Barack Hits the Nail on the Head

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

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

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

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

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

A Most Savage Compassion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before There Was Pallywood...

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

al Durah


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why We Must Fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what they cannot bear.

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

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

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

O(blah-blah)bama in the Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel Apartheid Week- the Fascist Alliance Strikes Again

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

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

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

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

Hebrew Mamita- A New Classic

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



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

Graphic Representations of Pathological Disorders in the Media

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

The Ignorance Conspiracy of Political Correctness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Biggest Honor Killing of All

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

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

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

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

How Israel became a terrorist state
Essa bin Mohammed Al Zedjali

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sent back my immediate reaction to my friend:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mask Slips- Racism on PBS

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

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

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

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

Richard Landes has a wonderful piece on it here.

Jew Hatred Howls in the Streets of Germany- Again

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

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

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

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

Have you learned nothing?

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

A Step in the Right Direction

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

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

Can Public Broadcasting Really be THIS Contemptible?

Oh Yes, I think they can.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

One more picture in the gallery caught my attention.

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

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


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