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.