The Hidden Radical Shows Himself

Last night, Obama tried to distance himself from the haughtily idealistic and much too trusting of others guy who once said that upon being elected, he would run right out and sit right on down face to face with any tin-pot dictator or genocidal mass murderer who would care to use him for the propaganda value of the meeting without preconditions. He did a lot of word games and qualifying (preparation as opposed to preconditions etc…) but it only reminded me of the ultimate language parser Bill Clinton who once retreated behind the smoke screen of “what the meaning of “is” is”.

Judith Apter Klinghoffer has a nice article about her initial reaction to Obama’s personal style in this debate. Her observations are very astute especially, I think, the fact that he cannot seem to find the moral fiber to admit a mistake. I would amplify that observation a little. A debate like this is something like a boxing match. You try to land clean punches on your opponent and parry his blows. It is a sign of tactical and personal weakness if you cannot move on after your opponent stings you. Admitting a mistake is one thing. Obama is obviously not secure enough to do that and it is, arguably, a mistake in the debate format. The unforgivable debating mistake is to try to convince yourself and everyone else that the punch did not land by continuing to parry it over and over again. Your supporters will take your first explanation and everyone else will see that you are hurt and flailing take the advice of the lunatic fringe group that you said the stupid thing for in the first place and Move On- it happened, get over it and keep punching.

And that points up another problem for Obama. That remark got him a lot of points over Hillary when he said it. It ingratiated him with the “War is Not the Answer” types. In return they helped him get the nomination over the more realistic talking Hillary. Last night, he did a lot of tough talking- he even darkly implied that he wanted to kick Osama’s butt so badly that he would invade Pakistan to do it.

So who is he? What does he want us to believe so that he can be elected and what will he really do when he is? In her article Klinghoffer admits freely that she wrote nothing about the substance of Obama’s performance and neither will I- because there wasn’t any that you could depend on. He leaves us trying to read the vapors of his style.

To me the single most interesting statement to come out of last night’s debate, and it was easy to overlook it because it was a little subtle, showed us a titillating glimpse of the true-believing, Progressive, pink underwear that he still has under his new Alpha Male suit. It shows that he is still the elitist, socialist Alinskyite organizer for which the far left forsook Hillary. It was really just a passing turn of phrase, but I think it a very telling one. You may recall, he referred to Putin as a real “twentieth century” tyrant (or was it dictator?). He went on to say something (if any one knows where I can find a transcript of these exact words, I would be very grateful!) about how he had to be made to become a twenty-first century leader.

Aside from the ridiculous image that it brings to mind of Obama calling up Putin on the red telephone and saying, “Whoa, Dude, hold the invasion up! That was, like, sooo last century!” - it was also a great throbbing tip-off that betrayed the intentional ignorance of human nature that is so characteristic of the socialist left.

It shows that he somehow believes that there is some magical process by which “the modern world” of the twenty-first century will somehow change and evolve human nature away from susceptibility to dictatorship, totalitarianism and conquest is a dead give away that he is one of those people who has little regard or respect for the achievement of the American system of government which by acknowledging human nature and building a system of checks and balances to channel the energy and grandeur of the human spirit while protecting against the venal aspects of it.

Obama’s faith in the new century is not naïveté it is something much worse than that. The naïve are educable. In the early years of the twentieth century it was, perhaps forgivable to have that kind of delusional faith in the possibilities of the new century, modernity and the paradise of the workers. People who can still believe in socialism and the possibilities of yet another century have simply refused to see and understand what it led too in Nazi Germany, Russia, China and every failed commune community that has ever tried to implement it.

Sadly, it is not Putin whose behavior and thinking is somehow so out of vogue and déclassé that that he will fail. No Mr. Putin is all too wired-in, capable and on top of his game. It is Barak Hussein Obama who, even though he is twisting every which way but straight, is out of touch, tone-deaf, shopworn and (I hope) just transparent enough for the sharp-eyed American people to see through him.

Islamofauxia Part II

There have been hundreds of instances like this that have included staged news, misrepresentations, fraud and inaccuracy that have been exposed by the blogosphere and media watchdog organizations. And yet they keep happening.

It was only this past January that Reuters gave us the Gaza Blackout Fraud. You may recall that, in a clear but silly attempt to smear Israel by accusing her of using collective punishment the Hamas propaganda machine produced a number of photographs like the one at the right. This one purports to show the Gaza government working by candlelight because Israel forced a blackout this one is clearly staged as it can be seen that, even with the drapes drawn, the vast majority of the hall is lit quite well by the bright daylight outside.

This next picture is even sillier as the candlelight parade is proceeding down a brightly lit street with street lights clearly visible in the background. It all seems so shamefully transparent and idiotically simple but, for some reason, it never ends.
In reality there is a vast volume of media fraud and misbehavior happening and most of it is far more subtle and sophisticated that these pathetic examples. Day in and day out, a virtual army of organizations and individuals respond to those fabrications and deceptions- publishing all manner of criticism and even ridicule. The offending media ignore what they can, deny most of the rest, fight legal battles to intimidate critics and, when all else fails, they issue bland corrections- and nothing changes.

That is, nothing changed until May 21, 2008. It was on that day that the chief judge in the Enderlin/France2 vs Karsenty appeal case dismissed all charges against Karsenty and confirmed that he had not overstepped reasonable professional ethics when he became one of the first media critics in the world to actually put into words the previously unspeakable fact that it had become apparent that Enderlin and France2 were either complicit or dupes in one of the bloodiest and most destructive frauds in the history of media.

The verdict in that trial was only brought about by seven long years of brilliant, innovative and painstaking work by several people. Among those people, it was Richard Landes of Second Draft and Augean Stables who, when the momentum was failing and the world had turned away, kept working, not as an agitator and accuser but as an honest researcher and synthesizer. His integrity, energy, intellectual honesty and the virtual mountain of solid scholarship he produced over the years lead to his becoming the most respected and influential expert witness to give testimony in that case. It also turned the tide against the intentional manipulation of the media by civil society and it will, if properly followed up, tip the balance away from those in the media who willingly (or blindly) assist them.

Thanks, in large part to Richard Landes, we stand at a true turning point in the single most urgent battle for the future of civilization in the twenty-first century- the quest, no, the absolute necessity, to turn the rising tide of chaos and propaganda in the Mainstream Media and the Cybersphere into a dependable, honest and accurate flow of information.

Second Draft, the organization founded to further Landes’ work is prepared to lead this effort. Having been at the center of the seven year long al Durah controversy and having lived through the two trials testing the work and methods of many researchers/writers we know what is required to identify, expose and destroy Islamofauxia. The combination of judgment, knowledge and skill required is unique. Only Second Draft has done such a complete job.

Our next step is to take these abilities and experience and instill them into an organization that will be on 24 hour standby to address and defeat all future attempts to stage and publish such frauds.

Mark Twain wrote, “A lie can travel all the way around the world before the truth can get out of bed and put its shoes on.” Second Draft aims to be there with boots on, ready to stand in the way of the lie.

We are now planning the next, absolutely essential, step toward building that system. We have begun the arrangements for a major three-day conference that will be the definitive work on the Kfar Qana building collapse- the only news story in history ever to have halted a war in progress. Our Kfar Qana conference has two objectives:
1. Condense the same kind of energy, collaboration and talent that it took to understand and debunk the al Durah incident and bring it to one location for three days and bring it to bear on the already discredited but still widely cited Kfar Qana incident.
2. Use the activities to build the relationships and working methodologies that will allow the same team to form rapid response task forces over the internet in the future.
The team gathering for this conference will include the following areas of expertise:

• Forensic medicine
• Ballistics
• Munitions
• Military equipment and tactics
• International law
• Crime-scene investigation
• Arabic language and culture
• Journalism and media
• Cinema
• Forensic digital photography and sound
• Intelligence
• Structural Engineer

There will also be Israel Defense Force experts, media people, bloggers and Lebanese investigators who were on the ground for the initial investigations.

There is a way of winning the information war and it is not just to "correct" and exhort- as if we were correcting mere mistakes. Islamofauxia is a deadly and intentional problem. Second Draft's combination of solid research and aggressive follow through has been successful beyond our modest means, with your help we can ramp up our capabilities so and continue to turn the tide.

First of all, we need your help to make this conference a success. We would like to hold it this December but there is much to do and arraigning a secure venue, the technical resources and travel for all our experts will not be cheap. Please, help us with a contribution today to support this urgent and vital work!

This is your opportunity to take a pivotal role in insuring that civil society will survive the current challenges and thrive well into the twenty first century.

To donate by PayPal just go to the Second Draft web site http://www.seconddraft.org/ and click on the “Donate” button at the lower right.

If you prefer to send a check, Please make it payable to Second Draft and send it to Second Draft, P.O. Box 150159, Newton Center, MA 02459

Islamofauxia

OK, class, lets try out a new word, I have been working on a more accurate way of describing the polymorphous phenomenon we study at Second Draft and this one actually came to mind while I was responding to a very good post at one of my favorite Canadian Blogs, Blazing Catfur...

New Word:
Islamofauxia (pronounced like islamophobia with no "B") – The lies, staged video, PhotoShopped pictures, calumnies, rage triggers, exaggerations and assorted frauds that Islamists concoct and the eager propagation of same by the Mainstream Media.
If all cases of Media Fraud and Islamofauxia were this obvious, you would not need Second Draft...
Back in the summer of 2007 the picture on the right made its way into the media via Agence France Press news agency. It came with this rambling caption, which intentionally blends the mention of the supposed bullets of the coalition forces into inflammatory references to suicide bombs (which the coalition was actually working to prevent):
An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more than 200 wounded when four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said. (AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)
Any one who has ever fired any kind of firearm and most people who have even seen a picture of a gun being fired would, if they stopped to think about it, realize that since those two bullets were still in their casings, it is impossible that they could have “hit” that woman’s house unless someone took them out of a clip and threw them. The picture (taken by an Iraqi stringer) and the caption were concocted with the intent to deceive and mislead. Yonatan Zunger has some very interesting take on the background of the picture here.

The dizzying combination of evil but inept fraud of the Islamists and idiotic complicity by the media that produced this example of Islamofauxia is pretty rare. But one must wonder, “If this transparent incompetency could get as far as it did, what else are they doing that they get away with- and how much damage is it doing?”

Defining, understanding and counteracting Islamofauxia is what Second Draft is all about, In the next few posts I will be exploring the implications of this new word and how it shows that our way of investigating and understanding Islamofauxia has led us to an historic tipping point, that may turn out to have fateful and momentous implications for Western Civilization.

Update:
It can be varied for sub categories like Islamofauxist for the perpetrators and Islamofaux-assister for the media dupes
And Islamofauxney (Pronounced Islamo-phoney) as a general description of all ideas, stories and pictures that are manipulative, misogynist, intolerant, hateful, sly, destructive and lethal....

Updated Update:
This word is catching on because is close enough to Islamophobia so that it take some of the venom out of the accusation. Also, it is a good antidote to cultural relativism. If you call it Taqiya or Kitman liberals will say "oh, its a cultural thing, its ok." Giving it our own name says, "cultural thing it may be, but its not ok in this culture and last time I checked this is the successful one."
Thanks for supporting the concept!

Rage, Sex Roles, Elections and the Media

My friend JHM sent me a short, schematic note the other day. He may be on to something, He wrote:

“Liberals are female and conservatives are male.
Males do war and business/the economy.
BHO wants to talk, not fight and his economics are really a redistribution of income. Plus another feminine issue is the environmental stuff [See "Mother Earth]
This speaks to why the liberals go bullshit with Sarah Palin.“

I think JHM is right in that there is something about the traditional sex-roles and gender determined behavior that is driving the absolute frenzy on the part of Obama’s supporters and much of the Mainstream Media.

This is really a mess to think about so let’s take it a piece at a time. My first Google on the idea turned up an interesting article, Hillary is From Mars, Obama is From Venus By Michael Scherer, on salon.com. It compared Obama to Hillary and found her to be more of a man than he.

Scherer sets the tone of his analysis by quoting Clara Oleson who he describes as an Iowa Democrat and former labor lawyer:

"Obama is the female candidate. Obama is the woman," she said, after admitting that she was one of his supporters. "He is the warm candidate, self-deprecating, soft, tender, sad eyes, great smile."

The article continues:

“So what does that make Hillary Clinton? "She is the male candidate -- in your face, authoritative, know-it-all." To be clear, Oleson was not doubting the symbolic power that Clinton retains as a woman. But she was calling it as she saw it, using the language of Iowa City, a university town. "It's what the academes would call the difference between sex and gender," Oleson explained."

This is interesting, nobody but a Democratic functionary could have opened this discussion using these highly charged terms without suffering a fusillade of accusations ranging from sexism to genocide. Since the suite has been opened by one of them, though, I would like to see how it plays out.

Neither Obama nor Clinton can avoid their obvious racial and gender “identities” as either white female or black male but they can and have taken on meta-gender personae in order to embody the required Democratic constellation of compulsory ideologies. Hillary Clinton is what I will call a DemWoman. Since the bygone days of real originals like Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm the ideal Democratic woman has evolved into a serious, masculinized icon. They dress in pointedly characterless clothes (not unlike designer Mao suites) and do their best not to show any authentic emotion or spontaneity of any kind. Obama mimics what I will call a DemFemMan- Doe-eyed, talkative, lip biting, smiley, warm and not-too-assertive.

Democrats are usually very conscientious and defensive about identities; they are, after-all, the party of Identity Politics. Still, they don’t usually talk about it as honestly as Oleson did. An even rarer example of a Democrat talking directly to the assumed identities of Democrat politicians was Geraldine Ferraro back in March when she said to The Daily Breeze, a newspaper in Torrance, Calif.: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Ferraro, is somewhat of an authority on this. Her sex, after all, was the very first entry on the “pro” side of the pro/con list when she was vetted for VP all those years ago. I find it fascinating, though, that she says, “If he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position”. I wondered if this is just victim talk- that kind of throw-in that people who make a fetish of blaming every slight and failing (imagined or real) on what they imagine to be the thing (that is not their fault) that is keeping them from the wonderful life and public adoration that they know they deserve (because they are who they are)? Or is it something more complicated?

Well, here’s a video clip that offers some clues:

This, of course, is a clip from last week, after Palin was nominated. It is interesting, not just because here Ferraro does not seem to be participating in the media and liberal elite’s desire to discredit and “un-nominate” Palin, she seems, in fact, almost to be ignoring Palin, she digresses about how Hillary was “treated badly” not just by the press but by the Democratic National Committee and the party apparatus in general. She pointedly adds that Howard Dean did not speak up “when sexism reared its ugly head”.

We should, at least commend her that she does not go after Palin but we need to try to figure out why she responds with that rant.

Victor Davis Hanson could well have included Ferraro’s name in his recent article about “Palin Derangement” where he writes:

“When we consider, in contrast (to Palin), the latticed background of careers of successful contemporary female role-model politicians, such as a Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Mary Landrieu, or Hillary Clinton — or pundits like Sally Quinn, Eleanor Clift, Andrea Mitchell, Campbell Brown, Gail Collins (the list is depressingly endless, in which marriage or lineage provides either the necessary capital, contacts, or insider influence — or sometimes all three) — then surely, whatever one’s politics, there should be some concession that what outsider Palin has accomplished, given where she began, is nothing short of remarkable.

In short, Sarah Palin is the emblem of what feminism was supposed to be all about: an unafraid, independent, audacious woman, who soared on her own merits without the aid of a patriarchal jumpstart, high-brow matrimonial tutelage and capital, and old-boy liaisons and networking.”

Note that the political women he mentions are all Democrats. So, how does Hanson’s article fit with Ferraro’s point?

I have to say that I believe that the whole thing about gender roles is a very acute observation but goes deeper than the observation that Obama acts like a woman and Hillary acts like a man. It is true that Hillary acts like a white man it’s a simple enough pose for her. But Obama has a harder task. If you read about his high school years, it would appear that he (raised by white people) taught himself how to act like a black man back then. If this is true, then today he would be what we used to call an oreo (black on the outside/white on the inside) a retro-fitted black man who acts like white woman who is trying to act like a white man.

As convolute and fascinating as the sexual personae of the denizens of the Democrat political establishment is, it is a distraction from the most important thing that can be learned here. That is, that journalism in the form of our current elite band of mass media practitioners are the “hand that rocks the cradle” in the way we view our politicians. They are the ones who present the candidates and their ideas to us in ways that subtly highlight these behavioral traits and lead the public perception to points of view. Point of view, in fact, is the journalist’s stock in trade. And journalism’s point of view is essentially aligned with the feminine persona- Story telling, social consciousness, caring for the weak, preventing conflict…,

Just as Hillary covers her female identity and becomes the “male candidate”, through being, in Oleson’s words, “in your face, authoritative, know-it-all” journalists usually layer those behaviors over the female persona of their profession in order to compete with each other for authority and “professionalism” .

Knowing everything and maintaining the initiative to be in everybody’s face all the time makes you brittle, defensive and inflexible it forces you to keep the world at a distance and to be guarded and combative.
It’s the lack of warmth and humor that is the tip-off. There’s no warmth because the layers of insulating role-play isolate the human core of the personality and keep it under pressure and molten with stifled rage, even while the outside facade is iced over with a brittle shell of outward calm that the merest hint of humor would shatter. When the keen edge of humor touches that icy shell, that slick veneer of smugness fractures and the rage bursts forth like volcanic eruptions.

It is counterintuitive in a way. They want to be loved so they put up barriers. They want to be respected so they never give anyone permission to see who they really are. They want to be egalitarian so they seek power. They want to be right about everything so much that they will not engage in debate and reasonable discussion without denial, labeling and hysteria. Most of all they want everyone to agree with them; so they believe in ineffectual, “consensus” policies and useless platitudes that are easy to rationalize and then build fortifications of emotion, identity and empathy so that anyone who dares to try to breach it with reason becomes an identity abuser (racist, sexist, fascist, etc…), an emotion crusher and an inhumane monster without empathy.

Look at all the Democrat women that Hanson mentioned above. They all have some variant of that layered-on masculine stiffness and control. They are all “professional women”. Which, as near as I can tell, requires them to comport themselves as a superannuated, over intellectual college sophomore playing a lesbian in a community theater performance. I’ve know a few real lesbians in my day and they have most are a hell of a lot more interesting and natural than those creepy Madame Tussaudes versions that Pelosi and Clinton Play on television.
And yet, as Hanson pointed out, they have advanced their careers to this stage- by means that are specifically feminine (what Tennessee Williams might have called “depending on the kindness of strangers”).

With all this gender bending and manipulative affectation going on, it should be no surprise that when a vivacious, unaffected, and un-androgynous woman like Sarah Palin comes along, and with a straightforward appeal, cuts through all the posturing and playacting with which Dem Women and Dem Fem Men trick out their lives, they don’t just resent it, they fear and loath. It doesn’t just threaten their ideological house of cards; it exposes the silly, debilitating game they play with their public images.

Palin reminds me of no one so much as a female Ronald Reagan- The Happy Warrior, The Great Communicator never had to pretend to be anything that he wasn’t to attract attention. His emotional security and self-possession made him an almost irresistible charmer. Secure in her identity, Palin is natural, direct and just as charming in he was.

Sarah Palin has not been untrue to herself. That is why she comes across as a real person to us. Absent the tension of the personality layering and façade maintenance she, as Reagan did presents a strikingly open and affable face to the world. This makes her charming and persuasive in a way that Hillary, Pelosi, all the political crones and media furies that Hanson mentions and many more, could only dream of. No wonder they (and their frustrated supporters) are furious.

And if you think the Dem Women and DemFemMen have knotted themselves up, wait till you take a look at those journalists who have made an career out of the same, very intimate sacrifices in order to be accepted by their editors and peers as well as have to access to their news sources.

They write news stories with semi-subliminal emotional and empathic slant that attempt to lead the reader into their interpretation of the events and evidence being covered. Under the banner of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted” they blindly support insurgencies that promise change even if it is obvious to most observers that the change they advocate will bring disastrous consequences. They fail to report on pertinent events that might “embarrass” anyone they consider sensitive or an underdog. Worst of all, they allow evil to go unchallenged by resorting to the sickening moral relativism of “evenhanded” reporting in place of accurate and honest reporting.

The pain and rage with which much of the media have reacted to Sarah Palin’s nomination for Vice President is an instructive example. It forces them to admit that their professional ethics are negotiable. They claim that They are journalists to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted; Even as they feverishly search her past for reasons to declare her unworthy and ineligible- to find some flaw or misdeed that might forced John McCain to ask this talented, hard working, successful woman of the people to resign from the ticket. They must be aware at some level that in rushing to the defense of the elite, independently wealthy, powerfully connected (yes, connected to the despised white patriarchy!) DemFem Man Obama, that they are actually comforting the comfortable. He is comfortable, they are comfortable and they expect to get us comfortable with him too. That awareness that their pretense is being exposed inflames their rage even more.

They are all so busy building, elaborating and justifying their careers and their personality composites that they seem to have forgotten why they are there. They are so occupied with keeping the whole creaking, smoking, wobbling Rube Goldberg system working (and paying them) that they often forget to care whether anyone in the real world even wants to read, hear or watch The News as they are constrained to present it. This is one reason why the Internet has sucked away so much of the Mass media’s audience.

This shapes up as a battle between “Professionalism” (shackled by ideological group-think and prejudice) and Authenticity (freedom of thought and expression) and I do believe that the people instinctively know which one they favor. I also believe they are right.

John McCain Accepts: America Makes the History Around Here, Mr. Obama!

With John McCain’s stirring acceptance speech last night he made it official. This is a contest for the very soul of America- the most basic and vital campaign waged in modern American History. It is a contest between the country that was created by the framers of the constitution and the country that we have slowly been becoming.

Maybe its just that I have been reading between the lines for so long, but I am sensing things- I heard a refreshing tone in McCain’s speech last night that I have been longing for since Ronald Reagan left office.
I am talking about the promise of America. When the Jefferson, Adams, et al laid the plans for the country they even more concerned with creating safeguards against new ruling classes arising as they were about getting rid of the old ruling class. They wanted to leave behind the dead hand of aristocracy and plutocracy that made the old world of Europe stagnant and devoid of real opportunity.

They knew that success and power accumulate in groups at the top and lead to abuses after a while. The contest between Democrats and Republicans is so often a duel of special interests and agendas that we loose sight of the reason why we have elections in the first place. Elections are part of the process because they are the most efficient way to insure that ruling elites cannot become entrenched and can be changed without blood when a majority of the people thinks its necessary.

The continuing danger in our two party system is that those two parties are sometimes more interested in cooperating on their own business than they are on the people’s business. The government in Washington is always in danger of becoming more of an insider’s club than an instrument of the will of the people. Change, which is a theme for both Presidential campaigns, is a reflection of the public’s sense that things have gotten too cozy again.
It is not a question of whether we want change. Change always happens. The question is: : What kind of change do we need?”

I would submit that the first thing on the list of things to change ought to be that sense that the current elite is becoming more like a ruling class. I’m not just talking about the current administration and its corporate connections, I am talking about the political machines, the entrenched bureaucracies and the vested interests that, together, make up “business as usual”. It is not a Republican or a Democrat ruling class, it is worse than that. Elections are designed to fix that. I am talking about folks who have climbed inside the power structure, rolled up the windows, locked the doors, turned on the A/C and tuned the radio to the Insider Network. Elections don’t fix that because there are a great many Democrats and Republicans who broker positions and power, for their own comfort and gain- not for the good of the republic. It is a way the have of trying to insulate themselves from the restorative powers of elections.

The first thing I liked about McCain’s speech is that he reminded us that he is a maverick and a reformer. That he has always been the guy who blows whistles on the cozy and the bureaucratic. He served notice on this when he acknowledged his own party’s short comings. When he said, “We were elected to change Washington and we let it change us. We’re going to change that!” It was not a personal mea culpa, it was a signal that he is an American first and a Republican by affiliation only- that he sees the problem and intends to do something about it. “We're going to change that.” He pledged, “We're going to recover the people's trust by standing up again for the values Americans admire. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics.”

“Back to basics”, this leads me to the most important thing about John McCain’s speech. Beyond the party, there is the underlying philosophy. The most accurate summation ever written of the American political milieu was these two sentences by Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

America has always had a basic culture of self-reliance, responsibility, enterprise and liberty. There have been many changes enforced on America by liberal activism, some have been beneficial but many have eroded the liberty and self-reliance of our people. It is the conservative impulse to let culture shine through, combined with his combative reformism that makes John McCain’s speech important and inspiring.

This guy has always been a pain in the ass for all his colleagues in the Senate. He does not toe the party line nor does he respect the trans-party structures of power. He, like his VP choice has Character. Put a bunch of people with character together in one country and your have a republic, a powerhouse of ideas and achievements. If you have a bunch of people with no character, you wind up with a totalitarian state with a stagnant economy because without people willing to stand up for something, you get fascism. McCain says, “I am going to say what I think is right.”

Obama, as Sarah Palin pointed out, “…says one thing about you when he is in Scranton and another thing altogether at a wine and cheese reception in San Fransisco.”

For McCain, it is not about his personal glory or success. He has been there and done that he is about repaying a debt on a different level. Here is something his opponent could never say:
“I'm not running for president because I think I'm blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need. My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.” John McCain is about America and her promise and Obama is about Obama and his chance to “make history.”

Can you picture John McCain standing in front of a massive rally in Germany, a country that forced us to destroy her cities and kill her people in order to prevent her from subjugating the world to Nazi brutality, and uttering this, “I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.” Then his next words are, “But I also know how much I love America…” as if THAT, the love of Obama, is what is important. You men out there, try going home tonight and telling your wife, “Honey, you may be a little homely and sorta boring but you mean well and I love you.”
John McCain knows that nobody’s perfect. Nothing in this world is perfect. He, better than anybody, knows America is a work in progress. But he knows there is no excuse to be made. America is the best.

To keep us focused and working on helping her to continue to grow into the dream of the founding patriots, we need to have a leader who can call on us with a more confident voice than that, a voice that inspires and encourages, a voice with Chuchillian echoes of determination and pride- like the end of John McCain’s speech last night. How about the call he made at the end of his speech. Here it is:

“I'm an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth, and with hard work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within our reach.
Fight with me. Fight with me. 


Fight for what's right for our country. 


Fight for the ideals and character of a free people. 


Fight for our children's future. 


Fight for justice and opportunity for all. 


Stand up to defend our country from its enemies. 


Stand up for each other; for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America. 


Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We're Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history. 


Thank you, and God bless you."

Yes indeed, America and whole hearted Americans make the history around here Mr Obama.

Its About Character Stupid!- Palin steps to the podium

Democrats, howling lefties, upper-income revolutionaries and the semi-educated demi-elite are having a gleeful carnival at the expense of McCain about his choice of Sarah Palin for his running mate. So transported have they been by this rapture, they have "end-zone danced" themselves very far out onto the leafy end of a slender limb.

Consider:

They have been so busy egging each other on, they have neglected to notice that most of America is made up of real people. While chortling over the teen pregnancy of Bristol and mocking Palin’s support of abstinence education, they failed to notice that this kind of thing happens to families in the real world. They just went on chortling while many real people all over the country just saw the daughter of a friend or relative reflected in the situation.

Sometimes, you see, in spite of what a child has been taught, they will get into trouble. Real people know and experience that every day. It is all very well to say that teaching her 16 year old about condoms would have prevented her from becoming pregnant at 17 but that is of no more use to Bristol or her baby than pointing out that if that boy’s parents had been successful in imbuing him with respect for women, concern for life and reverence for the personal intimate bond, there would not have been a problem.

Many, I dare say, might even be thinking that there has been way too much of the kind of sex education in this country that resigns itself to young teens having casual sex and limiting its message to trying to get them to do it responsibly. Yoo Hoo- Does any one out there have a teenager in the house?

In any case, what all this has a whole lot less to do with what kind of VP Palin would make than how she handles it now. She is not hiding or sheltering or coddling her daughter- what you see is what you get. With a mom like Sarah Palin, you know that Bristol is going to have to take responsibility, because that’s the kind of family she comes from.

What the elitist jokers who have been cutting capers on this woman and her family can never know is the way she handled the knowledge that she was carrying a downs syndrome child. How many of the dancing fools out on that limb would have gone to term and resolved to do their best by that baby? Sarah Palin and her husband will be still making hard decisions and giving love to that kid- a lifetime’s worth- when they have stopped dancing and gone home.

Sooner or later those jerks are going to look around and notice that the rest of us are noticing how shallow, weasely and feckless they and their Presidential candidate are. If that doesn’t freeze the smiles on their faces it will when they realize that the American people will, in the end, compare all of the candidates on the issue of character.

At first it seemed curious to me that these people who think they are so much more clever than folks who, as he says, “... get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment…,” are making “experience” their point of attack. They know that they are at an obvious disadvantage on the experience issue. They betray that knowledge every time they say “She’ll be a heartbeat away from the presidency”. The conclusion I come to is that they really have nothing left to say because if the address character directly everyone will notice that the Republican candidate, John McCain is the man who had the courage of his convictions and the raw moral strength to endure five years of torture and captivity rather than desert his fellow prisoners of war and allow the enemy to use him for propaganda against us and our country. McCain, who is after all, the Presidential candidate has never hesitated to do what he thought was right for us and our country regardless of whether it meant that he had to work with someone from the other party or call for reform in his own. But, since they are going after the comparison between Mr Obama and Sarah Palin let’s just look at the character issues between them.

Palin has a long history of saying exactly what she means. She is not a liberal consensus-seeking politician, she is a conservative who will tell you exactly what she thinks needs to be done and strive to implement it. She doesn’t need to run a focus group or take a poll- she speaks in specifics and she works with facts.

Let’s compare honesty and straightforwardness.
As an example- how about the question about drilling for oil in ANWR?
Palin is for it. We need energy independence and its good for Alaska. Drill in ANWAR!
What kind of character does Obama show?
He is staunchly against all oil exploration not just drilling in ANWR. Does that mean he is a green candidate- against burning hydrocarbons? No. He is one of the most avid supporters of ethanol- the idiotic halfway measure that has driven up the price of everyone’s food disastrously in the past eight months. Why does he support Ethanol? Because he happens to be a senator from Illinois which is one of the top ethanol producing states. Illinois is reaping huge profits from the current food price bulge and that’s OK with Mr O. Meanwhile, he supports windfall profit taxes on the oil companies.
Q. Consistent?
a. No.
Q. Intelligent?
A. Well, shrewd maybe…
Defend our country or at least respect those who do.
Palin’s own son is going to Iraq next week. She has visited the troops in Iraq already, travelling all the way there for the purpose.
Obama’s political career was launched in the living room of a couple (Bill Ayres and Bernadette Dohrn) who took part in bombings of the Capitol and the Pentagon. Ayers still says that he wishes he had done more. Mr. O is beginning to follow the same pattern with Ayers as he did with Jeremiah Wright . You will recall that Wright was, at first, leader of his church and his spiritual advisor and when the public saw who Wright was, Obama demoted him to “crazy old uncle” and is now, finally, ( and not because Obama objected to anything Wright said or did but because almost everybody else did) persona non grata. Since the Ayers connection will not go away on its own, Obama surrogates are now beginning the slow process of “stuffing” Ayers and putting him into the museum of Obama’s former friends, his “rungs on the ladder”; all this without ever addressing directly whether he hates America as much as Wright and Ayers avowedly do. Then too he could not even be bothered to visit wounded soldiers in the hospital in Germany when he found out that there would be no photo opportunity in it for him.
To tell the truth he sounds a little self-serving and cynical to me. That kind of thing plays well in the Starbucks and the Sushi Bars on the coasts and in Chicago but I think the old coffee shops and Burger Kings in between might have a bit less understanding.
Suddenly, tonight, the madcap dancers out on the limb stopped dancing. The smiles have frozen on their faces. They have heard the unique voice Sarah Palin. From the momrnt she walked out on the stage at the convention and showed the world that she is not the trailer-trash bumpkin they have been hoping she would turn out to be.
She spoke clearly about things about which that the fools on the limb would rather forget; families, the need to explore for new oil, patriotism and (heaven forbid) Islamic Terrorism. And worst of all for them, she talked about them in ways that showed that she has undeniable Character. Just as she said about John McCain, she is not someone who will tell you one thing to your face in Scranton and then say something quite different about you to a bunch of sleek metrosexuals in San Francisco. Trustworthy and loyal are part of character too.
Both the Presidential and the Vice-Presidential Republican Candidates by themselves have more character than Mr Obama, and I can hear that long leafy bough starting to groan and creak. I think, if it were me, I’d be stepping a bit closer to the trunk- maybe even getting ready to shinny down…

WHO IS TO BLAME FOR EVIL?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Update

A short note as the Sabbath begins-
David's operation went as well as we could have hoped for! Total removal of what he calls "The Alien Thing" with the least possible cutting involved. I am sure that all the prayers, energy and blessings that so many of you have sent his way have made a tremendous difference! Thank you all and bless you for your generous spirit.
He is hurting but healing and I know that the knowledge of your concern has buoyed him as much as it has me!
Thank You All from the Bottom of My Heart
YBM

Prayers, Please!

Breath of the Beast deals mainly with the political and contentious but it is still a personal blog. So, although you, my readers, have mostly been drawn here for the marketplace of ideas, I have sometimes tried your patience with my own personal requests and agendas. Permit me one more of these.

I would like to ask you for your prayers for my second youngest son, David ben Yaacov (for those of you who are Jewish and use the mother’s name too, Mom’s name is Ravital bat Avraham). David will undergo an “urgent” operation this Friday 9/29 to remove a tumor that has shown “rapid growth and cellular changes”. David is ten yeas old and has Neurofibromatosis and will probably be OK after this operation but OK is a relative thing with NF. He is likely to need more of these operations, especially in the next eight or so years of pubescence and adolescence.

Dave has already been through a great deal in his life. Before Ravital and I adopted him and his little brother Yishai from Ukraine, (the picture here is them dressed in their new clothes -ready to leave Ukraine Dave is on the right)they suffered through the death of their biological father (bone cancer- probably from an NF related tumor that was not understood or properly treated over there) and a year in an orphanage. I can assure you he is a good deal more courageous than I am about this.

Let me be clear, my friends, I am asking for your prayers only, we have insurance and a good life. If you would like to do something tangible for David a card (you can send them to David at the Second Draft PO Box 590591, Newton Centre, MA 02459) or a donation to the NF, inc. website or even one the Second Draft Website in his honor would be very nice indeed but not nearly as important to us as your thoughts and prayers.

Until I can return with good news right after Labor Day, blogging will be suspended here for a few days. I do have what I think is a very important post that I have been working on for more than a week.

Young Frankenstein Teaches Leftism 101

I don't know about you but after the last three posts, I am ready to try to find some humor, however macabre, in the situation.

Here is the text book demonstration of how to be a Modern Liberal- no, I mean Socialist- er that is- Communist- oh, ah, now its Progressive- yeah, thats, it Progressive; taught by Dr. Frodrick Frankensteen (or whatever). First, class, let's watch the film:

By the numbers now here's how it breaks down( for each instance the line from the dialog is in red, the rational is in grey and a current example of Progressivethink is in blue):

1. “Frankensteen not Frankenstein” Your grandfather gave your name a bad reputation so change it to disguise who you are. Call it by a different name and no one will know. Liberal is no good, neither is socialist or communist so let’s go with Progressive- Even if the whole world says “You’re putting me on- You have nothing to do with progress.”
   
2. “…the rates have gone up” Just agree, its only money – don’t even ask how much. We wouldn’t want a confrontation… Oh sure we’ll just raise taxes and spend more.
   
3. “I’m a rather brilliant surgeon, perhaps I could help you with that hump.” Don’t even get to know the people or examine the malady, be conceited and arrogant enough to immediately assume that you can cure whatever is “wrong” with other people and minister to their spiritual needs. Obama, President of Europe and the healer of our nation.
   
4. “What hump?" (awkward pause) “Lets go!" There is no denial of the obvious that cannot be answered with an even more blatant denial of the obvious. If CAIR and The Muslim Brotherhood say that there is nothing to fear from political Islam ("What terrorism? We are the religion of peace"), then we all should just ignore the pattern in all terrorism done in its name- “War is not the answer.”
   
5. “Walk this way, this way” accept and adopt any other way of doing things other that the one that is most natural and efficient. As when the Archbishop of Canterbury declaring that the magnificent, fair and just British legal system must adapt to the influence of the misogynist, religiously intolerant, arbitrary and brutal Islamic Shari’a system.
   

Damned if this doesn't shed some light on my posts about the humorlessness of The Left (here and here). It is hard to have a sense of humor when you are so rigid, pompous, self important and dependant on half-truths and fictions that the least snicker in the background makes you wonder if your facade has been broken and everyone is laughing at you. As kundera said, “No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.”

Just go back and look at the great development of expressions on "Frankensteen"s" face between "Eyegore" saying, "What hump?" and Frankensteen's "Lets go!" His looks seem to say "Yikes, he can't deal with the fact that he has a hump! I in danger of humiliating him, not by making fun of the hump but merely by stating that I noticed that he has it. If I insist that he really has a hump, he might humiliate me by insisting that my name is really Frankenstein. That would be intolerable. Oh well, if he is deep enough in denial to say 'What hump?' maybe I can just Move On and we can just pretend nothing happened here and ignore all these lies and misconceptions and proceed."

This is another thing The Left and the Islamists have in common. Vast networks of interdependent fictions and denials that explode in the presence of laughter- just look at the "Mohammed Cartoon Crisis".

But, then, you can always gloss it over if you declare that everything is relative. 

Oh, by the way, on your way out folks, please, sign the petition against moral relativism.

A Meeting on the Dark Side of the Moon

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

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

.
To which I replied:

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

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

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

“The distinctive feature of totalitarian societies is that everyone, including (in theory, anyway) the dictator, can be sacrificed in the name of a superhuman law, a law of nature or a law of history.”

Menand went on to quote Hannah Arendt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birthday Gift for a Dead Girl

I live next to a lovely suburban park in Newton, Massachusetts. It might be the last place where you would expect to find it but, if you pay attention, you will feel the breath of the beast here too.

Between my dogs and my kids, I manage to find quite a few excuses to spend time on the benches in the park. There is one bench in particular- in a very nice corner of the park where two streams converge. This bench is very near to a playground so that the sound of playing children is often in the background; but it faces away from the play area- as if to look away and brood.  It is a cool spot, under the shelter of several big, old trees so there is shade from the summer sun and the cruel winter winds are muffled.

I often sit on that bench, starting out there in solitude, only to find myself in the company of a young woman whom I will never meet. There is a little bronze plaque affixed to a rock here and it conjures her presence. Sometimes, I remember to contemplate her fate.



This coming Friday, Aug. 15, 2008, will be Sarah S. B. Philipps’ birthday. Her life ended at twenty years old when a bomb, apparently planted by agents of the Libyan government took her life and the lives of 269 others.

You see, December 21st, four months and six days from Friday, will be the twentieth anniversary of her death. She died on Pan Am flight 103 when a charge of Semtex plastic explosive (supplied to Libya by the then communist country of Czechoslovakia, hidden in a radio  and fused to a timer, some say, by Palestinian agents and smuggled onboard through lax security in Malta by a Libyan) blew a hole in the Boeing 747 causing it to disintegrate at altitude and smash into Lockerbie Scotland.

Sarah would have been forty this Friday- had she lived. Here is a clip from the memorial page for her on the Syracuse University Web Site

"Sarah left behind a legacy of laughter so compelling that her best friends can't help but remember her with a smile. Her parents describe her as bright, funny, friendly, and beautiful. She loved people, beaches, ski slopes, sunshine. She was going to be a clever publisher or a witty lawyer, a tender wife and mother, a sturdy citizen. Where Sarah was, there too was laughter and joy."

For the last few days, ever since I noticed that Sarah’s birthday was approaching, I have done a great deal of research on her and on Pan Am 103. I was hoping to be able to tell a story with assurance and clarity but I find that I cannot. I have gone over the history of the incident. I’ve rooted through the record of the legal and diplomatic efforts to bring justice to the perpetrators and closure to the victims’ families. It is taken me a very long way from this bench under these shady trees.

I have followed the trail to forlorn monuments as in the first line of a USA TODAY article about one of Sarah’s mother’s many visits to Lockerbie. It seems she always visits the place where Sarah's body came to rest after being thrown clear of the falling airplane. “They found her face down in the Scottish turf, still strapped into seat 21F.” 

Sarah’s mother Elizabeth, like so many other family members had to endure the horror of forensic photographs, listening to graphic court testimony and bearing the knowledge that someone murdered her beloved child out of ancient angers and scabrous hatreds of which she was entirely innocent.

It is a dismal business- young lives cut short, families shattered- here is another piece from that USA TODAY article:

"Just before her death, the young woman and her mother spoke by phone. Sarah had just taken a bus trip from London to Edinburgh and was enthralled with Scotland. ''Mommy, I love Scotland. You must promise me you'll travel here with me,'' Sarah said to her mother.
Instead, the tragedy ''stole her future from us,'' her mother says. Elizabeth's thoughts this weekend are of the wedding that won't happen, the grandchildren left unborn, the trip to Scotland they will never take."

And then there is the confusion and contention that still surround the quest for justice. Even though Libya has accepted responsibility for the attack on flight 103, there is an ongoing controversy in which it appears possible to some knowledgeable observers that the train of guilt might not be so clear and that other Islamic groups and causes were involved. Even as recently as this summer there have been revelations that unsettle the memory of Sarah and the other victims. Going to the various memorial and victims’ family’s sites I am overwhelmed by the confusion and unresolved pain. How to account for the blood and pain? How could another human being have done this to all these innocent people- the ones who died and the ones who loved them?

We want to find meaning and salvation in such devastating loss. We want to bring healing out of the pain. To do this we often look within ourselves. We know that, painful as it is, self-criticism is the key to improving and growing. This is one of the finest and healthiest traits of Western Civilization but it is crucial that we know when it is to our own detriment and how to look outside ourselves when necessary.

This little monument declares that her friends from her class at Newton North High School recall her “bright presence and love of life.” I have no doubt that they remembered her accurately. This is the glory of the Judeo-Christian tradition as it has come to fruition in America. We love life and we hold it sacred. It is the very banner headline of our national mission statement- The Declaration of Independence, that we are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The reason why Sarah never reached 21 years old is that whoever it was that killed her (the convicted Libyans or the rumored Palestinians) do not feel the same way about life. They love death more than they do life. Now, before you go off thinking that I am a racist or a religious bigot consider this:
The spiritual source of the modern Islamist movement and the founder of The Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna wrote about this at length in one of his seminal works.
Matthias Küntzel quotes al-Banna at length in his excellent book Jihad and Jew-Hatred:

"According to al-Banna, the Koran enjoins believers to love death more than life. Unfortunately, he argues, Muslims are in thrall to a "love of life." "The illusion which had humiliated us is no more than the love of worldly life and the hatred of death." As long as the Muslims do not replace their love of life with the love of death as required by the Koran, their future is hopeless. Only those who become proficient in the "art of death" can prevail. "So, prepare yourself to do a great deed. Be keen on dying and life will be granted to you, so work towards a noble death and you will win complete happiness."

He died in 1949 but al-Banna’s words echo through all of the blood-letting of Islamists up to the present from Bin Laden’s twisted Fatwas...

“I say to you William (Defence Secretary) that: These youths love death as you loves life.”

...to Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah who noted after a prisoner exchange:

“We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

Still not convinced? Then watch this:
This lovely fellow is Fathi Hammad a spokesman for Hamas Listen to what he says. “An industry of death… the women, the children, the mujihadeen and the old people…” and again the same refrain, “We desire death like you desire life”.

Only when we realize that they are not kidding about this and that they will not stop atrocities like the bomb on Flight 103 by themselves will young people like Sarah be safe to live, laugh and pursue free and happy lives. We must not let ourselves become discouraged by the fact that we are not perfect- We must recognize how much better our world is than theirs. We dare not flag or be daunted by the knowledge that they mean to sacrifice even their own children, women and elderly to destroy us; we must defeat them to save not only our children but theirs as well.

If there is any salvation and healing to be gained from Sarah S. B. Philipps’ fate and memory, it must be that we need to remember this basic difference between who we (and by “we” I mean all of western civilization- The U.S. and Israel in the vanguard) are and who the people are who killed Sarah in the name of their angry, life-hating amalgam of politics and religion.

Won’t you join me in honoring her fortieth birthday by rejecting and speaking out against the moral blindness with which many of us, in the name of "correctness" or as a polite avoidance of chauvinism we find ways to equate our civilization and its all too real faults and errors with the real fascism and bloody designs of the Islamist death cult? Give Sarah this present, tell her: "You have not died in vain, Sarah, we remember and we have learned."

Please sign our petition as a pledge to speak up for western civilization: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/recognize_evil/

A Very Distorted Vision of Humanity

Judith Apter Klinghoffer has an insightful post about a diabolically disingenuous study produced by Vision of Humanity, an Australian NGO. Judith, who is one of the clearest thinkers I know, calls the thing hilarious and I agree that the design of the study and the claim for its validity is laughable but my sense of humor about this travesty is overcome when I consider the damage it does.
In a comment I made to her post I say:

Tyranny- It Always Quickens the Progressive Pulse
Tyrannies always have an eerie kind of menacing quiet to them. When the government is opaque and supplies the statistics there is never any problem that cannot be minimized. Ahmadinejad says that there is no homosexuality in Iran and so the killing of homosexuals does not disturb the peacefulness index. Lets not forget that Progressives like these Australian twits are just the modern form of collectivist ideologues who created the most peaceful "workers paradises" on earth- places where you could starve to death - or disappear into the Gulag, concentration camp or reeducation camp without ever being recorded in such a way as to blemish the peaceful image of the "People's Republic or Soviet Union or Third Reich" in which you live. Leftists always admire tyrannies (from afar, of course) for it. They seem to be saying, "If only we can regain the power again, with all these new rationalizations, we would be much better equipped to denature the human spirit next time around."

One of the prime ironies of the study is that Iran is, according to this very Astigmatic Vision of Humanity, a much more peaceful country than Israel. With that in mind let’s take a look at a few of the scoring points on which Iran that peaceful land of Mullahs, nuclear ambition and Bhurkas did so much better than Israel. Their quoted points are in black and my comments are in red.


Relations with neighbouring countries Let’s see, if you’re Israel, everybody around you hates you and tries to kill you because you’re Jewish- That’s going to hurt your score. If you are Iran, you are the world’s most active sponsor of terror by proxy- you hire train and supply outsiders and your own army officers dressed as civilians to commit murder outside your own borders- none of which hurts your standing as a “peaceful country”.

Level of distrust in other citizens Hmmm, if a guy from a "certain group" grabs a bulldozer and crushes a few of your people that is no reason to be suspicious. Then when another guy from that same group does the same thing it would hurt you Peace Index if you thought that there might be a pattern emerging here… Then again in Iran the only people you have to distrust are the government’s moral police.

Level of disrespect for human rights (Political Terror Scale) It is absolutely unfathomable how it has been possible to formulate an index in which Iran (where religious intolerance is endemic and violent, where slavery is still practiced openly, where women are beaten by officers of the government for wearing western style clothing and where homosexuals are subject to capitol punishment) has a better score on this category than Israel (where all citizens can vote, where religious tolerance is absolute where there are open gay pride parades, Arabs have a better standard of living, are better educated and experience lower infant mortality and all styles of clothing are worn including the hijab)- someone please explain this to me!

Potential for terrorist acts This one is priceless! Iranian trained, controlled and supplied terrorists maraud inside Israel and fire rockets on an hourly basis and these count against Israel not Iran!

Level of violent crime Of course when the Morality Police beat up a woman on the streets of Iran because she isn’t sufficiently covered up this is not considered a violent crime- just the police "keeping the peace" does this make sense?

Military expenditure as a percentage of GDP With Iran, Syria and several other much larger countries dedicated to destroying her, Does it make sense for Israel to cut her defense spending?
Number of armed services personnel per 100,000 people Israel is a tiny country, out numbered (more than 100 to 1) by nations all around her that have sworn to eliminate her do you think she might want to have a higher portion of people ready to fight? Oh, and that doesn’t even take into account the difference between the citizen soldiery and reserve system of Israel and the professional military caste/establishment in the countries that have kept her under siege for sixty years.

Volume of transfers (imports) of major conventional weapons per 100,000 people. Not counting the traffic of weaponry flooding across Iran’s northern borders from the former Soviet Union.

Volume of transfers (exports) of major conventional weapons per 100,000 people Not, of course taking into consideration the massive shipments of arms from China and North Korea that are smuggled and trans-shipped to the Iranian proxy armies in Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.

Aggregate number of heavy weapons per 100,000 people Why would you need heavy weapons- Oh, maybe because your neighbors are trying to annihilate you… So if you intend to put up a fight you are a “problem child in the community”

Ease of access to small arms and light weapons In all totalitarian societies the first move is to disarm the populace- It cuts down on civil strife for better or worse.

Military capability/sophistication Heaven forbid you should study was to be able to protect your citizens efficiently with the least collateral damage. You’re going to look very un-peaceful.

That’s just a few of them- But you get the picture. The whole thing reminds me of my posts on the battered woman syndrome- Making it look like Israel brings it on herself. Then you punch her in the nose and yell at her for bleed ing on the rug. There it is a Vision of Humanity that only a Progressive could love.

Great name for a Progressive NGO By the way- They Love Humanity its People they Hate.

Mattot: A Warning From the Past

I try not to post on Friday and I have never posted anything about my religious feelings before so this is a bit of a departure for Breath of the Beast but I think this is an important exception to make. I have been asked to deliver this week's gloss on the Bible portion in my synagogue and It relates directly to the usual subject matter on this blog. So here is the draft of what I will be saying on Saturday morning.

This is a difficult time of year for D’var Torahs. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the parshas at this time of year are particularly troublesome. Last week was Pinchas the week before was Balak and now this- Mattot. Here is a rough outline:



Moses is near the end of his life. He has led the people out of slavery and been their shepherd for forty years of transitional wandering. They are on the threshold of the promised land and are in the final stages of preparation to go forward and claim their right to that promise. It is not clear if they know that Moses will no longer lead them but Moses knows. The parsha begins with a detailed treatment of the importance and legal implications of vows and oaths. It goes into fine distinctions about the vows and oaths of women and how they are subject to intervention, under certain circumstances, by the men folk (husbands and fathers) in the woman’s life. This is an irritant too- it certainly does not reflect modern Jewish practice. Then there is an abrupt switch to a narrative in which God commands Moses that the people must take vengeance on the Midianites and tells him explicitly that after that is done, that he (Moses) will “tayasafe al-ha-amecha” “be gathered to his kinspeople”. The Israelites go out into battle, return victorious only to find that the slaughter of the Midianites was not complete enough they- have killed only the Midianite men. The Midianite women and children have been spared. Moses then orders them to kill all the women “who have known men” and all of the male children. This done, the parsha closes with the story of how the tribes of Ruvane, Menashe and Gad begin to settle down on the eastern bank of the Jordan, showing a reluctance to continue on to help settle the rest of the people in “the Land” proper. Moses gets angry with them and insists that if they want the right to settle east of the Jordan river, the men of those tribes must agree to first go with the rest of the people and, in fact, become the “shock troops” (the word used is Chalootz also used as “pioneer” and, today, as “conscript”) of the battles to come. They agree to this and the parsha ends with them consolidating their positions and the stage set for the momentous crossing of the river.



I am going to talk about the war on the Midianites first. The vows section and the agreement with Reuvan, Menashe and Gad, can only be fully appreciated in the light of this major event. As it often happens, sections that seem unrelated, when you study them together, often reveal new and deeper ways of looking at things. There is always something sublime and laden with meaning about the way that sections that seem disjointed at first, the way these do, elucidate and clarify each other. 



So, God commanded the massacre of the Midianites and Moses orders it done. It seems irredeemably ugly and cruel to us but there is, no way to ignore it. Many, much wiser readers and interpreters than I, have tried to gloss over, minimize, rationalize or even evade it, because it is so harsh. Plaut, Alter and others say that it is “a story”, hinting that the completion of the murder is just as much of an exaggeration as the claim that not a single Israelite was lost in the initial battle. Plaut makes the point that the Midianites reappear as a people in the book of Joshua and while that might just be a people who have resettled the original land of Midian, it certainly gives an opening for those who would like to believe that there is a more “complex” event here than simple annihilation of innocents. 



Even so, the text is clear. When the battle is over and the killing is not as thorough as required, there is a frank and detailed discussion of who shall be killed. While the killing is never confirmed explicitly, it is never denied either. So, we are left having to accommodate this ancient savagery to our modern sensibility.


I struggled with this too; eventually it came to me, I was not looking at the story in context. Those Jews are not the Jews of today. They are not a group of educated professional people who have grown up in the peace and security of an American childhood. They live in an ancient world where the only way to insure that a defeated enemy’s sons and kin would not continue the cycle of revenge after a battle was to render them permanently incapable of it. The parents of these Jews were brutalized as slaves in Egypt. In Forty years of homeless wandering, they have been under constant threat of attack by every group around them. It was so bad that their movements and encampments in the wilderness had to be organized and carried out as military maneuvers with armed guards on all sides- with orders of march enforced. 

This was the ancient world where there were only three kinds of people- the conquered, the too tough to be conquered and the conquerors. There was no such thing as the UN or World Court- no higher authority- no concept of conflict resolution, there was only the struggle for survival. It is true that you could starve to death easily enough in a famine but the struggle against nature was nothing compared to the need to protect yourself against the depredations of other people.



And what other people! The context on this is even tougher. The vengeance we are talking about here is in response to the Midianite participation in the Baal Pe’or attempt to destroy the Jewish people from within. You will remember that in the parsha Balak, two weeks ago, the Midianites and Moabites conspired to use their own women - to literally prostitute their wives, sisters and daughters in an attempt to subvert and destroy the vitality, cohesion and morality of Israelite culture. 



The attempt had some initial success- many Israelites succumbed to temptation and made sacrifices to Baal. Then there came a plague and internal strife that resulted, we are told, in 24,000 Israelite deaths. 

What a contrast there is between Israel and her neighbors. Given that, in the ancient world, women were not the equals of men and were often treated as chattel, how can there be any comparison between these two cultures? And this is where the relationship between the section on vows and oaths takes on a deeper significance. Here we have Israel, on the one hand, which gives careful consideration and legal respect to the independent vows and oaths of women, compared to Midian, so degraded and underhanded that they use the bodies and souls of their own women as weapons of war. It is abuse of the vilest kind. Midian sacrifices the most intimate relationships and highly charged devotions of the human heart and soul as objects as tools of destruction.
In the history of the Jewish people, we have had to survive all kinds of threats. We have sometimes been able to repel them. At other times we have not. If you are dead, if your culture is conquered by a foreign one, there is no court of higher appeal; moral outrage will buy you nothing at all. I prefer to be able to repel the threat and that is what we see happening in this story; and it is what is happening in Israel today.
Israel the Jewish people (and the Western Judeo-Christian culture which we helped found) face a continuing (a spiraling!) campaign of terror in which the most vulnerable members of both our’s and our enemy’s society are being used as weapons against us. Pre-school children in Gaza, the West Bank and in Madrassas all over the world (even in places in the U.S.) are being taught that it is a sacred duty to kill infidels- especially Jews. Children, women, easily duped young men- even the clinically mentally challenged are turned into walking bombs. Innocent Jewish civilians, women, children the elderly, whose only crime is that they are on the streets of Jerusalem, in a synagogue in Turkey, on an airplane, on a cruise ship, an Olympic athlete or just working in a Jewish Community building in Buenos Aires or Seattle are targeted because they are Jews. Excuse me, let me correct that, Because We Are Jews. 


As the stewards and guardians of the Torah and the progenitors of the Judeo-Christian civilization of the west, we Jews have preserved this Torah- kernel of the most positive and moral culture that has ever existed. The things we have had to do have not always been pretty- or even easily defended but they have brought us to this point. 

The fact remains, though, that we have always done our best to make it as decent as possible. When faced with two very close enemies, Midian and Moab who used their closeness against us; and who, moreover, were willing to prostitute their wives and daughters in order to dissipate and defeat us, the instincts of our people were actually merciful in the context. That ancient army, with the firebrand Pinchas in command, initially reacted, not by total annihilation as is often the custom in modern and ancient wars but by killing only the guilty- the men who had perverted their own lives and those of their women in order to destroy us. Only when the army returned victorious, did Moses in his anger inform them that the women who had allowed themselves to be so used and their sons would have to be killed also. The female children were still to be spared.

With all the trouble and sacrifice our forefathers have had to keep this book and to preserve its teachings, we owe it to ourselves to get over our trepidations and look honestly and openly at this story which has such a relevance for us today.

We need to realize that context works in both directions. If Pinchas and Moses were to come back to life today, they would have as great a problem understanding why Israel does not, today, end the Palestinian problem the same way as they ended the Midianite problem back then as we do understanding how they did what they did to the Midianites.

The times are different. We have evolved but, we are still faced with an enemy who dehumanizes his children, abuses his women and has declared his intention to destroy us- to kill us wherever he finds us. We must stop trying to fit the conflict into our preconceived modern notions of how a conflict “should” be fought. We have to fight the war that is being thrust upon us by an enemy who still lives and fights by ancient rules.
We must stop bewailing or denying the perversion of the other side as Golda Meir famously did when she said, “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us” and protect ourselves from it with positive action. Otherwise, every Israeli child whose leg is blown off by a qassam in Sderot or whose head is bashed in on the beach only to have her killer set free to become a hero to those who want us dead is on your conscience; as is every Palestinian child who is used as a suicide bomber, human shield or just taught to idealize hatred and killing.

If we pay attention to the lessons of this parsha we will see that peace will not come easily when our enemies learn to love their children- they must first be taught that hate and violence is absolutely not going to work. Only Israel and Jews can teach them this and we are failing in our responsibility and as a result violence and hatred are working.

We here in America, like the tribes of Reuvane, Menashe and Gad are settled outside the land and this is where that part of today’s parsha comes in. Mattot means tribes and it means we have to participate. We need to renew the pledge to be in the vanguard of the battle line for our people. Not just for Israel but for ourselves and our children and for America. The Jihadis are not kidding when they chant “Death to the Jews!” and “Death to America!” and our first responsibility is to figure out how to stop the killing- not to understand why they feel so strongly. Midian and Moab had their “reasons” for hating and fearing too. It has always been there.

This parsha has been read every year in every synagogue for thousands of years but it has never been more important for us to really look at it and confront the reality it is showing us. That is the first step- just look at it and recognize what it is- and what is at stake. Then commit to some kind of action, at least learn about what is going on and be an outspoken defender of Israel’s right to exist in security.

For now, there is good news- We still have the power and the opportunity to exercise as much mercy as they allow us to. If we show resolve and willingness to assert our right to safety and security and they make an effort to act in their own best interest, it won’t be so bad. But the window will not stay open forever- Our two millennia of diaspora should have taught us that.

UPDATE
Because of the mixing of religion and politics and because I am fortunate to have a number of people of real depth and intelligence whom I respect and trust to fall back on when I feel I am on the edge, I sent the draft of this post to a few of those people as I was rushing to get it ready before sundown on Friday. It was a last minute cry for help and I got three very helpful responses. Here is a quote from my most Seraphic Friend screenwriter, and blogger Robert Avrech who's blog Seraphic Secret is smart, touching, interesting, informative and witty- any one of which would be enough for most people to achieve. Robert has given me permission to use this from his reply to my SOS email:

I have pondered the Midian slaughter, learned the glosses, and always came to the most simple conclusion—which you do too, in a manner—that this was the way warfare was conducted in the ancient world. If it was not carried out in this manner, you could be sure that the clan survivors would eventually return to extract savage vengeance.

There you have it- I took 2200 words and he says it in 60.