The Emergence of the Agélaste Left

Dear Reader,
That big post I've been promising has gotten to be so big, I've had to break it up and publish it in smaller bites. Here's one:

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

Hannah Arendt

I was walking my kids to school the morning after the last Presidential election when I witnessed an embarrassing spectacle. As my sons and I approached the school I saw a neighbor of ours, a young mother of two elementary school students, jumping up and down on a map of the United States that was painted on the asphalt of the school yard. She was shouting something. As we got closer I could see that she was jumping repeatedly on Ohio and shouting “I hate you Ohio!” over and over. She looked at me, and said, “I can’t believe they did this! Can you believe it?”

Well, actually, there were two things I couldn’t believe. The first, thing I found unbelievable was the violence she displayed. Violence? Well, yes, it was minor violence but it was pretty shocking in a symbolic way, shocking in much the same way that burning the American flag is shocking.

The other thing I couldn’t believe was her presumption.

Call me old fashioned; or just chalk it up to my being in the conservative minority in this very liberal, high income suburb that I live in, but I have always thought it was good form not to make a public display of my political opinions. Stumping in support of a candidate before the election is different; a respectful request for support for people and ideas you believe in is an honorable part of our civic tradition. But this was a bald faced assumption that as a person she assumed to be “good” I would be equally dismayed by the result of the election. I can tell you that I generally avoid that kind of assumption about other people and nearly every time I have let myself slip into it I have been embarrassed by the result. But embarrassment is only experienced by those who are willing to grant others the dignity of having their own thoughts.

In my last post I quoted Milan Kundera on Kitsch. I need to go back to Kundera and that same speech, his Jerusalem Address, once again to most accurately define what I found so offensive in this presumption. Kundera uses the word agélaste. Rabelais, he tells us, coined the word to denote people who do not laugh because they have no sense of humor and “…are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are.” My neighbor’s behavior, that morning fit that definition to a tee.
The moderate and progressive left for all its claims of good intentions and intellectual righteousness has for some time been slipping into a form of totalitarian fundamentalism. The totalitarian progressive left is, I fear an, as yet, undiagnosed epidemic among the upper middle class and the academic and political elites of Western Civilization. As with most epidemics, it has been hard to define in its early stages. In recent years however, it has begun to manifest itself in ways that are impossible to ignore.

For instance, why is there a marked and growing support for Islamism among the left-leaning sectors of the western countries? On the face of it, it makes no sense that a movement within the Muslim world that declares publicly that it wants to either kill or convert everyone else on earth to Islamism, which believes in slavery, misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, gay bashing(and murdering!), religious intolerance (exclusivism, really), the teaching of hatred and murder to kindergarteners and the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians with terror should be lionized by people who profess to hold “humanitarian” ( or, at least, humanistic) values above all others. Why, too, does that same left-wing so despise Israel, a country founded in Democracy, having a strong socialist component, and which far out shines any of its neighbors in human rights and minority freedoms? The answer to this conundrum is one of the diagnostic markers that prove the existence of a totalitarian system of belief. When there are such obvious internal contradictions that are held by a self-identified group of people who police each other for the correctness of their thought without regard to the actual logical content of that thought it is totalitarianism. I discussed this in my post about Islamofascim. Here is part of a quote from a New Yorker Magazine article by Louis Menand that I used to illustrate the point. “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.”

This is where the agélaste’s lack of a sense of humor turns lethal, for the hard core of any fascist system is the agélaste. Eliminating humor is essential to the totalitarian system. In His novel The Joke, Kundera has a Communist sympathizer saying, “No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.” A sense of humor would allow people to see the irony in the internal contradictions and turn laughingly away from it. The modern Progressive, leftist and liberal movements lack any real humor. What passes for humor in those precincts is actually more accurately classified as ridicule and mockery. While driving the other day I saw an excellent example, bumper stickers that read, “So Many Right-Wing Christians So Few Lions”. This is not humor. It is, rather, a kind of puerile, jejune attempt to wrap a hate message in a clever phrase and hurl it through the windshield of any car that had the misfortune to be driving behind. This is the very sort of message that the owner of that car would, no doubt, condemn utterly if it were aimed at any of the liberally approved minorities. How would he respond to- “So Many Black People, So Few Lynch Mobs”? I can’t see how one is any worse than the other. Political correctness, tone deaf “humor” and the conceit of “true belief”, are turning the mainstream left into a confederacy of Agélastes.

This by no means applies to all left-leaning citizens; there are many clear-thinking individuals on both sides of the center who can see these contradictions clearly enough to be troubled by them. For those with the good will and intellectual freedom to debate and consider the evidence on both sides, there is hope. If they can also avoid the paralysis that results from moral relativism they will be part of the solution of the problem. The problem arises from those who become devoted to anti-establishment worldviews to the extent that their individual intellect and discriminatory power becomes subservient to the intellectual framework of that “ism”. They come to believe that Jews and the corporate business world and government are somehow controlling their lives. They feel that in retaliation they have to support an extreme brand of progressive liberalism that is a true totalitarian ideology. In the grip of this reactive totalitarianism they no longer care about their own contradictions, as Menand pointed out above. This agreement to believe in and support the absurd is the binding energy that allows so many “liberals and progressives” to ignore the obvious contradictions between the values they profess and their sympathy for Islamism (and antipathy for Israel). As Voltaire wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.

Totalitarian systems loath each other but they hate the individual human being, his sense of humor and his free thought much more. That is why the Totalitarian left and Caliphate Islam find common cause with each other. In each of them, it is the system not the people in it or the ideals they hold that are important; the individual is an object of suspicion and disdain. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous,” The devotion to a strict fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran and the seemingly opposed devotion to the total and complete adherence to the intellectualized principals of the western left differ in their content but not in their disregard for reality and the complex nature of humanity.

This is why so many elite campuses are so inhospitable to Jewish and Christian speakers of any but the leftist point of view while they positively swoon in reverence over speakers from Islam who represent terror as an instrument of social control, the subjugation of women and death or conversion for all unbelievers. Even left wing speakers who do not toe the Agélaste Left party line are drowned out and not allowed to speak in today’s academia. Speakers of both the left and right who dare defy the intellectual Taliban of academia and support Israel or speak in support of American values are routinely harassed, drowned out and intimidated socially, academically and even physically. This is a universal characteristic of totalitarians of any stripe, they are more comfortable with other totalitarians, no matter how diametrically opposed their ideas, than they are with those who can see and point out the absurdity of their slavery to empty ideas and pathetic rationalizations.

It is no accident that Academe is a stronghold of the Agélaste Left. In the hothouse of tenure, and with loyal cadres of duped and inexperienced students who eagerly shout down any opposition, the modern University is the last and most secure refuge for bright but craven and bone-lazy “geniuses” who spin vivid verbal riffs on their wishful dreams of what the world is like even as they are entirely insulated from the harsh realities that the business people and workers they so smarmily patronize have to face every day. Socialism and Communism have failed everywhere they have been tried except in the hermetically sealed aviaries of academia. Year after year the tenured Macaws of the professorate gather their favorite toadies up into their own self-congratulating ranks and push the rest out into the “real world” for which they have conspired to keep them ill-equipped. Thinking independently in some regions of academia calls down a fate worse than death- expulsion into the market place where only production of goods and services for which others will pay money earns a living. This is how the elite corps of the Agélaste Left terrorizes its true believers to believe even past the point of self-destruction.

It is shocking but not surprising that the hierarchies of some of the mainline protestant churches have become hotbeds of the Agélaste Left. One need look no further than the Israel Divestment movements within both the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. To see that the hierarchies of these two once-great churches have been hijacked by leaders that are in step with the collectivist progressive hostility to the war on terror here and in the Middle East is to witness the greatest and saddest irony of all. It is shocking and ominous that decades of inter-faith bridge-building has been so swiftly undermined by this totalitarian wave of blind Agélaste Leftism among mainline religious leaders. The Agélaste Left leaders of these churches do not speak for the masses of Presbyterians and Episcopalians in the pews. There are strong indications that there is little grass root support for the attempt to handcuff Israel in her life and death fight with a foe that has sworn to destroy her and has openly promised to kill as many Jews and Christians as possible. Those leaders are merely trying to put words into the mouths of their flocks. What is worse, they do it in the name of God. Only to them, God apparently is a leftist who would rather see misguided even-handedness weaken the hand of an egalitarian, religiously tolerant, democratic and egalitarian country like Israel against the blood-thirsty onslaught of another totalitarian movement most of whose own people, when they are given the opportunity to choose, would rather live in America or Israel.

On the other hand, none of those on the left who reflexively bash America and Israel for “crimes against humanity” are crowding onto airplanes to go live under The Caliphate and Sharia rule either. I think it’s safe to say none of them would last a month in a country ruled by Sharia Law. Indeed, they would be lucky to only have their hands cut off rather than be buried up to their waists in the dirt and be stoned to death or have their heads sawn off with a bread knife in front of a video camera.

Neither do they give us a convincing picture of anything (within reason) that America or Israel could do to please them. Israel, they seem to feel, should lay down her arms and try to make a unilaterally disarmed peace with the Arab world- that Arab world that has sworn Israel’s destruction and is holding the Palestinian refugees hostage against her existence. That would please the Agélaste Left doubly. Israel would then be unable to stop the terrorists or interrupt their infrastructure; and then, shortly thereafter, there would be another genocide- the death of all the Jews in Israel- that they could condemn America for not stopping. If its one thing the Agélaste Left enjoys more than mourning dead Jews, it’s blaming America and finding fault with the very institutions that shelter them and their self-destructive antics from annihilation by the despots, terrorists and repressive maniacs they so lionize.

You know that they are the Agélaste Left because anyone with even a rudimentary sense of humor would see the irony of that!

Why the Liberal Media Whores Out for Terror

As I have said for the past few weeks, I have a major piece on the way- It is almost done but here is an out-take from it that will give you a hint about what it is about.

It is no coincidence that the ascendance of emotion over logic is a particular characteristic of fascist Islam. But it also runs through the entirety of the left from “the center” out to the farthest radical left wing. The emotional objection creeps up on logic and warns it off many subjects and points of views. There is always a point at which “how can such a thing be allowed to happen in our country” slides into “It makes me uncomfortable when you say that,” and that turns in to, “You just can’t say that kind of thing” and then metamorphoses into the overriding taboo of multiculturalism- “You can’t apply western standards to other cultures…” No matter how much evidence they are presented with, they are unable to understand facts and ideas because of their commitment to their emotions about the situation.

Under the equivocal spell of multiculturalism, the rage, humiliation and vengeance of the Caliphate Muslims becomes so enthralling as to be irresistible to a mass media that thrives only on mass appeal. It’s maudlin emotions and simplistic logic suffice as a vehicle for the bloody spectacle.

Milan Kundera would call this constriction and strangulation of debate by the incremental advance of emotional reactions “Kitsch”.

It is the ultimate indictment of the Main Stream Media and he wrote it in 1985!

Here is Kundera on Kitsch:
“The word "kitsch" describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number, at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel…Given the imperative necessity to please and thereby gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch; and as mass media come to embrace and infiltrate more and more of our life, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetic and moral code.” The Art of the Novel, Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe, Milan Kundera, 1986, Harper & Row

The Media - Like Stink on Gaza

Once again Richard Landes finds the story no one in the mainstream media will tell and few in the west have the courage to hear. A huge, open cesspool, part of an immense network of festering waste products has burst this past week and swept away an entire village of 25 houses. At least four people were killed and an unspecified number are still missing. Here’s the BBC story about it.

Note that, in the article cited, the Palestinian leaders immediately attempted to blame Israel and the west for the problem but were cut off at the knees when, “Stuart Shepherd, the UN's humanitarian aid officer in Gaza, said the Umm al-Naser plant had not been affected by the aid boycott, noting there had long been warnings about the plant.” This is especially damning as most UN officials are quick to unfairly accuse Israel and excuse Palestinian incompetence.

This is not anything to gloat or make smug about, this is a tragedy but it is also a crucial opportunity to learn a lesson about the Palestinian plight and the reasons for it. It is the very epitome of the problem with the Arab world.

My Father served in the Merchant Marine during WWII. He told me that at every North African or Eastern Mediterranean port he sailed into, he could smell it from 25 miles out at sea. That smell was the palpable odor of a people trying to live in the modern world with a governmental organization that was not up to the task of providing the services required. The stink that must be emanating from Gaza now is just more of the same.

As Landes puts it:
”The Palestinians still have an insane war to conduct, so they continue to do what little damage they can, while in an Israeli headlock. But rather than say uncle and get on with their (potentially, powerful lives as the cutting edge of an Arab/Muslim entry into the world of modern productivity), they prefer to struggle till they sprain their muscles, as in this sewage spill."

My only Quibble with Landes is that this is much more than a “muscle sprain”. If they thought they felt humiliated by Israel and the west before this, how must they feel now? Unable to make the rational choice of taking some small part of their assets and energy that they continually put into acquiring, stockpiling and discharging weapons toward Israel, they have created a colossal mess. They have ignored the third (food, shelter, sanitation, etc…)most basic need of human life to such a degree that they are now literally awash in their own excrement.

It seems insane, and it is. Here is a people who, along with the Lebanese, once were thought of as the most modern, secular and sophisticated Arabs in the world. The Caliphists and the despotic Palestinian ruling class have them and much of the western media and left wing convinced that they are reduced to wallowing in their own excrement because of Israel. Israel is no more the cause of Palestinian misery than it is the Syrian-led destruction of Lebanese civil society. How much longer can their leaders divert their attention from this insanity by blaming Israel and America? How much longer will they allow the dark forces of Caliphist Islam and the ruling elite of the Arab world to use those excuses for their venality and incompetence? How could this people have allowed their leaders to stunt the growing financial prosperity, social progress and modernization?

Once upon a time, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Then Syria moved in and for the past thirty years it has been a terrorist haven and a place of religious intolerance, sectarian violence and fear. It is a terrible irony that now that tired old metaphor has been turned inside out under the same Caliphist pressure. These days, Paris is fast becoming the Beirut of Europe.

The leadership of the Caliphate movement and the presidents and dictators of the despot states of Arabia knew that they would not stay in power long if they allowed the freedom and modernity that was growing in Lebanon to survive. This is why they forced the Palestinian refugees to remain in camps in Lebanon and fed them guns and Islamic mind control. They knew if they kept the Palestinians in poverty and strife and pitted them against the free Lebanese state, there would be trouble.

It was no accident that the nephew of the Mufti of Jerusalem (that infamous ally of Hitler and the man who, more than anyone else, succeeded in encouraging the Arabs living in the land when Israel was created to rise and flee, creating the refugee problem to begin with) rose to become the leader of the Palestinian people. That unprepossessing, grimy little man with his receding chin and irritating speaking voice rose to power not on charisma but on power-broking, outside financing and murder. The Arabs put him in place and set up the Palestinians to be eternal refugees because they knew that this formerly secular, better educated people, like their neighbors the Lebanese, left alone to find better leaders on their own, would settle in (as the Lebanese did after WWII and the “Nakba“) and create a new, more modern and greater Arab entity than the oil-rich, culture poor majority can even dream of.

The despots, ruling families and clerical elites of the Arab world would sacrifice anything to maintain their positions of power. They foment eternal war, poison the minds of their children, starve their people to buy weapons, murder millions of innocents - their own and ours, they would even see their people literally drown in excrement rather than help them to live better lives.

This is why they raped and ruined Lebanon.

And it is also why they backed and financed the terror stooge Arafat to keep the war against the Israelis alive. Arafat knew nothing about making a state work; he didn’t even know how to stop making war when he had an opportunity to make a state, but he certainly know how to secure arms and siphon billions off for his own fortune. This is his legacy, a people helplessly awash in their own excrement- not because they are stupid or dirty but because their leaders have been both for too long.

Even now, our media does not inform us about the stench of mismanagement, repression and corruption. Could it be that they are so dumb they can't even identify the smell of shit? No, they smell it all right and when they encounter any whiff of it here in the U.S. they revel in it. They roast the Mayors, Governors, Representatives, Senators and Presidents responsible. They blow the small ones out of proportion and the make careers out of the big ones. Look at the two years of bathos in aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. As bad as Katrina was, it is not a hair on a flea in comparison with the ongoing, rolling human tragedy that is the entire Arab world. Oh, but it would be racist and ethnocentric to mention that- wouldn’t it?

By exaggerating the peccadilloes of the open, self-policing west on one hand and not reporting the utter catastrophe that is life in the Arab/Islamic world, our own western media is playing a critical role in excusing and enabling the Caliphists. Only holding the responsible people to account will make the situation better. The media has to stop shrinking from reminding the “Poor Palestinians” (and us) that their leaders have betrayed them and that the priority they place on struggle is not just unsanitary but suicidal as well. They need to understand that their behavior does nothing but deepen their humiliation.

Shame on the Arab leadership, shame on the Arab people for suffering such leaders and, most of all, shame on the western media, for failing to inform us of the stink.

A New Name for the Beast

Well, I’m still working on another big post but this idea actually came out of that one the other night. When I say "came out", I mean, it tore it’s way out like one of the baby aliens in the movie of the same name. The problem is that I have become very frustrated at the lack of what I feel to be a truly accurate and descriptive name for the enemy. Here is my attempt to solve that problem. I’d like to know what you think. If anyone would like to add new warning signs to the list at the end, I’d like to see them…

Despite my defense of the term Islamofascism (which I stand by as a definition of the repressive and terrorized totalitarian condition of much of the Islamic world) I have been unable to settle on a terminology that adequately describes and isolates the strain in Islam that poses a grave danger to freedom and liberty in today's world. I like “Islamofascism” still but I’m afraid that the word fascism has lost a lot of its impact, not because it is not accurate but because its meaning has become blurred by the constant misuse it receives. I have also used “Islamism” but it strikes me that it is not informative enough- even something of a tautology. Political Islam has some value too. It is especially good in that it reminds us that the politicization of any religion leads to the same place. Thus it also suggests a commonality with the Presbyterian and Episcopalian Churches, in their movement to divest from Israel. In fact, all the mainstream liberal churches seem to be having an attendance problem because of their political nature LINK . However, in the sense that it does not specify the violence that goes along with the current variety, of political Islam, Political Islam too does not satisfy. Radical Islam has been somewhat useful too but the word, radical, is also over-used and as become fuzzy with constant misapplication.

I have come to believe that we still lack a title that focuses on the critical difference between the kind of Islam that gives rise to terror and intolerance and the rest of Islam that to some degree is amenable to living in the modern world with co-operation and tolerance.

The name I keep coming back to is “Caliphate Islam” (or Caliphatism). Here is my reasoning. As far as I am concerned, anyone is entitled to believe that their religion (whatever it may be) is the “one true faith”. What they are not entitled to is, in any way, to believe that non-members of that blessed faith should have any fewer rights or less human dignity than “the faithful”. It is the underlying assumption of those who believe in The Caliphate that the entire world should live under Muslim rule and Shari’a law and you can only be a good Muslim if you believe in bringing it about.

The Caliphate, by the way, is not the jolly, rollicking world of Walt Disney’s Aladdin. Nor is it even the hell on earth that was Afghanistan under the Taliban or the Insane purgatory of today’s Iran. The world-wide Caliphate is the entire earth gone mad. Women being beaten, hung and stoned to death for no other crime than having been raped by a gang of perverted Caliphists who have been raised to think of women not as human beings but as “meat” or weapons of the devil. The Caliphate will be a place where the ancient dhimmi status will be revived. Dhimmi-hood in the ancient Caliphate meant that Christians, Jews and anyone else who is not a Muslim will have protection under the law only in so far as the mercy of the local mullah allows.

It is Caliphate Islam that won’t accept a Jewish state in the Middle East because it is considered an affront to the will of Allah that Jews should not only not be subject to Islamic rule but might have Islamic citizens living in a Jewish country. It is Caliphate Islam that so stultifies the lives of its people that they have to emigrate to western countries only to reject the values that make those countries better places to live. Belief in the Caliphate justifies the mass murder of innocent office workers in Manhatten, school children in Beslan and tribal rivals in sub-Saharan Africa. The belief in and desire for the Caliphate is the difference between conservative Islam and the pernicious terrorists that endanger all of mankind for the sake of a utopian nightmare.

Is it fair to call it a Utopian nightmare? A cursory reading of Islamic history proves that the Caliphate idea deserves to be thrown into the same garbage dump of bad ideas and hideous failures that now holds Communism and Nazism. Would it be peaceful as they claim? Well, we know that the track record is not good. The Prophet Mohammad established a vast and secure Caliphate across a great expanse of territory, yet as soon as Mohammed died people began murdering each other to determine his successor. Right down to the present day, the issue of who the true leader should be (and should have been) is the primary divider in the Islamic world. Shias and Sunnis kill many more of each other than Americans do of either over it; and the Sunni,/Shia divide is entirely derived from the original disagreement about who should have been the first Caliph after Mohammed. Still, some Muslims continue to believe that as soon as they get Israel out of the way and they take over the western governments by demographic means there will be a world-wide peaceful caliphate. That way lies ruin and madness.

A word of caution, Caliphists are sometimes aware that this belief may be a red flag. Often their belief is so strong and insensitive to reality that they acknowledge and talk about it openly. The ones who are most dangerous know enough not to mention this belief in public. In these cases it is important to know how to recognize them by other behavior. At the risk of being accused of behavioral profiling, lets look at a few of the indicators that come to mind:

1. Dehumanizing language- calling non-Muslims names like kuffar (nonbeliever) or referring to them as pigs, monkeys dogs etc…

2. Inability to engage in reasonable discourse without flying into a rage- see my post Don’t Just Stand There, Dhimmi, Humiliate Me about Imam Al Husainy. (below)

3. Refusal to accept the existence of Israel.

4. Extreme Misogyny and gender inequality

5. Blaming all of the incompetence, inefficiency, misfortune, and rage in the Islamic world on: a. The Jews, b. America, c. The West, d. Women, e. Anybody else, f. All of the above

I know there are a lot more but you get the idea… Send me your suggestions!

Even Reuters Reports on Their Evil

Interim post-
Sorry for the lack of activity in the last few days- I’m working on a big new post- a major article (give me another day on that).

In the meantime, this is too important and devastating for me to let it pass without a comment though. Here is a news item that is buried on the Boston Globe web site (Reuters story) but should be on the front page.
Here’s a brief quote:

Major General Michael Barbero, deputy director for regional operations in the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, said adults in a vehicle with two children in the back seat were allowed through a Baghdad checkpoint Sunday.
The adults then parked next to a market in the Adamiya area of Baghdad, abandoned the vehicle, and detonated it with the children still inside, according to the general and another defense official.
"Children in the back seat, lower suspicion, we let it move through," Barbero said. "They parked the vehicle, the adults run out and detonate it with the children in the back."
"The brutality and ruthless nature of this enemy hasn't changed," he said.

Could anyone need any more proof that they will destroy the entire world to avoid admitting that they are failed human beings, that they have no future and that their religion is a jape and a sham? The question is: why does Reuters and the Globe even cover it? Can it be that even they are beginning to wake up?

No, Its Not All Their Fault...

It's up to all of us to insist on a free world.

Islamism, Islamofascism or just plain Islam- however you feel the definition should be framed, is a problem but it can only be as big a problem as we allow it to be. Western civilization, like any other natural phenomenon, contains the seeds of its own destruction that exist as part and parcel of the properties that make it grow and thrive. People grow and learn only to become old, brittle and moribund. The object of the game in civilizations, as it is for living creatures, is to accentuate the healthy properties and minimize the effect of those defects as much as possible for as long as possible. The challenge is to survive, fight entropy and create a greater and more satisfying life in the process.

The west has been driven by an engine of dynamic change tempered by ethical benevolence greater than any other the world has ever known. It is not necessarily the case that the world-wide Jihad has been so damaging, it is just that it has found was of taking advantage of our vulnerabilities. It is these vulnerabilities that we have to address before we can stop the process by which the Jihad threat has accelerated the sapping of the moral courage of our entire civilization.

Dr Jacob Bronowski identified the key aspect of the problem back in the early 1970’s. It is crucial for us to understand that, as evil and immediate as Islamofascism is today, it has only been able to make the inroads in the west that it has because of the crucial flaws that Bronowski eloquently exposed in his brilliant BBC series, “The Ascent of Man”.

Islamofascism, of course, was not even on anyone’s radar screen at the time, and Bronowski’s concerns centered on the “popular”, non-rational intellectual fads of the day, but Bronowski’s words are prophetic. Long before Islam re-emerged as a threat he had a clear vision of the vulnerability to it that was, then, in its embryonic stage. His words echo across the decades with a warning and an exhortation.

“And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into--into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.

It sounds very pessimistic to talk about western civilization with a sense of retreat. I have been so optimistic about the ascent of man; am I going to give up at this moment? Of course not, the ascent of man will go on. But do not assume that it will go on carried by western civilization as we know it. We are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken- but not by us.”

It is a striking passage. Leading up to this point, through twelve preceding episodes, Bronowski has dramatized the critical intellectual and scientific personalities and their discoveries that have brought western civilization to the pinnacle of human progress. He is neither apologetic nor tentative. Even in speaking of his reservations about the use of the atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he never wavered from his full confidence that the intellectual honesty, tolerant respect for new ideas, adventurous thirst for discovery and rigorous insistence on testing in reality that are the strengths of western science will lead to continual advancement and higher evolution. Now he confesses a deep concern for the continuity of that evolution.

Although it is true that Bronowski was a Jew, his real faith was in science and rationality. Born in Poland and raised in England he mounted a passionate defense of science even as he cathected personal loss and anguish in another memorable scene. This one filmed in Poland, standing by the swampy shore of a pond.

“Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality--this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we *can* know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."
(Now, as he begins this next sentence, he seems to forget that he is wearing a suit and dress shoes and walks, as he is speaking into the water at the edge of the pond) We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. (Here he squats down over the shallow water and reaches down to pull up a hand full of muck) We have to touch people.”

How sickened he would be to see what is happening in the Country he loved, where political correctness and multiculturalism have allowed the world’s most irrational and repressive ideology to use the tolerance he so prized to allow intolerance to gain a foothold. Bronowski understood better than anyone that tolerance is a two-way street. I has to lead to real debate and genuine give and take. If you agree to tolerate, you must insist on being tolerated in return. If the west continues to grant unidirectional tolerance to Muslims who refuse to accept western values, persist in anti-western behavior (in which classification I put such activities as wife beating, plotting terror attacks, honor killing, advocating the institution of Shari a Law and advocating the overthrow of the government)

“I, whom England made, whom it taught its language and its tolerance and excitement in intellectual pursuits, I should feel it a grave sense of loss (as you would) if a hundred years from now Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man, in the way Homer and Euclid are.”

Unless we in the west find a way to restore our own faith in the values that have made our civilization the shining light of humanity, that day is coming- and soon.

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.