice- How many times do they have to tell the world that all they desire is the annihilation of Jews?

Who does Goldstone think he is talking to with this "justice" fetish? Only guilty westerners who lack the moral compass to see that true justice is harsh and that "they" do not "want what we want." This guy is the quintessential useful idiot. The lack of justice is not undermining anything, It is lack of moral fiber and ethical balance on his part that will destroy any chance of peace.

In most cases, peace only comes after a defeat of some kind. Granting justice to the unjust insures that defeat will never happen- at least not to the ones who deserve it!

Goldstone apparently thinks that because he uses "Justice" as his title, that he knows what it is. Perhaps he fails to see the irony- Its kind of like calling the tin-pot idiot leader of Korea who bears the blood of millions, "Dear Leader".

Who is Watching the Human Rights Watchers?

2009-09-08T07:13:00.007-05:00

Omri Ceren at Mere Rhetoric is. It seems as though Human Rights Watch, an organization that makes it their business to scold Israel's Defense Forces have been relying on the judgement of someone who appears to have some very dark ulterior motives. NGOs like Human Rights Watch make a very rich living out of clucking in disapproval from self-appointed perches. They trade upon the widely held perception that they are "impartial and non-political". So what are they going to do now that it is coming to light that a very prominent staff member has a major-league fascination and a personal identification with the erstwhile Nazi war machine.

Ceren, using only public material, easily available through Google searches, has turned over a rock and found a very slimy side of the self-promoting, widely quoted, media trollop Marc Garlasco. Garlasco has worked on many projects in which he has presumed to call Israelis to task for the ways in which they defend themselves from the new genocidal threat and has appeared as a military expert on many of the anti-zionist media (CNN, ABC, BBC, etc..) networks.

All the while he has, rather openly, been a well known nazi-phile and collector of Nazi paraphernalia. Of course, he has been careful not to publish anything that identifies him with Nazi ideology per-se. He fawns and giggles in his posts on Nazi memorabilia web sites about historical value, elegance, design and manufacturing expertise but I, for one, don't buy it. Even if some one who collected child pornography covered the obsession with self-serving obfuscation about the "beauty of the human form" and "the ancient heritage of love between mature adults and pubescent children" does it make the obsession less dark and abusive? I think not.

Garlasco uses the moniker Flak 88 on his favorite Nazi memorabilia website and as a vanity plate on his (German made) car.

Flak 88 (pictured at the top of this post, above), for those of you who do not know the literature of World War II was the designation of a German artillery piece that was dreaded by allied soldiers on the battlefield and aircrews in their warplanes. The story he tells is that his grandfather was on a Flak88 crew during the war and that his choice of hobby and nickname is a result of this personal history. That would all bel very well for someone who makes his living judging cabbages in a sauerkraut factory but this person is actively engaged in limiting the ability of Jews to protect themselves from an incipient new holocaust while he is still venerating (at the very least) the symbolism of the last one. The icing on the cake to me is that online moniker and the license plate on the car. What would we feel if sixty years from now, Mohamed Atta's nephew was found driving around lower Manhattan with the license plate "Boeing 767"? Would he be considered impartial and non-political?

What is going on at Human Rights Watch? Who is watching the human rights watchers?

Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation- Scotland Knuckles Under

2009-08-20T10:01:00.007-05:00

Only a few days ago I posted about a thing I call savage compassion. And now Kenneth MacAskill is rationalizing the release of the convicted terrorist Libyan Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi with a new wrinkle on the concept. MacAskell, to the eternal dishonor of the Scottish people and Great Briton has said, "Our justice system demands that justice be imposed but compassion be available. Our beliefs dictate that justice be shown and mercy be served."

And here is yet another perfect illustration of how “compassion” in politics is the anathema of justice.

Last year I wrote about a lone memorial not 100 yards from my house. This memorial was placed in the Newton Centre Park by the friends of a college student who grew up here. That original post was titled “A Birthday Gift for a Dead Girl!” a commemoration of her fortieth birthday. The forty-first birthday of Sarah S. B. Philipps who was murdered on flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland twenty and a half years ago was just five days ago and now her murderer is being released.

Where is the compassion for the families of the flight 103 victims?

Where is the concern for the hope that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi might be squeezed for more information about the plot and its origin in exchange for this “compassion”?

Nobody believes he did this alone- Where is the justice for the other plotters with whom Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi worked?

Where is the justice for the Libyan government for which he worked?

Where is the compassion for the victims of other terror attacks that are encouraged and validated by this travesty of compassion?

The truth is, Britain is swamped by internal Islamists and greedy for oil deals with Qaddaffi’s Libya. But instead of admitting their cowardly and selfish motivations for not just rehabilitating Qaddafi, but positively fawning and cringing over him, they couch in the deadly language of "compassion". It puts me in mind of a Robert Burns Poem (made into a great song by Steeleye Span) about Scottish dishonor in another century. Here is my updated version of the original.

A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation

Farewell to all our Scottish fame, 
Farewell our ancient glory! 
Farewell even to the Scottish name. 
So famed in martial story! 
Now Islam runs over
Salway sands, And terror runs to the ocean, 
To mark where Mohammed's province stands - 
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!  

What force or guile could not subdue 
Through many warlike ages 
Is wrought now by a coward few 
For hireling traitor's wages. 
The Islamist terror we could disdain, 
Secure in valour's station; 
But Lybian Oil has been our bane - 
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!  

O, would, or I had seen the day 
That Treason thus could sell us, 
My old grey head had lain in clay
With Bruce and loyal Wallace! 
But pith and power, till my last hour 
I will make this declaration : 
'Our honor is soiled by Libyan Oil'- 
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Warning to Republicans- We are Not Doing This for You!

2009-08-13T10:43:00.007-05:00

Not so fast, Republican scum. This is not just about how the American public is discovering that the Democrats have deceived them. We are looking at you too.

We hate the greed, the lies, and the naked hypocrisy. Most of all though, it is that arrogant, self-congratulatory air of moral, social and intellectual superiority we can’t abide. There isn’t a tenth of the senators or congressmen on either side of the aisle, in Washington, who I don’t hate. Yes, I mean hate. I loathe those politicians. I despise the president. I think a lot of people are feeling the same way.

I especially despise the knee-jerk partisans who publicly display their ignorance by lowering the general level of discourse with snide and derisive comments about those with whom they disagree. Don’t call us “a mob” just because you’ve been ignoring us so effectively that we have to shout to be heard. We will not silence ourselves. And don’t think, just because you may be against the health care bill, that we are going to give you a pass. That sound you hear in the town hall meetings about health care is not the agitation of a partisan mob and it is not (at least not yet) the howl of a revolutionary rabble. If you look closely, you will see that it is every day people who are realizing and beginning to articulate that they are feeling betrayed.

I have been sitting and holding my tongue since the election of Barack Obama. I have been praying that our well-intentioned friends on the left were right and that I was wrong about the dangerous nature of the Obama victory. Now I find that there are many things worse than discovering you were wrong about the candidate you didn’t support and one of the very worst of them is happening right now.

The realization has been creeping in on me that not only had I been right to fear calamity in an Obama Presidency, but I was also wrong about the possibility that there might arise, in Washington, an honorable, intelligent and respectable opposition to the dreadful policies, empty rhetoric, pseudo-intellectual post-modernism, reckless “change-aholism” and idolatrous personality worship.

No, that sound that the Mainstream News Media is doing its best to filter out and cast in a prejudicial light is the sound of people waking up from the dream of being held in the warm embrace of a motherly and progressive government that wants to make everything “all right” and realizing that they have been encircled in the cold embrace of the mother of all boa constrictors- The Progressive Left. It is the cry of people who have finally found their resistance to the personal charm and political capital of the new administration and realized that if there is any hope of stopping the slow but inexorable strangulation that is already under way, they must act with passion and urgency. Like me, they are not just disappointed; they are in despair and futile rage.

Let me be perfectly clear:
I don’t just hate the stupid arrogance and messianic self-satisfaction of the Obama presidency; I hate the sickeningly ineffective and concupiscent faux conservatives on the other side even more. Both sides have betrayed their voters, their own natures and the promise of the American experiment in self-government.

Our President, charming, slick, loquacious and calculating though he is, could not help, in a few obvious gaffes, giving us enough unguarded moments through which to glimpse the size and darkness of the betrayal.
It was not, for example, just his initial knee-jerk, Community Organizer reaction in which he famously said that the "police had acted stupidly". That was bad enough. The smarmy "beer summit" with officer Crowley was, to me, even more of a symptom of his sub-rosa contempt for the middle class values and general class prejudice.

It amazes me, in retrospect, that no one that I am aware of has yet observed that inviting an Irish cop over to your formal rose garden, when you are accustomed to $100.00-a-pound steak, is the nearest thing in America today to the insensitivity of inviting a black guy over and serving him Fried Chicken and Watermelon. It is the way in which insufferable elites treat those they hold in amused contempt.

Likewise, the example he used earlier in that same verbose, slow-motion train-wreck of a press conference, in which he attempted to create the impression that family physicians are liable to drum up extra revenues by doing unnecessary tonsillectomies to the detriment of their patients and the economy. Leaving aside my original reaction to this, which is that I suspected that this might be a veiled reference to the heavy Jewish representation in the medical profession. I have come to realize, though, that it is not the anti-Semitic caricature of Jewish doctors doing unnecessary tonsillectomies that The President was after here, it’s actually a kind of classism.

This has not happened overnight. There are those who have written about this time in American history as class warfare but it is subtler than that. In today’s America, the class system has been twisted and spliced into a kind of Mobius Strip in which what we used to think of as the Upper Class has joined in common cause with what used to be referred to as The Poor. The confederation of these two constituencies, that used to occupy the polar extremes of the class spectrum, has warped the socio-economic plane on which America has always provided the most equal opportunity and freest marketplace of ideas in the world.

The public (the real people) has been slow catching on. Affirmative Action did not sufficiently alarm the working people and middle class. They allowed themselves to be lulled and co-opted when money market and mutual funds gave them the impression that, someday, they might live without actual labor and creativity in the style of the moneyed, coupon-clipping upper class. The nationalization of the Automobile Industry was slipped by them in a fog of urgency. They saw the value of their homes degraded by a crisis in mortgages that were intentionally sold without the time-honored requirements and caution so that “those less fortunate” could also have homes of their own.

The feelings and “dignity” of The Poor, in fact, supply the muscular grip for The Progressive Movement which has always been a cause born of privilege and upper class pretension. The chief distinction of the upper class is that they do not “need” to work. They can live their accustomed lifestyle merely by looking after their interests. As witnessed by the make up of the houses of congress and the Whitehouse which have come to resemble nothing so much as Ivy league clubhouses for those born to the upper class and the few fortunate tokens who they have raised up by affirmative action and so fully indoctrinated into the progressive fraternity that they cannot see that they are dupes. They are so progressive that they believe that self-defeating, divisive dogmas like the Black Value System vaunted by Barack Obama’s Chicago Church are positive and constructive not poison pills that will only perpetuate the racial divide and defeat successive generations of young black people. The alliance between the two great occupationless classes one living off the efforts (and sometimes crimes- as in the Kennedys) of earlier generations and the other swilling at the public trough (welfare recipients, political appointees, most of the news media, much of academia) has combined many disparate groups and turned them into a many-headed serpent that knows only to squeeze harder on the diminishing majority of people who work, create and earn livings in spite of the mounting pressure.

It would not be accurate to call the insidious, snide, condescending negation of middle class values a war on the middle class. It is almost never a warlike state. Only the occasional savagery (like the assault on Sarah Palin) rises to anything akin to war. There is just the constant tightening of the counter-cultural squeeze that mocks ambition, sneers at business acumen, recoils from value judgments and belittles even the healthiest of self-interest.

There is a deep prejudice in liberal circles against those who "sully their hands" with trade, profit and useful functions. The taxonomy of what makes a member of this new hybrid “occupationless” class needs to be worked out but it appears to have a great deal to do with those who spend the majority of their (working) time doing things that “look after their interests”, denying reality and jockeying for position than coming up with original ideas, making (verifiable) scientific discoveries, moving objects from one place to another, making anything useful, protecting society from itself or creating value of any kind.

I remember the horror amongst the room full of anthropology students I was asked to address a few years after I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree. A professor with whom I had maintained a relationship had asked me to come to a career night and tell them about my path after graduation. I told them about my experience with Affirmative Action and how I had found interest and satisfaction outside of academia. I spoke of how, having studied Anthropology, I felt that my understanding of people and life was enhanced and that whatever career they chose (or chose them) they would be well served by the education in humanity they were receiving. Looking at people Anthropologically was a great tool, not just for understanding the human condition but for understanding and serving people’s needs.
There were several graduate students in the room who were outraged by my tale.

In the ensuing rant, I was all but driven from the room. I don’t recall the exact words but, thirty years later I still feel the emotional temperature. I was informed that no one there had any interest in any career other than study, teaching and research and that the proper uses of Anthropology did not include anything remotely to do with making money in a direct way. They did not use the words “middle class” or “bourgeois” but they hung heavy in the air nonetheless. It was my first direct experience with this particular kind of class consciousness which I will call “occupationalism”. The bottom line is that if you work for a living, you are not one of us.

So now the actual workers, thinkers and producers are on the verge of realizing that The Democrat Party (that they used to think of as the working-man’s party) has become the party where the Upper Class and The Poor have come together under the progressive banner to squeeze them within an inch of their lives and that The Republican Party (that they used to think of as the party of the rich) has lost its way among the debris of the Bush years of “Compassionate Conservatism”- essentially a defenseless wreckage. If we are going to avoid a class war, it is up to one of these parties to come to its senses and re-adopt real values and actual work.

The first step is to recognize and reaffirm the dignity of real work and actual values, to stop worrying about what the rest of the world thinks and begin behaving like America again. Get out of the boardroom and the examining room. To hell with compassion! Let’s create opportunity. Forget the opinion poll results, lead with conviction and reason. Tell the government to provide us with law, order and safety and stay out of the way- we will do the rest. We are the ones who never stopped working and all we want is the chance to continue unobstructed.

Hey, Tovarish! Turn Yourself in for Re-education!

2009-08-06T08:11:00.002-05:00

The Obama administration shows its true colors more each day. Now they are asking their dwindling cadre of cultists to report back to the mother ship on any independent (or as they call it “fishy”) opposition. It may seem unbelievable but here is a link to the actual White House Blog http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/ that calls for informers to turn in their email buddies and randomly visited bloggers.

Well, last night I posted a link to my essay on Blame, Virtue and Evil at Victor Davis Hanson’s blog at PJM and while reading through the other comments there I ran across one that had an idea I think we should all help out with. Commenter TLM wrote:
“…Don’t bother forwarding this to . I have already reported myself and plan to do so every day until the government takes down that ridiculous un-American site. You would do better to inform your masters that Americans are angry regarding this legislation because they no longer trust their government…”

I am doing the same. I think anyone who believes in free speech and a government that governs openly and without intimidating citizens who disagree with the executive branch, should do the same. We do not yet have a Gulag in America but reporting each other to the government for unclean thoughts is the first step in the process.

Where are all the progressives who called George W. Bush Bushitler Now?
Here is the email address to turn yourself in: flag@whitehouse.gov

Blame, Virtue and Evil

2009-08-03T06:56:00.007-05:00

In my recent post, entitled A Most Savage Compassion, I compared Classical Liberalism with Progressive Liberalism. Citing my personal experience with affirmative action, I worked at showing how the “new” “progressive” values of Compassion, Selflessness and “the Good of Mankind” and a systematic effort ot increase the size and power of government have been advanced by The Progressive movement to undermine and replace the founding American value of each person taking personal responsibility for the individual pursuit happiness within a system that set out to guarantee only life and liberty. Progressives advocate incrementally replacing the responsibility and discretion of individuals with a manipulative, centralized authority of “experts” and “agencies” to manipulate and coerce individual behavior. I think I made it clear that I believe this is a very bad bargain.

It is manifest, though, that American liberals have been shifting from the classical toward the progressive viewpoint for many years. Ronald Reagan observed this shift more than thirty years ago. Regan, when asked why he left the Democratic Party and became a Republican was heard more than once to say, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; my party left me".

Which posses an interesting question. Since, America was founded on the idea that individuals, given the safety and opportunity, will make choices and live lives that perpetuate the common sense and enlightened self-interest that were the guiding principals of the founders how is it that Classical Liberalism is so easily giving way to Progressivism even as they claim to represent “American values”?

It is vital to understand how this shift is being achieved. First, let us remember why they call themselves “progressive”.

The sort of “progress” that is implied in the name Progressivism is actually a very un-American elitist fantasy in which The Progressive imagines that all people are equally ethical, trustworthy and basically good and that all cultures are likewise equally good and moral and that given the right information and presentation would agree with and submit to the Progressive agenda. As we have seen, this is opposed to and incompatible with the founding assumptions of the American republic.

That agenda assumes that normal human ambition, lust, acquisitiveness, anger and violence, either do not really exist or can be talked, legislated, educated or punished out of existence- not just subjugated or tamed, mind you, but eliminated entirely. The deepest and most redeeming wisdom of the founding fathers of America is that they had the spiritual depth and political intelligence to understand that those dark urges are every bit as universal in the human heart as are the selflessness, reason, empathy and light on which the progressives pin their hopes and it is no good getting rid of old tyrannies unless checks and balances are built into the political structure that guard against new ones arising.

The idea of progressivism, however well intentioned and idealistic, is dangerous. It would require an entire civilization of lobotomized and neutered drones, to bring about that end stage progressive society, in which human evil is expunged, into being. And yet, somehow, the progressive agenda is making real headway in America. The fulcrum of the progressive movement is the universal human need to blame and the lever is our need to think of ourselves as virtuous.

The progressive attack on the status quo begins with an emotional attack in which perceived cultural ills and social suffering are blamed on classical liberal institutions. The blame might attempt a specific causal connection such as the progressive attack on corporate greed, blaming capitalism for poverty and suffering or the Progressive’s support for the undemocratic Arab Jihad against Israel in which they accuse her of being the sole barrier to peace because of oppressive behavior and/or stealing Arab land by building the anti-terror wall. Or it might be more diffuse and inexact, like the accusations against the Bush administration for “fascist” intentions and thuggish behavior (see “BushHitler”) or the bland and nonsensical assertion that nobody should lack health care in the richest nation on earth. However the attack is couched, it is mostly done without any analysis on or respect paid to the actual cause of the suffering or ills.

In the world according to progressivism, blame, divorced from understanding or causality always trumps reason and evidence. The emotional content behind fixing blame for an event or condition works against the ability to observe and analyze the facts of the situation dispassionately and determine the cause with accuracy. Without understanding blame is a lie and a danger. The progressive agenda is based on one of the oldest and most destructive lies known to the human race. Last fall, in my post Who is to Blame for Evil, I quoted René Girard from his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World:
"When we describe human relations, we lie. We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion." In these two short sentences Girard has pointed out the most important mistake of progressivism.

In the citadels of the progressive elites in America where Postmodernism has the most sway (Academia, The Mainstream Media the Liberal Political Elite) it has become standard practice to blame the capitalism, the military, the police, religion, the constitutional guarantees that insure the sanctity of the individual (free speech and the right to bear arms) and other social and cultural institutions for fuzzy edged but emotionally charged ills like “poverty”, “racism”, “sexism” “suffering” and “inequality” in order to distract attention from the “competitive and war-like” nature of human relations and thus maintain and perpetuate the lie of “normal goodness”. They do this because they know that without the lie of ‘normal goodness” the acid bath of relativism (and the anomie it causes) that has corroded the confidence, self-reliance, responsibility and individualism of the enlightenment quest for objectivity and knowledge looses its strength.

The problem is that capitalism, the military, the police, religion and the constitutional guarantees of free speech and the right to bear arms are the very things that best protect and relieve us from those ills and dangers. It is like the man who only sees a physician when he is sick and so comes to blame doctors and hospitals for his illness. Which came first, the doctor or the illness? If there were no disease, there would be no doctors. If human relationships were devoid of competition and violence there would be no such thing as government, police, military or philosophy.

The progressive left blames our government for any deficit of human rights or for civil disorder- both of which are reflections of the very things they were created to prevent- or at least manage. While all governments, economic systems and religions are blame worthy, only the anarchist will find satisfaction in stopping there- and relativism is the avatar of anarchy. If no system is any better than any other system and no cultural mores more civilized than any other, then what is the use of defending any standard of behavior at all?

All forms of government put their trust in one or another way of neutralizing or channeling the best and the worst of the individual. Monarchy depends upon the purity of “The Good King” to decree peace and order while winning the love of his subjects. Theocracy looks to one man (or group of men) who claim to deliver the edict of God on earth. In a totalitarian regime, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “everyone, including (in theory, anyway) the dictator, can be sacrificed in the name of a superhuman law, a law of nature or a law of history…Totalitarianism (and there was never a totalitarian state that was not socialist) strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous.” Only republican democracy grants the individual the freedom to assume responsibility for his own actions and only capitalism gives the individual the opportunity to play an active role in determining his own stake in society and worth in the marketplace.

So why do the progressive accusations of blame against America seem valid? In fact many of them are, but only in a superficial way. It is quite true, for instance, that there are egregious abuses of the capitalist economy. Bankers take advantage of their power, stock brokers manipulate information, CEO’s bilk stockholders and companies abuse their workers. But these are less failures of the capitalist system than they are proof that people are not all good and will never behave perfectly no matter how perfect the system they live within.

This is the devastating power behind Rule 4 in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:
“Make opponents live up to their own book of rules… You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Alinsky was right, he was a radical and had no progressive illusions. He knew that using this tactic ruthlessly is the gateway to nihilism and anarchy. Progressives are far more dangerous because they have the illusion that by offering un-researched theory and unproven but “compassionate” policies to replace proven policies that have been circumvented makes them liberal.

Alinsky’s Rule Number 10 (The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”) limited his appeal to American Liberals who, at least, understood that you cannot tear down the existing structures of life without an alternative structure to propose without declaring yourself an anarchist.

And the Progressive alternative is the combination of Compassion, Selflessness and “The Good of Mankind” http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2009/07/most-savage-compassion.html armed with these three virtues, even the most pathetic socialist panderings can be made to look like real policies. Here is the argument for implementing a sweeping change and authorizing massive and detailed government intervention is health care:

Health care reform may or may not be a good idea but what “nice person” could possibly stand up to this emotional extortion? This is exactly the formula that brought us the welfare system that destroyed so many American families. It created (with a huge assist from venal bankers and brokers) the mortgage disaster of 2008. It was the irresistible force behind the passage of the grotesquely bloated stimulus package even though no single human being had ever read all of it or understood much of it. And it is now fueling the pressure being applied for the healthcare reform bill that President Obama tells us “must be passed”.

Or else what? Or else we will still have the best health care in the world but we will feel less virtuous and compassionate. The bind the progressive wants us to believe that to be opposed to the Progressive agenda, is to be without virtue, that by asking questions or making observations, you stand in the way of a more compassionate, selfless and better future for all of mankind. It puts you just a short step away from inhumanity and justifiable homicide. Just think about the vilification and character assassination of BushHitler, Cheney and Palin.

If you want to be counted as a good person, or a moral nation, everything you do has to fit the template of Compassion, Selflessness and “the good of mankind”. But the aggression and anger does not go away it just sublimates and gets expressed in other ways. As I pointed out in A Most Savage Compassion, “Virtue is more than a sham- it is the prim, ruthless face of coercion. It is aimed outward, at others, as a self-justification; an accusation and, above all, a yearning for Utopia.” Small wonder that progressives exhibit such self destructive, and cultural deconstructive rage against their own culture and people- they can’t express rage outward so it turns inward.

"Virtue" acts as an autoimmune disorder in which the body politick’s defenses are destroyed by progressivism which eats away the natural defenses from the inside while it encourages the external enemies to feast on the outside.

Progressive cant has it that the murderous stories of the bible, the piles of skeletal bodies of concentration camp victims, the American slave trade, The Inquisition and The Crusades, The 1,500 year Jihad of world conquest by Islam with its forced conversions, massacres, beheadings, stonings and honor killings are proof that the most hideous atrocities of human history have been committed because of Nation, Business or Religion that without those institutions, those things would never have happened. The truth is that evil things happen in spite of whatever Government, Business and Religion is in charge; evil happens because, as it is written in the bible, “the inclination in man's heart is evil from his youth.”

The heart of evil may be man’s, the blind assertion that people (humanity) are basically good may be the soul of evil but the progressive presumption that the pretense to Compassion, Selflessness and “the good of mankind” is by itself virtuous and the ultimate answer to evil, in the face of three and a half millennia of evidence to the contrary, is the strong right arm of evil. This is not even the deadly subterfuge of a Trojan Horse, it is the cowardly traitor who lets down the castle’s drawbridge in the dead of night and delivers his slumbering fellows into the hands of the enemy. And the enemy (whether in the form of Jihadist, moral disintegration or cultural decline) is not restrained by any such virtue.

Barack Hits the Nail on the Head

2009-07-24T12:38:00.006-05:00

Barack Obama said it. He didn’t mean it the way I do but all the same…
“I have to say, I am surprised by the controversy…”

What did America expect?
When your only tool is a hammer everything in the world looks like a nail-
So, if a white policeman, in the course of making sure lives and property are protected, happens to have to ask a man who has made a very good living and a personal vendetta out of blaming America and white people, would you expect him not to make the most of an opportunity to prove himself right and secure days, weeks, maybe even months of media attention?

And if you elect a “community organizer” President of the United States he will use every trick in the book to divert the attention from facts (of which there were not many) and logic (if wind were logic this news conference would have been the general theory of relativity- but alas…) including using a media stooge to creat a diversion. After using a great many words and a tremendous amount of time to say very little about the great white elephant of a Health Reform Bill that he is trying to shove down our throats, He made sure that the last question came from a friendly face from a Chicago paper. The following clip shows him completing the final maneuver to get his media toady the microphone.

Right out of the Savage Compassion handbook. Take an emotionally stinky topic put it in a paper bag, light it on fire, throw it onto the porch, ring the doorbell then hide in the bushes and watch the fun. Who cares if you admit that you know nothing about what happened you can still blacken America’s name and accuse a police officer because “everybody knows” that this is the way it is.

So, yeah, Barak I am surprised by the controversy too. I have been expecting it. The only surprise on my part is that it is happening so soon, before the end of your year in office. I thought it might have taken longer for you to squander all that marvelous political capital that swept you into office. I surely expected that you would be politically savvy enough not to say a thing like that or to defend it a day later. But, then, when you are used to hammering the police as a community organizer they must all get to look like nails after a while…

A Most Savage Compassion

2009-07-21T08:58:00.009-05:00

The doctor looked me in the eye and said, “Are you Mr. ben Moshe?”

“Yes” I said, barely able to hold my head up.”

“You poor bastard.” He said, with a slight smile.

It was a dreary morning in the spring of 1974, I was sitting in the waiting room at a hospital in Boston feeling as if I were going to die. I was 24 years old and had been, until the day before very healthy and strong. Even so, it was a shock to hear a doctor cal me a “poor bastard” even if he did say it with a touch of irony. It turns out that I would live but I had the worst case of Mononucleosis that he had ever diagnosed and he was sure I would have a very long and difficult recovery.

Judge Sotomayor has me thinking about that time in my life for a few reasons. For one thing, her handling of the New Haven Firefighters case brings back painful memories of that time for me.

Back then I was waiting for word from the one and only graduate school I wanted to attend. I had applied to University of California, Davis to do a PhD in Developmental Psychology. I had worked doggedly toward my dream goal for almost five years- three years of undergraduate study and a year and a half long master’s degree program. All that time I was focused on preparing myself for the program at UC Davis.

I was the son of a lower middle class family whose mother only graduated high school and whose father had gone to a technical school to learn a trade after high school. My family did not understand what I was doing or why and could not afford to support me in any case. So, that whole five years, I supported myself with a menial but meaningful job. I worked 36 hours per week at the Harvard University School of Public Health as an Animal Technician. I cleaned up monkey, rat and dog feces and fed them their food and assisted the researchers in the lab twelve hours a day, three days a week. I did this year-round while maintaining a full course load and dean’s list grades.

Even though it meant a transcontinental trip, which I could not afford, I had visited the Davis campus the year before, had extremely cordial meetings with both the head of the department and the guy (William Mason) with whom I most wanted to work.

My grades were excellent, my test scores were even better and my interests and Master’s Degree training matched up exactly with the work that was going on there. I had been told that UC Davis would be admitting three candidates for the PhD program that year and that I was sure to be in the top three, if not the best of all of them. I had pinned my hopes and focused all my energy on doing my PhD at U Cal Davis and I had earned my advancement.

In March, just before the acceptances were to be announced, the five years of full-time work and full course loads had taken their toll on my body and I came down with Mononucleosis. I was still in bed suffering the effects when the head of the department called me to tell me that, in the opinion of the committee, I was the second most qualified candidate, my heart leapt with excitement. I will never forget the cold, sickening feeling that washed over me as he continued with a “but”.

He didn’t say “You poor bastard” but he might as well have. “Ordinarily,” he said, “that would be good news.” It seemed as though the first candidate was a white male, as I am, and they was going to have to offer the other two places to a woman and a black man.

That all happened, by the way, the same year that Allen Bakke was turned down by the U Cal Davis medical school. I can only assume that Mr Bakke had more resources than I did and was able to harass U Cal with laws suits so that they finally did let him in and he got his MD.

I was rather more of a progressive liberal in 1974 than I am today. Unlike Bakke, I took "no" for an answer. I buried my disappointment and rage, telling myself that it wasan unlucky thing for me but that I had to understand the compassionate goals behind it. I was torn between outrage and selfless acquiescence. I found some sympathy from my friends and family but most did not want to talk through with me why something so compassionate ad selfless, something so obviously for the “good of mankind” could feel so hard and unfair to me. Who was I, after all, to insist on my right to achieve my dream when so many black scholars in the past had gone without their dreams? I was, in the end, able to move on, make a new plan, get a good job and build a career that, I dare say, has been more challenging and interesting than most, so I have rarely thought of this in the thirty odd years that have come and gone since.

I do not write this merely as a complaint. It is not just about the personal blow that it represented for me. I have, as I said before, gotten on with my life. No, what concerns me here is what it represents for the future of our nation. It has become more evident with the passage of 35 years that Affirmative Action, with its tinge of identity politics and frank quota policy was one in a (now long) series of strategic victories of the progressive movement.
The stated intentions of Progressivism are good, even noble, but there has always been something impersonal and intellectual about them that disturbs me. The goodness and nobility actually feel coercive and absolute. and it is often responsible for things that do not reflect the compassion to which it lays claim. This is because it is a kind of savage compassion that cares more about the collective idea that it has about “humanity” than it does about human beings. As Edna St Vincent Millay said, “I love humanity, but I hate people.”

In fact, Postmodernism, Communism, Socialism, Islam and Progressive Liberalism find their only common cause in their shared dread of The Individual. They share a fear, even unto loathing, no, even worse, unto denial, of the wants, the ambitions, the independence and the self-reliance of The Individual. When the culturally backward Arabs join the effete, postmodern/postchristian/postselfdefense/post good and evil Europeans in mocking Americans (at least before the election of Obama) as “arrogant” or “unilateral” or the ever-popular “cowboys” they are (were?) simply betraying the mixture of fear, fascination and envy they harbor for the first and only nation that was ever expressly “of the people, by the people and for the people”. It is true that we grew out of the proud tradition of English common law and the enlightenment “rights of man” thinkers, but only the American Experiment, created by Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, et al, had the freedom from historic burdens, openness of space and isolation from continental intrigue to bring it to its truest fruition. America was and has, for most of her history been, the land in which The Individual has been most in control of his own destiny and most involved in the running of his government.

I need to pause here in order to draw some distinctions about a word that has lost its true original meaning. It is a word that is so central to the American spirit of liberty, fairness and openness that I cannot imagine recovering the momentum and purpose of America until it is reclaimed. There has developed a schism in the heart of America about the word liberal. I will not here try to expose the history and context of the schism, It is enough to say that there are two main camps of political liberals on the American stage today, the progressive liberals and the classical liberals.

Many analysts hold that personal property is the fault line that best defines the difference between the two. It is true that while, to a Classical Liberal, the right to own and dispose of his own legally obtained personal property is nearly absolute and for Progressives there are important and sweeping exceptions, this difference is really just a superficial trace of a deeper difference. The chief difference between progressive liberalism and classical liberalism is that progressives hold sacred, above all, the collective ( as in “The People” or “Humanity”) and the classical liberal holds The individual to be the salient, transcendent unit of value around whom the nation’s laws and practices are constructed.

Affirmative Action in, placing a fungible value like “diversity” and attempting to redress individual wrongs of the past by legalizing and committing institutionalized wrongs in the present, places itself and its proponents at the leading edge of the movement to deconstruct our culture of individual responsibility and self-reliance and replace it with the politics of compassion, selflessness and the collective good.

In their collectivist vision, Progressive Liberals believe in the “perfectibility” of human life and society by political means- that through legislation and social engineering, people can be molded into a society of peace, equality compassion. Whereas, a Classical Liberal understands that perfectibility is not and never will be the question, that the individual, flawed and unruly as he might be, is the elemental actor in “humanity” and no government that denies his evil tendencies and fails to balance them not just with laws and penalties but with incentives and goals will ultimately fail.

The progressive professes faith in the essential “goodness” of humanity and declares the confidence that given a “good” government and the necessary resources “the people” will be happy and good; peace, equality and contentment will reign. The problem for progressives is the same one that bedeviled Lenin when hr came to power in the Russian empire and renamed it The Soviet Union: that “humanity” is made up of people and people often disappoint those who put too much faith in their essential goodness.

But then, goodness is often defined according to the assumptions of the prevailing political system. For the Communist, goodness is someone who buys into the warped and bloated logic of the commissars and will work to exhaustion regardless of the proportion of his rewards. For the framers of The Constitution of the United States, goodness was an honest yeoman farmer or merchant who managed his affairs intelligently, dealt with his fellows fairly and stood ready to defend his own freedom.

Ask anyone who has been in business, observed arraignments in criminal courts or otherwise had to decide whom to trust and whom not to: people can be wonderful but they are not exclusively good- no matter what your definition of good is and no matter how you distort the definition.

I would make the argument that although the Progressive Liberal makes the claim that he “cares” more about humanity, the Classical liberal cares enough about people to understand and accept them with all of their faults and failings. Classical Liberalism is the only political movement that does this and has a form of government that works in harmony with the diversity of people.

The argument is often made that the intellectual elite in academia and the mainstream media largely belong to the progressive movement. Many of the most brilliant minds of the last two centuries have been progressives. So, how can so many of the finest minds be mistaken about something so basic as human nature? My answer would be that it is not a matter of pure brain power. It is my experience that I would rather trust people of average to very good mental ability in matters of ethics and morality than someone whose powers of intellect, persuasion and rationalizing are so great that they have been able to avoid confronting the bankruptcy of their creed. Their glibness and facility with abstracts may have made it possible for them to cover moral and ethical shortcomings in their lives with reasons and rationalizations. For diagnosing a disease, designing a bridge or solving the puzzle of DNA, give me someone with the most complex neurons and the fastest synapses. For an appreciation of what is good in life and timeless in humanity, however, give me an honest man or woman who has had to work for their self-respect and feeling of personal worth.

The Progressive movement takes as its touchstones of goodness these three ideas: compassion, selflessness and “the good of mankind”- Compassion because it reassures The Individual that his needs and feelings will be taken into account and cared for, Selflessness in order to nullify the privacy and personal property rights, and “The Good of Mankind” to replace religion with humanism. If you accept these three virtues uncritically you have accepted the primacy of the collective over your identity.

Since the evidence is everywhere that the basic assumption of “the goodness of man” is mistaken, however, The Progressive often takes it as a personal and overriding mission to portray himself and all other progressives as perfect paragons and embodiments of the essentially god man that proves the evidence wrong. There is no way a human being can actually live up to that kind of standard- so he adopts a “virtuous” persona or mask behind which he hides all his thoughts and actions that are not good.

Virtue, though, is a one-dimensional imitation of true goodness and requires an intricate network of exceptions and excuses to maintain the illusion that it is equal to goodness. Certain things must be ignored (as in the fact that Islam, not some limited subset of it, is to blame for much violence and evil and will not be absolved until it acknowledges guilt and repents for it) many facts must be distorted (as in moral relativism and multiculturalism) and others must be overblown (The greatness and goodness of Obama). These omissions and distortions are resistant of any form of logical of reality-based test. They only have to keep the winds of reality from blowing over the hollow façade of virtue. This we call political correctness.

The progressive demands that we believe his claim that he serves a higher truth and a loftier goal. He tries to force us to accept the idea that his ideas are unassailably good. And, even if they fail to be good, his virtuous pretentions are supposed to indemnify him from guilt or shame. Even if he make mistakes, behaves badly or cause harm, virtue will save him from blame. His “caring and good intentions” are supposed to trump the fact that he cares about the wrong things in the wrong way and his intentions are a humbug. Virtue is more than a sham- it is the prim, ruthless face of coercion. It is aimed outward, at others, as a self-justification; an accusation and, above all, a yearning for Utopia.

Utopia is an attack on the individual. There has never been a Utopia that could survive for long without crushing the individual. That is why “selflessness” is considered a key element of virtue. Hannah Arendt foresaw the destructiveness of progressive virtue many years ago. In her work On Revolution she wrote:
“Virtue has indeed been equated with selflessness ever since Robespierre preached a virtue that was borrowed from Rousseau, and it is the equation which has put, as it were, its indelible stamp on the revolutionary man and his innermost conviction that the value of a policy may be gauged by the extent to which it will contradict all particular interests, and that the value of a man may be judged by the extent to which he acts against his own interest and against his own will.”

All utopias are inspired by the well-intentioned hope that there is a way to defeat evil and “make people happy”. Communism was supposed to be a compassionate and selfless way to improve the lot of humanity. When the benevolent and compassionate communists took control of Russia, however, they found that when they tried to get people to understand that communism was a foolproof plan to eliminate hunger, unhappiness and inequality, there were many people who found that the plan really didn’t work for them.

These enemies of the “workers paradise” were denounced as counterrevolutionaries and portrayed as so decadent and corrupt that the most selfless and compassionate government ever conceived had to eliminate them. It took several decades, innumerable political murders, millions dead by government induced famine, the largest system of concentration camps in the history of the world and a demoralization of the population so deep that the Russians have a fertility rate below replacement levels, but the individuals of the Soviet Republics finally proved to be “unworthy” of the communist utopia on earth.

To the classical liberal, the goodness of humanity is not the question so there is no need for denial and pretense. He is for the Individual, and he understands that his happiness, his life and his prosperity is his own responsibility- subject to the choices that he himself makes. The proper function of politics and government for the Classical Liberal is to provide checks and balances on the destructive imperfections and temptations of human nature and, as far as is possible, to provide the opportunity to pursue those responsibilities in safety and security.

Thomas Paine wrote, “Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence”. The notion that the flaws of the human vessel could be managed and even harnessed to create a self-regulating social organism inspired the framers of the constitution of The United States. The checks and balances built into the interplay of the three branches of government were designed precisely to mitigate the tyrannical impulses of human nature. They knew that the impulse to power and domination grows out of the natural and necessary human need for security and cannot (and should not!) be removed from or educated out of any human being. They understood that the most just society and the freest populace would be the one where the human spirit is accepted not solely for its grandeur or its squalor but for its potential for both. In the healthiest society everyone understands the limits of power and pains are taken so that no one is in a position to wield enough power to dominate all others.

Since the beginning of the Obama administration I have been reminded over and over of the words of advice offered to me by a ski instructor many years ago I was one of a class of intermediate skiers, all of us trying to break through our individual cycles of fear and doubt and learn to commit ourselves to the gravity and terrain- to lean forward downhill and take charge of our momentum rather than let it paralyze us with fear and send us tumbling. “The mountain is like a jealous mother.” He had told us, “If you lean back toward her instead of forward into the pull of gravity, she will reach out for you and pull you down into her arms.” Of course he was only trying to improve my skiing but the elemental wisdom of his words revealed a very basic truth: The sense of virtue or security derived from not committing whole heartedly (literally, throwing yourself into it) to the challenge of self-reliance, personal responsibility and critical thinking is dangerous - a sure guarantee that you will be drawn backwards and held fast b y the snares of dependancy, victimization and identity politics which are the other side of the "compassion equation".

The compassion of the Progressive Liberal is like the pull of the mountain. Welfare has destroyed the work ethic and family structure of most of the people who it calls “beneficiaries”. Affirmative action has done nothing so much as take very smart and motivated black and Hispanic young people like Sotomayor and the man who appointed her and, along with the education for which they were unprepared, also indoctrinated them into the deathly virtue of savage compassion that will continue to eat away at the vitality of the nation that made it possible for them to rise the way they did.

Sonia Sotomayor is not a friend of the common man and woman and she is not the wise Latina that she would like us to believe she is. Like the President who appointed her, she is a postmodern progressive, a dupe of the Progressive Liberal Elite Establishment that has shifted the political spectrum to the left by appropriating the name liberal and virtually prohibited honest debate by proscribing any speech and ideas that it labels as uncompassionate.

I look at my fellow classical liberals and say, “you poor bastards”. It is time to break the strangle hold of compassion by showing how savage and deadly it has become in service of a theory of humanity as opposed to a real understanding of and empathy for human beings.

Before There Was Pallywood...

2009-07-06T23:41:00.004-05:00

There were the Blues Brothers of Moscow... This is not a Belushi and Akroyd spoof!
This picture shows two KGB guys stroking the tumescent egos of "progressive intellectuals and media people" back in the 1970's. It is from the first of these two clips from a 1984 interview with Yuri Bezmenov. Bezmenov was one of the KGB men and a former Novosti employee who later defected. He is interviewed here by the author and political lecturer G. Edward Griffin. These two clips are part of a complete set of a long interview that is on YouTube and well worth the time. I post these two parts here because they are priceless.

Keep in mind that Mahmoud Abbas and many other Palestinian leaders studied these techniques and philosophies at the very Patrice Lumumba University that Bezmenov reveals as a training center for "international terrorist groups".

Bezmenov could just as easily be speaking of today's media and "leaders". His characterizations are pungent and accurate. Here are two of my favorites:

On the media: "Most of these shmucks were afraid to loose their jobs...If you tell the truth about my country you will not last long as a correspondant at the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times...They are dishonest people who lack integrity… intellectual honesty."

On Senator Edward M. Kennedy (could apply to BHO et al just as well): "He thinks he is very smart…he is narrow minded egocentrical idiot who tries to earn his own popularity through participation in propaganda farces."

Iran: Where the Blood is real and "The World is Watching"

2009-06-21T08:50:00.017-05:00

The crowds in Tehran and other major cities of Iran are no longer chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Jews”. It is exciting and even hopeful that there is, at least, a sizable element of the Iranian population that seems to want freedom from the Mullahs. The attention of much of the world is riveted on the events in Iran and rightly so. For the first time since 2001 it is possible for the world to imagine that the tidal wave of Islamic fascism that has ravaged the Islamic world and killed so many in the free world might someday soon begin to recede.

The courage of the Iranian people who are today facing riot batons, Kalashnikovs and tanks with their massive crowds and rocks cannot be ignored. There are many lessons they can teach us. Some are obvious- That freedom is worth fighting for- is the most obvious.

There are a lot of other lessons here that may not be so obvious. This blog was started because the screaming mobs and incessant chants of the Iranian street mobs of the early 1980’s brought a dark presence into the life of my daughter who was then only five years old. Because she is Jewish and American the chants of Death to America; Death to the Jews” had inspired one of her little school chums to threaten kill her. So I have been very interested to hear that the crowds are now reportedly shouting out: “Death to the dictator; Down with this falsified, populist government; People why are sitting aside, Iran has turned into Palestine”.

Palestine? Now, I know that for most of the protesters it is just a simple rhetorical device in which the Iranian mob is now equating the rulers under which they have lived for thirty years with the Israeli government and comparing themselves with the Palestinian refugees. It is a sad reminder that the complicity of the pusillanimous western media and the ineffectual Israeli public relations apparatus have allowed Israel to be maligned and used as a symbol of oppression. But there are also subtle resonances and cruel ironies in that chant.

The first and most stark of these ironies is that, in course of a week’s protests, in a country where western media has been largely deported and universally intimidated there has been more convincing evidence of brutality and bloodshed of innocent people by the government than in the entire sixty years of Israeli history.

Compare, if you will, the world famous bloodless blood libel of the al Durah incident with the heart breaking video of Neda, the young woman deliberately shot by government militia in Iran. Note: Before you click on the video from Iran, be advised, it is very disturbing.

The world was so very eager to be shocked by the al Durah incident in which there is never any blood visible either on the boy or the father who were both alleged to have been riddled with bullets:

al Durah

Yet that same world is oddly mute before the real blood pouring out of the Iranian girl from a single wound.

Or compare this photo of a young Iranian man who was shot in the leg
from Gaza.
with an example from Gaza I have already exposed:

Real blood and real pain in the body language of the Iranian makes stark contrast with the smirk on the face of the unbloodied Palestinian actor.

Why was al Durah such a "game breaker" against Israel, a country whose only sin was not defending herself from the libel intelligently enough, and the obviously real bloody murder of this girl is not stirring a tenth of the moral outrage against Iran? Picture an Obama reaction against Israel, had he been president at the time and than think about his treacly "The World is Watching" caution to the mullahs.

The ultimate irony, though, lies in the reports (verification needed) that among the government militias and police that are beating and shooting protesters there are cadres of Arabic speaking fighters. These are widely presumed to be Hamas and Hezbollah militants. It is not so much, then, that Iran has become Palestine. It is more that the morbid Islamist obsession with the destruction of Israel (based, of course, in their fear and loathing of the west) has, ironically, turned the tiny scapegoat into a real threat.

The Iranian people are suffering the result of thirty years of allowing themselves to be tricked into shouting “Death to America; Death to the Jews”. Many Iranians will tell you that they never supported the Islamist regime. But you never heard them complaining very much about the proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah that the mullahs trained and financed to surround and threaten Israel. Israel was always the “safety valve” the one thing that, even if they did not agree on it totally, they could find some neutral common ground in deploring “The Zionist Entity”. So, now those proxy armies are in the vanguard against the protesters. Being used to provide brutality against Iranians that fellow Iranians may be finding difficult to apply in the streets of their own cities.
So, yes, in a way, Iran has become Palestine: a place where violence and brutality is committed by Palestinians against people they have no real reason to hate under the mistaken impression that it will solve a problem that they have created for themselves. And they insist on turning their cultural problems into our security problems.

It is, at bottom, a cultural problem and unless we in The West break down our self-imposed prohibition against discussing cultural differences in a critical way, we will never be able to figure out how to protect ourselves. As Richard Landes ( in an excerpt from his forthcoming book now up at Augean Stables) wrote,"One of the more important dimensions of honor-shame self-help justice is the negative premium it places on self-criticism. The tendency of those who have been shamed by others is to blame the other for the insult." We shame them by our sucess and our liberty- they have a deep need to punish us for it.

President Obama told the Iranians "The World is Watching", but is he and "the world" really learning anything? Let's hope we can learn something from the Iranians this time...

Why We Must Fight

2009-04-11T14:08:00.012-05:00

This is a mugshot of Nour Hadid. Nour lives near Chicago. She is a muslim woman who has confessed to beating her two-year-old niece, Bhia Hadid, to death over a four day period of torture.
Nour's husband, Alaeddin Hadid, who surely must have been away on a business trip or was so deeply immersed in the study of islamic texts that he did not notice the "head to toe"bruises, screams and what must (at least by the third day of beatings!) have been severely altered behavior, is very upset. Is he upset by the death of little Bhia? Is he devastated that his wife has confessed to this brutal, extended torture and murder?

No, actually, Alaeddin seems to be most upset by the photograph above. He prefers focussing and raging on the fact that his wife's mug shot was released by the police and published in the press. He is upset because the mug shot shows her without her Hijab and with her shoulders exposed by the tank top she was wearing. He has been quoted as saying that the police are "really going to be in big trouble" because this is against their religion. He's going to sue. Oh, really?

I want to make sure that I am not misunderstood. I have no doubt that there are many abusers and scumbags of Judeo-Christian heritage who would take this kind of "The best defense is a good offense" opening gambit. To be sure, something like it is often the the first rock under which criminals and scoundrels to try to burrow in order to avoid detection and punishment. Attempting to appear tougher and more aggrieved than the authorities and the people they protect and serve is an old standby, the only older one maybe "the devil made me do it". The thing is, this one about the humiliation and insult to Islam has come to be the signature offensive weapon of the anti-western Jihad.

And it goes way back before 9/11 when the media in the U.S. first asked the pathetic question "Why Do They Hate Us?". It is the underlying reason that the Islamic World can (will) not coexist peacefully with Israel. The existence of a country full of productive, egalitarian people who value individual rights and enterprise over religious honor and collective shame is a constant humiliation because Israeli society works and thrives in a way that Arab society (whether it is an Islamic "republic" or a secular dictatorship) simply can't. If you read the rants of bin Laden (and Qutb and al Banna before him) its clear that Alaeddin Hadid's gambit here falls directly within the long tradition of justifying violence against the the west and its institutions and claiming exemption from the cultural norms and laws of the western countries in which they choose to live by virtue of their Arab culture and its religious Doppelgänger, Islam.

This is deflection and as I have pointed out before deflection is the classic tactic of the domestic abuser. With deflection beaten and abused women may be convinced that they brought the abuse on themselves and victims of terror can be misled to think that the terrorist is, somehow justified. The only surprise here is that there are a great many people who cannot see it for what it is.

So classic is the abusive overtone here that, personally, I would not be surprised to find that Alaeddin either knew about the beatings as they were happening or even did them himself and forced his wife to take the rap.

Don't believe me? Let's take a look at some of Mr. Hadid's statements. He told the press that his wife, "never leaves the home without covering up...It is against our religion; we do not do this in our culture,"

No, what they do in Alaeddin's culture, apparently is called deflection and blaming the victim.

The best indication of what upsets him the most about the death of this little girl is this sentence:
"People have been calling me about this all day." The poor guy. There is nothing a member of an unreconstructed honor/shame culture hates more than having to deal with public knowledge of his wife savage beating murder of a two-year-old girl than a public display of her bare shoulders. Either one, if kept private, is not so bad.

He's not upset at what happened he is upset about the fact that it has become so public and that his wife's shoulders and hair were exposed.

Even in an Arab culture this would be bad but not an insult. Why is this such an insult now? In a time when anyone who cares to can view videos of on the internet of teenage moslem women being hung, stoned and beaten in various stages of undress for crimes like being seen with a male relative other than her husband of having been brutally raped and not being able to fight off her attackers. None of these have been denounced as insults to Islam- even though because they are committed in the name of religion, they should rightfully be denounced as insults to humanity.

Has anyone in the Islamic world recognized the humiliation and beheading of Daniel Pearl as an insult to Judaism? You will recall he was forced to declare himself a Jew just before his head was hacked from his living body. Did anyone object to the insult to Judeo-Christian civilization when American soldiers were dragged through he filthy streets of Mogadishu? Did we not bend ourselves into fantastic positions of contorted self-deprecation to avoid calling 9/11 (and Madrid, and Fiji and the Sbarro restaurant and Beslan and the thousands of other bloody Islamic attacks) an Islamic Insult to western civilization?

No. This run-of-the-mill mug shot is only an insult because it is a photo of a Muslim who lives and did something terrible in a country in which Islam is just another religion, not the supreme and unquestioned ruling authority in every aspect of life. It is an insult because it is proof that Islam is not SUPREME- at least not here, not yet.

This is what they cannot bear.

Too bad for the little girl with dozens of bruises, beaten until her little body just stopped breathing. Who cares about the accused wife who's husband was, at the very least complicit and very possibly culpable? They want us to have sympathy for the poor islamic supremacists who are just too pathetic, inept and despicable, and whose faith is in a god too absolute and a prophet and scripture too political to actually be universal and supreme.

If you had any question of the meaning of our fight against terror , here it is- We are up against a belief system in which individual human beings, their suffering, their lives, their ideas and their feelings are all side issues. In Islamic Arab Culture, Islam is the ultimate trump card. the frame of reference that makes all other considerations irrelevant. If you can square your behavior with Allah, if you can convince yourself and some ignorant constituency that you are acting in the service service of Allah ad his messenger, you can justify any atrocity, ignore any fact, commit any abuse, tell any lie and desecrate any other religion or code of ethics in the world and claim to be a righteous man. This is religious fascism.

When you get right down to the nub of the matter, when we get our own values right, Western Culture holds right and wrong or, more accurately, good and evil as the supreme criteria- not blind faith or politics or, even, science. We try to discriminate between good and evil in everything. We have chosen our religious leaders and our political leaders in our best effort to achieve The Good. Many of us have trouble telling the greater goods from the lesser ones and many of us, fail in very human ways to achieve the good for which we yearn. But we need to pay close attention to lessons like the one the Hadid family is teaching us.I began this blog with a post about my own daughter and her brush with the evil of Islamiist fascism and I don't think its an accident that this subject comes up over and over. We are different because we come from a different culture- and ours is better- because we care.

O(blah-blah)bama in the Balance

2009-04-08T14:56:00.004-05:00

It is true that your great triumph to this point, the thing that has gotten you the presidency, is your ability to stand up and orate in a dignified and reassuring way. It is also true that this is a very important thing for a politician to be able to do. But you must be aware that this is not all that is going to be required from you.

That’s too bad because it is beginning to look like its the only thing you are good at.

Your promises of transparency disappeared in the pork-filled, un-read, pages of the first stimulus package that was cobbled together by people unnamed and railroaded through the legislature in the throes of trumped-up panic.
Your dedication to integrity has been exposed as a sham as you fill your administration with tax cheats and self-promoting ideologues.

You bow down to Saudi royalty as they smile in smug approval at your subservience, live under our protection and continue to make war on our values and undermine our civilization.

You hide behind a feckless Judenrat (Emmanuel, Boxer, et al) of compliant “warranting Jews” as you make flirtatious overtures to Iranian Mullahs. Then you just smile knowingly when their nasty little poppet-despot Achmadinejad insults you and America by throwing your words back at you. All the while he funds and fosters surrogate terror armies and continues to prepare to destroy our only real ally in the Middle East with a Nuclear Holocaust.

You cluck your tongue and issue empty cautions (they are not even strong enough to be called threats) as the lunatic despot of North Korea fires a ballistic missile over the very heads of our faithful ally Japan and in our general direction.
Even before you left the G20 meeting, the Europeans were getting tired of you. As you headed for the door you were already being called a windbag and a bore.

By the way, that sound you heard as you left Europe was the last few intelligent people in France and Germany letting out a gasp of recognition that they have gotten the ineffectual and self-deprecating America they thought they have wanted and are now more alone than they have been since 1941- with a more insidious and persistent enemy knocking at the gates.

You, my president, are looking less like The One and a great deal more like The Wizard of Oz. But here’s the catch, no one is going to kill the wicked witch for you. You are they guy we are all looking to. You are going to have to drop the Mr. McCawber routine and actually do something.

Sooner would be better than later, because one or two terror attacks in the US or a nuclear bomb blast over Tel Aviv will reverse the historical importance of your presidency- instead of the name of the first African American leader of the Free World O(blah-blah)bama will be forever known as the epitome of empty, impotent bloviation.

Israel Apartheid Week- the Fascist Alliance Strikes Again

2009-03-19T07:31:00.004-05:00

There is, embedded in every Fascist Accusation, the proof of its insanity and the vindication of those it accuses...

Where in the Middle East could this picture ever be taken? Only Israel.

At the crux of the issue is Arab/Islamic Male Supremacy. While “pro-Palestinian” activists accuse Israel of Apartheid, implying that Israel practices institutionalized racial supremacy, they ignore not just the obvious fact that Israel is the most open, egalitarian and democratic country in the middle east but also the less obvious but far more telling distinction that the chief reason that Israel’s existence is contested so hotly by her neighbors is exactly because those Arab/Islamic nations are unwilling (unable) to accept the existence of a country in which Jews and Christians have rights and liberties equal to those of Muslims and where women and gay people have equal standing with men; in short, is the only place in the Middle East where they are not “free” to practice Arab/Islamic Supremacy.

This is yet another instance of the left using the language and form of democratic ideals, rational discourse and humanistic activism to promote exactly the opposite. This is the very essence of demopathy. The undermining of individuality, the use of patently false (but damning by their very mention) accusations and the substitution of meanings and beliefs based on faith in ideology rather than observation and testing are the central hallmarks of totalitarian and fascist systems.

Hebrew Mamita- A New Classic

2009-03-05T12:29:00.005-05:00

Generally, my taste in poetry runs to Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats and ee cummings. I am often left scratching my head by the performance stuff, but this is way too powerful to miss. Enjoy...

Every Young Jewish Person and everyone who loves a young Jewish person should see this!

Graphic Representations of Pathological Disorders in the Media

2009-03-03T02:25:00.008-05:00

Friend and mentor Landes pointed the way (and gave a very insightful introduction) to a very informative and dramatic graphic representation at Stealth Conflicts of a telling symptom of the sick fascination that the Media harbors for vilifying Israel. SC posted a series of statistically accurate graphs that reveal the media's pathological obsession with the casualties of Palestinians- and callousness to the vast slaughters in other areas. It got me to thinking about how to use the same graphic representation techniques to draw the lessons of this bias. Below are my suggestions - The statistical accuracy is nil but the suggestions are real.
I might paraphrase Dan Rather, "False but statistically significant"

The Ignorance Conspiracy of Political Correctness

2009-02-22T09:20:00.005-05:00

Binks has a very fine piece up at Steynian. He has found yet another new and effective way of analogizing the terrible danger we face and the utter lack of fortitude with which most of our leaders and "thinkers" are meeting it. I left a supportive comment and, in the process, I coined a neologism ( at least I think it has not been used before) that I think is a big improvement over the old term. Here is my comment:

"This, friend Binks, is one nail hit very squarely on the head! The inability of the mice to recognize the cat and admit what needs to be done about it is staggering. That the leaders of the Ignorance Conspiracy (thats IC instead of PC) can pretend to piety and “intelligence” while enabling murder and the sack of civilization is the one true crime against humanity. This is why I am pursuing the liberal/Islamofascist love affair and Saint William Moyers so hard right now…"

Political Correctness is, indeed, a Conspiracy of Ignorance so from now on I am going to us IC instead of PC.

Saint Bill or Accessory to Mass Murder? The Dilemma of the Morally Relativistic Media

2009-02-17T13:06:00.004-05:00

In the light of my last post and the very acute comments of Truepeers, lgude, Nancy Coppock and others, I have been compelled to take another look at the question of anti-Semitism in Bill Moyers’ remarks about The Bible and the genetics of violence. There was a lot of anguish and recrimination in the wake of that incident and I am just beginning to make sense of it. Mr. Moyers was obviously horrified and felt injured by the whole thing. It seemed, though, that the more he twisted and squirmed, the deeper he got. Just look at his wounded and frantic reply to Abe Foxman (Leader of the ADL). even while he is denying moral equivalency, he says “And although I specifically referred to “the rockets from Hamas” falling on Israel and said that “every nation has the right to defend itself, and Israel is no exception,” Note that he uses a venerable trick of rhetoric, the passive voice, to minimize the impact of the “rockets falling on Israel” (oh dear, another one “fell” just now), while he characterizes the Israelis as “shelling” the Palestinians. So he minimizes the violence of Hamas as they initiate their avowed plan to annihilate Israel and he demonizes Israel’s defensive response. A masterful wordsmith, Moyers is good but the more he talks the deeper he gets.

Neither does he mention that Hamas deliberately uses their own civilians as human shields or that the alleged Israeli atrocities he refers to have both had serious doubt cast on them. It appears likely that they were staged or otherwise faked, as has turned out to be the case with every other allegation of intentional Israeli atrocity in the past- Jenin, al Dura, Kfar Qana- you name it. Yet Mr. Moyers repeats the reports as fact, as justification for calling the Israeli action an onslaught. The characterization of the restrained and careful Israeli actions with terms like “onslaught” and “slaughter” juxtaposed with his blithe gloss of the “falling missiles” is not merely an argumentative pose, it betrays an inner contradiction in Moyers heart.

On one hand he considers Israel to be entitled to defend herself (as if she needed his permission) on the other hand, he wants, from the vantage point of his snug PBS studio to be able to pass judgment on what a fitting (proportional?) defense would be.

Proportionality? Israel’s armed forces always has done and continues to do their best at separating Hamas from their human shields and killing only the combatants. But that is not enough for Bill Moyers. He uses two examples, examples which all media professionals by the time he used them knew to be suspect, to imply that the Israelis are no better than those who want only to murder them. He pointedly ignores the obvious difference in the morality of the two sides. He pretends, as it were, that he has just walked into the room and sees Israel beating up the Palestinians without knowing any of the background. According to him, it is an onslaught and a slaughter and he hurls those epithets at Israel, not the hate-filled murderers who have caused the problem and intentionally placed their own people between them and the tiger they had taunted once too often.

He crowns his assault on morality with the remark that first caught our attention- the one he has already backed away from as “obviously not sufficiently precise”. (Ah, suddenly the man who has traded in words all his professional life has “misspoken? More likely he spoke too quickly and revealed to much) Not only did he state that it was the bible that “genetically encoded” violence in the Jewish people, even if he goes on to say, “A radical stream of Islam now seeks to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth,” he compounds his betrayal of common sense and moral decency by adding “Israel misses no opportunity to humiliate the Palestinians with checkpoints, concrete walls, routine insults” as if he agrees with the Islamist honor/shame formula that their humiliation must be avenged in blood.

Not content with tacitly supporting the blood-revenge paradigm, he willfully misinterprets the purpose of the IDF’s YouTube channel. The IDF posts video on YouTube to try to prove to Mr. Moyer and his ilk that the strikes in Gaza are done with greater precision and care than has ever been shown before by any military in the history of warefare- to show the world that even against a foe that is sworn to murder every Jew and destroy their state the IDF is performing with surgical precision and Talmudic respect for innocent life.

All Mr. Moyers sees is a further insult to Arab honor. He says, “As if boasting of their might, Israel defense forces even put up video of the explosions on YouTube for all the world to see.” This is quintessential honor/shame drama! “For all the world to see!” To him this is a bad thing!?!?

Nor does his attempt to dismiss his “genetic” remark as “insufficiently precise” address the sense in which the remark still stands as a blood libel. Casting the two sides as equally at fault and implying that Israel “humiliates” the Palestinians by having checkpoints and walls, none of which existed until they were reluctantly employed to protect Israelis from suicide bombers! Laying the blame for these things equally on Israel is a deep, immoral wrong.

Deny it though he may, this is moral relativism, leveling the moral difference between two sides of a dispute and then applying spurious “evenhandedness” that injures and impugns the party that is morally superior.
And that is the first key to understanding Moyers’ dilemma. In Moyers’ world, the only morally superior stance is his. He rejects violence without reservation and blames all who employ it equally. He looks down on Israelis fighting for existence against Hamas, fostered and supported by Iran and the Arab world all of whom want nothing less than the annihilation of Israel, and he rolls his eyes in pious disapproval at the violence. As Truepeers has characterized it in a comment to my original post about Moyers, “this is one of the most well-worn of moral failings: admitting the eliminationist nightmare while at the same time giving the blame, or at least some of it, to the Jews. It's a smug righteous way of saying I'm above all that, a pox on both their houses.”

The ultimate insult he offers, though, is the suggestion that he is actually “a friend” of Israel. “From my days in President Johnson’s White House forward,” he writes, drawing himself up in the bogus dignity of a wordsmith who has crossed the line back and forth from “journalist” to “spin-master” enough times that he clearly has lost sight of any difference between the two, “I have defended Israel’s right to defend itself, and still do. But sometimes an honest critic is a government’s best friend, and I am appalled by Israel’s devastation of innocent civilians in this battle, all the more so because, as I said in my column, it is exactly what Hamas wanted to happen. To be so indifferent to that suffering is, sadly, to be as blind in Gaza as Samson.”

The reason they call it “spin” is that is designed to make you so dizzy that you forget which end it “up”. If you were to take him at his word and grant that he is a “friend of Israel”, you would be tempted to believe that he was really an “honest critic” and that Israel was indulging in the “devastation of innocent civilians”. He says he is “appalled “ by it and so you would see it through his eyes as appalling devastation- even as those eyes of his studiously ignore the evidence of Israel’s humanitarian intent. He says the IDF web site is a humiliation for the Palestinians but isn’t it just as humiliating to him? He resents the fact that there is proof that his assertions are false and that his moral compass is not true.

Then, finally, trusting that his double talk has rendered us so woozy and nauseated that we will be powerless to resist its authority, he flashes us the gold plated, jewel encrusted, richly engraved, plain-as-day badge of the hypocrite. He taunts Israel, saying that the slaughter of innocents he so deplores, “is exactly what Hamas wanted to happen.”

But, Mr. Moyers, a truly honest critic would have to ask why Hamas “wanted it” to happen. A real friend of reality, let alone Israel, would have to admit that a political/religious movement that intentionally incites violence against its own women and children for its own gain is an abomination- that is guilty of what amounts to human sacrifice. An honest man whether a critic or not would be compelled to admit that such a movement no more deserves equal respect with a modern, western, liberal democracy like Israel than Hannibal Lechter deserves to be compared with Julia Child.

The real hole in Mr. Moyers’ soul is that the moral relativism he denies so passionately does not only endanger Israel (who can take care of herself), it is that he must avoid knowing that it is he himself who is endangering the defenseless women and children of Gaza. The facts and reality push him to that awareness and he uses all his intellectual power to avoid it.

He is on a slippery slope. He has already acknowledged that Hamas (like Arafat before them) know that, what ever calamity they bring down on their own people, moralistic idealists with a grudge against Israel like Moyers will be unable to resist the temptation to blame Israel. It is he, not Israel who is giving Hamas what they want in reward for endangering their own people.

In spreading the blame for the plight of Palestinian children to the Israelis (who routinely risk the lives of their soldiers to avoid harming Palestinian women and children) and minimizing the responsibility of Hamas (the cowards who hide behind the children and by doing so put them in peril) he is succoring terror. He plays into their cynical game. He becomes a supporter and a participant in the slaughter. In legal parlance he is more than a bystander; he is an accessory.

It is the ultimate irony of Honor/Shame, that it so often results in unavoidable dishonor. In Moyers we see a man who has made the fatal error of staking his honor on a explaination of events that is fundamentally flawed and now cannot face the shame of admitting to his complicity in horrors beyond his intention. Now he'd rather see missiles "falling" on Israel forever rather than have to admit where the real responsibility lies for what he cynically calls the Israeli "onslaught" to stop them.

The Biggest Honor Killing of All

2009-02-08T15:12:00.004-05:00

A Catholic friend sent me the link to an article with this description:

The editor-in-chief of the Times of Oman, that country's paper of record, published an above-the-fold justification of the Holocaust. Since I don't have a permanent link, I'm reproducing the whole article. At the moment the link is: http://www.timesofoman.com/viewpoint.asp

Update note- two readers have sent me the permanent link.

And yes, as you would expect, it is an excrescence- but one that is so blunt, clear and unsophisticated in its expression of the underlying lunacy of how the Arab world’s “elite” view of the world that it is an invaluable tool for understanding not just the Arab’s problem with Israel (and culture in general) but also the reason that the western left is so firmly on their side. If you choose not to read it in its entirety, I'll understand. Just skip the indented stuff in italics but, please, meet me down below it and follow with me where it leads.

How Israel became a terrorist state
Essa bin Mohammed Al Zedjali

I HAVE been following the shameful and painful events in our Arab region ever since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. Thanks to my readings, I am aware of the aims of the West in choosing Palestine as a homeland for the Jews through what is known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917, crafted by the then British foreign minister, Arthur James Balfour, to fulfil his so-called promise. I have also come to know the fundamental objectives behind the establishment of the Jewish state.

We the Arabs know and, in fact, the entire world knows, the historical truth that the Jewish people had been a scattered lot with no homeland of their own as they had been living in other people’s lands. Some of the Jewish people used to live in Arab countries. There they lived like Arab citizens enjoying all the rights and duties. In fairness, however, we should say that the Arab Jews were far more polite, well-behaved and good-hearted than the European Jews.

But as it happened, the Europeans, the Russians and the Americans had a different attitude towards the Jews. They must have had their own reasons or justifications for expelling the Jews out of their countries and looking for an alternative homeland for them. The Jews were found to be harmful, racial, hateful and hypocritical and that was why they were hated by the governments and the peoples of their host countries and why those countries, especially Britain, agreed to find, as quickly as possible, a homeland for the Jewish people outside Europe. Unfortunately, Palestine was the place they chose to be the homeland for the Jews as it seemed an easy proposition because it was under the British mandate. As we all know, Palestine is a God-made land whereas Israel is a man-made land.

When the Western countries agreed to make Palestine the land where the Jews could converge from all over the world, the former had two clear objectives. The first was, of course, to get rid of the Jews along with their problems, once and for all. The second was to use the Jews in the Arab region as an agent to realise the Western interests and to be a permanent thorn in the side of the Arab world.

It is illustrative to browse through the relevant pages of history to know the real history of the Jews in Germany. You would then come to know why Hitler had taken harsh measures against them. The entire economy of Germany, including banks, publishing houses, jewellery stores, light and heavy industries and almost all economic organisations of consequence, was under the total control of the Jews.

They muddied every aspect of the economy by perpetrating fraud after fraud on common people. This unprepossessing situation annoyed the German citizens no end and impelled Hitler to punish the Jews for their bad deeds.

The United States today finds itself in the same predicament as Germany back then. Now in the US, the Jews wield enormous control over all important decisions, whether they relate to politics, economy or media. No American citizen is free today to utter a single word about international or even national issues. This is the reason the American views on various issues being relayed to the world through the media are in fact the views of the Jews.

No wonder, we witness American media relentlessly broadcasting false reports portraying Israel to the world as a state oppressed by the Arabs who are trying to uproot Israel. On the other hand, when Israel perpetrates unabashed massacres against the Arabs in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria or Egypt, they would be justified as acts carried out in self-defence to fend off uprooting threats. Israel manages to escape international punishment because it has the full support of some big powers led by superpower America who invariably reject the majority decisions of the UN Security Council if and when they condemn the inhuman practices of Israel against the Arabs.

Now, it is the turn of the European Union to support the US stance that always favours Israel. Therefore the EU can do nothing to stop the ongoing Israeli massacres in Palestine. The EU feels it has done its duty by condemning the brutal massacres and has politely asked the Israelis not to use force against the civilians. It is as if the Israelis have the right to kill those who are not civilians, especially the Palestinians who are fighting to regain their looted land and fundamental rights!

This was how Israel became a terrorist state and why the Arabs fear Israel. If the superpowers and the international community as a whole, do not change their positions with regard to the facts of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, Israel will gleefully continue with its arrogance and terror, the Arabs will continue to wallow in their weakness and the American/Jewish media will go on depicting Arabs as terrorists and Israel as a puny state surrounded by many enemies.
- emzedjali@timesofoman.com

I sent back my immediate reaction to my friend:

It is a textbook-worthy example of the crazy distortion that living in and trying to rationalize an honor-shame culture leads one into. The unspoken, bottom-line issue for the writer of this article is that Arab Muslims are supposed to be the master race and he is trying his best to make sense of why they come off so poorly in comparison with the rest of the world. This is the reason that Israel is such a telling wound to Arab pride. After all, if you owned a farm and it produced nothing but crab grass and cow dung year after year and then a Downs Syndrome patient from the independent living center downtown set up a shack in a tiny corner of your poorest field and started to grow healthy crops and prime beef on it, you'd be humiliated too. The difference is that having been raised as a westerner, you would eventually swallow the shame and learn from your new neighbor and become even more prosperous than they are.

Pity the poor Arab, they are unable to learn from the success of others (or even from their own failures!) because they are trapped in a cycle of honor and shame. As my friend and mentor Richard Landes often points out, shame in the Arab culture requires blood to restore honor.

Something clicked for me when I slapped my pinky on the enter key and sent this off. For the past week I have been spinning my wheels on a broader version of the question I posed in my post “Can Public Broadcasting Really be This Contemptible?” The real question, and I am not to first one to have posed it, is “Why do so many otherwise intelligent people ignore and deny the obvious savagery and danger of the Islamist Jihad?” What do the intellectual elite and the chattering classes actually have in common with Hamas, al Qaeda, the Taliban and The Saudis that allows them to accept and even applaud the bloody, violent, misogynist fascist behavior and writings while they revile our elected leaders and condemn our democratic government and its allies as oppressors.

I have written a number of speculations on that question in the past and I was resolved not to just go over old ground but to add something substantial if I could. In firing off that snap reply, I opened the new door I had been looking for.

It is fascinating that, at first glance, the Arab Muslims and The Left appear to have even more reasons to fear and distrust each other as they do points of conflict with Israel, western civilization, capitalism, the military and the business community. After all, the Muslim treatment of women, children and gays and their absolute antagonism (surpassing even their hatred of Jews) for atheists, pagans and agnostics would seem to be deal-killers for any leftist and the anarchic bent of the left is completely at odds with the desire of the Islamists to institute authoritarian Sharia law and a World-wide Caliphate.

But these are only problems of doctrine, theory and logic. If the bond between these two camps seems to make no sense, it is because political doctrine, logic and fact have almost nothing to with it. Caliphate Islam and Communism/Socialism/Progressivism are, after all, both utopian fascist movements. I have quoted Louis Menand in two other posts, writing that in a fascist movement…, “…official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it.” Given that absurdity, the actual details of ideology are much less important than the strength of the movement to dictate complete allegiance, the rejection and liquidation of counter-fascists and the conquest of any other nation - especially those that might be more successful or more democratic. Clearly, the left and the Islamists do not see each other as threats- at least not nearly on the same level as the threat they see in Israel, The U.S. and Western Civilization.

They are, of course, correct. One of the few things that can draw together common cause between fascist groups with entirely opposed “official ideologies” is the overwhelming shame of knowing that your movement’s goals and tenets are mistaken, embarrassingly counter-productive and contrary to human nature- and that there is a thriving example of the alternative right next door.

This is the disease at the heart of Caliphate Islam. Mr. Al Zedjali inadvertently gives us a glimpse at this when he ends his article this way:

“This is why the Arabs fear Israel. If the superpowers and the international community as a whole, do not change their positions with regard to the facts of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, Israel will gleefully continue with its arrogance and terror, the Arabs will continue to wallow in their weakness and the American/Jewish media will go on depicting Arabs as terrorists and Israel as a puny state surrounded by many enemies.”

In typical fascist double speak he never actually calls the truth a lie. He does not say Israel is a super power and has no right to self-defense. If he were to do that he knows very well that arguments would be mounted against his veracity that would further humiliate him. Instead, he merely informs the western powers that they must act as though the truth is a lie.

And if they don’t? Here he betrays himself and the shame that drives the fascist Islamic Caliphate movement with breathtaking candor. He writes: “the Arabs will continue to wallow in their weakness”.

It is a variant of this same heart-wounded emotion that drives the fascist imperative in Progressivism, Socialism and Communism in all of their various forms. They are all utopian movements that draw to them people who need to feel superior to other “normal” people. Leftists tend to come from very specific sub-groups of western civilization. These include the leisure-advantaged classes (especially children of the successful like William Ayers, the British communists like Philby, and their ilk), the career “do-gooders” (Dan Rather, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Cindy Sheehan, Ben Wedeman, Charles Enderlin, Bill Moyers) and the safe (tenured) but unsatisfied Academics (Chomsky, Zinn, Churchill). In true elitist fashion, they consider themselves more educated, and of better and more nuanced” judgment than the “normal” people who work at jobs, have sincere religious beliefs and do tangible things.

Barack Obama famously got “too candid” about the smug Progressive attitude of superiority toward working class people at a gathering of elite progressive supporters during the last election when he said, “So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Most leaders of the progressive movement, in spite of its origins in labor activism, look down on honest labor and spend their lives in descending spirals of empty ideology, angry protests and cultural sabotage that may give them transient thrills of victory (or at least vindication) while they sink deeper into the suspicion that they are really unproductive leeches that sap the vitality of the culture and undermine its future. Witness, the lack of surprise (let alone outrage!) about the recent parade of elitist tax cheats that have been nominated as the leadership of the new administration in Washington.

The left and the Islamists, each in their individual ways, share that very same painful dilemma, a cognitive dissonance which I analogized with that fable of the Downs Syndrome Farmers I used in my reply to my friend. Here is how the broader statement of the analogy goes:

"If we are supposed (as we assert) to be better than everybody else, why doesn’t our status and condition reflect that superiority? If we are so good why aren’t we richer, more respected, better loved, more secure than everyone else? Why do we feel so humiliated and unsuccessful? Why aren’t we in charge? Why do we have to answer their questions and listen to their criticisms? Why don’t they recognize how much holier, smarter, nicer and stronger we are and just do what we tell them to do?"

Does this shame, caused by the rupture of delusions of paranoid grandiosity, sound familiar? Last spring I wrote two posts (here and here) that explored the striking parallels between the Islamists behavior toward Israel, The U.S., and Western Civilization and the stereotypical cycle of violence between abusive men and the spouses they batter. Abusive men beat and rape women to satisfy those very same feelings of shame. Whether it is played out on a national scale in the little land “between the river and the sea”, on a personal scale in the back bedroom of a fourth-floor walk-up or on a civilizational stage between Islam and Western Civilization, this is the central drama of the honor-shame personality/culture.

Another blogging friend left a comment on my last post (the one about the German police who broke into a Jewish home to take down an Israeli flag rather than discipline the Muslim mob who were threatening violence) that pointed up yet another strong resemblance that I had failed to note. Here is the comment:
xanthippaschamberpot said...

My grandmother remembered the Nazi-German occupation. She used to tell me many stories...
This makes me afraid.
This is 'battered wife syndrome' on a national scale.
Really, think about it: telling a woman to 'not do anything that might set off a violent and abusive husband' has been recognized as a way to increase the abuse. How come telling a person to 'not do anything that might set off a violent and abusive religious/nationalist fanatic' is not perceived to be just as destructive???”

Right! Until we see that asking “Why do they hate us” is just as cruel and destructive as asking “What did you do to make your husband hit you?” We will never really understand the trouble we are in.

And that brings me back to our friend Mr. Al Zedjali. If you want to fully grasp the racism, bad faith and supremacist attitude he is (barely) concealing take a look at what this paragraph looks like with only a few words changed…

We men know and, in fact, the entire world knows, the historical truth that the women had been a scattered lot with no homes of their own as they had been living in men’s homes. Some of the women used to live in our homes. There they lived like women everywhere - enjoying all the rights and duties. In fairness, however, we should say that those women were far more polite, well-behaved and good-hearted...

I only changed Arab to “men”, Jew to “woman” and clipped a few other words and just look at how sexist and even misogynist it is. I might just as easily have changed the “Jews” to black people how about that sentence “In fairness, however, we should say that those black people were far more polite, well-behaved and good-hearted...” Oh hell, why not just call them “darkies”. Sadly, many on the left will tolerate such a statement about Jews where they won’t about women and blacks.

And why can’t otherwise rational people in the west see the inherent hypocracy and illogicality of the alliance of the left and Caliphate Islam? Why can’t they, at least, see how mismatched they are?

Richard Landes has written with wonderful clarity on honor/shame culture and so, since I had this realization of the “bond of shame” between the progressive left and Caliphate Islam, I have gone back and reread much of what he has written. One of his most important of his explorations of the subject is his article, Edward Said and the Culture of Honour and Shame: Orientalism and Our Misperceptions of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Published in: Israel Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 4 October 2007 , pages 844 – 858. The following passage was of particular interest this time through.

Said’s underlying point is that all cultures are essentially the same, and if anyone presents the Arabs (his major concern) as significantly different (even in a positive - e.g., Romantic - light), then that is a form of racism. Hence his particular disdain for discussions of honour and shame culture applied to the Arab world.
Such an analysis appeals specifically to a liberal/progressive approach that assumes what Said would have us accept as an unnamed axiom - that people are basically the same everywhere; that it is unacceptable to generalize about the ‘otherness’ of anyone else.

That unnamed axiom has a mirror image in the Progressive principle that the individual is not as important as the collective and that with the "right" education all people can be made to believe in the socialist ideals- (from each according to his means to each according to their needs, no culture is superior to any other, etc...,). This goes to the very heart of the humiliating futility and purposelessness of the modern Progressive. On one hand they have declared themselves the definitive authorities of a new “post-modern methodology” to understand the world and at the same time, they declare that there is nothing to investigate or understand.

Landes recently wrote in a recent post about a notable media misrepresentation from the Gaza War coverage:

Note the careful circumlocutions and the framing of the presentation: the narrator makes it clear this is not France2 footage, that it may be suspicious (although that word is never uttered). He may well know that this is unreliable but wants to use it anyway.

And the reason for that, is that this footage fits into his narrative seamlessly: “Israelis slaughter Palestinian civilians mercilessly.” The preceding scene covered a strike that Palestinian sources claim came from an Israeli naval vessel firing off the coast. Then, to drive home the point, he runs with the toxic footage.

The narrative is clear: Everything we ever read about how Western imperialists engaged in rampant, genocidal slaughter of native populations… is true again, of the Israelis. Think a scene from The Last Samurai, where he feverishly remembers the slaughter of Indian civilians… that’s the Israelis.

(The bitter irony of it all, is that the Arabs are unquestionably frustrated genocides, who openly declare their intentions to anyone who cares to listen.)

What this incident reveals most strikingly is what one might call the irresistible appeal that MSM reporters — especially Europeans like the folks at France2 — have for footage and stories that make Israel look bad, or even worse, like the most ruthless murderers around. Little truffles of moral Schadenfreude that make Europeans feel so superior to the Israelis

Of course, journalists never get tired (or ashamed) of serving up those truffles- and they come in so many combinations and shadings of flavor- fascism, totalitarianism, Jew hatred, moral relativism, anti-Zionism, multiculturalism, anti-Semitism, Communism, Socialism, Progressivism, moral superiority, anarchy, nihilism, jaded intellectualism- they mix and blend so subtly that the individual threads are, at times, inextricable. They blend so easily because they all share one thing.

To understand what that thing is, we have to peel back many layers of deception and justification. This thing that masquerades as virtue, piety and kindness is actually the mirror image of those attributes, it is license, arrogance and malice. The content of each is different. For the Islamists part, they have their belief in the coming of the twelfth Mahdi and the prophesied advent of the world wide Caliphate-a kind of paradise on earth. The progressive left is absolutely convinced that peacefulness, reason, negotiation and breaking down the capitalist system will solve all problems. They agree on nothing intellectually or ideologically but they share the much deeper bond of a towering, homicidal rage at the intransigent world and all the normal people in it who faithfully tend to their jobs, businesses and farms only to be looked on as mental defectives, infidels and “little Eichmanns” as they continue not to fall ecstatically in line with absurd, unworkable, utopian notions of the way things should be. Both the Progressives and the Caliphatists, in their own ways, are victims of honor/shame humiliation and they recognize each other as brothers in arms against human nature, reality and the status quo.

Those who pretend to know what is good for us in academia, the media and politics have somehow convinced us that the status quo is a cursed state, that they will show us the way to a better, more equal, secure and peaceful future. They claim to have a more complex and subtle grasp of reality itself. Never mind that when pressed they are always short on facts and plans and long on emotional appeals to belief in compassion, the common good, elimination of suffering and the achievement of world peace. They cannot understand when we don’t share their enthusiasm for what they want to offer us. They are infuriated by questions and requests for hard answers. There is nothing that enrages an elitist so much as underlings who refuse to submit to the superiority of their “betters”. Their brave new world would work just fine if it weren’t for the fractiousness and self-interest of the people in it.

Like the impotent Arab male who bullies, beats and demeans his wife and then wonders why she despises him and wants to escape, the Islamists and the Progressives are in a rage to liquidate the proof of their impotence. Xanthippa, in her comment above, had referred to Battered Woman Syndrome and I have drawn the same parallel in my two posts (linked above) but this is the proof positive that the left and the Islamists are abusive, hypocritical and dangerous. They are experts in how to use our Western openness, politeness, inclusiveness and sense of fair play to manipulate us into allowing ourselves to be blindfolded, bound, beaten and sabotaged. The media, most of academia and a fast growing contingent of our most powerful political leadership are part of this honor/shame based, subversive drive to destroy western civilization. Their desire is to murder the institutions (and the people in them if necessary) whose continuing vitality and strength exposes the imbecilic utopianism of their “more nuanced and sophisticated” understanding of reality. They are, in fact, conspiring to assassinate Western Civilization in a Cultural Honor Killing.

The Mask Slips- Racism on PBS

2009-01-15T11:31:00.003-05:00

The liberal establishment is under such stress over the possibility that Israel might succeed in protecting her own people that they are letting the mask slip a little. The latest is Bill Moyers giving us a raw peek into the consciousness of The Saint of PBS. Talking about Gaza and going back to the book of Deuteronomy, he referenced the biblical commands to take the promised land and jumped (I am not kidding!) to this outrageous bit of racism: “So God-soaked violence became genetically coded.”

Funny, isn’t it, that he would say that about the Jews not the other side of the Gaza conflict who routinely kill Journalists, film makers and other superior beings.

Essay questions:
1. What would PBS have to do if Moyers said that black people are genetically encoded to eat fried chicken and watermelon?
2. What will they do about this? (crickets chirping)

It is amazing that Jews still donate to PBS (Palestinian Broadcasting System).

Richard Landes has a wonderful piece on it here.

Jew Hatred Howls in the Streets of Germany- Again

2009-01-11T02:36:00.006-05:00

Both Israel Matzav and Jewish Odysseus have linked to Muqata's report on the German police choosing to suppress the Israeli flag rather than face down Germany's own "Arab Street". Whatever toxic combination of anti-Semitism and dhimmi cowardice inspired the choice, it clearly has pushed Germany one giant step closer to conquest by The Caliphate. Play the video- Jew hatred howls in German streets once again. I left the following comment on both Israel Matzav and Jewish Odysseus:

Hmmm, A knock at the door, German police, confiscating Jewish property, preventing Jews from participating in national discourse, Sounds somehow familiar... can't quite...

Update:
One commenter at Jewish Oysseus offerd an opinion that the police were acting "logically" to "deescalate" the situation- to which I replied:

Oh, right, "deescalate"- another word for "Jews keep taking abuse, qassams, suicide bombs and the threat of mob violence so that infantile Moslem thugs can destroy western civilization one brick at a time - without there ever being a showdown".
Germany is being swallowed up while concerning herself only with keeping things quiet enough so that they can pretend there is no problem.

Have you learned nothing?

Deescalate my Zionist ass!
Stand up for civilization, rout the thugs from the streets before they come after you too!

A Step in the Right Direction

2009-01-10T12:07:00.000-05:00

Here is a partial answer to the idiotic question the liberal press always seems to ask, “do you think that this military action will achieve the goal of stopping the rocket fire from Gaza?” This press release from the IDF this morning!

Amir Mansi, the commander of the Hamas rocket launching program in the Gaza City area, was killed today (Saturday, 10.1.09) by IDF fire with assistance of the ISA. Mansi was also the leading Hamas authority with regard to the long range Grad missile launching program.
Amongst other activities Mansi directed and actively fired dozens of rockets at Israel, killing and wounding Israeli civilians. Mansi was spotted firing a rocket in the Jabel Rise area during a ground force operation today. The forces opened fire, killing Mansi and injuring two additional terror operatives.

Can Public Broadcasting Really be THIS Contemptible?

2009-01-02T00:18:00.010-05:00

Oh Yes, I think they can.

While working on a new post last night had to visit the NPR web page for a transcript. I allowed myself to become distracted by a gallery of pictures. (Look here and click on the picture entitled "Israel Attacks Targets in Gaza") Only two photos into the gallery, I came across this obvious fake.

It is a prototypical Pallywood tableaux, the very composition of which should be a dead give away at this point. Palestinians are, if we were to believe their fancifully posed pictures, the only people on earth whose immediate urge, when their friends and fellows are injured, is to grab them and try to twist them into cruel and dangerous positions. The Second Draft has documented Palestinians dragging, dropping, rolling and hoisting allegedly wounded comrades in savage disregard for their well being. Recall that even the recent mass carnage in Mumbai produced no photographs of a comparable level of callous and medically damaging treatment to that routinely published by mainstream media as representing the transport of wounded among the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank.

If this were not damning enough evidence that the NPR photo editors are prepared to drop all pretense of integrity and professional responsibility in the cause of blackening Israel's name, let's look more closely at a couple of other aspects of this picture.

The caption alleges that the young man being pulled and twisted like a quid of taffy by his friends here was shot by Israelis using live ammunition. Generally when someone is shot there would be a hole of some sort in their person. Bullet holes are generally accompanied by profuse bleeding. At first glance, the vivid red on the arms that hold the feet of the subject alarms the eye but on closer inspection (below)

it is obvious that there is some combination of ugly clothing design (the right arm of the jacket clearly has white lettering that has no tinge or spattering of red on it) and, perhaps, idiotically obvious fakery (the right arm almost appears to have been either sprayed with or dipped in some red liquid while the hand on that same arm wears what appears to be a brown, fingerless glove with no red on either the glove or the exposed fingers). Since no blood is evident on the alleged victim, the photo is credited to an Arab working for AP- a notoriously suspicious combination to begin with and there seems to be a clumsy attempt to trick the viewer into thinking there is blood present, a photo editor who had the faintest spark of skepticism or wished to make even the feeblest wave at impartiality might have at least included the word "claimed" or "reported" in the caption.

The most pathetic aspect of this photograph and its obvious cynical maipulation, however, is the utter contempt that the Palestinian actors have for the western media. Just look at this close-up

The guy who has our victim in a very un-therapeutic full-Nelson here was not even alarmed enough to put down his orange flag or to feign much concern. And how about the victim himself? At greater risk of having his neck snapped by his flag toting rescuer than of discovering a bullet hole in himself, he betrays no trace of suffering. Far from a look of pain, panic or even shock, he appears to be bearing the man-handling with a mocking smirk. They may be manipulators and liars but the Pallywood crowd knows willing dupes when they find them and have the dignity to treat them with the contempt they deserve.

One more picture in the gallery caught my attention.

Another quintessential Pallywood scene. The only female I can see in this picture is the dead girl who's face is being displayed. The disgusting manipulation and politicization of their deaths is about the only respect that children, especially girls, get in Palestinian society. They get to be chattel and propaganda weapons and that is about it. NPR makes no judgement about any of that, though, they are far more concerned with fixing the blame on Israel.

Meanwhile, this video of one of the surviving sisters of those girls who died displays more courage, integrity and honesty than all the dupes at NPR in this video clip:

The Pallywood guys are not worried, though. They know that AP, NPR, CNN and the rest will suffer the contempt and mockery rather than abandon the narrative that they have swallowed and have sold their professional integrity to propagandize. They are not able to spare themselves even that humiliation.

You Know it is Coming

2009-01-01T23:00:00.002-05:00

Coming Soon to the Main Stream Media outlet near you- The visuals will be heartrending, the stage management will be transparent, the moonbats will eat it up!
It'll be a Massacre! An Atrocity! A Pathetic Fake! Richard Landes has the story before it happens.

A Jewish Plea for Merry Christmas -An Annual BotB Tradition

2008-12-17T08:55:00.005-05:00

I am a Jew. I grew up in an observant Jewish home in which we greeted Christmas with a mixture of fascination, respect and irritation. At some point I became fond of expressing my ambivalence by quoting Jackie Mason, who once said:

“I don’t understand something about Christmas; maybe you can explain this to me? Why is it that this time of year you Christian people bring all of the trees inside the house and take all the lights and put then outside”

. That line captured my general feeling of bemusement about the whole public Christmas celebration. I didn’t get it.

My feelings were mixed for a variety of reasons. My Dad had a retail store so the weeks leading up to Christmas were always a time of tension and brutally long hours of work. The traffic on the roads, crowds in the stores, and the saturation of television (especially in those pre- cable times) and radio airwaves with programs and music left me very glad to have it over on December 26th.

As a kid, I felt excluded by the whole Christian celebration. I didn’t get it. I found the incessant Christmas music on the radio punishing, the goodwill frenzy unsettling and the talk about Jesus (in whose divinity I was not supposed to believe) uncomfortable.

As a result, I was always just a little unsure of how to respond when some well meaning person would wish me a Merry Christmas. I would feel simultaneous but diametrically opposed urges to thank the person and try to summon a convincing Merry Christmas in return or to say,” Thanks Very much but I don’t celebrate Christmas and then deal with the uncomfortable silence or explanations and apologies.

I am ashamed to admit it today but I was, at first, pleased when I saw, over the years, the ACLU and Multi-culti types pushing “Merry Christmas” out of the vocabulary of cultural discourse in favor of the more generic “Happy Holidays”.

I’ve grownup, though, and I’ve grown into a new perspective on this whole matter question and, today, when someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, I have a new response. It’s really simple-

I stop what I am doing
I thank them very sincerely
I wish them a Merry Christmas in return.

I would like to encourage all my fellow Jews to join me in this. Here’s why:

I have come to see quite clearly that even if there are politically correct, multi-cultural, morally relativistic, post modern progressive busybodies who would like us to believe that our Christian friends’ and Neighbors’ spontaneous Christmas wishes are somehow injurious to us and our culture, they are nothing of the kind. A sincere “Merry Christmas is better for you than the blandest, most guarded “Happy Holidays”

You see, the U.S. was founded by Christians. Not just any Christians. The early colonists were both devout and independent. They were fervent Protestants whose purpose in coming here was to leave the Kings, Priests, state religions and archaic laws of the old world behind. They came here to build a country where every man could read scripture for himself and be his own priest, where he could be free to elect political leadership that he could follow gladly. Ultimately, that enterprise gave rise to the constitution and form of government we have today. At two hundred years old it is still the one in the entire world that best honors the individual and guarantees his rights.

It was these fiercely independent Protestants who set the tone for the nation in which we now live. It is important to remember that they were deeply religious people. When Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and the rest decided that there would be no Official Religion in this country they were aiming for Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion. They meant the freedom to practice your religion after the dictates of your conscience .

This is why America has become the destination of choice for any one wishing to escape repression or lack of opportunity elsewhere in the world. That's why Jews have gravitated here for two hundred years. But we are in danger of forgetting how this all works and I think this whole Merry Christmas thing is a symptom of that amnesia.

Fortunately, though, Jews do have a collective memory of stories if we just listen to them. My grand father told me stories about life in turn-of-the(last)–century Eastern Europe so I know what he escaped by coming here (not to mention that he was not in Zhitomir, his home town, thirty years later when the Waffen SS slaughtered thirty six thousand Jews there in one day!). I also have a friend who came here from Leningrad in the Seventies. He has told me many stories. Just few months ago, I worked with a client named Miriam who told me how she grew up in newly-born Israel after her family was expelled from Morocco in 1948. Each of these stories and so many others just like them have convinced me that The United States of America, as conceived by her Protestant founders, has been a miracle and a blessing to the entire human race. It has been especially important to the Jewish people.

We Jews are barely over one percent of the population here. We (a lot of us anyway) take pride in our contribution and participation to America’s dynamism. We point with satisfaction to the fact that the founding fathers of this country were inspired and informed by our holy book which they called The Old Testament. Many of them read it in the original Hebrew, something few of us modern Jews can do.

But why do I need to explain this? Why don’t we all understand the centrality of the Protestant ethic to the goodness of America? Partly, it’s because of a lack in the educational program. But it’s also because our media, whose responsibility it should be to make us aware of the important events and issues. But the media is often found to be doing just the opposite.

In the media, America is assailed daily for her imperfections; and if not assailed, then damned by the faintest of praise. The media’s emphasizes the imperfections instead of the achievements- the discords not the harmony. Hasn’t America (and her allies) banished the Taliban to isolated caves and mud huts in remotest Waziristan? Didn’t we free Afghan women to live more normal lives without the threat of torture, rape and summary execution for the crime of being female? Can’t, now, Afghans to grow beards to their own liking, listen to music, laugh in public send their daughters to school and have simple human dignity? Oh, well, yes, the press will whine, but there is still poverty, the occasional bombing and we never caught Osama bin Laden. Well then, have we also not saved thousands of Kurds, and non Baathist Muslims in Iraq from the depredations of Saddam and his two evil sons- people who raped and murdered fifteen year-old girls and put their political enemies (alive and feet-first) into industrial shredding machines just to hear them scream? Perhaps, but our press prefers to talk about a few incompetent American soldiers (who were punished for their stupidity) deriding and humiliating their Iraqi captives at Abu Ghraib and equating that with the horrors of Saddam.

I am one Jew who is all for the kind of spirit and strength of character that gets expressed at this time of year by wishing each other “Merry Christmas”. I’ll certainly take it over Allah HuAkbar. Give me Peace on Earth” and “Good Will Toward Men” over “Eternal Jihad” and “Dhimmi Status for Infidels” anytime.

If we do anything this holiday season, we need to loosen up and get a perspective on this “Merry Christmas” thing. It is not the people who say “Merry Christmas” and mean it that we need to be discouraging in America at this time. It is the people who find something wrong and suspect in the energy, enthusiasm and good-will that animates that “Merry Christmas” that we need to discourage.

The secular, morally blind, multi-cultural, Progressive ignoramuses who dare to equate the fully investigated, litigated, redressed and punished mistakes of a few misguided soldiers Abu Grhaib and Haditha with the bloody reign of terror under Saddam Hussein display their ignorance twice- First, because and find no moral difference are the same moral idiots who make excuses for the thousands of rockets a day that are being intentionally fired at the civilian population of Israel, rockets loaded with explosives, ball bearings and nails so as to injure and maim indiscriminately but still insist that any attempt to hunt down and stop the terrorists responsible for these rockets is equivalent or even worse.

The choice is clear. We can side with our fellow Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom are warm-hearted friends with morals and ethics or we can become unwitting dupes to heartless enemies with no moral compass who think they can rationalize almost anything and undermine our great civilization with reasonable sounding, non-judgmental sophistry. Do you need a moment to think about that?

By saying “Merry Christmas” in public we are not agreeing that Jesus was the son of God, we are just acknowledging that some very good people believe it. When we say it, that does not constitute accepting Jesus as our personal savior; it does show his followers that we see them as fellow countrymen, friends and brothers-in-arms in the defense of the highest ideals of our civil society. What is the problem with that?

The first four words of this essay “I am a Jew”, are exactly the words that Daniel Pearl was forced to say on camera just before he was pinned down and his head was sawn off. I'd like you to try a little thought experiment simulating a better world here- Pretend that the next sentence that I write followed that first one and I had no need for the rest of the explanation in between...
"Have a Merry Christmas"

The Lessons of Mumbai- Too Long for a Bumper Sticker

2008-12-02T01:00:00.008-05:00

The rage and frustration I feel as the full dimensions of the Mumbai attacks become clear is dangerous. I was walking through a supermarket parking lot when I saw this bumper sticker.

This was even worse than those imbecilic "coexist" stickers with all of the religious symbols. It took me a while to figure out why. There are so many levels on which this message is ignorant and dangerous that I had to sort them all out. First and most obvious is the fact that it is an obvious slap at “God Bless America”. But, no, that wasn’t the cause for the rage- I’m used to seeing that kind of fuzzy ignorance that passes for political thinking.
I live, after all, in Newton, MA- a very liberal community- so fatuous drivel like this generally just irritates but doesn’t enrage me. So why, suddenly, did I find it difficult to contain my revulsion? The tide of rage I felt was all but overwhelming.

Well, for one thing, I had just read a report on the Rediff India Abroad web site about the particularly cruel and deliberate attention with which the Mumbai terrorists tortured and disfigured the Israeli and Jewish victims of the massacre. An extended quote is instructive:

Doctors…, said they had not seen anything like this in their lives.

"Bombay has a long history of terror. I have seen bodies of riot victims, gang war and previous terror attacks like bomb blasts. But this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing," a doctor said.

Asked what was different about the victims of the incident, another doctor said: "It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatized. A bomb blast victim's body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words," he said.

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: "It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood," one doctor said.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Now, listen, I am married to an operating room nurse. I am all too familiar with the ability of medical professionals to compartmentalize, neutralize and discuss in a cool and detached way, things that make mere writers like myself flinch and even retch. The very idea that this hardened physician could not bring himself to contemplate what he had seen struck me to my very core. I found myself, temporarily, without a way forward.
Seeing that bumper sticker put me on a knife-edge between despair and rage. I stood there and stared at the car with my heart pounding. I don’t know what I would have done had the owner of the car walked up at that point.
“No Exceptions”?

What does that mean? Does it mean they would call down God’s blessing on the stinking swine who apparently did their reconnaissance in the Chabad House by posing as travelers and accepting the food, hospitality and blessings of the Rabbi and his family while they plotted their torture and death?

Does it mean that they can see no moral or spiritual difference between the Rabbi who welcomed and served them with an open heart and the filthy, lying murderers who rewarded his kindness by killing his wife before him and letting him suffer her death, tenderly wrapping her body in his prayer shawl, before murdering him?

Don’t get me wrong; I will admit that I knew, even in my turmoil and anguish at that moment, that the owner of that car would not be in favor of any of those things and would, probably think me very unkind to associate him with them.

I know very well that most of the people who have those bumper stickers have put them there because they were moved only by an urge to get in the face of people with “God Bless America” bumper stickers. I’ll admit, too, that I am very much in the God Bless America camp myself. I believe that America is a blessed country. I count among my friends and family a number of people who gave up everything they had and the lives that they had lived for many decades in order to come here and be free.

There is the lovely seventy-year-old lady and her husband who came here ten years ago from Russia along with their daughter and her husband. They still don’t speak much English but recently she proudly showed me around her neat little apartment and paused for a long moment at the end of the tour with a wistful smile on her face, clasped her hands together, looked at me and said with a gusty sigh, “God Bless America”! Having seen the former Soviet Union in depth and first hand, I know exactly what she means.

The reason we have a political battle about immigration in the first place is that anyone in their right mind would rather be here than in any other country on earth. And what country on earth is more free and open? I don’t understand the people who live here and are so alienated, embarrassed by our power and sulky that they feel they can’t let “God Bless America” stand as a sentiment without making a public display of distancing themselves from it.

Is it just moral blindness, and spiteful disenfranchisement that moves them to miss the important point that America, while not perfect, is by far the finest, most democratic, most humane and least Imperial “greatest power in the world” that has ever existed?

America, after all, has come forward over the last one hundred years and, with the help and support of the rest of the western powers, saved civilization from two militarized totalitarian movements that threatened to immerse the world in their respective fascist nightmares.
Now, even as we engage yet another murderous totalitarian threat with our traditional allies severely compromised by infiltration and the degenerate influence of moral relativism and multiculturalism, here is a person who thinks it more important to express their petty snit with America than to consider the implications of their stance. I have to wonder how can anyone think it possible that the ideal of multiculturalism that is (even if accidentally) conveyed by this bumper sticker is not deeply immoral- and self-destructive to the point of being suicidal?

There have been a number of times when I have not even known how to start thinking and writing about the utter horror of the actual events and conditions of our world. At those times, I will turn to the blogs of those I admire most. Robert Avrech who blogs at Seraphic Secret is one of my great comforts at those times. He has a huge range of moods and subjects but, whether he is writing about horror or Hollywood, Robert brings a wisdom and sensibility that has the power to help restore strength and faith.

So after wandering home from the parking lot I fired up my computer and found Robert quoting that same article that had stopped me in my tracks. Then at the end he added this- quoting from the brilliant Melanie Phillips:

Phillips comments:
The atrocities demonstrated with crystal clarity what the Islamist war is all about — and the western commentaries didn't understand because it simply refuses to acknowledge, even now, what that war actually is. It does not arise from particular grievances. It is not rooted in "despair" over Palestine. It is not a reaction to the war in Iraq. It is a war waged in the name of Islam against America, Britain, Hindus, Jews and all who refuse to submit to Islamic conquest.
What of the terrorists' treatment of their Jewish targets? Phillips writes:
They went to some lengths in addition to single out a centre for observant Jews. Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were murdered not because of Palestine but simply because they were Jews. That is because hatred of Jews as Jews is fundamental to the Islamists' hatred of the west — and of Israel.

Oh, how exactly!
I would like to presume to add some detail to Phillip’s “things Mumbai makes obvious”:
1. Islamist rage is not our fault. It is endemic to their culture. It has no regard for humanity, sex, age or innocence.

2. If you are not one of them it will seek you out and get you no matter how nice you are to it.

3. Even if you are one of them, once they kill all those who are not, they will find a reason that you are not quite one of them.

4. If you are not the strongest and the quickest and the most ruthless, you are eventually doomed.

The lessons we must learn and make sure we teach to the morally weak like the guy with that bumper sticker are:
1. If you have power over them today, use it now – tomorrow it may be too late.

2. Even if you kill someone who is innocent, as much as that disturbs you, you may take comfort in the certainty that they will die a less painful death than you and your family will if they get their hands on you.

3. The “hostages” of Mumbai had not absorbed the lesson of 9/11. The captives that were taken, tortured disfigured and murdered in Mumbai were no less doomed than the passengers on the airliners on 9/11. They allowed themselves to be taken and abused by captors who did not want anything from them but to use them as instruments of terror. Only the brave passengers of flight 93 understood and acted on this. Let no westerner ever rationalize ignorance of this from this day forward. If the Munich slaughter seemed to you acceptable, if flight 103 did not convince you, if you were able to harden your heart to the fates of Robert Dean Stethem and Leon Klinghoffer, and 9/11 failed to impress you and Madrid and Beslan and all of the theatrical, internet promoted, beheadings could not reach you, surely this atrocity cannot be denied.

4. We have seen in the Western Mass Media’s unwillingness to widely distribute the telling and ghastly details of the torture and murder in Mumbai, their dehumanization of Jews, Israeli, Americans and all other victims of the attack. and their studied avoidance of connecting the violence to Islam or Muslims that the blindness of our friend with the bumper sticker is reinforced by the very cultural institution that should be providing us with warnings and dependable information about the threat.
The Mainstream Media will not inform you, you cannot rely on them for full information; so you need to inform yourself. Do not allow yourself to be soothed and co-opted.

There is but this warning to add:
When (and unless we wake up and do something, it is not a question of “if”) you are attacked, you are going to have to fight as hard as you can, for as long as you can if you want to have any hope of surviving. We have seen what they do to captives so you must never leave yourself at their mercy- they have none. Remember that they are cowards. Suicide, no matter how many innocent people you take with you is a sign of weakness. They are so afraid of the impotence and ineffectuality of their culture and their pathetic individual enslavement to the honor/shame drama of that culture that they are willing to sacrifice themselves (and you!) to avoid the shame. They will murder you gladly rather than admit that they do not have the moral fiber to see how purile and ineffectual their society is. They are willing to accept their own deaths so you must assume they will gladly give you yours. The only defense is in strength and persistence. As Churchill said, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never- in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

I propose a different slogan- even if it’s a little too long for a bumper sticker- “God already blessed the whole world- God gave us America- too bad so many of us make exceptions of ourselves.”

UPDATE:
I have condensed the message of this post- I might have been more direct just writing this:

The Ultimate Lesson of Mumbai- Save the Last Clip for Yourself and Your Family

The “hostages” of Mumbai had not absorbed the lesson of 9/11. The captives that were taken, tortured disfigured and murdered in Mumbai were no less doomed than the passengers on the airliners on 9/11. They allowed themselves to be taken and abused by captors who did not want anything from them but to use them as instruments of terror. Only the brave passengers of flight 93 understood and acted on this. Let no westerner ever rationalize ignorance of this from this day forward...

....When (unless we wake up and do something, it is not a question of “if”) you are attacked, you are going to have to fight as hard as you can, for as long as you can if you want to have any hope of surviving. We have seen what they do to captives so you must never leave yourself at their mercy- they have none....

The Holtzbergs- Not "Ultra" and Not Missionaries

2008-11-28T13:03:00.004-05:00

The Mainstream Media are already in the process of demeaning and dehumanizing the Jewish victims of the Mumbai massacre.

They are routinely called “Ultra-Orthodox” and I have already read of them them being referred to as “missionaries”. Shabbat is approaching so I don’t have time to frame a complete response and as much as it is not my usual way to write in haste, I need to tell you, these are lies.

I know the Lubavitchers very well. When we went to Ukraine to adopt our two boys six years ago we spent Passover with the Chabad in the Grand Synagogue of Kiev. The soviets had used it as a marionette theater. It was virtually destroyed until it was lovingly restored by the Chabad. There was no condescending pretense that our (Conservative American) brand of Judaism was less Jewish than the full Lubavitch observance. There was only the open handed, loving hearted Chabad wish to help us be the best Jews and human beings we could be. Their hospitality ad open-mindedness are the only "Ultra" thing about them.

We also visited Zhitomir, the city where my grandfather was born. There too, a tireless and dedicated Shaliach welcomed us and treated us with respect and love. He showed us how they have restored the Shul, are reclaiming the Jewish cemetery and are, daily, sending out hot meals over hundreds of miles of decayed and neglected country roads all over the Zitomir Guberna (a political region, like a state that I think is about the size of one of our eastern states) to the elderly, isolated Jews who have survived first the Tsar, then Hitler and then The Soviets.

Since we brought our boys home, they have attended the local Chabad Jewish day school here in Boston, Shaloh House, where they have learned to excel in Mathematics, Science, English, Tanakh, Mishna and Hebrew. They have also seen, first hand, the love and gratitude the whole families of Russian immigrants whose children they study and play with, feel for America and Western Civilization- in all its diverse and chaotic glory. They are not insular and isolated, they are accepting and open.

We have attend religious services there and I can tell you, although the ritual basis is very traditional and strict, they are open and helpful for those who can't keep up.

The Rabbi at Shaloh House, Dan Rodkin is, as were the Rabbis we met in Ukraine, a luminous soul with not a missionary thought in his mind nor a derogatory word in his vocabulary. I am very sure that Rabbi Holtzberg of Mumbai was out of that same mold.

The mainstream media is ignorant (only some are intentionally so) but, in a way, you can't blame them- because so many of our fellow American "Jews" foster the "Ultra" canard about these beautiful souls who in so many way epitomize what it means to be a not just a Jew, but a “fully human being”. May Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, at least, be the beginning of an awakening.

Tell the world: “They were neither Missionaries nor ultra-Orthodox zealots they were, simple, devoted and loving people serving a very high purpose.”

They were murdered by zealots for purely political and bloody purposes. Here is a question for anyone who still denies that Caliphate Islamism is a problem: If they could do this to the Holtzbergs, if they could do this to all the other innocents people in Mumbai and Madrid and Beslan and New York and Jerusalem, how long will it be before they do it to you or someone you love? When will you stop trying to minimize and even excuse what they are doing by denigrating their victims?