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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. "Keep the pressure on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lessons of Mumbai- Too Long for a Bumper Sticker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Meeting on the Dark Side of the Moon

My friend Jeramayakovka wrote an interesting comment to my last post. Referring of the Islamist’s constant refrain of loving death more than life he wrote:

"In those Hamas remarks, I hear a strategic taunting based on raw willpower. The message is to win. And in order to win, to intimidate. A deathcult, if you will, but in service to a nuts-and-bolts strategy"

.
To which I replied:

"Very thought provoking comment. The way insecurity and weakness flip-flop with determination and desperation is a very unstable dynamic.
Bottom line, I think is that while they are destroying themselves we have to spend our energy on minimizing the damage and death they cause... Hitler, after all destroyed himself, but the rest of the world waited far too long to begin helping him do it.
Thanks for making me think"

While I still think there is some validity to both J’s comment and my reply, on reflection I have come to see that there is a deeper, more elegant and (in a way) simpler truth. I have come to see that, granting that this is a stratagem, consciously applied, it is also a compulsion- an irresistible impulse. As such, it is also a clear-cut, unambiguous, text-book diagnostic symptom of the presence of fascism.

No, the love of death is not just a ploy or bluff. It is the central argument of fascism in action. In my post on totalitarianism and why the Jihadists are truly fascists, I quoted Louis Menand writing in the New Yorker:

“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.”

Menand went on to quote Hannah Arendt:

“Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous,”

That is why they can (have to!) say they love death. That is what we are fighting- the meaninglessness and expendability of the individual.

Let's be clear. It is not just Sarah Philipps and 269 other innocent people on an airliner or three thousand people on a bright September morning, YOU do not matter in their system. No individual does- the concept of an individual with a life, possessions and any expectation of privacy is null and void.

That is why they disdain freedom and democracy, because under freedom and democracy you, the individual, matters the most. This also clears up a few questions that periodically plague us.

This is, for instance, what the far-left collectivist Progressives have in common with the Caliphate Islamists. It is precisely why, even though they are diametrically opposite each other on so many issues, they find common cause against those of us who love life and think we matter.

It is, maybe, even the ultimate explanation for Jew hatred among those groups. After all, the first assumption of Judaism is that God gives the individual the responsibility to behave as best we can. There is an expectation that what we do and how we do it matters- not just to God but to each other and the future of the universe. This is one of the wellsprings and strengths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

It is as though, ill-equipped to compete intellectually, morally or economically with western democratic success, they have removed themselves from the planet of liberty and reason. There, on a close but barren moon they do a wary dance of cooperation. Unable to fully accept each other in the light of day, the Islamists went as far east as they could and the Leftists went as far west and they have met to form an alliance of ignorant conspiracy on the dark side of the moon. Agreeing to remain blinded to each other’s contradictions by the darkness there, they conspire against the free, green and hopeful world they envy and despise.

Addendum:
Please, don't forget my last post and that Sarah Philipps' Birthday is only two days away. I plan to place flowers and a copy of the signatures to the petitition on the monument in Newton Centre Park on her birthday and I would like it to be a lot bigger than it is now. So if you haven't yet signed this is you opportunity! Please, email this link to your friends and family too!

Welcome to Sderot

Here is a chilling formulation of something you already know to be true. It is from JINSA INFO Report #781.

“For Hamas, the key is to keep the rocket attacks below an understood threshold and Israel's response will be tolerable, precise and produce minimal collateral (Palestinian) damage. The Hamas pattern is to fire one, two or three rockets at Sderot. Wait a few days and do it again. Injure two, three, four Israelis. Kill one or two, but not more than that - this week. Increase the range and accuracy of the rockets incrementally. Hit Ashkelon, but just once. Then wait. Hit a shopping center, but if no one is killed, the Israeli response is unlikely to threaten Hamas rule. If Israel does retaliate, the world will probably be more annoyed by the "disproportionate response" than the original rocket attack.”

The report goes on with an interesting analysis of Israel’s military doctrine and how she is currently being forced by world opinion and the demopathic tactics of her enemies (internal and external) to fight outside the comfort level of her defensive doctrine. As I was reading, though, something was bothering me. I was still stuck on the seemingly more limited issue of the terror involved. Who are these people who are being killed by the rockets? How do they live knowing that, only if some, unspecified number of them of them are killed and maimed, will their government be moved to do something about the terror under which they live? This dangerous and painful situation is only partially a product of the Arab/Islamist dream of annihilation of Israel. It is made possible by a combination of ruthless internal enemies (e.g. the far left peace movement), clueless dupes (e.g. Olmert, Livni, et al) and shortsighted erstwhile foreign “friends” who do not understand the reality of the threat. This motley assortment of fools and instigators hold Israel’s defense establishment, her regard for her own citizens and, indeed, her very moral, civic, ethical and intellectual integrity hostage.

When Shirley Jackson's famous short story The Lottery was first published sixty years ago in the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker magazine, it set off the most violent reaction the magazine had ever experienced. In the story, the reader is gradually drawn into a nightmare- as what seems to be a “normal” American farming village gathers for some sort of annual community gathering. There is a lottery involved and little by little it becomes apparent that it is a “selection process”. The reader’s curiosity gives way to bemusement as the author quietly seeds in ominous details that build a sense of foreboding. Then, near the end of the story there is a sudden shift to horror when we realize that the “slightly too” nonchalant dialogue and mysterious references have been leading up to the revelation of a sacrificial rite. One person in the community is chosen by lottery to be stoned to death- sacrificed for “the good of all”.

It is little wonder that the story caused the explosion of controversy that it did. A scant three years after World War II, the cataclysmic battle against totalitarianism, here was a story that hinted that the enemy was not dead, but could lie ever so close beneath the surface in the most unlikely of places. Is this lottery totalitarianism? I think it is. It is a society that holds itself hostage in a suicide pact. The eerily believable rationalization that the lottery must be carried out because the welfare of the group is everything- the individual is nothing- is the brutal signature of fascism.

The weird, unconvincing quality of the “reason” that stoning one member of the community to death is “for the good of all” is also a dead giveaway. It is true that an oblique reference to the sacrifice having a good effect on the corn is made but there is a dispiriting vagueness about it and nobody seems to endorse it convincingly. In fact, the agricultural pretext is really irrelevant. The central drama of The Lottery is the absence of individual human value. In my post about Islamofascism, I quoted Louis Menand (ironically, writing in the New Yorker), “official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it.” This is another hallmark of totalitarian systems. These lottery victims are the moral equivalent of suicide bombers, human shields and hostages. They have no power to achieve anything. Their own genuine emotions and aspirations are anathema to the system in which they live. Only their annihilation is of value. Every one of them is a martyr- most of them just aren’t dead yet. They are, in every sense imaginable, dead men walking.

I thought of this when I read JINSA report #781. The people of Sderot listen for the sirens all day and all night 365 days a year and all must wonder if today is the day that a rocket will come through the ceiling in a busy dining hall or a kindergarten classroom or a high school auditorium and finally be “enough” to force the government to use the power it has always had- but may not always retain- to eliminate the threat. They wait for the government to act. They pray for the rest of the world to recoil in horror. They face each day with bravery and hope. Just like the people in Jackson’s story, they are hostages.

Apologists, multiculturalists and advocates who try to convince themselves that the horror and savagery of Jihad is somehow lessened by pointing out the great (mostly ancient) achievements of Islamic culture are fond of pointing out that modern mathematics were made possible by the development of the concept of zero by Muslim mathematicians. This makes sense. It should be no surprise that one of Islam's last real contributions to human progress was the discovery of zero. It appears to me that, at least under the most fundamental application of their religion-as-political-system, zero is the human condition.

JINSA Report #781 concludes with this:

“It is hard to advocate large-scale military action against Hamas (or Hezbollah). The price will be high. But if Israel is waiting until a "Passover Massacre"-type terrorist attack and plans then to do what it knows it has to do, why wait? To wait is to give Hamas more time to import Iranian weapons, train its forces and build defenses - allowing the building a greater deterrent to IDF action out of fear of greater IDF losses completes the inversion of the defensive principles that have served Israel to well until now.”

Why wait, indeed. It is not just defensive principals that are inverted here; it is morality, integrity and simple logic. We know that Hamas has sworn to eradicate Israel. They say so freely.  

If there was outrage in 1948 over the publication of that short story, how could there not be outrage today when an Israeli government dares Hamas to kill one more Israeli and see what happens and when they do, dares them to kill another one. Over and over again the children of Sderot draw lots and when one of them is torn apart by ball bearings or has a leg blown off, what happens? Is it somehow “for the good of all” that they suffer?
Now the Israeli government has arranged a cease-fire insuring, not eventual peace but even more death and suffering. It is not even necessary to believe the predictions of JINSA on what a cease-fire means. Even if you refuse to see the Iranian shipments arriving and the burrowing and trenching of the fortification builders, there is no need to believe the analysts, only recall what has happened to every other cease-fire in that conflict. They have all been broken by the slaughter of innocent Israelis. It is as regular and relentless as the annual lottery in Jackson’s story. Who will be the first one to die when the cease-fire breaks? Is it worth it or is it as futile and empty as the annual sacrifice chosen by lot?

That answer must come from the Israeli government. When suffering appears endless and accelerating and you begin to doubt its value, the answer must provided out of action and dedication. Abraham Lincoln, speaking from Gettysburg a place of great violence and slaughter rededicated himself and his nation to a higher purpose when he said, “…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The Israeli government must reaffirm their purpose the same way, and they must not shrink from committing themselves to facing the realities and acting accordingly.

Do you believe that it is about The Nakba or The Occupation or The Settlements? Do you allow yourself the fantasy that there is a way to stop the madness- a sacrifice big enough to satisfy this ravenous cult?

Then what did the innocent victims die for on 9/11- or Madrid- or London- the Darfur? This is part of the same grotesque lottery that has been going on for 1500 years. In spite of the sacrifice of the innocent victims of 9/11, it is all too easy for us to deny that we are hostages too, but those “zero beings” from the Islamist void will not be happy to delete only Israel. They have "selected" them for annihilation first but it is nothing personal, you understand, just a sacrifice to prove there is no value to human life. There is no value to anything that does not affirm the spiritual vacuum of Islamism. It is not because they worship Allah, nor is it is that they believe Mohammed was a prophet. It is that they believe that he was the only prophet, that they know the absolute truth and that it is their mission to ignore (and destroy) all evidence to the contrary. If you believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they will not rest until they destroy you too.

The Jihadists are not interested in cease-fires or peace. They are happy to tell you what they want. They want the world to live under Shari’a law. They believe that anyone that doesn’t want that is sub-human and deserves to be killed. This is nothing less than another confrontation with the evil of fascist, totalitarianism, and that is a beast whose hunger cannot be sated with souls, nor can its thirst be slaked with blood. The lottery they are holding is to determine not if you will be destroyed but when you will be destroyed. We are all citizens of Sderot- its just that most of us don’t know it yet.

Indian Guilt and the American View of Islam Part I

Thirty years ago, in a lecture hall at Boston University, I first began to gain an insight into the impenetrable wall of ambiguity that we face when we try to understand other cultures. I was an undergraduate majoring in Anthropology. Our professor had just completed a lecture for the American Indian (I seem to recall they were still called Indians back then) survey course. In that day’s lecture he had made a comment to the effect that it was not possible for an Indian woman of a certain tribe (I can’t remember which one) to leave her husband. A feminist student took exception and approached him after the lecture and I happened to be a bystander as the professor patiently tried a number of ways of explaining to her that there was simply nowhere for a woman to go- no matter what her reason for leaving. In the lives of nomadic peoples there are no homeless shelters and the only survivable economic unit is a traditional family in which every individual played a very specific and confined role. This was clearly not acceptable to my classmate. She put up a vigorous protest, “surely she could go to a friend’s tepee- or set out for another village- even, in a dire circumstance, go back to her parents.” The more the professor smiled and tried to explain that there were simply no resources in such a society to allow for such life choices and that it was a survival issue not a gender-bias one, the more incensed she became. It wasn’t clear to me whether she was arguing in order to get him to admit that he was wrong about his observation or because she somehow felt that putting up a fight about it now could effect some sort of retroactive change for her Indian sisters that lived over a century ago. Then I realized that she was so incensed because like so many students in class she had a finely detailed and impossibly utopian imaginary picture in her mind of what Indian life was like and she simply didn’t want to give up that rosy, personally relevant preconception. This made a very strong impression on me. She was speechless with rage that the professor was accusing her innocent, noble Indians, the people she was convinced were so much closer to truly enlightened and pure beings of being chauvinist, Neanderthal dorks. I was filled with a new appreciation of how prejudiced, ignorant and agenda-driven my fellow intellectuals-in-training were.

Some time later, perhaps as a response, that same professor used the following quote from D.H. Lawrence’s book, Mornings in Mexico. I think it conveys very well the problem of understanding a culture so different from one’s own and it offers an insight into the clash of cultures that is difficult for a westerner to grasp.

“It is impossible for white people to approach the Indian without either sentimentality or dislike. The common, healthy, vulgar white usually feels a certain native dislike of those drumming aboriginals. The highbrow invariably lapses into sentimentalism like the smell of bad eggs. Why? – Both reactions are due to the same feeling in the white man. The Indian is not in line with us. He’s not coming our way. His whole being is going a different way from ours. And the minute you set eyes on him you know it. And then, there are only two things you can do. You can detest the insidious devil for having an utterly different way from our own great way. Or, you can perform the mental trick, and fool yourself and others into believing that the befeathered and bedaubed darling is nearer to the true ideal gods than we are. The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of connection. The sooner we realize this, and accept this, the better, and leave off trying with fulsome sentimentalism, to render the Indian in our own terms.”

I want to be clear, I am in no way saying (and Lawrence wasn’t either) that there is anything wrong, defective or inferior about the Native American. I am saying two things:
1. Once exposed to Western Civilization the Indian way of life was doomed.
2. The life and culture of Indians was so vastly different from ours that it is simply impossible for us to understand the magnitude of the difference.

That being understood, Lawrence had it exactly right and his perception is equally valid when applied to the modern confrontation with Arabian Caliphate Islam. The “highbrows” he was referring to correspond precisely to today’s modern liberals and the rest of the progressive left wing. That fulsome sentimentality he identified in the highbrows is more than matched by the guilty/romantic response of today’s left to the idiotic, provocative accusations of humiliation, cultural degradation and imperialism leveled at all of the west by the Caliphatists.

ShrinkWrapped has a true story on his blog of a client of his who had a particularly bad case of this contradiction. ShrinkWrapped generalizes from this patient’s pathology- “New York liberalism consists largely of sympathy for the deprived, guilt over one's affluence and advantages, and anxiety over aggression and competition. It is a political philosophy that rests on a deep well of emotion and a small dollop of rationality.” ShrinkWrapped is exactly right- what he says goes right to the core of the matter.

Guilt is indeed a powerful force and, in America. Liberal illogic and guilt are inextricably tangeled up together in the history of our relationship with the American Indian. The American Indian is the essential starting point (every bit as much as the colonial past and the holocaust are for Europe) for an American discussion of how to understand Islam in the modern world. There are two main strands in that tangle:

1. For many Americans our historic and emotional relationship with the “native” population is our emotional template for our reaction to the Israeli/Arabic drama If we respond only emotionally to it we miss the very real differences between the two situations.
2. The cultural confrontation with the American Indian and the change it effected between two unequal and very different cultures is a very powerful paradigm that can help us to understand the clash with Islam- if we read it carefully.

The mistake of, to paraphrase Lawrence, “rendering the Islamic Arab in their own terms” has caused many a true, reasonable liberal to become a dupe of the Caliphate and an unwitting dhimmi. Because the liberal mind-set predisposes a left-them to view all other cultures through that self-centered prism of guilt and primitivist love, they are almost powerless to see the danger. How else to explain the left’s blindness to the endless, gory catalogue of atrocities that have been committed in the name of Jihad? It makes understandable (if still unforgivable) how fervent feminists and devoted gay rights activists remain blind to the horrors gays and women face in Islamic countries across North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

As we face an opponent, who captures unarmed civilians workers and journalists, humiliates them in front of a camera and then hacks their heads off with a butcher knife for a public relations stunt; the cowed and guilt-ridden left can do no better than to find fault with our professional armed forces (that are bound by and enforce an internationally sanctioned code of conduct). The beheaders become cultural heroes while the American prison guards at Abu Ghraib are viewed as getting off with a slap on the wrist even after being tried and punished for their behavior. Notwithstanding Abu Ghraib (where is the comparison?) is there any logic or moral responsibility in that preference?

No- it is entirely based on emotion. That emotional combination of sympathy, guilt, unsupported opinion and dreamy primitivism that lead my classmate so long ago to idealize the less complex culture of the American Indians is very common and disturbing. Among liberals there is a nearly fanatical desire to see other cultures as “nicer, freer and more desirable than ours”. This primitivism is a key feature of the personality of the modern left. It is amplified in practice by the tendency of many on the left to rely too much on emotion and opinion and too little on understanding and fact. The combination of good intentions, sympathy and intellectual laziness is the most dangerous geopolitical force the world has ever seen.

Karl Marx spun his fantastic intellectual web of class warfare and communism from it, basing his proposed paradise of the worker on a kind of pass/fail society where no one is allowed to suffer any more or less than anyone else. It has taken a century and untold millions of lost and shattered lives for the real world to prove that this egalitarian dream was a sham destined to evolve into an unworkable nightmare.

Nevertheless, it keeps popping up and causing the left to take the wrong side in just about any conflict you can name. It causes many feminists and activist gays to speak out in blind support of the Palestinians and Islamic countries where women are little more than abused chattel; and homosexuals, if they are allowed to live at all, are brutalized outcasts. It is threatening Israel’s existence today and it has weakened many western democracies to the point that their survival as true democracies, ruled by law and vote, is in doubt.

The west only has one option; we have to start talking honestly and openly about subjects like the American Indian and learning how to handle the guilt and other raw emotions in a rational way. My next post will expand on the painful subject of the Indians and their fate and how it reflects on our response to Caliphate Islam.

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!

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.

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.