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!

Understanding is the key but having the morale and financial support to act on that understanding is just as important. If you ( or someone you know) are interested in helping us in this crucial battle for the very survival of western values, we will be happy to send you a copy of our full plan. We have been approved as a 501 (c) 3 Tax deductable organization and donations can be made via PayPals (on the left side of this screen) or sent to:

Second Draft
P.O. Box 590591
Newton Centre, MA 02459

Thank You,

YBM

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.

The Abomination of Suicide

I found this link on LGF. A blogger I have never heard of apparently committed suicide and connected his act with the struggle to sustain freedom and western values. Here is a quote:

What I did is not suicide. It is the action of a patriot and idealist who loves God and Country, and who makes a very public statement as a warning of a New Dark Age that looks America straight in the face armed with a hideous ideology that makes the German Nazis or Russian Communists look like bleeding heart liberals. I hope my fellow Countrymen will rally once gain in the defense of liberty no matter how long and hard the struggle.

I call it pathetic.

Friends, I beg of you, if you ever come to a place in your life where suicide seems like a good idea or somehow inevitable think again that is bullshit. If anyone close to you expresses any such feelings, beware, this is the quintessential blackmail/guilt trip.

As a fellow blogger and freedom fighter whose own brother committed suicide many years ago I must say that I am torn apart by this act of infamous and irrational cowardice. It needs to be said; suicide is for cowards, idiots, dupes, the mentally ill and the denizens of honor-shame cultures. It is NOT a normative Judeo-Christian response. Whatever personal demons moved Mr.Barbour to this action, he has done the free world and all of his fellow citizen-soldiers in this battle a grievous disservice in connecting his suicide to our cause. My brother inflicted intolerable pain and guilt on our family with his suicide but at least he didn’t drag the rest of western civilization into it.

What Did Michelle Obama Mean?

I know that this is an unusual flurry of political response for this usually long-winded blogger- but the developments in the Democratic race are too fascinting to pass up. Judith Apter Klinghoffer has an interesting look at some of the background and history of Michelle Obama’s “jaundiced” view of America.
The trail traces back to her experience as an under-qualified, ungrateful Princeton Affirmative Action charity case. She has found a quote from Mrs. Obama’s Princeton thesis that is very revealing:

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote in the introduction to her sociology thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really didn't belong."

Judith’s analysis is, as usual, unvarnished and insightful. She writes, “Barak may be on his way to becoming our first affirmative action president. Imagine how they are going to feel in the White House?!”

Judith is right. Getting things that you don’t feel that you deserve is a kind of poison. The sad thing is that it could be very different for Michelle but she and her husband are locked into a joint career that is based on an unwholesome addiction to that poison.

The most striking lesson here is that, no matter how many times it blows up in their faces, the progressive/liberal left always seems to choose the road that is paved with the gaudiest imitation of “best intentions” and leads most directly to hell. Affirmative Action, a trademark Democratic program, managed to take a perfectly smart, very charismatic young woman whose father had apparently worked hard all his life to provide her with security and opportunity into a confused and injured woman. In this and many other cases Affirmative Action has actually interrupted the healing process of generations of hard, honest work. Unless she confronts the harm that was done her and finds a way to, accept the gift that was given her and to reverse her ingratitude, each new degree of success will further deepen her self loathing and the expression it finds in the reflected disdain that she shows for “liberal and open-minded” America.

One can only hope that having her unattractive and unpatriotic feelings exposed in this way will inspire her to open up a national discussion that will pierce the hermetic wall of politically correct silence around the Affirmative Action and race in general. She might never have a better opportunity to transcend her own pain and do something to repay this great nation for the privilege bestowed upon her.

With Friends Like These...

Or- maybe he really is the problem. Another example of how Mr. Obama's friends and relatives (I won't even mention Michelle at this point) can't help themselves from highlighting his weaknesses.

Obama's Campaign and The Real Meaning of The Che Guevara Flag

Some of the things you learn about the people who attach themselves to political campaigns are more revealing and interesting than the candidates, what they say and how the media covers them. Last week's Che Guevara flag eruption was a case in point.

Usually, I don’t have the time and energy but I got involved in a comment trail about it on a post at Solomonia a few days ago. When I do get sucked into these things its always because something grabs my attention about one of the responders and I sense that I might learn something about some larger issue.

For those of you who don't know the background, that post had to do with the backwash from a Fox video report in which a Cuban flag adorned with a picture of Che Guevara was shown hanging prominently in an Obama campaign office in Houston.

Somewhat after the dust settled on the Solomonia post and its comments the Obama campaign posted this on its web site:

"This is a volunteer office that is not in any way controlled by the Obama campaign. We were disappointed to see this picture because it is both offensive to many Cuban-Americans -- and because it does not reflect Senator Obama’s views. Barack Obama has been very clear in putting forward a Cuba policy that is based on one principle: freedom for the Cuban people."

But one of Obama’s supporters (no doubt another volunteer) had already joined in the fray at Solomonia. The very first comment on the thread (how did she find it so quickly?) was from an ardent but only marginally coherent Obama supporter writing under the name of Susan (LAST NAME OMITTED AS A COURTESY). I have no idea who she is but it reads like undergraduate stuff; you can actually read it out loud and hear where “Omygawd”, “like” and “duh” fit in. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were one of the legions of “young people” who have decided that we need change and Obama is the guy to bring it on. She wrote (Parenthesis added by me):

“... (Oh my gawd,) This is because this is an office (that is, like) paid for by supporters. It is (sooo totally) not an official headquarter office Also, Che Guevara is viewed as an icon for (y’know) Socialist ideology that opposes the oppression of colonialism and capitalism (WhatEver!). This flag represents a symbol of change against the oppression these systems create. (Yo,) It does not say Obama is going to (like) turn the USA into a communist country. (duh!).”

A bit of a donnybrook ensued. I couldn’t help joining in. For a while I felt a little ashamed- I mean, this Susan was obviously very easy prey and there was already the beginning of a pack after her when I arrived on the scene. As things devolved, though, it turns out that I discovered another piece of the puzzle about how well meaning people who consider themselves liberal wind up getting themselves and everyone around them into very awkward positions. My last comment on this post was pretty long and although I suggest that you read the whole thread, I know that there is only so much time to read things and I am glad you are here reading here- so, to make things easier, I am reprinting that last comment of mine here with a few minor edits (I never polish comments as much as I should):

Susan, you are clearly out of your depth in trying to think about these things. I’d like to help out but hardly know where to start. You really write as if there is a progressive leftist shouting into one ear and a confused liberal simpering into the other and you, poor Susan, are trying to put both of their thoughts (loose choice of words) into the computer. Only once in a while does the real Susan get a word in edgewise. If you would just stop contradicting yourself from one sentence to the next you might sound as though you actually had a mind of your own.
I mean, look, here’s an excerpt- read it as you would a play and you’ll see what I mean-

LIBERAL:
I am not saying I find Guevara's tactics to be logical or practiceable (sic). Quite the contrary.

PROGRESSIVE:
What I am defending is the reality that Guevara fought for. Oppression is far from dead.

LIBERAL:
His approach is dead wrong. Socialism is dead wrong. Communism is dead wrong.

SUSAN:
I don't know what is right. ? I am obviously not a good candidate to run a country or reform the world.

PROGRESSIVE:
I do believe that there are very real deficiencies to colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, etc.

LIBERAL:
I believe that Castro's dictatorship (not communism) is far worse than the issues here in the US.

PROGRESSIVE:
However, I have a problem with the fact that anyone who doesn't fit into a white, middle class image is profiled and often underprivileged for their skin color or their class or their accent. They lack resources and opportunity that so easily come to anyone that is white.

LIBERAL:
This is why I support Obama because I believe that he pushes for a better, diverse US that "maybe" will unite us as a country and quit segregating us based on our skin color.

PROGRESSIVE
I believe the world hates us because we are racist and ethnocentric (me being a part of the problem with all of you.) I think there is a big possibility of Obama changing this image in the right way (consciousness raising rather than through a violent revolution.)

WHEW, it must be exhausting to be you!

Given your inability to keep from contradicting yourself in successive sentences, this might be asking a lot but I think you need to take a deep breath and think about why you are running from pillar to post about this. I think you are wild with enthusiasm for Obama. Like the confused liberal, leftist, progressive participants in presidential lemming runs of the past (McCarthy, McGovern, Carter, Dean), you are getting hyped up over an almost unknown candidate for purely emotional reasons. You cathect your angst and anomie into the campaign and, if you are ever challenged, you try to justify it with a grab bag of ideas and concepts that pop into your mind. You might want to check with all of the voices in your head, including your own, about why. Let’s look at your only line in the little play above:

“I don't know what is right. ? I am obviously not a good candidate to run a country or reform the world.”

That forlorn little question mark says it all. I’ll say this for you; you are honest up to a point. But then you get back on the flip flop of voices. Here’s the best example:

“I believe the world hates us because we are racist and ethnocentric (me being a part of the problem with all of you.) I think there is a big possibility of Obama changing this image in the right way (consciousness raising rather than through a violent revolution.)”

Earth to Susan! Aside from the fact that this is the least racist, least ethnocentric, most open country on earth, and ignoring the inconvenient fact that a very large number of those people who you say hate us so much (especially those “pobres de la tierra” you referenced in your first comment) want to come here to live, there is another big problem with your premise. Let me ask you, what, precisely, is it about Obama that makes you so sure that electing him president will immediately change our image in the world? He hasn’t really talked much about his ideas and beliefs. He certainly had not been specific until that point, about his policy goals. So, what do you have to base your single minded loyalty and dedication upon?

I am wondering, if you told your other voices to shut up for a moment, whether you would not just find that you just want Obama because you think it would be (totally) cool to have a black president. Well, you see, Susan, I think having a black president would be cool too but I don’t think that using that as our preeminent criterion is a good way to approach selecting the person who will be the most powerful human being on earth. Besides, wanting him to be president because he is black is just as racist as not wanting him to be president because he is black.

So, you see, this is what this discussion is about. What we are doing is evaluating the man, his organization and the kinds of workers and enthusiasm he attracts. It may be that the Che flag is an artifact of a peripheral group of “unsupervised” yahoos, but his response to it matters, as does the flack that “followers” like you throw up. So, when you equivocate on whether is it all right to use a communist thug as an iconic symbol of “change” and opposition (sounds a little like “resistance” to me) while enjoying the protection of this great country, you are giving every appearance of using code words that communists, confused lefty liberals like yourself and socialists will respond to while still trying to maintain “plausible deniability”. It is way too great a stretch. You become a kind of cartoon image of yourself. You complain that we are stereotyping you- but we don’t have to stereotype you- you have done a very good job of that yourself.

Consider, please, that you are not just, as you say, “not a good candidate to run a country or reform the world.”, You may not be a good candidate to vote for someone to run a country; let alone reform the world. You really haven’t done a particularly good job of even writing about it.

Yes, well, looking back on it, I am tempted to feel a little bad about that last paragraph, that I may have put that more unkindly than I needed to. But then I think about the fact that so much of Obama’s momentum is coming from the notion that we need change above all other things, change divorced from discussion of the consequences or means. Not that I think that Obama is anything remotely like the kind of murdering thug that Che was or Castro is, its clear he is not anything of the kind. On the contrary, he seems like a nice, upstanding person. That makes him and his followers all the more dangerous.

Stateist Communism is a monstrosity. But the creeping socialism (and the accompanying moral relativism and multiculturalism) of the liberal left is cruel and disillusioning in its own way. It robs people of their self-esteem and self-reliance, it stultifies enterprise and ambition, and, worst of all, it is the single fastest way to weaken and demoralize our resistance to Caliphate Islamism.

The quixotic, demented, anti-logical dueling contradictions I identified in Susan’s rant, combined with that craving for change is the very kind abandonment of reason brought Che and Castro to power in Cuba, Hitler in Germany and Lenin in Russia. The swelling ranks of impressionable young people and immature older people who, like this hapless Susan, seem capable of believing the most outrageous calumny about their own country while, at the same time, remaining blind to far more egregious short comings on the part of almost any other country (other than Israel, of course) is ominous in its own right.

It is unsettling that the Obama campaign, notably through his wife Michelle Obama, is pandering to and encouraging the ecstatic urge for change in a recent speech (HT Sister Toldjah) Mrs. Obama said in a recent speech at UCLA, “Barack is the only man who can “heal” this nation and “fix our souls””

My reading of history tells me that when a government undertakes to “fix” peoples souls, as nice as that sounds, it will ultimately mean that if you don’t care to have your soul fixed in that particular way, they are going to wind up doing something very unpleasant (maybe even fatal)to your property, your freedoms and, your life.

As Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Boston Globe:

With Che at his side, Castro toppled Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. "As soon as they had seized power," notes "The Black Book of Communism," a magisterial survey of communist crime in the 20th century, "they began to conduct mass executions inside the two main prisons, La Cabana and Santa Clara." As chief prosecutor of the new regime, Che oversaw the bloodbath, ordering hundreds of executions in the first months of 1959. Those he killed, "The Black Book" records, included "former comrades-in-arms who refused to abandon their democratic beliefs."

Like totalitarians of every stripe, Che didn't scruple at the death of innocents. "Quit the dallying!" he ordered Jose Vilasuso, a conscientious government lawyer who was seeking evidence against several prisoners. "Your job is a very simple one. Judicial evidence is an archaic and secondary bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! We execute from evolutionary conviction."

Che fixed their souls all right- by setting them free from their bodies. This is the thanks that naïve change-seekers can expect from true revolutionaries like Che to whom they find themselves romantically drawn. Let me be clear, I think that Barack and Michelle Obama are more like Susan than they are like Fidel and Che. They are essentially good people who are either too emotionally involved in their desire to advance their joint career through the false promise of socialism or so convinced that they have "a mission" that they find it possible to ignore the moral and intellectual bankruptcy and cultural danger of their ideology.

And then there are the nameless, faceless campaign functionaries, flaks and Public Relations experts- let’s look in detail at what they published as the Obama campaign’s official statement on the Che flags. It has become axiomatic in political campaigns that it is a big mistake, especially in primary elections, to give too accurate a picture of who you are and what you believe in. This statement is a masterpiece of obfuscation and hypocrisy.

The first thing I notice is that it never actually mentions the name "Che Guevara". This is a sure sign that there is something indirect and manipulative going on. We are in for a "Marketing Momnet".

It begins with a reasonably forthright first sentence: “This is a volunteer office that is not in any way controlled by the Obama campaign” a valid disclaimer. Any organization that is growing and changing as rapidly as the Obama campaign has got to have a few loose cannons. There is no way that the core leadership can keep a watch on everything.

The next sentence is not so direct. It is a loosely joined succession of phrases. These phrases, owing to the looseness of the connections, clack and bump against each other leaving us to wonder wha the real bond is between them. I am going to have to take it one fragment at a time.

The first phrase is “We were disappointed to see this picture” My initial reaction is that I find it shocking that all they can muster is “disappointment”. Knowing who Che Guevara was, what he stood for and the bloody murder he committed, if I were Barack Obama I might have felt something more like outrage or horror- but that is just me. How disappointed are they? What kind of disappointment is it?

The next two phrases are even more shocking. “…because it is both offensive to many Cuban-Americans-- and Americans of all backgrounds” So, we see where the word “disappointment “ comes from, it has nothing to do with being repelled by Che’s bloody record or dismayed by his totalitarian association. No, it is nothing so moral and judgmental. They are disappointed because it offensive to Cuban-Americans and others.

Incredibly, they are far more concerned about the “offence” caused than they are about the meaning of the flag as a symbol. Unspoken here, but clearly identifiable are two senses in which the Obama campaign apparently considers giving offense more notable and worse than the moral implications of his presence in the volunteer office. First, of all it giving offense to identifiable voting blocs (Cuban-Americans vote!) is politically counter-productive. When, as the Obama campaign seems to, you believe (we know Mrs. Obama does) that you have the power to “heal” and “save”, engaging in honest and direct debate that might drive votes away is a sin against your sacred (however mistaken) mission.

The other reason “the offense” is a greater concern for them than the substance of the matter is that in the multicultural, morally relative world of the left and the Democrats it is a greater sin to be “insensitive” to the feelings of revolutionaries and malcontents than it is to ignore and enable injustice and even murder.

They go on to say that it the flag does not reflect Obama's views and that "Barack Obama has been very clear in putting forward a Cuba policy that is based on one principle: freedom for the Cuban people" It's funny how bland and non-committal that “freedom for the Cuban people” sounds. What does that mean exactly? To me, it has the same ring of ominous irony of, say, calling a repressive Communist totalitarian state “The People’s Republic of Whateverstan”.

It doesn’t specify what kind of freedom they’re talking about. Presumably, they are trying to be sufficiently general to avoid offending anyone else. Incredibly, this champion of change for America, this campaign that wishes to sell us on wholesale change for America (the nation that needs change the least of all the countries of the world) comes up short on suggesting any particular change for Cuba (an internationally acknowledged economic and social basket case). Cuba needs more of what we have here – in a hurry. Democracy and free markets would be a huge improvement for that country. Does the Obama campaign suggest any thing like that? No, he certainly would not want to offend the people who put him into this fix with that banner of Che, and they are not so much in favor of democracy or free markets. The whole thing is weasely, multicultural, morally relativistic and marketing oriented- not at all statesmanlike.

Edmund Burke warned us about this three hundred years ago. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” From this one instance, it looks to me that Obama is very much in favor of doing nothing about evil. He can’t bring himself to call it “evil”. As I said above he seems like a very nice and pleasant man. If all the evil in the world were done only by evil people, though, things would be a lot less complicated than they are.

The real danger that the tone and direction of the Obama candidacy brings home to me is that once “Change” becomes the ultimate goal, the strongest, most ruthless candidate of change will often look like the best one and the well-intentioned, emotionally labile dummies of the liberal left (as the example of Susan shows) will be powerless to see what he is up to- let alone stop him. That blood thirsty criminal is not Barack Obama but he might well be hanging a Che Guevara flag up in a "volunteer" office somewhere and waiting for his chance. So, Mr Obama's people have not really addressed the key flag issue at all. They have only given us a flaccid denial of approval- not a categorical condemnation and that makes the Che flag a rather large red flag for me.

I seem to feel that hot breath on the back of my neck again…

Celebrate Diversity! Even if it Kills You

A friend has sent me a link to Andrew Bostom’s Blog with the story on the reinstatement of Major Stephen Coughlin’s reinstatement. Bostom includes a link to Coughlin’s seminal and compendious Thesis on Jihad- all 329 pages of it!

I have to confess, I don’t have the will power, or the spare time to read it all now; but I’ve dipped into it enough to see that this is a very important document. Of course, I flipped directly to the last chapter (this is why I never enjoyed reading mysteries). I was charmed to see that the title of that “pay-off” chapter “Disarmed in the War of Ideas” is very similar to a my phrase “Unilateral Cultural Disarmament”. I’ll be reading and ransacking this one for a very long time.

Colleague Lazar at Augean Stables has a very good initial pass at it here.

I won’t spoil all the fun for you “grinders” who will read it cover to cover and in order but I have to point out this elegant and telling observation from page 230. Coughlin is writing about how the Caliphate threat in continuing to sneak up on us.

“Under the Current Approach, this entire line of inquiry has been effectively shut
down by objections that do not extend beyond surface assertions that “Islam does not
stand for this” or “there are a thousand different interpretations of Islamic law” (so what’s
the point in looking?).”

Has anyone here not read Mark Steyn’s America Alone? (If not, you can just scroll down a little and click on the Amazon book icon for it on the left hand margin of this screen to order) I was immediately taken by how similar the above sentence is to one of the quotes that I remember best from Steyn’s book.

“…contemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them. After all, if it's grossly judgmental to say one culture's better than another, why bother learning about the differences? "Celebrate diversity" with a uniformity of ignorance.”

And its not just celebrating diversity. It is the imbecilic prejudice against their own culture that come along with it that is more astounding and perilous. Both of these quotes point directly at the Achilles Heel of civilization. This is the very same mechanism by which people who call themselves feminists delude themselves that abstract concepts like “the glass ceiling in Corporate America” should be a greater concern for western women than the savage brutalization of women under Shari’a law. It is embodied too in the morally bankrupt blindness that calls Israel an apartheid pariah and attempts to degrade her ability to survive in the face of regimes that really do practice apartheid and murder.

This is yet another example of how Multiculturalism is actually a very subtle but corrosive form of racism. No liberal or progressive would be caught dead saying that “All those (choose one: Black people, Asians, Indians, etc…) look alike to me. So why is it ok to say that, "It makes no difference what they think or do, we love all those other cultures without discrimination, even though we can't really tell one from another and we will only criticize ours?"

It is a relatively new idea, fostered by historical revisionists, that the ascendance of Western Civilization was a product of colonialism, imperialism and cultural xenophobia. It’s a guilty reaction in which only the coddled, directionless, morally deficient grandchildren of real achievers and visionaries can afford to indulge. Their lives, rendered too safe and too comfortable, spend all of their time and energy finding fault with the system that has given them those comforts and that protection while, at the same time, they remain too lazy, self-absorbed and spiritually flaccid to even notice the faults that doomed the other less-successful cultures that western civilization superceded; much less contemplate the threats posed by the rising challenge of Caliphate Islam.

Our Choice- Live in Incorrectness or Die Correct

I generally dislike sports analogies. They are often overblown and the context of sports is much simpler that real life. But with The Super Bowl coming up and The Perfect Season Patriots looking like they will soon rewrite football history, there is a subtle lesson to be learned from some of the “sports talk” we are hearing.

New England Patriots coach Bill Belichik has always been a controversial head coach but this year the controversy has come in waves all season long. He has long been an object of media and fan fascination often called a genius and sometimes called obsessed, cold, ruthless and even evil, but this year the debate has been fueled by forces larger than usual.

From the ‘tape-gate” scandal in the first game of the season to the whining about “running up the score”, the yapping dogs of envy and the devious media jackals that feed on the scraps left by big meat-eaters like Bill and this year’s undefeated Patriots have been trying to diminish his achievements and draw attention to themselves. They alternately, cluck their tongues disapprovingly and rail disingenuously about rules and moral issues that in the end have played no discernable role in this triumphal season. There has even a very earnest debate over whether Belichik deserves to be the “Coach of the Year”.

There is more to this debate than meets the eye. A large part of the animus against him, of course, is the anti-competitive angst of the fans of other teams who would like to find a way of rationalizing their teams as the “better” teams. But, beyond that, I think Mr Belichik is disliked in so public a way because he is very Incorrect Politically.

Here are some of the things about him that are incorrect:

He believes in keeping score.
He does not pander to the press.
He does not mince words.
He wants to win every time he competes.
He shows disregard for the feelings of opposing players and fans.
He thinks winning is more important than the emotions of his players.
He does not allow his own emotion to cloud his judgment.
He is resourceful, self-reliant and self-confident.
He is notorious for never being satisfied just to win- he wants to use it as an opportunity to assure continued winning.
He is famous for being so diligent and dedicated that he simply out-works all opposing coaches.
He knows the difference between inventive strategy and cheating and is not afraid to walk the thin line between them to secure victory.
When he is judged wrong he takes his penalty without complaint.
He is focused on winning because he knows it’s better than losing.
He knows the difference between a reason and an excuse.
He does not want to give in to “you can’t win them all”.

The thing that most offends the general sensibilities of people who don’t understand Belichik is the way he responds to winning. The Tuesday after a win he always has an even longer list of negative notes and film clips of mistakes and miscues to go over with the players than after a loss. This is looked on with a mixture of horror and amusement by much of the press and the general public. There are those who seem to believe that with a great group of individual athletes to lead and a winning system, Belichik might be better advised to celebrate a little longer and give his players a bit more of a reward. But Belichik knows that that is not how perfect seasons happen.

I heard John Madden (the former coach turned broadcaster) on the radio last Sunday morning. He was talking about how the most successful coaches have always been the kind of person who never rests on success. They are driven toward perfection. They are winners.

Madden was talking about the amused, even condescending, attitude with which many people, even inside football respectfully deride such behavior. But he defended it. He explained it this way, he said;

“Whatever you let go when you’re winning, you will have to live with when you are losing.”

I knew just what he meant.

A top flight coach realizes that if he can see it on the film then the opposing coach can see it too. When, for example, a linebacker habitually does not take responsibility for defending against the run in a particular formation, he is leaving his team defenseless against that threat. Sooner or later an opposing coach will design a running play to take advantage of him. The victorious team may think they will be winning forever but the coach knows better. If the coach does not correct that lapse now, he will, in the future, have to live with the result on a day when the team is not winning.

It has become a habit for us in the West to assume that we will be winning forever. We have, after all, dominated the civilized world for several centuries. By comparison the ‘07-‘08 Patriots are a flash in the pan. So it is understandable if not forgivable if we have begun to lose sight of what makes western civilization great.

Having our way so habitually has even made us a little shame-faced about it. We try very hard not to rub it in- not to appear to be “running up the score” on the opposition. In fact, we invented multiculturalism so that we could pretend that there really is no competition- that we are all just the same as everyone else and that there is no reason why any other culture should feel anymore threatened by us than we do of them.

The problem is that our perspective has become warped. We are not afraid of them because we have been on such a long winning streak. They hate us for our success and power- and they despise our smarmy, condescending, back-handedly racist multiculturalism.

At the same time, non western challengers are rising up in the Islamic world and Asia who do not share our values and our scruples. We don’t believe it, but they have no interest in becoming like us. We are so busy trying to console them for being so backward that we cannot comprehend that they don’t see it that way.


Nobody in the west can see this as clearly as someone from the outside. Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw it. In his 1978 commencement speech at Harvard (Hat tip to Jeremayakovka) he delivered a very clear and ominous notice to the western world about this blindness. He said:

“But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction.”

Solzhenitsyn was viewed as a crank back then. I remember the polite but troubled way in which most reviewers of that speech backed away from his ideas. They did not engage his observations because they could not find the words to do so in their politically correct vocabulary. And back then the vocabulary was so much broader and unconstrained than it is today. The Correctness mafia has been picking off words and ideas progressively and spreading the blankness of omerta wider and wider.

We actually have become so polite about it that we feel that discussing those things that make Western Civilization better than (or preferable to) other cultures (let alone the measures that might be necessary to defend the west) in public constitute some kind of “bad form”. We even have whole sets of words and ideas that we refuse to use because they sound too harsh, too male dominated, too power oriented, too insensitive or judgmental. This is what is called Political Correctness and if we could put a good coach in charge, a geopolitical Belichik or an American Solzhenitsyn, he would put a stop to it before another game went by.

Just as the small and overly legally-minded have continued caviling about Bill Belichik’s tape-gate peccadillo and crying that it should invalidate his body of work, so the tiny minds and shriveled souls of the progressive wing and their surrogates in the media have been harping on Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo, inflated collateral casualty figures and fabricated public-relations incidents like al Durah, Jenin, Gaza Beach and Qana and implying that they make us, “no better than” those who want to destroy us.

Political Correctness is Unilateral Cultural Disarmament. As bad as it is here in the U.S. it is even worse in Israel. In December Caroline Glick wrote about the aftermath of the Lebanon War:

“This week the IDF distributed ribbons to its soldiers and officers for their service in the war with Hizbullah in 2006. The ribbons were a source of embarrassment. Soldiers and officers, who like the general public view the war as Israel's greatest military defeat, are loath to pin them on their uniforms.

While the soldiers and general public view the war as a failure, one sector of Israeli society sees the war as a great triumph. For Israel's legal establishment, the war was a great victory. It was a war in which its members asserted their dominance over Israel's political and military leadership.

The legal establishment's ardor for the Second Lebanon War was exposed on Tuesday with the publication of the testimonies of Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz and Military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit before the Winograd Committee which the Olmert government established to research the war's failures. In their testimonies both men shared their perception of the war as a great victory of lawyers in their campaign to "lawyerize" - or assert their control - over Israeli society.

In his opening statement, Mazuz extolled the war as "the most 'lawyerly' in the history of the State of Israel, and perhaps ever." He explained, "The process didn't begin in Lebanon 2006. It… is a gradual process of 'lawyerizing' life in Israel."

Mazuz responded negatively to the question of whether legal considerations superseded operational and strategic goals during the war. He claimed that the government and the IDF restricted their plans from the beginning to conform with perceived legal restrictions.

As he put it, that preemptive limitation of goals was "the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years. I remember periods where there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think that there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game and I can't identify any confrontation… or … demands to 'Let the IDF win.'"

Solzhenitsyn predicted we would come to this in the west:

“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.”

The very idea that a nation fighting for its life could be saddling its combat units with the legal equivalent of the Communist “political officers” who used to be assigned to every unit of the Soviet armed forces is hard to believe. Israel is clearly on the threshold of discovering the point at which she can no longer live with all of goofy politically correct baggage that the west has loaded onto the back of her spectacularly successful society. She is, as is the rest of western civilization, is being challenged now by a new kind of enemy. Funded by torrents of petrodollars, allowed to breed uninhibited by any effective counter-measures and armed with the power of darkness and light through it’s control of our energy supply, this enemy has been studying our films. They know our weaknesses better than we do.

Israel and all of western civilization must face the fact that millions of us, including most of the most intelligent, powerful and affluent of us have already lain down our arms in this struggle. We refuse to talk about a proven threat despite the proof (9/11, Madrid, London, Beslan, Bali, etc…). Or we shrug and concede that we may, in fact, deserve the death with which we are threatened (viz. Vanessa Redgrave, Cindy Sheehan, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Sean Penn, Harry Reid, etc…). Some of us even accede that we should be ashamed to resist. We need to find ways to take back our city walls, to hold back the horde at the gate and to find weapons and rearm ourselves before we are conquered in a war whose existence we still refuse to even acknowledge.

There is yet some faint hope.
Back on December 27 I saw, on Little Green Footballs, a snip of an article by Andrew C. McCarthy who is director of the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The National Review Online article is clear and comprehensive and you should read it in full but I’ll shorten up the LGF quote to the most important paragraph:

“But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.”

You read it right. He said “kill”. A very incorrect word, that. In spite of the prejudice in our public life that “you can’t say that” he said it.

It is true. A lot of people have already been killed and many more are going to get killed and we are going to have to learn to talk and think about the prospect of the killing sooner or later. The sooner we do, the better off we will be. We need to be able to talk about it so that we can figure out how to do it with the minimum number of deaths and to make sure that the deaths that do happen, happen to them and not us.

“Surely, there must be another way”, the Political Correctness mafia tell us- “War is not the answer” they say. If you say that war is not the answer to any question, that means you have refused to understand the question.

Solzhenitsyn, our friendly outsider, says that we do not comprehend the danger we face because we think that there will be a point of convergence where all other cultures (he calls them worlds) will overcome their backwardness and corruption and begin to think and act like us…

“…It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence.”

Last April I used a lot more words to say what amounts to the same thing: In my series debunking the American Indian Analogy I wrote,

One of the two cultures, Islam or The West, must conquer the other and, if the end of the conquest is to be humane, there must be a clear winner. Someone has to admit they have been conquered. At the end of the Indian wars there were many moments of despair, bitterness and regret which still haunt America. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe gave voice to the Indian defeat in a speech that is both dignified and noble:
"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

It took several generations a profound transformation of the environment (including the slaughter of the buffalo herds) and much bloodshed to force that speech out of an Indian.
If, as seems to be the case, we cannot get the Calphatists to make that same transition peacefully, we will have to reduce them by some combination of that same kind of starvation and attrition. We will have to make them capitulate the way we did with Chief Joseph.

The good news is that we still have enough power and resources to protect ourselves, if we can find the will, there are a number of comparatively humane and easy ways to render them harmless. One that appeals to me because it addresses the source of their power most directly and would not damage the environment or kill large numbers of them to implement this solution, is to deprive them of the oil money. Without that vast river of cash to float on, they would be on a very short and precipitous downhill slide back to the pit of atavistic oblivion that their honor/shame based culture.

“No blood for oil”, you say? I have already written about that little Correctoid. What do you think 9/11 is? What do you think every honor killing of a young woman in western countries is? How about the slaughter of innocents in Israel? Its all blood for oil.

We must learn how to discriminate among the peoples of the earth. Who shares our cultural aspirations? Who are our cultural equals and who must we help by leading them through the gateways to equality? And who (if they, by their dedication to our destruction, insist) must we conduct, humanely (that is with the least number of collateral casualties)and swiftly as possible, to The Pearly Gates.

Just so there is no room for misunderstanding here, let me say this explicitly, I leave it open that it is possible that America did not have to kill all of the Indians who were killed in the development of the continent. It is probable that a better understanding of the cultural issues at stake and a better grasp of the possible strategies might have brought about a solution to the problem without as much carnage as did happen. No one (at least no one with any power to change the course of events) was able to see and verbalize that the Indians and their way of life were being replaced by the leading edge of western civilization. If they had been able to frame the situation that way, the whole thing might have been handled with out the wasteful and disillusioning hypocrisy of treaties that promised autonomy and coexistence.

Likewise, I am not saying we have to kill a large number of Muslims. It might only be necessary to kill a few- the few that are actively trying to kill us. The fact is, though, that our current approach is without doubt the worst way to handle the problem and will end up costing more in suffering and blood than a more frank and aggressive tack. We must acknowledge that they do not consider us fully human, and that many of them take it as their sacred responsibility to either make us full humans in their eyes by converting us to their primitive and imbecilicly intolerant cult or KILL us.

They will continue killing us and forcing us to kill them until we solve the problem in some way and that solution will be impossible if our rules of discourse continue to outlaw the vocabulary to describe the problem and the concepts that define it.

One thing is for sure, we have to neutralize the oil problem one way or another. After all, before the oil money started to pour into the shabby remnant of the Caliphate after World War II it had been shriveling on the vine for five centuries- dying of its own incompetence ( see here and here).

Or maybe we can either invent a replacement for oil or, perhaps just take it away from them. How we do it is debatable but unless we are able to speak frankly about it and consider the alternatives, we will continue to pretend it’s not really a problem until the Christians and Jews among us are all reduced to dhimmi status and the rest are forced to become Muslims and head the call to prayers five times a day
I’m not necessarily advocating that we take and hold the oil fields, nor am I saying we must invade Iran next. I am merely saying that we have no idea what we can do to stop being picked off a few (or a few dozen or a few thousand) at a time. We have not yet made the commitment to define and solve the problem as it exists. As a result we are forced to make concessions to a parasitic cultural disease. Caliphate Islam is attempting to burrow into and control the heart and mind of Western Civilization. Unless we can reclaim the vocabulary with which to identify and talk about it, we are at its mercy. The only thing standing in our way is our misunderstanding of our own principals.

I remember my step-daughter, at fifteen years old, cornering me after having been denied a bid to attend a "rave" in another state with her seventeen year old boyfriend. She had argued all of the familiar teenage arguments about trust (how can you ever trust me if you don't give me a chance to prove that I can be trusted? etc...) she had made her bid for respect (I'm not a baby anymore, you treat me like a child, etc..,) and she let us know how entirely unreasonable our position was (every other kid I know is going, etc...,) and her mother and I had been united in telling her that it was inappropriate and wasn’t going to happen.

After a while, her mother left the house and she approached me from behind as I typed. "Yaacov", she said, "do you consider me an equal?" With only a moment’s hesitation I recognized the attack. She was employing the fiendishly manipulative adolescent tactic of using an over-simplified version of one's deeply cherished principals to coerce you to give them what they want. Just like a besieged parent dealing with a sociopath (that's what teenagers are) we in the civilized world have to look the rest of the world and tell them "No, you are not yet fully equal. You have the rights but you are not up to the responsibilities that the rights require. Until you are experienced and mature enough that you will not kill yourself and others, I'll have to help you decide these things."

It is a fatal mistake to take "All Men are Created Equal" too literally. This allows the radical left, and the Caliphateists, to torment them by advocating premature equality. There must be a lower limit of civic ability below which a population cannot be trusted to act in their own best interest. The right to self-determination may be inalienable but THE ABILITY to participate in a culture that allows such freedom has to be affected by education, experience and culture. Multiculturalists will ask, “Who are we to pass judgment on another culture?” If the criteria are not obvious enough, I’ll mention a few:

Freedom of speech
Freedom of religion
Freedom of association
Free Enterprise
Legal, social and economic equality for Women

There are more but those will do for a start. If we could just stop pretending that we are all the same and put a real effort into understanding which countries have those attributes and which do not, we could begin to understand who our enemies are and why. The multicultural, politically correct elite want to prevent that discussion. This is how multiculturalism strikes at the heart of western democracy- it insists that the unqualified, the unwilling and the unready nations should never be identified by those characteristics. As a result, they are afforded the same access, independence and respect as the most culturally advanced.

Thus, the women, children and non-Muslims of those countries suffer murder, beatings, and all manner of abuse and humiliation while the US who first put those ideals into words for the rest of the world is mocked and Israel who scrupulously reigns in her own power and embodies the finest instincts of the west is branded a pariah.

In the event that the United States continues to dither away our waning oppotunity to reverse the direction of this threat, Israel has to begin to throw off its lawyers and resurrect her self-defence. Seraphic Secret had a very good post last week about the requirements for that effort. Here is part of it:

“Time is running out for Israel. If she doesn't get serious about the jihadist threat, I fear for her existence. Here then our recommendations for defeating the Arab/Muslim threat.

Towards Victory:

1. Jews have the right to live anywhere in the world. Especially in Israel, the Jewish State.
2. Appeasement leads to further aggression on the part of Israel's enemies.
3. There is no peace process; there is a process of war.
4. Israel should cut off all supplies of power and fuel to Gaza.
5. Israel should cease all negotiations with the Arabs. There's nothing to talk about. We have legitimized these genocidal killers far too long.
6. Israel should declare Israel's boundaries; the Arabs can sink or swim.
7. Israel should announce that the next rocket that comes from Gaza will be met with an overwhelming barrage against the infrastructure of Hamas.
8. If the rockets from Gaza continue, Israel should announce that the next attacks will be directed at the civilian population of Gaza.
9. Israel must carry through on these threats. Further: all terrorist attacks must be met with disproportionate responses.
10. Israel must never trade land for promises of peace.”

Here is the text of a comment I left on that Seraphic Secret post:

Jews must stop acting as though we live at the sufferance of others. May I presume to add another point? Since the Arabs seem to value their holy sites much more than their children, and in the light of their desecration of all Jewish holy sites within their reach, I have long thought that Israel should simply tell them that every Qassam that falls on Israeli soil will cause a brick to be removed from the Al Aqsa Mosque. Every Israeli murdered by Qassams, Katushas, drive-bys or suicide killers would be worth a wall. A mass killing should equal a plastique charge. When the Al Aqsa excrescence has been eradicated from our Temple Mount there will be other targets. In fact, if I were free to make policy, I might just tell them that if Israel is attacked militarily, the next time you want to make a pilgrimage to visit the Ka’ba you’d better plan to take a Geiger Counter and a very long rappelling rope. Of course we can afford to do the honorable thing and give them a day’s notice before launch…

Its not just Jews- Western Civilization must stop behaving as if we don't feel entitled to live unless every other culture wants to be like us. We have to understand that life is always and always has been a competition for survival. If we want our children and our values to survive, it is time to act while we are still able to win easily.