What Do Israel and the US Have in Common with Battered Women?

...A lot more than you might think...

What would you say if you visited your sister or daughter in her first apartment and found that she had a boyfriend living there. Lets just say that he is half her height, uneducated, stays home all day living on the proceeds of a family inheritance, he is domineering, ignorant and a religious fanatic. What if you witnessed this roommate ordering her around like a slave and screaming at her- calling her every vile name in the book and telling her that she didn’t deserve to be alive. You might, at the very least, want her to take him to a counselor who could mediate a better relationship for them.

“Oh, yeah”, she says to you, “he doesn’t like to talk about it. When I ask him to talk to me, he just agrees with me until I’m done talking and promises he’ll act better from now on. So, then I agree to do whatever he wants me to do and he agrees to be nicer to me. But that never lasts long, I just wind up giving in more every time and he just gets worse and worse.

Then, the next time you see her she has a black eye and a missing tooth. When you ask her what happened, she says, “Oh, uh, Mr. X did that, but it wasn’t his fault. I deserved it.”

When you ask her what she means, she says, “I guess I was bad, Mr. X doesn’t like the way I behave, He says I am a devil woman and that he should kill me- But there’s nothing to worry about because I know, deep down, he really respects me as an individual and loves me and wants to live with me. Besides he promised he won’t do it again”

My guess is that this would not seem right to you.

What would you do? I can’t imagine that, in this day and age, any clear thinking person would not want to make sure that their loved one got out of that situation right away. Most, I think, would also like to see Mr. X arrested by the authorities and punished for his behavior. A good-sized majority would even consider making some kind of intervention themselves.

We know from the accumulated, important work done by the social sciences and publicized so effectively by the Media, that this is a very dangerous situation and one in which the abused party is sometimes powerless to extricate herself from the peril.

How many times have we heard of abused women staying in this kind of relationship against all advice and in the face of increasingly terrifying behavior?

So, then, what would you do the next time you visit and find her on crutches with a crooked and swollen nose. Would you take action then?

What if she called you on the phone one day and whispered to you that she was getting concerned because she had found a receipt on Mr. X’s nightstand- a receipt from the police department for an application he has made- for a license to buy and own firearms? When will you tell her that the time for talking is done- that its time to call the police? When will you insist? When will you intervene physically?

If this all seems self evident, think back. It wasn’t so easy to recognize these patterns only forty years ago. Back when I was in my teens this was all a much murkier territory. A man’s home was his “castle” and there were deep social taboos against “outsiders” meddling in “family matters”. It was the old patriarchal notion, noble and comforting in theory but regrettably undependable in reality, that the family is the one dependable shelter and comfort in life- that a paternal husband and his wife would be each others best and most dedicated guardians and caretakers. Of course, that system put the “man of the house” in a position to be either a brutal despot or, if he chose, a benevolent sovereign in the castle.

Not to minimize the complexity of the issue or the shame and pity of the cases that come to light weekly in the news media, but I think it is safe to say that the severity of this problem is substantially diminished from the time when a young woman in an abusive relationship would have nowhere to go and get no advice but “show him that you can be a good wife and maybe he’ll learn how to be a good husband” or “try to be nicer to him” or “cook him his favorite dinner” or “greet him with a smile and he’ll be happier”. Domestic abuse was always a betrayal of the ideal in our culture. But today it is one of the last vestiges of the decayed honor/shame family style that allowed some minority (albeit much too large a minority) of men to give vent to the violent results of their flawed personalities by battering their families.
People hid their shame much more back then and suffered greatly for it. Women were much more trapped and had far less opportunity to escape situations like this back then. There are many more shelters now, the law enforcement, therapeutic community, social welfare professionals and the society at large are much more sensitive and aware. There are web sites, books, radio shows, movies and even classes in school. Not that the problem is solved, but as a culture we have made a commitment to a fundamental correction of the cultural weaknesses that allow it to go on.

So, it is with a sudden and overwhelming dismay that I realized, only last week, that two of the true loves of my life have allowed themselves to be locked into the horror of a battered woman and I had been missing the warning signs for years. What’s even worse, almost the entire world has responded just exactly the way those unhelpful advice givers used to in the past.

Thinking back, I can see that the signs were there as much as forty years ago. It began to dawn on me as I was reading (for the second time) the Introduction of Michael Ledeen’s excellent book The Iranian Time Bomb. If you have not read this book, it would be very hard to imagine how you could have a full appreciation of the nature of the Iranian threat.

Ledeen cites a long history of violence by Iran and her surrogates (Hizbollah, Hamas, etc…,) against the U.S., Israel and the west. Interspersed with these violent attacks were dozens of pathetic and futile attempts to “engage,” placate and negotiate by all five U.S. presidents to have served since that time.

Carter, whose hopes of reelection were ruined by the hostage crisis, Ledeen writes “…offered to arm the revolutionary regime within days of the fall of the shah”.

Regan’s administration was humiliated and taunted:

“…In the 1980s, Hizbollah operating in tandem with the PLO organized suicide bombing attacks against the French and American Marine barracks (241 U.S. dead and 58 French), and the American Embassy in Beirut, as well as the kidnappings of American missionaries and military and intelligence officers. Two of the latter were then tortured to death.”

Ledeen gives us Reagan’s response:

“…the Reagan Administration secretly sold weapons to Tehran and provided the mullahs with military intelligence to help in their war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”.

Then there was the Clinton Era and Ledeen continues the list:
In the 1990s, Hizbollah conducted lethal attacks against Jewish targets in Argentina, for which leaders of the Iranian regime have been indicted.”

“The 1998 Embassy bombings in East Africa, for which al Qaeda took full credit, were in large part Iranian operations.”

“…the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 American Air Force personnel were killed and 372 wounded.”

“…the Clinton Administration secretly permitted the Iranians to arm Bosnian Muslim fighters in the Balkans, and secretly permitted the Russians to arm the Iranians and support their nuclear program.”
“Clinton showered largesse on the Iranians, and even dispatched his secretary of state to apologize for real and imagined American sins in decades past. Encouraged by the election reformist Iranian president, Mohammed Khatami, we opened a channel of communications to the highest levels of the regime, liberalized our visa policies, expanded cultural exchanges, and removed the Islamic Republic from the State Department s lists of state sponsors of terrorism and narcotrafficking governments. We even eased the trade embargo. Then came Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s open apology. She apologized for the American role in restoring the shah to his throne in the 1950s. She apologized for American support to the shah prior to the revolution, and for regrettably shortsighted help given to Iraq during the war.”

“Clinton’s many gestures, concessions and giveaways, like those of his predecessors, produced a swift kick to a delicate part of our national anatomy. Supreme Leader Ali Khamene summarily rejected the American demarche, and reiterated the Islamic Republic’s passionate hatred for the American Great Satan.”

Under George W. Bush it has taken far too long to recognize long to identify and move against the Iranian source of aid and personnel to the Insurgency in Iraq. Ledeen says of this,
“This latest intelligence failure proved fatal to a considerable number of Americans, Iraqis, British, Italian, Spanish, Polish and other members of the coalition, along with many more Iraqis, in and out of uniform.”
Time after time Iran has bloodied our nose, killed our people and purposely destabilized their part of the world and George W Bush has, at least until recently, behaved as though it is America who owes Iran the apology.

More quotes from The Iranian Time Bomb:

“…following the defenestration of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Indeed, Iran attempted to foment civil war all over Iraq, aiding both sides in every potential conflict, from Sunni vs. Turkemans vs. Kurds, Arabs vs. Kurds, and so on. It was simply a continuation of the mullahs’ war against America, which had been under way for nearly three decades.”

“Even the Bush Administration, which famously placed Iran alongside North Korea and Iraq as a charter member of the Axis of Evil, pursued a grand bargain with the mullahs, and American officials sometimes made statements as when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage proclaimed that the Islamic Republic was a democracy- that can only be explained as an effort to woo the Iranian leaders.”

“…the Iranians have shown no desire for reconciliation; quite the contrary, unless you think killing Americans on a scale considerably larger than the tempo of murder in the Clinton years represents some odd form of mating dance…The terror war against us now extends to four continents, running from Thailand and Indonesia to India and Pakistan, down the Horn of Africa to Somalia and Yemen and back up to Afghanistan, on to Iraq, Palestine/Israel, and Lebanon, and thence to Europe, the United States and South America. The Iranians are involved in every one of those theaters…They believe they defeated Israel in the summer war of 2006, that they will expand their control over Lebanon in the near future, and in relatively short order destroy the Jewish State. They fully expect to compel us to surrender, and submit to their will.”

Submit to their will! Yes, that is the goal of all abusers. The pathetic, abusive spouse tries to change the all too real failure of his personality and identity by having complete domination of his most intimate partner and if he can’t have domination, he will destroy her. He will never accept that there are limits to his power. The Jihadists are so invested in the supremacy of political Islam that they cannot abide a world in which Jews and Christians are more educated, more productive and, for now at least, still (in spite of their vast oil wealth) more powerful than they are.

And it is apparent that The United States of America has, for some time been caught in a relationship that mirrors the spiraling, escalating violence of domestic abuse. Think about our reactions and compare them with the patterns found in spousal abuse:

• Denial (war is not the answer, they don't really mean they want to kill us)
  
• Guilt (why do they hate us?)
  
• Bargaining (restrict free speech, lowering our standards of behavior and responsibility on the basis of multiculturalism)
  
• Depression and self-hatred (bushitler, code pink) etc…
  

The resemblance is no accident. The Islamic world and Iran in particular does not view the relationships between nations the way we do for the very same reasons that they experience the relationships between individuals differently than we do. In The West we have come to value mutual stability, peace and prosperity above all. In Iran’s world it is about Honor and Shame, about who has power over whom. At the international level it produces terrorism and conquest vs. diplomacy and economic cooperation and at the intimate level it produces submission or honor killing vs. intimacy or divorce. Only in the world of international relations there is no divorce- only war. So while we keep trying to establish a future of intimacy and cooperation, they keep nursing resentment and hatred.

It is not that, in The West, we have perfected our ideal relationship- we obviously have not. It is that we hold the mutual and beneficial as the ideal to strive for. It is why Israel accepted the original partition plan in 1948 and the Arabs did not. It is also why when America was subjected to mass murder, the first reaction of a large proportion of our population was “Why do they hate us?” Was it also the reason why Israel, so much more powerful, organized and accomplished than her tormentors has never used her power to overwhelm and eliminate the Palestinian forces and disperse the refugee camps that support them?

Yes, Israel behaves as a prototypical battered woman too! Actually, Israel even more so! She is subjected to the same pattern- she sustains savage attack after savage attack and her weak, ugly, hate-filled little bed-mate in that narrow little sliver of Israel/Palestine deflects the blame for the violence onto her. All the while the abusive little savage is armed, egged on and supported by the same Iranian fanatics and Saudi plutocrats that have been tormenting America. And a whole world of on-lookers cluck their tongues, tell her to be nice to him, pander to his twisted desires, expect her to submit, placate and even apologize. In the end, even her apology is not enough for them, they will insist that she atone for the miracle blessing of her own rebirth – won out of the ashes of the holocaust and the Arab alliance with Hitler they will not be happy until she admits to their accusation that she does not deserve to live and commits suicide in expiation.

This is the ultimate in what is known as ‘Blaming the Victim” Here is a paragraph from an article on a women’s web site on this issue
“

Victims often go through a period of blaming themselves for their partners’ violence. In reality, we are each responsible for our own behavior. In their efforts to avoid responsibility for their actions, batterers can be quite adept at deflecting blame onto the victim, telling her and others how things she did or failed to do “made” him do it. Unfortunately, there are some traditional cultural ideas that support his reasoning and that are still embraced by some members of our society. That such notions exist in the culture at large, makes it easier for the victim to internalize blame and harder to fight the deflection of responsibility, especially when other people echo the batterer’s excuse-making. Besides being illogical and profoundly unfair, victim blaming traps the victim in a cycle in which she keeps trying (and failing) to avoid abuse by satisfying, and even anticipating, the abuser’s every whim and mood. She fails, of course, because only he is responsible for his behavior.”
In Israel’s case the behavior of the Arab world, even leaving aside that of the Jihadis, has been unforgivable from the start. Every Arab country in the world that was able to field an army, combined forces to try to murder the infant nation of Israel on the very evening of her birth. Even though she was formed in a legal and morally irreproachable way the leaders of the Islamist ad Arab nationalist movements have remained adamant in demanding her destruction ever since. That might have given the world a clue- if they cared about Israel. The fact that the media refers to the violence that results from the warfare to destroy Israel in misleading terms such as “the cycle of violence,” “collective punishment” or “reprisals” shows that they have chosen to ignore the reality of the abusive situation and to “blame the victim”.

Here in the U.S., 1979 should have marked our “consciousness-raising”. The hostage crisis, which began in November of that year, was a grave insult- not just to U.S. interests and prestige but, even more significantly, to the entire civilized process that governs problem resolution and basic relationships between countries. Just like the first time an abuser hauls off and smacks his or her spouse, it was a rupture in the very fabric of the relationship, a rupture that should have told us something fundamental about what we were up against. Diplomatic protocol is a voluntary commitment to live within guideline that foster a civilized approach to living together in a mutually beneficial way. It is, in a way, the inter-national equivalent of “marriage vows” for inter-personal interaction.
There is a war of annihilation declared against the U.S. (and all of Western Civilization) just as there is against Israel. The fact that the nation that wants to annihilate us is not able to do so today is not really relevant.

Here is Ledeen again:

“From the moment of the overthrow of the shah, the leaders of the Islamic Republic have declared, and waged, war against the infidels of the West, above all against Americans and Israelis. The hostage crisis that doomed the Carter presidency was the opening salvo of a long war against America, branded the Great Satan by Khomeini.”

“What are they thinking?” Who cares.
“Why are they attacking us?” Not the right question.
“Why do they hate us”? If you really want to know, listen to what they say. We occupy ourselves with these questions to our own detriment. Condi Rice, as did Albright, Powell, Kissinger and all the others, goes on assuming that she can strike deals based on mutual interests and our respective national priorities. Ledeen gives us a quote from Khomeini that should have disabused us of that folly thirty years ago:

“We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah,” he declared, “For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land (Iran) burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

To me, that sounds like nothing more than a scaled-up, megalomaniacal, religious fanatic version of an abusive husband, so shamed by his life and so committed to preserving his compensatory illusion of complete omnipotence and control by dominating and controlling “his woman\family\world” that he is ready to take her/them/it with him in a murder-suicide.

He couldn’t be more explicit but our diplomats (like our media) ignore his warning. Like the battered spouse, paralyzed by the old fiction of the sacrosanct and unfailingly protective patriarchal family, the soothing but misguided assumptions of multiculturalism and realpolitik have combined to make western civilization into the abused captive of the Islamist Jihad, powerless to use our superior power to defend our civilization.

And now we have the hapless man/infant Obama saying he would sit right down and talk with the mullahs as soon as he is president. He’s pro-dialog. Any part-time social worker in a woman’s shelter can tell you that dialog is just fine when you are negotiating how to share the house work. When violence has happened more than once and is escalating, when that certain someone is declaring an intention to kill you, dialog is a death trap.

And that’s not even the worst news. There is no need for the drama of a whispered phone call about it, they have told us what they plan to do. Ahmadinejad has been crowing about it for a few years now. Don’t look now, but Iran is going out to get The Big Gun. The Iranian nuclear project raises the ante for us just like the gun does for the battered woman in our original example. They have already specifically said they want to use it on Israel. We know they want to destroy all of The West and don’t care if their own country “goes up in smoke” to achieve the ascendance of their brand of Islam. What further question could there be about the gravity of the situation? How many times will we go back to that squalid apartment and try to cook them “just the right dinner”- and get slapped around for our trouble before we get the picture and realize we have to address this as a real threat?
A battered woman can sometimes escape the confrontation by going to a shelter but her abuser is almost always a lost cause. Israel is permanently stuck in the burning bed of “the river to the sea” with the Palestinian abuser and his howling troop of relatives swarm all around her borders. In the U.S. we are still so dependent on Islamist oil that we are forced into a co-dependant, connubial hell. Our options are limited – we have no choice but to find a way to force them to let us live.

Allow me one more Quote from Ledeen:

“We can win or lose, but we cannot escape this confrontation. As Salim Mansur puts it, “To achieve peace and freedom the most bigoted elements within the Muslim world- the Jihadi Muslims and their allies- need to be irrevocably defeated.”

I reached the same conclusion in my series on the erroneous but useful comparison between the American Indian and the Palestinians, conclusive defeat is the only way to resolve the conflict between cultures that are so completely unable to understand each other and whose people have such entirely different desires for their lives.

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.

A Note from the French Lunatic Asylum

I am still working on the next installment of the How Stupid/Wrong/Evil series but I had to get this off my chest.

Richard Landes has a translation of an article from the French weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur up at Augean Stables. Because I am unfamiliar with the naval-gazing world of the French Elite (they invented the word!), at first I thought that “Nouvel Observateur” must be some kind of French Idiom for Lunatic Asylum. The thing is such a monument to un-self conscious self-deification and denial of reality that it reads most readily as either parody or the ravings of the insane. If you read it sentence by sentence and really listen to what they are implying, it really sounds as if it was written by a group of loonies- some who think they are Napoleons, Louis XIV, a few Richelieus and a Robespierre or two- sitting around in the day room of a French mental hospital. I searched some of the names of the signatories and to my surprise, most of them appear to be out on the streets and without psychiatric “paperwork”. So, I guess, it turns out that we were meant to take it seriously.

This, then, is another and much more frightening story. Richard, who has now posted a brilliant analysis of the political and cultural implications in addition to the original translation, has summed up the demopathic thrust of it very well. I looked back at his translation of the original document, though, and I feel compelled to off my own version of it. Richard, as usual was at great pains to get meanings and tones right. As a result he was able to preserve much of the delusional veneer of reasonableness that holds the piece together.
I was so taken by the absolutely delusional arrogance and self-congratulatory tone I just had to do a re-translation of my own. I have tried to open up the text so that we can see what is going on in their minds and hearts. Richard’s translation is below in black and mine is interspersed in red.

Seven years. It’s now seven years that a obstinate and hateful campaign has tried to tarnish the professional dignity of our colleague Charles Enderlin, correspondent for France2 in Jerusalem.

Seven years! Mon Dieux! These Jews have long memories! This is getting serious; people are actually starting to pay attention! That’s why, in this entire mewling, deceptive screed we will never once mention the scabrous nature of the libel that Charles Enderlin committed and we are denying. We really don’t care about the anguish it cased the Jews. Let’s not mention all the bloodshed suffered in Israel either. Forget the civil war and deprivation in the Palestinian territories. Who cares about the terror it inspired all around the world. So what if when we finally get to the end of this great steaming pile of rubbish we will have done nothing but shown that we are more concerned with issues of false dignity and personal honor than we are about the accuracy and honesty of what we actually do and our effect on the world. Maybe if we keep talking about dignity and professionalism, though, they notice we are all basically a bunch of pompous, venal, lazy, opinionated fools too… It shouldn’t be a surprise- as our resident Napoleons have said, “Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.”

For seven years the same individuals have attempted to present as a “hoax” and a “series of staged scenes” his report showing the death of Mohammed al-Doura, 12 years old, killed by fire coming from the Israeli position on the 30 of September 2000 in the Gaza Strip during a confrontation between the Israeli army and armed Palestinians.

We are not going to name the people who are “persecuting” our friend Charles because, frankly some of them have more reputable jobs than we do and we want to make them look like a small group of fringe nuts. This is a little trick we learned in journalism school, just one of the reasons we feel superior to ordinary people and immune to their ridiculous desire to “understand what really happened”. We have no intention of playing their game and looking honestly at the evidence they have put together. We will simply re-assert the same hideous libel that got Charles in trouble in the first place. We do this because it is so obviously untrue that now, after seven years of supporting it blindly, we could not possibly bear to do what Enderlin and the rest of us should have done in the beginning: look at all the evidence as objectively as possible. Here is the equation; Enderlin accuses the Jews unjustly because he believes he is doing a greater justice for the Palestinians. Then the Palestinians, who started the hoax in the first place, use the unjust accusations against the Jews to rationalize terror, intransigence and murder. Enderlin, instead of being horrified by the libel and bloodshed he has helped to create, becomes horrified by the possibility that he might be exposed as a lazy repeater of lies and a tool of the propagandists, decides that among the tough choices he had that it would be a higher benefit for all of humanity for him to defend his squalid career and fight the truth coming out- right down to the last Israeli. We agree! Because if Enderlin can loose his credibility just because he told lies that resulted in thousands of deaths, we might be vulnerable too!

On the 19 of October 2006, the correctional tribunal of Paris had judged the principle animator of this campagne, Philippe Karsenty, guilty of defamation.

On the 19 of October 2006, the cause of arrogant dignity won the first battle. It was a great victory, really. It should have ended, once and for all the amusing notion that Charles had anything to “explain” to these people. The judge in that trial was our kind of jurist! He ignored the existence of evidence that showed it really was a hoax. It should have been a lesson to everyone! Charles said it happened, why should it matter if it happened or not? Louis XIV over here (actually there are a few of him here) used to say “the state is me” (L’etat c’est moi )back in the old days. That was before he was an august French journalist now we all live by his revamped motto “the truth is me” (la vérité c'est moi).

The decision rendered on the 21 of May by the appeals court of Paris, invoked by Philippe Karsenty recognizes that the claims made by him “unquestionably struck at the honor and professional reputations of the information professionals” but admits, curiously, that the “good faith” of Philippe Karsenty, who “exercised his right to free criticism” and “did not transgress the limits of free speech.” This decision which exonerates Philippe Karsenty both surprises and worries us.

Speaking of the good old days, whatever happened to the times when you could say anything you wanted to about the Jews and they would just be so glad you weren’t beating them with whips they would take it and say “thank you”. But noooo, this guy Karsenty appealed his conviction! They feel they have the right to ask questions and to see proof- what an insult this is to the dignity of a true journalist- an information professional! OK, so on the appeal the court said that Karsenty “did not transgress to limits of free speech,” but they did say that his claims “unquestionably struck at the honor and professional reputations of the information professionals”, (Oh, wait, that must mean that the judges thought that it was accurate enough to warrant questioning his honor and professional reputation. Sacre Bleu,! I’d better steer away from the part of the judgment where the judges agreed with Karsenty that the preponderance of the evidence was in support of Karsenty’s claims)

We are surprised, because it grants the same credibility to a journalist known for the seriousness and rigor of his work, who exercises his profession in sometimes difficult conditions, and to his detractors, engaged in a campaign of negation and discrediting, who ignore all the realities of the terrain and have no experience of reporting from a conflict zone

We are surprised and shocked! How could the court do this? Don’t they know that each journalist is like a little Richelieu whose every word is the emerging truth and whose dignity is as sacred as it is transparent and undeserved. Have you ever seen The Killing Fields or All the Presidents Men, or The Year of Living Dangerously? Well we are now, with transparent cynicism, going to try to imply that Enderlin is that kind of journalist. Besides, you have no idea how serious and rigorous it is sitting on ones’ flaccid behind in comfortable salons in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and sipping Merlot and sorting through the crap that whatever contacts from the Palestinian Propaganda Ministry have weaseled their way into your confidence send by.

It worries us, because it gives permission in the future for a “permission to defame” journalists, which would permit anyone, in the name of “good faith” and “the right of free criticism,” to strike with impunity at the “honor and reputation of information professionals.”

It worries us because, just as the first Richelieu believed that nothing trumped the power of the State, we believe that the authority over what is and is not true must rest in the hands of the Information Professionals. I mean, if we allow any schmoe whose only authority is “good Faith” or “the right to free speech” to question with impunity what we say and write, that’s going to lead to chaos. Zut allors! the next thing you know, facts will become known, debates will break out and people might even try to think for themselves. 

We are the Information Professionals, people, we will tell you what to think!

At a time when the freedom of action of journalists is the object of repeated attacks, we invoke our attachment to this fundamental principle, pillar of democracy and we renew our support and solidarity with Charles Enderlin.

These are tough times for Journalism. First the Jihadists, and Palestinians intimidate us with violence, loss of access and even kidnapping so that we are terrified not to repeat all the stuff they stage and write. Then the Israelis show us up for the pusillanimous humbugs that we have allowed ourselves to become- its just not fair! We still want you to believe that we are still a pillar of democracy, even while we have allowed the Islamists to turn us into a weapon against democracy. But our highest allegiance is to our pathetic selves and the cynical pose of mock nobility to which we pretend. That’s why we are with Chuck! We’ll do anything to preserve our position and privilege. That’s why we want Enderlin to keep pursuing Karsenty and his supporters. We need to destroy them all. As Richelieu once said, “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him”. To us, there are things that are more important than honesty, accuracy and free speech. Oh, Robespierre wants us to say, “Omelettes are not made without breaking eggs”

How Stupid/Wrong/Evil Were They?-Part 1- The BBC

Is anyone else wondering where the media is? No, I know the newspapers are still grinding out the daily sausage and the anchor people are still hailing out to the reporters “at the scene”. I am talking about how deserted The Mohammed al Dura Affair that, once enticing and popular swimming pool of the media, has become. Where reporters, anchor people and foreign correspondents used to frolic, splash and gaily hold the gasping reputations of Israel and the Jewish people under water for hours at a time- and pull their bathing suits down and stab them repeatedly and mutilate their corpses? Now that the French courts have cleared Israel’s name and shown the whole thing to be a hoax, it is as quiet and desolate around the al Dura pool it is almost as though someone had floated a big ole economy sized Oh Henry bar out into the water.

Where are the defamers and slanderers now? How do they feel when they look back on that frenzy, when they were fairly quivering with orgiastic glee as they clattered out calumny on their keyboards or yodeled their voice-overs into the rising chorus of the media lynching of Israel in September and October of 2000.

This first and paradigmatic blood libel of the twenty-first century, the Muhammad al Dura affair was launched by the arch media megalomaniac and soulless dupe Charles Enderlin, but it was sustained and propagated by a legion of other egomaniacal progressive ax-grinders, a stampede of sincere but addled multiculturalists and a diverse assortment of media whores with a wider variety of unwholesome agendas than a naked antiwar street parade in Berkeley.

I’ve been going back to see what they were saying at the time and I will compile it here. Maybe some of the perpetrators will consider what they have done and take at least some of it back.
The byline-less article on the BBC website from October2, 2000 is where everyone else starts. You can always count of the BBC for the gold standard in snide, superior, “butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths” anti-Semitism/Zionism.

It’s pathetic enough that the article uncritically uses the wildest accusations and the most damning language taken from Enderlin’s report. For instance they repeat his allegation that the gunfire was so unremitting for 45 minutes that all the father (Jamal) could do was try to shelter Mohammed, implying that in 45 minutes there was never an opportunity to get out of the line of fire. Forty-five minutes is an eternity when you are firing high-powered military rifles, never mind trying to weather the fusillade. Then they call the boy, “a new martyr for the Palestinian cause”.

The most telling stuff, though, is the two quotes from the boy’s parents.

Little Mohammed’s Mom is quoted as saying, and the BBC quotes the father (allegedly lying in the hospital with life-threatening wounds) as saying his son died for "the sake of Al-Aqsa Mosque" The BBC is not this stupid.

Did an actual BBC reporter hear them say those things? Or was is a Palestinian official that passed on the thoughts of the faux-bereft mother and father?

You cannot tell me that the pointy-headed dupes at BBC saw nothing about these two quotes that would arouse suspicions that there was something odd, some kind of stage-managing, and manipulation going on here. Mere hours after her son goes off for the day on errands with his father and is allegedly cut down unexpectedly but intentionally by Israeli gunfire the mother says, “This was his sacrifice for our homeland, for Palestine”? What exactly does she mean, “his sacrifice”? Only if they did something heroic to save others, has anyone ever spoken of any of the office workers on 9/11 as having made “a sacrifice”. The firefighters and policemen made sacrifices. Surely, people in the towers who stayed to help others made sacrifices. The passengers on flight 93 made a sacrifice in their courageous uprising because, even though they would have died anyway, there is no question that they traded the last few minutes of their lives to protect the safety of others on the ground.

No, but they probably did feel OK about ignoring that suspicion. How do they rationalize it? First of all, they are in a very competitive business. This stuff is big news and the world wants to see it.

Then there is the fact that they know that if they say anything that The Palestinians do not like, they will find their sources of news dry up very quickly. They can’t even send their most supine toadies for the “Palestinian Cause” there anymore without them being attacked, kidnapped and otherwise intimidated. So they, like Charles Enderlin, have become dependant on Palestinian and other Islamist operatives masquerading as journalists. They know that the honest, democratic Israelis are boring and not a source for sensational news so they are stuck with being tools of the Fatah and Hamas propaganda machines.

How do they disguise pathetic gaffes and inconsistencies for their Palestinian controllers? Well, look at this story. For one thing, if you went to the link above, you will notice that they isolated the two quotes out of the mainstream of the story. They do not comment or elaborate. They certainly do not tell you how they got the quotes. There is no phrase like “His mother told BBC’s Alan Johnston” or “Sources at the hospital told BBC that the father said,” as you would expect to see in a story that was giving you all the information you need to understand the situation.

Then too, they can always fall back on the soft-racism of lowered expectations. That is to say the filthy, ragged back edge of the multicultural sword is that minorities and other cultures are held to reduced standards of humanity- always low enough so that they cannot fail the test. Do they intentionally kill innocent civilians? Do they endanger their own children by putting them in front of gunmen and hiding their missile launchers in their elementary schools? Oh, ah, that’s understandable. Do they publicly and vehemently call for the death of everyone else in the world that they don’t agree with? Yes, well, I’m sure that’s just a “cultural” thing I’m sure they don’t mean it the way it sounds. Do they teach their children that everyone that does not worship the exact same God in the exact same way is not human- a pig- a monkey- a dog? Hmmm, okay, that’s not ideal but they have a history of treating their slaves and sub-humans with mercy- most of the time, uh well a lot of the time, well, alright… sometimes.

At any rate, it does not seem likely to me that the BBC got the quote directly from the parents. If they did, all the sadder for the parents. Clearly, if a mother and father say the exact same insensitive crap about the (faked and/or staged) death of their son with identical political bravado, it rings no alarm in the minds of anyone and the very politically correct and even more venal BBC.

Coming next: Cynthia Cotts- the least accurate sentence I have yet discovered in a written article about al Dura.

Another Thank You- This Time Hold the Sarcasm

I am posting this for two reasons:
1. I am proud to have recieved it
2.I want to pass it along, in a public forum, to every blogger and concerned citizen who posted, emailed and linked the Open Thank You to Charles Enderlin and France2.

We made quite an impression on Google and that makes at least some impression on anyone who Googles Enderlin and France2; and now we know that Philippe has read it and has gotten some well-deserved support from our efforts. Its a good day!

Here is the email I recieved from him last night:

Dear Yaacov,

I’ve loved your open letter to Enderlin.
If by any chance you receive an answer, please let me know!
Warm regards,

Philippe Karsenty

Right back attcha Philippe-

Oh, and I might just say that somehow I don't think I'll be getting any reply from Mr. Enderlin or his lawyers. I"m pretty sure that even he doesn't want to advertise his shame anymore than he has already committed to.

ANYONE WHO WANTS TO BE INCLUDED IN FUTURE SWARMS SEND ME YOUR EMAILS! at yaacovbenmoshe (at sign) comcast .net

Loose Lips Sink Ships- Lessons from al Durah

Richard Landes has a speedily done translation of the court decision up at Augean Stables. This is an astonishing document. It is a glimmer of faithful justice- of Western honesty and courage in a sea of post-modern cynicism; a respite from the onslaught of relativism and moral cowardice.

Is it merely one of the last, flickering flashes of light from the bridge of a sinking ship or is it a signal that the once again the ideals and fairness of the enlightenment are back in charge and pumps will be turned on, at last, to try to save her?

The language is thick and legal and Richard warns that there could be corrections needed but there are a few things that are clear to The Court:
1. Enderlin reported on a staged event as if it was real.
2. The Israelis did not harm, much less target the boy and his father.
3. His report "drew in its wake unprecedented violence throughout the region"
4. In trying to defend his indefensible unprofessionalism he added serious lies and distortions to the original offense.

Two even more important revelations have come out of the al Durah affair. They were not articulated in the decision document but it are very much in the background throughout.

One is that It is now patent and part of the public record that Jihadists have taken the use of the media as a weapon of war to new and deadly standard. Richard Landes has invented a new word, "Pallywood", to describe the tactical practices they employ, the staging of news events, intimidation and manipulation of foreign journalists and the infiltration of the western mainstream media by local "stingers" (many of whom are nothing more than operatives of the palestinian propaganda ministries) This "weaponization" of our media can no longer be denied.

We have also, now derived a new and very clear cautionary tale that might serve as an inspiration (or, at least, a deterrent) for other western media to learn from.

Charles Enderlin, whether he lied intentionally or was duped, got caught. Instead of coming clean and helping to right the ship, he tried to save face by suing. Were it not for the terrible toll in blood and death he has caused, it would have been comical. He did the equivalent of drilling holes in the bottom of the boat to let the water out. I hope the lesson gets through to his fellow journalists. They are the ones most capable and in the best position to can pump the poison out of the bilges and save the ship.

An Open Thank You Letter to Charles Enderlin and France2

Thank You Charles Enderlin and France2-

We have to admit we were angry with you for libeling Israel that we wanted to get you to take it back. It wasn’t just anger. We wanted to make it impossible for you to ever release such a tidal wave of violence and blood on us again. After the disastrous aftermath of your al Durah report, so many people suffered and died, we have come to think of you more as a war criminal than just an unethical journalist. Really, we do not feel that you deserve to be thought of as an honorable journalist. Fortunately for us your character flaws have relieved us of the responsibility to attack you. If you had ignored our criticism, let the whole thing drop and not sued anyone you would still be on top of the world today and Israel and the Jewish people would still be blackened by your libel.

Your restless guilt and vanity would not let you do the smart thing, though, and you sued Philipe Karsenty. Only those blinded by self-importance and its underlying insecurity, on the one hand, and driven by a need to deny fault on the other, would have felt the need.

So you showed your weakness and hubris just by filing the suit. Even more important though, from your law suit flowed the healing drama in the French courtroom in March. First, you demeaned yourself by bringing obviously altered tape into evidence into the courtroom. Then you further revealed your self delusion by pretending not to notice the derisive laughter of the gallery or that even the judge who was questioning you was treating you and your evasive explanations with amused disdain.

Now that the judgment is published, Charles, we are very pleased to see that you are going to do your best to help us to help you to complete your self-destruction by taking it to a higher court. We never had the stomach for the dirty fight you are waging we do not like to destroy other people- no matter how richly deserved. We, therefore are especially grateful to you that you have not had the moral fiber to resist you darker instincts and have thereby undertaken to do the job yourself.

We are not character assassins- but we are enjoying immensely watching your character commit a spectacularly public suicide.

Sincerely,
Yaacov Ben Moshe,
Second Draft

The Worm Turns

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
William Blake

The invisible worm has been busy on the rose of western democracy. All over the world we have been waking up to hidden disintegration and malignant disease in places every bit as tender, intimate and sensitive to our civilization as Blakes’ bed of Crimson joy was to the mythical rose.

I have watched as a group of bloggers- friends and allies of democracy- have been besieged by unprincipled, self aggrandizing, professional litigants who, using the Human Rights Commission, which was meant to be an instrument of help and shelter for the vulnerable has been turned around and made into a weapon to harass honest people into silence and to prosecute those who disagree with Progressive group-think. It is as if they woke up one morning to find the invisible worm nestled into their ears, toward their brains, telling them what not to think- what not to say, forcing them to fight an ominous but valiant struggle against the erosion of free speech in Canada.
I have seen Israel behaving as though she is powerless to defend herself from the blackest kind of blood libel. So bound to her bed and gagged is she by lawyers in the armed forces and doctrinaire judges telling her what is unthinkable, un-sayable and un-doable that her barbaric enemies make free with her honor and reputation until she cannot hold her head up in public.

Even here in the U.S. the State Department has decided that the words “jihad,” “jihadist,” and “mujahedeen” may no longer be used to describe people, most of whom proclaim themselves to be Jihadists and/or mujahedeen and who are proud enough to proclaim a Jihad against us and our government. This is not just a violation of free speech, it is suicide. What insanity is it that moves us to make it impossible to speak the name of the worm, this worm that seeks out our most vital organs of democracy and uses the very warmth and protection that nurtures our freedom to feed its greedy parasitic lethal intentions?

The name of the insanity is Demopathy. Demopathy is any action or intentional inaction which uses the language, logic and/or law of democratic society to misappropriate, weaken, undermine, subvert, or overthrow democratic society.
When Jihadists and their enablers file Human Rights complaints or throw the cover of politically correct non-speech over their intention to institute a world-wide Shari’a Caliphate this is the quintessence of Demopathy. When the western mainstream media helps that same enemy to concoct frauds that impugn and parayze Israel and America it is nothing less than Demopathic treason.

Yet another sleeper has awakened with horror this morning. In a French courtroom, a panel of judges has thrown back the sheets and begun the process of extirpating a nest of worms that has bred for far too long in the dark confines of their government owned media agency France 2. The most visible and egregious of these worms is Charles Enderlin who, this morning, lost on appeal his quest to keep the covers closed on one of the most damaging and bloody libels in the history of journalism. For four years, as his culpability in aiding the Pallywood propaganda machine in foisting the al Durah fraud on the world has slowly revealed itself, Enderlin has pursued a law suit, the sole purpose of which, has been to keep his incompetence and guilt out of the public eye.

He has fooled nobody. The disgrace of Charles Enderlin has begun but we cannot stop there. This is a seminal opportunity to shine light on the complicity of all of the world’s media, not just in propagating the al Durah blood libel but in perpetuating a Demopathic cycle of damaging propaganda being produced by Islamist operatives and mainlined into Western Culture by thousands of journalists who, like Enderlin, have compromised their professional codes of ethics and become conduits of demopathic poison.
More on Augean Stables

Lies Our Media Tells Us

I’ve been reading. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is a brilliant book. Not since Lee Harris’ great Suicide of Reason, have I been so riveted by a book. Originally published in 1985, and recently re-released with a new introduction by the author’s son (Postman died in 2003) it is still essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the media. (Oh, look, there it is, over there in the left hand margin! Just click on the picture of it to buy a copy from Amazon… Gee, Suicide of Reason is there too!)

Of course a lot has changed since 1985 but Postman’s landmark book puts everything in context. Postman understood television exquisitely well and the seeds of our current dilemma were sown in the television age. He was the one who coined the term “infotainment” to describe the softened, cooled out non-news that evolved on television. Even though the hegemony of TV over our news consciousness is now passing into history, its effect on the way we experience the world is still very strong.

You can see the effect of it in multiculturalism and political correctness which have been bred in the hot-house environs of local and network news broadcasts where the only talk about “hot” subjects like race, or religion and the only mention hot terms like “terrorists” when they can’t avoid it and even then in apologetic and equivocal ways. The TV medium, Postman tells us cultivates such “cool” issue avoidance because the medium cultivates an audience that is stultifyingly passive and entertainment oriented. As he wrote in 1985 he described, with horror, a society sliding inexorably down into a “Huxleyan” totalitarian Brave New World. He was right about the slide but he did not see the crocodile waiting at the bottom of the slope.

Even though he did not see it, he perfectly described the ignorant arrogance and soporific inattention with which western populations have allowed the media to anesthetize them to the very real threat of Caliphate Islam and lull them into acquiescence to the creeping resurgence of the already failed ideology of world socialism. With every new “big story” we get closer to the waiting jaws.

A case could be made that in the age of television, and especially since 1967, there has not been a news event of major transformative effect that has not been presented to the public without serious distortions. Some have been outright lies. The seriousness of the effects of these distortions cannot be understated. Here are a variety of examples:

• In 1967 the world was given the impression that the great victory in The Six Day War had solved the Middle East problem and secured Israel’s existence. This distorted view has set the stage for the Arabs, who still vastly outnumber the Israelis, are far richer and have an undiminished desire to utterly destroy Israel, to claim the mantel of “underdog” and even “victim” in the eyes of a majority of Europeans and very large numbers of Americans.

• The defeat of the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968 was presented as proof that further support of freedom in Southeast Asia was futile. This perception turned allied victory into defeat and caused a substantial bloodbath in Viet Nam and contributed heavily to the cataclysm in neighboring Cambodia

• In 1987 the video of the Rodney King incident was shown over and over to the public on the evening news without the first segment of it which showed King attacking one of the officers. The public then could not understand the verdict when the jury (who, in court, had seen King’s aggressive attack) acquitted the police officers. The reverberations of the riots, in which 48 people died, that followed are still poisoning the “conversation about race” in the US today.

• The systematic demonization of the Serbs in the Balkans and the complete bestowal of “victim-hood” on the Moslems of Kosovo. Led to allied bombing of the Serbs and an overall tilt toward the Moslem side which gave prestige, courage and comfort to many foreign Islamist fighters who were active in the Balkans at the time. Many of those fighters, including Osama bin Laden himself, have gone on to terrorist activities against the west.

• The al Durah blood libel poured fuel on the fires of Islamist Jihad and the resulting wave of “retaliatory” violence that reference al Durah included the Ramallah lynchings, the beheading of Daniel Perl and 9/11. Even more damaging than the directly related violence, though, is that the wide acceptance of this particular fraud as truth has given credence to every other fraud, misrepresentation and slander since that time.

Postman saw no remedy for the distortions when he wrote his last edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1987 but he could not have foreseen the sweeping changes of the last twenty years. The blind, soporific, hypnotizing blandness of the television screen has begun to yield to the computer screen with its infinite array of connections and (most importantly) its keyboard. This new medium gives hope that the endemic diseases of coolness and trivialized amusement” which contributed to Postman’s bleak outlook might find antidotes in the new millennium.

This is why I consider myself so fortunate to be working with Richard Landes to create Second Draft. Richard is uniquely qualified to understand and guide the process of finding these antidotes as this new and disruptive technology begins to correct the distorted old media. He is a specialist in millennial studies and the transformations wrought by new media of communication. He is able to put the changes we are experiencing now into a broad historical perspective. Our team at Second Draft is ready to build on the track record of success- to research and implement these antidotes.

One of the best antidotes we have in hand is the blog uprising. There is a major one, for instance, going on in Canada. Mark Steyn, my friend Blazing Cat Fur, Kathy at Five Feet of Fury, Kate at Small Dead Animals, WebElf Binky and so many other smart-mouths really seem to have begun a groundswell against the absurd neo-fascist CHRC. Many other blogs have tweaked the Religion of Pandemonium by running “ the cartoons, etc…, Maybe we at Second Draft need to set aside some resources to foster, manage and perpetuate Blog Swarming…

Stay tuned- Oh, by the way did I mention we are a 501 c 3 and are tax deductable?

Second Draft - Our Declaration of War

Breath of the Beast has been quiet for a couple of weeks now and my friends, allies and constructive critics know that when that happens, something very important must be distracting my attention. I am happy to say that we have moved into a new phase at Second Draft. Richard and I have been pounding out our detailed plan to establish Second Draft as the Organization of Record for the quest for honest and ethical media. The written plan is important because it will serve as our primary planning and fundraising instrument. It is, I say this in all modesty, a comprehensive plan to first understand and then to motivate change in the mainstream media. Here is our Executive Summary-

The Unique Mission of Second Draft

Why are there so many anti-Zionist Jews? Why do so many Westerners hate Israel and America? Why do so many people assume that our government is always wrong, fundamentally bad? Why do the media always seem to ignore, make excuses for or gloss over the actions of terrorists, hateful Imams and extremist Mullahs who spread virulent hatred and the violence it inspires?

Israel’s fight for survival is a microcosm of the conflict between Caliphate Islam and Western democratic Civilization. This is a complex and deadly conflict, made more deadly than necessary by lack of inter-cultural understanding. Among the major contributors to this incomprehension, the mainstream media plays a critical role. The media’s failure to realize how our enemies systematically exploit them in the asymmetrical war on democracy makes them easy dupes in that war. The media are not alone as dupes though, as westerners, we are all hobbled by many cultural blind spots.

Key Western Blind Spots (what psychologists call cognitive egocentrism)

• Believing they (the Islamists) are just like us. (tolerant and open)
• Thinking they want the same things we want (peace, liberty and autonomy in a civil society).
• hoping that we can find a “win-win” co-survival arrangement with them (positive-sum).
• Supposing that if we extend the hand of friendship they will return the favor.
• Feeling that if they are angry at us, we must have done something to make them angry.

In order to apprehend the true nature of the conflict we need to:

• See how these blind spots render us incapable of understanding the conflict

• Understand how our mainstream media, sharing those same blind spots, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation by the enemy in this asymmetrical warfare.

• Develop simple reality testing exercises to reveal these misconceptions.

• Improve our own and our media’s ability to detect and challenge the distortions introduced by the Jihadi PR machine.

• Reaffirm that our highest values; the democratic social and political rights of tolerance, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion are sacred but are a two-way street and must only be granted to those who honor them in return. Those who use them to undermine the society (e.g. seek to curtail freedom of speech to prevent hurt feelings), degrade the culture (e.g. allow honor-killing, wife-beating, female circumcision, and the burkha) and to mortgage the future (e.g. stop teaching the superiority of western democratic values in schools) must be denied those very rights.

When a group aims to degrade the rights and liberties of others, as does Caliphate Islam, we must find civil and lawful ways of recognizing and neutralizing that threat. If we do not, our blind spots will remain breeding places for political-correctness, cultural relativism and moral equivalence- all of which are corrosive of the ability of our democratic culture to sustain itself in a battle with the pre-modern forces of religious imperialism.

At Second Draft we go beyond the daily identification and fixing of inaccuracies, to identify the fundamental sources of the problem and, targeting them, help to build a more alert, effective cultural response. Our research and communications reveal the blind spots and restore clear cultural vision.

The Jihadis use the mainstream media as a theater of war (where they are, till now, consistently successful), our first step in building that cultural defense, and Second Draft’s highest priority, is to not only challenge our journalists to inform us more accurately but to understand that real accuracy requires knowing where the blind spots are and learning what is in them.

END

Important: Join us in our Declaration of War!

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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.

Why Good People Believe Bad Things

Unconscious Anti-Semitism, Anti-Westernism and the Mainstream Media

How do people who are not anti-Semitic come to behave, think and speak in anti-Semitic ways? Why do well intentioned people who enjoy all the advantages of living in free and prosperous countries come to question and even revile the protectors of their good fortune? It has a lot to do with the way the media presents the world to us.

As individuals, we experience the world around us through our five senses. On a cultural level, the media are our eyes and ears, the lens through which we experience the world beyond our immediate experience. We depend on the media to bring us an undistorted representation of that larger world so that we can understand and adapt to it.

Many people of many political persuasions complain about the media lens’ distortions, which, they all feel is biased against them. The news media often point to this widespread disapproval as a good sign. “After all,” they say, “If no one is happy with us then that must mean that we are doing a good job, that we are fair.”

But the very concept of fairness may be the problem. Fairness and its often silent partner “evenhandedness” are the fulcrum by which the media’s good intentions are flipped into the upside-down world of moral relativism and political correctness. The media’s job is not to find the mid-point of competing political agendas, but to report the news regardless of how that plays out for or against any particular group’s interests. In the name of “fairness” our media too often aim for a sort of "average" position between opposing groups. Whether those opposing groups are political parties, cultures that are competing for survival or warring armies, the "mid point" between them is seldom anything but a barren no man’s land. The sort of fairness that we find routinely in the media is, at best a morally blind position based on reporting both sides equally credibly and credulously. The reason that no one seems to be satisfied that we are not getting fair and honest representations of events is, simply, that we are not.

This tautology of universal offense is one of the hand-maidens to the most dangerous public delusion in Western Civilization: moral relativism, which holds that no set of values or opinion or culture is superior to any other. This radical variant of multiculturalism, which refuses to judge other cultures by our own (or any) standards, dominates much of the media and academia.

It seems safe to say that in all of human history there has never been a conflict in which both parties were exactly as right (or good - or nice) as the other. In truth, the morally neutral approach actively undermines the side with the most moral clarity and confers an unfair advantage on any side that is less democratic, ethical and open. So why is the media intent on making believe that all causes are equal?

Leaving aside the reporters and outlets who are anti-Semitic and virulently pro-Arab, there is still a very strong anti-Israel bias to the mainstream media (and academia) that is directly traceable to this pernicious moral relativity. How does a measure whose avowed purpose is the elimination of bias become the source of bias and distortion? It is in the very nature of moral relativism- It Is a willful denial of real differences and denial can only ever deepen any crisis. Without trustworthy media, the more tolerant and open the culture, the more paralyzed and defenseless it is. Honesty in reporting requires, not blank indifference to cultural and moral values, but a firm grasp on the consequences of ideas and actions. Truly fair reporting does not present the average between two sides in a dispute; it finds the real center of gravity, based on the best estimate of the moral values of each side and presents the relationship as accurately as possible.

Nowhere is this problem of moral relativism more acute than in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arabs have no compunction against making wild accusations. They make claims of humiliation, land theft, collective punishment, apartheid and massacres that never happened against Israel. Even though they have been exposed In many notorious fakes (al Durah, Jenin, Gaza Beach Kfar Qana…) they persist becausee the tactic succeeds. It succeeds because when the media tries to find the "evenhanded" center point between those wild inaccuracies and the honest, reasoned, compassionate apologetic approach of the Israelis, they invariably throw up their hands and say, “Who are we to judge?” or “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” and find some way of reporting the events that put them half way between the wild lies and the halting attempt at truth. The Palestinians and their supporters are enraged because their outrageous accusations are softened a little and the Israelis are exasperated because they have once again been reported to be war criminals when they are nothing of the kind. The “fair" version is skewed far out of the real center point that Israel's integrity and earnest search for evidence is rewarded with labels like– apartheid, pariah and even Nazi. She winds up being tried and convicted in the kangaroo court of the "evenhanded" media of disproportionate response, massacres of civilians and collective punishment. All too often Israel and her supporters neglect to appeal this injustice and through their inaction the accusations stick.

Of course, this tendency to settle for the morally blind “geographical” measure of the center-point of a dispute, while pointedly ignoring the moral and cultural dimensions of it, is not just a media disease. In the culture at-large the uninformed, the morally weak, the self-loathing, and the politically immature flock to organizations and ideas that feed from this same trough. Sabeel, International Solidarity Movement and the various Israel divestment proposals (Academic, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian) all lean on this central distortion of reality to support their activities. While it is true that some of these are motivated, at least partially by good intentions, many are moved by insensate Jew-hatred dressed up in genteel clothing. almost all have some mixture of the two.

Under normal circumstances, Israel's lack of self defense and the rest of the world's general disinterest in correcting the media is a mere disorder in judgment that might pass for generosity of spirit – Israel and the Western democracies are strong and can afford to be self-critical; Arab and Muslim countries have great difficulty dealing with modernity and need a break. But under current conditions of waxing global Jihad, the current media (and academic) approach is backfiring – disguising Jihadi aggression through (polite) under-reporting, encouraging that same aggression by a disproportionate self-criticism that registers as weakness, failing to hold the Arab world and their western abettors (journalists and their dupes) to any standards, undermining genuine moderates who really do want to live up to modern standards, and paralyzing Western capacities to resist Jihadi aggressions. The moral inversion whereby Israelis and Americans are spoken of as “state-sponsored” terrorists resisting Palestinian or Iraqi “freedom fighters” has catastrophic consequences for the Western world and any human being interested in Liberty.

The situation could be improved dramatically if the media would just be honest and accurate. Instead of contorting themselves, obfuscating their stories and persecuting their readers/listeners/viewers with evasive and inexact politically correct jargon, they should forget about balancing their spin on the news to keep everybody equally dissatisfied and concentrate on the facts and the realities. That will make those who most deserve to be unhappy the unhappiest.


Update:
Kate at Small Dead Animals (welcome SDA readers!) linked here with this quote added:

"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

My thanks to Kate- this is a great quote!

Austin Olney, Another Great Dead White Man

I met Austin Olney through his daughter who was a friend of mine in college.

I came across his obituary in tonight’s newspaper and although it has been a number of years since I have seen him, I was deeply touched. I admired Austin and, like so many others, was nurtured just by knowing him. His obit barely scratches the surface of the list of authors whose works he coaxed to higher levels of honesty and craft. I was privileged to have spent a little time with him at the house in Marlborough, NH and fifteen or twenty years ago we climbed Mt Monadnock together a couple of times. He helped me to develop my writing skills and encouraged me to believe in myself as a writer and thinker.

Even though I had allowed myself to fall out of touch, I have carried the warmth of his easy and tolerant friendship with me, in some way, ever after.

He touched a great many lives in a positive way. He was an inveterate instigator of creative and intellectual fun and ferment. He had a wonderful, generous way of correcting and encouraging at the same time- but to me, the greatest gift was that way that he had of finding the profound, the good and the humorous in everything. It was a kind of unselfconscious spirituality.

One day, on the lower reach of the white cross trail of Monadnock, as we returned to the base after a climb with my two oldest sons, I remarked to Austin that the boys were bickering with each other quite a bit lately. Austin chuckled and told me about the time his mother (I think it was his mother) was getting irritated with the bickering of the young Austin and his fractious siblings and cousins at some family get-together. He recalled for me how his grandmother had altered the spirit of the day (and taught everyone a beautiful lesson) when she laughed and said, “Yes, isn’t it wonderful how much they care!” This was how Austin corrected- with love and humor. I may be one of the least of his mourners but I am no less sincere for that. I am very grateful to have known him.

It is a sharp irony for me that my dad, who was a lot like Austin in many ways, died last October 11th and Austin passed just a few days short of my father’s birthday.

Think Happy Thoughts About People Who Want to Kill You!

The BBC has excellent news! The Gallup Study of the Muslim World suggests that the problem of Islamist violence is easy to solve. All we have to do is concentrate on thinking happy thoughts about Muslims and all the problems will go away.

Well, actually, it does require four other little things:
1. Believe all the self delusion and lies Muslims tell pollsters
2. Pointedly ignore the gaping holes in their perception of reality that the
pollsters forget to ask about
3. Revile anyone who notices the inconsistencies as an “extreme right winger”
4. Be willing to blame Western Civilization, America, President Bush and The
Jews for everything

Here’s how it works:

Last week I followed a link from LGF to the BBC Web Site and for a few seconds, I thought I had clicked onto The Onion by mistake. The article was titled Most Muslims 'desire democracy' “Yeah, sure, democracy and Sharia law, what a natural combination!” I thought, to myself, “They go together like feminism and burkhas; this is going to be good”

The first paragraph was only one sentence long- but what a breath-taking little stanza:

“The largest survey to date of Muslims worldwide suggests the vast majority want Western democracy and freedoms, but do not want them to be imposed.”

“Exactly!”, I thought, “..Great Irony! Terrific deadpan delivery! In all one thousand five hundred years of Muslim history- there have been Caliphates, Dictatorships, Empires, totalitarian states and chaotic free-for-all wars among tribal warlords and not a single democracy and somehow they really think that they are just going to sprout a democracy spontaneously. Right! the Saud family, Ahmadinejad, Abbas, Haniyah, Qaddafi, Assad, Nasrallah, and all the other tin-pot dictators, Imams, Sheiks, fiends and mullahs of the Islamic world are going to just decide one day that since everybody is yearning for democracy its probably a good thing to do and without a word or any sort of help from the western democracies (two hundred thirty two successful years in business here in America alone), will just announce national conventions, write up constitutions and hold elections.”

So, as I read the next sentence/paragraph I’m waiting for the punch line- and the smile begins to fade on my face…

The poll by Gallup of more than 50,000 Muslims in 35 nations found most wanted the West to instead focus on changing its negative view of Muslims and Islam.

What? A Gallup Poll? You mean this is serious? Muslims are actually saying this kind of stuff, pollsters are recording it, journalists are writing it down and their editors are allowing it to be printed? Never mind 9/11, London, Madrid, Beslan, Bali, the USS Cole, Buenos Aires, the continuing slave trade, Darfour, the ongoing attempted genocide of Israel, the suicide recruitment of the vulnerable (including women, children and people with downs syndrome) as suicide bombers, the teaching of hatred to children, the endemic child abuse the beating and honor killing of women and so very many other little matters of conscience, we need to cheer up and get a perky little smile on our faces towards good old Islam before there will be an improvement in relations. Are we supposed to just nod our heads and agree, “oh yes, we really must change our opinions of those poor misunderstood folks.”

So let’s review the first two sentences. Not only do Muslims claim to desire democracy, not only do they think they can (in fact, have to) do it by themselves but they also seem to think that we should just ignore their cultural sanction of violence, hateful rhetoric, anti-western, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, misogynist, repugnantly sexually exploitive behavior, entirely unjustified attitude of superiority toward every other people on earth and their parasitic oil cartel and just “change” our perfectly justified “negative view of them.

A little further down in the article there is a quote from one of the authors of the book that analizes the poll. John Esposito the well known academic shill who, as a professor at Georgetown University, has positioned himself at the business end of a serious pipeline of oil money with which the Saud royal family have bankrolled a pseudo-academic propaganda machine they call The Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Esposito says "Muslims want self-determination, but not an American-imposed and defined democracy. They don't want secularism or theocracy". Since any model of democracy that has ever worked for any length of time has been predicated on some sort of seperation between church and state the aversion to secularism might be a problem. Also, since we already know that Islam only approves of the Caliphate, the disavowel theocracy leaves one wondering exactly what kinf of democracy they might have in mind? No wonder they always have to put up with what ever travesty the next bloodthirsty despot wants to subject them to, they obviously have no intellectual tools or civic understanding that would enable them to support a democratic society; and they refuse the help necessary to develop them.

I almost wrote down the following old saying as a metaphor for this dilemma: “Everyone wants to get to heaven but nobody wants to die.” Ooops, sorry, when you are always longing for things that your own behavior prohibit, you might very well want to die. In Islamist culture they are caught in so many of these impossible binds, contradictions that fly in the face of reason and reality, that suicide seems to them to be a hero’s way to get to heaven. The Islamic variation on that old saying should rather be, “Everyone wants to get to heaven but there are only so many suicide belts to go around”.

The new Gallup Poll of the Muslim World asked a lot questions of a lot of people and there is a lot of information about the responses those people gave in the study but there is something missing from the analysis- something, like, oh, say, honesty and reality. They never address the logical difficulty of rationalizing the existence of two such incompatible (and mutually contradictory) opinions in one mind. Even more incredible than this, is how can they do it and not be exposed and challenged by the purportedly scientific pollsters or the supposedly impartial and objective journalists.

It is the behavior of those analysts and journalists that I find most disturbing. When the BBC implies that we should care about what The Muslim World thinks about us and that the only way to have peace with them is to believe Esposito’s conclusion that, “Those polled also said the most important thing the West could do to improve relations with Muslim societies was to change its negative views towards Muslims and respect Islam.” they are actually advancing a utopian philosophy that is often mislabeled as “multiculturalism”.

They are not “just reporting” that, “Muslims want democracy” alongside the other opinions by which the Muslims simultaneously set preconditions that absolutely guarantee they can never achieve democracy, without posing the revealing and discomforting questions about how such illogicality is possible, pollsters and journalists are intentionally betraying the standards of their professions. They are conspiring to cloak the fact that the Muslim world has a different idea of what democracy is than we do and that many of their responses are colored by immense cultural differences. Their behavior in not understandable unless you consider culture and attach a value to it. And this is something that has become forbidden by the ethic of what most people call “Multiculturalism”.

When I say “what most people call Multiculturalism”, I include myself. I’ve been writing about Multiculturalism a lot lately and the more I do the more I realize that it may have started out as a way of “understanding” and “tolerating” the behavior of other cultures but it has, in common practice, morphed into a denial that there are any useful distinctions that can be made in the ethical value, moral viability and economic strength of differing cultures. It has become a way for the misinformed, poorly educated disenchanted and the nihilistic to target and disparage their own culture while preventing any criticism of any exotic one. I have begun to believe that what I have been writing about is actually a form of nihilism which would be more accurately called Anticulturalism or Cultural Nihilism.

I know this will sound harsh to many of you who are still partially under the influence of the peaceful, Aquarian-Age lure of multiculturalism but our culture is better ethically, morally, economically, intellectually and spiritually than any other culture in the world. This does not meant that there is no room for improvement or need for criticism. There are many things we can learn from other cultures. One of the strengths of the Judeo Christian West is that, even if the evolution, growth and spread of the culture has, at times been ugly and rough, it has learned and expanded through openness and tolerance- in spite of the (sometimes disastrous) periodic retreats into ignorance and intolerance.

Other cultures, by comparison, have not grown greatly or created much that is new or of real value in the five hundred years since the renaissance. Even today The Muslim World, for example, often appears to be nothing more than a bedlam of deluded, ignorant, bigoted rageaholics who, when they are not busy repressing, persecuting and murdering each other in their own countries, are found in the west- protesting in the streets, blowing themselves and innocent bystanders up and generally trying to screw up the western world in the name of Allah. This is not to say that all Muslims behave this way- only the ones who are the most firmly embedded in Islamic culture. The ones who have adopted western cultural values and are willing to become citizens of western civilization are some of the finest and most productive people on earth.

Culture is the problem. Muslims are embedded in a system that leaves them very little choice- not nearly as much choice as ours leaves us. Of course, not all Muslims are like this but all of their leaders are. Esposito the supreme apologist writes:

“The unfortunate news is that there is a large number of politically radicalized Muslims (the 7 percent previously mentioned, which translates to approximately 91 million individuals) that could be pushed to support or perpetrate violence against civilians.”

Esposito plays on our Western sensibilities here. The violence, rage and intellectual barrenness of the Islamic world inspires tremendous anxiety in us. We cannot comprehend it. It is a force that we would like to control or ameliorate. When Esposito here implies that the “radicalized Muslims” have been in some way pushed to that point and then he warns us that more could be pushed to support or perpetrate violence, he gives the weak-minded and easily manipulated the soothing option- All we have to do is stop pushing them and they will be happy with us. Many in the west are ready to sign up for that one.

So when Esposito and the BBC archly keep repeating that we forget about how culture-bound, benighted and violent they are and “focus on changing our negative view of Muslims and Islam.” They make it sound as though this will solve the whole problem. It would be an act of suicide to listen to them.

They, for a multiplicity of reasons, have used the freedom of choice given them by our culture to become tools of the Caliphate Islamists- what Esposito refers to as politically radicalized Muslims. You see, even his name for them is designed to avoid the fact that this is a cultural conflict. When he calls them politically radicalized Muslims, it makes them appear to be actors within a political system we might recognize. But they are not just western political radicals they wish to destroy the western system of politics and put in its place a world-wide Islamic Caliphate. The great danger is that they have learned to use our democratic principals against us. The Caliphate Islamists have become expert in co-opting the language and principals of the democratic world in ways that twist its strengths into weapons to be used against it. This is what my friend and mentor Richard Landes calls demopathy- using democratic language and invoking human rights only when it serves their interests. One who behaves this way is a demopath.

The name demopath is very well chosen as this behavior is a strong cultural analog of the criminal sociopath. A sociopath is an outsider to human society who does not feel bound by the commonly felt restraints of social integration and is very adept at manipulating the restraints that others labor under for his own (usually) pernicious purposes. A demopath does the same thing at a cultural level. In the case of the Caliphate Islamists, with their hyper-emotional rage at imagined slights, their wild rhetoric, capacity for mass violence and their refusal to indulge any self-examination or criticism from the outside, they use our principals as a cudgel against our honesty, take advantage of our propensity for self-criticism and, ultimately, damage our ability to defend ourselves. They make our easy tolerance and open intellectual curiosity work against us.

Just as sociopaths are defined as antisocial deviants, we need to identify demopaths as anticultural deviants. We need to take appropriate protective measures. One of the first and most important measures needed is to isolate them so that they cannot work on the structure of the culture. This requires that we find ways to address the way the Gallup organization, John Esposito and the BBC pass this cultural poison through their filters and feed it into our information stream.

The analysis of The Gallup Poll of the Muslim World and the coverage of it by the BBC are not just bad science and sloppy reporting. By choosing not to compare these opinions to the historical record and by refusing to make observations of the ways in which they might not reflect the contemporary realities, they have allowed the demopathic argument to go unchallenged.

They look through the morally relativistic anticultural lens of multiculturalism, and see no reason (or way) to challenge or examine these opinions- after all, if right and wrong are relative, so is true and false. In their world, there is no meaningful difference between the values of Muslim Society and Western Society. An opinion is just as valid and means the same thing on either side of the divide. The cultural gulf that yawns between the opinions in the survey and the western audience to whom the book is addressed is ignored. The raw opinions are presented without explantion of the cultural matrix out of which they are being expressed.

I have written before many times about how the rage and anguish of the Muslim World is a product of Muslim Culture. It is the fruit of honor-shame, intellectual and religious intolerance and the civic inability to support any sort of democratic system. So, as the BBC article says, they “desire democracy” and refuse the only way they could ever get it- by having it introduced from the outside.

Too many well-intentioned but culturally naïve people in the west react to the dissonance created by the alternately plaintive, angry, aggressive and contradictory nature of the opinions of Muslims by taking Esposito’s treacherous but soothing lozenge of poisoned advice- “focus on changing your negative view of Muslims and Islam”. The BBC and Esposito are, wittingly or not, what Landes might call “demopathic dupes” they are enabling the demopaths of Caliphate Islam to paralyze the public and keep it unaware of the danger we face with these soothing but hopelessly inaccurate misinterpretations of the situation.