23 Bombs Explode in Thailand Attack (And the Two Reactions)

“Yala - Muslim militants launched 23 coordinated time bomb attacks at commercial banks in this southern province Thursday, killing at least one man and severely injuring at least four bank customers, police said.

“The bombs, mostly left on bank counters and some in ATM booths at the banks, were detonated mostly by clocks between 11:30 to 11:35 am. Twenty six people suffered minor injuries.” – from The Nation of Bangkok, via LGF

MOONBATISTAN, EURABIA, A FEW HOURS LATER:

Neville Rootcause: Thailand out of Iraq NOW!!!

Winston Stormfacer: But Thailand doesn’t have any troops in Iraq.

Neville Rootcause: What?! Then why did they get those bombs? Ah, I know: Thailand to stop one-sided support for Israel NOW!!!

Winston Stormfacer: Thailand doesn’t support Israel, or oppose it, or have any special dealings with it beyond those it has with any other faraway country.

Neville Rootcause: Don’t be silly. People don’t bomb people just because. Just like you get mugged in the street for supporting a government that doesn’t care about poor black or Hispanic people. Bombings are the sigh of an oppressed people, the legitimate defense of an indigenous nation without weapons to resist the tyranny of Empire, the song of threadbare fighters for equality and the dictatorship of the proletariat… Thailand to stop oppressing its native Malays NOW!!!

Winston Stormfacer: The Malay Muslims living in the south of Thailand have been there since at least the 15th century—more than half a millennium of undisturbed, unoppressed inhabitation of those areas.

Neville Rootcause: Look, it’s a matter of solidarity. Everybody knows Israel and its proxy the United States are oppressing Muslims within their grasp as part of their plan to institute the rule of free-trade capitalistic globalization all over the world, as the former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad said so eloquently. Those bombings are a statement of protest, a sigh of an oppressed people, a cry of the weaponless and defenseless in the face of global injustice, a scream of the…

Winston Stormfacer: So, just as a hypothetical question, not saying it could ever be expected to happen, if a white man in Los Angeles beats up a black man one day, then you have no problem with another black man drilling a bullet hole through the head of a friend of yours as protest, right?

Neville Rootcause: I’d be saddened by that, sure, but I’d understand the motives of the attacker. See, you can’t oppress people for years without any repercussions. Eventually, the chickens always come home to roost, and it’s justice done.

Winston Stormfacer: OK, I get it: the whole world, including states like Thailand having done nothing whatsoever to contribute to the grievances of Muslims worldwide, should just lie down and surrender to Islamic expansionism, all because of the need to do reparations for Western colonialism.

Neville Rootcause: Islamic expansionism?! That’s RACISM!!! You’re tarring a great, diverse group of people with a single brush! Islam is a peaceful religion! For all we know, those 23 bombs detonated in Thailand were organized by BushChimpHitlerburton at the behest of the Israel Lobby in order to take people’s minds off their fascistic and imperialistic agenda, just like they did back in 9/11!

Winston Stormfacer: I… I have to express profound… admiration of you… of Leftists in general, for having such a keen eye for unmasking the conspiracies endangering the world. It certainly displays more shrewdness than paying attention to the storm that’s gathering before us… in plain sight!

THE END
THE BEGINNING (of the West’s fight for survival)

Choose! (Hat Tip: Villagers with Torches)

Radicalized Jews

If you believe that all narratives are of equal worth and deserve a fair hearing, then you will see the other side to the coin of radicalization. Of course, most professing postmodernists and cultural relativists are hypocritical in that regard, using the idea of “all narratives are of equal worth” as a convenient pretext for casting the “Palestinians” as a David against the Israeli Goliath, but repudiating it in reality when Israel and the Jews today ask for a fair hearing of them. Thank G-d for the blogosphere as a way out.

All the world has heard of the narrative of formerly peaceful Arabs radicalized by the actions of Israel, and the Left has taken that narrative to a permanent place in its heart. That the enmity between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land predates the state of Israel by more than a century is of no interest to them. The possibility that the hostilities of the Arab world toward the Jews of the Land of Israel have always been an Islamic jihad, and not a nationalistic territorial feud, is never even entertained, because it is not conducive to the Marxist narrative of the struggle between haves and have-nots or to the general Leftist narrative of Western oppressors vs. the non-Western oppressed.

This narrative has been accepted by Jews as well, Israeli Jews too, ever since the 1970’s. The year 1970 could be considered the dawn of post-Zionism, signaled by Hanoch Levin’s play Malkat Ambatyah (“Bath Queen”), which cast self-skepticism on the whole Zionist project. To be sure, the 1970 play was probably benevolent introspection of the Yizharian kind, but, as we all know, it snowballed into what we see today. Also, back then in 1970, the play caused a great scandal, with uproar from Israeli society at large, and leaders of the Israeli Left of then demanding its removal (which did promptly take place). It was a different time.

By the time the 1980’s came to a close, the mainstream Israeli Leftist narrative was what I like to call the Sachbak Declaration. “Sachbak” is a slang word, from Arabic (as is most Israeli Hebrew slang), meaning “my friend”, and in the metaphorical sense, denoting the attitude of trying to be pally with the other, doing everything to reach them, to be friends with them. It is often used in a derogatory manner, for example when rebuking a student for speaking to his professor as if he were one of his classmates. (Indeed, the negative meaning may have started from IDF commanders berating soldiers under their command for failing to address them properly.) The Sachbak Declaration of post-Zionist Jews toward the Muslim enemy involved the sickly smile meaning to say, “I’m your friend! I’m just like you! Let’s just lay down our differences and talk and…”, and the rest; and it involved the mental concept that Jews and Muslims shared common dreams and that the bloodshed would stop as soon as all grievances were settled. Under this, the Oslo Accords were the bright ray of hope, and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza the embodiment of all evil.

This Sachbak mentality of the Israeli Left held near-absolute sway over Israeli politics for seven years, from 1993 to 2000, and had much power even beyond, until the recent events. In 1993 the Oslo Accords brought hope for peace; in 1995, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin (hy"d) only strengthened it, because the assassination made it possible to equate all opposition to the Oslo Accords with the extreme fanaticism of Rabin’s assassin. In the years afterwards, the bus explosions saw the first cracks among some, but mostly only those who were already right-leaning. It took the Second Intifada, of October 2000, to arouse second thoughts in the Israeli Left; even so, when the time came in August 2005 to expel Jews from their homes in Gush Katif, most of the Israeli public did not care much for the settler’s cries of impending disaster.

But now, after this Lebanon War, Israeli Jewish soul-searching has been rampant. The excuses to which adherents of the Grievances Narrative could hold had become thin straws, for this war was centered not on holding the “occupied territories” (Gaza, West Bank and Golan Heights) but on protecting Israelis living within the internationally-recognized borders. The war was triggered by abductions and rocket fire initiated from areas Israel had evacuated for the sake of doing away with the enemy’s grievances.

There has been over these 13 years a slow but steady flow of Israeli Jews, even Leftists, abandoning the wish, nay, the yearning, to be friends (“sachbak”) with the enemy, having seen that the sentiment is not reciprocated, that the other side is not interested, to say the least. Why, they came to think, should we Israeli Jews tire ourselves out, and suffer our wounds silently, in trying to gain the friendship of the other side when the other side shows little effort in that direction? What good is our educating our children that the others are just like us when the others’ education system keeps bringing their children upon a mixture of the Koranic genealogy of Jews as descendants of apes and swine with the Norwichian Passover blood libel?

You may have read about the recent introspective cry of Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad on the sorry state of society in Gaza. Now, ask yourself: why does this make the news? It is, of course, because it is exceptional. In contrast, when a Israeli intellectual says similar things about Israel, most people yawn, and another article among hundreds on the subject is added to CounterPunch. Jewish extremists like Baruch Goldstein are marginalized in all but the restricted circle from which they emerged, while Muslims who hold to anti-Jewish aspirations much worse than Goldstein’s actions in comparison, indeed much more comparable to the aspirations of the leaders of Germany 70 years ago, are hailed as heroes far and wide, not just in their societies (the cult of Nasrallah is now all the rage with the “Palestinians”). Up until recently, in Israeli society a Jewish extremist could be one who merely expressed disagreement with the idea that all Jews should be expelled from the territories gained in 1967; whereas among the Muslims, now and for years, a Muslim moderate is one who is willing to relinquish the idea of the “Palestinian Right of Return” (euphemism for elimination of the Jewish state through immediate demographic overpowerment). Moreover, that Muslim would be right to fear for his life. Jews’ arguments against appeasement have won disapproval from the Israeli Left, while Muslims’ mere suggestion of abandoning the “Right of Return” have triggered… pulls of the trigger. The disparity is fundamental.

Now, ever since October 2000, and running from station to station, like September 11th, 2001, like the Danish Cartoons Affair, like the recent Lebanon War, Israeli Jews have been driven to engage in soul-searching, and some have become—dare I say it?—radicalized. Yes, that word which is thought to be reserved for victims of “Western and Zionist colonialism and imperialism”, that word is the most fitting here. It has now entered the minds of many Jews, even Leftist Jews, that reality does not bend to the post-colonial narrative, that the Sachbak Declaration doesn’t win the desired friends. Israeli Jews are beginning to realize that the sickly Sachbak smile wins only contempt from the Muslims, not friendship, not even the first steps toward friendship. The Israeli Jewish hand held out in a gesture of peace invites not an Arab hand shaking it but a Muslim fist clutching the handle of a scimitar to cut the Jew’s hand off.

“That was only a prelude”. The rest of the non-Muslim world will learn it too. The West has indulged in post-colonial guilt, in regret over the “oppression and exploitation of innocents” (all are innocent but Westerners under the post-colonial narrative), and now tries to make up for it by self-negation, by groveling to the other, most of all to the Muslim. But the reception, as with the Israeli Jewish Sachbak Declaration, is not what the Westerners expected: they are changed in status from oppressors to patronizers, from destroyers and exploiters of non-Western innocents to haughty, puffed-up, sophisticated know-it-alls who look down upon the natives and treat them like little children who need education. Not much of a change for the better, is it?

No. I’d say even a change for the worse. When you’re an oppressor, you’re hated but you’re also feared, and that gives you some protection; when you’re a patronizing sophisticate, a water-soft outsider among the Fremen, as it were, you’re not only hated, you’re considered weak. And with an world-imperialist enemy such as Islam, that image can be fatal. In a Hindu or Buddhist country, being laughed at is merely an unpleasant experience; when surrounded by Muslims, it is an invitation to jihad just as surely as a drop of blood calls the piranhas to the flesh in a frenzy.

We (Israeli Jews in particular, Westerners in general) were better off, and certainly no worse, when we had more the image of oppressor than patronizer. Sir Charles Napier may have been hated in his day for his decision to hang window-murderers in India, and considered the textbook example of a Western colonialist oppressor, but his self-guilty, appeasing, patronizing, weak-looking descendants in modern Britain are paying for their fear of being seen as oppressors with homegrown suicide bombers and plane hijackers and no way of countering them, because of self-righteous screams of the Politically Correct guardians of the always-innocent, ever-oppressed noble savages with their “legitimate grievances”.

To paraphrase a wise commander of old: Damn the rotten PC tomatoes! Full speed ahead!

On Sin’at Chinam and the Salvation of Israel

Because of sin’at chinam the Second Temple was destroyed. Sin’at Chinam means gratuitous hatred. It is the hatred doled to those undeserving of it, the hatred borne of lack of discernment between friend and foe, of thinking of friends as foes because of minor difference, and taking foes as friends because of blindness.

Our sages use the term sin’at chinam in tandem with the phrase kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, which means, “All of Israel are mixed in each other”, mixed in fate. It is not possible for Jews to be in isolation; even when they think they have achieved such an island status, the Jewish fate always follows them.

We are commanded not to hate our brother even in our heart (Leviticus 19:17). A Jew is a Jew for life; the obligation of brotherhood toward a fellow Jew lasts for as long as the Jew does not act against our salvation. Here it is necessary to clarify what the word “salvation” means in a Jewish context, for it is different from the Christian concept.

Sins, accountability for them and the requirement of atonement are all there in Judaism, but they are not an integral part of a hopeless human condition. Rashi comments upon G-d’s words to Cain, “but thou mayest rule over it”, thus: “If you wish, you will master it”. None of the doctrine of incapacity in the face of temptation to sin. Salvation in the Jewish context is collective: the salvation of the Jewish people. There is, in the Jewish view, no state in which some Jews receive a different fate than others. Physically there may seem to happen so, but that is an illusion: physical burning and spiritual assimilation are intertwined, different facets of the same stone.

I have called the Naturei Karta “traitors” not because of their anti-Zionism per se, but because of their siding with those who want to exterminate the Jewish people (G-d forbid). They have praised Arafat (shr"y) in his terrorist efforts to dismantle the Zionist state and encouraged Ahmadinejad’s (shr"y) nuclear efforts to do the same. And Chomsky too, it is not just anti-Zionism that warrants the verdict of having cut himself from the Jewish people, but his aiding and abetting of those who want a repeat of the Holocaust (G-d forbid), such as Hassan Nasrallah (shr"y). If there is a Jew, or even non-Jew, who can separate his being against the existence of the Jewish state from advocacy, direct or indirect, of extermination of the Jews there (G-d forbid), then he would be in the clear. But I have yet to meet such an individual, perhaps because it is an impossibility.

But the Naturei Karta traitors and the Chomskyites are clear cases. In contradistinction to them, Orthodox Jewish leaders often issue similar condemnation and shunning toward Jews who cannot be compared to those castaways. The most common case is that of secular Jews, for example in the state of Israel itself.

It is not open to negotiation that all Jews are to observe Torah and Mitzvot. The leaders should, however, realize that non-observance cannot be cured by disparagement and angry preaching and hateful tirades. Hatred toward most secular Jews is indeed sin’at chinam, for modern non-observance of Torah and Mitzvot is, more often than not, caused by inheritance, habit or plain lack of interest and knowledge. Most non-observant Jews are so because they were raised thus by parents who had left the religion themselves (to carry the nation of Israel out of the frozen and hopeless existence of the Diaspora); some would want to observe, but it requires such a radical change of their way of life that they are daunted by it all; and yet others do not think the question of religion to be interesting, their lives occupied by other things.

To all these is a cure, yes, but it is HaShem’s cure. There are Orthodox Jewish outreach activists who fancy themselves to have converted secular Jews to Orthodox observation by the force of their speeches and presentations, but that is indulgence in the thought of kochi ve’otzem yadi (“My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth”, Deuteronomy 8:17). The awakening of Jews toward the Torah life is by HaShem’s power alone, and He does this not with speeches and presentations but by throwing hard facts in the faces of His people.

Rabbi Kook zt"l was ostracized by his Ultra-Orthodox contemporaries for suggesting the secular movement of Zionism to be the beginning of the salvation (of Israel; atchalta dig’ulah). He replied that G-d can use any means He desires of bringing it, and added that it would not be long before the secular Jews were brought to the light of the Torah by virtue of the land. The reply has usually been taken to mean that the holiness of the land would effect an awakening, which it did (recall the soldiers, mostly secular Jews, crying in front of the Western Wall after its retaking in 1967), but it is clear that it is also the events of the land, whether historical or current, that play a part in that. The first Zionists, those who had left religious homes in the Diaspora for their secular dream, were imbued with inherited Jewish identity. The secular Jews of today are cosmopolitan, even to the point of wishing Israel to transform into “a state of all its citizens” (that is, to have its Jewish peculiarities, such as even the anthem, excised), but HaShem constantly pounds them with the reality of being His people and not just another nation among many.

So the rants and hatred of those Orthodox Jewish leaders who castigate secular Jews are the fruit of impatience, and they are sin’at chinam in most cases. The hatred may not be gratuitous in the case of a doctrinaire secularist who wants all Jews to abandon Torah and Mitzvot (G-d forbid), loathing his heritage up to the point that he even refuses to circumcise his male children, but those secular Jews are a definite minority. Most Sabbath-breakers do so not out of spite, but out of some faulty reasoning (“I got scientific education that means the world wasn’t created in six days, so how can I keep the Sabbath?”) or the difficulty of breaking habits (suddenly those drives to the beach have to go…). All this does not excuse Sabbath-breaking, but it does mean that howling at the Sabbath-breakers won’t help. More than that: not only will it not help, it’ll actually harm. The hateful preaching will make the prohibitions attractive to the secular Jews, a case of mayim gnuvim yimtaku (“Stolen water is sweet”, that is, excessive prohibition attracts people to transgression). There is no permission for human beings to coerce others except as HaShem allows. And His way of coercion is the firm yet gentle one of simply laying hard, indisputable realities before His people.

A turning of secular Jews toward a life of observance is certainly to be encouraged, and leaving (G-d forbid) to be discouraged. But humans, even the greatest rabbis of the generation, can only encourage, while only HaShem can actually convert. He brings upon us war after war initiated by our Muslim neighbors despite our yearning for peace and normalcy; He just recently brought upon us a purely defensive war complete with condemnation from nearly all the world for us daring to defend ourselves; He brings before Jews in France and Britain and Venezuela the fact of the hatred of the surrounding Gentiles, so that the Jews may not fall once more under the delusion that those are their permanent homes. Fact by fact does HaShem lay before His people, forcing them, slowly but surely, to realize that nothing here is natural, that the Jewish people is outside the nature that governs all other nations, and that the only one who can lift the placeless, timeless threat of Jew-hatred is HaShem Himself. All but the willfully intransigent secular Jews can see the facts and be astonished. For any secular Jew who is so not out of self-conscious doctrine but out of mere circumstance (upbringing, habit, lack of interest and similar things), the facts end up, sooner or later, prompting doubt and soul-searching, the end of which is the realization of our eternal covenant. HaShem is the only converter.

Observe, therefore, that HaShem operates patiently and succeeds in bringing back His people, while many Orthodox Jewish leaders act impatiently and bungle, turning Jews away from Him. HaShem can do as He pleases, but Jews do as His Torah says, and of His Torah the wisest man of all time said, “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace” (Proverbs 3:17). That means disparagement of secular Jews and attempts to force religious observance by law are out. They lead to sin’at chinam and turn Jews away from HaShem; there’s no way around it, such actions constitute profanation of His name.

So long as a Jew is alive, there is hope that he will turn to observance. The only warranted hatred, therefore, is toward those who shorten the lives of Jews, by consorting with the heirs of Haman. The Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Yehudah Meshi-Zahav, head of Zaka, came to the inevitable conclusion, after years of collecting body parts from the scenes of suicide bombings, that there was no logic in making a distinction between Zionist and non-Zionist Jews when the enemy wasn’t making any such. When all Jews realize we are in the same boat, when all Jews take kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh to heart, HaShem will save us all from the modern Hamans. The Ultra-Orthodox Jews will stand with the IDF, and the secular Jews will pray to HaShem for defense from weapons an army cannot be expected to stop. The absence of sin’at chinam will build the Temple again, amen.

If I have been preachy myself in this post, I apologize, but my zeal for sanegorya (defense in a court of law) for Israel has overcome me, and for that I don’t apologize one tiny bit!

This Is An Age

This is an age of inversion,
Where fair is foul, foul fair,
A time of mass deception,
And people just don’t care.

An age of image manipulation,
Where you can’t trust your very eyes,
A time when foes reap harvests
Of a picture of any child who dies.

An age of wolves protected
From a sheep trying to stay alive,
Of humans rights only to those who
Take other humans’ lives.

An age of sheer impudence,
Where suited foes make demands
Right after their vested counterparts
Have on planes been laying their hands.

An age of covenants of the damned,
Where peace and justice are invoked,
Manifestos mixed with Bism Allah
Flames thought dead restoked.

An age of carrots constant
In face of mortal threat,
A time of self-negation
In face of the foes most gruesome yet.

O Israel, no place is going to be safe.
The danger is spreading to all coasts.
Gird yourselves now with armor,
Both earthly, and that of the L-rd of Hosts!

---

Hat tip (for inspiration):

Words of Santayana by Russ Vaughn.

Launch the Syracusan Mirrors!

Of Archimedes it is said he deflected a Roman siege on his city, Syracuse, by erecting a wall of mirrors to concentrate sunlight on the Roman ships, burning them. Research has still not conclusively proved the feasibility of such an event (because concentrated sunlight does not burn instantly, and ships are normally assumed to be in movement in battle), but more important than the literal occurrence of the event is its symbolism: now that the armies of Islam are laying siege to the West with their ships of Legitimate Grievances Against The Oppressors, and weakening our defenses from within by means of Political Correctness and appeal to Multiculturalism, what is necessary for the West is to bring out Archimedian mirrors to deflect those charges onto Islam.

Diagram showing how Archimedes’ mirrors are conjectured to have operated.

All the catchphrases of the Islamic narrative must be turned so as to be favorable to the Western point of view: raise, far and wide, the issues of Islamic aggression, Islamic apartheid, Islamic colonialism, Islamic imperialism, Islamic oppression, Islamic fascism, Islamic supremacism and so on. For every Left-enticing catchphrase they trot out, tag “Islamic” before it and bring examples of the reality of it. Now the details follow.

First, do no harm. Read this splendid article, Don’t Apologize, by Nidra Poller, and follow the advice. As she says: don’t apologize. We (the West in general, the Jews and the state of Israel in particular) have so little to apologize in comparison to the accusations heaped on us from the Left and OrwellMedia; and what little we do have to apologize for, it is best to leave it until the world does not take every apology of ours as admission of our being evil. Don’t apologize. Even the topmost of the Catholic Church hierarchy have begun complaining that the mentality of turning the other cheek is leading to disaster—why, then, should we Jews, who have no such instruction or even suggestion from any of our scriptures or sages? For those who agree Israel has the right to defend herself, BUT without hitting civilians, don’t apologize for that, but remind them that we have an enemy that uses civilian lives as currency for its propaganda warfare. This an enemy that glorifies suicide bombers, where the mothers are glad to bring babies to the world just so they may sacrifice them to their bloodthirsty deity, and who are offended not by that culture of death but by a few line-drawings. They are the ones who need to apologize. So don’t apologize.

Talk about Islamic aggression, such as that which is going on in Thailand, a land where the Muslims have nothing that has even the semblance of a legitimate grievance. Trumpet far and wide the reality of pure, unvarnished Islamic aggression in Thailand, where reality does not leave room for the Left to trot out their anti-colonialist narratives any more than it leaves them room for stating that two plus two equals five.

Tell people about Islamic apartheid, such as that which goes on daily, unabated, and supported by the state, in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; where a man can be hanged for accidentally leaving the Bible outside in public, and his women taken for sex slavery, and his children stolen to be raised as Muslims, as were the Janissaries of old in the Ottoman Empire.

Mention the reality of Islamic colonialism, which is expressed in the funneling of money from well-to-do Muslims in Europe and America to the jihadi war machine in Iraq and elsewhere. Do not neglect to tell of the shariah colonies, those no-go zones for non-Muslim policemen, that Muslims have set up in France, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Britain, all now an integral part of the Ummah, and of the caliphate-to-be.

Do not refrain from regaling the slumbering Chamberlainians with examples of the danger of Islamic imperialism, which, as Ayatollah Khomeini said, can cease, temporarily, only when the Islamic world is as yet incapable of carrying it out, but is now in full force because they feel they can. Ask them why the secular-nationalistic terrorist organizations of just twenty years ago are but a distant memory, while every time we hear now of a bombing, from the halls of Montezuma to the seasides of Bali, we instinctively think of Islam.

Remind those self-proclaimed lovers of justice and equality of Islamic oppression: the cycle wherein, in the Islamic world, an oppressive regime reigns with an iron fist, is then brought down by an Islamic revolution in the name of justice, but that new regime proves to be no less oppressive than the one that came before. Ask them what it says about the Islamic religion, the religion claiming to be the summit of divine justice, that the number of people, even Muslims themselves, chafing under the yoke of poverty, is in proportion to the strictness of shariah law in the country in question.

Tell the left-wingers that claim to oppose fascism of any stripe that Islamic fascism is one of the most virulent kinds, being not just all-encompassing like Mussolini’s system, but backed with appeal to the divine, such that a Badoglio would be lynched by the people themselves, not having to be executed by the authorities, upon an attempt at cutting the grip of the reigning tyrant. Note that “Islamic” is here the modifier for “fascism”, and not “fascistic” a modifier for “Islam”, as it is not a mainstream tenet of Islam that apostates can be allowed to live. Apostasy warrants death in Islam because it is treason; the idea that leaving Islam is treason means Islam is a political system, not a member of the same class as Feng Shui.

And whoever speaks of American or Israeli supremacism, make it clear to them that Islamic supremacism is much worse, and enshrined in doctrine. It is not the type of supremacism that wants mere material gains, but the type that holds peace to be the cessation of all opposition to it, ideologically as well as physically.

Finally, whenever Islamic apologists and Leftist appeasers bring out dark historical facts from the West’s past, remind them that the West has moved over the centuries to void any problematic tenets it had, by all kinds of means (Jewish suspension of the more severe halachic laws until explicitly restored by G-d; the Christian tenet of “Render unto Caesar…”, providing at the very least a theoretical basis for separation of religion and state; and the Enlightenment idea of expanding old Greek democracy, then confined to a sparse stratum of the populace, onto the whole of it); while, in contrast, the Islamic mind is stuck in the 7th century, without even the theoretical beginning of getting out of there. Let them abandon their narrative of oppression by the West if they want to gain the energies they need for recreating their so often flaunted Golden Age. It is their decision, and theirs alone, whether to use science for its true purpose (gaining knowledge) or for the sole purpose of making better weapons to wage the war of Islamic imperialism against the non-Muslim world. The West has nothing to apologize for the Islamic world’s backwardness.

We love life, and we will not let the sieging barbarians disturb our circles this time.

Limud Z’chut on the late S. Yizhar

Yizhar Smilansky, better known under his pen name S. Yizhar, was born in 1916 and died a few days ago, on August 21, 2006. He was a left-wing writer.

He is held in ill memory by Jewish right-wingers, for he was one of the initiators of the movement of self-skepticism about the Zionist project. His writings to that effect are, like Chomsky’s, widely paraded nowadays in anti-Semitic circles.

However, unlike Chomsky, he was not a post-Zionist, not a quisling, but an honest critic. This post engages in limud z’chut, speaking to the credit of the person in question. Three consecutive parashot in Leviticus are Acharei Mot (“after the death of…”), Kdoshim (“Holy [ones]”) and Emor (“Say”), which are joined as “acharei mot, kdoshim emor”, to mean, “After the death of [people], say, ‘Holy ones [are they]’.” For any person not deemed totally evil (like Haman, Hitler or Ahmadinejad), the Jew must attempt to speak good things about him after his death. On S. Yizhar I bring the following, by way of Uri Orbach’s column on today’s Yediot Achronot, from Yizhar’s column “On the Suicide Bombers” of April 18, 1995:

“A society that agrees to send its sons to suicide warfare and sees it as the pinnacle of national patriotism destroys the common basis necessary for all humans, excludes itself from the human collective and turns into a party that cannot be talked with. Just as there is no talking with cannibals… the allowance that the senders of the suicide bombers take for themselves in denying what is human and making a human into a live bombshell—in that they treat his life and being in scorn—raises the question as to whether they are humans, and [regarding] those who surround them, whether they are still a human society having the right to demand human rights. A society that accepts the turning of a child into an explosive negates itself, and invalidates itself from being a party in negotiations; its humanity is cast in doubt.”

A far cry from the Chomskyites, whose fanaticism for the “Palestinian” cause drives them to justify their dysfunctional society and inhuman actions! In that is one litmus test for distinguishing between legitimate critics of Israel and the anti-Semitic majority of them. S. Yizhar, whatever he could be faulted for, was innocent of that. May HaShem grant him peace.

Alliance of the Pristinians

In this post I cover another important unholy alliance against the West: that of the spiritual Left with Islam. I use the term “spiritual Left” to distinguish it from left-wing secularists and atheists, most prominently the Marxists. Although both are allied with Islam, their reasons are different.

The puzzlement aroused by the alliance of the secular Left with Islam is, in my opinion, minuscule in comparison to that aroused by the alliance of most (not all, but nearly so, just as with secularists) hippies, New Agers, pagans, environmentalists and the like with the Muslims against the West. For all the Marxists’ delusions, at least one thing can be said for them: they recognize Islam to be a political movement, not a spiritual one, and form their alliance with them out of political expedience. But the spiritual Left see Islam as a spiritual movement like theirs, yet they ally themselves with it against the Judeo-Christian West although Islamic doctrine holds Islam to be Abrahamic, to be more Jewish than Judaism and more Christian than Christianity. Nor is Islam friendly toward so many practices of the spiritual Left, such as “free love”, homosexuality, nature worship, magic, divination and polytheism (that last is the worst crime in Islamic eyes, the unpardonable sin).

What do we make of this alliance, then? Is it a simple case of, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”? I think the answer is yes, but more than that. I think that, for all the irreconcilable differences Islam and the spiritual Left, there are ties, spiritual ties, that bind them. Of course, the Muslims themselves are glad to have those useful idiots at their disposal. But as the secular Left sees the Koran as a socialist manifesto, so the spiritual Left sees it as yet another collection of Upanishads. What feeds the attraction of the spiritual Left to Islam? I submit that the answer is primitivism.

Primitivism goes, at least in systematic form, all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). The idea that the primitive, natural state of humanity is the most beneficial branched off into the Historical Materialism of Karl Marx, which sought to solve the human problem by bringing it back to an idealized “classless society” of the past; and into the various New Age movements, striving to save the planet by bringing it back to its trouble-free pre-human days (just don’t tell them about the Permian extinction…), or bringing humanity into a healthier mental state by ridding it of those pesky Judeo-Christian inhibitions, or calling the New Age by going back to pre-monotheistic religions.

For the primitivist, feelings are key, and romanticism trumps all evidence, or indeed any need to gather evidence. Pre-human mass extinctions are glossed away, or excused because they were acts of Mother Nature rather than of “Bible-based human rape of the Earth”. Human sacrifice performed by Aztec, Ashanti or Babylonian polytheists is shrugged by the rationale that “the atrocities of the British colonials were much worse”. Historical records of class warfare and inequality in primitive societies is trodden underfoot, or shredded in the razor of revisionism. And slave-trading by Christians is marshaled as an example of Biblical corruption, while slave-trading by Muslims does not cause the primitivist Leftists to bat an eyelid. The myth of a pre-human or pre-capitalist or pre-Biblical Garden of Eden has to be maintained, no matter the facts, for else how can the narrative of the fall from there, instigated by the human or capitalist or Judeo-Christian snake, thrive?

An Aztec calendar. From Wikipedia.

Did you see the movie King Kong? (Any of the versions.) If you did, what was your reaction to the scene where the natives of Skull Island put Ann (or Dwan) to sacrifice while the drums go on beating?

A native of Skull Island beats the drum while Ann is lowered into Kong’s lair. From the 2005 version.

If your reaction included a “…BUT that’s their native culture” or something of that sort, you may well be part of the spiritual Left. If looking at the natives, frenzied, unclean, unkempt and malnourished, sends a surge of admiration down your spine, you’re probably not only of the spiritual Left, but also already allied with the Muslims against the West.

A native girl of Skull Island.

The average Westerner’s knowledge of the Muslim world and Islam still stems from romantic sources, feeding a Laurentian (after T. E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia) admiration of Arab and Islamic culture, no different from 18th-century Enlightenment Europeans trying to find their own soul, their very own authenticity, in primitive cultures, in “noble savages”. The “Palestinians” are, in this narrative, Incas, the Iraqis Native North Americans, the Muslims as a whole keepers of the flames of resistance against Western, Judeo-Christian colonialism raping native peoples and the planet’s resources. Under a primitivist framework that excuses Aztec human sacrifice, one can easily excuse as native culture similar features in Islam.

Hizbullah natives getting ready for performing human sacrifice.

Where other eyes look at the unkempt hair as a sign of neglect, at the rotting tooth as a disease that should be cured, and at human sacrifice, Aztec or Islamic, as something that a person ought to be serving quite a few years inside for, primitivists excuse it all, make apologies for it. As the hard childhood excuses the murderer and foists the blame upon the society that took away the man’s innocent childhood (of which G-d has a different opinion—see Genesis 8:21), so the primitivists transfer the blame of suicide terrorism away from the Muslims and onto the European, American or Zionist colonialists. Primitive good, modern bad.

Best as untouched by the sophisticated clutter of civilization as possible. Collage from a Daily Kos diary.

“Why does G-d not bring people into the world circumsized?”, the Roman commander Turnus Rufus asked Rabbi Akiva. For the spiritual Left, nothing has changed. Rabbi Akiva’s answer was to offer Turnus Rufus freshly-picked stalks of wheat to eat, at which the Roman naturally protested that it was not in an edible state. Rabbi Akiva then fired the winning shot: that was the proof of what G-d says (in Genesis 2:3), “…of all His work that G-d created to do”, meaning that the world was created for changing things, not for glorying in its primitive state (and that verse, remember, comes before the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden!).

Now the question may be raised as to how the woolly, postmodern, “anything goes if it feels good” spiritual Left can reconcile itself with a religion of one god, of scriptural revelation and of absolute certainty. On the face of it, it looks as if never the twain shall meet, but Islam, for all its talk about certainty, suffers from great weakness in that regard. Perhaps it’s a reaction: the assumption of absolute certainty as a cover for the inability to achieve it.

The Jewish religion is only for the Jewish people, yet the requirements of evidence that G-d has bestowed upon the Jews are stringent: no fewer than the fathers of the entire nation were to behold His giving of revelation, the Torah. Consequently, the claims of all other religions since have been judged paltry in Jewish eyes. Christianity claims many eyewitnesses for the resurrection of Jesus, but that’s not enough for a believing Jew—he requires that the fathers of all living religionists be eyewitnesses of the formative event of a religion. Still, the (for Jews) insufficiency of the number of eyewitnesses for Christianity’s formative event is next to nothing against that of the event of the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed. Here the number of eyewitnesses is so insufficient that not just a Jew, not just a Christian either, but any judge sitting on the court of law would throw the case out: one man. Only one man. The god of Islam revealed the Koran to one man, with no other human participants, and we are supposed to take it all on blind faith.

Yet there are more than a billion Muslims. How can that be, with such a shaky foundation? They do have rationalizations for their belief in the Koran. Foremost among those is the Argument from Inimitability: that the Koran is written in such a style that no one has ever succeeded in producing a similar work, or ever will.

The jaw drops at such an argument. To rest your entire life on literary or poetic judgment! Yet that really is the prime argument for Koranic divinity, there being no eyewitness case as in Judaism or Christianity. Subjective judgment, the type of which applies to the works of Shakespeare or Molière, is touted as proof. The feeling of being swept off one’s feet by the style of the Koran does it all for the Muslim believer. The contrast with the Torah, containing various styles according to the best fit (narrative when G-d wants to narrate, poetry when Israel is to be readied for prophecy, and so on), could not be starker.

And so the primitivist love of pre-Columbian lore, of the sight of snake-charmers playing next to their basket and of Chinese calligraphy meets the foundation of Islam: feelings of being carried away. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but to base one’s very way of life upon it is, to put it bluntly, lunacy.

Islam and the spiritual Left both rest their beliefs upon subjective feelings. They both view the past (Mohammed’s political system at Medina, America before the Europeans arrived) as flawless, and as something that needs to be restored. And whatever failures they run into they explain away as unfairness and oppression on part of the unbelieving or unprimitive West.

And the rest is history being made now in our lifetimes.

Do We Have A Winner?

We do.

The Virtual Vienna Crescent.

My reaction, IRC style:

/me blushes, because of conditioning wrought by Western guilt culture.

And following on the guilt culture: to assuage the guilt, I’m going to mention the slogans I liked best (by that order).

---

By all that you hold dear, on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West! – Fanusi Khiyal

Washington, Adams, Jefferson…Clinton, Bush…
What? We’re STILL fighting these guys!?! – bookstopper

Remember Constantinople! – Dan Kauffman

Terrorists stop attacking means peace; the West stops defending means slaughter. – spydermr2

We Didn’t Choose This War—Now We Must Choose To Win It – cathyf

Jihadists believe in equality—we’re ALL legitimate targets. – Linda

D-Day Past, Danger Still Here

It was Robert Spencer, proprietor of Jihad Watch, who first warned of the possible danger of an Iranian unconventional attack on August 22. That “possible” is crucial, for many on the Left now accuse him, and those who took after him on that warning (like Bernard Lewis), of crying wolf, of alarmism, of adding to the “neo-con culture of fear”, although he never said an attack was certain, only possible.

Is Ahmadinejad now smiling at having made the infidels fearful for a whole day? I don’t know and I don’t care. Sure, I was agitated for most of that day, and the night was almost sleepless, yet far from accusing Spencer of being alarmist, I commend him for his responsibility. Spencer did the job required of the watchman:

“But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the horn, and the people be not warned, and the sword do come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand.” (Ezekiel 33:6)

Better he warn and it not come than he not warn and it come upon us unawares. HaShem be thanked for delaying the dreadful day (of which our sages said, yete v’la achmine—“when it comes, let me not be there to see it”), Spencer is to be commended for every warning, now and in the future, and let shame be heaped upon the Left for their dhimmitude and their calling the good evil and the evil good.

So nothing happened on that day, praise be to G-d. But let there be no complacency: the Iranians are working toward the goal of building nuclear weapons and, G-d forbid, using them. The reasons for them not doing anything on August 22 are unknown (conventional thinking would have it that it was because they hadn’t finished making a nuclear weapon yet, though Newt Gingrich, who sees the gathering storm on the horizon for what it is, said they could have easily acquired one from North Korea, which is known to have them), but the reprieve is only temporary, unless Islam is neutralized. It is thought that a strike on Iran would halt their plans, but there is no guarantee of being able to strike down all nuclear launchers on time (just as Hizbullah’s katyusha launchers proved difficult for the Israeli Air Force to find). And even if that goal could be achieved, the reprieve granted thereby would still be temporary, because it is not only Ahmadinejad who believes in the Islamic End Times vision. Al-Quaeda would be just as happy to lay hands on an unconventional warhead and use it on non-Muslims.

We’re in for the long haul, and the journey toward lasting peace has hardly even started. Even the temporary reprieve that might be gained by striking at Iran doesn’t look like being achieved any time soon, because the appeasement-minded statesmen of the world are insisting on buying Iran with incentive packages, and even the USA is loathe to do anything substantial, because of fear of Iraq-like repercussions. Imagine when the non-Muslim will finally get around to the necessary (and the only efficient one) step of de-Islamization!

It seems the miracles we need right now are less of the physical kind and more mental ones: miracles of people changing their minds away from the assumption of bringing the hatred of Muslims upon them by their own deeds, and the miracle of fortitude to be involved in a war that only G-d knows how long will last, and of which humans know only that it will be full of “blood, toil and tears”, with but the hope to win and secure lasting peace for humankind.

Do not sleep.

They Know What Works

A short one this time because I have a lot of work (yes, work, as in making your own money rather than living off the Establishment, hippies) for tomorrow. Couldn’t let it pass, though.

A Winnipeg doctor is demanding an official apology and compensation from United Airlines after being kicked off a flight in the U.S. this week, an incident he has characterized as “institutionalized discrimination.”

“The whole situation is just really frustrating,” Farooq said. “It makes you uneasy, because you realize you have to essentially watch every single thing you say and do, and it’s worse for people who are of colour, who are identifiable as a minority.” – from CBC News, via Jihad Watch. Emphasis added.

“Color”. Reciting his evening prayer aroused the suspicion of one of the passengers, said Farooq himself, yet he talks about the difficulties faced by “people who are of color”. Reciting prayers has nothing to do with color, ethnicity or race. It has to do with religion, and in this case a religion that prides itself as being beyond color, ethnicity and race, as opposed to that “decadent West”. But that shouldn’t prevent Dr. Farooq from pulling out the race card in order to gain victim points and impunity, just as it was good for Cynthia McKinney.

Islam is a religion (actually a political ideology masquerading as a religion, but that’s making burgers out of the PC sacred cow), not a race. It admits blond, blue-eyed Swedes and almond-eyed Malays—anyone willing to enslave themselves to the god of the Koran and, preferably, kill and be killed for him. So why do Muslims constantly pull out the race card? Why is every offense against Islam and Muslims called “racism”?

Because the Left’s shaping of the academic and political discourse has a stranglehold over the West. Because, under the PC (politically correct or post-colonial) narrative, underdogs are allowed to commit any crime against the ones in power. The underdogs’ being underdogs not only explains their actions, but also excuses them; the “oppressors” and “colonialists”, nearly always Western, white (no racism here, none at all…), Christian or Jewish, are accused of doing evil all the time, even when they do good (in which case it’s termed “patronization”).

And the Muslims, such as Dr. Farooq, know that, and use it to their own advantage, to further their goal of shariah law over the whole world. They use the West’s systems to render it incapable of defending itself.

That is why adherents of the Islamic religion, of any race, keep bringing up the race card.

Pray for tomorrow (in both ordinary and metaphorical senses of the word).

Fisking the Israeli Left

A great many of my posts so far have been an attempt at elucidating what makes the Left-Islam unholy alliance tick. Such posts will continue, G-d willing, but for this post I decided to take a break from analysis of worldwide, historical ideology and concentrate on a particular place and time: the reaction of the Israeli Left to the aftermath of the (in all probability) first Israel–Hizbullah war of 2006.

In this post I bring important snippets from one of the two leading newspapers of Israel. I take the article “Wounded Doves”, from the section “24 Hours” (dedicated for items going beyond news reporting) of the Sunday, August 20, 2006 issue of Yediot Achronot. This article talks about the moving of the Israeli Left away from the consensus following the war, and the lessons the Leftists say they have learned from that. I take the words of the Israeli Leftist leaders, translate them and reply right after that. The quotes are indented; my replies are without indentation, and leading with “ZY: ” after each quote block.

“I think that not all the steps we took were mistakes”, the minister Yitzchak Hertzog, from the Labor party, defends the peace camp. “I don’t think it’s possible today to state that getting out of Lebanon or from Gaza was a mistake. It gave us stature in the international arena. But those steps were wrongly interpreted by the Palestinian side and by Hizbullah, and that's something that should be taken in account”.

ZY: The whole impetus behind the Israeli Left’s advocacy of the evacuations (of Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005) was the idea that it would give Israel a good standing in the eyes of the world. Hertzog admits here what Israelis on the Right knew all along. It is constructive, though, to conclude that if we didn’t achieve even that paltry (I would say “unacceptable”, but I’m a right-winger, so what do I know…) goal, then the whole idea of evacuation should now be given a radical rethinking. It used to be the Left would advocate abandoning lands for peace, and then we saw what peace we got by that, so then the Left relinquished the idea of land for peace and settled for the idea of land for world praise. But now, in that purely defensive and necessary war we waged in Lebanon, we got a thorough lambasting from world opinion, so land for world praise is seen not to work either. I wonder what the Left will advocate in exchange for the lands of Israel now.

Hertzog says the Palestinians and Hizbullah interpreted our evacuations wrongly. Does that mean he acknowledges the fact the enemy sees our evacuations as weakness, as invitations to further war? It would seem like it, but a later passage shows not, shows that a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist can easily spin it in a different direction.

“Our getting out of Gaza and Lebanon also gave us exceptional international backing in the last war. They [the evacuations —ZY] were the first-degree hasbara weapon. They proved that Israel had made steps toward peace [and] set up on the international border. There can’t be such a thing that Israel should both get out of the area and be attacked”.

ZY: I don’t know what world Hertzog is living in. I saw international condemnation of Israel nearly universally right from the first IAF air raids on Lebanon. Sure, there were the surprises of even Saudi Arabia condemning Hizbullah, but that was only for reasons of Realpolitik (the Sunni–Shi’ite battle for hegemony), and only by the heads of the state. The people all over the world, unless they were on Israel’s side from beforehand, marched out to protests and demonstrations the earliest they could. In short, the Israeli Left’s idea of selling portions of our divinely-promised land for a few hunks of approval from the world didn’t work.

(Replying to the reporter’s question if the Israeli Left should undergo a process of soul-searching) “The more radical Israeli Left is confused today, because it has always been averse to wars, and this was a just war. But the soul-searching should be not only of the Left, but of the great majority found on the Center. The Center found a very convenient solution in unilateral steps: you don’t have to negotiate with anybody. You close the fence and what’s behind us doesn’t matter. The true Left has always preferred negotiations to unilateral steps”.

ZY: Hertzog’s calling it “a just war” is refreshing from the Left; then again, as we will see later, not all on the Left agree on that.

So now the Israeli Left has managed to find out what caused the war: unilateral steps, the lack of negotiation. There are two points I have to mention here: first, the Oslo Accords were anything but unilateral, they were a peace treaty like Hertzog would really prefer, but they were torn down nonetheless, along the 1990’s unofficially, until their final dissolution in October 2000 following the Second Intifada. Of course, the Israeli Left found ways of explaining that away too. Nothing new for Leftists. Second point, related to the first: I fail to see what benefit bilateral, negotiated agreements have over unilateral steps when the other side is hell-bent on employing any means of destroying you. A bilateral agreement can give you the benefit of striding down the tarmac waving a piece of paper in your hand, but that could no more halt the march of enemy aggression than a unilateral step could.

A less introspective position is presented by Yossi Beilin, the leader of Meretz and one of those who conceived the Geneva Plan. As far as he is concerned, the Second Lebanon War has turned the Israeli Left to more relevant than ever. “Our message is only getting stronger today”, he argues. As far as he is concerned, the war has opened a new window of opportunity. “Olmert now has an historic opportunity”, he says. “This is the first time the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, of Syria and of Lebanon say to us, ‘We are ready’. He just needs to decide what his agenda is: Netanyahu or Beilin”.

ZY: My first reaction is, of course, to ask what substance Mr. Beilin has been abusing. Second reaction, leaning on the last sentence: he may not be deceived, he may be deceiving, which is worse. The Israeli Leftist framers of “peace plans” (plans for expulsion of Jews from their homes, more accurately) usually had the interests of their standing in history books in mind rather than the interests of the Jewish nation.

I have skipped a few more trite Beilinisms (on the same vein as the preceding, so it’s redundant). Now the interview passes to the Leftist writer A. B. Yehoshua:

(Reporter) So what do we do now?

“In my opinion, we need to go quickly for an agreement with the Hamas government. You see, the retreat has been done, so let’s calm down Gaza—we’ll agree on a ceasefire, with opening of passages and international surveillance on weapons smuggling and a safe passage to the [West] Bank. Now is the time to work on it, and we can start on rehabilitation immediately”.

ZY: All done before, when Fatah was the PA government. Done first under Arafat, only to explode, literally, in our faces when “Palestinian” suicide bombers used our “safe passages” in order to reach our malls. And then, when Arafish kicked the bucket, Abu Mazen proved to be a lame duck, and then the Hamas, which A. B. Yehoshua advocates negotiations with, came to power, through a democratic election signaling the will of the “Palestinian” people to be governed by an Islamic group vowing to destroy all of the state of Israel from the river to the sea (G-d forbid).

(Reporter) Aren’t you afraid that the Right could pick the fruits of the last war?

“I’ve heard in the last days a lot of contemptible declarations from the Right, but they’re the last ones who have a right to complain. They ruled the government, they let Hizbullah arm themselves, they are the ones who kept the army busy at the border blocks and on guard at the unrecognized settlements, they were the ones who controlled the treasury and dealt out the resources. Their whining now isn’t convincing”.

ZY: Should the fruits of Leftism prove to be rancid, blame it on the Right. Sharon’s right-wing government let Hizbullah rearm, yes, but that’s because any attempt to stop that would have been roasted by the Israeli Left as “a right-wing wrench in the wheels of the peace process” (until, on July 12, 2006, the straw broke the camel’s back). The border blocks, which the Oslo Accords should have made unnecessary (Shimon Peres’s dream was for the Middle East to become like Europe, without borders), were made necessary by infiltration of suicide bombers. A. B. Yehoshua sure does engage in some weapons-grade chutzpah.

(Reporter’s background) Tzali Reshef, one of the heads of “Peace Now”, believes that not only is the Left not dead, it has gained a concentrated dose of oxygen that will guarantee it a new life. Like many in the Israeli Left, Reshef thought that in its first stages, at least, the war was justified, but, according to him, the failure of the war proves what he and his friends have been arguing for all the years: that only a political arrangement can bring quiet.

(Reporter’s question to Reshef) So your conception has won?

“Yes. The war has totally refuted the thesis that gains could be had by means of force. With all its power, Israel can’t quell guerrilla operations on enemy territory, and we won’t be able to do that in the future. Only arrangements can bring security, and we need to reach such agreements as quickly as possible with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians, including Hamas”.

ZY: The truth is the IDF was not allowed to check whether force could, or not, solve the problem of guerrilla warfare. Before it could do that, it was ordered a ceasefire by the government, prompted by the pressure of world opinion. There are ways of winning guerrilla warfare, as in Iwo Jima for example, but world politics are not as they were in the days of Iwo Jima. So, the IDF is politically handicapped, and Reshef takes that as proof that there is no military solution to terrorism? Best-of-breed logic, my good fellow.

(Reporter) Can we now convince the public of the benefits of another retreat?

“The next war will be with long-range missiles. The strategic significance of holding the Golan [Heights] is meaningless. Next time, we will get missiles from Tehran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, so that the Golan would have no significance. What’s significant is if there is peace or not”.

ZY: Appeasement. If, as he said in the previous quote, there is no military solution, then the only thing we can do is buy out our peace with concessions toward the enemy. Which we already did, but don’t let the facts get in the way of Leftism. Far be it from us to think that, if there is a threat in Tehran, then it might be actually better to go after Tehran than bet our lives on agreements with their proxy terrorist organizations on our borders.

There follows a description of how lots of Leftists were united with the right-wingers at the first stages of the war, only to go back to their leftarded (hat tip for the term: Atlas) position following Qana and Saniora’s seven-point plan. The next on interview, after telling us Yossi Sarid (leader of the left-wing Meretz party) refused to be interviewed, is Shulamit Aloni, who was with him in Meretz in the past:

(Reporter) Sarid’s former partner, Shulamit Aloni, is one of the few who opposed the war from its inception. “We had a case, but we should have dealt with it a different way”, she states. “After they captured our soldiers, we should have made an ultimatum to the Lebanese government instead of bombing. They went out to war for lost honor [i.e. she implies it was for the sake of restoring our honor. —ZY] and destroyed Lebanon. Why, because our sovereignty had been violated? How many times did we violate the sovereignty of Lebanon?”

ZY: The only reason Aloni and her ilk (Avneri and Gush Shalom, which features anti-Israel cartoons on its website that look like being taken out of any Arab daily) is less openly vilified by the Israeli public than she ought to be is the memory of the assassinated Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, the care not to make it happen again. Inwardly at least, extreme, intransigent Leftists like Aloni and Avneri are hated because they invariably present the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli point of view, under a guise of “moderation and sanity” that convinces no one. Give Lebanon an ultimatum? Everyone knows the government of Lebanon, being fractured into Christian, Druze, Sunni Muslim and Shi’ite Muslim seats, is nearly totally ineffective, even at peacetime, let alone at times of war. The ultimatum would have had no effect, and then what? Israel would have ended doing the same thing it really did. And the war wasn’t about restitution of our honor—that’s projection of the Muslim mentality upon the Jewish people, who have long matured out of such things. The war was about achieving peace, about living in peace. It was about bringing the number of enemy attacks on us to zero, a goal which the Oslo Accords should have achieved but did not. It’s not the military solution that has been tried and found to fail, it’s the opposite: the diplomatic solution has been tried and found to fail. But don’t expect Aloni to make those pesky facts change her mind. What’s good for Yehoshua Sobol isn’t necessarily good for Aloni or Beilin.

The next, final section of the article quotes a few Israeli Leftists saying it would be better for the Left to leave the arena of Israeli foreign policy and concentrate on domestic policy instead. So long as that doesn’t mean whittling away all signs of Zionism and working on educating Israeli Jewish children to hate their religion, for the purpose that we could all worship the golden calf of cosmopolitan sameness and political correctness, I’m for that. But I doubt Leftists can contain their deep-seated desires on the domestic policy front either.

Pray for the salvation of all Israel.

Lennonism, Leninism and ’Lahu Akbar

“…nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too…” – John Lennon, Imagine

Another prominent joining-point on the Marxism-Islam axis and its opposition to Zionism is secularism. Given the fact that Islam parades itself as a religion and aims to establish theocracy the whole world over, this point is nothing short of astounding. However, it becomes clear once the fog of terminology is lifted.

Imagine having lived in the 19th Century

“There is nothing new under the sun”, said King Solomon. A great number of anti-theistic arguments can be traced back to the first anti-theists, such as Epicurus, whose riddle on the impossibility of G-d being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent is still used today, over and over again. The heyday of intellectual atheism, however, was the 19th century, when it seemed science could give all the answers that religion could not, and more, that ridding the world of religion would rid the world of all (or nearly all) evil and end all (or nearly all) its wars.

That was the day of pamphleteers like A. D. White and R. G. Ingersoll, powerful in oratory and filling the need of a skeptical, religion-tired world. It was a world that could read about scores of religious wars in its history textbooks, and therefore conclude that religion was the blight of humanity and its eradication salvation.

Modern-day secularists repeat the arguments of the 19th-century pamphleteers, often in a new dressing, but whatever is new is only variations on the old arguments. This can be excused, as I showed by quoting our wise king of old, but the idea that the removal of religion could minimize wars to a negligibility cannot be excused—not of those who have lived to see the 20th century or read about it in history textbooks.

Neither World War I nor World War II were caused by religion, if religion is meant in the sense of that which was behind the Thirty Years Wars (1618–48). Nor the Cold War. This coming war looks like being of a religion (Islam) against the secular West, or even of one religion (Islam) against another (Christianity), but—and here the attitudes of right-wingers and left-wingers are curiously reversed—truth is more complex than that.

“Religion” No Longer a Useful Term

Press a secularist to the question of wars and massacres and genocides done in the name of non-religious, or outright atheistic, ideologies like Nazism and Communism, and one of the responses you will get will be on the lines of, “Communism isn’t thought of as a religion, but it shares many of its vices”. Or even a reply of, “Communism is Religion”, as plain as that. Sam Harris in his The End of Faith, ranting about the vices of faith and religion and its being the source of all darkness, anticipated the charge of non-religious darkness, and countered it by… you guessed it, grouping Nazism and Communism together with faith-based darknesses like Christianity and Islam.

The first reaction may be to gloat on the scene of secularists painting themselves into a corner. Beyond that, however, I think the issue is very useful in revealing to us the problematic nature of the old “religion vs. secularism” dichotomy. When you have to explain the evils of communism by saying communism is a religion, or the good behavior of all but a few Christians by saying they are imbued with the spirit of secularism, it is a sign something in wrong with your terminology. If you have to fudge your terminology to the point of uselessness, only because it keeps your theory intact, then you had better take a fresh look at your theory.

Secularist anti-Zionism and pro-Islamism

Now that the pieces have been set in their places, let us look the secularist-Islamist nexus for a few strange facts:

First, secularists (most, not all, to be sure) oppose Zionism (and evangelical Christianity) on anti-religious grounds, but do not oppose the Islamic enemies of Israel (and the USA) on the same grounds.

Second, secularists (like the ACLU) oppose “Jewish fundamentalism” in Israel and “Christian fundamentalism” in the USA, citing the danger to the world if those should take hold of their states, but give Islam a free pass, or at most a nod of acknowledgment of the existence of a tiny minority of “Islamic radicalists”, despite the explicit scriptural command for the institution of Islamic rule not just over one state, but over the whole world.

Third, environmentalists (could be believing New Agers rather than atheists; the common point is deification of nature) howl constantly at “Biblically-mandated Judeo-Christian destruction of the Earth, and high birthrates”, but do not sound a peep at Koranically-mandated Islamic actions of the same sort.

Fourth, feminists decry the Bible as “a handbook for the subjugation of women”, while turning a blind eye to the plight of women in states ruled by Islamic law.

Fifth, secularists oppose the one state in the Middle East where a true democracy exists, calling it oppressive, though it is surrounded by states whose human rights record is not exactly stellar.

Those are the facts. How do we explain them? How do we account for such secularist hypocrisy, involving the selling out of each and every tenet for which secularism has always claimed to stand? Here is my proposal:

Falsification, Fudging and re-Flection of Blame

The first cause is adroit falsification on the Islamic enemy’s part. The very creation of the “Palestinian” people (their being settled in refugee camps in the Arab states after 1949, instead of allowing them to melt into the local population) was for the purpose of framing this struggle, this jihad, as a territorial dispute. Framed thus, it appealed to the secularists’ rationalism, the mindset that every problem could be solved by talks, negotiations, concessions and material offerings. Later, the Muslims went even further in astuteness by framing “Israeli intransigence” as being the result of the Zionists’ religion-based opposition to all land concessions. Framed thus, it is the religious Zionists fighting against secular (desiring a land to live on, nothing more) Palestinians. For the secularist, the decision which of the two to support is a no-brainer.

The second cause, which comes into play whenever secularists are finally confronted with the inconvenient, nagging question of Islamic (indisputably religious) actions, is fudging to support the previous narrative of war between religious Zionists (and American Christian fundamentalist theocratic neo-cons…) and secular Palestinians (and other Arabs wanting nothing more than a plot of land to live a Lennonian life on). They cannot deny the reality of the death vests and mosque preachings, but they will always say the “Palestinians” were driven to that path by the actions, the intransigence, the oppression of the religious imperialists on the other side. They will call it “Islamic radicalism” rather than Islam, implying a perversion of a harmless, noble religion. Like learned, sophisticated Juan Cole telling us how Ahmadinejad’s words about “wiping Israel off the map” (G-d forbid) are to be taken as a figure of speech, as Oriental hyperbole (I’m sure Edward Said would approve of that expression), secularists construe Islamic terrorism as an aberration caused by a feeling of being under siege. This joins hands with historical revisionism in ignoring the military impetus of Islam ever since its inception in the 7th century.

Finally, working hand in glove with fudging, is the reflection of blame, as by a mirror, from the Islamic perpetrators onto their non-Muslim victims (inverting the roles of perpetrator and victim in the process). Following any pointing out of Islamic oppression and imperialism to a secularist, the immediate reaction is usually, “And Judaism and Christianity are any better? Did you ever take a peek at the Bible?” From there on, all secularist responses to Islamic aggression and injustice hinge upon tu quoque, and not merely that, but tu quoque first. The Crusades, the founding of the state of Israel, the American invasion of Iraq were all initiatives of aggression, to which the Battle of Hattin, the Ottoman siege of Vienna, the Intifadas and 9/11 were responses, therefore justified (so much for Gandhi’s “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”). Muslim rage merits as explanation only the fact of Western, Judeo-Christian exploitation, colonialism and capitalist globalization.

Tying all this to secularism is a psychological term called the need for effective control, which is humankind’s search for insurance policies against things that seem to be beyond their reach. For religionists, that is the deity or deities and worship of him, her or them. For secularists, that is the making of all humans in their image, the secularist image: rationalistic, desiring of living for the day as in Lennon’s song, and having the pragmatism to accept a gift and crave no more. As surely as a born atheist stares wide-eyed at the fact of so many other people believing in G-d ruling the world, in the supernatural, a political secularist is dumbfounded by the fact of a whole group of people, not just a few leaders, desiring everything, everything, pragmatic only temporarily for gaining the resources for achieving their ultimate goal, which is directed by megalomania.

The first reaction is, understandably, denial. Then, when the facts can no longer be denied, there is a critical juncture of bargaining with the situation. Most secularists assuage the shock by retreating to the effective control strategy of reflection of blame, saying it was not that way in the past, and is that way now only because of our misdeeds. If it is our misdeeds, then we are in control, in that we can remove the reasons for the enemy to hate us. We can give away the Sudetenland. We can grant separate beaches for Muslims and Muslim-only days at fun parks. We can dismantle the Zionist Project (G-d forbid). All for making them stop hating us.

The seal of the US Dhimmicratic Party. From Sacred Cow Burgers (now defunct).

That there could be something as “natural hatred”, someone as a “natural enemy”, hatred just because, enemies just because, is a reality that was clearly in the eyes of the historians of Ancient Greece (which secularists claim to lean upon, in opposition to the “darkness of Judeo-Christianity”), but now in our modern, modern times, the very thought of it is anathema.

If the coming war is destined to be between [Judeo-]Christian civilization and Islam, it is because most of the secularists did not wake up in time, preferring instead to sell their oft-claimed birthright of love of liberty for the lentil stew of fashionable anti-colonialism, blinded by a rationalism that makes them a hammer seeing everything as a nail. They could open their eyes and realize that the enmity is existential, that the fruit of “Palestinian resistance” is not a festival where people dance naked in the woods, and that just as Communism does not teach about the whole of atheism, Islam does not teach about the whole of religion, so that the equivalence they make between the Islamic world and the Christian USA is misguided at best, and counterproductive, in the sense of providing aid and comfort to those who wish to bring us all into a mode of life that would make medieval Christian Europe look like a picnic, at worst. Failing that, the fight for the side of life and liberty will have to be waged by the only ones in the West who are wakeful to the truth.

The First Islamspeak Manual

CONFIDENTIAL: Communiqué to all heads of the Islamic Party. For review, prior to distribution among the Ummah.

Allah

The embodiment of all the goodness of Islam. Allah is watching you, but he is not your brother—thinking of him in terms of family relationships is kufr.

Democracy

Majority rule, a sacred principle which must be coupled to immigration of Muslims to the West and high birthrates once there.

Elastic loaf

A baked Italian dish of a thinly rolled bread dough crust (or a thick dough) typically topped with tomato sauce, cheese and other ingredients (illustration).

Evolution

The extrapolation of the Koranic observation of pithecanthropy among a particular nation onto the rest of humanity.

Freedom of speech

The provision for preaching jihad in mosques. It does not give permission for non-Muslims to draw cartoons of kufr, however.

Jihad

A struggle (German: Kampf).

Justice

Islamic law.

Just society

A society ruled by Islamic law.

Koran

Allah’s final manifesto, superseding all others (see: Torah).

Kufr

Intellectual opposition to Islam. Sins of thought against Allah.

Oppression

The rule of a state by non-Islamic law; actions of resistance to implementation of Islamic law.

Palestinians

The indigenous people of the land currently occupied by the Zionists (see: Evolution). Removal from vocabulary pending elimination of said entity, after the Western Left has helped us with it because of buying into our narrative.

Peace

The state of cessation of all resistance to Islam.

Racism

Discrimination against blond, blue-eyed Swedish Muslims. Not against Arab Christians or Pakistani Christians or Iranian Bahá’ís.

Torah

The first manifesto given to humanity by Allah, later revised (see: Koran). To deny its expiration constitutes intellectual opposition to Islam.

United States of America

The greatest opponent of Islam currently, because of its relative livelihood of belief in the superseded manifesto (see: Torah) and resultant relative lack of useful idiots.

Working day and night toward the dictatorship of the Ummah. The future is for this religion—tomorrow belongs to us.

(signed)
Jihad Abu Islam Ibn Shaheed Ibn Abdel Moloch.

First As A Tragedy, Second As A Fark

Offensive:

Passport of a five-year-old girl showing her bare shoulders. From Dhimmi Watch.

Not offensive:

“Palestinians” stomping on the bodies of people executed publicly for alleged collaboration with the enemy, after no trial. From Riehl World View.

Yes, they’re just like us. They can be reasoned with, and their hearts and minds can be won over by doing a Czechoslovakia. There will be no more beheadings in Thailand once they’re given a chance for full self-determination. Of course.

So, the bare shoulders of a five-year-old girl are offensive to Muslims, and they must not be shown on a passport picture when traveling to an Islamic country (like Southern France—thanks for the confirmation). And don’t forget to give them holidays of their own (hat tip: LGF) in a Christian host country as protection against further bus and plane bombing plots. Anyone know the Arabic for “chutzpah”?

The question that still lies open is why people feel the need to cover up a five-year-old girl. In Western society (at least until Leftist perpetrator-sympathy-cum-victim-blaming gains total control), people who feel a sexual attraction to little girls aren’t viewed as normal, and if they act upon it they get in the slammer. In Islamic society, however, the noble idea that women shouldn’t be valued for their bodies alone is enforced with such draconian measures, namely the covering of almost the entire female body, that anyone who’s spent a few years there would, like a prisoner, seek to satisfy his sexual cravings on anything—even a five-year-old girl.

And there’s also an historico-religious reason that might have something to do with it: old Mo’s marriage to a little girl. Whatever the prophet of Islam does, Muslims take it as making it lawful (the Law of the Holy Gourd, obeyed by about a billion people who are all different).

I did fauxtography a few posts ago and it didn’t go very well. I decided now to try my hand at farkery instead. You be the judge how I am at that.

Prophet Clinton testifying in a hearing. Farked from original by Wondermark, via thread on Fark.

Eifah Ve’Eifah toward Lands of Israel

Historical revisionism is one of the most serious problems that beset Western civilization in defending itself today. Prominent symptoms of this are Holocaust denial and 9/11 conspiracies, but these, outrageous though they are, are lesser examples of the dangers of historical revisionism, for they are still fringe theories in the West, or at least judged so in common opinion.

Far more dangerous is not the denial but the total disregard of historical backgrounds when it comes to what is facing us today. The Western Left smugly dismisses 7th-century history as an academic curiosity, although that history is precisely what drives Islamofascism today. The farthest back Leftist memory goes is the Crusades, as the beginning of the Muslims’ “legitimate grievances against the West”. But the Left usually sticks to the 20th century in its explanation of “the roots of Muslim rage”. To go back to the 7th century would force an admission that Islam is an imperialistic force of aggression, which would undermine the entire Leftist narrative of Islam as an anti-colonial resistance movement fighting for freedom, equality and cannabis.

The Israeli Left suffers from the same problem of historical revisionism: the inability to see beyond 1967 (the Six-Day War). According to the Israeli Left’s narrative, everything was swell until Israel took the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights and got carried away into Messianism and started settling Jews in those lands.

Nowhere is this more demonstrated than in the writings of B. Michael, an extreme-Leftist Israeli columnist on whom you can depend to deliver the anti-Israel point of view. In one of his columns back in the late 1990’s (whose title eludes my memory, but I remember the theme and the exact following expression), he wrote that the “occupation” (kibbush, of the lands taken in 1967) and our settling there had turned us (Israeli Jews) from “clean-handed pioneers” (chalutzim nekiyei kappayim—this is the one expression I remember exactly) into a group of “thieves, robbers and wrongdoers”. The final suggestion, of course, is to vacate the areas of all Jewish settlers (called Entjudung in Germany some time ago) and leave the areas for the Palestinians to form a state in (and the Golan Heights to Syria, its rightful owners), and then the region would become a Disneyland.

“Clean-handed pioneers”, wrote B. Michael. Supposedly, before 1967 we were saints in the eyes of all the world, even the Arab world. That’s why they forced us to go to war in 1967 in the first place. We were so clean-handed in the eyes of the Arabs that they graciously accepted the UN plan of sharing the land between Jews and Arabs with bullets and the invasion of armies. We were so pure in their eyes that they massacred our settlers in 1936–9 and earlier in 1929, 1921 and 1920.

I know that, when pressed about such facts, “everything was swell until 1967” revisionists would reply by conceding the point that Arab hostility predates 1967 (often with the obligatory “…BUT they felt their land was being stolen!”), but saying that in the court of general world opinion we were sympathized with until 1967. And that our borders from 1949 to 1967 were and still are the internationally recognized borders. Both points are true, but founding Israel’s policy on them is a sure way to bringing the end of the entire Zionist project (G-d forbid).

A map of Israel by the CIA, from Wikipedia. The brighter area is the internationally recognized extent of the state of Israel.

The sympathy with Israel in the years 1949–67 had its temporary reasons: the memory of the Holocaust was still fresh (in contradistinction to today, when people can demonstrate their alliance with an organization dedicated to a second Holocaust (G-d forbid) without fear of even social sanctions); world opinion had not yet inverted the roles of David and Goliath in the Middle East; socialists sympathized with Israel because of its being founded on socialist ideals (the kibbutzim as the best-known example of this, and the reign of the left wing in Israel until 1977); the Muslims had not yet perfected the art of appealing to Western hearts and minds, while the elites of Israel were still confident in Zionism; and the West itself had yet to be flooded by the flower children, their infatuation with all things not Western and their idea that every conflict in the world could be kumbaya’d out of existence.

So by the 1970’s, it was more the outside world that had changed than Israel; the “stealing of the Palestinian homeland” in 1967 was but a pretext, the final piece in the puzzle of postmodernism, post-Zionism, hippie exoticism and indigenism and Saidian anti-Occidentalism. Give back the “Palestinians” all their lands and Israel’s image still won’t change, for these world factors will cause world opinion to condemn and vilify Israel when it inevitably has to defend itself when those who have been given land for peace use it as a base for further liberation of “all Palestine, from the river to the sea”.

At least they’re honest. Picture from Age of Hooper.

For the Muslims since 1920 at the latest to this day, and for their useful idiots at the [still only] Far Left, there is no difference between Tel-Aviv and Ma’aleh Adumim: both are occupied territories, stolen from the Palestinians, and the Jewish inhabitants of both are settlers, the evacuation of whom would be an act of righting an historical wrong. So much for world opinion.

For Israeli Leftists less extreme than B. Michael, living in Ma’aleh Adumim may not be an outright crime but it is still considered less sensible than living in Tel-Aviv. They say settling in the West Bank is religiously-motivated, therefore breaking ranks with the original, secular Zionism of Herzl (zt"l). They say all but the extremists of the world consider Tel-Aviv a legitimate area while nearly all the world considers Ma’aleh Adumim occupied territory belonging to another people. The Israeli Leftists, then, rest their choice of a place to live upon the verdict of world opinion—fickle, finicky world opinion, which can change any moment and raise the bar of its satisfaction higher and higher.

And now I come to the crucial point: though I am a religious Zionist, I submit that the Israeli Left’s use of a double standard (Hebrew eifah ve’eifah, “[one] measure and [another] measure”, from Deuteronomy 25:14) toward different geographical locations in Israel is a betrayal not just of religious Zionism, but of secular Zionism as well—a betrayal of all Zionism.

“Ancient history” time again: remember the earliest systematic writing of modern, secular Zionism? It was Leon Pinsker’s (zt"l) Autoemancipation. In it, Pinsker stated the abnormality of the Jews’ life at the mercies of the Gentiles, and the necessity of emancipating themselves by having a state of their own. And Herzl, whether from the anti-Semitism of the mayor of Vienna (Karl Lueger) or from the Dreyfus Affair, concluded the same: the nation of Israel’s subservience to world opinion, and the Jews’ constant begging for recognition of legitimacy for any of their actions, was a sickness that had to be cured by the return of the Jews to a state of their own. This is secular Zionism—no religious argument here at all, not yet even a mention of the historical land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean as that which the Jews should return to.

The present state of the Israeli Left is worse than that of Jewish Diaspora life: a state of Jews being out of the Diaspora, but the Diaspora still being inside the Jews. If the Israeli Left said settlements on the West Bank were hard on its own conscience, then that would still be somehow acceptable; but when the Left says settlements on the West Bank are illegitimate because world opinion says they’re illegitimate, that is as if Zionism had never happened. It’s a kick in the faces of Pinsker, of Herzl and of all the Zionist settlers to this day. For Zionists to seek first a charter for their legitimacy is one thing (Herzl himself visited the Ottoman sultan for that purpose), but for them to predicate Jewish inhabitation of the Land of Israel upon world opinion is quite another.

Therefore the only argument the Israeli Left has against living in the West Bank that does not betray Zionism is the safety argument: Tel-Aviv is safer than Ma’aleh Adumim. It sounds a reasonable argument, and at least it is not ideologically self-defeating like the legitimacy argument, but it fails for the following reason: our history from 1947 to this day shows that every part of the state of Israel is a potential target (Tel-Aviv was the target of Saddam’s Scud missiles in 1991; the north of Israel is the heaviest target currently, but Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip are inflicted with Kassam rocket fire every day), so that an Israeli Jew’s statement that he lives in Tel-Aviv because Ma’aleh Adumim is unsafe can soon transmogrify into a European Jew’s statement that he lives in Europe because Israel is unsafe. A lot of Jews have indeed undergone that process.

But judging from the photos taken by the citizen journalists (see Moonbat Media for a veritable dung mine of them), there will soon be nowhere safe, nowhere for Jews to escape. There will be a union of secular and religious Zionism: Jews in Israel defending themselves with their army, and crying to HaShem Yitbarakh to save them from the conventionally unstoppable, to give them strength, and to finally, finally after more than three millennia, bless them with peace, with true peace.

All you who believe, pray that Ahmadinejad (shr"y) meet the same fate as Haman. Amen.