The Biggest Honor Killing of All

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.

Cultural Insanity Part II The Cultural Analog

On April 23rd 1891 the Jews of Moscow were expelled from that city and forced to resettle in the pale of settlement. It was one more pogrom added to the endemic but accelerating European anti-Semitic assault that reached its horrific climax fifty years later.

In the seventy years since my great grandfather Nathan Channen’s death, a tattered piece of paper, the remnant of an official form of Imperial Czarist Russia, has been passed down in my family. His daughter, my paternal grandmother, gave it to my father back in 1975 and a few months ago my father gave it to me. None of us ever had any idea what it was. Last week I finally got this ragged piece of paper to a good friend of mine who is a native Russian speaker. He and his wife kindly translated as much of this archaic and fragile document as they could. Here is what we have learned from that paper.

On June 6th of 1891, forty four days after the pogrom in Moscow began, Nachum Khannina, journeyman tailor, applied to the Russian authorities of the Vitebsk Gubernia in what is now Belarus for permission to travel to an unspecified location to complete his training and receive his certification as a master tailor.

The physical identification was oddly antique because of its descriptive categories, but then they didn't have digital photography to embed in the document back then.; Age: thirty-three years, Height: indecipherable, Eyes: brown, Hair: black , chin: medium, Nose: moderate, Face: clean. His wife Sarah and two daughters Rivka and Maiva are listed as well.

The paper specifically states that if he was not back in Vitebsk at the end of six months he would suffer penalties under the law. In Czarist Russia, Jews could not move about freely either on personal visits or business travel. They had to purchase official permission to do so. This, now bedraggled, piece of paper, for which he paid 85 kopecks, was the means by which Nachum took his wife and daughters out of Vitebsk never to return. I say this with confidence because another document I received from my father at the same time as he gave me this one is a legal deed, dated November 4, 1894, to two seats in the The Baldwin Place Synagogue in the North End neighborhood of Boston. According to the deed the seats cost him one hundred dollars which was a great deal of money in those days for a recent immigrant to pay. If, only three years after the permission was issued, he was settled in Boston and prosperous enough to pay one hundred dollars to purchase synagogue seats he must have left immediately upon receiving it. Under their new Anglicized names Nathan and Sophia Channen, founded an American family that would eventually include five daughters and two sons. One of those girls was my father’s mother- my grandmother.

This newly found window into my family’s history has been on my mind as I have been composing my ideas for this second installment in my Cultural Insanity series. I have not been able to shake it loose from the ideas that I am percolating about culture and how it affects people and their lives. When he left Czarist Russia one hundred sixteen years ago, my great grandfather was a man who had been born and raised into the beleaguered Jewish community that had a culture that was very distinct from the larger Russian culture surrounding it. That larger Russian culture, ruled by an aging monarchy, was so afraid for its own future that it had virtually invented the institution of the secret police force which focused on political repression. If you had asked him, Nachum might have simply said he was escaping persecution and seeking a better life for his family; but he was also voting a referendum on the moribund Russian culture and on the vigorous and confident culture of The United States of America.

Two Hundred and Seventy years earlier, in 1620, the very year The Pilgrims landed and founded Plymouth colony, Sir Francis Bacon wrote in his Novum Organum, of the natives of the Americas (which he calls New India), “There is a startling difference between the life of men in the most civilised province of Europe, and in the wildest and most barbarous districts of New India. This difference comes not from the soil, not from climate, not from race, but from the arts.” By arts Bacon clearly was referring to the same arts that are among the “arts and Sciences” taught in Liberal Arts Colleges. The arts Bacon is talking about together make up what anthropologists call culture.

1620 was a momentous year because in the very instant that Bacon was rightly pronouncing the superiority of the European culture, the seeds of a more vigorous and open scion of that culture were being sown on that wild but fertile shore. In the two hundred and seventy years between 1620 and 1891, the new culture had taken root and had become a magnet for a tidal wave of new Pilgrims. Nachum was only one drop of humanity in a flood that was cascading out of all of the “civilised provinces” of Europe and swelling the urban centers and farm lands of the new world with wave upon wave of enterprising and courageous immigrants. The thing they shared above all was confidence in and commitment to the future.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary lists three entries for the word pilgrim.

1. one who journeys in foreign lands : nomadic
2. one who travels to a shrine or holy place as a devotee
3. capitalized : one of the English colonists settling at Plymouth in 1620
That last one, I would broaden to include every soul who has come to America to have a better life, and every Israeli who has escaped persecution and death in Europe, all of the Islamic countries, The former Soviet Union and almost everywhere else to be free and to contribute to the American future. The other two are mere manifestations of chaos and atavism.

Before the American Experience there were only two meanings of the word pilgrim and they both began with the lower case “p”. Now there are three and the American Pilgrim is redefined every time a new soul arrives here in the USA or in Israel.

This brings us to the threshold of a new understanding of what the left and Islam have as a common cause against America, Israel and The West. Up to this point I have concentrated on the similarities between The Left and the Islamists. As important as it is to understand those similarities, we cannot solve the dilemma they put us in without looking at the ways in which they differ. Ironically, the only way to highlight those differences is to point out one last, critical similarity. That is, that they are both afraid of and at war with the future.

Now, it is true that to conceal this fear (even from themselves) both groups put up a brave front by claiming to be “the wave of the future”. Communists and socialists, of course, have always presented themselves as the avant-garde. From the theses of Marx, to the perpetual revolution rhetoric of the Russians and the Chinese, to the presumptive (and pathetically hopeful) appellation “Progressive” that much of today’s European and American left has adopted as its title, the left has always presumed that their ideas and practices would sweep away the “old order” and bring in a new and finer age of political, economic and social equality. But we have seen that whenever a leftist government has been in control, change has immediately become the enemy, a new, more exclusive ruling class has arisen and extraordinarily harsh measures have been used to repress individual initiative and thought. That same fear of the future is what turns liberal western politicians into “control freaks”. It fuels their desire to give the government control over all aspects of life. They want government health care, to make government the monitor of the balance of conservative and liberal conversation on the broadcast media, to call on government to become the enforcer of racial preferences on hiring and educational opportunity, it even (in Massachusetts, any way) wants the government to specify and police the fat content of perfectly edible foods. It is the atavistic fear of the future that desires the government to control the distribution of wealth and resources.

The left’s fear of the future results in paralysis. The logical extension of those creeping government controls is a soviet-like, centrally controlled economy, and history has shown that to be a failure. It was that very central management of the economy and the stagnation it created, not any internal political heresy or subversion, that caused the Soviet Union to fall apart. The leftists paralyze themselves politically with their cultural relativism and the illusion that they can create equality in an unequal world. They are unable to make value judgments on cultural cornerstones such as family, education, morality and ethics because they are mired in intellectualized, multicultural “non-judgementalism”. They have no way forward because they have prohibited themselves from favoring any one course over another- or even considering what the differences might be. Their ethos is one of an intellectually nomadic existence, wandering from one platitudinous, ineffectual idea to the next.

As long as the leftmost “progressives” are a tiny minority this might seem a harmless, if perverse, pastime. But they are never content with strangling and avoiding their own future. They are convinced that everyone must be forced to participate in their dystopian dream. The left is always attempting to force others to share their unproductive illusions. They take a particular interest in becoming educators and trying to bend, fold and mutilate the children of others into becoming the vanguard of the new social order of stagnancy they aspire to. My post about the “progressive” teachers who banned their classes from playing with Legos because, “the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive” shows how they take normal childhood behavior and turn its energy not into a productive learning experience but a pedantic inquisition into thought crimes.

They don’t seem to know who they are, really. They deny that they are children of this culture. They do not seem to recognize that they owe their education and freedom of expression to this culture. They keep themselves assiduously ignorant of the fact that no other culture in the history of the world was ever as free as ours, and that their pose as perpetual social gadflies and Cassandras would have landed them in prison or mental asylums in most other cultures. They are in total denial that is that very “ownership and social power” that they detest that has given them the opportunity to work with (and attempt to indoctrinate) the children of gainfully employed, productive citizens. This is a classic example of the dissociation of a borderline personality expressed in the cultural dimension. How else could a human being of at least average intelligence (many of these lefties are very intelligent) propose the least successful, most class-based (the ruling class in a communist system decides everything by fiat) and repressive system known in modern times as a “better alternative” to the most successful and freest one. Remember that the definition of Borderline Personality Disorder is, in part; “(3) self-image, (4) identity, and (5) behavior, as well as a disturbance in the individual's sense of self. In extreme cases, this disturbance in the sense of self can lead to periods of dissociation.”

The western left seems always to be behaving as if they want to tear down the government and the culture that supports it while not admitting to the knowledge that were there to be a change of regime, even a leftist one, the vast majority of them would be among the very first to be purged, imprisoned or marginalized by whatever autocratic or totalitarian regime arose in its place. They are literally sitting on the limb that they appear to be trying to saw off. Either they have supreme confidence that nothing they do will actually cause the bough to break they are simply so blinded and consumed by their fear of the future, they are blind to the kind of future they would bring down on themselves if they were successful. They clearly do not feel at home in their own culture and have no clear idea of what their new home might look like if they could move to one or build it themselves. They only know what they hate (Bush, capitalism, ownership, power, competitiveness, patriotism and meritocracy, etc...) about this one. They really seem to be happiest knowing that the culture they despise will not hurt them, nor will it expel them thereby forcing them to fend for themselves in other, less hospitable, societies. They are homeless, nomadic foreigners in their own homeland. Which, in a cultural sense, is the first definition of pilgrim (with a lower case “p”): one who journeys in foreign lands: nomadic

As for the Islamists, their primary goal is to restore the ancient Caliphate. They want a Caliphate, not just in the old local incarnation, they want to extend it world wide. They want the entire world to be ruled under Sharia Law. Sharia Law is, in fact, a system designed not just to petrify the present but to return the world to the illusory erstwhile glory of that bygone era. It is also a cannily designed system to thwart the evolution of new ideas about and interpretations of the Koran and other Islamic texts. It also attempts to curb social change by mandating bloody forms of capital punishment for moral and ethical decisions that express the powerful pull of personal liberty and choice such as, apostasy(a broadly defined catchall including merely disagreeing with the local Imam), marriage to a non-Muslim, pre-marital sex (or even the accidental appearance of the opportunity of having pre-marital sex), that are not even considered to be questionable behavior anymore in enlightened western countries. It especially seeks to control women. It proscribes their sexuality. It governs their child bearing. It forces them to dress and behave as will-less, personality-less ciphers. With laws decrees, customs, strictures and bans it mutilates them, holds them captive, demeans them and sanctions their murder but above all it denies them the ability to modernize and moderate the culture.

Even worse than the way it enslaves women, the way Islam warps, abuses and destroys the life of its children is the clearest manifestation of this fear. I have already written my testimony of how a child of five went to Iran as a typical American boy and came back with homicidal ideas about my own daughter . I have also written about the plight of children in Islam in general here. The use of children for suicide missions has been an acknowledged problem for many years. Even Amnesty International has noticed and commented on the Arab/Islamic/Iranian practices of turning children as young as nine years old into weapons platforms and minesweepers in military and paramilitary operations. The evidence of the warping and perversion of the innocence of their children is obvious but its implications still need to be explored.

The torture, murder and betrayal of children guarantees a sterile future. A world in which it seems desirable to poison the hearts of its children with hatred and bigotry is a world that is in open warfare with its own future. it will insure its own demise. When a society sacrifices its children and the children of those it claims as enemies it is a sure sign that any true connection with the future is severed. It is burning the hearts and minds of its children the engine that powers its movement- how can they grow up to desire anything but destruction? The horrors of the Soviet Union lasted three generations. Hitler’s burned out in less than one. However long the fires of Islamist hatred will blaze, it must eventually run out of fuel.

In the meantime the highest goal of their lives is not progress toward a better life but the yearning for a return to a golden age of Islamic hegemony that was only golden in retrospect. It was a time of internecine conflict and bloody conquest in the name of Allah. They act this out symbolically every year by performing the Hajj to world wide gathering of the faithful who, at least once in their lives, spare no expense bear sometimes unbelievable hardship and travel thousands of miles to visit the ancient shrine in Mecca- the second definition of pilgrim is “…one who travels to a shrine or holy place as a devotee...”. I would add that this is a manifestation of the desire to avoid the future and crawl back into the womb of the past.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote:
"He who fights the future has a dangerous enemy. The future is not; it borrows its strength from the man himself, and when it has tricked him out of this, then it appears outside of him as the enemy he must meet."

The set of shared cultural symptoms that I identified in the first post of this series derive their compelling force from this one primal fear. The twisting, prevaricating and fulminating that the left and the Caliphate Islamists indulge in is primarily motivated by it.

Although they both have chosen to fight the future, they have very different solutions to the problem. The left's pilgrimage is an aimless wallowing in the undifferentiated present- a kind of holding action in which obfuscation of true values and arbitrary non-goals take the place of real values and lofty aspirations. The Caliphatist on the other hand, is in a desperate pilgrimage to the sacred, mostly imaginary and inaccessible past.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
This is a profound observation. It captures the very essence of the problem with the left. Culture, you see, is the supra-organism that human beings have evolved in tandem with for the last four million years. It is the totality of the behavior, values, traditions, norms and technology of a group of humans by which it adapts to and changes in response to its environment. Culture changes organically when external conditions change or when the people within it develop new capabilities. Culture is the way that human societies survive in this constantly changing universe. Every cultural decision is in some sense critical because it affects the survivability of the culture. Law making in the American system is a messy but effective genius system. In it the conflicting factions of the nation meet in a contest to prove out what new direction or preservation of an old one is most healthy for the body politic. The danger is over-legislation in which unnecessary changes may be instituted to the detriment of all.

When liberals attempt to change culture with legislation there is a great danger that they are merely trying to hide from the future. I believe The fairness Doctrine is a perfect example of this defensive reaction in action. The manifest failure of liberal and leftist talk radio is discomforting to them but instead of learning from the fact that the flaccid, obfuscatory aversions of liberal talk shows cannot hold an audience and the cold logic, incisive wit and common sense conservative idea mongers on conservative radio have attracted large and loyal ones the are trying to institute mandatory boredom in the form of equal attention for liberal ideas. This, of course, will only result in turning frustrated listeners away from radio altogether and into the shelter of streaming audio on the web and satellite radio. They will become Intellectual Pilgrims. The liberal belief that the adaptive process of cultural change can be controlled and directed by making laws is no less short-sighted than the Caliphate’s belief in force.

I am going to presume to guess that if Mr. Moynihan were alive today, he might have added a third sentence to the above quote. I’d like to think that sentence would go something like this: “The central truth of Caliphate Islam is that culture comes from God, is prescribed in the Koran (as interpreted by whatever mullah or despot wields the most power) and must be conformed to that prescription by any means necessary including terror, intimidation and murder.”

Cultures that cannot adapt have a limited lifespan. That is why, up until the 1960’s the original Caliphate had been withering on the vine for several centuries. In fact, it had all but disappeared. The infusion of Oil wealth and the self-serving policies of the Arab oligarchs have temporarily revived it but it is far too brittle and ignorant a system to survive long.

Here is an odd little bit of symmetry: That little piece of paper, my great grandfather used as his declaration of independence from the Czar, was written out by a minor functionary of an already moribund regime 115 after Thomas Jefferson wrote the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and 115 years before I started this blog, which places him precisely half way between the document that expressed the cultural aspiration of the new nation and today.

Nathan Channen was a true upper-case Pilgrim. He was, in fact, one of the multitude that broadened and elevated the original name Pilgrim. He came here to America and with his love of the freedom he found here, his honest labor, his love of family and his devotion to his God and he helped to build the nation that Jefferson did so much to launch. I never met him but I know that his daughter (my grandmother) was a woman of heart, insight, valor and generosity of spirit and I know that such traits do not just appear in people, it arises from family and culture.

I have, I know, presented a kaleidoscope in this long, rambling post so permit me one last paragraph to tie it up. When, in my first Cultural Insanity post, I said that the left and Caliphate Islam suffer from the cultural analog of Borderline Personality Disorder I meant to try to explain behavior that I find inexplicable. In writing this post I have learned that BPD is a good scale model for something that I am tempted to call Cultural Dissociation. Culture functions in the best interest of the people within it when it promotes a healthy and comfortable life in the present. The only way to do this is to learn from and value the past while welcoming and adapting to the future. When some aspect of the culture like religion, ideology or phobia short-circuits the clear-eyed evaluation of alternatives and options, the culture becomes dissociated. There are ways to repair that dissociation.

In my next post I will go back and retrace the phenomenal success of the west and explore what it can teach us about the values and ideas that we need to get through the present crisis and continue to welcome the future.

Cultural Insanity - Part I - The Diagnosis

I’ve been quiet for a week and as you might know by now that means I’ve been working on something big Here is the First of a two part essay-

In a recent post on his own blog Richard Landes printed a letter he had received from someone who had heard him interviewed on the radio. The letter cited numerous “facts” that were obviously false and claimed to point to evidence that was clearly “cooked” and kneaded into a pungent soufflé of anti-Israel canards.

Landes, never one to miss a challenging “teaching moment”, wrote a lengthy reply. In the course of his reply, he addressed the superficial reasonableness of the letter writer’s arguments. He wrote:

“The important point here is not that your position isn’t “reasonable” — and as supported by evidence as mine. It’s a legitimate one. And under normal circumstances, we could agree to differ, just as Ptolomean and Copernican astronomers could differ without grave consequences in the 16th century. But don’t try to send a space ship beyond the solar system using Ptolomean calculations.”



It might seem that Landes goes a little too far in his charitable concession that his interlocutor’s point of view was “reasonable” and “just as supported by evidence” as his own, but Landes is following an honored and sadly neglected academic method, one that is designed not to merely support a point of view in a contest but rather to test it against alternatives and see which one is more successful at describing reality. So without looking any further than the narrow frame of reference in which the letter writer framed his point of view, they seemed just to present competing and equally valid ways of looking at the situation.

Landes’ then proceeded to widen the frame around the argument to show that, like the Ptolomean system, the narrow view taken by the radio listener does not work once you expand the frame to a wider and more comprehensive view of reality. The Copernican system is, of course, much more useful in space travel because it more closely approximates the real positions, relationships and movement of the heavenly bodies; and Landes’ view is much more robust and able to account for the reality of the conflict between Western Civilization and those who wish to rule the world with collectivist systems.

That point, elegantly stated, traces the stark fault line between the strangest sets of bedfellows the world has ever seen and the most successful civilization in history. The fatally conjoined, murderously quarrelsome twins of the Sunni and Shia Caliphate Cults and the liberal/socialist/communist/collectivist bastard children of The West (fascists all !) all have this in common, that they simply lack the ability to see the cultural frame of world events in any but the narrowest perspective. This is more than a willful blindness and it is not a product of stupidity of ignorance either. As I observe the smug, suicidal behavior of the progressive/socialist/liberal left and compare it with the belligerent, intolerance of the Caliphate Muslims seem to me to be in the grip of a similar kind of mental illness. They are all “collectivists” and there is something about people who believe in giving up one’s rights and prerogatives to a group of any kind that renders them unable to behave in a broader self-interest- even while they believe that they are doing the righteous thing. One way to explain this apparently inexplicable behavior is that it represents a cultural analog of a mental illness known as Borderline Personality Disorder.

I am not in favor of criminalizing or dehumanizing people because of their ideas and I believe that calling anyone that disagrees with you “insane” is an intolerant and unproductive tactic. I also Acknowledge that, just as it is dangerous and inexact to apply models of animal behavior to human beings, and that it is perhaps even more tricky to project individual psychology onto social and cultural groups Nevertheless, the parallels here are striking and, I believe, very instructive.

Wikipedia defines Borderline Personality Disorder this way:

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is defined as a mental illness primarily characterized by emotional dysregulation, extreme "black and white" thinking, or "splitting", and chaotic relationships. The general profile of the disorder also typically includes a pervasive instability in (1) mood, (2) interpersonal relationships, (3) self-image, (4) identity, and (5) behavior, as well as a disturbance in the individual's sense of self. In extreme cases, this disturbance in the sense of self can lead to periods of dissociation.[1]

Dissociation is the key. The leftist and the Islamist (infact collectivists of any stripe) are dissociated from their own very natures. They deny basic human truths in a defensive but doomed effort not to have to deal with issues that cause them tremendous anxiety.

Wikepedia continues:


“The disturbances suffered by those with borderline personality disorder have a wide-ranging and pervasive negative impact on many or all of the psychosocial facets of life, including employability and relationships in work, home, and social settings. Comorbidity is common; borderline personality disorder frequently occurring with substance use disorders and affective disorders. Suicidality and completed suicide are possible outcomes without proper care and effective therapy.”

Whether it is the abrupt and violent suicide culture of such diverse groups as al Qeada, Hamas and Hezbollah or the slow cultural/intellectual suicide of multiculturalism, it is compellingly apparent that the definition applies in both cases. Caliphate Islamism and Leftist liberalism both predispose their adherents to lose the ability to see the wider moral and ethical frame of the world around them.

This explains why, even though their idiosyncratic and xenophobic ideological systems are mutually contradictory, they don’t find it important to argue with each other. That’s because at the moment the contradictions amongst them are orthogonal - that is to say, in the presence of the dominant Western and American cultural and political influence, they really don’t interfere with each other. Their common disease makes them natural allies against that larger, more psychologically stable power structure that seems to them to humiliate and mock them by its very existence.

Of course, that alliance would evaporate the instant one of them ever got into a position of power. As soon as Islamists take over in an area, whether in Iraq, Waziristan or (most recently) in Gaza, they immediately behead, shoot, disembowel and torture anyone that represents moderation or reasonableness. The left, given the opportunity, in the USSR, China, Korea and Cambodia has always done the same. But while Western civilization is the common enemy, an Islamic Caliphateist who believes that women are inferior to men can accept (or at least ignore) the ranting of an anti-Israel socialist woman who believes that no human being is any more deserving than any other because she, as he does, finds it so much more important to deny the reality and moral superiority of Israel- a country whose founding principals are not orthogonal to but directly opposed to his. Indeed, the very existence of Israel is a challenge to his most basic beliefs and desires. She, on the other hand, remains blind to the plight of Muslim women and the lack of even the most rudimentary freedom of expression in the Muslim Caliphate because she has dissociated those things- split them off from her reality because they are intolerable for her and her illness has so weakened her that she cannot contemplate them.

Wikipedia provides this a list of diagnostic criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR). The presence of five out of nine of these is considered diagnostic of borderline personality.

Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
Chronic feelings of emptiness.
Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

I’ll admit at the outset that my definition of the progressive/socialist/liberal left is pretty broad and fuzzy around the edges. To try to define it down would be to miss the point. My point is that beyond a fairly narrow band close to the center of the political spectrum, the left has so swallowed the failed progressive agenda that they all suffer from the same cultural malaise. Here are the symptoms I see for the left:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
a. Objections to the Israeli Security fence and the Mexican border fence.
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
a. The idealized view of Caliphate Islam as “freedom fighters” and “non-materialistic religious devotees while at the same time devaluing them with the “racism of lowered expectations” by not holding them to the same high standard in human rights, public discourse, child welfare and civil governance as expected of other people.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
a. Self-hatred:
i. Concentration on the “human rights record of Israel” while the Arab/Islamic, Chinese, Korean, Zimbabwean and Rssian records are orders of magnitude worse
ii. Public displays of disgust with America even though it is the greatest country and most finest democratic experiment in the history of mankind
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
a. Advocacy of sex-education that emphasizes techniques and birth control and derides abstinence and relationship counseling.
b. The introduction of legislation to control the content of food beyond basic safety standards. The move to outlaw trans-fats in some locals is symptomatic of food-faddism and group eating disorders.
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
a. Multiculturalism leads to the inability to discriminate between right and wrong and to protect the culture from death-cult attacks
b. Persistent belief that “War is Not the Answer” even when an enemy has sworn to destroy and rule over you.
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
a. Conspiracy Theories (9/11 truth movement, Bushitler stole the election)
Well, there’s six, a diagnosis plus one. I’m sure there are a lot more- suggestions and additions are welcome …

Here’s my take on the symptoms of The Caliphate:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
a. Objections to the Israeli Security fence
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
a. Humiliation and rage over everything The West is and does stems from the dissociation of the knowledge that their culture is actually inferior.
b. Honor killings
c. Rampant child and sexual abuse
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
a. Suicide martyrdom raised to a cultural ideal
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
a. The “Arab Street” in general
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
a. The two Intifadas
b. The Cartoon-ifada
c. The Pope-ifada
d. The Paris street riots
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
a. Jew Hatred
b. Dhimmi laws
c. Conspiracy theories (9/11 was an Israeli plot, etc)
There’s six there too. It’s only six because of time restraints- suggestions and additions welcome here too.

Let me make it clear, I’m not a psychiatrist or psychotherapist so I don’t know what the prognosis is for individuals with this disorder or what price their family members and neighbors pay for their proximity to them. I do have a degree in anthropology, however, and I am able to see into the cultural scale of the problem. It is not hopeless but is is frightening.

Loren Eiseley who was a great anthropologist and paleontologist of the old school, knew the pathology of culture well. In his great essay The Star Thrower he wrote, “Man would kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food, then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him.” That is culture on a rampage. My next post will focus on the hope for recovery and reconciliation.