Phyllis Chesler's Personal Encounter with the Beast

Reproduced here, with Ms Chesler's permission, is a story that preempts our natural reactions by its juxtaposition of one of the most agile and powerful minds alive with the most archaic and atavistic social systems on earth. If the young firebrand that Ms Chesler must have been could find herself in this situation, how careful we must be ourselves...

How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam
Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?


Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.

When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.

In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.

In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.

I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).

Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.

However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents — from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America — assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.

According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?

Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York

The Hammy Awards- A Proposal

Here is an idea I have been toying with for some time- I posted as a comment at Augean Stables yesterday. What do you think?

The “Hammy” Awards

The name of the awards derives from MoHAMed the first name of the 9-year-old boy whose faked death scene was the defining image that led up to the "Al Aqsa" intifada. It also has the added implication that comes along with the practice of calling hack actors "Hams".

It is high time we step back and admit that we have to hand it to the the Islamists, the left and, in particular, the Palestinians. When the staged film clip of Mohamed al-Dura’s faked death was allowed to burn itself into the consciousness of the world, it was the crowning triumph of many long years of an increasingly bold-faced effort that uses the mainstream news media to slander and libel the Jewish State. It should have then been apparent to Jews all over the world that we are losing the media war. The more we are confronted with lies and rage from the “Arab Street” the more we stiffen up and try to be reasonable. The result is that we look like the poor dumb kid in the schoolyard whose only answers are “I didn’t do it” or “He hit me first”. It doesn’t matter that we are telling the truth- those answers don’t fly in the schoolyard and they don’t fly in the mass media either.

As American Jews and Israelis we have to admit that we are not “good copy. We Jews in general and Israelis in particular, grimly pursue ethics and truthfulness. We are dogged researchers and careful about our language. We have a touching but boring faith that being right and dignified will “win out”. We have been repeatedly dumbfounded that we are ignored and even ridiculed.

Its not just Jews who don’t get it. Michael Moore has been able to get away with all kinds of fraud disguised as documentary for decades. He is just beginning to get a little of his own treatment.

We just don’t get it. Most westerners and, especially, Jews don’t think intimidation and deception are the way to win arguments. We despise those who threaten people’s lives (let alone kill them) or riot in the streets when someone says something we don’t like, we answer them with reason, logic and a sincere expectation that if we do a good enough job at investigating and explaining the situation, the truth will win out. Dull, dull, dull. It just doesn’t play well for the news cameras. Apparently, while we weren’t paying attention, the court of world opinion has become the equivalent of the audience of the Jerry Springer Show where the crowd cheers most for the loudest, most obscene threats, the most violent lunges and the wildest haymakers.

That’s why we need to take a moment to recognize how out-classed we have been in the battle for world opinion. It’s not that we are going to abandon our love of truth and the pursuit of justice, it’s just that we have to find a way to make our side of the story both appealing and understandable. We need to repackage it in a “sound bite”.

By acknowledging the success of the other side’s tactics by instituting the Hammy Awards we:

1. Condense our message into a bumper sticker that is more attractive and eloquent than “they are liars and fakers”.

2. Put them on the defensive- for once the will not be “taking credit” for attacks on civilians or accusing anybody of anything.

3. Put aside our serious faces and our dogged pursuit of justice aside for one day and showcase the Jewish sense of humor that the world has loved in so many Jewish comedians, artists and writers. This is a lot more appealing than the usual humorless Israeli generals and politicians who are the traditional spokespeople. It would be great if we could get some well-known Jewish comedians to host the presentations- that would assure media coverage.

4. Embarrass the News Agencies and Media outlets and put them on notice that we can do more than just complain. We can convincingly impugn their reputations in a way the world will pay attention to if they allow the propaganda machine to use them.
5. Raise the indignation of the intelligent News Consumer who will, no matter what their feelings about Israel will be angry at having been fooled by the media’s carelessness and propagation of such transparent fakery.

The awards could be given in various categories of false news. Possible categories might include: Spurious Massacres, Faked Civilian Target Damage, Photoshop Tampering and “Trick Photography”, Untrue War Crime Accusations and Stage Managed Media Events.

Each award could be given to recipients in two divisions one for the originators (be they Islamic agents or biased Nongovernmental Agencies) and one for the complicit media stooges. So, for instance, in the Spurious Massacre category there will be two recipients, one for the fabricator or Non-Governmental Organization official who did the most to create the impression that it existed and the other for the Mainstream Media stooge who was most responsible for it becoming a reality in the eyes of World Opinion.

How about it? Anybody out there have any muscle or lucre to put behind this idea?

Lorraine Ali's Travesty in Newsweek

Dennis Prager, who is a hero of mine, has a nice response to the now infamous review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book “Infidel”. Prager gets some of the details wrong (see comments)but he nails the historical comparison just right..

I’d like to add my say in the form of an address to Lorraine Ali. This is based on a comment I left on Prager’s article.

Dear Lorraine Ali,

Toward the end of your review of Infidel, you unconsciously betray the fatal flaw in your rhetorical stance when you write:

“Hirsi Ali is more a hero among Islamophobes than Islamic women. That's problematic considering she describes herself in "Infidel" as a woman who "fights for the rights of Muslim women, the enlightenment of Islam and the security of the West." How can you change the lives of your former sisters, and work toward reform, when you've forged a career upon renouncing the religion and insulting its followers? Hirsi Ali says overhauling Islam is not her responsibility: she just lays out "the facts" and leaves it to others to go about fixing this supposedly broken faith.”

You have missed the point completely. Here is the point Lorraine, pay attention this time: Hirsi Ali is NOT A MUSLIM ANYMORE. She left because her experience with Islam was worse than the death she has been threatened with for leaving. Yes, even after her friend, Theo Van Gogh who was director and producer of her ground-breaking film, Submission was brutally murdered on a public street by a Muslim man, she had the courage to speak out in public and fight for what she believed to be the truth. She believes that Islam at its core is dangerous and repressive. She is telling the world what she thinks and why she thinks it. She has no interest in reforming Islam. The responsibility se feels toward her former sisters is to urge them to leave too. Hirsi Ali’s experience tells her that she cannot, as you do blithely dismiss the connection between Islam and the “patriarchal society” and “messed-up people” YOU blame for her life experience.

Lorraine Ali, you, who have grown up in America, sheltered by the finest example of free society the world has yet seen, have no idea what it is to be Hirsi Ali. You have no right to imply that she should work from the inside and fight for reform. How do you have the presumption? Women across the Islamic world are hanged, raped, beaten, stoned, stabbed and shot to death every day just for being women- let alone speaking up about inequality.

The final giveaway is that last phrase "leaves it to others to go about fixing this supposedly broken faith." Oh, Lorraine, don't look now but outside of the posh Mosques you might have been raised in here, most mosques in the world are seedbeds of hatred, repression and vile prejudice. Not a day goes by that they don't call for death to America, The Jews, the Bahais, the Dutch etc... According to many if not most Islamic clerics the majority of the people in the worlds are no more than pigs, dogs and monkeys. In Islamic countries the women and children are systematically terrorized (see my last two posts). This does not strike you as broken?

Just as Catholicism was during the Inquisition, Islam IS a faith that has become seduced by power and convinced that it has God’s blessing to convert, kill or subjugate every human being on earth. The Catholics grappled with their demons and are now a civilized sect. I would rather not have to wait several centuries for Islam to follow suit.

It is true that we have nothing to fear from you while you live here under our laws but what if your Islamic Mullahs had their way and there was a world-wide caliphate… Think about it. You’d no longer be allowed to peddle your silly, self important “criticisms” of western music to Newsweek, Rolling Stone and GQ. There’d be no glossy magazines and music store would be fire bombed by the world-wide Taliban.

Also, I’m not sure you know this but the Mullahs say you can’t quit if you want to. According to a preponderance of religious authority in the Islamic world, if you are born a Muslim and decide you no longer want to be, you are automatically a heretic and under death sentence.

And you? You’d be allowed (provided you kept your westernized trap shut) to hide yourself under 30 pounds of burkha and hope that your husband/father/brother/uncle is in a good mood.

If that is not broken, what is?

The Terrorization of the Defenseless

This post is going to be hard for all of us, but please stay with it for a little while. I know I am taking a chance at alienating some readers by writing about this but I don’t know of any other way of moving the unmoved to see the threat that we all face. The Beast we face trades on our inability to discuss taboo subjects. It has learned to thrive, to breed sedition and perversion in the shade created by the great living tree of respect we in the west have nurtured to shelter the opinions, private lives and religious feelings of individuals. I propose that we need to shine light into the dark recesses they inhabit. We need to expose their abuses no matter how dark. Indeed, the darker they are the more we need to expose them.

If this marks me as a Neo-Con, so be it. I was not always like that; I was once a liberal American Jew who was constitutionally opposed to applying my own beliefs and standards to other people, especially people from other cultures. I felt that my respect for and awe of the “differences” somehow would inoculate me and my people (maybe even all people) from becoming victims of intolerance ever again.

Then I had a brush with the evil that I call The Beast. I told that story in my first post on this blog. That encounter was the first time I felt The Beast’s hot breath on the back of my neck. On that day I began the process of awakening to the threat that is always there. The fright of seeing the threat rise up against my five-year-old daughter in the form of my friend’s little boy, shocked me out of my reverie. I had to face the fact that this threat was a direct result of how the Islamist movement seeks to deform and murder the future through child abuse. Far from having mercy on them for their innocence and helplessness, the Islamists show a kind of unholy opportunism in which they rush to twist and torture that innocence. I had to admit to myself that here is horror beyond my ability to understand, let alone control with my adamant tolerance and acceptance.

Of course, my encounter was only a searing but infinitesimal splatter of molten hate that happened to pop into my life. It was not until I looked back in the direction from which it had come that I caught sight of its source. When first I glimpsed that vast, white hot, creaking, lava flow of blind hatred and dogma that is bearing down on us all I could not take it all in at once. The feeling of dread that filled me was overwhelming. I have not had a single day in the nearly twenty years since then that I have not thought about it.

I know that the direction I am headed in at this point runs against the grain here in The Free World. I know that many of you, if you have gotten this far, are feeling very uncomfortable reading these kinds of things about other people. Most of us studied the classic case of “yellow press” and the Spanish American War in middle school. We all understand how prejudice poisons everything it touches. We have lived through the continuing transformation of the west into the most tolerant and open culture that has ever existed. We continue to face our history, treasure our present and strive to improve our future. We are all taught from the time we first watch Sesame Street that respect for others and tolerance of differences are the cornerstone of being a good person. We know only too well the terrible consequences of this kind of talk. Our education and Judeo-Christian ethos has made a lot of progress in coaxing much of the prejudice and xenophobia out of us. So, it’s natural to feel as though it is simply wrong even to bring these things up. If you are feeling this way, it is understandable but I ask you to bear with me.

As a reasonably well read American with an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and a Master of Science in Communications, I was not unaware of some aspects of Muslim culture and the difficulty of understanding and communicating about those differences; but I was still very much under the spell of the moral relativism that rides on the back of multiculturalism. So, when I had my early brush with the Beast, it shocked me. It inspired me to think and write about its cause and meaning. Some of my readers have found an urgent personal meaning in it too. Others have not been interested in or touched by the story though. Many have been offended that I bring it up and try to understand it. If you are one of those, I want to reach you before it is your child facing the death threat, your friend strapped into an airline seat as a terrorist flies the plane into a skyscraper at 500 miles per hour or your daughter being stoned to death in a public park for the crime of having been overpowered and then raped by four men.

These are not things I made up to vilify and demonize all Muslims, they are real things that were really done by some real Muslims because of the teachings of mainstream Muslim culture. You have to pay attention to what they do and where they come from and you have to understand they do it with intent and purpose.

If the relatively small shock that affected my family has no effect on you and the plight of Millions of Muslim women does not do it either, I have to bring up the most dire of all the indictments against Muslim culture and the Arab fundamentalists in particular.

Above and beyond recruiting them as suicide bombers, rock throwers and human shields, dwarfing the dreadful cult of blood and hate they teach them from kindergarten on. There is the pandemic of violence toward and sexual abuse of children in the Islamic World. The Islamic child abuse problem is the most immense and covert tragedy in the modern world. Children are the most abjectly powerless members of any society, so they are also the best test of the inherent goodness or evil of that society. Their cries of pain and despair are easily kept from the outside world so they are at the mercy of those whose responsibility it is to care for them. When they are used for political and ideological purposes it is bad enough- these are expressed publicly so there is at least some moderation by the standards of the larger society (such as they might be). But with physical and sexual abuse there is often an absolute protection for the abuser. The abuse takes place in the confines of the home- the very place that should be the child’s ultimate shelter.
The tragedy of it is that along with the moral and cultural relativism that we in the liberal west often use to excuse and conceal the horror of:
•the continuing human slave trade
•the destruction of Darfour
•the honor killing of women
•the social repression of women
•the intolerance of infidel and non believers
and
•the inability to engage in the most rudimentary standards of modern discourse
…we also entertain the naïve and mistaken belief (more of a hope) that all people are endowed with the same sense of what is right and wrong. This is one of our most dangerous delusions.

The magnitude of this vast tragedy can be glimpsed through the statement of Gert Kapelari a UNICEF ( a stronghold of uncritical support of uncritical support for Arab causes) delegate who was quoted in this 2004 BBC (usually a bastion of multiculturalism) story as saying that the staggering truth of the Arab child abuse problem is not well understood because true numbers are unavailable. Here is how the article put it:
Child protection specialists said the fact that there were no fixed statistics on abuse in the Arab world was shocking, particularly because they know it is widespread.

The number of reported cases is very low, they argued, and that belies the truth about what is really going on.

Gert Kapelari, a delegate for the United Nations children's agency Unicef, said a survey among school children in eight Arab countries showed that the numbers were staggering.

"Where we asked children to what extent they have been victims of abuse or other forms of violence, what comes out of the preliminary findings are really shocking," he said. "We have to conclude that more than half of the children are, in one way or another, victims of violence and even sometimes of severe abuse,"
Now, I know that we are all civilized people here and we would never want to be accused of saying anything bigoted or prejudicial about another culture; but, if Kapelari is anywhere close to accurate in his assessment, the majority of Arab children (and possibly all children in Islamic countries) have much more to fear from his or her own father and uncles than from the licentious western morals, Liberal media, U.S. Marines and Israeli Defense Force that the rage filled mullahs and street protesters blame for everything.

It is not cultural chauvinism on our part to talk about this; it is our duty as human beings. Here, for those who need them, is a link to more details on how the Islamic clergy rationalize and foster this tragedy. The child abuse is not so well acknowledged as the second class status of women in the Islamic World but it is all part of the same terrorization of the defenseless that should illustrate to any but the most suicidally liberal what is in store for the world if Islamofascism should ever get the upper hand. The sickening state of terror and oppression that those children live under mirrors the suffering of their mothers and is a metaphor for the condition of all humankind if their dream of a World-wide Caliphate come into being.
It is also an absolutely reliable predictor of the insanity that, later in life, not only perpetuates the cycle of abuse in its own society but moves them to plan and/or celebrate acts like the callous slaughter of thousands of innocent airline passengers and office workers.

Those in the west who believe the fables that the policies of western countries, the existence of Israel and the presence of the U.S. in Iraq (as we try to stabilize that country after deposing one of the most infamous tyrants of all time) are to blame for the discontents of the Islamists should be forced to work for six months in a pediatric or Gynecological ward in any hospital in the Arab world. That might give them a clearer idea of what it is that torments the present and cripples the future of the Arabs and from whence the wellspring of rage that powers so much of their political and religious life gushes.

We all need to keep in mind that this fleeting moment in the history of the world, when the greatest power on earth is also the champion of the finest and most democratic impulses of the human spirit is the exception not the rule. We must not let this best hope for humanity slip through our fingers by false modesty or self-effacing reluctance. We need to face the danger, understand it and defeat it.

It is Way too Small a World!- at least for women in Islam...

Back from Disney!
My boys had a fantastic time and I got some time to think and renew. My primary reaction I is, “What a great country this is!” The place was jammed- you couldn’t stop walking with out having several people pile up behind you. In spite of long lines and fierce competition for places, I didn’t hear an uncivil word spoken all week. This has to be the most courteous and genuinely gracious group of people in the history of the human race!

I did find one thing a bit unnerving though. I refer to the ride “It’s a small world”. I wasn’t put off by the kitsch- I find that entertaining and cute. No, I tolerated that alright. I had, after all, resolved to make an effort to leave behind my usual critical edge and try to see the whole thing through my sons’ eyes.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with it’s a Small World it’s a pretty typical Disney ride for the younger kids. You get into a little boat and you are floated along a sort of metaphorical stream that carries you past what seems like dozens of dioramas filled with animatronic figures representing a very broad sampling of world cultures. In each diorama a host of child-like animatronics, dressed in appropriately ethnic garb, serenades you with the tune “It’s a Small World”. In every setting there is some distinctive lilt or syncopation or inflection added to give the song an ethnic flavor. That was OK, I suppose, but then, toward the end of the ride, we came around another one of the bends in that “world river” that ran through all the settlements of the worlds children and we came upon an Arab grouping. There they were, with their veils, turbans and harem pants singing,

“There is just one moon and one golden sun
And a smile means friendship to everyone.
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It's a small small world”

The thought occurred to me that the problem with multiculturalism might be deeper than I thought. Here we are teaching our kids to unconditionally offer to accept the good will of people who are not even remotely friendly.

We have fallen for the ideal of multiculturalism without thoroughly understanding what it is or what it requires. Multiculturalism comes with the benign sounding proposition that “society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural groups, with equal status”. The trap in multiculturalism is that it offers uncritical acceptance of foreign influences that may be illegal, immoral or injurious to society. It leaves to door open to everything from sickening animal sacrifice rituals to culturally sanctioned beating and murder of women. In doing so we have mistaken the maxim that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” for its evil twin “no opinion is any better than any other”. Now we are faced with a sizable portion of the Islamic world that calls us the “Great Satan” and believes that every single one of us should either believe exactly as they do or be killed. Yes, killed.

So who are these homunculi at Disney World who are lulling us and our children with this lethal lie of one world with a single dream of harmony? They are our wish that we could, by being of sufficiently good will, make them see that our way is better and that they should subscribe to our common dream. They are not about to do that though, and we need to temper our uncritical good will with a real defense against their evil.

Do I think that Disney should change the display to leave the Arab scenes out? Am I advocating that they turn them into a more realistic display where the children are being taught to chant "death to America, death to Jews!"? I am not sure that either is either possible or advisable. There are other things we need to do immediately however.

The first thing we need to do is to rethink our taboo against looking with a critical eye and speaking openly about other cultures and religions. We need to make value judgments on the basis of what we can see.

Consider the words of Ayaan Ali Hirsi, in her acceptance speech when she was given the Martin Luther King International Brotherhood Award, she said: “Human beings are equal; cultures are not.” Hirsi herself is proof of this. Since she fled the Islamic culture in which she was raised and westernized herself she has become one of the most powerful and sincere defenders of Western ideals. She has also earned a death sentence (fatwa) from Islamic clerics for her outspoken opinions.

Hirsi told an interviewer “Almost nobody in the West wants to understand that Islam's problems are structural. Contemporary Islam hardly exists. Islam stopped thinking in the year 900 and has stood still for more than a thousand years.”
Hirsi’s point of departure is Islam’s treatment of women. Here is another quote from that speech:

“I am being acknowledged here today because CORE wants to take Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream beyond racial inequality. CORE wants to be a platform from where the greatest inequality of our time, perhaps of all time, can be battled.
This is gender inequality: an inequality most obscene, expressed through acts such as mutilation, beatings, rape and murder--and almost all this aggression is justified in the name of culture and creed. Atrocities committed against girls and women in the most intimate setting of all: in the home; by dad or mom; by a brother or a sister; by a husband or his mother. The sort of persecution I talk about is one in which the religious leaders, the politicians, aunts and uncles, fathers and mothers, all share the staunch belief that girls--that women--are born of a lesser god.

I was born into this culture. And I stress my emphasis on the word “culture”.
When I first came to a Western country, I was astonished to find men who said, "Ladies first"--yes, ladies first. I was amazed because I was born and raised in a culture that put me last because I was born a girl; where I was confined, because of my gender; where all the burden of what is considered good sexual conduct was for me to bear because I am female.”

We must believe her, we must try to use our critical faculties before it’s too late.

Everyday it’s too late for thousands of Muslim women who are mutilated, beaten, raped and murdered.

We also need to look at ourselves differently. Hirsi can help us get started there too. Instead of exclusive focus on negatives and shortcomings we need to recognize that we are the world’s best hope. Hirsi puts it this way:

A culture that celebrates femininity is not equal to a culture that trims the genitals of her girls.
A culture that holds the door open to her women is not equal to one that confines them behind walls and veils.
A culture that spends millions on saving a baby girl’s life is not equal to a one that uses its first encounter with natal technology to undertake mass abortion simply because baby girls are not welcome.
A culture with courts that punish a husband for forcing his wife to have sex with him is not equal to a culture with a tribunal that decrees a young woman be gang-raped for talking to a boy of an allegedly higher caste.
A culture that encourages dating between young men and young women is not equal to a culture that flogs or stones a girl for falling in love.
A culture where monogamy is an aspiration is not equal to a culture where a man can lawfully have four wives all at once.
A culture that protects women’s rights by law is not equal to a culture that denies women their alimony and half their inheritance.
A culture that insists on holding open a position for women in its Supreme Court is not equal to a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half of that of a man.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial equality has become a reality for some and remains a dream for many. It has become a reality for the few people privileged enough to live in this culture that values the human individual regardless of race or gender. It is this culture that provides me with the vocabulary, the legal tools, the material resources, the platforms, and most of all, the opportunity to meet like minded individuals who will stand for the rights of those fellow girls and women who haven’t been as lucky as me or you.

It is within this culture that it pays to fight for equality.
Unfortunately, it is this culture that is under threat today. Many of those born into it take it for granted--or worse, apologize for it.

So dear men and women of colour, and dear women of all colour: Let’s join together to protect this culture of life, this culture of liberty, this culture of "ladies first."

As a first step, lets stop apologizing. Then we can begin working on a firmer grasp on reality.

I'm going to Disney World

Dear Readers,
I'ts school vacation and I'm off to take the two youngest Ben Yaacovs to Disney. I will try to check in every day and moderate comments but Mrs Ben Yaacov will be tapping her beautifully pedicured toes when I do. I'll be back at my word catapult on the 26th. In the mean time, I put the post below this one up on Saturday Morning- There is more to come on that subject but early reaction has been off to a brisk start-
My thanks, to my friend Discerning Texan who has already linked to it with a nice comment.

Don't Just Stand There, Dhimmi, Humiliate Me!

When the Imam Husham Al-Husainy appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show he burst into a explosive rage when Hannity respectfully but insistently tried to get him to answer a couple of simple questions about his political views. Don’t take my word for this, here it is from Little Green Footballs.

I do not bring this incident up here for any political hay that might be made from the fact that the remarks the Imam is being questioned about here were made as part of a “prayer” he offered at the Democratic National Convention. That has been done to death already. I want to point it out because it is a very valuable opportunity to learn something basic about the Islamist rage in the Arab Street that we hear so much about.

Toward the end of his tirade the Imam accuses Hannity of humiliating him. I found this very interesting and provocative. In western terms we might have accused someone of attempting to humiliate us but if we are convinced we are right and prepared to reason our case and present facts, we would never jump to humiliation voluntarily. We would also, I think, take humiliation, once established, as a sign that we have been shown to be wrong or venal in some way, albeit unkindly.

Truth is, it is uncannily easy for Hannity to Humiliate him. The Imam is simply unwilling to speak directly to Hannity’s questions. Instead of telling Hannity and the world that he simply won’t answer the questions, he attempts a long, abusive counterattack that features intimidation, religious condemnation and what can only be termed “damnation to Hell”. Why, I want to ask, is the Imam so extraordinarily quick to take on the mantle of humiliation and what can he hope to accomplished by it?

Humiliation is the key to understanding the Islamist Jihad. They are always humiliated because they invite it. Actually, they insist on it. Just listen to the way the conversation goes between Hannity and the Imam. When Hannity asks him direct questions about his own words the Imam launches tirade after meaningless tirade until he is so embarrassed and exhausted that he has no choice but to hang up and get himself out of the situation.

This man, who claims to know the words and mind of God, can’t even acknowledge his own words let alone explain them. He is so unused to being questioned or having to explain the nonsense he talks, that he becomes outraged in the event. These Imams are not religious leaders as we know them in this century, rather, they evoke dark centuries past. Each of them is a small Torquemada who would condemn you to death and damnation at the drop of a hat.

Just as any other fascist (see Islamofascism post below) would, Imam Husham felt compelled to utter the standard, irrational, central mythos of his movement. It is a circular argument, they hate us because they say we humiliate them while they insist on humiliating themselves. In the true fascist style they dare us to help them humiliate themselves by holding fast to obviously idiotic beliefs and positions- one of which is that we are the ones who humiliate them.

How easy it is to humiliate the average Islamist! A beautiful woman walking down the street in a modest dress but with no burkha to cover her humiliates him. If his sister were to so much as say one word to an unrelated male; he is humiliated. If Danish cartoonists draw cartoons poking fun at The Prophet; he is not just outraged, angry or hurt, he is humiliated. It is so easy for us to humiliate them because they are using us as a scapegoat for their personal shamefacedness. This is a shame that is drawn from a different, unspeakable place in their culture. It is clear to me that they are only using the interaction between us and them to express that deep, permanent humiliation that precedes any thought of or interaction with us. That is a deep wound indeed. I am working on another post that will begin to explore the evidence for that wound.

Christians and Jews are especial targets for scapegoating because, as the Imam points out several times, we are all Abrahamic peoples. That makes us theological cousins. The Islamists remember better than we do that for centuries we were their dhimmis, (not quite slaves but not free men and women either). They held the sword over our heads and called us apes, pigs, monkeys and dogs to our faces. Now, the west is ascendant. The U.S. is the lone superpower and Israel is the most successful, freest and most powerful country in that region.

They still call us apes, pigs, monkeys and dogs but not to our faces any more. They only dare do that in Arabic when they think we aren’t listening. They are perfectly capable of lording it over us again if we let them. This rare moment in time in which we live, when might is also on the side of the right must not be frittered away. The Islamic population bomb and the Islamic nuclear bomb must be defused while we have the opportunity.

Recipe for Survival: An American Brain and A Russian Heart

In 1976 the American Nazi Party requested the right to hold a parade in Skokie Illinois. Skokie was not just any town; several thousand concentration camp survivors had settled there after WWII. The Nazi march seemed to them to be a direct threat and a painful reminder of the slaughter of their loved ones and their own suffering and brush with death. When the Nazis went to court to challenge the denial, the ACLU went with them. I recall my grandfather making a remark at a family gathering that the Nazis should not be allowed to show their faces in public and that the ACLU lawyers should be disbarred for helping them.

I recall with a great deal of unease and shame how I, full of liberal sophistication, undertook to educate my grandfather on the fine points of the first amendment. My grandfather was not a holocaust survivor in the exact definition. He left Ukraine and came here to America thirty years before Hitler invaded Poland, but the memory of the Cossacks, the Tsar’s army, the Bolshevik police and the friends and relatives that stayed behind and were probably killed in his hometown of Zhitomer were always with him. He had, at sixteen years old, struck out alone, on foot, across the rolling hills of what is now Ukraine to become a citizen of a country he could only imagine. His dreams, his determination and his faith in the God of Abraham carried him. In one city on the way, he thought he remembered that it happened in Lublin, He remembered having witnessed a Cossack raid. He remembered hiding in a basement. At one point he looked out the high street level window just as a man’s head, severed by a saber blow rolled up and stopped right before his eyes. He was not a holocaust survivor but he was no stranger to the beast either.

I reflect on my hubris from my present vantage point and I see what a self-important ass I was; and I see that the scene I had played out with my Papa Joe was a perfect replica of the Skokie fracas in exquisite miniature. There I was, two generations and a secular, liberal college education removed from the man who saved the gene pool that had given me life and I was presuming to lecture him about what makes this country great.

I was, that night, very secure and smug in my knowledge that I was, as was the ACLU, standing up for the essential freedoms of speech, assembly and belief that are at the very core of our great country. I was, I felt, standing for the rule of law against (God forgive me for my hubris) a passionate but misguided and unsophisticated man who simply did not understand how sacred the principals we were discussing and how slippery the slope on which he was treading.

I remember my grandfather’s frustration as I persisted in explaining the rights of free speech and assembly. He was angry in a way that I had never imagined he could be. He called me an idiot and told me that I knew nothing. I remember too the regret I felt for getting the whole ugly thing started in the first place. Most of all, I remember knowing that, even though I could prove that I was right logically, that I was deeply and ignorantly wrong.

So too was the ACLU, very sure of its ground in presuming to compel the residents of Skokie to allow the American Nazi party come to their city and parade in front of them. It has taken me almost thirty years to comprehend how wrong we were and why.
Much of the transformation in my thinking has come about through my association with what, for lack of a more precise term, I will call the Russian Jews. This is not a very accurate term but it is what they call themselves and since the fact that a large number of them are not precisely Russian (just Russian speaking- from the former Soviet Union) and many of them have lived here in the U.S. for more than twenty years makes no difference to them, I don’t feel it ought to matter much to me either.

I am a Boston area Jew who grew up (I’m now 57 years old) in a prosperous suburb; but I also consider myself a Russian Jew. I find that politically and emotionally I have more in common with the Russian Jewish community than with most of the rest of the community I live in. I still live in the same city I grew up in and most of the Jews here in my safe little suburb have intentionally distanced themselves from the knowledge that most of our grandparents and great grandparents were also Eastern European Jews. Many of us are assimilated, liberal and vaguely embarrassed by those more recently arrived neighbors who speak in the patois of our grandparents and see the world and other people in a more Manichean way. Those homogenized liberal Jews irritate me- partly because they are trying so hard to be unassailably lovable and “truly” American and partly because they remind me of what an ass I was to my Russian grandfather that night so long ago.

Last week Jewish Odysseus left a comment on my blog http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/ . On his site I found a reference to a story entitled Tatiana Menaker: Russian Jews, American Jews, and Traifn Bleet. Here is a snippet of Tatiana’s piece:

I was raised and lived until the age of 20 in the dirty communal apartment in Leningrad where eight families fought for a place in the kitchen, waited in line for the only toilet, and where people were forced to live, deprived of any privacy, with disgusting strangers as with close relatives, and watched those strangers’ lives. It was the best life lesson I ever had.
A few of my girlfriends, who had the luxury of living in apartments of their own, never learned how low human beings could fall. They never saw husbands beating their wives’ heads against the tiled stoves and hot radiators, they never saw men having sex with their neighbors’ wives while husbands slept dead drunk, they never saw families where people were stealing from each other, informing on each other to the police and sending each other to prison, and 20 year olds drowning in bathtubs from too much vodka.
My delusional girlfriends expected people to be good to them and to each other as their own loving mothers and grandmas. They were as delusional about people as Mr. Ruby and majority of American Jews are delusional about Palestinians and Muslims. They never lived among barbarians and never dealt with their cruelty. Russian Jews did. And we know that barbarians respect nothing besides force and cruelty much worse than their own.

Read the rest here.

When I followed the link back to the source blog, I was surprised that it was written by a Russian Jew no more than five miles from where I sit typing this.

Among the comments posted under Tatiana’s story there runs common thread, an implied consensus, if you will, that Russian Jews see the world more clearly than the Assimilated American Jews that I grew up with. This is completely true. Assimilated American Jews have no true feeling for what savagery and hardship exist in the world outside America. This is not their fault- they have never felt the Breath of the Beast on their backs.

They are also incapable of facing the one true fact about being Jewish out side of Israel. They are emotionally unable to face the knowledge that as Jews it is always possible (however remotely) that even though today they are privileged Americans, one day there might come a time when the privilege will be swept away and they will find that their finely honed knowledge of America’s Civil Laws and culture is no protection against the cold hard reality that exists in most of the rest of the world. The most frightening and ominous phrase in the Torah comes near the beginning of Exodus “V’yakham melech hadash al Mitzrahim asher loh yodah et yosef” which means, “And there arose a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph” Things can change as quickly as that. The current threat is the Islamofascist wish to institute a world-wide caliphate and Shari'a law in the thirties it was the German American Bund. It is always there.

Russians feel that knowledge in the core of their beings. No one who has not in some way suffered the way they did in their own lifetime can possibly understand this well enough to have the strength to face this awful truth. Most of us Assimilated American Jews subconsciously choose not see through the veneer of civil society to the chaos, cruelty and fear that can lie behind it. We may know its there but have a great emotional need to ignore it.

Among Assimilated American Jews it is only those of us who have had some combination of harsh life experiences, closeness with the Russian community, and, most of all, the rare first hand encounter with the The Beast who can see that it is more dangerous to remain ignorant and passive in the face of the threats than to face them and deal with them.

Back in 1976 when the ACLU and I had assumed the mantle of “protector of the constitution” and, each in our own way, committed ourselves to the single-minded dedication to the minute letter of the first amendment we were guilty of a “foolish consistency”. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines”. I would add over-educated prigs a group to which I hope I have tendered my resignation for good.
. Don’t misunderstand me, its not that I’ve in any way changed my mind about the essential sanctity of free speech. The distinction I have learned to draw may be subtle but it is also very important.

Here is the problem: I agree that the Nazis are entitled by our constitution to assemble and speak, but to require our government to countenance such activity with no way of protecting the welfare of other citizens is unconscionable. When we enforce the right of free speech without regard to the effect of that speech on others we are in danger of allowing the active harassment, sedition and defamation. The holocaust survivors are one example of a group of people that deserve to be protected.

The families of fallen soldiers whose funerals have been disrupted by anti-war demonstrations are another, more current one example. This wholly nasty and heartless tactic has been adopted by the anti-way movement, in which they seek out the funerals of soldiers who were killed in action and picket them with the express purpose of causing the maximum anguish to the grieving family. They apparently feel that this will amplify the media coverage they receive.

As laws have been passed specifically to prevent this kind of activity, the ACLU has risen on its haunches and filed lawsuits to limit the effectiveness of the laws. Here is part of a press release issued by the Eastern Missouri ACLU division about one of these suits.
“Free speech and the right to protest peacefully extend to all Americans, even if their messages are unpopular and distasteful,” said Brenda Jones, executive director of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri. “The government cannot pick and choose whose rights it is going to honor. Laws that restrict first amendment rights never harm only one group; they pave the way for restrictions on the right to dissent for all groups.”

These are the same noble sounding justifications I might have used in contradicting my grandfather so many years ago; but I am afraid I am not so willing to hold my nose in support of the rights of the criminally cruel and deranged. Let them have their rights to speech by why allow them seek out and persecute grieving families of young heroes? They can protest any where they want to- why not just keep them out of ear-shot and sight line of the bereaved.

But no, Brenda Jones feels she must lecture “the government” about picking and choosing.

Of course, when you are used to lecturing people, sometimes you’re just so busy waggling your finger and pontificating that you forget to apply the same standard to yourself. This past May an article By Steohanie Strom in the New York Times exposed a clear example of hypocrisy on this point by the ACLU. Here is a snip,

The American Civil Liberties Union is weighing new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization's policies and internal administration.
"Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement," the committee that compiled the standards wrote in its proposals.
"Directors should remember that there is always a material prospect that public airing of the disagreement will affect the A.C.L.U. adversely in terms of public support and fund-raising," the proposals state.
Given the organization's longtime commitment to defending free speech, some former board members were shocked by the proposals.

Apparently, the ACLU, which is always demanding total transparency from all governmental branches, and major corporations, is not so convinced that transparency looks so good on them. Freedom of speech, you see, is still the most important thing in the world to them when it comes to encouraging the sadistic tormenting of families that just want to be left in peace to bury their dead. But if it interferes with “public support and fund-raising” for the ones who enable the heartless bastards- oh, well, that’s got to stopped.

The ACLU is terribly politically correct. They allow no exceptions to their rules, and their rules say that no one may be spared the responsibility of total free speech. They’ll sacrifice anyone’s dignity and peace of mind for their idea of the way things should be- anyone else’s that is. Just don’t ask them to pay that price themselves. As politically incorrect as they are, I don’t know a single Russian Jew who would support act that way. They have seen the face of the beast and to them it looks a lot like the ACLU.

Is There Such a Thing as Islamofascism?

Islamofascism is a controversial term. Much of that controversy stems from the confusion that exists about the actual meaning of the word that is the back end of the term- fascism. I have been wondering about the term myself. To avoid any misunderstanding I have generally used the term Islamisism for the brand of radical islam that seeks our demise and referred to its proponents as Islamists. I ran across an old article in a New Yorker magazine recently that may change my practice on this score. In the article entitled The Devils Disciples, Can you Force People to Love Freedom? Louis Menand was reviewing a pair of books dealing with totalitarianism and terror. He wrote:

“One writer who identified terror as the essence of totalitarianism was Hannah Arendt. Arendt started writing “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in 1945, the year Nazi Germany was defeated. …, Arendt was a philosopher. She was interested in the politics of totalitarianism, but she was also interested in the metaphysics, in totalitarianism as a mode of being in the world. Terror, she argued, may be experienced as arbitrary, but it is not arbitrary and it is not lawless. Every despot exercises power arbitrarily; all dictators are outside the law. The distinctive feature of totalitarian societies is that 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.

…or a religious dogma. I recognized this arbitrary nature of terror immediately. I have seen its foot prints in visits to Babi Yar and the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem I watched it crash into the North Tower and slaughter Daniel Pearl on the Internet. All of these events have their own unspeakable individual character but they all share the lunatic devaluation of human life that is born of a totalitarian belief system. I have also have had to face the hard fact that a five-year old boy could in a matter-of-fact way explain to my five-year-old daughter that because she is Jewish he really ought to kill her. Menand continues quoting Arendt:

“Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous,” she said. In Nazism, everyone is subordinate to the race war; in Bolshevism, to the class struggle. Man-made laws and political institutions are temporary shelters for vested interests, to be flattened by the winds of destiny. And the winds never cease. Hitler did not talk in terms of his own lifetime. He talked in terms of “the next thousand years.”

Here was the answer to the questions that had burrowed into my consciousness and had been living a parasitic existence in me ever since that night twenty years earlier. The Islamist version of utopia is the total abnegation of the human soul in submission to a literal and dogmatic reading on the Koran. It presumes that a perfect world would have no place for Jews, Christians or any other kind of believer. It even excludes other Moslems who interpret the Koran in less fundamentalist ways.

I have always felt (although until recently I had no idea why) personally offended when in the wake of 9/11 so many seemed to be asking “why do they hate us?” in such an anguished way. It seemed to me that this very question contained an excuse for the barbarity of the terrorists. There are quite a few purportedly moderate spokespeople for the Islamist point of view who talk about anger and rage in the Moslem world as if it is a reasonable justification for the barbarities visited on the world by Islamic terrorists. I do not doubt that many in the Moslem world feel anger and rage, what I question is its provenance.
Menand goes on:

The mysterious part of totalitarianism’s appeal—and here we return to the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen—is that its official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it. This is because the mob is made up of cynics; for them, everything is a lie anyway. And the masses’ hostility is free-floating. It has no concrete object: the masses are hostile to life as it is. The more extreme and outrageous the totalitarian ideology, therefore, and the more devoid of practical political sense, the more ineluctable its appeal. Totalitarian rule, Arendt argued, is predicated on the assumption that proving that a thing is true is less effective than acting as though it were true. The Nazis did not invite a discussion of the merits of anti-Semitism; they simply acted out its consequences. This is why documents like the memorandums for which Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” continued to be believed even after they had been exposed as forgeries, and why the Moscow Trials were defended even by people who knew that the “confessions” were fraudulent. It’s why some of the defendants in those trials went uncomplainingly to be executed for crimes they had not committed.

The idea that the anger and disenfranchisement of the “Arab street” is in some way a comprehensible rationale for the callous barbarity of the attack on innocent civilians is an offense to humanity. Ironically, the very enormity of the crimes they commit and the wildness of the pretext they do it under, are taken by those who do not understand the game they are playing as proof of the authenticity (even righteousness) of what they do.

The rage, when looked at honestly, is nothing more than that same invincible, fervent stupidity that filled the air at the nazi rallies in Munich or that propelled the Bolshevik protesters into the streets of Moscow. This wild arousal state crowds out reason and hope. It pumps up its own excitation and then demands revenge on the world for the distress it has caused itself. Daniel Pearl’s death tape is the perfect illustration of the end result. It is actually mostly propaganda and screed. It is an obscene blend of lies, fabrications and outrageous distortions. It intimidates by showing Daniel Pearl being forced to “admit” to being a Jew and making him dwell on his Jewishness. Then at the end, after his head is hacked off and held up as a trophy, a threat scrolls onto the screen. This will be repeated “again and again” it promises. That phrase, “again and again” forms a mocking echo to the Israeli Slogan “never again”.

In much the same way that Hitler told the world what he had planned in Mein Kampf the Islamofascists are being very honest with us.

Even if you choose to ignore (as many do) their continuous intentional murder of innocent children in Israel and other non-Moslem countries (Beslan, passengers on jetliners, hotel guests in Kenya and Bali, Christians at prayer in Pakistan, the trains in Madrid etc.) you must look at what they do with their own children and tell me how a society that allows babies to be used as a cover for smuggled explosives, encourages 14 year olds to blow themselves up in crowds of innocent bystanders and takes the body of a an infant who died of natural causes way from its grieving parents so that it can be posed as the victim of an Israeli bombing raid, can be anything other that the prototype of a fascist, totalitarian terror society. The actions of Islamofascist terrorists speak to a total break down of ethical values and a perfect paradigm for what Arendt was talking about when she wrote, “The distinctive feature of totalitarian societies is that 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…,” This, to me is the best, most complete explanation I have yet heard of the state of mind in which a society seduces its children to become suicide bombers .

They are spreading the infection of hatred and bigotry in their media. They are teaching sectarian murder in their schools- not just colleges and high schools but in kindergartens and elementary schools. The obscenity of pictures we see with toddlers dressed up in suicide belts and seven-year-olds with Kalashnikovs surpass child abuse. The glee with which they feed their own children into the terror machine is a crime against humanity.

Now I understood better how a child like my neighbor Amir could have nice parents like Hamid and Haideh and still be carrying such a bloody idea in his little heart. I also see better than I ever could have before how easily Daniel Pearl , Leon Klinghoffer the wheel chair bound tourist shot to death and dumped overboard from the Achille Lauro, Israeli Olympic athletes, schoolchildren on a Jerusalem bus, three thousand office workers, airline passengers pilots, stewardesses and pentagon staff, or even my own daughter (or yours)can become a victim.
It all reminds me of the scene in the movie Goldfinger in which, James Bond is tied to the table and the laser beam is working its way through the steel deck of the table and heading straight for his groin. Bond in an uncharacteristic nervous moment looked up at the villain and said.” I won’t talk” Goldfinger says, “Don’t”. Bond then asks, “Do you expect me to talk?” To which Goldfinger smiles and says, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” and leaves.

There should be no reason for anyone in the west to have to ask Al Qeada, Hamas or Hizbolla, “What do you expect of us? The answer will be the same. They would like to distract us by encouraging us to worry about why they hate us- If we want to survive we have to focus on what we can do to thwart their intentions.

For Israel, the spurious arguments about precedence in the land in the post World War II period and the purported Israeli atrocities are absurd on their face. They are equivalent to the latest editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in Saudi Arabia. They are the nonsensical prattling of the totalitarian Beast. Those who listen to its chatter are deaf to the sound of its breath behind them.

A Poem by YBM

This is an edited version of a comment originally posted on Solomonia

The Fence

Some say its apartheid
Some say its self defence -
When the guy on the other side wants to kill you...
opt for common sense.

Augean Stables has a nice analysis of the British Multiculturalism Problem. It is a brilliant vignette of the pernicious effect of multiculturalism. The ultimate danger, of course, is that now Britain has a formidable fifth column, thriving and virulent. For a little historical perspective, here is a description of the German American Bund of the 1930’s by Jim Bredemus.

The organization was soon filled with those calling themselves “Germans in America” and dreamed of the day when Nazism would rule the United States…, It is estimated that around 25% of Bund members were German nationals—the rest being mostly first or second generation Germans. Research indicates that most Bund members were of lower-middle class origin.Here is the rest of the article.

Hmm…, "Germans in America" sounds like "Muslims in Britain"- second generation immigrants, advocating that a totalitarian ideology come to rule the host country… If this sounds familiar, just try to imagine what would have happened had the same kind of multiculturalism had held sway in the U.S. Would we have approved the Bund because to all our citizens of German extraction, in Mizra’s words, their identity is the most important thing? Would they have been encouraged to express that identity through solidarity with the Nazis?
We demanded more of our German citizens than that. We went after those who crossed the line into intolerance and subversion of our basic tenants (remember Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?). I am not sure of my facts but I seem to recall that Britain had a flirtation with sympathy for Nazism early on too. The limit of tolerance has to be that you cannot allow yourself the sloth and cowardice to tolerate the intolerable. Britain and the U.S. did not tolerate the intolerable in the 30’s thereby temporarily saving Europe from the fate that Lewis predicts for them now.

Watch PBS- But Don’t Let Your Brains Fall Out

Anybody who has been paying attention knows that anti-Semitism is a problem. It is an especially bad one in the Arab world. So when I heard about the program Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence that aired on PBS a week ago last Monday night, I was very excited. I sat down and watched it all the way through and expected to digest it and write a quick essay for my blog. It has been two weeks now and I am still not over the feeling that there was something disappointing and disturbing about it. I’ve been having a hard time putting my finger on it though. I was more than ready to put aside the skepticism with which I generally greet anything on PBS. I had wanted very much to be satisfied with it and I was looking forward to seeing a deep exploration of the problem and perhaps getting some insight into what can be done about it.

All these two weeks I have tried to pin down my thoughts. Somehow they keep returning my senior year in high school, and the SAT test I took that year. The essay section of the test asked for an elaboration of this sentence, “If you keep your mind too open, your brains might fall out.” I grappled with the essay and, though I have no memory of what I wrote, I have often thought of that sentence since then. Why does Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence remind me of it so persistently? I have begun to sort that out.

There were many worthwhile moments in the film. It was open and wide-ranging. It got in front of a lot of people of many diverse stripes and let them talk. Some of them came off well and others- not so well. It was fascinating to see very ordinary people saying monstrous things. For the most part these passages were illuminating and sometimes chilling.

Then too, there were a number of places, when the filmmaker was talking directly to us. It was in a couple of these that I felt that we were being let down

The film explicitly endorsed the notion that Arab/Moslem anti-Semitism was essentially non-existent until European Christians brought it to the Middle East. This assertion came directly from the narrative of the film without the usual preface of “So-and-so says” or “This or that group felt as though”. At first my reaction was a kind of bemused hopefulness.

It felt oddly comforting to hear this. If it were true, then maybe its possible that the Islamic world could someday return to that state of acceptance and tolerance in which, the filmmakers told us, they dwelled for 15 centuries. When they realize that their minds were poisoned against their Jewish neighbors by European influence wouldn’t they resent those corrupters and throw off the blinkers of hatred imposed from the west?

Then you realize, “no, it’s not that simple.” The program goes to relate the long and sordid history of social discrimination, political defenselessness, economic dispossession, physical intimidation suffered by Jews in the Caliphate land- even mantioning the outbreaks of deadly vilence and major massacres that had occurred in the Muslim world in the course of those “golden” centuries.


So, how to account for the idea that anti-Semitism was a European invention?

Was it simply an expression of a basic racism on the producers’ part, a kind of racism of lowered expectations? Were they saying: “Arab culture is primitive but noble; they could never have thought up the depraved curse of Anti-Semitism on their own. It is too base and they are simple religious folk who just have this funny little way of relating to anyone who does not believe in the deity precisely the same way they do”?

Or, then again perhaps they were indulging in wishful thinking. After all, hasn’t Europe gone a long way toward tidying up since the unpleasantness of the 1930’s and 40’s? The case might even be made that if you average it out over the past several hundred years, Anti-Semitism has been trending downward, on the whole since The Inquisition. It would be nice to believe that even as European Anti-Semitism which has, in spite of the occasional, nearly successful, genocide seemed to show moderation. There is the possibility that the Arabs and Islamists, if they adopted the practice from the Europeans, will eventually see their error too and begin to moderate as well.

Or maybe it’s just a tendency on the part of this most liberal of American media giants to blame everything that goes wrong on the planet earth on Western Civilization. In any case, even with them presenting the case, their attempt to place the exclusive blame on The West is not supported by the facts they uncover.

There was, for example, some “unpleasantness” when Jewish immigration began to swell the population of the Jewish communities that had lived continuously in Palestine since it was ruled by the Jewish people during biblical times. Arabs, by the film’s account, still unsullied by the taint of European anti-Semitism, seem to have figured out how to massacre the Jews of Hebron, they also invented quaint pastimes such as burning synagogues and they diverted themselves by destroying Jewish property of all kinds. They did a great many other exceedingly unpleasant things in “The Holy Land” during the teens, twenties and thirties of the last century, including forming a formal and enthusiastic alliance with Hitler and the Nazis. Oh, but that, according to Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence, was nothing more than a by-product of their “understandable” resentment of the influx of Jewish settlers who were changing life in the area.

When was the last time a PBS program advanced the idea that anti-immigration groups in the American southwest aren’t racist but are simply expressing an “understandable” regret in regard to the change in the local ethnic balance and life style that are caused by illegal Hispanic immigration. Did any commentator on PBS ever speculate that the white people of South Boston, Little Rock, Alabama or Mississippi were not really racist when they resisted school integration? Was there ever a film on PBS that theorized that school segregation, redlining and blockbusting were artifacts of simple, innocent resistance to change?

While oblique mention is made that Arabs were moving to the area in increasing number during this period also, there is nothing said about the fact that much of this Arab immigration was drawn there by the increased economic opportunity and improved standard of living created by the Jewish influx and their investment of labor and capital.

The crowning moment of moral equivocation in the film, though, is yet to come. We are informed near the end of the show that one of the reasons that the Arab world has been unable to make peace with Israel is that they cannot come to terms with the loss of the 1967 war. We are informed that since ancient times Islam has collectively believed that Jews (along with Christians, Bahais, Buddhists, etc..,) are “pigs and apes” and that because of this belief they find it impossible to countenance the existence of an autonomous Jewish state. This is an especial affront to the Arab psyche because this state is on land that was once enslaved by the Ottomans and has some Arab citizens.

I try to picture the writer of this passage as he types it into the computer while attempting to avoid seeing the incongruity. I imagine him sitting in his chair with his head rising above his shoulders in a cloud of steam and turning three hundred sixty degrees exorcist style. Having told us that Islamic Anti-Semitism was an import from Europe in the first half of the film and then intimating that it is understandable that the Arabs should not be judged for their understandable atrocities that were motivated by the natural resentment of Jewish people arriving in their own homeland a scant step ahead of the bullies and executioners of Europe, now he is informing us that the Islamic world is all upset because people that they consider sub-human have achieved liberty and economic success on the very doorstep of their continent-wide expanse of more than twenty countries where the majority of the populations live squalid lives of poverty and frustration under the heels of a corrupt assortment of dictators, kings and mullahs.

Hold onto your whirling head there for a moment fellah, I thought that if someone considered a race of people to be inferior by virtue of their racial identity, if you dehumanized them and rationalized treating them in a systematically unfair and unequal way, if you excused physical violence against them that that was a pretty clear proof of racism.

Maybe the form of anti-Semitism that was imported to the Middle East from Europe is different in some particulars from the native Arab/Islamic version, but it is no less real or pervasive. It seems to me that the film missed an excellent opportunity to explore what happens when two formidable streams of the different flow together and form a new and even more virulent one.

Why was the opportunity missed? This is the very reason I can’t get that old essay question out of my mind. I think it’s because the Filmmakers and PBS have been so open minded for so long that their brains have fallen out.

Almost everyone agrees that in principal open-mindedness is good. Unfortunately, almost no one agrees on what being open-minded is or how to use it. There is a spectrum of interpretation of the uses of open-mindedness. The spectrum ranges from being just open enough to listen to opposing views so as to gain just enough evidence to reject them while sounding as if you were really listening, to being so accepting of differing opinions that you can no longer differentiate between ideas that can be demonstrated to have merit and those that clearly don’t work. There are many ways to misuse and misunderstand open-mindedness. One of the most common and futile of these being the tendency to value open-mindedness as an end in itself rather than a means to attain a better understanding of the world and a more felicitous way of living in it. While expending energy and resources to be open-minded and inclusive in seeking out ideas and opinions from every source, it has forgotten to be open to the possibility that some of those ideas and opinions may actually be more moral, more consistent, better, more just and more productive ideas than others. This is moral relativism.

This particular perversion of the “marketplace of ideas” is a hallmark of the liberal, leftist and socialistic. Just as, in socialist and communist economies, where the economic marketplace is driven not by what works for the people who participate in it but by the prejudices of a collectivist ruling class ( Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, etc…,) based on the intellectual theories of Marx and supplemented by a legion of supporters and apologists. The implication is always that the central authority knows better than the real forces of the market and the real people whose behavior constitutes those forces. The leftist/liberal marketplace of ideas as exemplified by this film likewise does not insist that ideas prove their usefulness and gain a consensus of support from real people. Rather, it gives equal weight to all ideas no matter how destructive, bigoted, silly, unproductive or spiteful they are. Then (because we wouldn’t want to display any cultural bias) they only feel free to criticize those that are closest to them. Unfortunately those ideas of which they are critical are the ones that underlie the freest, most successful superpower in history and the most democratic and dynamic small country in the Middle East.

Culture is not a pass/fail enterprise. Human history is the story of the succession of cultures that have overpowered the ones that preceded them and been superceded and overpowered in turn by newer, more effective ones. To succeed, a civilization has to have enough power and economic success to secure its position. Western democracy has been on top for a while now but we have never been without our challengers. The old monarchies, National Socialism and Communism have made their bids. But the oldest and fiercest rival is still with us.

If you listen to them they will tell you what they are and what they want. They are the Islamists. They want to reinstitute the Caliphate and make Shar’ia Law the universal law of all mankind. They see themselves not as a new phenomenon but as a continuation of the march of conquest that started in the time of The Prophet and reached its high watermark in Spain and at the gates of Vienna. The ancient caliphate lasted until the demise of the Ottoman Empire in the years after World War I. The Caliphate died not, as Muslims like to fantasize, because of Jewish treachery or Western trickery but because it is a system based on the idea that certain human beings are the perfect and infallible representatives of the almighty Allah here on earth. It failed because it is a collectivist, religious form of fascism that stultified its people and prohibits them from thinking and acting as individuals. It pretends to Divine Perfection while it despoils the initiative and integrity of the human will.

The Caliphate would, in fact, be a dead issue entirely now were it not for the unearned and accidental ocean of oil money that fuels the efforts to reinstate it. We in the west must find the moral fiber and self-assurance to rally in support of our ethical ideals and constitutional principals and resist this threat or we will cease to have a future and join the failed civilizations of history.

We face two critical tests. First we must find the moral resolve to close our minds to the moral relativism of excessive multiculturalism and say out loud that, as imperfect as our practice of our democracy is, it is infinitely preferable to the sham perfection of the Caliphate. We must acknowledge the imperfection of our system and leaders while still respecting them and working with them to improve ourselves and our system. The other test is to find a way to deprive the Islamist fascists of the oil money that allows them to invent and aspire to their prurient fantasies of world domination, misogynistic persecution of women and forced conversion of dhimmis.

This film has intentionally ignored the opportunity to identify, expose and explore the biggest, most potentially lethal problem in the world today. By denying the xenophobic, atavistic anti-Semitism of the Islamic world and refusing to examine its interaction with the unique anti-Semitisms of both the radical left and the reactionary right in the west, it has thrown away a unique and vital opportunity to raise awareness of a confluence of forces that threaten the existence of Israel in the short term and all of Western Civilization in the long term.

Despite the unspoken attitude of the film, it is not only Jews who need to be concerned. The mixing, mutation and recombining of the totalitarian camps of Whahbism, fascism, socialism and Islamism is a geopolitical nightmare equivalent to the viral time bomb that has been threatened by AIDS, SARS, Avian Flu, Ebola, etc…, If our minds are too open we might just find we are all dying from it.

I am forced to admit that I seem to have committed the error of excessive open-mindedness too. I had dared to hope that PBS would come through and take a stand for something other than the pass/fail, multicultural, I’m OK- You’re OK acceptance of evil that is moral relativism. If Culture is not pass/fail neither is Life. We can’t continue to say I’m OK-You’re OK when the other guy in that idiotic equation would like to force us to live under Shar’ia law. Under Shar’ia law, I am unalterably not OK and neither (willingly or not) are you or, for that matter, any of the dreamy folks at PBS. They seem to believe that we need only be open enough and we will win the other guys over. Actually, we need to be less open minded rather than more. If our brains don’t actually fall out of their own, the Islamists will happy to beat, or blow them out.

We have to be open to reality first. We have to be open to the idea that there is a problem. We have to understand the problem and be open to all of the possible solutions. So as I bend down to pick up my brains, dust them off, and put them back into my mind, I suggest that we all do the same and in the future keep them open in a rational way- a way that is faithful to our finest principals of democracy, law and ethics.

Jimmy Carter - the Great Humbug

Here’s A Great Article by Spengler.

I picked up the reference on this wonderful analysis of the pious humbug Jimmy Carter on the American Thinker. It originally appeared on the Asia Times Site. I find it revealing and tantalizing. Since it came to light that Carter’s pro-Arab cheerleading (you can’t merely call it bias) come to light articles like this one (Jimmy Carter's Li'l Ol' Stink Tank) in such places as Investor’s Business Daily it was still difficult for me to see how a man of such sanctimonious facade could still hold his head up in public. Spengler provides a plausible theory for how he rationalizes his sellout.
It’s good reading too!

You Can Speak Up II!

Here are two more "Quick" answers that you can use and adapt when challenged by the usual lies and misrepresentations.

Let’s look at
Blaming Israel

Accusation:
The “Occupation” is the cause of the conflict.

Answer: The root cause of the conflict is that, for a variety of reasons, the Arabs and the Islamic world in general refuse to accept the existence of Israel. The Arabs fought a war of annihilation against Israel in 1948 twenty-one years before the occupation.. Israel’s presence in the territories is a result of ongoing Arab aggression. Arab terrorism preceded 1967 in fact it has been continuous for centuries, dating back to the massacre of the Jews of Medina by the prophet Mohammed. Israel has tried repeatedly to give land back in exchange for security within her rightful borders. Every time Israel has given up land the result has been more terrorism closer to home.

Accusation: “The Jews are the cause of the Palestinian refugee problem.”

Answer: Arab aggression brought about the refugee problem; Arab regimes are intentionally perpetuating the suffering. Not one Palestinian refugee would exist today if the Arab countries hadn’t launched a war of extermination in 1948 and the corrupt, despotic regimes in the Arab World have isolated the Palestinians in the camps in order to maintain a hostile presence on her border and a perpetual casus belli so that they will have an excuse to pursue their rejection of Israel’s existence.

Erica's Encounter

Erica's Blog has exactly the kind of story I am talking about. There is no better way for us to learn what we are up against than well told stories like this one Erica's Encounter with The Beast.
Thank's to Erica for sharing this with the world and thanks to God she only felt The Breath. I am the father of two young Jewish women See (My First Encounter) about her age and of all my nightmares this is the worst.
Isn't it ironic that the Islamofascists target our young womwen while they beat, cloister and murder their own-

SEND ME MORE STORIES- THEY ARE ALL IMPORTANT

You Can Speak Up!

The Beast wants us to believe the worst about ourselves. It hopes to sap our energy and resolve by weakening our self esteem and confidence. Israel is the frontline of the clash and the breath of the beast is felt there the most immediately. As a result the calumny and pressure that falls on Israel every day is unremitting. The lies and condemnations are insidious. They range from the ancient blood libels to the most recent accusations of war crimes.

I am contemplating producing a series of posts designed to share some of our best ways of answering the most common accusations and distortions that we hear about Israel. Whether they come from a well-intentioned but uninformed person or from a malicious toady of The Beast, it is helpful for us to have a solid, truthful and informed answer ready. Each post in this series would present a common misconception about Israel and one or more alternative answers to it.

I will start with the one below because it is a very basic one that appeals not only to the inherent sense of fairness of many, especially those on the political left but also conjures up echoes of the dispossession of the Native Americans and the Colonial past of Europe.

Please let me know if you find these helpful. As always suggestions and corrections are welcome!

Accusation: The Jews colonized the land and stole it from the indigenous population.

Answer 1) To say that 'the Jews colonized the land' is incorrect. In fact the only time when the land of Israel has not been a colony has been when the Jews have had sovereignty. This self-determination paved the way for unprecedented economic growth, agricultural development and modern resources. The economic opportunity and higher standard of living attracted and continues to attract mass immigration by Jews and Non-Jews alike turning a barren desert into a land of milk and honey offering a high standard of living for all up to this day.

Answer 2) This is a misconception: Jews were the only people who did not colonize the land. The Jewish people have been a continuous presence in the area for thousands of years, and those who did immigrate purchased land legally. The Jews who returned in the early years of the twentieth century were not just Zionists; most of them were fleeing from persecution and intolerance. They invested in infrastructure and changed the barren landscape, attracting mass Arab migration to the region. Most modern day Palestinians are immigrants to the region who were attracted by and benefited from those economic and agricultural improvements.

Answer 3) There has been a continuous Jewish presence in the land from biblical times. Escaping from persecution in Europe and throughout the Islamic world, Jews began to return to a barren and sparsely populated area that could only loosely be termed “Palestine”, as it was never an independent country. The arriving Jews purchased and cultivated land, attracted mass Arab immigration, and improved the living conditions of Jews and Arabs.

The Beast is not Right Handed or Left Handed- Its The Beast

I have had an email question that presumes a great deal more about The Beast than I am willing to assume. It reads in part:

I respect and identify with your experience. I'm glad you are mounting a personal campaign to warn all the complacent people. It's badly needed, and I wish you all the success in the world.

However, don't think you are EXPLAINING why the Left doesn't reject its violent past. The most obvious one seems to be that the Left is simply allowed by the media to evade and rationalize it. People who care about historical accuracy haven't rubbed their noses in reality, because they have been shut out of the MSM.

So the only answer in sight is the New Media, including your blog. Just as we haven't stopped asking, "What about Hitler?" we should ALSO keep asking, "What about Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam, the Sudan regime, Ahmadinejad, and all their enablers in the intellectual elites?"

"Never Forget" should apply to all genocides and all genocidal fantasists.

I answered him that I have not set out to explain why the left does not renounce its past (and present) barbarity because I despair of getting any ideology to take responsibility for the totalitarianism committed in its name. Perhaps its just an artifact of my being a Jew, but as a member of a religious group that has been subject to uninterrupted centuries of condescending tolerance, implacable hatred and occasional outbursts of savage genocide at the hands of nearly every political party, religious group, chowder society and social club on the planet, I am less concerned with the ideological orientation of the perpetrator than I am with the fearful mechanism by which intelligent people who kiss their babies goodnight and pat their dogs lovingly become capable of lining other human beings up beside trenches and shooting them in the head (the Nazis) or hacking them with machetes (the Hutus, the Khmer Rouge and the TonTon Macoute)or putting explosive jackets on their children and setting them loose on innocent civilians (Palestinians) or flying airliners loaded with passengers into skyscrapers filled with white collar workers(Al Quaeda). The perpetrators of these and so many other horrors are blind not simply because of the ideology they profess. Of course, their beliefs are idiotic, but that’s not the point, all totalitarian systems are based on nonsensical ideas. Approached ideologically, there is only a tautology- they don’t see because of their blindness; they are blind because they are convinced of something that is impossible and they are so committed to that idiocy that anyone who is not part of their system, especially one who that sees the stupidity of what they believe, is a threat to their entire universe of denial.

That is what Totalitarianism is.

I have always been haunted by a conversation I had with a co-worker at a Cambridge think-tank back in the seventies. John was a communist. I had become friendly with him on the basketball court where conversations ran to jump shots not politics. He had a fine jumper and he was a good team mate we never talked politics at work. My wife and I joined him and his wife for dinner one night and the after dinner conversation got quite bizarre. I asked the basic question one always asks of someone who advocates forcible redistribution of wealth- What about resistance from high producers? How do you convince them to give up what they have and continue producing at a high level when what they produce will go into the communal pot? His answer was chilling. “They have to be forced to do it. It’s for their own good.” Then I pointed out the great wave of starvation set off by Lenin’s NEP and the totalitarian regime that had followed. His answer was that some blood would always have to be spilled for the common good. He added for good measure that Russia had strayed from the path and that it was not working out there because that wasn’t “true” communism.

I think this pretty well sums up the easy way in which the left avoid responsibility for The Gulag and the killing fields. “Oh, that’s not what we mean by Communism (or Socialism or Baathism etc…),” they will chuckle. “Stalin was a power hungry thug (or Pol Pot was a savage aberration). Force and blood would only be necessary to get the process started if the ideas a re applied correctly…,” In a perverse way they are right. By virtue of the merciful fact that they themselves have never actually attained the power to persuade, cajole, intimidate and, finally, forces the ungrateful masses to conform to their ridiculous ideas, they are innocent.

I do not think it is possible to defeat the mistaken thugs on either end of the political spectrum by appeal to the failures of history. I only hope to expose The Beast of Totalitarianism and Terror and to help thwart its aims.

I am not an ideologue, part of me wishes that the theory behind communism could work- even though I know it is totally out of sync with human nature. My opinion is that, deprived of its weapons of terror, isolation, force and coercion, the national socialist states, Islamist sheikdoms, personality cults, fascist states and communist systems would dry up and blow away of their own accord. In the final analysis, the only ideology that I have reliance in, outside of my Jewish faith, is the great constellation of principals on which the United States Constitution is founded, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I believe in it not blindly but because it has given rise (even with all its human flaws) to the finest, freest, most prosperous nation in the history of mankind.

The Soviet Union is a case in point. We didn’t win that one through argument, President Reagan simply increased our defense spending to the point that their bungling, broken-down jalopy of an economy just fell to pieces on the road while trying to keep up. Thus, I think we can only win by either defeating them on the battlefield as with the Nazis and Imperial Japan or by so disrupting their isolated incompetent system of internal terror and brainwashing that it falls of its own weight. So to, me, totalitarianism is not just the real enemy; it is the most vulnerable weakness of the enemy too. It must be exposed, recognized and defeated- not because it follows Marx or Hitler or the mullahs but because its seeds are in all of us and the power to destroy it is in knowledge and courage that we all possess.

Islamofascism by the way is a tough one only because we are funding it with our Oil Addiction. We are going to be hard put to finish it altogether until we solve the energy problem. The largely unacknowledged truth is that the Arab world is sitting on a vast supply of easy money that creates the idle useless lives that are so easily turned to Jihad. It is an inexhaustible supply of lucre, which does not have the value of having been earned. It is wealth totally without a comprehensible purpose. It has created a class of parasitic plutocratic rulers whose sole concern is to maintain the control of that stupendous river of capital. It is a double edged sword. When you are that rich, everyone wants what you have. As they sit on their caliphate thrones looking down on the turbulent Arab Street. Their thoughts are not on improving the conditions there but on diverting the turbulence and rage outward from their kingdoms and despotisms. From the Himalayas to the Mediterranean there stretches a belt of terror, misogyny and repression interrupted only by one tiny island of sanity. Those sheiks of petrodollars have made it their entire career to blame the west and especially that little thorn in their side, Israel, for the misery and turmoil in the street. The measures they take to secure their own position they project outward on the Israelis and the U.S...

We have to realize that every time we fill up the car or turn on the air-conditioner we are paying our subscription fee to a kind of Terrorist Attack-of-the-Month-Club. It is a nightmare scenario where our money goes to Gaza and the West bank to be lobbed into Israel as Qassams or comes back here in suitcases, and cargo containers to plan more mass assaults.

Send me your stories- encounters with The Beast are the best way to teach each other to defeat it!