Talmudic Does Not Equal Socratic

On the Leftreasonous rag The Guardian’s online forum, Comment Is Free (which I usually call, “Grauniad Ciff”, as anyone who’s seen my linkfests on LGF knows), Seth Freedman brought another of his anti-Israel articles dressed as “concern for Israel’s future”, No Peace, no prosperity, from September 18, 2007 (subtitle: “All the money spent on war, walls and West Bank expansion is taking its toll on the sectors of Israeli society that badly need state assistance.” The fact of Israel having to spend on defense even within its 1949 Armistice Line borders is conveniently ignored). Once again, the more interesting stuff goes in the comments. Here’s the first, from “TheKingOfDoubt”:

/YAWN/ One more "gig" for Freedman to draw silly moral equivalences between Palestinian terrorists (whom he calls "militias") and Israeli settlers (whom he calls radicals).

Freedman, one of the reasons I would never convert to Judaism is that there are people like you within this prestigious religion, making a mockery of your own heritage, and slandering their own people under the excuse of a phony "objectivity". It's a bitter "gesheft," to be sure.

Shame.

It never ceases to amaze me how non-Jewish pro-Israel commenters tend to be much bolder, and furthermore, much more Jewish in their stance than a lot of Jews. On the later thread Life behind the wire, by Chris Doyle, another piece hammering home the “Israel = Apartheid South Africa” libel, a commenter named “RowdyDragon”, who says of himself that he is “neither a Jew nor an Evangelical”, posted three comments advocating mass expulsion of the Muslims from Israel! (The second comment was deleted—the “free” in “Comment Is Free” obviously refers to price, not to freedom—but as always when I catch them in time, I save them for posterity.)

But back to Freedman’s thread. A commenter named, “figliomedio” answered “TheKingOfDoubt” thus:

[…]

Another reason that you would never convert to Judaism is that you do not appear to know that when two burglars drop down a chimney it is inconceivable that one will be clean and the other covered in soot.

Argument, debate, turning and turning it and turning it again goes to the very essence of Judaism. People like you who would merely stifle debate do not have the necessary qualifications. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

[…]

This point needs addressing, because one of the charges of “Progressives” (in reality, cultural-Marxified religionists) everywhere is that “the true spirit of the religion” is about absolutely open debate, and moreover, is about asking questions for the sake of asking questions.

With all due respect to the Socratic method, which has its uses and might be beneficial in certain situations, it’s not the traditional Jewish way. The Talmudic method asks questions, sure, but that’s just about what it has in common with the Greek philosophical tradition. And if anyone says the Talmud is based on asking questions for the sake of asking questions, he couldn’t be more wrong.

Let me open with the Mishnah, Brachot 2:1:

From when do you say the Sh’ma in the evenings? From the hour that the priests enter to eat in their offering.

“Until the end of the first watch [of the night]”, [those are] the words of Rabbi Eliezer. And [the other] sages say: “Until midnight”. Rabban Gamliel says: “Until the column of dawn rises”.

A story [goes] that his sons came from the house of feasting, and said to him: “We did not call the calling of Sh’ma”. He said to them: “If the column of dawn has not risen, you must call”.

And not just this did they say, but also, in all places where the sages said, “Until dawn”, their mitzvah is until the column of dawn has risen. Incense the fats and the body parts—their mitzvah is until the column of dawn has risen. And all that which is eaten in one day, their mitzvah is until the column of dawn has risen. If so, why did the sages say, “Until midnight”? So as to distance a person from transgression.

This mishnah begins with a question, but there are many things here that go against the “Progressive”, or the Socratic, tradition.

First, far from the Socratic-Progressive tradition of putting everything up for grabs, we can see here an assumption, taken for granted, that a Jew must say the Sh’ma (Deuteronomy 6:4) in the evenings. Were that debate along the Progressive lines, there would be the question, “Who says the Sh’ma must be said in the evenings at all?” In fact, the Progressive way of “questioning everything” (everything except for the newly-hatched orthodoxy of Progressivism, that is) would lead to such questions as whether there is any divinity in the Torah, or whether God exists at all, until one is far gone in the depths of estrangement from everything that has defined Judaism for over 3,000 years. No, in the Talmudic method there are some truths that are given and are not to be questioned. Progressives may not like it, but that’s the way traditional religion, as opposed to the New Age deviations, goes.

Second, the questions are not for the sake of asking them—they are for the sake of coming to a conclusive answer. The whole of traditional Jewish discourse is purpose-driven, something that flows from the above fact of buying into the divine assumptions: Talmudic debate is for the purpose of finding the halachah, the religious decree which every believing Jew must follow. The Torah was given in order to be performed; in the Talmud, our rabbis elucidate the details as to how. And though the rabbis may go on wild tangents, the debates often looking like today’s jumps from hyperlink to hyperlink, in the end they come back to the goal: “Halachah k’Rabbi ploni”, meaning, “The religious decree is as Rabbi so-and-so said”, and then the debate is closed.

The aversion to questions for the sake of questions is most illustrated by the Aramaic phrases, “Mai nafkah minah?” (“What goes out from that?”) and “nafkuta hilchatit” (“Halachic consequence”): whenever a question is asked that does not seem to have any consequence to the final verdict, to the religious decree that will be the final outcome of the debate, our sages ask what difference that question makes. The sage who raised the original question is then called to justify it, showing how his question makes a difference as to the final decree. If he does not succeed in doing so, the question is discarded—the Talmud is deeper than the sea in extent, but it has no time to waste on mere philosophy. The purpose stands above all: How to do the Creator’s will.

The New Age, meaning the Primitivist and Cultural-Marxist mindset applied to religion, is about remaking all religions in its obligation-free, faith-free, fluffy and above all heretical image. To be sure, the basic questions that the New Agers ask (mostly concerning the attributes of God) have their place. But not in the Talmud and its tradition, which is beholden to the view that those questions are already behind us, and now the only real question is how to serve God according to His will. And by the way, like all “rebellions against the Establishment™” that have only spawned new orthodoxies, often far worse than the ones they rebelled against, the New Agers are pretty much set on their dogmas: it’s settled for them that, for example, prayer is a means of focusing oneself and does not effect any change in objective reality, or that reward and punishment are systems flowing on a natural, “You reap what you sow” basis rather than meted by God. They display little skepticism for those dogmas.

Beside my encountering of this issue on a forum of the anti-Israel Guardian, this point is important for the defense of Zionism on two counts: because part of the same Progressive tradition is the denial of Jewish nationalism, i.e. of Zionism; and because the Progressive mindset of putting everything up for grabs is the engine that powers the debilitating movement of Post-Zionism, which in the name of “slaughtering sacred cows” has made it fashionable to view the whole Zionist project in doubt, and thus serves as ammunition for those who call for the dissolution of Israel as Jewish state (God forbid). Without that excessive doubt which leads to questioning one’s core assumptions—to sawing the very branch on which one is sitting—and then turning its “skepticism” into the orthodoxy which one must accept or else suffer opprobrium, the preposterous idea that the Jews of Israel are settler-colonialists, rather than a nation returning to its homeland, could never have taken root as such is the situation now. And on the international stage, excessive doubt is the root cause of the pathetic dhimmitude we see all over the non-Muslim world today. Such are the fruits of self-doubt to the point of nihilism.

There are some materials that have to be handled with care, and there are some questions that, if asked at all, must not be asked in a cavalier manner. Doubts and questions are necessary for pruning branches that have not grown the right way; it is when doubts and questions are applied to the roots, to one’s core assumptions, that great caution must be taken, for the results could be disastrous. Many isolated tribes have been blighted by an epidemic of suicide ever since they were first exposed to the changed world outside them. That is because the exposure challenged all the assumptions that they had held until then. Confidence in one’s way, in one’s purpose, is the key to survival. The Muslims have that, and that is why they are able to inflict damages on non-Muslim states way out of proportion to their military capabilities. It is only when we regain our confidence that we will be able to fight back.

A Persian Letter

O people of Persia, this is a letter
From a member of a nation as ancient as yours;
Written in the hopes of a small improvement
Before the guns of war drown all out with their roars.

In the days of king Koresh
You were most blessed.
In an age of ruthless empires,
You are still numbered among the best.

We, the nation of Israel, still remember your king,
As does all the world, for he is in the Bible recorded;
For his tolerant rule, granting us return to our land,
God him the status of anointed accorded.

We remember you for good, except for one period
When you let a non-Persian go against your needs.
God be thanked, Haman ended up hanged, and his family,
But everyone is condemned to repeat history unless he its lessons heeds.

People think of Persia, and they imagine:
The carpets, the cats, the courtly festivals of wine;
The rich ornamentation of Khosro’s palace,
With its golden halls and dresses of silks fine.

Iran is known for its gardens, so much so
That we have from Persian the word, “Paradise”;
Gardens of beauty, the envy of the world,
Looked upon by desert nomads as the afterlife prize.

And even after those nomads took what was not theirs,
Persia still maintained its creative pulse, its original rhythm,
Providing the world with poets and scientists,
Innovators like Al-Khwarizmi, for whom is named the algorithm.

But ever since the people of the desert robbed yours
And placed you within their caliphate’s pale,
O people of Persia, can you not see?
The best you can hope for under them is to be the lion’s tail.

It is better, of course, to be the fox’s head, as you were,
Than the lion’s tail, or even a human riding a camel;
Far worse, then, O people of Persia, is what Islam has for you:
Not to ride, but to be ridden by the camel!

Is it becoming for Koresh’s nation to prostrate
In the direction of a small, black cube in the desert?
Is it the fitting destiny of Ardashir’s descendants
To carry out tasks to the Arabs’ whim and comfort?

HaShem is our guardian, He does not sleep,
He executes judgment on those who assault his city, Zion.
He told Abraham, after Ishmael tried to murder our father Isaac:
“Drive him out as your wife says—I will make another nation his scion.”

And now the Muslims repeat their forefather’s transgression:
Attempting to murder those who came out of his half-brother;
Why should you, O people of Persia, be entangled
With the ongoing feud of a family other?

Come, O people of Persia, return to your former glory,
Leave subservience to interests not yours, to purposes foreign.
Abandon enmity toward those who need not be your enemies,
Stay away from a conflict whose end could only be barren.

Iran was once master of a vast area of land,
Its culture radiant, its achievements legion,
But now, for over centuries thirteen, it is in slavery,
To the black stone in the desert, to Ishmael’s religion!

Such would be one of history’s greatest tragedies,
If Persia is used by Islam to its demise.
It need not be so: if only you throw away those alien chains,
Iran will live in peace, in prosperity—a paradise.

---

[UPDATE, October 31, 2007]: Happy Cyrus Day to you too, Mr. Imani! May Iran soon be ruled by true Iranian, non-Islamic leaders of her choosing, instead of people who serve Ishmaelite-Islamic interests.

Response to Walton Pantland

I started responding to Walton Pantland’s post, Telling the truth about Israel, on his blog, but then I ran against the limitations of HaloScan (word count, “too many links”), so I’m posting the response here.

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Hi Walton,

First, it was very nice of you to leave the important bit that came after what you quoted from me: “By that, I do not mean assassination as the Muslims do in their lawless way, but I will pray for the rise of the Sanhedrin that will carry that out, at least on the more high-profile among those who are opposed to the Jewish State.”

Now for some things here:

It is very common for Zionists to brand all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

No, I did not brand all criticism of Israel as Jew-hatred. But I insist most vehemently that anti-Zionism is a form of Jew-hatred, indeed it is the form of Jew-hatred in our day and age. Statements against Jews that were common 70 years ago are today acceptable again just if you take care to say “Zionists” instead of “Jews”.

The logic is that Israel is a Jewish state, therefore if you criticise it you criticise Jews, and are an anti-Semite.

The logic is that if you single the state of Israel for condemnation, then there cannot be any other reason for it than Jew-hatred. The perfunctory tributes the modern Left gives to Tibet and Darfur are nothing in comparison to the zeal it has for the Israel/“Palestine” conflict, even though the oppression and atrocities going on in the former two are far, far worse. The zeal, it’s all about the zeal: zeal is what reveals where your heart truly lies. A fraction of the energy you devote to “Palestine”, if you devoted it to Darfur, would go a long way in saving lives. But you choose an easy target instead.

That’s because the great powers of the world […] provide cover for Israel, and pretend there is nothing wrong. This is why many Muslims see the West as an enemy.

So there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: it’s all about appeasing the Muslims’ wrath.

Let me spell it out for you loud and clear:

You will not appease the Muslims on our expense.

I don’t believe in a national state for the Scots or the English or the Zulus or the Afrikaners – unless you expand your definition of ‘Scot’ to include anyone living in Scotland, regardless of race or religion.

Again, you do not show the same zeal for the condemnation of all nationalism as you do for Jewish nationalism.

There is absolutely no denying that Israel’s behaviour is despicable. Even if I supported the idea of a Jewish state, I would still oppose Israel because of its actions.

There is denying it; Israel’s actions are pretty mild considering the ruthlessness of the Middle East. And Israel’s actions, again, are tame in comparison to that of so many other states. Ever condemned Russia for leveling the Chechen town of Grozny? I thought not. As Eric Hoffer said, the Jews are demanded to be the only true Christians of the world!

So for these two reasons I don’t believe the Jews should have an exclusive state of their own.

But that is the Jewish dream, dating 3,000 years, based on the entire canon of Judaism. By opposing that, ipso facto, you’re an enemy of the Jewish nation. That is another reason why anti-Zionism (opposition to the Jewish dream of sovereignty on the Land of Israel) is a form of Jew-hatred.

I believe that the best option for peace in the Middle East is a single state of Israel-Palestine, with equal rights for all (also known as the binational solution).

You read my post, The Binational Delusion, and you still can’t see how your vision is a pipe-dream?! My, you are dense. Once again: how do you implement the One-State Solution without it resulting in either genocide or apartheid? You just conjure ideas without thinking whether they could work out at all.

So much for free speech – no such thing when you criticise Israel.

I will point out again that anti-Zionism is dangerous because it gives the “Palestinians” the moral right to murder Jews (God forbid), as “resistance to colonialism”. Jews have no command to turn the other cheek; on the contrary, we are commanded to counter what we perceive as threats.

One of the things he critiques is Jewish exceptionalism – the idea that the Jews are the Chosen People, or different or special in some kind of way.

Jewish exceptionalism is, first, something we hold out of belief that it is true, not out of spite, and second, contrary to the popular misconception, it does not give the Jewish people anything in the way of obscene perks. “Greater Israel” is still a modest-size chunk of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. The Muslims, in contrast, want the whole world under their feet.

The answer is to take that uniqueness and contribute to the human project, not retreat into tribalism.

Like it or not, Jewishness is tribal. “Jew” is an ethnicity (an ethnicity that spans multiple races, by the way, so the accusation of “racism” doesn’t hold water) as well as a religion. And look at this: you can support the tribalism of the “Palestinians”, but you cannot support that of the Jews. Very suspicious, isn’t it?

In fact, the opposite is true – as a South African schoolboy, I was force fed Zionist propaganda, which I uncritically lapped up.

Everything is propaganda; you just substituted ours with that of the “Palestinians”.

It took more than a year to realise that the problem was with Zionism itself, rather than with a particular manifestation of Zionism, and that the solution lies in the dismantling of Zionism and its replacement with democracy.

OK. But to us Zionist Jews, the ancient dream of a Jewish State is non-negotiable. There is no possibility of compromise, then; we are enemies.

There’s no one in the world that I want dead.

It may not be your intention, but you’re bringing to it. By propagating the lie of Zionism as a “settler-colonialist movement”, you tacitly give the “Palestinians” the moral right to “resistance”, which means murdering Jewish men, women and children (God forbid).

Last summer, Israel invaded Lebanon, and started bombing innocent people out of their homes.

Resultant of the Muslims having no compunction about hiding their jihad combatants among the civilians. You show they achieved exactly what they intended: propaganda points. They kill their own, they raise their own kids to be suicide bombers, and then go crying out to the world about “oppression”.

The injustices being visited on people in the Middle East by Israel and the US are far more important than my hurt feelings, my fear of offending, or my concern about my reputation.

Please. Stop putting on that mask after you put it off some paragraphs back with your statement, “This is why many Muslims see the West as an enemy”, and later, “This injustice fuels terrorism”. It’s not injustice you care about, it’s your own sorry behind, the one you wish to save from those who tend to blow stuff up on every trumped-up occasion—a few silly cartoons are all they need, but you insist on thinking it’s all about Israel/“Palestine”.

The gloves have been off since then. I say what I think about Israel, […]

I agree, the gloves are off. And I say what I think about you anti-Zionists.

A Jewish state on the Land of Israel. Non-negotiable. The ancient Jewish dream, a dream that trumps the machinations of that fictive nation called, “the Palestinian nation”. A dream that trumps John Lennon’s “Imagine” as well. The Jewish nation will not stay passive in the face of adversity this time.

And again:

You will not appease the Muslims on our expense.

Keep that in mind. Always.

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To those who respond to this post: in a few hours, it will be the Jewish festival of Sukkot; Jewish festivals have almost the same rules as the Jewish Sabbath, meaning my computer will be off for 25 hours, so don’t take my lack of response as evasion. I’ll be available again, HaShem willing, after that.

Sukkot: Celebrating Life

This piece, standard fare from the “Palestinians”, about the arrest of a Hamas suspect hiding in Shchem in a weapons cache under a pregnant woman’s bed, brings out the basic contrast between us and our enemies.

Or to put it more graphically:

Islamic child abuse contrasted with Jewish education to love of life. Click image to view full size.

Chag Sukkot Sameach to all the nation of Israel and to those who stand with us!

Maintained Fiction

“I will concede your point,” say some of the more moderate pro-“Palestinian” debaters (invariably two-staters, and regarding themselves “both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine”), “that the Palestinians as a nation are no older than 60 years; however, after 60 years, don’t you think they now are a real nation, if only because of the circumstances, and deserve to be treated as one, if only because they self-identify as such?” This position is slightly charitable, though naïve (it glosses over the totality of the “Palestinian” demand, viz., their unwillingness to settle for the 1967 territories) as well as parochial (viewing the Israel/“Palestine” conflict for itself, instead of the particular part of the global Islamic jihad that it is). To its holders’ credit, they are merely wrong, and not malicious as are the advocates of the Binational Solution.

There are two arguments here as to what makes nationhood:

1. Circumstance: that has made the “Palestinians” a nation just as the aftermath of the Korean War has given rise to two new nations, the South Korean nation and the North Korean nation, from a single Korean one.
2. Self-identification: if a group of people call themselves a nation, then they are one.

The first argument is a pragmatic argument. Because it is such, it has a pragmatic counter-argument: circumstances can be changed, reversed, undone and otherwise rendered irrelevant. More than 40 years of a Germany divided into West and East, similar to the situation of Korea, may well have created two new German nations, but no one ever argued that that state was to be continued after the unification. After such a long time, it is inevitable that there should be difficulties in healing the rifts, yet no one has said, “Because of the great difficulties in turning the West Germans and East Germans back into a unified German nation, the two will have to be considered two separate nations, permanently”.

One of the hallmarks of the crisis of our age is the allowance for pragmatic concerns to enshrine such an explosive issue as nationality. In countries ruled by the regime of Multiculturalism, the effect of this is the most sharp: the pragmatic argument (bolstered by the ideological one, see later) holds such sway that all attempts at assimilating immigrants are forestalled. For Mexicans crossing the US border as well as for Muslims in Britain, the pragmatic argument is a shield against the common-sense but maligned demand that they adopt the culture of their host country: “It would be so difficult, and they are in such great numbers, that they had better be recognized as separate”. Even if that means being a nation within a nation, with all the strife that that entails. Once again, we see how the Left perpetuates the very hatreds it claims to be the solution to.

In short: if the circumstances are what made the “Palestinians” into a real nation, then new circumstances can unmake them. It’s “Might Makes Right” either way you look at it, though the anti-Israel Leftists call only the other way (away from “Palestinian” nationhood) that name, for some odd reason. The pragmatic argument is like a chain—as strong as its weakest link.

Now to the ideological argument, that of self-identification. I wish to bring a frequently quoted anti-Zionist quote by the leftist Jew Erich Fromm, one of so many estranged Jews who, because of that, wished to express his Jewishness by joining the bad causes of his day (think of Noam Chomsky). The quote is this:

If all nations would suddenly claim territory in which their forefathers had lived 2,000 years ago, this world would be a madhouse.

That quote is beloved of all those who dispute the legitimacy of the Zionist project—of the idea that the Jewish nation can be sovereigns of their land, the Land of Israel. I have brought it before, and also refuted. I said, that this argument is a purely hypothetical one, there being almost no nation today that is both 2,000 years old and outside its original homeland. The Iranians and the Chinese are ancient nations, more than 2,000 years old, but they have never been exiled en masse from Persia and China, and therefore never posed that scenario. The Welsh may be descendants of refugees from the Anglo-Saxon invasion, but neither they nor their Irish and Scots brothers have called for ridding the OCTs (Occupied Celtic Territories) of the Sassenach colonials, for they have and are interesting in keeping their self-determination, unlike the “Palestinians”, who are interested in taking away the self-determination of another nation.

Indeed, today such revanchism, invariably for the sake of furthering an imperialistic goal, a greedy end, is the monopoly of obscure, recently-formed “nations”, all propped up by the Marxists as part of their anti-Western agenda. We have the “Gagauzian nation”, of which my dad claimed, when he first heard of it, that it was as if a city in Israel were to be declared a nation-state all its own. We have the multitude of new “nations” in Africa, all the artifacts of lines arbitrarily drawn on the map by European colonials in the 19th century, supported by the Left, with no regard to the question whether the individuals in them have the minimal cohesion required of a nation. It is time for me to revise Fromm’s quote, turning it into something more truthful:

If all groups would suddenly claim to be nations and be granted that status on the basis of their mere claim, this world would be a madhouse.

Only this time the sentence is not a hypothetical: because of the credence given to every small group that claims to be a nation (or an ethnicity, or a minority, or a religion, or what have you), and the automatic ear given to their “legitimate grievances” by virtue of that, the world is a madhouse: a madhouse of grievance-mongering, of gratuitous hatred, of aggressive litigation and of intrusive “hate-speech” laws. And all that is aided and abetted by the ostensibly internationalist (“Nations must be done away with in favor of the Brotherhood of Man”) Left!

In the past, nationhood was a given, flowing from a common heritage, but those standards are too stringent, too discriminating for modern tastes; now nationalism requires the satisfaction of only two conditions: 1) Self-identification; 2) External acknowledgment given by those who have an ax to grind. The “Palestinian nation” is an excellent case in point, for it is not only in the past, before 60 years ago, but even now as well, that they have never been a real nation; they self-identify, and since they serve as handy platform for denying the Jews their nation-state and (for the Leftists) an altar to sacrifice the Zionist scapegoat on in order to appease the wrath of the Muslims, they are given credence. But the facts on the ground are not changed by that: they do not have the minimal requirements of a nation. They do not cohere in either religion (Muslims, Christians, Druzes), language (the “Palestinian” of the Galilee and the “Palestinian” of the Negev scarcely understand each other), race (white-skinned, blue-eyed “Palestinians” in the Galilee, dark brown-skinned, black-eyed “Palestinians” of the Negev) or values (“Palestinians” of the cities, the villages and the desert are three different value systems). Contrast the ability of a European (Ashkenazi) Jew and a Yemenite Jew to sit together before a Daf G’marah (page of the Talmud) and debate it as if the Jewish nation had never left the Land of Israel! (Thanks be to God. Thanks always be to Him Who created this nation to be His forever.)

The “Palestinian nation” is as authentic as the invented African-American festival of Kwanzaa. This, the brain-child of black Marxist Ron Karenga in 1966 (Marxism? Check. Sixties? Check. All you need to know is there), is there for “serving as heritage for Americans of African descent”. To be fair, unlike the “Palestinians”, Kwanzaa is admitted to be an invention by its own practitioners; and also, it is not necessarily celebrated instead of Hanukkah or Christmas. But over 40 years have not made this festival anything beyond its original purpose, the purpose of furthering identity politics. It remains a Marxist tool for needlessly separating between fellow Americans according to their race, and for inflaming gratuitous hatred between them. That has always been the modus operandi of the Left, with the sowing of cultural strife being the method advocated by Antonio Gramsci (one of the major influences on, among other, the late and unlamented intellectual terrorist Edward Said).

Here is the answer to those who argue, “If self-determination for the Jews, then self-determination for the Palestinians also”: self-determination is for real nations—for those that have stood the tests of cohesion and heritage. To support self-determination for nations that are no real nations at all, for front-groups for an ulterior agenda that are dressed up as nations, is to support hatred, unending hostilities, total war, unremitting bloodshed and incessant strife. If one is aware of the true nature of such “nations”, including the “Palestinian” nation, but still chooses to support them, then he has chosen to support evil. Nationalism in its proper and good sense is the desire of a nation for self-determination in well-defined borders, as indeed Jewish nationalism is, following from the Torah itself, which gives the Jewish nation a specific land, not promising it the whole world. That latter is imperialism, and it can be found that most fictive nations of today are really wrappers for an imperialistic agenda, whether it be Islamic imperialism or the Marxist vision for the world.

The “Palestinians” are not even now a real nation, but are, as they were in the days of Hitler’s Mufti, the front-end for the Islamic jihad in the Land of Israel. That they have not expended any serious efforts in building their nationality is because that has never been their purpose—the same reason that, after the expulsion of all the Jews from the Gaza Strip, they chose to destroy the greenhouses rather than make good use of them. The purpose of the fictive “Palestinian nation” has always been to usurp the real and authentic claim of the real and authentic Jewish nation to the Land of Israel. They are not for their own self-determination, but against the Jews’; conversely, to fight them is not to “crush the spirit of a nation under the colonial jackboot”, but to preserve the life of a nation from the encroachment of an imperialist onslaught.

They are part of the worldwide Islamic jihad. Expel them all.

Yom Kippur: Leaving Today’s Mind-Fashions

Jewish folk-tales endure, often taking new relevance in each age. The stories of “the wise men of Chelm”, simple-minded Jews who attempted to solve problems by means not thought out to their conclusions, are now metaphors for political and bureaucratic bungling; for example, the story of how the sages of Chelm ordered to build a hospital under a bridge with a hole from which wagons would fall finds its grim counterpart in the modern reality of a government that decrees that the basic training camp that was hit a few days ago by a Kassam rocket, resulting in many casualties, be given improved armoring, instead of the better-conceived move of showing the senders of the rockets that they’re better off cracking pistachios.

This coming Yom Kippur falls on Shabbat, and on this subject there is another folk-tale, of a Jew who gives excuses for his transgressions of the day before his rabbi, but makes his position worse with each excuse given:

Rabbi: Why did you drive on the Sabbath?

Jew: There wasn’t any Jewish restaurant open.

Rabbi: So you ate treifes at a Gentile restaurant?! Why couldn’t you ask for some food from one of your neighbors?

Jew: There was no one to ask from, because it was Yom Kippur.

There are variations to this tale, some making it much longer, but that’s the gist. I bring it here not only because of the date, but also because I remembered it when I read an oft-made but incorrect interpretation of Phinehas’ act (Numbers 25:10–15). A while back, having finished reading the seventh and final Harry Potter book, I did as I always do on such occasions and dove into further reading (by “on such occasions” I mean the occasion that now I have no spoilers to watch out for). On Phineas Nigellus Black, the former Hogwarts headmaster who delivers his insistent words of wisdom through his portrait, the Harry Potter Wiki has this to say (version of September 4, 2007):

In the Bible, Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, is an extremely controversial high priest who murders two persons because they were having sex on the steps of the Tabernacle (the building containing the Holy Ark), and because one is Jewish and the other is not. His example has been used to justify attacks on interracial couples over the centuries. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

I’m skeptical of that last sentence (it always pay to be skeptical of what is written in any chmod 777 encyclopedia). As for the part I emphasized, it is most instructive of the seeping of the tenets of Cultural Marxism into the subconscious of the public today. Melanie Phillips gave her analysis of the Harry Potter books as a feast of counter-postmodernism, and I find that agreeable; all the more saddening, then, if Rowling chose the name, “Phineas” as a symbol for fanatical devotion to blood-purity. For the fact that Zimri had sex with a Midianite woman was merely the culmination of transgression, à la the above Jewish folk-tale, and even then, it was not about what Leftists today call race.

Portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black.

In Jewish law, sex is allowed only in the bounds of marriage, and then on certain conditions, such as purity, both bodily (pertaining to women’s specialties) and externally (for example, there must not be a Torah scroll in the room at the time). And it must, of course, be l’shem shamayim, for a divine purpose, for the purpose of bringing forth a new Jewish family. Zimri failed on all counts:

1. His act was extramarital—Cozbi was brought to him as a sacred harlot.
2. Since she was not Jewish, she did not observe the Jewish laws concerning women’s bodily purity. So Zimri had sex with a woman who was in a state of impurity.
3. As she had seduced him, it is clear Zimri had done it only for pleasure, and not for the purpose of bringing Torah-observant children to the world.
4. She had been sent to drive the children of Israel to idol-worship, of which extramarital sex was an integral part. So Zimri ended up performing a pagan ritual in the vicinity of Ohel Mo’ed (the Tent of Meeting), then the one and only holy site of Judaism!

What we see in this analysis, which is from the Orthodox Jewish point of view, is how “race” barely figures into it, if at all. That the seducing woman’s ethnicity is mentioned is not because she was “born inferior” (that is what racism really means and why racism, if it is really racism that is the issue, is so pernicious) but because the Gentiles posed a cultural threat to the Jews, seducing them to a way that is apart from HaShem’s will for them. Had Cozbi done as Ruth, leaving the idolatry of her people and embracing HaShem, and married Zimri, and consummated the marriage with him according to the injunctions of the Torah, the account of that would be featured prominently as an example of righteousness, and the couple might have brought forth the greatest in Jewish history, as Boaz and Ruth became the ancestors of King David.

The watchword, “diversity” is raised by the cultural Marxists as a banner to rally under and to die in its defense, but in reality, the religious wing of Marxism, better known as the New Age, aims to assimilate all religious traditions to its overarching agenda. So it is that, for the Religious Left, Judaism is reduced to the mistranslation of tikkun olam (“mending the world”; the real meaning of that phrase, as I said in a post months ago, is “preparing the world [to be in the Kingdom of God]”), making the world a better place by purely human efforts, often kumbayistic and socialist; Christianity is reduced to the “Social Gospel”; Hinduism and Buddhism become nothing but their doctrines of ahimsa (non-violence; though Marxists are very, very far from non-violent when given the chance); Native American traditions become nothing but paths for “finding oneself”, though vision-quests and drug-taking and the like; and even Islam, that untouchable darling of the Left, the one and only religion which they seem to respect, is reduced to a creed of “socialist resistance against the unjust oppressor”, and its book to a Communist manifesto.

Under this view, interpreting the story of Phinehas as an example of racism is the obvious path to take. What is lamentable is how those assumptions, the subconscious worldview of Cultural Marxism, has crept unawares into the best and brightest minds. If the analysis is correct, even a relatively sane (as much as one can be in today’s Marxified and dhimmified Britain) author like Rowling can be seduced, without even knowing it, into that way of thinking. And, relevant especially to Zionists, another part of this worldview is the framing of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist dream, and one of the longest-running examples of such dreams—as a “White European Colonial Settler Movement”. The best and the brightest can be, and have been, seduced into that vile and Jew-hating lie.

[…] What’s objectionable about Zionism is not the desire of Jews to live in Palestine. It’s the desire to live in Palestine as a majority and exercise sovereignty as Jews.

– commenter “Ernie” on Left I on the News

Just so: single among the nations, the Jewish nation is the one that is expected to wander the world to the end of days. This view, an old one, having roots in medieval Christendom, has subconsciously been taken over by the so-called Progressives, dressed in the modern, new and improved finery of Cultural Marxist discourse. As is also this:

From the Age of Hooper. Note “Zion” and not “Zionism”. Apparently Doc Emmet Brown built a new Delorean and brought this man to our time from 1907.

Yom Kippur calls every Jew to remember God’s Midat Ha-Din (measure of justice) as well as His Midat Ha-Rachamim (measure of mercy). Today this is more important than ever, because it is this twofold idea, namely that God is a judge (contrary to the New Age’s pantheistic “Love, Love, Love…” spirit to which they append the name, “God”), and that the fate of the world ultimately rests with Him (contrary to the stance of both Marxism and Islam, that the world can be made a utopia by human efforts alone—hence the modern-day rivalry between Marxism and Islam as to who will attain the highest innocent body count, HaShem guard us), that guards against assimilation into the spiritual, and then physical, gulag of this evil ideology, an ideology as seductive as were the Midianite women and their idolatrous practices in Biblical times.

G’mar chatimah tovah!

On Standing With Israel

“Why should I stand with Israel? I’m not Jewish, and it’s a faraway country that has as much significance to my life as Burundi.” In giving the answer, an answer which is probably not what the reader expects, I speak for myself only, though there may be many of my peers who think the same.

My obligation is to a Jewish State, governed by Jewish law, in the borders promised by HaShem. I cannot compromise on that, especially not now that I have seen past compromises lead to only more bloodshed. I believe that the Land of Israel is Jewish land, as affirmed in Jewish sources throughout, and that none of it should be conceded to a fictitious nation that was concocted for the sole purpose of usurping our rightful claim to it.

On the one hand, I aspire to hold to the Jewish doctrine that only HaShem is to be trusted, not human beings. Therefore I reject putting all our trust even in a malchut shel chesed (kingdom of grace) like the United States of America. Those Jews who say, “America will save us from our enemies” or “If the USA doesn’t do something about Iran, we’re doomed”, are in the wrong; if the USA turns its back on us one of the coming years, it will be because of that way of thinking, for HaShem wishes us to trust in Him and not in mere men.

On the other hand, Zionism is regarded (by Religious Zionists like me) as the beginning of our salvation because it marks our return to history. For 2,000 years of exile, we were in the sidelines of history, except in the many conspiracy theories that were hatched about us. Now we are back to taking a real (and central, thanks in no small part to our enemies) part in world events. We are not isolated from world events; we are one of the eyes of the storm, of the current global conflict between Islamic imperialism and the non-Muslim world.

That, the balance between the Jewish particular dream (Zionism, Jewish sovereignty on the Land of Israel) and our return to world history (Israel as one of many non-Muslim states under attack by Islam), prepares the way for an answer:

If you support Israel out of belief in HaShem’s word, His Torah, as the Noahides and the Christian Zionists do, then may HaShem bless you abundantly. This Jew, if not many others, bears you his deep gratitude.

If you support Israel out of a pragmatic motive, such as a Hindu having realized that Israel and India are facing the same enemy, or an atheist reasoning that a small Jewish theocracy on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean is preferable to a worldwide Islamic one, just as I stand with Thailand because of my view of the Southern Thailand “ethnic Malay separatism” as being of the same nature as the “Palestinian national struggle” in Israel (that is, a cover for the local branch of Islamic imperialism), then may HaShem bless you also. HaShem desires the act first, for whatever motive, while the righteous motive can come later.

And now to the stance of which I said that it could sound surprising: if you say, “Israel does not concern me, neither for good nor for bad; I harbor neither like nor dislike toward it, my feelings toward it are neutral; let the two sides there sort things out on their own, and I have no desire to intervene for either side, neither militarily nor diplomatically”—if you say that, then that too is good! As I said, I trust in HaShem for help, therefore the neutral stance toward the Israel/“Palestine” conflict is no skin off my nose, in fact it is quite good in comparison to those stances whose holders I consider to be our enemies. Which are:

If you say, “Israel is endangering us and world peace, and support for it brings hatred and terror threats upon us, therefore we must pressure Israel to sign a negotiated, conceded peace treaty with the Palestinians”, then you are no longer neutral. You wish to appease the Muslims on Israel’s expense, and that makes you opposed to the imperative of Zionism, namely Jewish sovereignty on the Land of Israel. If you insist on believing in the Two-State Solution, despite all the evidence given that the Muslims (not “Palestinians”—there is no such nation) have no intention whatever of stopping at the territories taken in the 1967 War, because you think the interests of appeasement should take precedence over the harsh reality, then you are at war with Israel, even if only on the ideological level.

And yet, that position is next to nothing in comparison to the following:

If you are a doctrinaire believer in the wrongness, ab initio, of the Jewish State of Israel, talking of the “original sin” of its birth in 1947–9, calling for the application of the “Palestinian Right of Return”, and for the dissolution of the Jewish State into a binational Jewish/Arab state, then you are a sworn enemy of Israel, of Zionism and of the Jews in general. If you believe the existence of Israel as a Jewish state is a wrong, and that that existence is the major cause of the current worldwide conflict, and that the key to solving this conflict is the abolition of Zionism, and that every suicide attack and Kassam rocket (God forbid) on Israeli Jewish women and children is “blowback” or “resistance”, then I regard you as a modern-day Nazi-sympathizer (the modern-day Nazis being the Muslims), and I want you dead. By that, I do not mean assassination as the Muslims do in their lawless way, but I will pray for the rise of the Sanhedrin that will carry that out, at least on the more high-profile among those who are opposed to the Jewish State. We read in Pirkei Avot that Rabbi Hillel once walked along a river and saw a skull floating on it and said, “Because you drowned [a man], you were drowned; and those who drowned you will end up being drowned”. Why will those who drowned him end up being drowned, and how can such a chain ever end? The commentary says: they will be drowned because they took it upon themselves to drown him, instead of bringing him before the court to carry out justice. Enjoy, then, all you enemies of Israel, the period of grace you have until HaShem raises our Sanhedrin again (speedily in our days, amen).

In summary: I for one do not ask that you support Israel, only that you not stand against it. If you support it, for whatever motive, then may HaShem bless you. If you are neutral with regard to Israel, then there is peace between us. It is only if you wish to gain peace from the Muslims at our expense that you become our enemy. And if you are ideologically opposed to the very existence of the Jewish State, then we are openly at war, to the bitter end.

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may they prosper that love thee.” (Psalms 122:6)

The Path from 9/11: Six Years’ Hindsight (Part 1)

The Good War. The Bad War. “Everything was done as it should be”, say the critics, “until Iraq”. There is Afghanistan, which is a good and appropriate involvement, and there is Iraq, which the USA should never have gotten into. Up until March 2003, goes the Narrative, everything went smoothly, and everyone, including the Western Left, stood wholeheartedly behind President George W. Bush.

The archives tell a different story, however.

Sites that were there in September the 11th and keep archives of that period are invaluable. Beside preserving the pictures and voices of that terrible day, they also smash to smithereens the idea that the current Leftist treasonfest dates from the invasion of Iraq and no earlier. The archives show that, sans Vietnam comparisons (that really took Iraq to emerge), everything we are now familiar with from the Left was already there in the period right after 9/11.

LGF archived post for September 11, 2001: search for the monsters:

Commenter “øivind”:

This is the typical American reaction I completely understand - but at the same time it calls my disrespect and disgust.

It's like the palestinians vs. israelis - at first the palestinians were the big bad wolves - now the israelis are as much a part of the problem as they are - maybe even bigger.

And the israelis say they are God's chosen people? That reminds me of nazism... übermensch if you know what I mean.

I guess religion has fueled yet another conflict here with these attacks on the entire western civilization - maybe even the entire world.

The Israel/“Palestine” conflict brought into this on the very day!

Commenter Nicholas Dunham:

And Reid, yes, we do have a better understanding of what the Israelis have been living with for decades, but unfortunately, that means we also have a better understanding of what the Palestinians have been living with for decades. Both sides have committed atrocities. Neither side is innocent. That doesn't justify an act of terrorism--there is no possible justification for that--but neither is there justification for much of what has been done by the Israelis in recent years.

[…]

I also agree with Charles that some response to these events is necessary. I just think we need to be careful--first, to be sure we're going after the right people, and second, to avoid killing civilians in the process.

Postmodernism (“All narratives are of equal worth”) and the wish to fight a war under Politically Correct rules of engagement.

Commenter “J B”:

Typical American... as I suggest to all Yankies... read Non-American news... everyone else knew this was coming except the American Public... that's what happens when u watch TV Pulp... read the Press to see how much of the world is being f****d up by your "administration". Sad that people died.. but I have to say, as a spectator, u ain't seen the last of this... feelings are high around the world about American involvement in matters that have nothing to do with your country... [Expletive edited. —ZY]

Anti-Americanism, and the hint that the atrocities were blowback for US foreign policy.

LGF archived post for September 12, 2001: bush's moment:

Commenter “thomas”:

Yesterday I saw a posting on indymedia saying "On what happened in NY we had just some thousands more people (and children) dying than on every average day are dying all over the world".

Maybe you should waste some more time to think about the world as one place. [All emphases original. —ZY]

The charge of American self-centeredness.

LGF archived post for September 15, 2001: hatred rooted in failings:

Commenter “øivind” again:

well.. to clarify something... fundamentalism really means that you take your "bible" literary; as in you do whatever it tells you to do and live exactly by the rules it gives you.

these terrorists only take parts of their "bible", the koran, and turn it into a soup of religious trash.

they are in no way fundamentalists.

as for these terrorists - they are sad souls.

The idea that Islamic terrorism is nothing but a perversion of a truly peaceful religion.

And, following a comment by “danny” in which two links, one about Vietnam and the other about Hiroshima, were posted with the close, “try and think about these things before you feel a victim”, commenter “PhotoDude” observes:

Charles, it seems your weblog has become a magnet for a few people who seem unmoved by the death of thousands of innocents. They still see this as a mere comeuppance for the US, not as an assault upon humanity. They seem to forget that up to half the dead did not even come from the US.

Commenter “danny” responds:

[…] A ‘war’ on terrorism? Does bush honestly think that he will win it? I think not. I remember reading a quote once, which said, “The authorities need to get lucky all the time where as the terrorist need to get lucky only once”. What hasn’t been mentioned is the fact that the US, via the CIA, actually sponsored the Taliban and bin Ladin during the occupation of Afghanistan by the Russians. Americans need to start reading the history books again.

The genesis of John Edwards’ quip, “‘War on Terror’ is just a bumper sticker”, and another charge of blowback for past US policies.

Thus much from a few commenters posting on LGF, back when it was beginning its transformation from being mainly about bicycling and web coding to today’s Anti-Idiotarian Headquarters. But let us hear it from official lefty sources. CounterPunch and Common Dreams keep archives of that period.

From CounterPunch’s page, titled “CounterPunch on 9/11 and War on Afghanistan” (yes, war on Afghanistan, not on Terror, let alone Islam—already a damper on the notion that it was regarded as The Good War):

From Sense and Nonsense About September 11, by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, from September 12, 2001:

The commentators were similarly incapable of explaining with any depth the likely context of the attacks. It was possible to watch the cream of the nation's political analysts and commentating classes, hour after hour, without ever hearing the word "Israel", unless in the context of a salutary teacher in how to deal with Muslims. One could watch hour after hour without hearing any intimation that these attacks might be the consequence of the recent Israeli rampages in the Occupied Territories that have included assassinations of Palestinian leaders and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians with the use of American aircraft; that these attacks might also stem from the sanctions against Iraq that have seen upward of a million children die; that these attacks might in part be a response to US cruise missile attacks on the Sudanese factories that had been loosely fingered by US intelligence as connected to bin-Laden.

All on the lines of, “She had it coming because she was wearing scant clothing”. “Strong Is Wrong”, therefore “Plight Makes Right”, which in the context of this conflict translates to “Jihad Is Just”.

Or take this quote:

Before I support a war that will jeopardize the lives of tens of thousands of our servicemen and women, I want to see the evidence that we are relying on to justify this. So far, I do not see it. I see allegations. I see innuendo. I see winks and I see nods, but I do not see the evidence that you need under international law and the United States constitution so far to go to war. Maybe that evidence will be there, but it is not there now.

It’s about the prelude to the Iraq War, right? Nope. It’s the words of law professor Francis Boyle in a debate with Bill O’Reilly on September 15, 2001.

From the Common Dreams archive, this September 12, 2001 piece from Stephen Zunes: U.S. Shouldn't Fight Violence With Violence (a “promising” title already):

Terrorism is not rational, but an emotive reaction by frustrated and angry people. Yet the common reaction to terrorism is often no less rational, no less a reaction by a frustrated and angry people.

Yes, the approach to it all from the vantage point of the chair next to the patient’s couch. “You want to talk about it?”

More:

It would behoove this great nation not to respond to yesterday's terrorist attack on America in ways that would restrict civil liberties, particularly if the terrorists are from an immigrant community. Already, analogies are being drawn to Pearl Harbor, which resulted in the internment of tens of thousands of loyal U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry.

The seeds of the charge that Bush is taking opportunity of the “War on Terror” in order to assume dictatorial powers.

And more:

Indeed, not only did it avoid resolving the Palestinian question - the key to peace in the Middle East […]

An assertion repeated, again and again, serving as the basis for every Israel/“Palestine” diary on Daily Kos, but given no evidence whatever to support it.

Lastly, from September 15, 2001, by Jesse C. Buikema, the piece Gandhi Knew Not to Fight Violence with Violence:

Gandhi had the wisdom and the courage to stand up to the British Empire without firing a shot, without retaliating after the massacre and torture of his people.

The typical carrying of Gandhi’s (long may he roast in hell, amen) mindset by the “reality-based community” over to a situation where it cannot apply (or, as I once wrote: had Gandhi lived and acted so in the days the Muslim ruler Aurangzeb, he would have won the independence of his head from his body).

And the last quote I bring here:

If we choose the freeway -- the quick solution -- we shall run the risk of being just like them -- hateful, vengeful, cowardly and ignorant.

Ah. “Beware, when fighting monsters, lest you become a monster yourself”. But the monsters have full moral right to keep on being monsters, and to remake the whole world in their monstrous image (God forbid).

I think the idea is pretty clear: the “Iraq blew it all” narrative is either a case of memory deficiency, or worse, a sham. The Leftists have been on the other side since Day One, giving moral support to the enemy, if only through their intimation that 9/11 was the result of the backfiring of past US foreign policy. Afghanistan was never a Good War; the Leftists, right from the start, called for “avoiding innocent civilian casualties”, even at the price of letting the Taliban win by hiding among the women and children. Their call to sacrifice Israel (“an evenhanded Mideast policy”) in order to appease the Muslims’ wrath was sounded on September 12. The shrieks about “the danger to civil liberties posed by anti-terrorism measures” were already present in those days. Everything was already in place—everything that we are now told is the result of Iraq.

Continue to Part 2 »

[Blogmaster’s note: both parts are really one post that I split up after finishing their writing, because of the exceptional length, even for an essay blog like mine; but I wish to treat this as one post as far as comments go, so please go to Part 2 if you wish to comment.]

The Path from 9/11: Six Years’ Hindsight (Part 2)

« Continued from Part 1

So the myth of the Afghanistan Good War is here shown. And yet, whether you think the invasion of Afghanistan was a good move or a bad one, there is one thing shared by both sides regarding it: the knowledge of its inevitability. No one, and that really means no one, was in doubt that the USA had its eyes on invading Afghanistan. This was so because it was the most obvious, and, dare I say, knee-jerk—but not in the way the Leftists mean it—reaction.

Today, six years after, we have new footage of Osama Bin Laden (may he go to hell soon, amen, or burn there long if he already is there), with him sporting a modified beard to give him a younger, more healthy look, probably to serve as an allegory of the state of the worldwide jihad for the infidels. Whether that is really him, or someone dressed up as a look-alike, or perhaps the fruit of the wonders of Photoshop (which the Muslims got acquainted with in the 2006 Lebanon War), the focus on Osama Bin Laden (and, therefore, on his hiding place of Afghanistan) was as erroneous then as it is now.

What foolishness has gripped both sides of the political map as to think that this war is tied with the fate of Osama Bin Laden? What would the capture or killing of Bin Laden do except provide us a few moments of cheering, only to be followed by the continuance of the same, same, same process we have been going through all these years? Did the killing Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (long may he roast in hell, amen) end the terrorism in Iraq? Is Osama Bin Laden the sine qua non for the Demographic Jihad of Muslims in Europe, or for rioting and demands for appeasement after every perceived outrage toward the Muslims? What are the Taliban even, if not a localized branch of the global jihad, on an equal footing with the Kashmiri jihadists, with Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, with the Kosovo and Southern Thailand “separatists”, and with the fictitious “Palestinian nation” in Israel? Osama, the Taliban and Afghanistan are non-issues now, as they were on September 12, 2001.

“We fight them there so we won’t have to fight them here”. But they are here, in great and ever increasing numbers. And wherever they are found in sizable numbers, there the state has to take costly anti-terrorism measures, and to go through “racial strife”, so misnamed by the left-leaning Mainstream Media, that would never arise without them.

Every state in the world today can be seen to be in one of four stages regarding Islamification:

1. Small numbers, sufficient only for forming interest groups and litigation forums (such as CAIR). Examples: the USA, Australia, Eastern Europe.
2. Large numbers, forming effective Islamic colonies, each a law unto itself. Examples: London, Brussels, Malmö.
3. A fully armed grouping, within or on the border or even both, forming a physical threat. Examples: Israel, Serbia, (Southern) Thailand, Ethiopia.
4. Islamic. Non-Muslim subjects face discrimination in court at best (Egypt, Malaysia), regular persecution in most cases (Pakistan), and at worst the threat of elimination (Iraq).

The biggest mistake is the particular, parochial, piecemeal view of this conflict, taking every part of the world in isolation. To talk of “Kashmiri fighters for self-determination”, of “Malay separatists in Southern Thailand” or of “The Palestinian struggle” bespeaks cluelessness about the whole conflict. Many of the Leftists do better than that: by talking of “the desire of Muslims for real freedom from the increasing political domination over the Islamic peoples by Western (Christian and Jewish) parts of the world” (thus from CounterPunch’s Bill Christison), they get things completely backward, but they don’t make the mistake of viewing every part of the world to itself. The pattern of suicide terrorism, rearing children to be suicide terrorists, riots following every small outrage, and demands to accommodate the needs of Muslims after every such rioting or terrorist attack, just recur all over the world. The same everywhere. It has turned out to be an elephant in the room, such that one needs to be a “reality-based thinker” in order to miss it.

And there is another mistake: the Western sense of obligation. In his essay from October 10, 2006, Recommendations for the West, Fjordman says:

The West is declining as a percentage of world population, and in danger of being overwhelmed by immigration from poorer countries with booming populations. Westerners need to adjust our self-image to being less dominant in the 21st century. As such, we also need to ditch Messianic altruism: The West must first of all save itself. We have no obligation to “save” the Islamic world, and do not have the financial strength nor the demographic numbers to do so even if we wanted to. We are not all-powerful and are not in the position to help all of the Third World out of poverty, certainly not by allowing all of them to move here. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

While Afghanistan was born of the error of focusing on Osama Bin Laden, Iraq—under the premise that it was about “winning hearts and minds” through democratization—was born of that error, the sentimental sense of obligation, that carryover of Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” days. So it is that American soldiers, meant to fight wars and kill enemies, could be seen in Iraq, and later also in Afghanistan, giving sweets and toys (among others, footballs with the name of Allah imprinted on them, which “provoked” swift outrage from the parents of the beneficiaries) to children, like a group of Europeans giving presents to the natives upon whose island they had stumbled. “Winning hearts and minds”—a phrase directly from the Vietnam days! And a patronizing mindset at that. For, as Rabbi Meir Kahane (HY"D) said, in a different time (1990) and concerning other people (the Arabs of Israel), in his last essay, Israel: Revolution or Referendum:

For years, the contempt of Jewish leftists and liberals for Arabs was stupefying. The myth of the happy Israeli Arab, so much better off than the Arabs of Iraq or Egypt. We have given them electricity and indoor toilets and now they sit happily grateful. Loving us. What contempt! Is there one person with a shred of respect for himself who believes that Arabs will trade their national pride for electricity or indoor toilets?

Yes, that patronizing error, of “winning hearts and minds” by giving people the opportunity to improve their material situation, when, all the time, their hearts desire the fulfillment of an ideological goal.

“Tiny minority of extremists”. “Material improvements will moderate them”. “Religion is just a dress for pragmatic goals”. Wrong, all wrong. Jihadists may be few, but their support base is huge, making up the majority of Muslims worldwide. Material improvements only increase their loathing toward “the corrupt and immoral West”, just as they did for Sayyid Qutb when he spent time in the USA as a student in the 1950’s. And religion for the Muslims, unlike for many Christians today, is all-pervading, and taken seriously by all. You talk of secular Jews in Israel, and everyone accepts its reality, even if they do not approve; but if you talk of “secular Muslims”, eyes widen in disbelief. They pride themselves on “being untouched by the tide of secularism”; and whoever of them wishes to eat during daytime in the month of Ramadan must do so in secret. Think of Medieval Europe, not of your own present existence, and you will gain some understanding of their mindset, remnant of an age when being an open unbeliever was not an option. They really do nearly all of them take their religion seriously—including its supremacist doctrines, which are supported by canon. There is no “moderate Koran”.

Thus the USA plodded from Afghanistan to Iraq, when, as one Hot Air commenter said, the surge should have been carried out in Europe. And now the sights are set on Iran. Considering that Iran is being made into a suicide-martyr country by its nuclear mullahs, that move probably makes sense—if only a way can be found to take out all the threats, which could be hidden underground anywhere in that vast country. But I cannot help saying that this could be the culmination of nearly a millennium and a half of a great tragedy. The Persians are an ancient and noble people who have been forced to wallow in the excrement of the Arabian camel for over 1,300 years. Some may be in glee over the prospect of “turning Tehran into glass”, but I, if alive to see that, could not regard it as anything but the tragic end of the cultural rape of what was once the light among world empires. Such a fate for the cities of Saudi Arabia would leave me thinking, “Ishmael has met his reward”; not so for those of Iran.

It is on this note that I count the movie 300 as a notable expression of erroneous thinking. Perhaps the timing was coincidental, but it has not been interpreted as such, so I too take that movie to be as rallying for the war of Freedom (Sparta) against Oppression (Persia). I view that in utter contempt, for it makes not one but two errors: the assumption that the present conflict is about Iranian nationalism, and the construing of Sparta as a bastion of freedom. Iranian nationalism, just as Russian nationalism was during Uncle Joe’s day, is occasionally used as a tool for agitation, but that is a disingenuous use; in reality, Iran is being led by the interests of Islam against its own, even to the detriment of its very existence. And Sparta—Sparta as a bastion of Western freedom?! Sparta was one of the first fully-documented fascist states! Sparta, with its top-down micromanagement of every man’s life, from cradle to grave, a bastion of freedom?! Sparta was an abomination that foreshadowed Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and from which the fighters for the Islamic Caliphate do not hesitate to learn a thing or two! Sparta, where unfit babies where left on Mount Taygetos to die—a model for eugenics and abortion. How can any lover of freedom not recoil in disgust from identifying with Sparta?!

In the end, the only argument that had any merit for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was the argument that they were support bases for the jihad—that arms and funding flowed from them. But then that leaves as a wide, gaping hole the treatment of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, with whose fanatical Wahhabi leaders President Bush unashamedly holds hands; Saudi Arabia, with which Bush has made student exchanges, thus bringing more potential terrorists to his own soil; Saudi Arabia, which is regarded as an ally of the USA, all while churning out anti-non-Muslim, anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Jewish literature with no holds barred; Saudi Arabia, whose oil money finances the Demographic Jihad in Europe and the Legal Jihad over all the West. If there was ever a case for invasion and complete takeover, this is it. But no, that could not be done, for it would “alienate all the Muslims of the world”. As if the Muslims needed a good reason to be alienated.

Six years after 9/11, the man in the non-Muslim street is in various degrees of having come to those insights, away from the past errors; the leaders, however, have mostly not, and even if they have, lack the will to act upon them. Mass deportation or expulsion, for example, is, in my opinion, among the first steps for Fjordman’s vision of saving the West, but how could it possibly be put into practice when the academics, the media and the chattering classes insist on portraying such measures as “racism”?

It has been asked, “What would it take to wake people up?” Some have said it would have to be a nuclear attack (God forbid), but I disagree: if 9/11 didn’t do that, nothing of that same sort (violent attack) will. The Danish Cartoons Affair woke up much more people than 9/11 did. My question is, instead, “Will the fall of some Western state to shariah law wake people up?” 9/11, in hindsight, could never wake people to the threat, because the best analogy they could come with for it was Pearl Harbor, while the enemy at hand is not dependent on a state (Afghanistan or any other) and not dependent on a charismatic leader (Bin Laden or any other). 9/11 was a demonstration of intent; but it was the Danish Cartoons Affair, and the Pope Benedict Quotes Affair, that did something in the way of showing the nature of the threat. A military threat on the part of Muslims is only the third stage, a late one; the first two are equally dangerous, and perhaps more so, because they can catch a country unawares, especially when aided and abetted by the Muslim-sympathizing media of today.

In a way, 9/11 might be remembered one day as a saving grace of the non-Muslim world, waking it up to what could have been a silent takeover through the Demographic Jihad. But whether the non-Muslim world will be saved depends on having the correct interpretation of it, and on the ascension to power of those who adhere to that interpretation.

In the prairies of North America, in the fens and heaths of the British Isles, near the lakes and rivers of the Balkans, on the snowy mountain-tops of Ethiopia, at the foot of the world’s highest mountains in India, in the rice fields of Thailand, in the vast deserts of Australia, and last but not least, on the holy soil of the Land of Israel, may HaShem be with you all in this fight. “And he shall be a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren.” (Genesis 16:12)

The Binational Delusion

In this post I show why the Binational Solution, also known as the One-State Solution, of one common secular state for Jews and “Palestinians”, is a heart-conceived (meaning not thought out to the full), misguided or malicious, and dangerous delusion.

The natural question to come now is, “Why devote a post to the Binational Solution? It’s a fringe proposal, taken seriously by no official source”. That may be so now, but that is no guarantee for the continuance of the situation in the future. The “Palestinian Right of Return” was once considered to be exactly that—a fringe solution, not taken seriously by any statesman—until suddenly it came out as a serious proposal by former US secretary of state, James Baker (may he go to hell soon, amen), in his Iraq Study Group report. What is now fringe can easily turn mainstream in a few years, or by the lever of circumstance. In addition, our war is a war of minds first, and we must engage any ideological challenge that looks likely to become a threat.

We ignore the fact of the Binational Solution at our peril; it is that proposal which many Leftists say Israel must follow in order to “get right with the international community”, to “atone for its original sin of dispossessing the indigenous Palestinian people”. It is a proposal that gains momentum with each rare, half-hearted and overdue attempt of Israel to do the right thing in defending herself from her would-be annihilators (God forbid), the Muslims. It used to be an unthinkable proposal, but as we saw a year ago, the Second Lebanon War brought out what had been latent. Just as, on Daily Kos, the war instilled boldness in a diarist to openly express agreement with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (may he go to hell soon, amen), that it would be better for the world if Israel were wiped off the map (God forbid), so too I have found a case of a blogger who, up to that war, kept his mouth shut about Israel, but then found out he could hold no longer. Walton Pantland sometimes posts comments on the South African Jewish blog It’s Almost Supernatural, which I regularly read, and that’s how I found his blog, Red Star Coven (coven? Isn’t that a witches’ grouping? Ooooo, scary scary scary! Hocus Pocus! Double Trouble! Avada Kedavra! Cauldron Bubble! But back to the post…). He began his publicization of his anti-Israel feelings with a gala opening on July 13, 2006, and has since gotten quite, quite comfortable with bits like “Pull the plug on the Zionist entity” and “Israel, that blood-thirsty, war-mongering pustule of aggression in the Middle East”. But already on that first anti-Israel post, we can see he went from complete silence to a full-blown proposal of the Binational Solution:

There will be no justice in the world until Israel is destroyed, both physically and as an idea. This will not happen while America continues to bankroll this brutal oppression, and while the Western media are too frightened to speak out against injustice.

[…]

Israel and Zionism must be destroyed, and replaced with a Palestinian territory where Muslims, Jews, Christians, Druze and atheists can live together in peace and harmony, sharing humus recipes and enjoying the sunshine and unique history. Until then, no platform should be given to Israel to put her side of the story. There isn't one - it's just racism and imperialism.

Amazing how that war cut through all the BS and brought the utmost in honesty from the Israel-bashers. There’s a lot more I can bring from that post, including a nod to the Khazaria Hypothesis (saying of the ‘Jews of eastern origin’ that “Culturally, they have far more in common with the Palestinians than they do with Jews from Europe or America”), but I’m going to focus on the Binational Solution here. Lest you think Pantland is advocating Jewish genocide (I’m sure he doesn’t but would, if that happened, God forbid, shrug it off as “you reap what you sow”), he writes the following:

Note that by destruction of Israel, I don't mean the destruction of Israelis, or Jews, or any other people. I mean the destruction of the State and its army. I believe that anyone should have the right to live anywhere they want in the world, and that includes Jews in Palestine.

But that also means that Palestinians have the right to stay in Tel Aviv, and Muslims in New York. No one has exclusive right to any territory.

This is the meat of the post. It’s important, because it’s something I can work with, intellectually address. Leftists say—and they say that’s what the Muslims, including Ahmadinejad in his “mistranslated statement”, want too—they only wish for regime change in Israel. Or a little more than regime change: a re-engineering of entire Jewish thought to reject its exceptionalist (they call it, “racist”) ideas. They propose leaving the wine (the people currently living in the Land of Israel) intact, just changing the wineskin (the political system, the state). “We’re not anti-Semites, we’re just anti-Zionists”, they say (see this old, but ever more relevant, take by Steven Plaut).

Kept together until the strongman was gone, then all hell broke loose. Reminds me of another place, beginning with an I, ending in a Q.

But the question that must be posed, especially when the proposers never tire of reminding us that they’re the reality-based community, is how that solution can be made to work out. As we all know, Communism looked good on paper, and it was supported by an extensive infrastructure of intellectual smoke and mirrors arguments, but ended up failing miserably in all its goals, taking 100,000,000 lives in the process. Millions of lives are at stake here again; people do not buy a car without reasonable guarantees, much less, then, take mortal risks that are not covered by safeguards. And let us remember that the Israeli Jewish public today, all but its youngest, are cognizant of the fruits of the Oslo Accords. They are not in a mood for gambling, and certainly not for betting the farm, which is what the Binational Solution amounts to.

“One secular state where Jews and Palestinians live in peace and equality”. The piping of the human heart (“Imagine no countries… nothing to kill and die for…”) is evident and slightly sympathy-evoking; however, hard-nosed reality demands a probation of those lofty sentiments. Where to begin?

Let me begin with the word, “secular”. This is possibly the gravest mistake of our time, because it underlies not just the errors concerning statesmanship of the Israel/“Palestine” conflict, but also the misconceptions that led President George W. Bush, otherwise a good and capable president (consider who could have been the alternatives: Al “Gaia lo volt” Gore and John “Botched Joke” Kerry), to make so many wrong moves following 9/11 to this day. The myopic Eurocentric eye thinks all the world has undergone the same changes as the West, but the hard facts are that the Islamic world, and especially its Middle Eastern heartlands, are like the Bible Belt squared. The Bible Belt of the USA astounds Europeans in its prevalence of religious feeling among its inhabitants; in the Islamic world, not only does that situation exist, but religion is prevalent even on the political level. Take Saudi Arabia, change all its Islamic elements to Christian ones, and you come pretty close to Medieval Europe.

Apart from assuming the veneer, there has never been any successful secularist movement in the Islamic world—even the Turkish experiment, led by Kemal Atatürk’s forceful hand, is now falling apart. The PLO may have advertised itself as a “secular liberation movement”, but that was no more than smart marketing, just as “Palestinian nationalism” is nothing but the Marxist-friendly wrapper in which the Islamic jihad against Israel is sold. The rulers in the Islamic world tend to be more secular than their subjects, for they wish to keep the flow of US aid, while the people’s hearts are with the jihad against both the Great and the Little Satan. The short of it: there cannot be a secular Binational Solution, because the inhabitants of the Middle East, the Muslims, overwhelmingly take their religion seriously.

Next: following Pantland’s [self-]righteous decree, “But that also means that Palestinians have the right to stay in Tel Aviv”, a Binational Solution would mean, shortly after its application, an influx of Muslims into all the state of Israel, including, as he says, Tel-Aviv. So now the question is: This high-flown dream of “Jews and Palestinians living in peace”—what’s to guarantee it? What do you offer to convince the Jews that the influx would not be followed by a massacre (God forbid)? Words are not enough—we’ve already been through trusting in words without anything concrete to back them up, been there, seen it, done that for at least seven years (1993–2000), thank you very much. The Oslo Accords had no tangible provision to stop the suicide bombers from exploding in Tel-Aviv (beginning in 1994); it was the much-maligned “Apartheid Wall” that did that.

Steven Plaut (HaShem bless him) calls the Binational Solution the “Rwanda Solution”. It is a very apt name, because what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is a case of kal va-chomer—if the binational coexistence of very similar nations like the Tutsis and the Hutus did not stand in the way of genocide, then it is the height of insanity, or criminal negligence, or malicious scheming (pick your poison), to raise seriously a binational coexistence for the people living on the Land of Israel. The members of the Hutu and Tutsi nations look the same or almost so, speak the same languages and share much heritage; the Jews and the “Palestinians” don’t look the same (even the Jews of eastern origin look markedly different from the Arabs, the main reason for this being the prevalence—for cultural reasons—of inbreeding in the latter), they don’t speak the same language (Hebrew and Arabic are not mutually intelligible, even though they’re related), and they don’t share the same heritage and religion (the Biblical and the Koranic narratives and mindsets are very different ballgames; see also my post Desert, but no Manna, from August 21, 2007). Anyone who, in the view of the Rwanda Genocide, believes in a naturally-flowing peace between the Jews and the “Palestinians” cannot honestly keep calling himself reality-based.

This should have relegated any binational solution to the trashcan of failed ideas. Unfortunately, a lot of people haven’t done that even to Communism.

Another point, bringing out yet another of our Leftist ironies, is that their proposal constitutes cultural imperialism, in that they are intent on imposing their vision no matter the dreams of the others. I mean dreams like the ancient Jewish dream of sovereignty in the Land of Israel, maintaining a Jewish state with a Jewish culture and character, observing all the Israel-dependent mitzvot (commandments of God that can be performed only on the Land of Israel), with the promise of renewing them all, including those of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem (may it be rebuilt speedily in our days, amen). Apparently, only two dreams matter to our Leftist enemies: the “Palestinian” dream of “self-determination” (i.e. a state for a nation that was cooked up from scratch 60 years ago), and more importantly their own dream of “righting colonialist wrongs” (of which the very state of Israel is a part, in their view), on the way to their final Messianic vision, the aforementioned refrain, “Imagine no countries”. The Jewish dream is not given a thought, apart from the platitude, “We respect the Jews’ right to a secure life” (why, thank you! And I respect your right to inhale and exhale—ain’t I so, so grand, so worthy of praise, for that?).

I outlined the inseparable connection between Zionism and Judaism in a previous post. For people who like to talk of “respecting the Muslims” (which we all know is really fear—non-Muslims don’t go into a frenzy when you depict the founders of their religions dipped in bodily refuse), the Leftists seem to spare little of it to the Jews. But the Jews, however much 2,000 years of statelessness may have obscured it, have minds of their own, and they’re not going to give up that 2,000-year-old dream easily. Effectively, this means another possible outcome to the Binational Solution: apartheid. Yes, that word that is now bandied about carelessly (recently by an Israeli Jew, no less, choosing world praise without regard to the fact that his words will be used as justification for spilling his brothers’ blood, God forbid), that word which, when applied to present-day Israel, debases what things were in South Africa back in the day, would be able to be rightly applied if the Binational Solution came to pass without being immediately followed by genocide. For, just as there is no chance for any Western country to stay a Western country when Muslims become its majority, so too Israel would be stripped of its Jewishness by democratic vote if the Muslims were to become its majority. Maybe the Europeans could take that lying down (I’d like to think that the upstanding European citizens posting on Gates of Vienna are representatives of a still silent majority, but wishes do not always reality make), but the Jews could not, not after 2,000 of life in the Diaspora, a history which every Jewish child knows by heart. And then the only way of preserving the Jewish character of Israel would be true apartheid, the Leftists thus having made the situation worse than it ever was.

Two possible outcomes of the Binational Solution, both horrible to contemplate: genocide or apartheid. Making the world a worse place either way. I have yet to hear how those outcomes could be averted, how the Binational Solution could really be made, forced, ensured, guaranteed to lead to that utopian dream of “peace and equality between the two nations” that Leftists like Pantland describe it to be. Again: millions of lives are at stake, and we Jews are in no mood for making costly experiments.

The Binational Solution was never conceived with our interests in mind. It runs over us, proposed as “a sacrifice for the greater good”, just as the concession of the Sudetenland was forced on Czechoslovakia in 1938 without asking the Czechs what they thought about the whole matter. The Leftists propose it only as a measure of appeasement, or worse, as part of their perverted philosophy of, “no peace without justice” (best screamed from the rooftops in a shrill tone while wearing a Ché t-shirt), which really means “sticking it to The Man”, The Man being the hated capitalist, Bible-believing West. The Muslims propose it for the same reason they accepted the two-state Oslo Accords: as a first step in their plan of a Middle East free of that non-Muslim encroachment on Dar Al-Islam (any territory Muslims have ever taken root in. That means Spain, too).

If there is any negotiated solution that has a theoretical chance of working, it’s the Two-State Solution. But even that’s theoretical, because in practice, Islamic ideology does not permit a truce (note: a truce, not a peace treaty) with the non-Muslim enemy for more than 10 years. And it’s already been tried two times: 1947 and 1993, with similar results. The Binational Solution can’t work even in theory. Therefore, whereas those who propose the Two-State Solution are usually just missing some critical information (about the nature of the conflict: the fact that the “Palestinian nation” is a fictitious covering for an uncompromising Islamic jihad, the local chapter of Islamic imperialism worldwide), those who propose the Binational Solution are enemies of Israel, of Zionism and of the Jews in general. They must be called, as I have here, to present a realistic, credible way of how the Binational Solution would work; if they do not but still insist on advocating the Binational Solution, they must be dealt with as threats to our lives. May HaShem raise soon our Sanhedrin, in order that we may have the divine judicial basis for striking at our enemies, both the Muslim murderers and their Leftist enablers. Amen.