To Annihilate Evil

Ho-hum, another day, another Jew is accused of being blood-thirsty. No surprise either that another Jew is adding to the chorus. There is a gem of insight to be found here though so bear with me and slog through this hideous little example of faux journalism from Russia Today. Fellow Blogger Carl in Jerusalem, by the way, is the "blood-thirsty" exemplar here and he has blogged on the mess here.

I watch this video and the outrage I feel at the lies, anti-Semitic innuendo and the outright blood-libels is dwarfed with a kind of wonder at the utter absurdity of the Israeli woman, Inna Michaeli. Is there no limit to the venal careerism of people like this toad from "Women for Peace"? I wrote about Amira Hass as the Queen of the Toads three years ago and the same things I said about her back then apply double here to Inna Michaeli. She perverts and subverts liberal democratic ideals by implying that there is a moral equivalence between Israel's struggle to survive and protect her people and the annihilationist Arab Jihad against her, she obscures truth by inferring that Israel has not tried to achieve peace in ways other than warfare, and she betrays her own country a country which, judging by her accent, not so long ago redeemed her from the oppression of living in some part of the former Soviet Union. Now she is a professional in an organization that raises money and thrives on that betrayal, obfuscation and perversion. As with Hass, she has made her livelihood at betrayal and perversion and she takes her public acclaim and professional standing as her justification.

But who is blood-thirsty? Is it Carl who's only sin is in identifying evil and warning of its consequences or is it this fraud Inna Michaeli who pretends to want peace but who works to prevent Israel from asserting her power advantage (while she still has it) to secure her own people and survival. Who will be more responsible as the wars drag on and the land runs with blood for yet another generation?

The answer is made plain when she says “war is inevitable because ...wars and military action by our government simply goes unpunished..."?

If all military action is punished, who punishes the punishers? This is nothing less than a subconscious manifestation of the essential leftist yearning for world totalitarianism. This is the call for unending war.

Then too, Israpundit posted a brilliant speech by Spanish politician and Journalist Pilar Rahola at the Conference in the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism. This quote was debated in the comment stream, “The World is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don’t do anything about it”. I was moved to write a comment which I have expanded upon below.

The only thing to disagree with here is that she comes so close but then misses the heart of the real problem. That is that ALL people are evil. The founders of the U.S. knew, as they learned it from Genesis, that man's heart inclines toward evil from his birth. The Patriarchs were evil Thomas Jefferson owned slaves NO ONE is perfect. The genius of America is that the founders were honest about evil. They constructed the first human constitution that accepted that honest appraisal and was specifically designed to make sure that no one person or party could dominate and hold the rest hostage. They constructed check and balances so that the next ruler would not have to kill his predecessor. By making it so that we were responsible for keeping each other "honest", They gave us a reason to work with and trust each other. On the whole, it has worked. Israel's government has very similar aims.

What is so insane about the left is the utter dishonesty about evil- the pretense that the government (any government) or the financial system or bourgeois morality or organized religion or The Jews or the Republicans are the cause of evil. In "resisting" these and other "institutions of evil" they are blindly and ironically undermining the very Institutions that have evolved to control and channel ever-present human evil. The left has declared a war of annihilation against evil, thinking that that is good. It is not an accident that the greatest slaughters of human history have been perpetrated by socialists and communists. They are ready to pursue and exterminate evil right down to the last human heart in which it resides.

And, like Inna Michaeli, they all pretend to virtue and compassion...

Blame, Virtue and Evil

In my recent post, entitled A Most Savage Compassion, I compared Classical Liberalism with Progressive Liberalism. Citing my personal experience with affirmative action, I worked at showing how the “new” “progressive” values of Compassion, Selflessness and “the Good of Mankind” and a systematic effort ot increase the size and power of government have been advanced by The Progressive movement to undermine and replace the founding American value of each person taking personal responsibility for the individual pursuit happiness within a system that set out to guarantee only life and liberty. Progressives advocate incrementally replacing the responsibility and discretion of individuals with a manipulative, centralized authority of “experts” and “agencies” to manipulate and coerce individual behavior. I think I made it clear that I believe this is a very bad bargain.

It is manifest, though, that American liberals have been shifting from the classical toward the progressive viewpoint for many years. Ronald Reagan observed this shift more than thirty years ago. Regan, when asked why he left the Democratic Party and became a Republican was heard more than once to say, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; my party left me".

Which posses an interesting question. Since, America was founded on the idea that individuals, given the safety and opportunity, will make choices and live lives that perpetuate the common sense and enlightened self-interest that were the guiding principals of the founders how is it that Classical Liberalism is so easily giving way to Progressivism even as they claim to represent “American values”?

It is vital to understand how this shift is being achieved. First, let us remember why they call themselves “progressive”.

The sort of “progress” that is implied in the name Progressivism is actually a very un-American elitist fantasy in which The Progressive imagines that all people are equally ethical, trustworthy and basically good and that all cultures are likewise equally good and moral and that given the right information and presentation would agree with and submit to the Progressive agenda. As we have seen, this is opposed to and incompatible with the founding assumptions of the American republic.

That agenda assumes that normal human ambition, lust, acquisitiveness, anger and violence, either do not really exist or can be talked, legislated, educated or punished out of existence- not just subjugated or tamed, mind you, but eliminated entirely. The deepest and most redeeming wisdom of the founding fathers of America is that they had the spiritual depth and political intelligence to understand that those dark urges are every bit as universal in the human heart as are the selflessness, reason, empathy and light on which the progressives pin their hopes and it is no good getting rid of old tyrannies unless checks and balances are built into the political structure that guard against new ones arising.

The idea of progressivism, however well intentioned and idealistic, is dangerous. It would require an entire civilization of lobotomized and neutered drones, to bring about that end stage progressive society, in which human evil is expunged, into being. And yet, somehow, the progressive agenda is making real headway in America. The fulcrum of the progressive movement is the universal human need to blame and the lever is our need to think of ourselves as virtuous.

The progressive attack on the status quo begins with an emotional attack in which perceived cultural ills and social suffering are blamed on classical liberal institutions. The blame might attempt a specific causal connection such as the progressive attack on corporate greed, blaming capitalism for poverty and suffering or the Progressive’s support for the undemocratic Arab Jihad against Israel in which they accuse her of being the sole barrier to peace because of oppressive behavior and/or stealing Arab land by building the anti-terror wall. Or it might be more diffuse and inexact, like the accusations against the Bush administration for “fascist” intentions and thuggish behavior (see “BushHitler”) or the bland and nonsensical assertion that nobody should lack health care in the richest nation on earth. However the attack is couched, it is mostly done without any analysis on or respect paid to the actual cause of the suffering or ills.

In the world according to progressivism, blame, divorced from understanding or causality always trumps reason and evidence. The emotional content behind fixing blame for an event or condition works against the ability to observe and analyze the facts of the situation dispassionately and determine the cause with accuracy. Without understanding blame is a lie and a danger. The progressive agenda is based on one of the oldest and most destructive lies known to the human race. Last fall, in my post Who is to Blame for Evil, I quoted René Girard from his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World:
"When we describe human relations, we lie. We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion." In these two short sentences Girard has pointed out the most important mistake of progressivism.

In the citadels of the progressive elites in America where Postmodernism has the most sway (Academia, The Mainstream Media the Liberal Political Elite) it has become standard practice to blame the capitalism, the military, the police, religion, the constitutional guarantees that insure the sanctity of the individual (free speech and the right to bear arms) and other social and cultural institutions for fuzzy edged but emotionally charged ills like “poverty”, “racism”, “sexism” “suffering” and “inequality” in order to distract attention from the “competitive and war-like” nature of human relations and thus maintain and perpetuate the lie of “normal goodness”. They do this because they know that without the lie of ‘normal goodness” the acid bath of relativism (and the anomie it causes) that has corroded the confidence, self-reliance, responsibility and individualism of the enlightenment quest for objectivity and knowledge looses its strength.

The problem is that capitalism, the military, the police, religion and the constitutional guarantees of free speech and the right to bear arms are the very things that best protect and relieve us from those ills and dangers. It is like the man who only sees a physician when he is sick and so comes to blame doctors and hospitals for his illness. Which came first, the doctor or the illness? If there were no disease, there would be no doctors. If human relationships were devoid of competition and violence there would be no such thing as government, police, military or philosophy.

The progressive left blames our government for any deficit of human rights or for civil disorder- both of which are reflections of the very things they were created to prevent- or at least manage. While all governments, economic systems and religions are blame worthy, only the anarchist will find satisfaction in stopping there- and relativism is the avatar of anarchy. If no system is any better than any other system and no cultural mores more civilized than any other, then what is the use of defending any standard of behavior at all?

All forms of government put their trust in one or another way of neutralizing or channeling the best and the worst of the individual. Monarchy depends upon the purity of “The Good King” to decree peace and order while winning the love of his subjects. Theocracy looks to one man (or group of men) who claim to deliver the edict of God on earth. In a totalitarian regime, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “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…Totalitarianism (and there was never a totalitarian state that was not socialist) strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous.” Only republican democracy grants the individual the freedom to assume responsibility for his own actions and only capitalism gives the individual the opportunity to play an active role in determining his own stake in society and worth in the marketplace.

So why do the progressive accusations of blame against America seem valid? In fact many of them are, but only in a superficial way. It is quite true, for instance, that there are egregious abuses of the capitalist economy. Bankers take advantage of their power, stock brokers manipulate information, CEO’s bilk stockholders and companies abuse their workers. But these are less failures of the capitalist system than they are proof that people are not all good and will never behave perfectly no matter how perfect the system they live within.

This is the devastating power behind Rule 4 in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:
“Make opponents live up to their own book of rules… You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Alinsky was right, he was a radical and had no progressive illusions. He knew that using this tactic ruthlessly is the gateway to nihilism and anarchy. Progressives are far more dangerous because they have the illusion that by offering un-researched theory and unproven but “compassionate” policies to replace proven policies that have been circumvented makes them liberal.

Alinsky’s Rule Number 10 (The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”) limited his appeal to American Liberals who, at least, understood that you cannot tear down the existing structures of life without an alternative structure to propose without declaring yourself an anarchist.

And the Progressive alternative is the combination of Compassion, Selflessness and “The Good of Mankind” http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/2009/07/most-savage-compassion.html armed with these three virtues, even the most pathetic socialist panderings can be made to look like real policies. Here is the argument for implementing a sweeping change and authorizing massive and detailed government intervention is health care:

Health care reform may or may not be a good idea but what “nice person” could possibly stand up to this emotional extortion? This is exactly the formula that brought us the welfare system that destroyed so many American families. It created (with a huge assist from venal bankers and brokers) the mortgage disaster of 2008. It was the irresistible force behind the passage of the grotesquely bloated stimulus package even though no single human being had ever read all of it or understood much of it. And it is now fueling the pressure being applied for the healthcare reform bill that President Obama tells us “must be passed”.

Or else what? Or else we will still have the best health care in the world but we will feel less virtuous and compassionate. The bind the progressive wants us to believe that to be opposed to the Progressive agenda, is to be without virtue, that by asking questions or making observations, you stand in the way of a more compassionate, selfless and better future for all of mankind. It puts you just a short step away from inhumanity and justifiable homicide. Just think about the vilification and character assassination of BushHitler, Cheney and Palin.

If you want to be counted as a good person, or a moral nation, everything you do has to fit the template of Compassion, Selflessness and “the good of mankind”. But the aggression and anger does not go away it just sublimates and gets expressed in other ways. As I pointed out in A Most Savage Compassion, “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.” Small wonder that progressives exhibit such self destructive, and cultural deconstructive rage against their own culture and people- they can’t express rage outward so it turns inward.

"Virtue" acts as an autoimmune disorder in which the body politick’s defenses are destroyed by progressivism which eats away the natural defenses from the inside while it encourages the external enemies to feast on the outside.

Progressive cant has it that the murderous stories of the bible, the piles of skeletal bodies of concentration camp victims, the American slave trade, The Inquisition and The Crusades, The 1,500 year Jihad of world conquest by Islam with its forced conversions, massacres, beheadings, stonings and honor killings are proof that the most hideous atrocities of human history have been committed because of Nation, Business or Religion that without those institutions, those things would never have happened. The truth is that evil things happen in spite of whatever Government, Business and Religion is in charge; evil happens because, as it is written in the bible, “the inclination in man's heart is evil from his youth.”

The heart of evil may be man’s, the blind assertion that people (humanity) are basically good may be the soul of evil but the progressive presumption that the pretense to Compassion, Selflessness and “the good of mankind” is by itself virtuous and the ultimate answer to evil, in the face of three and a half millennia of evidence to the contrary, is the strong right arm of evil. This is not even the deadly subterfuge of a Trojan Horse, it is the cowardly traitor who lets down the castle’s drawbridge in the dead of night and delivers his slumbering fellows into the hands of the enemy. And the enemy (whether in the form of Jihadist, moral disintegration or cultural decline) is not restrained by any such virtue.

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.

A Field Guide for Fighting Evil- First Principles

As many of you already know, my second youngest son was born with Neurofibromatosis. NF is the perfect paradigm of evil. It is a tumor disorder in which the tumors grow along nerve fibers. Because nerve fibers are uniformly arrayed throughout the body, the tumors may appear anywhere and are usually so inextricably interwoven with the tissues of skin, organs and bone that removing them completely is impossible. That is how I see evil. It is inextricable in the fabric of humanity. What is truly important is how we try to deal with it.

Thoreau observed, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.” Ask anyone- they will tell you that they are opposed to evil but few understand that (as I pointed out in my post of 9/2) that evil is part of the universe and especially present in the human soul. There are three main political remedies that claim to hack away at the branches in The West, lets look at which of these might have the best shot at the root.

Progressives, Communists and Solcialists
The emotional lability of Socialism and the allied “Progressive” leftist extremism stems from their belief that it is evil for any one individual to be any better off (regardless that they may be more intelligent, or better educated or even just luckier) than anybody else- The inevitable exception, of course, being those who will run the Stalinist bureaucracy that will be required to compel everyone to accept and participate in this fantastic perversion of reality. When the revolution comes, they-or at least the ones that survive the purges and infighting that always accompanies the success of socialism- will become deities. To see the corrosive effects of the creep of this ideology into the mainstream of Western thought, simply look at the havoc created in Canada by the actions of the Human Rights Commissions. In Canada, now, if you say anything of substance about the national discourse it is considered (I borrow and paraphrase from the title of the new book by Kathy Shaidle and Peter Vere) “Not Nice” and you are fair game to be persecuted for expressing a mere thought. It is inevitable. Socialism (especially the kind that regards itself as Progressive) does not match up with the reality of human nature- so it does not stand up to reason- so the more leverage you give it the more it will attempt to stifle discussion and, ultimately, thinking. (note: for really insightful blow by blow coverage of the CHRC mess you can’t beat Blazing Catfur )

Liberals
Liberals don’t necessarily agree with socialist principals they are just slowly submitting to the emotional blackmail of the extreme left. At heart, they only want to prevent suffering and because they will not understand the nature, unavoidability and source of suffering they are drawn to the emotional appeal of socialism and its phony egalitarianism. So committed are they to this pious goal of preventing suffering, it doesn’t even occur to them that they actually end by causing much more suffering by their efforts- they are satisfied knowing that they are “doing something for change”. Few will take the trouble to deny that welfare had a great hand in destroying the African American family and that Affirmative action has cast a shadow on the reputations of two generations of black, university-educated professionals- but they support those programs and others like them out of reflex and the soft racism inherent in the inability to imagine that many black professionals could make it on their own if allowed.

Conservatives
Conservatives want only to preserve, restore and enhance the system that has proven to be the world’s most successful at espousing and enabling the individual’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They do this out of a love of liberty first but they do it in the conviction that there will always be evil and suffering and the best yet devised on earth to ensure that there will be as little evil and suffering as possible, is to leave free people in charge of themselves and give them sufficient checks and balances so that as they govern themselves, the interference of the government will be minimized, the rule of law will be paramount and (all of) the people (through their ballots) will always be in control.

So today, it appears even worse than in Thoreau's time. There are millions whose ill-conceived notions of fairness and openness are actually feeding the roots of evil rather than striking at them.

Through dealing with David’s disease we have had to become conservatives. We know that we cannot just declare the disease “Not Nice” and make it disappear. We know that we cannot prevent him from suffering with it. We can only do the things that will give him his best shot at living and being a productive and competent person. Those things do not include not talking about the problems or letting him sink into a despairing, undisciplined lack of expectations. There is no special Sharia court system, welfare or even affirmative action here. Perhaps we are very fortunate that he has the courage and intelligence to have faith in his doctors, in us and in his future but I am inclined to think that the better you understand and confront evil the more you strike at its root.

WHO IS TO BLAME FOR EVIL?

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. William Shakespeare,
The Tempest, 1. 2

It is fashionable in some circles to blame religion for the evil that men do. Hitchens, Dawkins and others are leading a new resurgence of aggressive atheism that seeks to vilify all religions as the source of a large part of the chaos and misery in the world. They specifically negate the value of all religions and blame them for most of the violence and misery of the human race.

This bothers me, partly because I have a strong personal religious inclination, but it also bothers me because it is totally illogical. Ironically, I love reading Hitchens on most subjects and find his style, logic and command of fact and history impressive on just about everything with the exception of religion and Israel. I think it possible that his blindness on these two issues is a combination of negative personal history with religion, a vestigial (and erroneous) leftist belief that Israel is a colonialist enterprise and an unfortunate inability to see Israel apart from his prejudice against religion. More about Hitchens later because he is the exception that proves the rule.

I ran across an article about the French philosopher Rene Girard on the blog CUANAS a while ago that got me thinking about this. Since then I have read a lot of his work and I have been inspired by a couple of very clear and original insights, For one thing, Girard saw that it was not that religion caused the evils of human sacrifice but that religion evolved to govern and channel the natural competition for resources, jealousy and fear inherent in the human condition that led to the violence and horror of sacrifice. Girard exposes an important and much denied view of human nature. CUANAS writer Jaco Pastorius quoted this from Girard, “"When we describe human relations, we lie. We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion."

Of course religion is not the only “culprit”, if you don’t happen to have strong religious faith, don’t worry, whatever cultural institutions you respect and depend on in this world, there is likely some nut-job who thinks your positive values are the cause of mayhem, madness and destruction. There is someone out there who will be happy to tell you that the fault lies with (pick one or more-) government, marriage, society, money (capital), science or some mixture of these. They make passionate cases for their allegations but can they all be right?

Without becoming involved in the numbingly arcane objections, squabbles about definitions, speculations about theology, theories of economics and hair splitting about psychology into which discussions about these matters tend to degenerate, allow me, please, one general anthropological observation. All of the above mentioned supposed causes of evil (and any others of which I am aware) have one thing in common- they are all systems or conceptual frameworks that were created by people.

Think about that. Leave aside the obvious question of how several different systems could be The Source(s) of All Evil; could any single one (or combination) of them actually be The Source(s) of Evil? Does it not stand to reason that any evil that is in the systems ultimately derives from the people who created and inhabit these systems?

Like the old comedy routine in which someone floating in a small boat notices a bit of water in the bottom of the boat and essays to let the water out of the boat by drilling a hole in the bottom so it can run out, it is a curious and quixotic spectacle when we see these attacks on western institutions and culture by people who under any other known system on earth would be outcasts, imprisoned as traitors or burned in the streets as heretics. In the West they are educated, protected and given a platform by the very same institutions they decry.

This inverted protest- in which the blame for humanity’s violence, misery and pain is projected onto the institutions which, of all the similar institutions in the world, have the best record of managing and minimizing the violence, theft, hatred, xenophobia, abusiveness and uncontrolled rage about which they are complaining- is the diagnostic symptom of western cultural anomie.

We have already discussed the most obvious signs (anti-theism, moral relativism, political correctness, post modernism, liberal cognitive egocentrism and post-colonialism) of this anomie at length. But, somehow, there has always been the nagging question of how so many, otherwise intelligent and well-educated people could be blind to the obvious internal contradictions inherent in their behavior and thought-process.

This unconsciously self-destructive behavior is a special case of what Richard Landes calls Demopathy. Demopathy, is the cynical and calculated use of the ideals, language and institutions of democratic western civilization to weaken or destroy it. Under Landes’ definition, someone who indulges in the form of blindly suicidal behavior described above is referred to not as a full-fledged Demopath but, rather, a Dupe of Demopathy. A Dupe takes up the arguments and reframing of true Demopaths and in a well-intentioned but overly emotional, and sub-rational state, they can not see how the ideas they profess weaken the very fabric of there own culture.

The question has remained open- what could possibly motivate people with no obvious mental incapacity to want to weaken and possibly destroy the culture that made them who they are- the only culture in the history of humankind that would have a place and tolerance for people who think and behave as they do. The energy source for this powerful screen of denial lies in the deeply disturbing idea that the source and magnitude of the evil of human nature is not an aberration but an inherent part of every individual.

This is the wellspring of demopathy. The Demopathic westerner has a very personal, deeply emotional investment in projecting the evil within himself (which otherwise he has to recognize as analogous to, if not identical with, the evil behind all the atrocities and horrors committed by the whole human race) onto his closest support system.
To make this work, he willingly believes that all individuals are either good or totally neutral until they become trained or enlisted by one of these (evil) institutions. This is what makes it seem like a good idea to some people to weaken or try to destroy the very structures that make us free and safe. There is not even a corresponding assumption that we are not as safe or free as we might be under a system that denies our true nature and attempts to turn us into totalitarian tools.

And this is where I must return to Hitchens. I have to stress that I use him to stand for all who, like him, want us to believe that belief in a supreme being is not essential to living a principled existence and is even somehow retrogressive.

Humanists would have us believe that secularism, rationality and “universal values” will suffice to safeguard our liberty and guide us to the next stage of human liberation. Humanism embraces a variety of related philosophies, according to Wikipedia, “…that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appeal to universal human qualities – particularly rationality.” This faith in human beings and their intellectual devices would not seem justified in the light of what the antitheist regimes of the last century have done to the human race. One would think that Hitchens, as a substantially reconstructed Trotskyite, would have an idea about that.

To depend only on human values and reason- to claim dependence on universal moral values is itself an exercise in faith. Viewed only from the human perspective, though, there can be nothing truly universal about those morals and the effect of it is to deny that evil exists in the human nature. The greatest evils in the history of humankind have been a result of the denial that evil exists in the human heart- that it is only governments (like the monarchy of Louis XVI) and systems (such as capitalism) that need to be eliminated (along with thousands or even millions of arbitrarily selected people) to allow the reign of reason and humanistic values (from each according to his means, to each according to his needs) to prevail. In 1911 Joseph Conrad, in Under Western Eyes, Wrote “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”- And that goes for institutional, cultural and social sources of wickedness too.

The greatness of the American off-shoot of the western tradition is that in its foundational spiritual sources the society of Freemasons, farmers and frontiersmen who framed the republic were deeply involved with the “Old Testament” and had made a commitment to responsibility and self-reliance in preference to the soul deadening interpretations of original sin so prevalent in the old world of Europe. This hopeful, productive and democratic strain of the Judeo-Christian tradition acknowledges that evil (as well as righteousness) is part of what makes us human. Its greatest innovation is that it saw that the only good reason for religion, government and tradition is the to make it difficult for the any one group to gain too great a proportion of the power. We need all the help we can get to keep us from acting in ways that are (in the long run at least) counter to our own interests- it does us no good to sanctify humanity and project our evil side onto God and religion (and our freely elected government) we need to continue to try to live up to our best understanding of the goodness, order and balance that are the visible manifestations of Godliness.

The constant battle between The Judeo Christian West and the various retrograde Western ideologies, (Nazism, Socialism, Communism, Utopianism, religious fundamentalism, etc...) of which I believe Humanism and its corollary, Progressivism is one, is the same battle that divides the west from Islam. It is the conflict between utopian approaches that believe the human being is neither good nor evil but can be molded and remade in a political or religious image and the liberal western approach that acknowledges the human character accepts the good and the evil, acknowledges the human freedom to take responsibility for choosing between them and attempts to devise a system that balances and restrains the two sides of human nature in the most liberating and productive way possible.

Balance, indeed, is the signal innovation and genius of the Constitution of the United States of America. The framers of the Constitution were men versed in scripture. They well understood the problem of evil. They built a system with so many redundant safeguards that even the demopathic paranoid fringe that feigns courage by calling the current president Bushhitler and accusing him of being a fascist thug do so in complete confidence that they will not wake some night to a raid by the Secret Police and be “disappeared” into a mythical American Gulag.

It reminds me of nothing so much as the paranoid bravado that I (yes, even I), like many of my generation, felt in 1968 about what we would do “when the revolution comes”. We had convinced ourselves that a revolution was required to stop the evil we saw around us- and that our ascendance as leaders was Inevitable because of our own youth and purity. We fancied ourselves important in an adolescent and grandiose fantasy.

The revolution never came nor will today’s progressives be rounded up and turned into lampshades by the Bush administration. In time, we will gain enough perspective to see today’s pathetic attempt to appear heroic by challenging the most benign and open democracy on earth to suppress them with just as much condescending nostalgia as we do the “when the revolution comes” fantasy of 1968. But the similarity is no accident and it is important to see that they are both analogous to “feeling ill, calling a doctor, letting the doctor treat you and then blaming the physician for the disease”. They are quintessential expressions of that same human urge to avoid the reality of the chaotic evil that is present in all of us by projecting it onto the very institution(s) that have evolved to balance it with the good in each of us.

Our Judeo-Christian Western experiment is a flawed and human enterprise. Any human endeavor is doomed to embody a mixture of good and evil. But it is unique in human history as the one that has most productively valued introspection, fostered intellectual honesty and supported the dignity and rights of the individual. We can only continue the evolution and perfection of these powerful forces for good by, at last, putting away the childish omnipotence and imaginary purity of the extreme ends of the political spectrum.

As embodied in the US constitution, balance is the key. The rights and dignity of the human race can only be defended and expanded by first understanding the human being and respecting his qualities- both the positives and the negatives- then the checks and balances we devise will be felt as fair and effective and we can stop hating them and helping our enemies (the Demopaths of all stripes) to undermine them.

It is not, after all, the fault of religion or government or George Bush, Osama bin Laden or even Dick Cheney that there is evil in the world. It is not even the things that are done that seem evil. The things that seem evil to us are the violence and the hatred and the fear that are inherent in the human soul. Rene Girard offered a singularly brilliant insight when he observed that the source of evil was not the institutions but the nature of the human being. He falls short, however in carrying that insight through to its full meaning. In my next post I will discuss what Girard missed. In doing so, I will also show that progressivism and Islamism are actively engaged in behaviors that multiply and spread the violence and pain (and the denial that causes them).

Israel's Choice: Die or Confront the Aggressfugees

I got an email today from one of my favorite bloggers. The guy who calls himself Shrinkwrapped, who, as he wrote, almost never does this sent out a blast to a bunch of other bloggers. Here it is:

Subject: Has Israel Lost the Will to Live?

I almost never send out mass mailings but the behavior of the Israeli government, and more importantly, the behavior of the Israeli population begs the question, "Has Israel Lost the Will to Live?" My post is here and includes:

"Is there a threshold beyond which the entire population surrenders to despair?

I am very fearful for Israel. It is still a democracy. Yet where are the people? Why are they not marching through the streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv in the hundreds of thousands, demanding their government do something to stop the reign of terror that they have been told repeatedly is their inevitable lot? Why are the Israelis not enraged with their own government's fecklessness?

Israel has the power to destroy their enemies many times over. That is a frightening prospect. Their enemies do not believe that the Israelis, civilized in ways that their enemies are not, would ever take the necessary steps to safe guard their people and stop this war. Yet the Israeli government could win this war with methods far short of total war. It is a question of will.

If the Arabs are correct and Israel has lost the will to live, this war can only end with the destruction of Israel and a second Holocaust where they will, as they often boast, finish the job Hitler started. The Palestinians would be only too happy to administer the coup de grace but it will be the Israelis who have committed collective suicide."

I hope this is of interest.
All the Best,
ShrinkWrapped

I felt a physical shock go through me as I read his email. Please, by all means, read his post, it is excellent- but before you do let me share my answer with you:

SW,

I share your concern. When Kate at Small Dead Animals linked to my last post on 03/12 she got me thinking in this direction when she posted it with this quote from Ayn Rand:

"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube." - Ayn Rand

This quote makes a direct connection between the work Richard Landes and I are doing on the media and the mental state of Israel and, indeed, much of the west.

My last post spoke to the way in which Israel's public image has become compromised by the media's constant compromise with evil. The mainstream media is, at this point, paralyzed by the, vertebra-popping, ligament snapping contortions it has put itself through to convince itself it is being "fair" when what has actually been needed was not fairness but honesty and accuracy. Fairness, as practiced by the media (as I show in that post) is neither honest nor accurate but a delusional attempt never to offend the most easily offended party even as it cares nothing about offending the most open and least easily offended party.

Is it not possible that the malaise of the Israelis is a product of the same process on a cultural scale? As Neville Chamberlain proved for all time, appeasement and compromise with evil is not prudent, it is wasteful and stupid. But, even worse than that, it is debilitating to the compromiser. It literally compromises his legitimate defense mechanisms and disarms his ability to act.

Israel must stop compromising, if not for her immediate survival but for the hearts and minds of her people. If they continue to be forced to live under the threat of evil and (perversity of perversities) be reviled by much of the world including many leftist within Israel as the evil ones, is that not the ultimate compromise with evil? Let us say, “No more Compromise!” Turn off the power. Close the borders. For God's sake shoot back!

Could Olmert, Livni and their government possibly still have a forlorn hope of convincing the Arabs that Israel has the right to exist? In the entire history of the planet earth, rights without the exercise (not just the possession) of power has never availed anything for anyone. For a Jew, of all the perpetual victims, to think he will be the first case, is lunacy. Buy a history book. Look it up on the Internet. Ask any Arab.

Are they afraid of getting the Caliphateist Arabs (the world's frothiest collection of rage-oholics) angry? Are they afraid of making refugees out of a people that has held that title as a holy sinecure for sixty years? The so called Palestinians are the most murderous, longest suffering, loudest complaining, least productive and most resistant to resettlement refugees ever. It would, perhaps, be more accurate to call them "aggressfugees".

This is one of the few moments in the history of the human race when might coincides with right. Israel and America cannot afford to let the advantage wane for another year. For Sixty years Israel has been fighting an uphill battle and for the same sixty years the west has been pouring vast seas of petrodollars into the enemy's coffers. The tipping point may be at hand any time now; and we know from experience that the more even the fight gets, the more civilian tragedy will occur. It does not have to be a holocaust on either side but might must be asserted and the more one-sided the better.

Permit me to introduce a somewhat frivolous but pointed illustration:




Nice sword you have there Hizbollah (Syria, Hamas, Iran etc...)

Israel is still a democracy but the government of the moment is self-destructive to the point of suicide. If the people do not shake off the deadly effects of compromise and insist on a new civilian leader to replace Olmert and jolt Israel out of her paralysis, the confined and frustrated military might at some point elect to save the country on their own authority- A latter day Saul or David may arise. I pray that this is not necessary. It is not a good prospect but it is preferable to annihilation. It is not too late- YET.

Understanding vs Nonthought- Why the Left Does Evil With the Best Intentions

For three of the most interesting and stimulating years of my life, I was a professional step father to dozens of baby monkeys. I was working my way through my last two years of undergraduate studies and a three semester Master’s Degree. I was the weekend supervisor of the infant monkey nursery at one of the most renowned medical schools in the world. My hours were 12 noon to midnight every Saturday and Sunday. Despite the lack of any free time on weekends, I loved that job. It paid well enough, it came with health insurance, the monkeys were very interesting and over the one hundred and fifty or so weekends that I worked there I got to . listen to one of my great heroes speak dozens of times. After eleven PM I would begin the clean-up process. There were baby bottles to wash and data records to compile. These activities would keep me in the lab office. It so happened that on Sunday nights at eleven, one of the local college radio stations, ran a program that originated from Wayne State University in Detroit. It turned out that they had produced only a dozen or so programs for the series and because it was on in an undesirable time slot, the station repeated them over and over. Three of the programs in that rotation changed my life in a fundamental way.

These three were actually half hour segments made from an antique ninety minute recording of a speech that a man named Charles F. Kettering had given at some commemoration or dedication ceremony toward the end of his career. Kettering was, by then, one of the few surviving members of a generation of entrepreneurs and inventors that quite literally changed the conditions of human life during the early decades of the last century. Kettering was responsible for scores of inventions that changed people’s lives and expectations. Among his inventions were; the electric cash register, the diesel locomotive engine, the electric starter for the automobile, safety glass and ( what is probably the most profoundly influential of them all) the discovery of Freon gas for refrigeration and air-conditioning.

This great technologist spoke not of knowing things, shaping industry and wielding power but of how to help people’s minds to grow how to empower them to solve problems by understanding themselves and the world around them.

He told the story of his first job as a recent college graduate. He was schoolmaster in a turn-of-the-century, one room school house. One of his youngest pupils was a first grader who had already had a difficult experience in school. Although she was obviously bright and could already read at a high level for her age, she could only do it with the book held upside down. Her previous teacher had insisted that she learn to read the “right way” and refused to let her read upside down. Luckily, she kept reading and only learned to hate and fear the teacher.

When Kettering took over the school, he sized the situation up in the same way he approached all of the other problems that he would later solve in mechanics, chemistry and electronics. First he undertook to understand the whole problem. It turned out that the little girl had spent many hours in the care of her grandmother who was unable to hold the little girl on her lap and read to her in a more standard way so she would read to her by placing a book on a stool in between two chairs that faced each other and would read to her as the girl looked on upside down. Kettering knew from this that the girl was smart and motivated and could adapt to any condition. He hit on a plan that worked perfectly- with no emotional damage or condemnation of the child. He borrowed a music stand from someone in the community and placed her book upside down (rotated 180 degrees) in front of her. Then next day, Kettering turned the music stand’s holder 5 degrees clockwise. Every Monday after that he would turn it an additional 5 degrees. As the school year progressed, the girl found herself reading at 175 degrees out of the usual then 170 then 165 etc… By the end of the year she was reading just the way everyone else was and Kettering had done it without making her feel as though she was different, strange or wrong. He honored her as an individual at the same time he was correcting her because he understand the problem deeply enough that the solution became obvious. This was an example, he said, of “letting the problem be the boss”. Later in his life this slogan would be his watchword; he posted the exhortation “Let the Problem be the Boss” on the wall of his laboratory.

The trouble that most people get into when they run into a problem they have never experienced before, he explained is that they immediately try to solve it using what they already know. The more educated and “expert” the person, the greater is that tendency. Kettering advanced the idea that true solutions to problems come not from trying to fit every problem to the answers you already know but from meeting the problem on its own ground and letting it teach you what you need to know to understand it and solve it. Once, Kettering said, you “let the problem be the boss” and not try to bend it to fit your small view of the world, you begin to grow in power and ability.

I was captivated listening to Kettering talk because he had clarity of expression that perfectly reflected the genius of his insight. He made you feel as though his understanding was your understanding. Somehow I felt that this very practical man was so clear and so pragmatic that he paradoxically was talking in a perfectly spiritual and transcendent way about these quintessentially down to earth matters. He offered a glimpse into the core of our relationship with the real world and because of this he was seeing too into very fiber of the order of the universe.
I looked forward to these programs and must have heard each one of them a half dozen times. I read as much as I could find about Kettering in the library too. I took him and his philosophies to heart and he became one of my life’s heroes.

He was also an anti-authoritarian of the purest and most constructive kind. Another story he told was about an earlier speech he had given before an august assembly of academics. They had gathered to honor Kettering, Edison and a few others of the great inventors of that time. Kettering told how he had gotten up and explained to the academics that the kind of education they prized and awarded advanced degrees for was the antithesis of the kind of training that was needed to produce more innovators like the ones gathered there for honors. He related how his group of engineers had been struggling to find the right gas to serve as a refrigerant for a cooling system that GM had commissioned him to develop. They worked by their own methods for a long time with little success. Then Kettering took things into his own hands and told them to pack their things for a working retreat. Once there he had them draw a graph of all the molecular formulae they had tried so far on the wall. The graph included the composition and the properties of each gas. As they filled in the graph, it became apparent that there was one spot where all the properties of the other molecules seemed to converge to point toward the most efficient refrigerant. Kettering pointed this spot out and was immediately told by one of his slide rule wielding engineers that they had suspected that there was a molecule that would fit there for some time but that they had not tried to produce it because according to their calculations, the characteristics of the molecule would be unstable and it would not be tractable for use. Kettering insisted that they try and Freon gas was discovered. Freon served for many decades as the best refrigerant known. It made possible food preservation and shipping as we know it as well as air-conditioning and many medical and scientific research techniques that have saved and enriched uncounted lives.

Kettering ended this tale by saying that after that, he would often call meetings at which slide rules were strictly forbidden and that he insisted on re-training all engineers with advanced degrees who came to work for him.

Kettering was driven by problem solving and it is understanding- not knowledge that solves problems. He, like Newton and Einstein, knew that there was more to this Universe than any human can know or understand. As Kettering put it in his plain and firm way, “Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.” His approach to problems was to encounter a problem without preconceptions and to let the problem teach him to both know and understand it. In this way the problem becomes its own solution. Or as Kettering said, “The only difference between a problem and a solution is that people understand the solution.”

In thinking about it, I have finally realized that this quinessentialy pragmatic man, whose purity of thought and purpose transformed the world around him has arrived at the same place as Milan Kundera- a man whose angle of approach could not be more different, although his transformative effect can be comparable. The crystalline intellect of the born inventor and engineer and the senitive, intuitive artist/novelist whose soul was forged between the freedom of his art and the totalitarian society he was born and raised in have intersected and their message to us is simple but vital. Recall with me the quote of Kundera’s that I used in my post about the Mainstream Media.

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

There is a vital intersection between the thinking of these two great but utterly different thinkers and it lies in what Kettering described as knowing without understanding and what Kundera calls “received ideas”. These “received ideas” that Kundera writes about, are simply the preconceptions by which we explain the world to ourselves. They do not constitute real understanding they are merely a superficial knowledge, a set of ideas which the great numbers of our fellows accept uncritically. They are the intellectual cocoon within which we shelter ourselves from dangers real and imagined, where we reassure ourselves of our goodness and anesthetize our anxieties. The extent to which we accept the complete verity of these received ideas is the exact measure of our indulgence in kitsch, that desire to enlist the sympathetic emotions of the “greatest number”.

The dominant kitsch of our age in the west are surely the fetishes of the left. They are the very means by which the left attempts to analyze and solve every problem by fitting them into “what they already know” rather than understanding them on their own terms. Hence, the persistent and obdurate refusal to believe in the threat posed by the bloody and brutal Caliphate Islamists. Because, for instance, they already “know” that multiculturalism is a universal and that according to its dictates “all people are brothers”, they cannot see that this sweet but dangerously mistaken belief is not shared by many other cultures. They also already know that all of humanity are brothers and that if you treat your enemy with dignity and resolve your problems by talking them out there is never any need to have a war. These seem like nice principals but they are deeply flawed and not universally shared, in fact, the Islamists view them as a fatal weakness to be exploited.
The pathetic retreat into these bland (and blind)assertions without testing in reality are what Kettering calls “…a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence”, Kundera calls “nonthought”. Here is Kundera:

“Nonthought. This cannot be translated by “absence of thought”…We cannot say that an absence is aggressive, or that it is spreading. “Nonthought,” on the other hand, describes a reality, a force; I can therefore say, “pervasive nonthought”, the “nonthought of received ideas”; “the mass media’s nonthought”; etc.”

I was watching Bill O’Reilly interview Whoopi Goldberg recently and she said something in the exchange that clarified the whole issue for me. O’Reilly was questioning her on the reluctance that she and other celebrity activists show to support their activist positions with discussions of logic, fact and substance. At one point Goldberg, talking about fellow celebrity Tim Robbins, said, “Well, I think he's very clear that he is not for the war in Iraq. It's not a new stance that he's had. He's also for years been a peace activist. So this can't come as a surprise to anybody.
No. 2, when I take a stance on something, all I can talk to you about it how I feel about it and why. And I don't have to justify it, and you don't have to listen to it. But it is important for everyone to know that they have an opinion and they have a — have a right to express it.”

I was astounded. In one short statement Ms. Goldberg was recorded trying nearly every trick in the left’s version of Kundera’s Kitsch list- she attempts to get away without answering his arguments with clear reasons by playing the “everyone is entitled to their opinion” card, and then claiming that that is “just how she feels” This is a perfect example of leftist nonthought in action.

In our ongoing quest to find ways to reason, alarm, intimidate and ridicule the left and liberal west into full awareness of the challenge and danger that our civilization faces, one of our most valuable resources must be the tradition of pragmatic problem solvers, like Kettering, that have made some of our greatest contributions to the comfort and progress of our species. Another inspiring influence is the experience of those who have lived in other cultures and come to ours with an appreciation that, if we listen to them, makes us realize once again how lucky we are to live in a culture that, though it is not perfect, is the best that humanity has managed thus far and is the only reasonable hope for continued improvement. In this essay I have attempted to pull those two streams together to show that the one thing they exemplify most of all and their clearest difference from the insolent and counter-productive left is an honest desire to understand rather than react emotionally.

Ms Goldberg speaks in half truths with half sentences. We must continue to advocate real understanding. When she says, “everyone is entitled to their opinion” she has omitted the most important part of that assumptive sentence- the other half is “no matter how ill considered and uninformed it may be.” The entitlement to opinion and expression is not a validation of content- in fact, it is a call for responsibility. Equal rights to speak them doesn’t mean all opinions are of equal value it means that they should to be considered and supported rather than merely indulged.

The first recorded declaration of that responsibility in U.S. history came in the fall of 1787 when a woman approached Benjamin Franklin immediately following the concluding session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and asked “What form of government have you given us?” Franklin replied: "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

We cannot allow ourselves to be lulled by the easy appeals to emotion and received ideas contained in Ms Goldberg’s typical liberal glibness. No matter how secure we feel we must realize that we have enemies. As the usually non political Kettering said, “The future can be anything we want it to be, providing we have the faith and that we realize that peace, no less than war, requires "blood and sweat and tears."”

Even Reuters Reports on Their Evil

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

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

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

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