The Wreck of Darfur

Communist website Common Dreams recently broke new ground with an article by David Morse, The Myth of “Darfur”, from February 21, 2007. In a stunning show of real taboo-breaking, Morse writes:

This single-minded view of Darfur arises partly from media myopia. But it also stems from the trouble Darfuri rebels had trying to join their cause to that of other marginalized black African regions struggling against the Arab-dominated central government in Khartoum.

And more:

Harvard scholar and activist Alex de Waal describes it as “counter-insurgency on the cheap.” But the genocidal intent was clear. In his book, Darfur: a short history of a long war, de Waal cites a directive from Janjaweed militia commander Musa Hilal’s headquarters: “Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes.”

And still more:

Darfur is in large measure a manifestation of the same racism that characterized the 21-year long North-South civil war, in which Arab supremacists sought to Arabize and Islamicize Sudan and take over the country’s oilfields at the expense of the Dinka and other black tribes.

I find those quotes amazing, simply amazing. A Leftist writer acknowledges non-white, non-Western racism. What with the word, “Islamicize” appearing in the second quote, I’d say Mr. Morse is in great danger of being sent to re-education camp sensitivity training.

But my sarcasm, born of this too abundant kind of experience (think of Robert Mugabe—he gets a free pass for oppressing his people because he’s black), is not to deny the writer his correctness. The genocide, the ethnic cleansing, the apartheid in Sudan is real. It is not backed up by regular reporting from the area, probably due to the fact that reporters run the risk of literally losing their heads there. But I think it’s because of that fact that this calamity is so manifestly real. No reporters also means no staging, no selective coverage, therefore a great chance that any black Sudanese fleeing from that hell-hole will be telling the truth when on the lands of life. In contrast to certain people who are only too keen to pose their tears and retell their [self-inflicted] plight in front of the reporters, who are overwhelmingly of well-known political leaning and stance on Israel.

A real genocide. A clear case of ethnic cleansing. True apartheid. If the Left expended on Sudan a quarter of the efforts it does on the Pretendestinians, thousands upon thousands of lives could be saved. If Daily Kos featured half as vigorous a stream of Darfur diaries as it does Israel/“Palestine” diaries, David Morse would not be writing now, “Over the past three years Sudan’s troubled Darfur region has achieved increased visibility, thanks to the tireless efforts of activists”, but many years ago.

Cowardice rules the Left. President Bush would never detain all the treasonous moonbats speaking against him, not even the secret-leaking New York Times, despite all the implications to that effect; Israel continues to permit anti-Zionist Jonathan Cook to write from Nazareth; and Dan Brown and James Cameron can rest easy that their “Christianity-sinking” books and films will garner nothing but a strongly-worded letter of protest. But when push comes to shove… ah, that’s when their true colors, or should that be their true color, is displayed for all to see: yellow. Come to Havana to protest Fidel’s imprisonment of dissidents; get out a film with the tagline, “This time, the ship he’s sinking is Islam”; or take that flight to Sudan to earn your fame as the one who got the truth out regarding the genocide against the native blacks there. Naw, that’s going too far, ’cause it requires a coating of titanium on the two relevant parts, not just a gift of gab.

While you were busy preying on a modern, Western, democratic state defending itself against those who deny it the right to a single inch of land, Lefties, and cheapening words like “oppression” and “ethnic cleansing” in the process—while you were doing all those brave and doughty deeds, Cuban dissidents passed away a few more years in Fidel’s prisons; the people of Venezuela lost, one by one, their freedoms to Chávez’s “rule by decree”; the Tibetan nation stayed under Chinese colonial occupation; more and more people in North Korea starved to death under Kim’s rule; the Iranian people continued suffering the yoke of Arab cultural imperialism; and a genocide was taking place, and still is, in Sudan. All causes which the Left ought to champion, if we go by their constant rhetoric; but they wield that rhetoric against those who permit it, and hold their sinful silence as soon as true tyrants and aggressors, real suppressors of all criticism, are concerned.

The Left is like Gandhi. They wear it with pride. But there is nothing to be proud of a man who stood up to the civilized, war-worn British, but turned a blind eye to the Islamic aggression that led to the formation of Pakistan, and would have done the same had he lived in Aurangzeb’s time. He was not of the stature of Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur, who resisted the Muslims knowing he would meet his death that way; or our own great sage Rabbi Akiva, who did likewise toward the Romans. Not all who call themselves “fighters against tyranny” are truly such, but only those who do so to dire potential consequences. The Robert Spencers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s and Danish cartoonists of our day.

Let me close this concourse of hypocrisy (apologies to zombie) with the final quote from David Morse:

Having brokered the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement —ZY], the Bush administration has an obligation to monitor its implementation. Having played a role in excluding Darfur, and seeing the consequences, the administration needs to recognize that no lasting peace can be achieved in Darfur or the South at the cost of the other. Sudan must be addressed as a whole.

Interventionism? US intervention in another part of the world in order to maintain the peace and bring the natives an opportunity for a brighter future? The same thing that the Bush Administration set out to do in Iraq (maybe not as the initial plan, but definitely for the last three years or so) and the Left now bashes, decrying it as “Western colonialism”?

Heaven help us if those hypocritical chickendoves and latter-day Gandhis ever get hold of the reins of power. It will then be Vietnam squared.

Merry Purim, and don’t forget forget to bring an extra noisemaker for the Haman of our time!

Bring two. Hat tip: Solomonia.

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UPDATE (Tuesday, March 13, 2007, 09:08): Professor Edward Bernard Glick has the article The Darfurians and the Sudanese on The American Thinker today, going in-depth on the issue of American interventionism and Leftist hypocrisy regarding Darfur. Note that “Darfurians” refers to the Leftists who talk the talk without walking the walk on Darfur, not the inhabitants of Darfur—perhaps an obvious point, but it had me confused at first, so I wish to spare other readers that initial confusion.

Proving Jew-Hatred Internal

This post builds on my previous, The Tribes, addressing a Jewish matter.

A question I have not yet been personally asked (though I have seen it raised in some form or another in the blogosphere from time to time) is, “How do you know the anti-Zionist critics of Israel are anti-Semitic at heart? With all due respect, singling Israel out for criticism, though a potent demonstration of it, is still not ironclad proof. Do you have any way of showing that their anti-Semitism is an internal, emotional, ingrained matter?” That is a fair question, and I can answer it.

I spoke of the Leftists’ admiration for all manner of exoticism in my previous post, and particularly for tribalism. Conservatives usually, as I described on myself, channel this “feeling that burns in one’s blood and bones” by returning to the heritage that was extant just a few generations before, while Progressives, ironically, let that feeling carry them away to the direction of turning their backs on that same heritage. I talked of myself as being a happy “urban tribesman”; for Leftists, the real, heartfelt dream is to go back to living as non-Western tribesmen do: as villagers or desert nomads.

On all of the left-wing sites I read (linked to at the sidebar, under the heading, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), whenever tribes and tribalism are mentioned, the feeling of admiration, of identification, of desire to be like them, oozes from every letter. Iraqi tribesmen deserve to have their sovereignty recognized, Western capitalism and Christian missionaries are slammed for “destroying indigenous tribal cultures”, and the thought of Native American scholar Vine Deloria is echoed that Western Man must transition to the Native American (i.e. tribal) way of life in order to regain happiness. Again, I agree with the foundation of those sentiments but not with their details, and certainly not with where the Leftists take them. But I digress. My point is that there is only one exception to their feelings toward tribalism: the Jews.

Whenever Israel, Zionism and the Jews are mentioned, all of a sudden tribalism becomes to the Leftists something to be despised, reviled and condemned. Jewish tribalism is, to their minds, a regression, and furthermore a danger to the world and its wellbeing. The Jews, in contrast to any other tribe, are expected to “rise above their tribalism and adopt more universal values”. No other tribal group gets this treatment on sites like CounterPunch and ZNET. Only the Jews.

Think I’m making this up? Here is a fine specimen by Gilad Atzmon, One Hundred Years of Jewish Solitude, displaying the condemnation of Jewish tribalism in full form. And to those who wonder how one article shows the truth regarding all, remember that such sites, particularly CounterPunch, are Stalinist sites, not admitting any article prior to being checked for strict doctrinal conformance. Besides, there’s more where Atzmon’s article comes from—do a search for “tribalism” on CounterPunch and you will find, wherever it is mentioned in connection to Jews, the mention is unfavorable, and favorable everywhere else.

Recall what I said about the Leftists’ attitude toward tribes and tribalism: heartfelt admiration and a desire to be like them, seeping from every word. An internal, emotional thing, without a shadow of doubt. And now, with that in consideration, the question arises: what does it mean that, when the same concept, tribalism, is attached to the modifier, “Jewish”, all of a sudden their words turn from admiration and wistfulness to condemnation and loathing? What it does mean when a deep-seated emotion is overridden by that single modifier?

Yes, it means that we have before us 100 percent, irrefutable proof that the Jew-hatred of the CounterPunch and Common Dreams Marxists and Jimmy “Too Many Jews” Carter and the Daily Kos Kids (not all of them, of course—I’m talking about those like Christopher Day, mattes and litho) and all the rest of left-wingers of those type is an internal matter. It will be no use wrapping it in the nice package of “care for the plight of the Palestinians” and “love of peace and justice”—if tribalism stirs such strong pangs of sympathy when mentioned of Native Americans, of Arab Bedouins, of Uyghurs, et cetera, yet the same concept, tribalism, evokes the opposite of that as soon as the Jews are concerned, then what we have here is Jew-hatred, Judeophobia, anti-Semitism on the internal level, within the heart.

As an indigenous Jewish tribesman, native of my land, I have no less a cause for being sympathized with by the Leftists than do the Native Americans. (But see my post On a Few Comments on DKos, from January 23, 2007, for their typical hypocrisy on that regard.) That I am instead regarded as a colonial invader, and my belonging to The Tribe (always thus capitalized when they speak of “the stranglehold of the Israel Lobby on the USA”) is brought up as a basis for disparagement rather than solidarity, is ironclad proof of ingrained Leftist Jew-hatred, hide as it may under the cover of “criticism of Israel’s policies”. I have proved what I set out to prove; now the burden is on the other side to show otherwise. And for us, members of The Tribe, this is a call to keep the Leftist dogs on the short leash they deserve, and not give them the credence of which they are not worthy.

The Tribes

There is one point of agreement between the progressives and the conservatives, and that is the depressive effect which globalized, urban, consumerist mass culture has upon the individual. They differ in their reactions: the former usually ending up throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but the latter often getting confused as to the proper reaction, both to the phenomenon and to the progressives’ attitude toward it.

My opinions on the constant barrage of commercials (I call it brainwashing), on the evils of fast food, on the mind-numbing power of television, on the tastelessness of pop culture and its icons such as Britney Spears, on the drabness of an “everyone to himself” life of big cities and on the emotional starvation of online attachments are the same now as they were in the 1990’s, when I was a left-winger, when I called myself a progressive. In that, the Progressive Left and the Conservative Right see eye to eye almost completely: not all is well in our kingdom.

Nor is it an entirely new sentiment: from the 18th century onward, we see Western writers projecting their dissatisfaction with their own culture onto non-Western characters, characters that are to varying degrees of proximity to reality. The “noble savage” dates from that age.

I have been reading geographic magazines since elementary school, and I saw then a trait in them that still exists now: that editorializing in favor of exotic cultures. Today, when we can all see the mainstream media betray its stated job of objectivity day after day with its editorializing, this is no great surprise; back then, it shocked me. In the case of geographic magazines, it is even worse than the mainstream media, for the MSM has only short items in which to do its underhanded work, while those magazines have whole, spacious articles. Then as now, you will not find it difficult to read in them an article whose spirit is no different from that of Montesquieu (of Persian Letters fame) and Diderot: the outsider is used as the platform for criticizing one’s own society. Those criticisms, as I said, are such that progressives and conservatives share, but the geographic magazines and the mainstream media are of an overwhelmingly progressive, left-leaning streak. And that has dire consequences for our present conflict, for the War On Islam.

An article from a geographic magazine would be too long to bring here, so here’s a link from Flickr, the online photo album, that is quite representative of that mindset. Photograph The Bedouin of Sinai, by Mike Marcus, from September 27, 2005:

That has two comments. First, from Gunnella:

Love the tilt of their heads, ;-) the pride!

And second, by the photographer (mikemarcus):

They are proud and they deserve to be. Bedouins seem truily satisfied with thier lifes. How many westerners can say that? (All spelling original. —ZY)

Concisely put indeed: tribesmen are happy, modern Western man is not. Though such a sweeping generalization should raise question marks, especially when sounded by those who claim to “oppose all bigotry, stereotyping and racism”, there is in it the grain of truth that modern society of mass-production has lost us something.

Do you not long for it, that society whose members are a community, helping each other in times of need? Do you not pine for family ties, for gatherings where your kin are united in common cause and thought and feeling? Do you not yearn for those tales of love where the man is willing to go in fire and water for the woman, to be her protector and win her heart so as to marry her? Do you not long for traditions, for authentic festivities, for the opportunity to say, “This is what we do”, for being yourself a possible object of an article in a geographic magazine for a change?

“Romanticism”, I hear you say. “Letting your feelings carry you away, away from reason”, I hear you warn. “No better than those Sixties Radicals you so despise”, I hear you scoff. And yet… how many of us who were raised as progressives and became conservatives would have done that if the change had not been stated to involve the rejection of the mass-produced decadence we see around us? The fact that we might have a point of agreement with the progressives doesn’t negate the reality of that drive, that push, that thrust toward something bigger and better. The only question is where this takes us.

The progressives say, “Western culture is trash, all that mass-produced junk is an integral part of it and not a modern aberration, the only way to escape is to throw it all away and adopt the wisdom of the non-Westerns, thereby also atoning for our past colonial sins”. This leads to all kinds of roads to perdition: Marxism, anarcho-primitivism, multiculturalism and, of course, Islam, whether by actually converting to it, as Adam Gadahn did, or, more usually, giving sympathy and support and aid and comfort to it as a “resistance movement against Western imperialism”. In which case the sentiment of, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” prevails over many, many stated progressive ideals, such that the suggestion that women might actually be harmed by abortion is decried as “Biblical patriarchy”, whereas the custom of female genital mutilation prevalent in African societies is hailed as a form of women’s liberation!

On the sane side of the map, the side that is not so lost in hating itself and embracing anything exotic solely by virtue of its exoticity, what is to be done? So far, conservative reactions to leftist Occidentalism (to invert the title of Edward Said’s intellectual ball and chain) have been to discredit them without addressing the common root, shared, as I said, by both progressives and conservatives, from which they sprout. They rightly say that a full application of those anti-Western ideas would lead to famine, oppression and misery of unimagined proportions. (As they already did. Ask any Cambodian.) But then they fail to make the positive case for an authentic, might I say even tribal, Western culture.

For I know, I know, what I have as my own now! I see this situation in which, when one man suddenly gets in financial trouble, all the others help him—because he is one of the regular congregants at our synagogue. I see at least one day every week set out, mandatorily, for all the members of the family to be together at the table, singing and conversing on holy and good things. The community watches for unmarried men and women and cares for their solution. Life is steeped in tradition. Festivities abound, whether the gaiety of the Purim carnivals or the solemn procession of bringing in a new Torah scroll. And all this, all this is without relinquishing a single modern convenience. City tribesmen, as happy as any Bedouin.

Now that was a description of life in [Orthodox] Judaism. But every Western country has its traditions, mostly Christian, some pre-Christian reworked into modern times. And it never ceases to amaze me how progressives envy the Bedouin tribesmen yet trash the Bible. So many traditional customs and ways of life that win their hearts when marketed as “Oriental exoticisms” can be found in the Bible. The three patriarchs of Judaism, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (peace be upon them), lived as desert nomads. This is not to say life as desert nomads is necessarily desirable—I just described a whole, authentic tribal life without it—but it does show that the progressives don’t just betray their minds, they betray their own hearts as well. The fact that the same custom elicits a different reaction from them when presented as Biblical than when presented as, for example, Ancient Native Himalayan means the progressives are not for anything positive, but only for the negative goal of doing away with Western civilization. It makes things all very clear now.

Biblical justice and Greek democracy are good enough reasons for some as to why Western civilization is worth fighting for. But apart from these admittedly relatively abstract concepts, there is a substratum of native, authentic Western culture, or cultures, which can still shine clear through the mud of mass-produced junk culture, and which can thus serve as the anchor against throwing it all away for life in a Marxist or Islamic gulag. Be your own tribes.

The Old Jews vs. “The New Jews”: A Comparison

I have said before that the Anti-Defamation League is not itself to be faulted, but only the fact that their modus operandi has been copied by the Muslim enemy (as is the Koran a ripoff of the Tanach, and as is the “Palestinian Nation” fraud a cynical imitation of Zionism), foremostly by CAIR. So it is only natural that the Muslims should portray themselves as “The New Jews”, and “Islamophobia” the counterpart of anti-Semitism. Leftists play gladly here: Daily Kos once did a diary on that theme, and just recently the British TreasonMedia rag The Guardian featured an article, titled “This scapegoating is rolling back the gains of anti-racism”, by Martin Jacques, where he brazenly ignores the fact of Islam being a religion, a doctrinally supra-racial religion, and warns of anti-Muslim racism. (Question: if a black Christian policeman arrests a blond, blue-eyed convert to Islam, is it racism? An answer of “Yes” is the minimum necessary to score an MQ (Moonbat Quotient) of 100).

To every argument a response, if not a refutation. How do the Muslims of today fare in their “Jewishness”? Jewishness being, according to the Leftist definition, the status of victimhood, scapegoating, prejudice and the like. That definition, that focus, is already a reason why the “Muslims as New Jews” ploy won’t fly—I’ll come to that later.

First of all: Jew-hatred has always required conspiracism as its base, while “Islamophobia” is based on things seen in the light of day and heard cried out loud. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were, by the author’s admission, even to the very title, overheard in secret, not meant to be revealed at all; the Dolchstosslegende, the legend according to which Germany lost World War I because the Jews stabbed it in the back, is similar, for a stab in the back is something done unawares; and the blood libel is altogether something that makes me remember why G-d is to be trusted over humanity every time. The blood libel, saying Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to bake matzos for Passover, is beyond conspiracism. For conspiracism has going against it only the lack of evidence for it, while the blood libel is sustained by ignoring the evidence to the contrary. The Torah and all its rabbinical commentaries forbid the Jew to drink a single drop of blood, something which only for non-Jews is allowed (for which see, for example, the German Blutwurst).

The student of the Orthodox Jewish sources will find many politically-incorrect ideas, especially exceptionalism, but not a plot to control and dominate the world. What is there is there and can only be admitted: disparaging words about Jesus, for example (in the past, those were censored from European editions of the Talmud). But what is not there can only be fabricated, and that is what Jew-haters have done throughout countless generations.

In contrast, the mainstream canon of Islam is explicit about the goal of Islamic world domination and the means of furthering it. Radical Muslims have no problem appealing to the sources of Islam to rally Muslims to jihad and to cower their moderate brethren into silence. Nor do they hide those views from public:

These things are public. For a Muslim to say them is to be a practitioner of his religion; it is only when a non-Muslim quotes the same sources and shows the same scenes as a criticism that it becomes “Islamophobia”. A Muslim leader in Australia can compare unveiled women to uncovered meat, and a Muslim leader in Britain can say a whole host of things that offend the sensibilities of the host society around him, but as soon as it comes out as scandalous, they cry it has been “quoted out of context”.

There was Rosa Luxemburg, a Jewish woman who launched an attempt at a Communist coup of the Weimar Republic, and many Jews of similar misfortune. But she did not do it in the name of Judaism, at least not of Orthodox Judaism, except for maybe an appeal here and there to Jewish sentiments à la Perchik. In contrast to that, every Muslim terrorist gladly and loudly proclaims to be doing it in the name of Islam. Among “multicultural” societies, the phenomena of Hinduphobia, Buddhophobia, Sikhophobia, Bahaiphobia, Zoroastrophobia, Taophobia, Confuciophobia (you think of the rest) are scarce to be found, if at all; only Judeophobia and “Islamophobia” are prevalent, the former being carried over from days of old, now under the mantle of anti-Zionism, and the latter is quoted because the word, “phobia” means “irrational fear”, while there is nothing whatever irrational in the fear of Islam. 9/11 as an act of Islamic terrorism was clear for all to see; the alternatives, such as the hypothesis that it was a “Jewish plot, executed by the Mossad”, is a conspiracy theory, same as The Protocols. In short: Judeophobia grows out of conspiracy theories and lies, while “Islamophobia” is the result of reflecting on the events in plain sight. Whether it is because of 9/11 or the Danish Cartoons Affair or the Kassam rockets, a formerly tolerant person becomes an “Islamophobe” because the events have made him rethink his position; Jew-hatred, on the other hand, is usually already there, waiting to find an event to support it, such as “the oppression of the Palestinians” or the alleged mistreatment of women in buses by Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Jimmy “Too Many Jews” Carter didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to write his book.

And there are some true accusations, such as Jews as money-lenders, which brings me to the second point: the Jews’ lowly status was usually forced, while Muslims inflict their woes upon themselves. With nearly all occupations in Medieval Europe requiring a Christian oath, money-lending was among the few left to the Jews. As soon as the requirement was repealed, Jews filled new roles in their host countries (until banished, or worse). To contrast to this, the Muslims withdraw from their host societies far beyond the need to maintain their identity: they could marry European converts, but they prefer to stick to their custom of cousin marriage; and they reject modern medicine on grounds of purity laws. Wherever the Muslims are in a miserable state, it will be found that they are the ones who perpetuate it, through their rejection of “infidel” achievements; and more, they desire to drag their host societies to their level, and say so publicly. Society is open to them as it was not to Jews in the past—no Christian oath required, no numerus clausus policies, in fact, quite the opposite, a society that has engraved equal opportunity on its banner, to the point of opting for Affirmative Action rather than selection by merit. As of their starting-point, they are no worse off than any other immigrants, yet they stay in their mire and whine (permissible, in contrast to the same without the H) about it.

Indeed, here is the Leftists’ fallacy in calling anyone “The New Jews”: it defines Jewishness as victimhood. But while Jewish history is full of woe (or Yiddish vey), Judaism is about positive ideas: choosing life over death, fulfilling the role of spreading G-d’s light in the world (by which the facts of His sovereignty over and fatherhood toward His creation are meant, not Leftist platitudes like “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability”), believing ourselves the beloved sons and daughters of the King, and so on. These strong positive beliefs made the long centuries of Diaspora life tolerable for Jews, and dissuaded them from the suicide of assimilation. Islam, on the other hand, has experienced relatively very little in the way of defeat, vanquishment and lowered status, so that its believers are programmed to view victory and dominance as their natural state, and anything less than that as oppression.

The Jews have never been either rootless or cosmopolitan; the Diaspora has always been their temporary abode, for as long as it might take, and the world as a whole never their dwelling, but to the Land of Israel, their only land, have they ever set eyes. The Muslims wish to make every country in which they live theirs, and regard the whole world as belonging to them. Their sadness is the sadness of the plantation owner bewailing the spectacle of not being accorded his “right” to slaves. They market themselves astutely to the Western Left by using its post-colonial vocabulary, but between themselves and in their source texts the truth is there for all to see.

As Melanie Phillips says, Jews are the new Jews. I would add, editorially, “Dressed up as ‘Zionist colonial oppressors of an indigenous people’ as the newest fashion”, and further: the Muslims, after the Soviets, in turn after the Nazis, are the members of the third fascistic movement carrying the torch of Jew-hatred in modern times and striving for world dominance as well. Slick post-colonial marketing can’t change the facts.

The Re-1947 Document

Even for someone like me who abandoned the “It all started in 1967” theory long ago, the report from the National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel from 2006, featured on ZNET as an article titled, The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, from February 9, 2007, was a disturbing read. And then, at the bottom of it, I found out it was just a summary, an abridged form of a PDF file from the Mossawa Center. In all probability, the Marxist fifth columnists at ZNET found it worthy to feature that article now because of the climate of intellectual legitimacy that Jimmy “Too Many Jews” Carter’s book has bestowed on the subject.

It is deeply disturbing if only for the list of participants toward its end (p. 25): Arabs living within the 1949 Armistice Line borders, not in the “Occupied Territories” taken in the 1967 Six-Day War. Many of the participants are academics holding positions in Israeli Universities: Ben Gurion University (Be’er Sheva), Haifa University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and even Bar Ilan University (only Tel-Aviv University doesn’t have a “Palestinian Right of Return” advocate to its name, for some unfathomable reason). I wonder what Steven Plaut (HaShem bless him) would make of it, if he hasn’t already seen it.

The report is marketed as a call for equal status for Arabs and Jews in the state of Israel—a seemingly innocuous cause which, as we now know only too well, is a mask for the goal of ending Zionism (G-d forbid), the same thing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants, only carried out by less explosive (though that too is not to be taken for granted) means. As with the cultural and demographic jihad in Europe and the United States, the Mossawa activists line their report handsomely with post-colonial language, guaranteeing the support of the Western Left for their cause, as well as future condemnation from them of Israel for “racism” should it do anything to defend itself. Exhibit A:

We are the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, the indigenous peoples, the residents of the States (sic) of Israel, and an integral part of the Palestinian People and the Arab and Muslim and human Nation. (Both emphases mine. —ZY)

Right after that, the next two paragraphs elaborate on the “Al-Nakba on 1948”, to make it clear to the outside world that the state of Israel was born in sin. More on that vein on p. 5, after the heading, “The Palestinian Arabs in Israel and their relation to the State of Israel”:

Israel is the outcome of a settlement process initiated by the Zionist-Jewish elite in Europe and the west (sic) and realized by Colonial (sic) countries contributing to it and by promoting Jewish immigration to Palestine, in light of the results the Second World War and the Holocaust. After the creation of the States (sic) in 1948, Israel continued to use policies derived from its vision as an extension of the west (sic) in the Middle East and continued conflicting with its neighbors. […]

This should give you an idea of what stands for history at the Mossawa Center: Zionism being a reaction to the Holocaust (I am not sure, however, that that meaning is what was intended; the poor wording of the sentence makes it difficult to ascertain the meaning), and complete omission of the 1947 refusal of the local Arabs to agree to the UN treaty and the 1948 invasion by the Arab armies. To those Leftists who sarcastically ask, “Israel can do no wrong?”, this is the answer, in showing them and asking, just as sarcastically, “Israel can do no right?”

The primal sin, of course, is that Jews inhabit the land at all (p. 5):

Israel carried out the Judaization process in various forms, beginning with the expulsion of the Palestinian People back in 1948 […] This has led to the judaization (sic) of the land and erosion of the Palestinian history and civilization and the building of political and economical system that marginalized and weakened the Palestinian People especially in Israel.

Everything you wanted is here: Western colonialism, framing the “Palestinians” as being like the Native Americans, and the implication that Israel is an apartheid state. However, the next paragraph was a light in that darkness, an unintentional one of course, but still:

Israel can not (sic) be defined as a democratic State (sic). It can be defined as an ethnocratic state such as turkey, (sic), Srilanka, (sic) Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia (and Canada forty years ago). These countries have engaged their minorities in the political, social and economic aspects of life, in a very limited and unequal way. This comes amidst a continued and firm policy of control and censorship which guarantee the hegemony of the majority and marginalizing the minority. (All emphases mine. —ZY)

So where is the book titled, “Lithuania: Peace not Apartheid”? Where are the international resolutions declaring that “Estonism is Racism”? Latvia doesn’t look to me like a pariah state blamed for all the troubles in the world, does it?

It is reassuring: I don’t address Turkey here, which is problematic because of its mainstream genocide-denial and its now creeping Islamization (meaning the scandalous denial of the Armenian genocide is now not even beset—if I could use that word at all—by having a model “modern, secular, moderate, democratic Muslim state”), and of Sri Lanka I don’t know much; but Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are modern European states, democracies, freshly liberated from Marxofascist oppression. The comparison of Israel to those three states is a compliment.

Among the “ethnocratic controls” Israel imposes on the “Palestinians” are (p. 6):

A. Cutting all identity relations between the Palestinian Arabs in Israel and the rest of Palestinian People and the Arab and Islamic Nation. Israel has tried to create a new group of “Israeli Arabs”.

Plainly put, Israel is being faulted for not letting people under its jurisdiction ally themselves with enemy states, regimes and ideologies. Note “Islamic Nation”, not just as an example of the “Islamophobia is Racism” canard, but also for its lack of hesitation to exclude Christian Arabs from the Narrative. For anyone who doubts the Christians Arab detractors of Israel are useful idiots of the Muslims, to be accorded dhimmi status when no longer serving the purpose, this is as good a proof you can come by. Another point on the list:

D. Opposing the Palestinian Arab leadership attempts to building a vision adverse to consolidate the Status (sic) of the Arab minority in the Jewish state which ultimately accepts the Jewish control of the state, its resources and abilities.

Again, the Mossawa activists are criticizing the state of Israel for actually exercising sovereignty. The idea that, after 2,000 of being at the mercy of non-Jews in the Diaspora, Jews should return to their historical homeland to be the rulers of it, free of the fear of laws being enacted against them by non-Jews, is here described by the Mossawa activists as an “ethnocratic control tactic”. Yet that idea is the core of Zionism, not just religious Zionism but also the secular Zionism of Herzl and Pinsker (HaShem bless their rest)! This document is anti-Zionist without question, no matter that it masquerades as an argument for Arab Israeli equality.

On the same page, the goal is stated:

The Palestinian Arabs in Israel are in need of changing their status. While they are preserving their Arab Palestinian identity, they need to obtain their full citizenship in the State (sic) and its institutions. […]

So, an Arab, Muslim science minister (Ghaleb Majadleh) is not enough? What more do they want in order to consider themselves full citizens? (Don’t tell me, I know.) Speaking of Majadleh, he has been very quick to use his position to… slam the Israeli works near the Temple Mount. Note: not to improve the state of science in Israel, not even to improve the state of Arab science and technology education in Israel, but to criticize his own state for a matter of religion and archeology! And they wonder why the Jews of Israel today don’t trust them.

Continuing on the same page, the heading, “The Palestinians in Israel should demand the following, from the State”. Very subtle and nuanced, is it not? “Demand”. It’s always about demanding with the Muslims, wherever they are. The first demand:

The State should acknowledge responsibility of (sic) the Palestinian Nakba (tragedy of 1948) and its disastrous consequences on the Palestinians in general and the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel in particular. Israel should start (Emphasis mine. —ZY) by rectifying the damage that it had caused and should consider paying compensation for its Palestinian citizens as individuals and groups for the damage resulted from the Nakba […]

First demand: recognize that you are born sinners. Atonement starts by rectifying that Original Sin—who knows where it may end. (Who knows? I know. We all know, if we just listen to their authentic voices on MEMRI.) Still on that first point:

[…] and the continuous discriminating policies derived from viewing them as enemies and not as citizens that have a right to appose (sic) the state and challenge its rules. (Emphasis mine. —ZY)

Why do we Jews view them as enemies? Really… it’s just like those damn Islamophobes who take 9/11 as their reason to hate the Religion of Peace. (All in sarcasm, of course.)

Another point, from the next page (p. 7):

Israel should refrain from adopting policies and schemes in favor of the majority. […]

Or to put it in another way: let the demographic jihad go unabated. But when, G-d forbid, the Muslims become the majority, Israel will be told to refrain from adopting policies and schemes in favor of the minority—the Jews.

Next point, belying the secular-nationalistic nature of this conflict and throwing a bone to the Christian useful idiots at the same time:

Israel should acknowledge the rights of the Moslems to run their affairs according to the Waqf (Islamic endowment) and the Islamic holy sites. Israel should no longer be in control of the Islamic and Christian holy sites and acknowledge their right of self-rule the (sic) as part of the collective rights given to Palestinian Arabs.

“Israel should no longer be in control” (thus, bare and naked for all to see) of the holy sites, even if one of them happens to have been built on top of the Jews’ most and only holy site! Religion of thieves.

For the next thing that held my interest I jump to page 10, under the heading:

There is no doubt that struggle for land was and is still the core of the Palestinian–Zionist conflict since the inception of the Zionist movement by the end of the nineteenth century. The Zionist movement used religious and secular terminologies to convince the Jewish people and the world of its right over historic Palestine. Terms from the torah (sic) such as the “holy land” and “land of israel” were and are still used. These were mixed with secular sayings such as “a land without a people for a people without land”. They were like a fuel that operates the Zionist cart and unite the “Jews of the Diaspora” and link their future to Palestine. (Both emphases mine. —ZY)

Their thievery is not confined to physical things; they steal everything, including spiritual heritages (the Koran rips off the Tanakh, then states it is the correction to it) and historical inheritances. That paragraph makes it absolutely clear that the writers think the ideology of Zionism is their enemy, and that they think the Jews do not have a rightful claim to the land. It proves beyond doubt that they view it as a zero sum game. If so, when are we Jews going to reciprocate that, for the sake of our survival?

Another tidbit, from page 14:

Our study tackles the institutional structure which includes local authorities, political parties and civil society institutions. Concerning local authorities, we found out that, during the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the Arab society in Israel was witnessing a genuine development on the levels of administration, organization and leadership. This development process was very limited and did not last long as conventional administration endured the process of development. Corruption and deterioration of the administrative structure expanded. (Both emphases mine. —ZY)

Let me summarize the above: the supposedly apartheid state of Israel permitted its local Arabs self-rule, and that self-rule was negated by the corruption among the self-ruling Arabs. That was in the 1980’s and 1990’s? Sure sounds like the daily news about the oxymoronic “Palestinian Authority”. But then as now, they blame Israel for their own faults.

I now pass on to page 19, which begins with the heading, “The Palestinian Arab culture in Israel”:

The Palestinian Arab culture in Israel underneath the Israeli regime is a nature (sic) continuation of the Palestinian culture that was developed here up until the Nakba. Prior to the Nakba, Palestine was a focal point for two Arab renaissance centers: Lebanon and Egypt. Culture, literature and philosophy were developed in Palestine. Books, Daily (sic) newspapers and tabloids were published. Print houses were established in Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem. Translation (sic) from Arabic to English, French and Russian were produced as well. Intellects of the Arab world exchanged visits with their Palestinian counterparts.

What a pity it is that Mark Twain, visiting the land in the late 19th century, couldn’t attest to all that “Palestinian culture”; instead, it had to wait for the influx of Muslim immigration to the land once they saw the desert described by Twain begin to bloom. (Under whose hands? Now, now, Zionist Youngster, don’t confuse people with the facts.)

The next few pages give proposals for nursing “Palestinian cultural identity” back to its “former health”. It makes me wonder: for two millennia in the Diaspora, we Jews never had to worry about such issues; and today, when a Jew decides to come back home (praise be to G-d) after years of grazing in strange fields, he finds half the work already done for him, in that his cultural heritage is all laid out to the tiniest detail in a multitude of books. But the “Palestinians”, little over than half a century after their “dispersal”, need to form committees to bring their cultural identity back to its former health. Mayhap it is because there was never such a thing as a “Palestinian cultural identity”, or indeed a “Palestinian nation”, in the first place? Perish the thoughtcrime.

The document ends with concrete organizational proposals for furthering the goal, and finally the list of participants mentioned at the beginning of this post. Each participant, keep in mind, agrees to this document, with all its seditious, anti-Zionist ideas. And here it is that I wish to deliver my take on it as a whole.

In the 1990’s (the pre-9/11 and Oslo Accord hopefulness days, as I say repeatedly) I wrote Rabbi Meir Kahane (hy"d) off as a dangerous racist fanatic who had best be locked up. I cannot yet say I am a Kahanist, yet day after day I see him more and more as having been a seer giving warning. The participation of Israeli Arabs, Arabs within the 1949 Armistice Lines, in the Second Intifada riots of October 2000 was the first event that gave me pause to rethink my position regarding Kahane. And there are many Israeli Jews who have gone that same route.

The Leftists quote from the Torah, “You shall not oppress the stranger in your land”, against the state of Israel. That quote actually refutes them, at two points: first, “in your land” means the land is really ours, while the other side, the “Palestinians”, as evidenced by this document, are saying the land is not ours at all; secondly, this mitzvah means that, contrary to the anti-Zionists’ accusations, non-Jews are allowed to live on our land, and are to be accorded fair treatment at that! The non-Jews must, however, abide by G-d’s Law, which for them means the Seven Commandments of the Sons of Noah. That is why Joshua rid the land of the Canaanites (polytheist baby-sacrificers). And non-Jews live on the land having accepted that is Jewish land ruled by Jewish law; if they are not pleased with that, they are free to leave (all the rest of the world belongs to the non-Jews). And if they are not pleased with that but do not want to leave either, they must be expelled. This will no doubt raise the standard Leftist outcries, but there is an easy, handy answer to them: it’s not about race, it’s about culture.

The saintly Eurodhimmis, basking in their self-righteousness, would do well to realize that, in the near future, expulsion of the Muslims within their states will be a matter of survival. Not because the Muslims are “a threat to their racial purity” (the Leftist caricature and strawman), but because they are a threat to the European, Western culture of liberty and democracy. The color of the skin is not the issue here; the issue is whether those football stadiums will really be used for football games a few years from now, or whether they will be used for public beheadings and amputations. When considered that way, it is plain to see that the Leftist platitudes are nothing more than a suicide pact being forced upon non-Muslims everywhere—not just in Israel, Europe and the United States, but in India and Thailand as well.

The document is a statement of intent. If the Muslims of Israel (and Christian useful idiots of theirs) put it into practice, they will find the Jews of Israel to say, in unison, “We are all Kahane!” And it will, again, be no one’s fault but their own, their fault of having, as Abba Eban said, never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Reform At Will (Not)

“Reform”. For those who are not into the dhimmi mindset, for those who do not believe terrorism is “resistance against Western imperialism”, for those who recognize that we are the ones who are up against an imperialistic ideology, called Islam, that word is the last glimmer of hope for true lovers of peace, the only alternative to World War III. If Islam could be reformed to be like other religions, whether personal or national or having dreams of worldwide acceptance but through the power of the deity or of intellectual persuasion rather than through human military efforts, then the need to confront it on the worldwide battlefield would be spared from us. But hope is one thing; every hope needs to be evaluated by a study of its feasibility.

Is religious reform at will possible, and if so, how long could it take? Time is of the essence here, because, as Fjordman emphasizes, it will not do us much good to witness the reform of Islam after the demographic jihad has brought our states down on their knees before the god of the Koran. In an attempt to answer these questions, I compare religions and reformations in them; not all the comparisons may be applicable to Islam, yet the workings of the religious mind share some common points that can shed light on the issue.

The idea of religious reform at will suffers from the bias of the outsider view (“outsider” not necessarily meaning atheistic, but the view of anyone who does not share the belief system in question—for example, the way I view Scientology): it rests on the belief that one’s religion is a human artifact, a lump of clay to be molded as desired. This is decidedly not the view of any serious religionist. He who believes his religion to be lower than its practitioners will not follow it for long. That is evidenced not only by religion throughout all of history, but also today, in the situation where, for example, fundamentalist Christian churches are full to brimming with people, especially young people, while the liberal churches, those which assume religion to be man-made and malleable, sport a handful of old people. Religion is adhered to, not despite but because of its making demands on people; even truer today than in the past, for today religion serves for countless people their anchor against the emptiness of McDonaldism (a.k.a. globalism and consumerism).

Reforms have happened; sometimes they really did happen as a result of religious authorities sitting on their council and making decrees, but never did a reform take place out of a desire to fix “errors inherent in the religion itself”. The errors any religious reform is meant to fix are errors caused by humans deviating from the pristine state of the religion. That is an important fact that must be remembered when discussing religious reform, whether it be the historical Protestant Reformation or the future prospect of Islamic reform.

Historians say the Protestant Reformation opened the way to the Enlightenment, first by making the Christian Bible compulsory reading for all, then by allowing private interpretation of it—a process which, when carried to its conclusion, led people to doubt the religion itself. It goes without saying, however, that Martin Luther did not have the current Episcopal Church, with its woman priests, homosexual bishops, dropping of the Christian exclusivist message and substitution of Marxism-inspired social utopianism for it, in mind. He did not want to create a new church at all; he believed himself to be bringing Christianity back to its roots after centuries of (again, his belief) creeping apostasy.

Luther would have met the same fate as the Bohemian reformer Jan Huss (burned at the stake the previous century). However, he was backed by German princes who wanted lands of the Catholic Church for their own. Here is another fact about religious reform: unless there is political support for it, it will be crushed by the original form of the religion, by some way or another. That crushing need not be physical elimination; it can just as easily be religious ostracism, which delegitimizes the movement of reform. No Conservative or Reform Jews have been accorded by Orthodox Jews the treatment given to Muslim apostates, yet Orthodox Judaism has cut off those reform movements as legitimate branches of Judaism, and does not recognize their authority.

Religious reform can take the form of decree by the religious authorities, as in the case of the Second Vatican Council, but it often occurs quietly, as a de facto change. For example, in 18th- and early 19th-century Orthodox Judaism the acrimony between the chasidim (centered on the mystic layers of Torah study) and the mitnagdim (the more traditional sect, focused on debating Talmudic issues) was comparable to the aforementioned relations between Orthodox Judaism and the two reforming branches, but in the course of the 19th century the controversy died out. No religious decree declaring the end of the dispute was ever issued by the mitnagdim; the change happened just so, and Chasidic Judaism is now together with Yeshivish (or “Lithuanian”, because most of the mitnagdim were there) Judaism under the roof of Orthodox Judaism. As to why it happened, researchers are reasonably certain that it was because of the necessity to unite against a common enemy: the Enlightenment, with its challenge to faith (and, consequently, Reform Judaism). The circumstances can elicit religious reform, whether de facto or de jure; in both cases, this is not about a group of people sitting and saying, “Hey, let’s get with the times and reform our religion”.

Islam underwent reform in the 19th and 20th centuries. Previously, the advances of the Ottoman Empire had kept the religion in a complacent state; as the duty of jihad was being executed by the Sultan, there was no need to reform. But the Ottoman Empire began its decline in 1683, with the second unsuccessful siege of Vienna, and from the 18th century onward the scientific and industrial revolutions gave non-Muslim Europe military superiority to conquer many Islamic states. The distress of the Muslims at losing their dominions prompted them to try out various reforms, among which were nationalistic movements such as Pan-Arabism, Nasser’s Arab Socialism and the Baath movement. But already in the 19th century the voices of “Returning to the Original Islam” could be heard, as in Mahdi-ruled Khartoum, which took its toll on the British colonials, including their general, Gordon.

The figurehead of “Back to Islam” and “Islam is the Solution” is the Muslim Brotherhood (or Brethren), set up by Hassan Al Bana in the 1920’s. It is described as a reformist movement; that is perfectly correct, but this is exactly the opposite kind of reform we clamor for. Bana and his successor Qutb were no different from Luther in wishing to bring the religion back to its pristine state, away from its perceived current state of mass apostasy. They had, as Robert Spencer says repeatedly, no problem recruiting the canonical sources of Islam for their purpose. Here is yet another fact of religious reform: the weighty legacy of the canon.

I have brought this useful example before: Orthodox Judaism does not permit females to wear pants. This injuction is from the Torah (Deuteronomy 22:5), and the rabbinical interpretation of it gives the rule that males are to wear pants while females are to wear a dress. Now, you might find an Orthodox Jewish girl here and there who goes with pants, but that can in no way be taken as an example of religious reform. She will usually be condemned by her parents for that, if not by her society as a whole; and most importantly, no Orthodox Jewish rabbi could ever give it a de jure recognized status. Another example from the same area: boys and girls dancing together in Centrist Orthodox (also known as Religious Zionist; that’s where I belong) up until the 1980’s. It was a de facto custom; Rabbi Neriah zt"l had no problem mustering the Orthodox Jewish canon to put an end to that practice in the 1980’s. A de facto deviation can linger on for quite a time, but if it does not influence the canon, it cannot be called a reform. The writings of the Chasidic rabbis are now part of the Orthodox Jewish canon, which is why Chasidic Judaism is part of Orthodox Judaism now even though the mitnagdim never issued a decree to that effect. Pants for females and mixed dances are not forthcoming to Orthodox Judaism; anyone who dared to make changes in that department, be he even a well-respected rabbi, would be ostracized.

The change of times and circumstances may nudge religious reform. The prayer-book for Centrist Orthodox Jews adds prayers of thanksgiving for Israel’s Independence Day; the Ultra-Orthodox have not added those prayers, yet in the recent Lebanon War, last summer, they prayed for the safety of the state of Israel, something that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. The Neturei Karta huggers of Ahmadinejad, for all their religiosity and orthodoxy, are shunned universally for the traitors they are, even by anti-Zionist Satmar. In the case of women’s attire, there is no motive for reform; whereas, in the case of the agunot, women who cannot remarry because their husband refuses to divorce them and has fled to far away, the issue has gotten pressing today, so that many Orthodox Jewish rabbis have endeavored to find a remedy.

In summary, religious reform must first have a motive, and then it must withstand the opposition, not just of the mainstream branch, but of the mainstream canon of the religion. When we observe the state of Islam in our day, we find both requirements scarce at best. We would wish Islam to reform away from the jihad ideology, but we must ask ourselves: what motive is there for such a reform? The prerequisite for reform is the recognition that something is wrong, but the jihad ideology only brings rich dividends to the Muslims, foremostly because non-Muslim dhimmitude shows them that it pays. Jihad is, as Robert Spencer says, supported by the canon of Islam; to find room for repudiation of the jihad ideology within the canon, let alone to challenge the canon, requires an extraordinarily heavy lever of circumstance. It requires showing the Muslims that the jihad ideology is their undoing.

But that is not what is going on in the non-Muslim world right now. As long as Western universities, supposedly the bulwark of freedom of thought (but in reality hotbeds of Marxist sedition), detain students for stepping on flags with “Allah” written on them or for reprinting the Mohammed Cartoons, the reform of Hassan Al Bana and Sayyid Qutb will be the only one toward which the Muslims turn, for they are given daily proof that the two were right in stating that the return to the original Islam of jihad would restore the old glory of the Caliphate. This state of affairs adds to Fjordman’s warning that we may not have enough time to wait for Islamic reform: as things stand now, the awaited reform has zero chance of happening at all. Pacifism ensures the prospect of world war once again. G-d help us all.

Tip: Haveil Havalim #106

The 106th edition of the Jewish blog carnival Haveil Havalim is here, hosted on Jack’s Shack. Here are the posts I liked best:

• YMedad of My Right Word brings Intramural Pal. Activities, from February 4, 2007, where he shows how enemy infighting, obstructing (thanks be to G-d) their goal of destroying us, is nothing new, with pieces from the 1920’s and 1930’s sounding like our daily news.
• Robert J. Avrech of Seraphic Secret quotes Larry Miller in his The Middle East Conflict Analyzed… Seriously, from February 8, 2007. Larry Miller is one who gets it.
• Meryl Yourish, in her post Once again, the lies and the Temple Mount, from February 6, 2007, shows how, as with the Second Intifada (October 2000) and as with the Danish Cartoons Affair, Muslims will find any pretext and employ any subterfuge to declare jihad.
• Jameel at The Muqata brings the post Responding to a Comment: Why endanger your family?, from February 6, 2007, to a commenter who asks why he takes the risk of living in Israel. Great reply, and I would add: eppes Europe, swarming as it is now with Muslims, is safer for Jews? Fat chance. Best for us to be back home.
• Ocean Guy ponders the future of the Democrat party in the wake of their imam-led prayer, and what it means to the Jews, in his post On Being a Jew and a Democrat, from February 5, 2007. At the bottom he also adds an update to answer the tu quoque accusation toward the Republicans, similar to how Mark Steyn answered it on Hannity & Colmes.
• Mastiff of Critical Mastiff criticizes paper-worship in his The Failure of the Diplomatic Mentality, from February 4, 2007.
• Benjamin of Kesher Talk, in his post Another Jewish Radical Goes Completely Insane, from February 10, 2007, describes the far-out Perchikness of “rabbi” Michael Lerner.

My featured post: An Image Problem, from February 8, 2007, where I suggest a more offensive strategy in waging the war of minds.

The Issue of Jewish Exceptionalism

On February 7, 2007, Daily Kos regular LondonYank wrote a diary on the problem (in her opinion) of Jewish exceptionalism. Her diary starts like a verbal recapitulation of D. Honig’s cartoon (see also here): she lauds Jews past for joining every civil rights movement, but chides the Jews of now for not showing enough enthusiasm in joining the movement for the dismantling of Jewish settlements and the application of the “Palestinian Right of Return”. She says:

Somewhere in the 1970s there was a divergence of interests. The objective of equality was replaced with a doctrine of exceptionalism.

Adopting exceptionalism, the major Jewish lobbies no longer sought to advance general principles of tolerance, non-discrimination or equal treatment before the law. Instead they sought narrow preferential treatment for Jews and for Israel that recognises a special status they would deny to other minorities in the American body politic.

The Wikipedia link is in the original. It is therefore suitable to see what Wikipedia says on the matter (retrieved from the article last modified 12:14, 27 January 2007):

Exceptionalism is the perception that a country, society, institution, movement, or time period is unusual or extraordinary in some way, and thus does not conform to normal rules, general principles, or the like. Used in this sense, such a perception reflects a belief formed by lived experience, ideology, perceptual frames, or perspectives influenced by knowledge (or lack thereof) of historical or comparative circumstances. (Bold original, a Wikipedia convention. —ZY)

The Wikipedia entry does not fit LondonYank’s purpose. She talks of exceptionalism as being contrary to “general principles of tolerance, non-discrimination or equal treatment before the law”, but the Wikipedia article defines exceptionalism as a doctrine born of observance of a group’s being extraordinary. Exceptionalism is the belief that a group is unique in some way, that it evades the fate that befalls all other groups. Exceptionalism can, but not always does, bring the group to believe that it is not beholden to any human laws and values shared by other groups. I covered this point in my post Chosen To Show, from October 19, 2006, where I contrast Jewish exceptionalism with, for example, Nazi German exceptionalism: the former stems from the belief in the divine task given to the Jewish people, a task from which, when completed, all nations will benefit, while the latter was the pretext for unprecedented atrocities. So, contrary to what LondonYank says, Jewish exceptionalism does not give rise to the thought, “it’s okay if you’re a Jew” or “it’s okay if you are Israel”. On the contrary, most of Israel’s actions toward the “Palestinians” are the barest minimum a nation can do toward those who have sworn to destroy it, a show of restraint bordering on insanity.

Jewish exceptionalism is born of both religious belief and continuous historical experience. We believe that we, the nation of Israel, have been chosen by G-d, the creator of the universe, to follow His instruction, the Torah of Israel, some of whose injunctions can be carried out only on the Land of Israel. As I said, this belief, unlike that of the Nazis in the past and of the Muslims today, does not lead us to even want to lord it over all other humans. Our desire is independence to live and worship G-d in our land, which even at its great extent is a modest-sized strip on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. If Jewish chosenness were an excuse for spreading our dominion over the whole globe like cancer, then it would be an exceptionalism worthy of condemnation and eradication; as it is not so, its sole offense is its being contrary to the sentiments of the politically correct.

Christianity and Islam were religions just waiting to arise; they each took part of the Jewish message and universalized it. Certainly if there is only one deity, one deity who created and governs all humans, then it would make sense—human sense—for Him to bring one universal religion for all of mankind. But G-d says through His prophet Isaiah (55:8–9):

For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.

If Jewish chosenness does not permit Jewish global imperialism (contra Nazism and Islam), why the anger? Why is it that Jewish exceptionalism, as the diarist says, “grates and raises hackles even among Jews themselves”?

Before I got religion, I considered the belief of Jewish chosenness to be the height of arrogance. But that was because I did not believe in the foundations of Judaism. It is just as the man who calls himself King of Sweden is arrogant… unless, of course, his name is Carl Gustaf, in which case he is not arrogant but simply telling the truth! The charges against Jewish exceptionalism are valid only if it has been ascertained that the Torah’s claim is false.

Where does this, shall we say, theological debate meet the issue of anti-Zionism? I have shown, from the beginning of this blog repeatedly, how anti-Zionism serves today as the mask for hatred of the Jews. It follows, then, that the accusations against Zionism and the Jewish state can serve as the mask for what was once leveled against Judaism itself. We can see that this is the case: the charges of racism, arrogance and scoffing at human law, once made against the religion of Judaism, now appear under the acceptable covering of being leveled against the Jewish state and its founding ideology, Zionism.

Would that all the Leftists were that honest. From Zombietime.

G-d has commanded the Jewish people to be a nation apart. Ample ink has been spilled throughout the ages against Jewish practices of separateness, for example the laws of kashrut. As that is not acceptable now, the equation of Zionism with racism and the branding of Israel as an “Apartheid State” serve as modern, acceptable, politically correct substitutes. Never mind that other groups stand equally guilty of refusing to assimilate, and even more so—the Muslims (in Europe, for instance) do so not for survival but for exercising gradual dominion over their host countries. Yet anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are equivalent in Leftist eyes. Those morally-confused people attack the harmless exceptionalism of the Jews while giving a free pass to the imperialistic, colonialistic, cancerous exceptionalism of the Muslims.

We know that as the age reaches its close, masks tend to fall one after the other, and taboos tend to break one by one. I remember how not long ago it was that any talk of the need to redress “the problem of the Palestinian refugees of 1947” was unheard of, not just in Israel but outside as well; nowadays there is almost not a single “peace plan” that doesn’t bring that as one of its main points. The talk of Israel being a mistake is commonplace. And it took just one book by Jimmy “Too Many Jews” Carter to make the comparison between Israel and apartheid South Africa all the rage.

I think I am not making all too wild a prediction in saying the day is not far off when it is acceptable to heap vitriol on Judaism itself. It is only a natural progression: first there was criticism of Israel’s “occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967”, then came the charges against Israel for “the Palestinian refugees of 1947”, which gave rise to the insight that the state of Israel was “born in sin” and ought to be dismantled (G-d forbid) for the sake of world peace and justice, and after that the notion that the inherently racist founding ideology of the state of Israel, Zionism, was that which is obstructing that utopian dream and should be fought against. It will not be long before the haters of Israel arrive at the final revelation, namely that that racist ideology of Zionism has its roots in the Jewish religion itself, and then Judaism will be slated for demonization as “the gravest impediment to peace and justice in our time”.

I am not totally sure of this scenario—after all, history is in G-d’s hands, and He can turn it in ways unimagined by mankind (see the quote from Isaiah above). If my scenario does come to pass, however, it is my hope that the blatant blasphemy of the Torah by the wicked will spell the end of G-d’s suffering of them, and then we will behold the fulfillment of, “hen ga’alti etchem reshit ka’acharit”—“For I will redeem you, as in the beginning, so in the end”, in which our eyes will behold the likes of the miracles of Egypt.

We Jews are nothing in and of ourselves; but G-d has chosen us to bear witness of His sovereignty over all His creation, an exceptionalism which, if true, He is true, and if false, He is false. Behind the masks of the questions of the Israel/“Palestine” conflict and Zionism and all the rest, the true issue is whether people wish to worship false gods, such as the Proletariat Dialectic (“…and Karl Marx is its prophet”) and Gaia (“…and Al Gore is her prophet”) and the god described in the Koran (“and Mohammed is…”), or the G-d Who Really Is, who established His truth not in front of Moses alone, but in front of the entire ancestry of the Jewish people.

An Image Problem

The infighting between the “Palestinian” factions has finally prompted some of them to a bit of soul(?)-searching and admission of being wrong. From Jerusalem Post, via Elder of Ziyon:

Hafez Barghouti, editor of the PA-funded daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda, said he was concerned that the fighting would tarnish the image of the Palestinians. “Tens of millions of people now look at us as worthless gangsters with no values”, he complained.

[…]

Columnist Mahmoud Habbash also acknowledged that the fighting had caused grave damage to the Palestinians on the international arena. The internal fighting, he said, has distorted the image of the Palestinians in the eyes of the world.

“The world is watching how the Palestinians are destroying their institutions and achievements with their own hands. They see how we are mercilessly slaughtering innocent people. We are losing the sympathy of the world. I’m afraid the world will now view us differently”.

What stands out here at first sight is, of course, the fact that the “Palestinians” don’t think all the years of their terrorism against Israel, even inside the 1949 Armistice Line, may have “tarnished their image” and made people look at them as “worthless gangsters with no values”. Only now, says one of their columnists, does the world see how they are “mercilessly slaughtering innocent people”—now, not in all the past years of carrying suicide terrorism attacks on Israeli buses, bakeries and malls.

I can elaborate on how this shows the moral depravity of the enemy, but before I reach that issue, I wish to point out an essential fact that concerns far outside our region: world opinion.

I have never spared the Muslim enemy my recognition of their mastery of the art of propaganda, their extensive knowledge as to how to play on the sentiments of the Western Left. (Just look at this recent snippet, via LGF: “Two of those caricatures make a link between Muslims and Muslim terrorists. That has a name and it’s called racism”. Compare my post from August 21, 2006, They Know What Works.) From the beginning of the “Palestinian Nation” fraud to the portrayal of Israel as an “Apartheid State”, Muslim propaganda has been successful in shaping world opinion to such an extent that the “Palestinian” spokesmen’s lack of concern that their aggression against Israel could have “tarnished their image” reflects not just their own moral depravity but the prevailing opinion of the world. The world really does see “Palestinian” terrorist acts against Israel as being acts of resistance against colonialist injustice, and really does not consider Israeli Jews to be innocent people—not the “settlers” in Judea and Samaria, that goes without saying, but nowadays not even the once “legitimate” Israeli Jewish inhabitants of Tel-Aviv and Haifa.

That, in a nutshell, is the reason why Carter’s book has raised such a furor. It wasn’t the factual errors and egregious distortions in that book—those are easy things to deal with, as CAMERA and the ADL show. Jimmy “Too Many Jews” Carter himself knows that, on the arena of intellectual debate, he can only end up as a floor mop—that’s why he refused to debate Alan Dershowitz. The great peril of Carter’s book is its provision of a strong justification for people to think Israel, or at the very least the “Zionist regime”, should be wiped off the map (G-d forbid)—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s sentiment, now endorsed by an American ex-president’s comparison of Israel to South Africa. Indeed, throughout all history, the Jew-haters’ arguments have been pathetically weak intellectually, but their danger has always lain in providing the masses with a pretext to consider Jewish blood a free-for-all.

That is also why I spend a good deal of my time engaging Daily Kos diaries—not so much to respond to them as to alert people to the fact of the new mainstreaming of anti-Semitism, now dressed as anti-Zionism or just “opposition to Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian people”. The Islamic propaganda machine has worked its effect, first by framing the Islamic jihad against the Jewish state as a nationalistic struggle of the “indigenous Palestinian Arab nation” against “Zionist colonialism”, and then, from that base, demonizing Israel in every way possible, by any means available, including stagings, lies and Photoshop.

We have reached a state comparable to being ordered to dance with a leg cast. The enemy tells us how to fight this war: don’t retaliate, don’t fire back, don’t bulldoze buildings of families of terrorists, don’t this, don’t that… an unprecedented situation in which an enemy bent on destroying you dictates the rules of engagement to you. And on the media front, on the left-leaning TreasonMedia and the left-wing blogosphere, we’re being told what we must feel as well: don’t hate the other side, no matter how many of your number they murder. Don’t cave in to irrationality, don’t give in to all-consuming hatred, they say. Turning the other cheek, which even for Christians applies only to individuals and not to states, is demanded of us Jews. And there is, finally, the canard that “Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism”, usually followed by statements that would have Ahmadinejad nodding in approval.

It’s things like that that make me feel like my head’s going to explode. We are at war, dear muzzies and lefties, and we’re not going to behave as if it were peacetime. “Don’t call us anti-Semites!”, say the left-wingers—but you can keep calling Israel an apartheid state, right? We’ll call you anything we want. Your open justification of Islamic terrorism, so often disguised as “understanding what drives them”, is good enough a reason for me to call you anti-Semites. (Screenshot examples:  [1], [2] )

That wasn’t a digression. It’s the whole point: our (belated) response to the onslaught of Muslim propaganda has been hampered by our goodness, by our misplaced wartime gentlemanliness. We have limited our response to describing the humanity, the civility of the state of Israel. It’s not that that kind of response does nothing, but it just isn’t enough. Look how much mileage the Muslims have gained not by painting a positive picture of themselves (for there is nothing positive a fictional nation can say about itself apart from a few generalities, such as cultivating olive trees) but by blackening the other side with a hideously negative portrayal. Usual result: all the descriptions of Israel’s humanity and civility are brushed aside by the reply, “But you are stealing the land of another people and oppressing them with your brutal occupation!”

Let’s not stop the positive portrayal of Israel and its achievements (which are legion, thanks be to G-d!), but let us also add to them the necessary negative portrayal of the other side. First, reframe: no more “Palestinians” (except in sneer quotes as I always do) struggling for their independence, but Muslims fighting against the existence of any state ruled by non-Islamic law, of which Israel is only one. That puts it in a whole new perspective: you get a tiny white patch of land surrounded by a huge mass of green covering much of Africa and about half of Asia. It also allies us with people who could otherwise be swayed by the post-colonial discourse: the Buddhist Thais, the Catholic Filipinos, the Scandinavians, to name just a few who, if just approached to see the commonality between their situation and ours, will not be supportive of the “Palestinians” any more than they could support the Muslim terrorists of southern Thailand, Kashmir, Paris and the rest.

The second strategy, building on the basis of the first, is to demonize the enemy. There is one caveat that applies to us in following this strategy, but it is not an impediment: we cannot use lies. Fudging the numbers, staging the scenes and editing the photos with digital tools are out of the question. The Muslims can and do lie with no holds barred for the same reason that they put women and children in the front line of fire, store weapons in mosques and raise their newborn babies on the culture of suicide terrorism: a total lack of morality. We, being better than them, obviously cannot resort to such tactics.

Nor do we need to do so: reality is the best demonizer of the Muslim enemy. All the CAIR campaigns against “Islamophobia” cannot undo the fact of Islamic terrorism that jumps out before the viewer’s eyes on the daily news. All we have to do is steer the message so that it doesn’t get explained away by the bromides of, “tiny minority of extremists” or “resistance to Western imperialism”.

Stranger Than Fiction, by Cox & Forkum.

The slick campaigns portraying the “glorious past of Islam” try to whitewash the present by focusing on the past. However, even after weeding out historical falsehoods, past achievements of Muslims are a talking point against the Muslim public relations fronts, for they set the current malaise of the Muslim world against the starkest background. What good, exactly, are all those past scientific achievements of Islam when today the Muslims are suffering from self-inflicted diseases, such as genetic defects caused by inbreeding and curable diseases caused by rejecting modern medicine on religious grounds? Islamic architecture may be truly beautiful, but what do we get in that department today except the Islamic “rearrangement” of statues of the Buddha? There is here not a single lie, not a single fudging, not a single staging—reality itself paints a picture of a world, perhaps glorious in the past, but now having nothing to its name but death and destruction, nothing but the desertification of all blooms, whether literally as in Gaza, or figuratively (the replacement of prosperous civilization with anarchy and poverty) in Europe, where cities are filled with no-go zones for the police, complete with forced marriages, inbreeding, “honor killings”, female genital mutilation, murder of apostates and even the Sunni–Shi’a conflict.

Right now it takes “Palestinian” infighting to “tarnish their image”, because we have confined ourselves to the defensive position of showing how good we are. If, however, we expend more of our efforts on reframing this conflict globally and showing the reality of our being “in a new phase of a very old war” (from the Gates of Vienna tagline), their image will be such that a burka would have to be placed over reality itself in order to cover its shame.

This is a war, so… Onward!

The Lawlessness That Masquerades As Law

Suddenly all the occurrences of this type come one after the other:

1. British citizen Dr. Otto Chan finds the police phlegmatic in helping him when reporting the burglary of his house, and the same police enthusiastic in threatening to arrest him when offering a reward for the recovery of his stolen property. (December 30, 2006, via Gates of Vienna.)
2. National Guardsmen on the US–Mexico border let illegals overrun them and make their escape to Mexico rather than fire at them. (January 5, 2007, via Infidel Bloggers Alliance.)
3. The American Communist Civil Litigation Liberties Union sues Rhode Island police for detaining illegal aliens. (January 9, 2007, via Moonbattery.)
4. Border Patrol agents Jose Alonso Compean and Ignacio Ramos are thrown in jail, having been sentenced in October for shooting a drug-smuggling suspect. (January 17, 2007, via WorldNetDaily.)
5. Israeli Jewish farmer Shai Dromi is arrested after shooting at two Bedouin thieves who had burgled his property, and charged with “murder, misuse of a weapon and shooting in a built-up area”. (January 13, 2007, via Israel National News [1], [2] )
6. American troops in Iraq are hampered (to put it mildly) by the “Rules of Engagement” they have to abide by. (January 21, 2007 and earlier, via The Captain’s Journal.)
7. A watchmaker in Copenhagen was arrested after shooting at three robbers who had robbed his store, and charged with “unlawful possession of a firearm”. At least one of his robbers sued him for compensation on grounds of, “wrongful injury, loss of work time and loss of the ability to work”. (February 1, 2007, via The Brussels Journal.)

In my secular days, I always read religious accounts of an end-times evil world with disbelief. It was one thing, I thought, for a particular society like that of Sodom and Gomorrah to turn corrupt, but quite another for the whole world to go that route. I thought then, and I still think now, that human institutions of law can keep systemic (as opposed to sporadic) evil in check. What I see now, however, and convinces me that the reality of global systemic evil is unfolding before us, is that systemic evil can grow unabated if it is disguised under the clothing of law. That is what we see today, what is demonstrated by the above news items starkly.

Orthodox Judaism, while it does of course hold Jewish law to be the best of all, issuing as it does from the Source of Justice, does not regard all non-Jewish systems of law to be worthless (unlike Islam). Indeed, there is a phrase, metukanot she-ba’umot, meaning roughly, “The normed among the nations”, used in reference to non-Jewish nations whose systems of law are just and pleasing in the eyes of HaShem; and the Jewish people, when sunk in depths of depravity, is often compared unfavorably to those nations, saying for example, “You have abandoned G-d’s Law and are now worse than the normed among the nations”. This ties in to today’s situation.

Together with the return to the Land of Israel from exile and the rebuilding of the Temple, the reestablishment of Torah Law is one of the aspirations of Orthodox Judaism, something prayed for three times a day by every Orthodox Jew. As with many modern issues, there is controversy about the “when”, about how long the state of Israel (“The beginning of deliverance”, according to Rabbi Kook) can be ruled by non-Jewish laws. My plea, driven especially by the trauma of the assassination of Rabin in 1995 and also the fact that a lot of my relatives are still secular, is for the establishment of Torah Law to follow the willingness of the people, in order to avoid sin’at chinam (gratuitous hatred) between Jews—a sin that has always had disastrous results (G-d forbid). However, I have no doubt, following the evidence of my eyes, cited in the news items above, that HaShem is preparing His people to accept the restoration of His law gladly and willingly. That is because secular law, once fairly reasonable and just, has recently fallen into the sorry state demonstrated by every one of the news items above.

Our situation as depicted by Mike Shelton of Townhall.com, February 1, 2007.

The Politically Correct laws of today, showing mercy to murderers and robbers and cruelty to those who try to stand up to them, cannot honestly be considered laws at all. In truth they are but a codification of the current downward spiral toward lawlessness, toward a vicious condition in which the man in the street suffers from all the disadvantages of the medieval serf, but benefits from none of the advantages, namely protection of the feudal lord. The socialist nanny-state does not see itself duty-bound to protect its citizens, only to quell threatening discontent. That is, its heads calculate the threat quotient of the citizenry, and thereby inevitably reach the conclusion that they had better reward the bullies and trample the law-abiding, for the bullies are a potential threat to the state while the law-abiding are not so. Thus it is that illegal aliens, robbers and Muslim colonialists are served eagerly, while the others are treated like thin air at best. This is lawlessness: appeasement of every aggressor because he is an aggressor. Is it any coincidence that appeasement of Islam has been at full throttle since 9/11, 7/7 and the Danish Cartoons Affair?

How the Left loves to extol the need for justice, and to denounce “naked power”, yet at the end of things, they are the first to cave in to naked power, and the last to allow the use of power by the good in order to combat evil! What is this phrase, “Our moves in Iraq are breeding more terrorists than ever”, if not a divulgement of their thought that Islamic terrorism is a reaction to Western provocation? And who can you count on to denounce even defensive measures, never mind counter-offensives, against Islamic terrorism if not the ACLU or any “human rights” NGO? And they do all this with the thought, the sincerely-held thought, that it is righteous, that it is good, that it is lawful.

Among the sayings of Karl Marx is, “Property is theft”. In free countries, property is usually the reward for a person who has worked hard, who has put an effort, who has proved excellence. In countries governed by Marxism, the hard-working, excellent producers are robbed of their reward, supposedly for the good of the Collective, but in reality it is the ruling class (which does not exist—thoughtcrime!) that reaps it whole. Marx’s “Property is theft”, then, can be seen as nothing more than a device for making theft legal. This stupefying insight has to do with today’s situation not just in the specifics but in the broad view.

When is a society on its way to the abyss? When crimes are committed within its bounds? No. It is on its way to the abyss when crimes are no longer condemned. When crimes are no longer punished. When crimes are excused by the circumstances (“He had a hard childhood”). And, finally, when crimes become law, and their prevention illegal. When that state has been reached, the society in question is, qualitatively, no different from Sodom and Gomorrah. If crime is the law of the land, then the chance of reform, of repentance, is exceedingly slim, so that the society in question is almost certainly doomed. If, for example, pedophilia is enshrined in law, and criticism of it condemned, then it will take a cataclysmic event to change the situation.

But for us to judge what is good and what is evil, the first requirement—even before getting my religious beliefs into it—is a yardstick. By “yardstick” I mean the opposite of the view that, for example, “pornography is a matter of geography”, or that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, and so on. It does not mean cultural ignorance—I for one am well-versed in the amazing variety of cultural descriptions in geographic magazines—but it does mean knowing your own values, and standing for them. Like what the heroic councilors of the town Hérouxville, in Quebec, did.

That is the first step, but by no means the last. For, as we all know, the Muslims have the same type of confidence (in fact, our lack of it, when confronted with theirs, is one of the foremost reasons why no end to this global conflict is in sight, more than five years after 9/11). Westerners recognizing the need for cultural confidence are just as prone to convert to Islam (as Adam Gadahn did) as they are to do as the councilors of Hérouxville did. How do we know that our values—the Jewish-Christian-Greek synthesis that makes up Western culture—are the good ones? Easy: the same way as we have found the truth about Marxism.

Islam, like Marxism, like Nazism, comes as a system of law, but enables its adherent to exercise lawlessness to those outside its framework (and even to those inside, as the Sunni–Shi’a and Fatah–Hamas scuffles today vividly show). War and robbery and oppression of the non-Muslim is sanctioned under it. Misogyny as well: victims of rape are stoned to death, while their perpetrators are usually let free. Again this pattern: the lawlessness that masquerades as law. As Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna pointed out: those of the type who in the 19th century would turn to the anarchist Bakunin are now attracted to the vision of the Caliphate. The Sixties Hippies, purveyors of the Permissive Society, would not be attracted to a totalitarian ideology unless it had a rich reward for them in the way of permissiveness.

After all this, I have an even more unsettling thing to say: this is just the beginning. These news items set the trend in clarity, but make no mistake: you ain’t seen nothing yet. In my secular days, I scoffed at “the elitist notion of a tiny remnant of righteous people amid a majority of wickedness”, thinking it was nothing but religious hyperbole designed to put the masses in fear; now I see how it is possible in a way that looks like a totally natural (non-supernatural) progression: the lawlessness that masquerades as law, the wickedness that believes itself righteous, the injustice that wears the mask of human rights, the revenge that is draped in the garment of redress for past colonialist wrongs, the moral blindness that is presented in the wrapping of multiculturalism… and so on, and so on, and so on, structure after structure of corruption made acceptable to the hearts of men through deceptive labeling. The same predicament is behind the failure of the American democracy-building experiment in Iraq: appearances are not enough; not even free elections are enough; what is required is free minds.