Our Children Are The Guarantors

Cyberfutility

2007-12-18T15:41:00.000+02:00

Well, well, this has been educating…

The time is the end of July 2006. Charles Johnson’s masterful exposé of Reuters’ photography fraud broke through my skepticism as to the power of information warfare in general and of Internet campaigning in particular. I couldn’t adopt Charles’ format of short news items, because it wasn’t my style, but then I found Gates of Vienna, with the format of news items followed by lengthy commentary, and I liked it right away. So when August 2006 came, I launched this blog.

The time is the middle of December 2007. Between the two points of time, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert has gone through a complete meltdown, starting with his acceptance of a ceasefire agreement authored by the treacherous, Jew-hating United Nations, going through his refusal to even visit, let alone do something sensible about, the rocket-shelled Israeli town of Sderot, and now his participation in the Saudi-made conference of Annapolis, complete with declarations of intent to offer the Land of Israel as if on a fire-sale (God forbid).

The writings by us all—Charles Johnson, Zombie, Fjordman, Dymphna, Baron Bodissey, and me, to name a few—have had little effect beyond organizing the thoughts of those who were already predisposed toward right thinking. Here and there you might find a few converts, à la Neo-Neocon, but not in a critical mass. My intention is not to demoralize; only to bring some realism and then propose a better way. It must be remembered why the Muslims and their Leftist allies are dangerous: because they do not confine themselves to cyberyapping—because they make new facts on the ground.

Riding on the crest of Charles Johnson’s great hour from July 2006 for so long is no mean feat, but I should have known better, from the start. I had given in to impulse and youthful hope, but I should have heeded the lesson from the Holocaust Encyclopedia on my shelf, the particular lesson from its entries detailing the pre-Holocaust Jewish counterpropaganda efforts. Those existed; more: they were plentiful, contrary to what is commonly believed. The common belief results from their catastrophic failure in halting the tide. There were defenses of the Jews in the face of the accusations, and there were Jewish attacks upon the Jew-haters. Amazing, how it all mirrors the course of my writings: apologetics in the earlier part of my blog, then the realization that we are better off blackening our enemies’ name rather than trying to clear our own. Neither path, in the 1930’s, succeeded in halting the march of facts on the ground.

I shouldn’t have believed otherwise. I should have learned from the Israel/“Palestine” diaries on Daily Kos, especially the more recent ones. What I have seen there is both horrifying and enlightening at the same time: the moving of so many commenters who used to think themselves objective and even-handed—and really strove to be so!—into one of the two poles. Many a “both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine” poster now endorses the Rwanda (i.e. One-State) Solution, and many a pro-Israel poster with a willingness to compromise now displays deep skepticism as to the other side’s good faith. The polarity, the acrimony, the venom and the sweeping, absolute statements on both sides all run counter to the stated goals of objectivity, even-handedness, readiness to listen and rational discussion. There is no reason in all this: the mad passion and judgmentalism have supernaturally gripped those who call themselves, “reality-based”. Calls for compromise always translate to, “Let the other side start with trust-building moves”. It is the height of delusion to think mere words, even under the most articulate and dazzling presentation, could turn the tide of this war. If the same world that cried, “Jews to Palestine!” 70 years ago now cries, “Jews out of Palestine!”, then the truth must be remembered, at all times: this entire drama is in the hands of a higher Director. The irrational hatred toward us, and the hard-heartedness of governments worldwide, are the products of people who only think they are in full control.

The war of minds is out, then. How about organizing the right-minded for waging the war of survival? This is where the next layer of cyberfutility comes. Both blogfathers of mine, Little Green Footballs and Gates of Vienna, made this clear to me, even if the one is more realistic than the other.

The legend of Rodrigo of Spain (Roderic, the Visigoth, Christian king) has it, that the king was asked to add yet another padlock to an enchanted tower, but instead decided to break all the locks, in order to enter the tower and take (as he believed) the treasures inside it. When he did so, he found no treasure, but only a scroll in an urn, and upon reading it, Rodrigo saw a prophecy of doom: that whoever broke into the tower would see the downfall of Spain. And also upon the scroll was an illustration of a battle, in which Rodrigo spotted, to his horror, his own white horse without the rider. The king rode away in panic, and over the next few years tried to forget it all, even holding extravagant banquets and tournaments for that purpose. But day by day he could hear the news of the Muslims advancing from east to west in North Africa, until one day they crossed the Pillars of Hercules, and the prophecy came to pass.

Reading LGF is a lot like being in Rodrigo’s situation: you hear the news of Muslim atrocity, you hear day by day of more and more inroads they make into non-Muslim lands and cultures, but you are confined to mere spectatorship. On the peanut gallery following every such LGF post, all you can do is write something like, “ROPMA!” or a witty disparaging pun on Mohammad’s name. It does not have to be a prophecy of doom as it was for Rodrigo, yet the commenting policy on LGF has made it so. Charles’ request that all commenters “exercise self-control” and avoid “loose-cannon hate speech” were the last straw for me. I knew, I then surely knew, that I could just waste away a few good years on LGF that way, interrupted only by the sound of Ishmaelite hordes marching down my street (God forbid). Apart from its still-valuable role as a newswire, LGF could serve as nothing but an online get-together: an assembly of the bored and life-lacking, replete with the cyberlingo I hate intensely: “troll”, “Godwin’s Law”, “ROTFL”, “GTG BRB” and all those pathetic caricatures of human conversation. A waste of time even in peacetime—then how much more so in today’s situation.

It looked like Gates of Vienna’s hour to shine. For a time, GoV was basking in its newfound veneer of seriosity and rationality. Certainly the comments on GoV tend to be of a much more intellectual nature than those on LGF (though, it is prudent to mention, intellectualism is often nothing but a cover for mental self-stimulation—in other words, “ROTFL” and “LOL” dressed in a more highbrow form). And there were, of course, comments I didn’t like, but this time I decided to acquiesce on them. Offensive ideas are the price of freedom of speech. If you think otherwise, then you’re in principal agreement with those who riot over certain cartoons.

But it was exactly on that point, freedom of speech, that I was jolted out of my sense of security on Gates of Vienna. In the post Faith of Our Fathers, from December 11, 2007, Baron Bodissey posted the following notice:

I just had to hunt down and delete some comments which were intemperate, and threatened GoV through their infammatory [sic] statements.

I will not engage in this kind of operation on a routine basis.

Since Blogger does not allow me to ban people, I will be forced to close posts to comments if this continues.

This is not what I want to do. I hope you all can control yourselves, because these comment threads are extraordinarily informative and valuable.

You have been warned.

On that thread there is a poster who insinuated that Jews (albeit left-wing Jews, as he made clear later) were responsible for the push to ban Christianity from the USA. Believe me, although the idea was offensive to me, it didn’t carry a tenth of the offense that the Baron’s warning did. The warning, especially the term “intemperate” and the phrasing “I hope you all can control yourselves”, flashed a hundred alarm bells in my head. Alarm bells all blaring out, “LGF Redux! LGF Redux!”

In some comments upthread, it can be seen that the reason for all this was a comment with a “Kill all X” type of expression. I can agree with the idea that it must have been (to use Charles’ infamous term) “loose-cannon”, but there is a chance there is more to it. But there is a much more concrete issue here: by the Baron’s own admission (again upthread), his readiness to restrict certain types of comment stemmed from his fear that “Blogger could shut us down for it”. A fear which in no wise do I hold to be unfounded, but means that the online arena is under constant threat of silencing. And while “Kill all X” comments may still be the only point where the red line has been crossed, we all know how slippery the slope is: I for one know that, after a long time of putting the red line at “Kill all X” comments, Charles Johnson saw it fit to delete a comment of mine advocating mass expulsion of Muslims from non-Muslim states. The Road to Serfdom can only wind further from that point.

How we disarm ourselves while our Muslim and Leftist enemies grow bolder and bolder! How we constrain ourselves to gentlemanliness while they bar no holds! How eagerly we carve out the words, “We are better than them”, not realizing that those words will be encompassed by our own tombstones (God forbid)! And how, out of consideration of our public image, we shy away from real solutions!

For all the throat-clutching going on between the Right and the Left in Israel, it is next to nothing to the vile abuse, the hideous demonization, heaped upon Rabbi Meir Kahane (HaShem avenge his blood) in his day. One might think it was the assassination of Rabin that tempered the spirits, and although there is truth to that, the fact is that the behavior toward Rabbi Kahane (by the so-called Right as well as the Left!) was incomparable to anything even before that assassination in 1995. Let me tell you why.

An Israeli right-winger can point out the dangers of concessions toward the “Palestinians”, and how the “peace process” has been nothing but a piece-by-piece process of giving away the Land of Israel for nothing in return, and the Israeli left-winger might even agree, reluctantly, with some of his points, but then the left-winger will deliver the Magic Question: “But what do you suggest we do? Keep fighting them forever? Live by our sword? What is the alternative to a negotiated peace agreement?” Yes, the classic battered wife’s phrase, “What is the alternative?”, the phrase she says to all those who implore her to leave the abusive man before tragedy should strike. The problem is, the Israeli right-wingers take the bait. They appear to stand their ground, talking about “Israel’s need for security” (why this should be the subject of discussion at all is never made clear), but they retreat into the language of diplomacy and “treaties”. The left-winger need never break out into a state of panic in the face of most Israeli right-wingers, for he knows they have no solution. They can point out what the problem is, which way not to go, but when asked for a positive proposal, they end up being not all that far away from the left-wingers.

Rabbi Kahane was different. He could point out all the perils of concessionism like any right-winger, but he also had solutions. True, viable solutions. Workable ones. And with a divine stamp of approval to top it all, in case you thought of accusing him of “besmirching Judaism’s name” (not that that stopped such accusations, but the moral high ground was his). The left-wingers were quick to brand his solutions as “racist” and “fitting for dark regimes”, but that was not because that was the uppermost issue on their minds, but because they simply panicked at the sight of a right-wing Israeli Jew who actually brought a solution and not just pointed out the problems. They had never encountered such an adversary before, and now that their safety-net (of asking, “What is the alternative?”) was being torn apart, they went ballistic. And so the abuse and demonization came forth furiously, until, in 1988, the Israeli Left allied with the opinion-conscious Right to ban Rabbi Kahane from politics under the charge of “racism”. There has been nothing comparable in Israeli politics, ever.

You will be hated for deviating from “conventional opinion”, but you will not yet be under full firepower. As long as you just point out flaws in the Left/Islam alliance’s ideology, but offer no practical steps to halt their onslaught, you will not experience much more than name-calling. Such is the case of LGF and GoV: called “Nazis” and “fascists” all over the Leftist blogosphere, but not much else. But organize something real like a Counterjihad Europa conference, even if it’s only the beginning of the beginning of fighting back, and then the Marxist/Muslim proverbial guns will come blazing. I find it very hard to believe that the popping up of the Vlaams Belang affair right at the time of the Counterjihad Europa conference was a mere coincidence. If I believed that, I could just as well believe the reaction toward Rabbi Kahane was something commonplace.

Confinement to “cyberwarfare” (looking to me now as much an oxymoron as is “Palestinian Authority”), all the more so under posting constraints as on LGF first and now also on GoV, is as sensible and rational as a beggar exercising gastronomic discretion. Where would the world be now if the Internet had existed in Winston Churchill’s time and Churchill had confined himself to it, just spreading his ideas through it and little more than that? Unless we snap out of this virtual fixation and insistence on “not lowering ourselves to the level of the enemy”, we will be modern Rodrigos. We will be doomed to hearing the news of invading hordes approaching year by year, until it is too late.

I will admit my own big mistake: the Global View of the conflict I espoused. It is expressed here in one of the blog categories: “Alliances: forging a united front against the threat of Islam”. That was a mistake. Like democracy, the management of this war is impossible when scaled too large. Though it is always good for the participants to help each other—I stand with Serbia, Ethiopia and Thailand as before—the fact is each local area of this war will have to concentrate on its own part. Localization, the key to bypassing the treacherous governments of our age, is also the key to stemming the tide of Islamization in each particular part of the world. As I learned on Gates of Vienna: similarities not denied, the situation in, say, Thailand is not identical to that of Israel. To each part its best solutions.

Localization ultimately means getting out of your global newsroom (also known as the Internet) and starting a thousand local versions of Counterjihad Europa. And it means that, in those meetings, any idea is open to discussion. Not acceptance, I didn’t say “acceptance”—discussion. Because when any idea, however odious-sounding it may be, is up for discussion, then sooner or later the participants of the discussion will hit upon a real, workable solution. And that, after all that is said and done, is what we are all clamoring for.

Our survival is at stake. Whether the survival of our ways of life, or our physical survival, we cannot gamble, nor can we put gentlemanly constraints on ourselves. The survivalist turns his back on the oh-so noble but self-defeating phrase,

Beware, when fighting monsters, lest you become a monster yourself.

which only serves to hand the monsters an easy victory, a direct path to remaking the whole world in their monstrous image. Instead, the survivalist adopts the idea expressed in Midrash Tanchuma:

Just as they show you no mercy, so should you not show them any mercy.

May HaShem, the one and only true Decider of all that is taking place, give victory to His righteous speedily. May He, the King of Kings of Kings, show His strong hand as He did in the days of Egypt, and pour forth His wrath upon all those who gather against His anointed ones, against Israel. May He slaughter the evildoers until they have all repented or perished, and not one is left on the face of the earth. May He build Jerusalem, the Holy City, speedily in our days. Amen and amen.

[The blog is now officially closed. Having read this post, it should be clear it would be hypocritical of me to do otherwise.]

Racists Branded, Nazis Ignored

2007-10-31T22:53:00.000+02:00

The use of the tactic had gotten so blatant that even commenters on his own side called him on it. “Jon the Anti-Zionist Jew”, a regular poster of the vilest anti-Israel diaries on Daily Kos, had the habit of calling “racist” anyone who disagreed with his opinions—anyone who showed the slightest hint of siding with Israel.

Jon was (or still is?) extreme in his employment of that ruse, hence even his komrades (sic) no longer being able to stand it, but that tactic, of using the stigmatizing term in order to brand perceived opponents as diabolical, has been a staple of the Marxists, and in the mode of operation prescribed by Antonio Gramsci, the word “racist” is the magic wand that anathematizes any desired target.

“Racist” is what Arab members of the Israeli parliament are now calling the law banning membership in it of any citizen of Israel who has visited enemy states. A sensible law, a law which would never have been contested in the past, is now being assaulted by that curse-word, that all-powerful, all-catching, damning whisper: “Racism”. The law specifically says, “Israelis”, not “Arabs”, yet the Arab Knesset Members know full well who would be on its receiving end—“The hat burns on the thief’s head”, as we say in Israel—and they know the best way of countering it: a blackmail tactic, a ploy that appeals not to reason but to the knee-jerk reaction today’s world displays upon the word, “racism”.

Today is also the 17th anniversary of the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane, may HaShem avenge his blood. This man, the closest the nation of Israel has had to a prophet as could be after the destruction of the Temple (most of the events in Israel from 1993 to this day were foretold in his writings and speeches), was vilifed by the Israeli Left for… you guessed it: “Racism”. In 1988, when he was getting too powerful politically for comfort, the “Anti-Racist Law” was passed in order to bar him from Israeli politics. As regards world opinion, I don’t think this has helped much. Israel is now so basking in its anti-racist veneer, so much that our Dear World has given us a place of honor as the successor of South Africa. But there is something else notable about the Anti-Racist Law: it was passed by unanimous vote on part of both Left and Right in Israel. The Israeli Right was so anxious to be “with it”, so caring for its “moral purity”, that it joined hands with the Left to silence the one leader who had the only non-miraculous way of bringing lasting peace to the Jewish State. Five years later, we got the Oslo Accords, which brought to Israel the Jew-murderer Arafat and his gang from Tunis. In October 2000, we got a mini-redux of 1947 with the uprising of Arabs within our 1949 Armistice Line territories. And now, more and more of our towns are coming within rocket range. Ah, but we just had to be “Not Racists”!

Rabbi Kahane of blessed memory knew, from both the Torah and common sense, that there could be no peace for the Jewish nation in Israel if a rival nationalism were allowed to become a majority within it. The Torah says, in many places (Numbers 33:50–56 being the example I frequently quote), that the Israelites must not occupy another nation in their land, for that occupation would spell enduring trouble; but must, instead, drive out the other nations, expel anyone who does not agree with the idea that the Land of Israel is under Jewish sovereignty, under the rule of Jewish Law. The Beneš Decree, by which all the Germans of the Sudetenland were expelled in 1945, is a historical example of the necessity of insisting on national sovereignty: the region that served as the catalyst for World War II has not been on the news ever since the execution of that decree. But any discussion of expulsion or deportation gets you the boot not just from Daily Kos, but now even from ostensibly right-wing sites like Little Green Footballs and Hot Air. Because, as we all know, it’s (drum roll, please) “racist”.

And there is the word, “Nazi”, which is the same, just on steroids. The right-wing blogosphere is, in part, awash in Nazimania—in the craze of proving how the Counter-Jihad movement in Europe is being hijacked by Nazis. Yes, Nazis, as if this were still the 1930’s in a literal sense! You see, we’re now so done, so finished with the job of neutralizing the Leftists and repulsing the Muslims that we can now concentrate on the Next Big Thing™: ghosts from the past. The impulsive boss of LGF and his like-minded commenters (because the others have all been banned) did not stop to think whether the branding of certain European parties as “racist” and “white supremacist” and even “Nazi” might, just might, have something to do with the Left-Wing Spin Machine. You know, the same propaganda mill that brands LGF itself as a “fascist, racist, hate-mongering site”, and which is behind the move to criminalize all criticism of Islam as “racism”, “Western imperialism” and “Islamophobia”. So now the budding anti-Islamization movement in Europe, in the continent that is in a far worse state than the USA (and in many ways Israel too), has to contend not only with the concerted effort of the Gramscian Left and the Islamic colonialist enemy, but with smears from the American Right as well. Great, just great.

“Are there no Neo-Nazis? Are there still no Ku Klux Klan members? Are there no people in real life behind the screen names you see on Stormfront?” Yes to all, there are all those. But in this fiesta of finding Nazis everywhere, the sense of proportion has been lost: the preference of focusing on classical racists and Jew-haters rather than on the new imperialists and anti-Zionists may be compelling, especially when propped up by a treasonous media and academe managed entirely by people who have been brought up on the Marxist “dialectic”, but it is wrong. Plainly wrong. It’s about as wrong as worrying about “freedoms curtailed by wiretapping and other measures” while turning a blind eye to the real loss of freedom resultant of Politically Correct and pro-Islamic pressure and legislation (or put it this way: How many of those “brave, courageous” artists who’ve displayed unflattering depictions of Jesus are willing to do as Lars Vilks, of Modoggies fame, has done?). Yes, there are some of the scum from the 1930’s, or re-enactors of them, around, but the danger from them is by far eclipsed by the menace of today’s true heirs of the Nazis and their equally nefarious enablers: the Muslims and the Marxists, respectively.

You worry about the Jews of Europe? The Diaspora is on the way out. So our prophets foretold us. Even those of the USA are not guaranteed to stay there for long. In the meantime, there is a state full of Jews on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, surrounded by those who follow the same religion as Hitler’s ally, Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the religion founded by the one who ordered a mass grave dug and the Jews of the town murdered and thrown into it, thus predating the Einsatzgruppen by about 1,300 years. Hitler was on the march to the British-ruled Land of Israel; he was stopped at Al-Alamein, but no matter, the Muslims are perfectly intent on finishing what he failed to complete (God forbid). All aided and abetted, by the way, by the European Union.

The European Union. That part of the Caliphate-in-the-making, with its open borders and unrestricted immigration policies serving as an irresistible honey-pot for Muslims from all over the world. Marching, under the regime of Multiculturalism, to the abyss of Islamization, of full subsumption into the House of Islam, day after day. And do you know what would fall to the Muslims if Europe fell to them? Not just lands and culture, which would be a tragic loss in itself (remember the Bamiyan Buddhas? The treasures of Florence could meet the same fate), but also technology, and worse, weaponry. We are rightly worried about the prospect of Iran making nuclear weapons, but the threat of the whole European arsenal (or even the arsenal of just one European state is bad enough) falling into the Muslims’ hand like a ripe fruit has to take a back seat to ideological purity, to doing a search-and-destroy of Nazis within the Counter-Jihad Movement. Real smart, people.

Israel gained nothing for its “anti-racist” push to ostracize Rabbi Kahane. The non-Muslim resistance to the Islamic invasion can only stand to lose from taking the Leftist bait. One of our sages was once cursed by a witch, and then replied to her, “Go away; your words have no power over me, for to God alone is the power”. This magic word, “racism”, needs to be treated like the empty curse it is, not given such great consideration. As Baron Bodissey concludes, in the moral of a story:

Ladies and gentlemen, the handcuffs labeling you as “racists”, “Nazis”, and “Islamophobes” are simple to remove and discard.

The door of the PC Multicultural bus unlocks easily, and invites you to jump off and escape.

“In addition”, said Cato the Youngster, “I think the Muslims must be expelled”.

Monday Night Megalinkfest

2007-10-29T22:39:00.000+02:00

In the wake of this transition period (more about that in a later post, HaShem willing), here is a linkfest to bridge a possible gap until my new offerings come up.

Dhimmi Watch: an example of the platform-neutrality of the resistance to Islam: Not a dime’s worth of difference…, from October 27, 2007.

Little Green Footballs: an Islamic youth leader issues a ~~niqab~~veiled threat to Australia should relations of the police with the Muslims not improve: Aussie Islamic Leader: The Violence Will Continue Until Relations Improve, from October 28, 2007.

Oleh Musings: Michael collects the news report to form a clear picture of what the goals of the “Palestinians” are (not that the Leftists are going to accept this information, for it would mean giving up their cause celebré, a cause far more important than trivialities like Tibet or Darfur): And the Campaign Continues…, from October 25, 2007.

Sultan Knish on the the issue of European resistance to Islam, which is now making the waves on the right-wing blogosphere: Brussels Journal, Altas and LGF: Dealing with the Devil, from October 29, 2007.

Woman Honor Thyself: Angel outlines most brilliantly why the term, “hate speech” is the first step on the road to the PC straitjacket: You say “Hate Speech”, I say “Truth”, from October 22, 2007.

Atlas Shrugs: Pamela (who was the other main actor besides Charles Johnson in the beginning of this spat) defends the European parties resisting Islam: Nazis? By Their Fruits We Shall Know them.......And so we know them, from October 28, 2007.

For Zion’s Sake: Bar Kochba comments on the Israeli Arabs’ (including Knesset Members. “Knesset Members?! How can there be non-Jewish Knesset Members?! Israel is an apartheid state!” /moonbat) latest round of treason: Treason Most Foul, from October 28, 2007. As in Europe, as in the USA, as in any country that cares about its national cohesion, so too Israel needs to deport, expel all those who can’t abide by its national sovereignty.

Israel Matzav: Carl brings a piece of news that dovetails perfectly with the Australian Islamic youth leader’s threat: ‘Palestinians’ threaten war again, from October 29, 2007, where the Pretendestinian leader Abu Ala says Israel can expect war if it does not cave in to the blackmail of Annapolis. Muslims operate the same ways everywhere. So much for seeing the Israel/“Palestine” conflict as a “nationalistic land dispute”.

Elder of Ziyon: the Egyptians claim that Israel is treating the “Palestinians” like the Jews were in the Holocaust that never happened: Egyptian newspaper compares Israeli prison—and Gaza—to Auschwitz, from October 26, 2007. This ties in to an article on Countercurrents (linked below).

Media Backspin: an argument I’ve often made is now repeated by Michael Medved: A World Without—Pakistan?, from October 29, 2007. Kudos to Medved, who follows up on an honorable article of his I linked to in January exposing the fraud of the “Palestinian nation”.

Kafir Canada: a new blog, with the post Islam is Peace in Word, but…in Deed?, from October 28, 2007. All are agreed that the picture on the top of this post needs to go viral:

The words and the reality. Click image to view full size.

Brussels Journal: Paul Belien has his word on the recent Nazimania that has gripped LGF: Are We All Nazis Now?, from October 27, 2007.

Vanishing American: on how the fear of being called “racist” is cowing even those on the Right against making a strong stand for national interests: PC everywhere, from October 26, 2007.

Gates of Vienna: Danish commenter Kepiblanc gives a clear and rant-free opinion the resistance to Islam in Europe: Kepiblanc Weighs In, from October 28, 2007. Down in the comments are some of mine too, detailing why I changed my mind about the whole issue, and why I left LGF.

Thus from our side (infighting notwithstanding). And now for some from the enemy (the real enemy), to serve as a recording:

Common Dreams: Michael Birmingham complains that the world has been silent on the massacre of the “Palestinians” by the Lebanese Army at Nahr Al Bared: What Happened in Nahr Al Bared?, from October 25, 2007. Here’s a hint, Michael: the silence is because this event is of no use in bashing Israel, which is the entire raison d’être behind the Left’s support of the “Palestinians”. Maybe you should give Leftism a rethink, hmmm?

Common Dreams: Jared Genser and Meghan Barron indulge in typical Leftist hypocrisy: America Must Do More to End Myanmar Misery, from October 26, 2007. America must do more to end Myanmar misery?! The same America whose “imperialist meddling” the Left blames for nearly all the world’s troubles?! This is a contender for the Brass Chutzpah Award Winner.

Countercurrents: no-holds-barred “Jews are Nazis” inversion from Khalid Amayreh: Gaza: The Auschwitz Of Our Time, from October 26, 2007. The writer should be a high-priority candidate for being brought to stand trial by the future Sanhedrin, speedily in our days, amen.

Daily Kos: Lefty Coaster isn’t as outspoken, but the message is pretty much on the same vein: Israel Tightens it’s Economic Noose on 1.5 Million Gazans, from October 28, 2007 (yes, the apostrophe on the possessive pronoun is in the original). Rockets on Israel every day? No matter: cutting off fuel to Gaza is a war crime (this from the same types who say Israel isn’t at war but maintaining an occupation). “Palestinians” ought to be independent from Israeli fuel and electricity, if it’s all about their “self-determination”? Who cares—Israel is engaging in collective punishment. Hamas democratically elected (as the anti-Israel posters on DKos like to mention), therefore its positions reflect the will of all those who elect it, thus making them deserving of collective punishment? I’d probably be called a Nazi (with or without “Zio-” before it) for making that suggestion.

Tha… That’s all, folks. And now to the drawing board. ’Till next time, with God’s help!

Standing for Nationalism

2007-10-26T01:15:00.000+02:00

The right-wing blogosphere is now awash in the issue of racialism and ties to Nazi and Nazi-like movements, the greatest salvo being the LGF thread about Vlaams Belang and the Swedish Democrats. By sheer coincidence (or maybe not; an Orthodox Jew ought to believe there is no coincidence, only HaShem’s hand), this started just a few days after my spat with the racialists on Gates of Vienna. I didn’t have anything to do with the LGF thread; it was part of Charles’ reaction to a post on Atlas Shrugs. But this topic looks like staying on for a few weeks at the very least.

On that last LGF thread, in a discussion with Fjordman, I tried to outline both the agreements and disagreements I had with the European branch of the resistance to Islamization. I wrote (comment #257):

[…] Let me try to draw a few common, undisputed arguments:

Islam is a mortal threat to all non-Muslim host states.

National sovereignty should be defended from the encroachment of superstates.

The governments are no longer in any synchrony with the people they are supposed to represent.

Uncontrolled immigration is disastrous and should be done away with.

To contrast, the disagreements:

The role of race in shaping human cultural differences.

The idea that each culture fits its race of origin best.

It appears to me that the greatest agreement we have (in general, and between Fjordman and me in particular) is #2: national sovereignty is a must, and superstates like the European Union are to be fought until they are toppled (or nipped in the bud if they are in their formative stages). I may disagree with the guys of The Brussels Journal on some or even many things, but I agree 100% with their overarching goal: the protection of the sovereignty of individual European nations from the absorption into the EUSSR Borg. I can identify with that goal fully, because I am a doctrinaire, self-conscious nationalist. And, because my nationalism, Jewish nationalism, also known as Zionism, isn’t entangled with the consideration of race as in the European case, I can offer a defense of nationalism against the Leftist device of conflating it with racism.

The Left is internationalist by doctrine; John Lennon’s “Imagine no countries” is a succinct description of Marxist sentiment. The phrase, “rootless cosmopolitan”, which Stalin (long may he roast in hell) used to depict the Jews of the USSR, is ironically an accurate depiction of what the Marxists wish for all humans to be: citizens of the world, shorn of all nationalistic ties.

It was the main point of contention between Trotsky and Stalin, as it is now among Leftists, even on officially non-Marxist sites like Daily Kos, to what extent the reality of human nationalism should be cut slack. Trotsky wanted to export the Russian Revolution to outside Russia, while Stalin insisted Russia wait with it until more favorable times. In like manner, on one of the Daily Kos Israel/“Palestine” threads, one of the commenters expressed the wish humanity would “grow out of artificial distinctions such as ‘Israelis’ and ‘Palestinians’ and see ‘human’ as their only identity”; to which another commenter grudgingly agreed, but then said humanity was not ready for that yet, so the next best thing was to support “justice for all indigenous peoples” in the meantime. They were both agreed that the final goal, their Messianic vision for the End of Days, was a world without states, countries and national divisions.

So, regardless of the dispute between Trotsky and Stalin as to the tempo, the Marxists have always had their sights on nationalism, and striven to discredit it. They received their golden, unrepeatable chance to do so in the aftermath of World War II, and they did not fail to seize on it: from 1945 to this day, the Marxists (and other Leftists influenced by them—an increasing number since the 1960’s) have not ceased to use Nazism and World War II as “proof” that nationalism is by necessity a force for evil.

Today, however, it is important to defend nationalism, because it is very much the only stop-gap against the encroachment of superstates, whether nanny-state socialist like the European Union or Islamofascist like the planned Caliphate; superstates which, by nature, would spell the death of civil liberties to all those who fall under their jurisdiction. It is necessary, first of all, to clear nationalism’s name from the Marxists’ post-WWII narrative, and then to show how nationalism, when properly done, is the best fit for the human race.

“Nazi” is short for “National-Socialist German Workers’ Party”, a name containing two red herrings one after the other. The “Socialist” part was a relatively standard socialism for the 1930’s, a far cry from Communism: Hitler and FDR had similar programs for responding to the Great Depression. But my subject is nationalism, and here the inaccuracy is of a different nature: not that the Nazi Party’s platform was not nationalistic, but that it went far beyond nationalism. In fact, it went beyond mere racism as well. For all my loathing of the Stormfronters and other such racialists in Europe, they differ from the Nazis in one crucial aspect: their stated platform is only “Defending White Europe from the wave of non-white immigration”, while the Nazis’ goal was to make the Herrenvolk the masters of the whole world. What made Nazism such a force for evil, then, was imperialism. Mere nationalism, even mere racism, would never have driven Germany to opening a world war and exterminating millions (Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and more). The idea of entitlement to the whole world was the vital ingredient here. And this—a point that cannot be stressed enough—is something Nazism has in common with the non-nationalist ideologies of both Communism and Islam. Answer to Leftist anti-nationalists: Nazism was imperialism; non-imperialist nationalism is clean of the atrocities Nazi Germany committed.

And now to the explanation why nationalism is the best fit, or perhaps I should say, as it is said regarding democracy, the least bad model for human political organization. The explanation is as follows: human differences become less manageable the more individuals are involved, until there is a level at which the gaps can no longer be bridged; based on history and current events, the nation is the highest level where the differences can still be managed.

Without shared values there can be no cohesive society. That sounds obvious, but so many unifying paradigms have been tried that give no sustainable shared values. For example, the patriotic ideal, according to which two different nations can be united by virtue of sharing history on the same land. This has failed everywhere: Yugoslavia, Rwanda and now Iraq, to name just three examples. It is failing in Lebanon as we speak, and the One-State Solution proposed for the Israel/“Palestine” would, should it ever be implemented, fare just as disastrously (which is why I insist on treating anyone who advocates the Binational Solution as if he had called for a Second Holocaust). In a past post, I cited Belgium as the only example I could find of the success of the patriotic ideal, but since then the secessionist strife between the Flems and the Walloons of Belgium has come to the fore, crossing off Belgium as a success story as well. In all the failed examples, the differences were too great to be reconciled, so that, as soon as the temporary unifying factor vanished (for example, the iron-fisted ruler in the case of Yugoslavia and Iraq), there was nothing to hold the factions any longer. True nations are capable of holding together without such a factor.

Granted, there were supra-national organizations long before the current superstates. The Catholic Church was the one for Western Europe, as it still is for millions of Catholic Christians worldwide. However, the limits of such supra-national structures in motivating political actions have been apparent since the early days; already in 1096, when the pope called for the first crusade, he had to appeal to nationalism (“the acts of God through the Franks”) in order to rally the necessary troops. Organizations like the Catholic Church provide for ideological unity and inspiration, and the Islamic aspiration of the Caliphate shows how potent they can be, but they cannot hold diverse identities together politically. Nations are in enough danger of civil strife themselves, but the reality of national identity means this is not inevitable; whereas Christian Europe and the Islamic Caliphate in the Middle Ages were destined to break up into individual, often warring, states from Day One.

In the modern world there is a possibility for a supra-national state to hold together. The method of doing so was covered most extensively, I think, by George Orwell, especially in his book 1984. The short of it: only by totalitarian rule can a superstate be sustained, be prevented from breaking up into its individual nation-states. Only through the crushing of civil liberties can the consequences of such great differences be contained. Superstates, then, are anti-liberal (the “liberal” part being in the classical sense) by their very nature. Barring a basic change in how humans think, internationalism is a pipe-dream, all attempts at its implementation necessary leading to disaster, such as the 100,000,000 deaths that Marxism has so far left in its wake.

With my talk of human nature, I tread into religious territory. I write from the Torah-based point of view now, so non-religious readers might wish to skip this paragraph. It would seem that only God can truly bring an age of internationalism. That is true, strictly speaking, but we have it on the authority of HaShem’s prophets that He will not do so. Look at all the prophecies regarding the End of Days, i.e. the Messianic Age, and you will see a vision of peace, plenty and brotherhood of man, but not the end of human nationalities. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation”, says the prophet Isaiah (2:4)—no more war between nations, true, but that means there will be nations! For the Bible, being the only authoritative source on human nature, tells us, in its first chapters, how humanity could not hold on to its pristine state of being unified, without national divisions. It does not matter if you take the first eleven chapters of Genesis literally or allegorically (I do the latter); the message about humanity is the same: human beings are too weak to rise above such divisions. Therefore HaShem, in His great favor, gave indulgence to nationalism, and made it an eternal institute for mankind. HaShem will only end wars between the nations (speedily in our days, amen), not the nations themselves. When the Marxists envision an End of Days without nations, they are being, how shall we put it, plus royalist que le roi. And the results, as we all know, have been disastrous.

So I, as a Jew, am totally unfazed by the argument that the Jews were victims of nationalism in 1939–45. This argument only serves as a starting-point for the main thrust: that Zionism, Jewish nationalism, is as equally detrimental to the Jewish people (with the standard “Jews are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them” soon to follow). Nice try, but no: Nazism is not exclusively a member of the set, “nationalism”; it belongs to another set in addition, called “imperialism”, which is what made it so destructive a force. Jewish nationalism is both Biblically-derived and sound from a general human, non-religious point of view. And the struggle of Israel against the Muslim sedition in its midst is one of the best demonstrations of why nationalism must be defended.

The Muslims of Israel (as well as a few non-Muslim Arab useful idiot allies of theirs) demonstrate excellently why nationalism is required for cohesion. One might point out the divisions among the Jews (secular, Modern Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox; in the past the racial divisions were also of importance, but not so now, despite the attempts of Leftists to describe it so), but even in the thick of the sharpest divisions, there has always stayed the constant of the idea of Ha-Am Ha-Yehudi—the Jewish nation; such that, as we saw during the Lebanon War of summer 2006, times of trouble could bring all the factions to set aside their differences. The Muslims of Israel, in contrast, have never been part of this unity. Fear had them lying low in the first decades of the state of Israel, but when that fear dissipated, their typical Muslim insolence surfaced. Not only do they not share the nationality (which is true for non-Muslims in Israel like the Druzes, who do not display those seditious tendency, except for a few who have been Leftoxicated into the Post-Colonial paradigm), they have an active, conscious nationalism of their own, a nationalism rivaling the Jewish one. (A supra-nationalism, to be more accurate—the idea of the Islamic ummah.) There cannot be lasting peace inside a state under such a state of affairs.

So too in Europe, the accumulation of rival nationalisms under the same roof is not making for a peaceful existence. Note that this has little to do with race; this has to do, foremostly, with an uncontrolled flood of immigration that is not beset by any demands upon the immigrants to make steps toward naturalization. In the past, it was unheard of that an immigrant would permanently reside in the host country without learning the language. Nowadays, a call for insisting that Mexicans immigrating to the USA (whether legally or not) speak English earns you the worn-out epithet, “racist” from the self-righteous Leftist establishment. Between today’s extremes of not making any demands upon immigrants and the idea that only people of a particular race can be real citizens, in the past there was the middle road of accepting anyone but on condition that they assimilate themselves to the host culture. This necessarily cut down on immigration, for only those who were serious about it immigrated. And most importantly, it preserved the national cohesion of the state. No “nations inside a nation, rivaling the host nation”—immigrants had to adapt. The Hispanic immigrant did not have to cease speaking Spanish among his family, but he did have to learn English, and totally absent was the situation that he would ask others to speak Spanish to accommodate him. He would find immigration difficult at first, as all immigrants do, but afterward he, or if not he then his children, would be an integral part of the fabric of the American nation. That was until recently, until it became “culturally imperialist” to make such demands of immigrants.

The Left will never be pleased by anything short of its internationalistic goal. In the meantime, all the efforts to placate the demands of Political Correctness are taking their toll on states worldwide. People of all nations worldwide need to realize that the phasing out of nationalism and the dropping of all national demands can have only two possible results: civil war or superstate tyranny. Two evils to choose from. Nationalism is the only way out, because the national level is the highest in which the differences between individuals can still be managed. The Leftist Big Lie that nationalism was the cause of World War II and its atrocities must be demolished, in order to make room for the truth that nationalism is today’s self-defense measure against both anarchy and totalitarian rule. All who stand for civil liberties must demand national homogeneity; a homogeneity that does not mean ending all immigration and deporting all immigrants, only enforcing the demand that immigrants accommodate themselves to the host state, and deporting all those who refuse to do so.

May peace both within nations and between them arrive soon, amen.

Non-Interventionism: A Litmus Test

2007-10-22T22:50:00.000+02:00

Trawling lately between the Leftscum (the PC, dhimmi Marxists) and the Rightscum (the racialists; see previous post), I stumbled upon a post on Israellycool where the endorsement of paleoconservative Ron Paul (a phenomenon all its own; henceforth “Rompaul”, as I write his name out on LGF) on Stormfront is duly noted. The post attracted comments from a few Rompaulians. First:

FatDrunkAndStupid Says:

Stormfront is a National Socialist website. Ron Paul is a libertarian- about as far away from National Socialism as you can get. They support Paul because he believes in a non-interventionist foreign policy, and indirectly, that position has the effect of ending US subsidies to Israel (a key sticking point to the stormfront folks). But Ron also supports ending the handouts to Egypt, The House of Saud, and Jordan too. His position comes from principle, not hate. When Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in the early 80’s, Paul was one of the few US Congressmen who refused to denounce them. I suggest you look a little deeper in to Ron Paul’s positions before writing him off. Ending the War in Iraq, Ending the War on Drugs, Abolishing the Income Tax, Repealing he Patriot Act, Restoring Civil Liberties… are these idiotic positions? [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

And second:

DetainThis Says:

Indeed. The man’s principled voting, writing, and speaking records easily undercut the haters’ fraudulent smears. His positions regarding other Middle Eastern states and the Israel-Osirik vote are especially deflating for those who’d paint him anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, or even un-American.

I don’t know about “FatDrunkAndStupid”, but “DetainThis” doesn’t sound very convincing to me, once I have taken a peek at his blog, which features the worst of both New (Leftist, anti-Zionist) and Classical anti-Semitism in its sidebar links. Rompaul may or may not be just a simple libertarian, but the supporters he attracts are… well… you get the whole lovely spectrum from Stormfronters to 9/11 Troofers.

But this post is about the question of interventionism. The argument is often made that US citizens have the full right to question support of Israel because the US pays for that support, in both real and figurative cash (dollars in foreign aid in the former sense, “the hatred of the Arab and Muslim worlds” in the latter). The fact that Israel itself pays a heavy price for US aid after every time it gets it, in the form of pressure toward negotiations with and land concessions with the Pretendestinians, is rarely mentioned. For all the talk of “unrestrained Israeli aggression”, Israel’s hand has, beginning from 1956, been severely held down by Washington’s orders. So sometimes I just ask myself if non-interventionism might not be a good thing. But then I remember that, before I make a rushed statement, some testing against reality needs to be done. Which is the point of this post.

Non-interventionists must be asked how far they are willing to go in that. Far too many self-styled “non-interventionists” expose their dishonesty by limiting their talk to “stopping all aid to Israel”, while calling for pressing Israel to the negotiations table. In fact, such faux-non-interventionists call for cutting off US aid to Israel as a means of blackmail, as a way of forcing Israel to make concessions to that fictive nation behind which the total Islamic jihad against the very existence of the Jewish State is waged. Those are not non-interventionists by any stretch of imagination; they’re nothing but modern Chamberlains doing a Munich on Israel in order to secure their sitting organs, operating out of the erroneous conception that Islamic terrorism gets all or most of its fuel from the issue of “Palestine”. The future Sanhedrin will no doubt find some of the more high-profile of such “non-interventionists” to be ideal candidates for trial and execution. Speedily in our days, amen.

Now what the commenter “FatDrunkAndStupid” says, that Rompaul refused to denounce Israel’s bombing of Osirak, is more like it. But the blowing up of a nuclear reactor, however much it makes the news, isn’t stretching it as far as non-interventionism goes. The big money challenge should be the following:

In exchange for cutting on aid, would you be willing that the US turn a blind eye when the Jewish State expels all the Muslims within its Biblically-defined borders?

You wanted a litmus test for non-interventionism? Here is a real litmus test for you!

If the answer consists of just one word of the type, “That’d endanger US citizens and interests”, then the prospective non-interventionist has failed the test. Remember, the non-interventionist platform is about giving full focus to the situation at home. A non-interventionist can be as equally keen as an interventionist on tackling the problem of Islam and terrorism on US soil; non-interventionism just means he doesn’t propose any action abroad in order to improve the situation at home. That means no invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, and no aid to any Middle Eastern country—neither Israel nor Egypt nor oil-rich Saudi Arabia—but that also means no stepping into the regional war after it has broken out. It means, then, no calls upon Israel to agree to a UN-brokered ceasefire before Hizbullah has been eradicated, and no threats of sanctions on the Jewish State to prevent it from carrying out the only workable plan for permanent peace, namely the expulsion of all the Muslims from within it.

If the non-interventionist says, “I couldn’t care less what Israel does in its own playground”, then we have a real non-interventionist before us, who should be congratulated for the consistency of his views.

I don’t think Rompaul would ever be presented with that question, and he’s out of the race, anyhow. But this isn’t about Rompaul. It’s about the recurrent theme of Jewish existence today, which is: discerning between friend and foe. As I put it in another form before: To rally support for Israel is deluxe; we can be perfectly content with dissuading support for our enemies. May God and the future Sanhedrin take care soon of all those who oppose the ancient Jewish dream, whether they be the One-State exterminationists or the Two-State appeasers.

Crisis du mois

2007-10-22T18:33:00.000+02:00

I’m at a loss for words. No, not really, only as a figure of speech.

What’s this all about? It’s about:

The emasculation of LGF:

Comments that advocate violence will be cause for immediate banning with no appeal.

From the commenting rules, retrieved on October 21, 2007.

Charles Johnson has had to contend with visits from the FBI in the past. And it does not do his reputation any good that every comment on his site is automatically ascribed to his thoughts. That said, banning all calls for violence effectively means LGF is nothing but a news aggregator and “online get-together” (oxymoron, I know…) forum.

LGF is one of the best at what it does, if not the best, and Charles deserves all praise and support for his Herculean efforts. But as there is no operative solution to this world war that does not involve some measure of violence, this means I just lost one of the major venues for my ideas and suggestions. I got a comment deleted only once. It was a comment calling for expulsion of all the Muslims, typically. I thought, “If it doesn’t call for genocide then it’s OK”. Charles thought it could damage his reputation. He did as he saw fit, and I lost all the feeling of security I’d previously had posting on LGF. And now this new rule stamps the seal on the affair. I can’t use LGF as anything more than a dump for the Leftreasonous links I find.

The coming of the Stormfronters:

I used to loudly shush defeatists who said, “Europe is doomed”. Now I think Europe is doomed myself—not because I think the Muslim colonialist invaders can’t be repulsed (which is what the defeatists think), but because it seems clearer and clearer to me every day that the only ones with the guts to stand up to them are the racialists, people for whom the fight against Islam is only part of the general battlefield over the “racial purity” of Europe. People who get their kicks out of bringing “scientific studies” showing how “blacks have a lower average IQ than whites”, which is just an intellectual-sounding, sophisticated way of saying, “N*****s are stoopid”.

You can see all the gory details on a Gates of Vienna thread I participated in. I got called “Politically Correct” and “part of the Left” for voicing my idea that race is a chimera, a red herring, a maintained illusion, and that culture has everything to do with it.

And very much related:

Arguing for “innateness” by Jews as well:

See comment #353 on an LGF open thread for October 21, 2007. A succinct excerpt:

[…] In next week's portion in Genesis, Abraham sends his servant Eliezer to find a wife for Isaac. The rabbis ask why he did not take a wife for his son from the surrounding Cananite tribes. After all, the Cananites were idol worshipers and Abraham's cousins back in Haran were also idol worshipers. The rabbis answer that while both were idol worshipers, Abraham's family had an innate goodness that was not present in the Cananites and could not be taught.

I expressed my disgust in a later comment (#390), and Carl replied (#396). Thanks, Carl, though I find the reply unsatisfying. It’s nothing personal against Carl, who was just quoting others. It all has to do with the same problem I have with the Stormfronters: I consider policies derived from unchangeable, inborn traits to be anathema. As I said in my comment: If you didn’t exert an effort in it, then it’s worth nothing.

Let’s take it to science fiction for a slightly more neutral ground. Star Wars: the force-sensitives are so by genetics. If you weren’t born to the right parents, all the efforts at training in the use of the Force won’t be of any good. Let me put it bluntly: I detest, despite, loathe, abhor, revile (etc.) this idea.

“Looks like there’s still some of the old 1990’s hippie you were left in you.” “God didn’t make a politically correct world. Lodge your complaints with Him if you don’t like the way things are.” Yada yada, blah blah and so on ad nauseum. My soul is not for sale, folks. If this belief of mine, that unmerited traits should be disregarded as much as possible while merited achievements should be rewarded as richly as possible, has stayed a constant after all those years, then the verdict is final: it’s an inseparable part of me. I view everything through a cultural lens as much as is feasible, and nurture as the major player in all affairs. I hate the Muslims intensely, and call for the mass expulsion of them from within and near every non-Muslim state they reside, not because I think they’re inherently, unchangeably evil, but because they are nurtured by their religion to institute their rule over the whole world, blowing stuff and people (God forbid) up in the process.

I will not cave in to either extreme of multiculturalist Political Correctness or racialist misoxeny. As for Judaism, I already wrote that, far from the misconceived image of it as being a “racist ideology” (advanced so often by the “reverse”-racist Leftscum with their Khazaria Hypothesis, no less), Judaism was the first supraracial ideology in a world that, back then, was racialist to the core. So where is the crisis here? It is in the realization that, between the rock of multiculturalism and the hard place of racialism, my niche has been narrowed. I can expect more and more accusations of heterodoxy now.

Let Europe (Western Europe, anyway) be mired in the bifurcation fallacy of anti-white, “reverse”-racist multiculturalists vs. xenophobic, “scientific-study”-quoting racialists. Let Western Europe choose which of two putrid swamps—life under Islamic fascism, or life under the sway of decisions made around genetics, bodily fluids and kindred things—it wants to drown in. Maybe that’s God’s delicious way of bringing payback for the Holocaust. I don’t want any part in this. My wish and vision is that the Jewish nation (and HaShem willing, the American as well, for they are a malchut shel chesed, a kingdom of grace) will carry the torch of the good fight, the fight for culture, for the good lifestyle, for the elevation of man above both the stunting mindset of “Nothing can be said to be better than the other, not even by merit” and the unjust one of “My father was better than your father, therefore I’m better than you, and there’s no changing that”.

Above all, I call for honesty. When you want to say, “Jews control all world affairs”, say that, don’t write an intellectually-sounding book called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. When you want to say, “N*****s are stoopid”, say so, don’t go citing “scientific studies showing how blacks have a lower IQ on average than whites”. We are all biased, therefore state your biases. State forthrightly your position, clearly what you believe in. Life is too short to treat it all like a poem to be analyzed, with hidden meanings to be figured out.

May HaShem be with all the righteous of the world until the end of days. Amen.

Absurd!

2007-10-21T16:13:00.000+02:00

The idea of the “Palestinian nation” is inseparable from the plan to eliminate the Jewish State (God forbid). It is therefore not possible to be both pro-Israel and pro-“Palestine” at the same time, even though many of those who claim to be so are just deceived, not malicious.

The name, “Palestine” was given by the Roman emperor Hadrian, in order to sever the connection of the Jews with their land. His empire is now nothing but a lengthy chapter in the page of time, and he who understands will understand.

Response to “Clockwork Zionists” (Pantland, ep. 2)

2007-10-10T08:37:00.000+02:00

Response to Clockwork Zionists, by Walton Pantland (yes, he of the first response).

I can write about whatever I like - things that interest me, and that I think are important - and no one pays much attention.

Put the words 'Israel' or 'Zion' into the title, and my stats shoot up as defenders of Israel gather to call me an anti-Semite and a neo-Nazi.

I don’t know jack about your site stats, but I don’t single you out for responses. Back when Daily Kos still had new arguments to make against Israel, there were times you could expect a response to them on my blog every day. My goal is to defend Zionism; to expect attacks to go unresponded (just like the state of Israel is expected to take every Kassam rocket lying down) is unreasonable.

So, for the record, and despite claims to the contrary:

I am not advocating genocide against the Jews.

I am not calling for Jews in the Middle East to be displaced or killed.

Few and far between (still…) are left-wingers who openly call for those things. However, as I already said to Pantland in his comments, the demands they make of Israel cannot lead to any other result.

It looks to me as if the challenge I have presented, to advocates of the Binational Solution in general, is being ignored once again. To remind you what the challenge is: To bring a credible binational proposal in which it is guaranteed that the result will not be disastrous. One-Staters have talked plenty of how both the status quo and the Two-State Solution are no good, but they have yet to offer a one-state solution with which we Israeli Jews could even begin to feel comfortable with. They support the One-State Solution with idealistic arguments (“The only possible way to restore justice” and the like), but they have totally neglected to address the pragmatic aspects of their proposition.

It’s almost as if they didn’t care what the final result would be.

I am simply saying that the Zionist dream hasn't worked. It hasn't made the world a safer place for Jews.

That is definitely true, if Zionism is about making the world a safer place for Jews. But that was Herzl’s (the founder of modern, secular Zionism) error: he thought that the Jews having their own state would end all Jew-hatred. The disillusionment from that dream was nailed by Golda Meir’s phrase, “Israel is the Jew among nations”. And yet, that does not mean the alternatives are any better:

Most Jews choose not to live in Israel, because Europe, the US, Canada, Australasia and many other countries have proved to be better places to live.

Of all the places you listed, you had to put Europe first?! Europe is fast becoming the most unsafe place for Jews to reside in, thanks to the growth of its Muslim population. Unlike you Leftists, the Muslims have no reservations about calling for Jewish genocide (God forbid). You Leftists just do your part in saying the Muslims are “venting their frustration over the injustice in Palestine”—justification.

The way of thinking, “Why live in Israel? The rest of the world is much safer”, is so 1970’s. Increasingly, a Jew leaving Israel finds the same threat upon his arrival at the new country.

Israel is such a mess that it has its own, home grown neo-Nazis, who are Jewish enough to be able to immigrate to Israel, […]

The result of inappropriate criteria for determining Jewishness. If that were done according to the traditional yardstick of the halachah (Jewish Law), that problem would be solved; but I’m one with Bin Laden just for proposing that, pace Pantland.

[…] not to mention the American Jewish fundamentalists who settle in places like Hebron.

And pray tell, what is the connection between “homegrown neo-Nazis” and “American Jewish fundamentalists”?! Could it be only that they are equivalent in your eyes? As far as many (and growing) Israeli Jews are concerned, the “American Jewish fundamentalists” are part and parcel of their society, something that could never be said for the non-Jewish hooligans who made the news.

Israel wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for $30 billion of US military aid, […]

Oh yes, the subtle threat: “Better go to the negotiations table before the aid is cut off and then you’re goners!” Thing is, US aid to Israel hasn’t always been a given. Back in 1948, when five Arab armies attacked our nascent state, we didn’t get any US aid; we had to make do with a few Czech leftovers from WWII and some French offerings. How did we survive?

[…] which the Israeli army uses to kill Palestinian children. Are they anti-Semites too?

Where does the link lead? To Jews sans frontieres, which bills itself “An Anti-Zionist blog”. Good start. And the post itself begins by quoting the quisling Gideon Levy. Even better. And the whole of the post is centered around the argument that, even though the “Palestinians” target Jewish children and send their own children to the line of fire, Israel is still guilty of “targeting” children. Again the extraordinary standard: “Take it all lying down, until you have defused it through talks and concessions.”

I am not happy about what is going on in Judea and Samaria. But concessions and capitulations won’t work—they merely bring more Jewish areas (and in the 1949 Armistice Line borders, no less) into rocket range. There is only one way to end the occupation and all its unfortunate results: expel all the Muslims from those areas.

I’m sure Pantland will pounce on my solution as “the height of injustice”. Clockwork. But he might want to ponder on the fact that, ever since the expulsion of the Germans from there in 1945, the Sudetenland has been out of the news. Yep, the same region that was the catalyst for a world war. You can’t argue with facts.

Come on. I really do have a deep respect for people's connection to place, and if Jews want to live in Israel-Palestine, that's fine. But respect other people's rights as well.

Ah. You have deep respect for our connection to the place. Not for the Jewish dream, the ancient dream, of having sovereignty over a state of our own on the Land of Israel.

Walton, I have news for you: we’re done living under the sovereignty of non-Jews. We have a whole history of it to know it’s not a very good deal. In the Diaspora, we had no choice (unlike the Muslims, who think themselves entitled to remake every host state in their image), but on our own land, the Land of Israel, we can’t accept anything less than sovereignty.

As for other people’s rights: No problem, but they are required to recognize the local culture as the law of the land. Would you not require cannibal immigrants to Scotland to leave their dietary habits? It’s the same here: We are not going to put up with any suicide-bombing, sedition, restrictions as to where we are allowed to live in the Land of Israel or worship, or any other sort of nonsense. This is the one and only Jewish state in the world; unlike the Muslims, we do not believe ourselves entitled to any other area of the globe, therefore all those who don’t like the fact of Israel being a Jewish state are free to choose all the rest of the world map.

But even that’s too much to ask, of course…

But at least I am in good company: Desmond Tutu is the latest to be smeared as an anti-Semite, and have a speaking invitation cancelled […]

Contrary to the misconception, I am not trigger-happy on the accusations of anti-Semitism (example: I refuse as of yet to call Richard Dawkins a Jew-hater, despite his recent “Jewish lobby” comment, for I still have no evidence that he made that statement out of a doctrinaire position), but Desmond Tutu most definitely is a Jew-hater. See item #1 on the post for October 9, 2007 by Steven Plaut.

[…] all because the Zionist Organization of America made up a quote comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and attributed it to him, and it was reported without fact checking.

JTA blundered in giving it as direct speech. They should have said, “Tutu compared Israel to Hitler and apartheid”. That distinction does not, at the end of the day, make much of a difference: Tutu is in agreement with Ahmadinejad (as is Pantland) that Israel as a Jewish State has no right to exist and is fated to disappear one day (God forbid).

OK, you don’t need to tell me: Leftist advocacy for the end of Israel as Jewish State stems from the view that a Jewish State is inherently racist; and I’m going to bring my challenge again: present a credible way of putting your proposal into action without the final result being disastrous. You may not call for Jewish genocide, but your call for the dissolution of a Jewish State comes with absolutely no means of preventing that from happening. That’s why I regard you, Tutu and all other proponents of the Binational Solution as threats, not just to Jewish sovereignty in Israel, but to Jewish life in Israel. Threats to our lives should your pressure lead to steps toward the application of the Binational Solution.

Who do you think is more credible? Tutu, or you nuts?

This isn’t about credibility. Credibility is the later stage. This is about the earlier stage, the stage called listening. Neither you nor Tutu nor Ahmadinejad are willing to even give ear, let alone respect, the essential Jewish narrative that we are not “colonial settlers” on the Land of Israel, but its true and rightful inhabitants. The Leftists do not cease talking about how “Israel treats the Palestinians as subhumans”, yet they are guilty of the inability, upon thinking about an Israeli Jew, to see anything other than a land-robber, a racist and a colonial oppressor.

Even at the best case, we only have basic needs in your eyes. The “Palestinians”, they have “dreams”—dreams of self-determination, of justice restored, of cultural significance and so on. But us Jews? All we have, in Leftist eyes, is the basic need of “living in security”. Nearly all the agreements bear that language: “A treaty that will enable the Palestinians to achieve their self-determination while not compromising on the Israeli’s need for security”. This, the denial of the ancient Jewish nationalistic dream, is Zionism Denial and is far worse than Holocaust Denial; the latter concerns only the past, while the former has impact on the present and the future.

It’s not whether Tutu is credible or not. It’s about the fact that Tutu, like you, runs roughshod over us Jews with his high-flown conceptions of “justice”.

Comparing Israel to apartheid also earns the anti-Semite slur - despite the fact that Haaretz, a mainstream Israeli paper, said the same thing in an editorial a few days ago.

An anti-Zionist quoting Haaretz to make his point—so what else is new?

I have news for you, Walton: Haaretz ceased being a mainstream Israeli paper years ago. There are two papers in Israel that can be called mainstream: Yediot Achronot and Maariv. Religious Zionist newspapers like B’Sheva are in the process of becoming mainstream, by virtue of the shifting of right-wing opinions to the center in Israel (a result of, among other things, the Kassam rockets following the evacuation of Gaza in August 2005, and the various proposal for boycotts of Israel worldwide. This ain’t South Africa here, Walton: the more you press against our state, the more the Israeli Jewish public moves to the right). Haaretz, conversely, has been undergoing a process of decline, in lockstep with the wane of concessionism starting with the Second Intifada in October 2000. Except for a decreasing number of disconnected, die-hard left-wing ideologues in Israel, all Israeli Jews regard Haaretz as an irrelevant elitistic rag. To cite Haaretz is only to strengthen the reality of its being in a world of its own, away from the pulse of the public in Israel.

What? Are they anti-Semites too? Or self-hating Jews?

Quislings. Self-hurting Jews. Jews for a Bad Cause. I don’t use the term, “self-hating Jews”, because it shifts the discussion to feelings, which are essentially undebatable. It is sufficient for me to say that Haaretz, just like the New York Times in the USA, is a seditious paper that takes the enemy side far too often, in the guise of “even-handedness” of course.

Like the boy who cried wolf, the anti-Semite slur has lost its power - which is a victory for real anti-Semites everywhere.

It’s not that crying “anti-Semite” ever had much power anyhow, but let’s leave that. A much more relevant point is that what you call “real anti-Semites” (if they are those I think you mean) are of scant significance today, while the real danger is from those who see themselves so far removed from Jew-hatred. If you think I’m going to let someone off the hook even though all his sayings and writings do nothing but serve as moral justification for the “Palestinians” to murder Jewish men, women and children (God forbid), then you’d better think again.

My blog sidebar has a heading, “Abstract”. The text under it is the condensed version of why anti-Zionism is today’s prominent form of anti-Semitism. If you understand this, you will understand all my vehemence.

ZionistYoungster (ZY) claims that my support for one state, with equal rights for all, will lead to the killing of Jews.

Not quite accurate. My claim is that a binational state would enable the influx of millions of “Palestinian refugees” (the well-known “Right of Return”), which will put them in the same position as they were in 1947: in physical proximity to start a war to wipe out all Jewish presence from the Land of Israel (God forbid). In a slightly better scenario, a binational state would enable them legislate anti-Jewish laws by democratic majority vote. Either scenario is not something we Jews are prepared to even contemplate.

But why should it?

White people weren't wiped out in South Africa after the end of apartheid.

There is a slight difference between the ANC and Hamas. The latter’s charter, in addition to their actions right now, should give you a clue. And for a graphic illustration, see my post It’s Just Like Seffrica, Trust Me.

Most Palestinians just want to live, work, study, fall in love, feed their families and enjoy life. It's only when they are prevented from doing this that they are driven into the arms of extremists.

And here we have come to the one great error that has blighted all non-Muslim states in their relations with the Muslims for the past few decades.

Hard truth: the Muslim world has not undergone the process of secularization that most of the rest of the world (especially the Christian West) has. Overwhelmingly, the Muslims take their religion seriously. Overwhelmingly, the masses of Muslims, and not just the poor and uneducated either but also the affluent and intellectuals, think the Islamic imperative, that all the world be governed by shariah law, is binding, in full force. If a secular Jew eats a sandwich in front of religious Jews fasting on Yom Kippur, he gets angry looks, calls to go away at worst. If a lapsed Muslim does the same in front of his coreligionists fasting in the month of Ramadan, he usually ends up with a lot of holes in his body shortly afterward.

There are Muslims who do not want the whole world under shariah law. They keep their opinion to themselves, for they know that if they voice it in public, they will be branded as apostates and killed, often by their own family members.

Cultural understanding demands that you not apply your cultural situation automatically to others. When thinking of the relationship of the rank and file Muslim to religion, don’t think of yours—you’ll get much closer to the truth if you think of the Muslims in analogy with how every Christian related to religion in the Middle Ages. The hard and inconvenient truth is that, for the average Muslim, his religion is a serious and absolutely binding matter. And the desire that the state be governed by shariah law isn’t extremist Islam any more than closing one’s shop on the Sabbath is extremist Judaism.

ZY also says "you won't appease Muslims at our expense".

I am not interested in appeasing anyone. I don't like right wing Islam anymore than you. But it is a symptom of the fact the Muslims are treated unjustly by Israel and the West.

There are 57 official Muslim states in the world (“official” means members of the Organization of Islamic Conference). Furthermore, Muslim immigrants in non-Muslim states, particularly in Europe, are constantly accommodated, with footbaths in universities, halal food in public schools (Jews never demanded kosher food to be prepared for them in public schools) and what not. The non-Muslim world has to suffer their temper tantrums upon the slightest provocation (a few silly cartoons). How, just how, can you talk about Muslims being “treated unjustly by Israel and the West”?!

Working for justice is not appeasement.

Whose idea of justice? I mentioned 57 Muslim states, and there are 22 Arab states; taking lands from the one and only Jewish state in the world in order to set up yet another Arab or Muslim state isn’t any kind of justice in my book.

He [refers to me. —ZY] says our 'zeal' is what exposes us as anti-Semites. Actually,the 'zeal' is to do with the fact that the injustice in Palestine is the fulcrum around which the big conflicts of our age revolve. […]

Way to go, Walton, you just blew your very argument that this isn’t about appeasement. Or how else am I to understand the bit, “[…] the injustice in Palestine is the fulcrum around which the big conflicts of our age revolve”? Implicit in that statement is that, were “the injustice in Palestine” not behind the big conflicts of our age in your eyes, then you would not display such zeal for it. As is evidenced by what follows:

[…] However important Darfur is, it's peripheral to the war on terror and the imperialist strategy of the US and it's allies.

Um… that noise? You heard that noise? It was the sound of my jaw dropping on the desk.

There’s a genocide in Darfur. A genocide, Walton, you know that? Do you care that over two million black Sudanese have been murdered there? Or is there no consideration you find worthy other than “the imperialist strategy of the US and its allies”? That’s what feeds your zeal? “The enemy of my enemy (=US imperialism) is my friend”?

I find your fine talk about “justice” a tad less convincing now.

As I said in my post, I didn't know it was a competition to see which was the worst country in the world.

I don’t see it or put it that way either. The Israel/“Palestine” conflict is a different matter altogether: it’s about whether the Jews have a right to sovereignty over a state of their own on the Land of Israel. To compare Israel’s fight against those who wish to destroy it with all manner of fascist, racist and imperialist forces is a libel.

Also, I put it to you, ZY, that you only notice the issues that interest you. If you were a supporter of the British state, you'd be noticing my 'zeal' for the destruction of Britain, and if you were a neo-Nazi, you'd call me a race traitor. Israel is far from the only thing I comment on, but it appears to be the only thing anyone wants to read about, which is why i keep coming back to it.

This reminds me of a snide question I got on the comments on Left I on the News a while back: “Zionist Youngster, do you read LeftI or do you just troll blogs looking for people bad-mouthing Zionists?” I answered: “Yes, I'm a regular reader, of this blog as well as Daily Kos, CounterPunch and many others”. My focus in undeniably on Israel and anti-Zionism, but I do not confine myself to reading only those topics on left-wing sites.

I talk of zeal in the more general sense. Darfur is again a case in point: as Eyal Rosenberg said in his parting Daily Kos diary:

Barely a word for Darfur - Israel has been in a diary on dkos over 5000 times in the past year, Darfur less then 1000. How many thousands continue to be killed there by Muslims? If I did not know better I would think that on dkos bashing Israel was more important than saving lives. But what has gone in Sudan? Only 2 million dead versus the circa 7 thousand in the I/P conflict in the same period.

Your zeal is placed exactly where it shouldn’t be: against a state that lets its enemies write screeds against it from within it, such as Jonathan Cook, writing his anti-Zionist articles from Nazareth; this while a reporter going to Darfur runs the risk of losing his head, literally, and an activist for Tibet had better not leave his armchair if he values his freedom. You take advantage of Israel being—despite all your allegations of fascism—a Western, democratic state with all the freedoms involved, including the freedom of dissent. You Leftists could have exerted your zeal on far more worthy causes, on true cases of oppression, racism and atrocity, yet you conveniently choose not to.

The state of Israel is not fascistic, not colonial and not imperialistic, therefore undeserving of being criticized as if it were such. You talked of injustice? Now here’s a miscarriage of justice if there ever was one.

And that's [my clarification that I will pray for the rise of the Sanhedrin. —ZY] supposed to make us feel better? He wants to kill Muslims lawfully, as ordered by the Sanhedrin?

My purpose was just to make clear that I do not call for assassination, which is illegal under both Jewish and international law. That’s all.

A Sanhedrin is a Jewish religious court. So we're supposed to criticise right wing Muslims who want to impose Sharia as dangerous extremists, but accept the Jewish version?

They're as bad as each other!

No, they’re not as bad as each other, if only because the Jewish religion does not call for instituting Jewish law over the whole world. The Muslims call for worldwide shariah. Judaism doesn’t require any non-Jew to convert to Judaism, let alone live under Jewish law; Islam, in contrast, has it that any part of the world not under Islamic law is the House of War, and needs to be put under Islamic law by any means possible. Also, under Islamic governance, the best a non-Muslim can hope for is the subclass status of dhimmi. In other words: apartheid. Apartheid not just in one state, but all over the world!

ZY, you come across like a Jewish Bin Laden. You and the right wing Islamists are two sides of a coin, and you're making the world more dangerous for all of us.

See above, and also: freedom from religion is not the key to making the world a safe place. The anti-religious ideology of Communism has 100,000,000 dead for its claim to infamy.

He [JP, another commenter on Pantland’s blog. —ZY] points out that Israel is racially diverse - sure it is, and deeply racist, too.

In what sense is Israel racist? In the sense that it has to employ unfortunate measures to defend itself? You Leftists always talk of the “Apartheid Wall” without mentioning that it keeps suicide-terrorists out. Yes, I know you want Israel to be “a state of all its citizens”, and indeed for all cultures to live together in one big, happy global village, but what you don’t realize is the following irony: your vision is cultural imperialism, in that it ignores the diverse identities and cultures of the world in favor of a unified, cosmopolitan vision. The desire of a nation to have a state that acts to preserve its culture and identity is not racism, however much Leftist thinking has made it fashionable to think so.

Even among Jews, the whiter you are the better. Jews of Arab origin have always been cannon fodder in the Zionist dream - so much so that 100 000 Israeli children were poisoned in radioactive tests - 6000 died.

Ah, more proof for my point that the Left, the “anti-racist” Left, is the greatest purveyor of racism in our day and age.

“The whiter you are the better” was true for the first three decades of the state of Israel. It is not true now, not with Jews of Oriental descent enjoying key positions in all areas of life in Israel (including ministers in the government). As for the linked article, whose author, by the way, is the discredited conspiracy theorist Barry Chamish, it talks about things taking place (if they ever took place—extremely doubtful, when you keep the author in mind) in 1952. This is on a par with the Daily Kos diary by “jon the antizionist jew”, Fascists in Israel and the Fiddler on the Roof, in which, as proof of “White Racism” in Israel, he uses the film Sallah Shabati, which (by his own admission) dates from 1965!

Do you take seriously a critic of the Theory of Evolution who addresses Darwin’s original arguments while ignoring all the numerous updates that have come up ever since the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis of the 1930’s? Clearly not, that amounts to building a strawman of the Theory of Evolution to knock down. Here is an analogous situation: all the accusations of institutional European Jewish racism in Israel are built upon ignoring the changes that Israeli Jewish society has undergone since about 1977. This is a compound sin: dishonesty in the service of stoking gratuitous hatred.

Israel does not now have any form of institutional racism among non-whites. As for the Muslims of Israel, they’re a separate matter, because their complaint isn’t racism but the fact that they have to live in a Jewish state at all. Apples and oranges. The attempts to frame this whole conflict (indeed the conflicts over all the world) in the paradigm of “non-white peoples struggling against white colonial racist imperialism” is contemptible as it is erroneous.

He thinks that when we say 'Zionists' we really mean something else. We don't. We mean Zionists. Many of them are fundamentalist Christians who believe the Jews will go to hell, but that we should support Israel because it's part of God's exit strategy for them, the Rapture and all that nonsense. They have a powerful lobby in the US and elsewhere, but they don't control the world. That's a conspiracy theory.

Be the reasons Christian Zionists have for supporting Israel as they may, Zionism is still the idea that Jews should have sovereignty over their state on the Land of Israel. You cannot say, for example, “I’m not anti-Italian, even though I’m opposed to the idea of an Italian state”, therefore you cannot make the same argument for Zionism and the Jews. Now you will probably say you’re against all nation-states, and I commend your consistency, yet the stakes for us Jews are much higher: as I said, once again, no proposal has given as to how the Jewish state can be dissolved (God forbid) without a massacre taking place shortly after that. My vehemence stems from that.

Anyway, it's worth keeping an eye on MuzzleWatch to see who the latest victim of the Zionist lobby is.

MuzzleWatch is an anti-Zionist website. It is has little, if anything at all, to say about attempts to stifle open debate at the other direction, such as the academic boycott proposals. And MuzzleWatch is not quite up to handling free discourse themselves, that’s why they decided to disable comments.

Anyway, it’s worth keeping an eye on Dhimmi Watch to see who the latest victim of the Saudi lobby is.

Here ends my post.

The Banality of Moral Generalities

2007-10-09T15:05:00.000+02:00

The title is obviously an allusion to Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “The Banality of Evil”, which she said regarding Adolf Eichmann after seeing him sit inside the glass box in his trial. Arendt, together with Orwell and a host of others, is one of the post-WWII thinkers on morality whose pronouncements have the distinction of being quoted extensively on political blogs on all areas of the political compass. This fact illustrates two notable points: 1) The practical uselessness of moral generalities; 2) The grip that Nazism, or more accurately its aftereffects, has on people today, particularly on their moral judgments.

A writer whose deep and clear thinking about totalitarianism is invaluable, yet does not guard against the possibility of inverting the good and the evil.

I will begin with the second point. That Nazism was evil is one of the few points of concensus extant between Right and Left today (not the Muslims, however—for much of the Muslim world, Hitler was a divine emissary who didn’t finish his job). But this concensus is of no utility in reaching a concensus in moral judgment, for each side uses Hitler and the Nazis for its portrayal of what is wrong with the other side. Hitler was an atheist, a Christian, a pagan, a homosexual, a vegetarian, a harborer of sympathy with Islam, a scientific fundamentalist, a cloudy-eyed mystic, a corporatist, a socialist, a Luddite, a techno-utopianist—you name it, the allegation has been supported by selected quotes of his and used as ammunition against the other side, as in, “Hitler was X, therefore X is evil”. Much as I loathe Godwin’s Law as an easy pretext for silencing arguments (a feature it has in common with the term, “troll”), it is not difficult for me to understand why there came a need for that law to be formulated: comparison to Nazism and Hitler is such a lazy way to win the argument.

Orwell’s 1984 can be used by conservatives against the creeping socialist totalitarianism of the European Union, but also by the progressives against anti-terrorism measures (foremostly the PATRIOT Act). Pastor Niemöller’s “First they came for the Jews…” is now the paradigm of “speaking against evil, speaking truth to power”—equally useful for supporting cartoonists who draw disparaging images of Mohammed, and for bolstering one’s fiery insistence on comparing Zionists to Nazis. And anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan described the rank and file functionaries sustaining the “capitalist war machine” as “little Eichmanns”, which Ward Churchill, a university professor of honorable Native American pedigree—the ancient and most noble Wannabi Tribe—was only too eager to take in describing the people who jumped to their deaths from the windows of the burning World Trade Center towers. I think the case for the bankruptcy of moral generalities is one of the easiest to make.

Those generalities are the Cliff’s Notes and fast food of morality today: they alleviate people of the hard work of making judgments on a case-by-case basis, by giving them catch-alls. The generalities are conclusively proven to be useless by the fact that they are postdictive rather than predictive—it is not from them that one comes to make his moral pronouncement, but the opposite, one first has his moral conviction and then uses the generalities in order to give weight to them. An anti-Islam activist publishing a book exposing Islam and an anti-Zionist academic publishing a book “exposing the all-pervading influence of the Israel lobby” can both quote Orwell’s, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” to hammer home the moral rectitude of their endeavors, but it was not Orwell’s quote that led them to it. Conversely, moral generalities stemming from the aftereffects of Nazism can be used to nip sane and vital measures in the bud. None other than the branding of activities for stopping the Islamization of Europe as “racism” is the best example of that today. Nazism as a viable force is long gone, but it looks as if ideologues on all locations on the political compass are still in the thick of fighting it.

Analogies as guidelines and aids for clarity are good and useful, and I have made them myself quite a few times. But like wine, they can be harmful unless taken in moderation—morally deleterious if one sinks into them, if one is immersed in them to such an extent that he can no longer distinguish between the analogy and the real. In the view of how so many political bloggers tend to wallow deep in historical comparisons (not necessarily to Nazism—the Left’s favorite is the Vietnam War), I often feel like quoting that classic line from Spaceballs: “We’re at now now”. Yes, there are historical similarities galore (not least of which the repeat of 1930-ish appeasement), but the present, it must not be forgotten, still speaks in a voice of its own, with things that are not exact repetitions of what took place in the past. Even if the Leftist is right in comparing the rhetoric of some right-wingers (for example, my own calls for mass expulsion of the Muslims from within and near all non-Muslim states) to words from 70 years ago, the comparison does not cement his argument, for the situation is not what it was 70 years ago. The Leftist may compare the Israeli security barrier to the Berlin Wall, using the coinage “Apartheid Wall” to make his point, but that entire analogy comes to nothing in the face of the situational reality, the reality that the Berlin Wall was erected to keep people in whereas the Israeli security barrier is there to keep suicide-terrorists out.

I have emphasized the word, “situational”. This word, especially when part of the term, “situational ethics”, has gotten a bad reputation, and undeservedly. Undeservedly, because that reputation stems from a serious misconception: that “situational ethics” and “moral relativism” are synonymous. Not only are they not synonymous, but also, Jewish law is based on the former while being most emphatically in opposition to the other. I don’t know when the misconception started—it seems to me that the pivotal point for it was when, in the 17th century, King James’ translators committed the error of translating Exodus 20:12 as “Thou shalt not kill”, instead of the correct “Thou shalt not murder”. Did they make that choice because they wanted to prove God speaks only in moral absolutes? Maybe. Whatever the case, that may well have been the beginning of the downward slide of the reputation of situational ethics, ethics that are the mainstay of traditional, orthodox Torah legislation. Ethics which, if they came back to be applied today, could haul us out from the moral quagmire and every-man’s-land of generalities. An antidote to generalities through casuistry.

“Casuistry”. Yet another term whose reputation has declined over the ages. In this case, the decline is partly deserved, but its extension to morality is not. Deriding casuistry in philosophy is appropriate: as philosophy deals in generalities, going into particulars only in attempt to generalize overarching truths from them, the use of casuistry (case-by-case determination and analogical extension) in it is an exercise in futility. Casuistry in philosophy was once as damaging to it as postmodernism is now. But the world of morality is different. It is different because, while philosophy treats the universe as a giant abstraction to be made sense of, morality deals with a multitude of entities and ever-changing realities. Far from being damaging, casuistry in morality is the only sustainable method, for, as my above survey of the effects of confining oneself to moral generalities shows, generalities are useless in capturing all the permutations.

Yes, there are guidelines in Judaism. “‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’—that is a great rule in the Torah”, says Rabbi Akiva. I did not say guidelines are useless, only that guidelines alone are such. Guidelines are vital in order to maintain the spirit of the law. Comprised of decrees alone, a system of law could easily degenerate into a bureaucratic code, followed spiritlessly without regard to conscience. The Second Temple, our sages tell us, was destroyed because the Jews ruled according to the Judgment of Torah—according to it alone, the letter of the law alone, turning God’s Law into a technical manual, without ever walking the extra mile to accommodate the calls of conscience. Had they paid heed to the guidelines, that could have been prevented. The guidelines are the watchdog of the spirit of the law.

But that was the problem then, while now we have the opposite problem: moral guidelines are either used alone or, if accompanied by case-by-case laws, the guidelines are invariably used to support the laws rather than to correct them. So the sentiment of the day is either, “Leave out all those laws, all you need in order to lead a clean life is a few guidelines”, or “You should do as this law says, because it is according to the guidelines”. Of the first position I have given many examples in this post. The second position underlies the calls (from the anti-Establishment hippies, no less!) to respect laws when they are in accordance with their principles, such as laws criminalizing “hate speech”. Or witness how the Leftists use the generality, “No peace without justice”, in order to invoke the United Nations and international law when calling for the Jewish State to capitulate to the demands of the “Palestinians”, while castigating the same United Nations and the same international law when they think it is being “subverted by corporate America’s interests”. This is where the death of moral casuistry leads.

Moral generalities are such a pitfall that they can lead even to heresy. Take the aforementioned mistranslation, “Thou shalt not kill”. From even a cursory reading of the first book of the Bible, it is easy to see God has killed, and killed many. Thus, in the name of warding off situational ethics, you get a God who doesn’t keep His own word. With the correct translation, “Thou shalt not murder”, this is rectified. Oh, but you say it makes God’s ethics situational? So what? There is an idea here that many people today are either ignorant or unaccepting of: “Situational ethics” and “moral relativism” are not synonymous terms. When this truth is understood, it changes everything. And I mean everything. It changes your moral view of the world into something saner, and something—dare I say it?—much more reality-based.

For example, if you are shackled to the generality that mass expulsion is an evil act, absolutely, unequivocally, irrevocably, with no room for debate, then you are liable to get into a situation where you cannot employ the only means that could possibly save you from a life of serfdom (at best). But under casuist law, you can evaluate criteria according to which mass expulsion is good or evil. We can thus distinguish between those who wish to keep their fishbowl free of piranha (good) and those who want their fishbowl to have only one type of fish, their own type (bad). This way the moral generality that sweeps both under the rubric of “racism” (“Evil, evil, evil! And don’t you dare to even think otherwise!” /moonbat off) is kept at bay, and in its stead comes a judgment that is much more cognizant of the facts at hand. This is just one example of how the casuist view changes everything.

Jewish law strives to cover everything, just as HaShem is the creator of all things. The Halachah, in contrast to the Aggadah (Jewish lore; of which our sages say, “From reading it, you get to know the One who said and the world came to be”), deals in cases everywhere, from the individual’s first actions upon waking up in the morning to the laws of statecraft, laws which are only now, after 2,000 years of statelessness, in the process of being reactivated. Halachic debate from the Talmud onward is about covering all the possible cases, much as a programmer, even after having designed his program with the best of forethought (“guidelines”), still has to spend time tracking bugs (“cases”). Casuistry does not always lead to a unanimous verdict; however, unlike generalities, even multiple decrees take the facts at hand into account. This has special merit today, in guarding against the misapplication of generalities to situations where they are not appropriate.

(An aside: To the argument, “Halachah, as you describe it, as an all-encompassing law, sounds just like Islamic shariah law”, my answer is, “The original author is not to be blamed for cheap imitations others make of his work”.)

I can still quote Arendt and Orwell if I so wish. However, my political readings of just the past year alone make one thing clear to me: they are not a sound basis for deriving moral decisions. My choice will therefore be the tried, true, traditional Jewish one: the case-by-case morality of the halachah. God created His world complex and full of variations, therefore His law too, though absolute (indeed the only absolute and authoritative source of law there is), is complex, taking into account the situation in front of us.

On Richard Dawkins’ Statement

2007-10-09T14:57:00.000+02:00

From Daniel Finkelstein on Times Online blog comments, via Melanie Phillips, a statement by atheism evangelist Richard Dawkins that recently made the waves:

When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.

The comments for that post have focused on the question whether Dawkins is anti-Semitic (=Jew-hating), with many commenters saying on the lines of, “It’s not anti-Semitic to point out the Israel Lobby’s influence on American politics”. What is my take? Is Dawkins a Jew-hater? Is this another example of a “Progressive, rationalist” (the self-styled king of rationalism, no less) succumbing to the irrational tide?

My take consists of two parts:

In all honesty, I don’t know. A record of more such statements by Dawkins is necessary in order to determine the truth.
It is worse for us Jews if the answer is, “No”. Much, much worse.

If this man Richard Dawkins is not a Jew-hater, but has merely given in to the wind of the age; if this professed paragon of rational thinking has but jumped on a bandwagon; if this writer of numerous essays stressing the importance of believing things on the basis of evidence alone, never on the basis of tradition or revelation or faith, has not seen any problem with voicing a stance that has not been subjected to any kind of rigorous evidential examination; if the flame of anti-Zionism has gripped such an ostensible cedar of sanity—

—then the final hour is upon us!

I cannot cease stressing this point, nor can I emphasize it too much, that the issue is not, and has never been, Jew-hatred per se, but its coming into acceptability. I cannot stop pointing out that the alarm bells should not be sounded over ravings and rantings about “crooked-nose Jews” voiced by speakers at an Aryan Nations convention, but should be sounded over slick, rational-sounding, intellectually-formulated essays, articles and remarks about “Zionists leading the world to war” and “Jewish colonialist settlers perpetrating a genocide of the Palestinians”. Acceptability must always, always be the operative word, the criterion to watch for. Respectability of such sentiments, so that a self-described “guardian of reason” like Dawkins has no qualms about making them, ought to have the Jewish klaxons blaring worldwide.

If Richard Dawkins is not a Jew-hater, then his making of that statement means those sentiments now flow freely in the bloodstream of everyday discourse. What more, then, can now have already embedded itself in the structures of everyday discourse?

Could it be the idea that Israel is a mistake that needs to be corrected is already part of mainstream thought?

Could it be the idea that Zionism is an inherently racist and unjust political movement that needs to be “wiped out from the pages of time” is already part of mainstream thought?

Could it be the idea that every Jewish man, woman and child in Israel is a land-thief and oppressor whose killing (God forbid) is absolutely justified is already a part of mainstream thought?

And could it be the idea that any Jew who supports Israel is a Zionist agent is already a part of mainstream thought?

How much more could be lurking under the surface, beyond the slight hint that Richard Dawkins, if indeed he is not an anti-Semite, has uncovered for us?

How much more evidence do we need against the canard, “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism”? How much more redressings of sentiments from the 1930’s in anti-Zionist garb, in the clothing of “criticism of Israel”, do we need in order to realize this is the real deal? How much more? How long?

Brothers and sisters, how long do we give a moral blank check to the New Anti-Semitism, this new torch of the old hatred, now carried by the alliance of Crescent with Sickle and Crescent?

How much will some of us try to apologize, in the form, “No, I assure you, I do not support Israel’s policies!”, or worse, even hold competitions with each other as to who is the more pro-“Palestinian”?

When will we all come to the understanding that we are condemned for not accepting the Marxist Cacangelium, which sees all Judaism pre-Marx as naught but a foreshadowing of that Cacangelium, now made null and void (chas v’shalom) by it? That “in Zionism’s fall we Jews fell all”? That, because of what we did in 1947–9, during the war in which the Jewish State was born against all odds (thanks be to God), “their (=the ‘Palestinians’’) blood be upon us and our children”? And that, unless we become “complete Jews” by accepting the all-new, internationalist vision that Marxism preaches, we will be justly condemned to burn in the fires kindled by the proxy enforcers of the Marxists’ wrath—the Muslims? That is the narrative!

Neither apologies nor concessions, neither compromises nor capitulation, neither gestures of goodwill nor outright selling of our birthright, neither “showing respect for the other side’s story” nor going into treasonous standing with the other side—nothing will sate the demand of the Jew-haters, which is total: “Leave us alone to ignore the truth you have been bringing for over 3,000 years”, the truth that HaShem is the God.

It was inevitable for anti-Zionism to become the newest form of Jew-hatred, for Zionism represents the last stage in Jewish truth-bringing: the reactivation of Jewish Law. Jewish truth-bringing had hitherto been concerned mainly with the philosophical truth: that there is one deity and not many; that He is a Person and relates to all His creations personally; and that the universe is His creation and not an eternal entity, nor a spontaneous emergence from nothing. But now comes Zionism, the beginning of deliverance, in which all the Jewish laws that had been put on hold for 2,000 years are being reactivated, one by one. Laws which go against the institutional lawlessness of both Marxism and Islam—against immorality enshrined in law just as things were in Sodom and Gomorrah. Now comes the time for the final truth: It is God, not man, who makes the rules.

The United Nations building will be burned to the ground, as were Sodom and Gomorrah back in the day. This corrupt organization, mired in scandals, totally ineffective in stopping true oppression, serving as a platform for the most unjust rulers of the world to legalize their injustices, has no right to exist. Politically Correct “law”, having criminals roaming free on the streets while the innocent have to seclude themselves in their homes in fear, will be abolished, for it has no right to exist. All that which usurps God’s law will vanish, for by nature it has no right to exist.

The UN represents the interests of its constituent members. A bad idea from the start.

If this man Richard Dawkins, this fanatical caller for rationality, can lend his pen to the service of a reworking of an ancient conspiracy theory, then all faith in human-conceived “rationality” needs to be abandoned. The human mind, be it that of even the most sane and balanced person, can always be carried over by the wind of the time like a straw in the wind.

In naught but HaShem and His Torah is there salvation from that predicament.

Repent. For the end looks near.

Sort Our Your Guilt

2007-10-07T06:41:00.001+02:00

I have related to the Native Americans numerous times on my blog. From some of those, the reader may have gotten the impression that I hate Native Americans, but that is not so, nor is it exactly the opposite of that. I will say forthright that my attitude toward Native Americans is neither of love nor of hate, but simply, “incapable of having an unbiased opinion on the matter”, the reason for that being, of course, the use of comparisons to Native Americans by the anti-Zionist Left for scoring their points. The usual talking point of the anti-Zionists is that the Pretendestinians are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel just as the Native Americans are of North America, and therefore, by dint of logic, the Jews are colonial invaders and dispossessors of the former just as the Europeans from the Old Word are. As I have shown, this view is utterly false, and of such offense to us Jews that, if we Jews were in the habit of reacting toward offenses the way the Muslims do, we would make the Danish Mohammed Cartoons riots look like a kindergarten playground scrap. We do not, and we leave it mostly to God to scorch the anti-Zionists in His indignation, speedily in our days, amen. But from this brief account alone it can be understood why I could never deliver a fair and reasonably unbiased stance on the Native Americans, and for that I apologize for a likely bad impression.

What is clear, however, is that I am not impressed by the anti-Zionist Leftists’ self-righteous stance which they justify by that comparison. Their claim of “standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples’ rights” does not wash with me, for they are selective as to which indigenous peoples they support, the criteria being, always, appeasement and anti-Americanism. What has the oppression and the dispossession of the Tibetans on and from their native lands by the Chinese colonial invaders won them but a few perfunctory “Free Tibet” stickers? Some maverick (the Kossacks would say, “troll”) had this to say on the Daily Kos diary Jews, Neocons and Democrats, on August 1, 2007:

I will listen to your lament for Palestinians (6+ / 0-)

When you give your own home keys over to a Native American family from among those who are the rightful inhabitants of your little valley of hypocricy [sic]. Like the Sioux, the Comanche and the Iriquis who's [sic] land you have stolen, the Palestinans [sic] will just have to adjust to life among a different people. In land tenure might makes right. Your decision to object to that grim reality only in the case of indiginous [sic] people without a claim to your house and a few thousand miles away makes for exquisite hypocricy [sic].

[…]

by SmithsLastWord on Wed Aug 01, 2007 at 05:59:01 PM PDT

Pointful. It appears the anti-Zionists are not overly swept by guilt feelings for what happened—at least not so much that they would bring themselves to take the plane back to the Old Word, for the sake of “Justice, without there is no peace”:

Genocide that occured by my ancestors,,, (0+ / 0-)

not contemporaries. BIG difference.

by theralph on Wed Aug 01, 2007 at 06:43:55 PM PDT

And in a little longer formulation:

Such an act of sophistry. The Indian situation... (3+ / 0-)

is what it is. There is still time to stop the same from happening to the Palestinians.

Israel should have a state and Palestine should have a state.

by theralph on Wed Aug 01, 2007 at 06:09:16 PM PDT

And even more clearly, in case the reader still didn’t get his point:

They weren't alive and neither was I. The.... (2+ / 0-)

Israelis are actively, even as we speak, taking lands from the Palestinians. Not to mention they almost started WWIII last summer. Oh, don't think about that though. Just blindly defend them with stupid arguments about Native Americans. Man you are pretty stupid huh?

by theralph on Wed Aug 01, 2007 at 06:43:09 PM PDT

Now after my caveat that the reality behind the Leftists’ fixation on the “Palestinians” is nothing but appeasement and anti-Americanism, I still wish to go with what they say—their declared feelings on the matter, even though they are lies. I could put their stance this way: “We do feel guilty for the Native Americans, but that is now water under the bridge; we stand with the Palestinians because that’s a repeat happening in real-time, and if we prevent that we’ll have made up for the past wrong”. In this we can find a sentiment that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (may he go to hell soon, amen) has astutely exploited.

His arrival at New York had been protested on account of, among other things, his Holocaust Denial. He came nevertheless, and in his visit he scored a propaganda coup de grace against the Jewish people by cleaning himself of the accusation of Holocaust Denial, which he did by substituting Zionism Denial (the denial of the Jews’ scriptural, ancient and rightful connection to the Land of Israel, and the portrayal of Zionism as a “White European Settler Colonialist Movement”) for it. His question, “Why should the Palestinians pay for something done to the Jews in Europe, by Europeans?”, has found welcoming hearts in the anti-Zionist Left.

In fact, I do not think there is a logical fault with that question. As my blogosphere friend Bar Kochba says, the argument against “setting up a Jewish state on Palestinian lands” as compensation for the Jewish Holocaust in Europe is logically flawless, whereas it is the premise itself that is not only fallacious but totally erroneous—neither the Holocaust nor any of the wrongs suffered by the Jews for the past 2,000 years are justification for a Jewish state on the Land of Israel; it is the scriptural mandate that justifies that. And when the Jews took the Land of Israel for the first time, under Joshua’s command, it was not the 400 years of slavery in Egypt that justified the vanquishment of the Canaanites, but the repeated statements by HaShem that, on condition of following His Torah, the Israelites are entitled to the Land of Israel, even to take it by force from its long-time residents. “Righting past wrongs” and “compensation for past injustices done” never figured into it.

But I find Ahmadinejad’s statement (perfect in logic, flawed only in its premises, as I said) very useful in order to counter the anti-Zionist Leftists who muster comparisons to Native Americans in order to make their point. You saw above how the Leftists are (taking their narrative at face value, ignoring the Machiavellian reality of appeasement and “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” for the sake of the argument) intent on assuaging their guilt over the dispossession of the Native Americans by opposing Zionism. In which case we Zionists have a good opportunity to take Ahmadinejad’s good logic and ask, in a loud and clear voice: Why should we Jews be paying for what you did to the Native Americans a long time ago? Why should we bear the burden of compensating for something done to other people far away and at least a century ago? In like manner as Ahmadinejad implied the question, “What has the Holocaust to do with the Palestinians?”, we ask: What has Manifest Destiny to do with us?

Again, going along with their stated feelings of guilt, of overwhelming remorse for past wrongs done on their own continent, in fact very probably where they are standing right now, I offer, as a free gift, two offers for dealing with those feelings of guilt:

The first is the real-world solution: pack your bags and get your hineys where your ancestors came from in the Old World. Leave the Native American lands you’re dispossessing and colonizing in order that their Right of Return may be applied, thus satisfying the requirements of justice, without which, as you do not cease saying, there can be no peace. But of course, as commenter “SmithsLastWord” extracted from them with his probing comments, those are ideals to be preached at others from the comfort of one’s armchair, rather than be followed by oneself.

So I have a second, less demanding solution: therapy. It’s all the rage today, when having guilt feelings, to try to quash them by means of numerous sessions on the shrink’s couch. Sometimes it even works. Call your friendly neighborhood therapist, fix your appointments with him or her, and talk at length about your problem, as in, “My guilt feelings over what my ancestors did to the Native Americans is causing me sleepless nights and a lot of lost productivity at work!” If you’re in competent hands, then in a few months you can expect to feel pretty OK about what happened in North America in the 19th century.

Cynical? Insensitive? Callousness on my part? You could make that case, but as with most of my blog, I’m addressing, reacting to, participating in a battlefield on this war of minds. My form may or may not be the best, but the message ought to be clear: my message is for the Leftists to get off our backs. In the view of their perfunctory tributes to (if not blithe ignorance of) the real and acute ongoing injustices in Tibet and Darfur, my agreement to take their narrative (of guilt over the Native Americans) is an act of generosity. They really do not deserve other than to be called on their hypocrisy and their opportunism for their choosing to elevate the Israel/“Palestine” conflict above all others. But I have done them the courtesy of addressing their guilt complex as is, and I have shown that their argument is thoroughly felled by the logic of none other than their strange bedfellow, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “No compensation for a wrong on expense of those who had nothing to do with it”—if that logic is good against Zionism (or more accurately against a strawman thereof), then it’s good against American Leftist anti-Zionism as well. And in fact it is worse for the anti-Zionists, for, as I said, in Ahmadinejad’s case it stands on false premises (the misconception that Zionism is about compensating Jews for past anti-Semitism), while, in the case of the Leftists, the premises are sound by their own admission (see the Daily Kos comments above).

Anti-Zionists on the Western Left, hear now this:

You will not appease the Muslims on our expense. You will not vent your anti-Western, anti-Bush, anti-American, anti-Capitalist or anti-anything-else steam on our expense. And you will not assuage your guilt for past colonial wrongs on our expense. Either repent of your actions completely or at least change to a neutral stance toward the Israel/“Palestine” conflict; if not, then may God destroy you all, speedily in our days, amen.

Introductory Math for Pacifists

2007-10-07T06:36:00.000+02:00

The crushing of the revolt of Buddhist monks in Myanmar hammers the hard truth home once again, but the diameter of the Leftist cranium is of such extent that even a visual depiction may not be enough:

An inconvenient truth. The building top right is the Parliament of India. Click image to view full size.

Appease away, ye heirs of Chamberlain. And then, as you always do, come crying to your saner compatriots for help when those attempts have inevitably put you in dire straits. George Santayana’s motion is now sufficient for a whole country-wide power station.

Talmudic Does Not Equal Socratic

2007-09-28T15:01:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-27T20:57:00.000+02:00

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

2007-09-26T13:03:00.000+02:00

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.

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.

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

2007-09-24T12:59:00.001+02:00

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

2007-09-23T12:30:00.000+02:00

“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:

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.
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

2007-09-18T13:54:00.001+02:00

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:

His act was extramarital—Cozbi was brought to him as a sacred harlot.
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.
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.
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

2007-09-10T12:17:00.000+03:00

“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)

2007-09-09T15:56:00.000+03:00

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?”

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)

2007-09-09T15:55:00.000+03:00

« 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:

Small numbers, sufficient only for forming interest groups and litigation forums (such as CAIR). Examples: the USA, Australia, Eastern Europe.
Large numbers, forming effective Islamic colonies, each a law unto itself. Examples: London, Brussels, Malmö.
A fully armed grouping, within or on the border or even both, forming a physical threat. Examples: Israel, Serbia, (Southern) Thailand, Ethiopia.
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

2007-09-06T20:25:00.000+03:00

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.

“Kos Eisley. You will never find…”

2007-09-04T12:52:00.000+03:00

Only a Sith deals in absolutes, good is a point of view, yada yada, but when push comes to shove, there are facts on the ground that a man must face, even if that means having to leave a whole childhood’s worth of postmodern “fuzzy logic” indoctrination. And then those who defend the indefensible, even going against the very core principles they stand for, can’t be called anything but, “lost”.

Even an herbivore like Yoda knows there’s a time to switch on the lightsaber. Click image to view full size.

To all the bleeding hearts: the comparison is actually tame. The Muslims are worse: they kill their own younglings.

(Nope, this post doesn’t have anything to do with Daily Kos this time. But I needed a catchy title!)

Zionism: An Integral Part of Judaism

2007-08-29T21:37:00.000+03:00

When I first heard of the canard that Zionism is a 19th-century movement, I was shocked. Time has passed since then, but to hear Jewish nationalism framed as a “White Colonial Settler Movement”, and more seriously, that Jewish nationalism as a whole had no existence before the 19th century, still shakes my nerves, and it is only my knowledge of humanity’s inclination toward evil thoughts that fills me with the understanding of how people can believe such an egregious lie, an understanding without which I would probably have joined the Human Extinction Movement long ago, out of sheer despair of humanity.

That is because one does not have to be a religious, Orthodox Jew, or even with a thorough Biblical education, in order to be utterly dumbstruck by the idea that Jewish nationalism dates from the 19th century and no earlier. There is not a single Jewish child in Israel, even from the most anti-religious family, who has not imbibed the historical connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel together with its mother’s milk. Secular Zionist historiography de-emphasized the 2,000 years of exile, but regarding even that, it never denied the yearning of Jews throughout that entire period, in prayer and song, for returning to the Land of Israel—Jewish nationalism. I, like all my friends, both from the past and now, knew that the Jewish nation had its nationalism, its well-developed and canonized nationalism, back when the ancestors of both the Ishmaelite imperialists and the British boycott-proposers were still bands of loosely-related tribesmen. To hear now that Jewish nationalism is recent, a stepping on the 19th-century bandwagon, and that at least half of the Jews in Israel have no connection to the land, and to top it all the denial of the centrality of Jerusalem (Zion) in Judaism! Diabolical.

For 2,000 years that Jews were absent from the Land of Israel, the land did not cease to form an integral part of their day-to-day, religion-dictated lives.

A Jew would wake up in his morning and don the tephillin (phylacteries). Immediately after putting them on, he would read Exodus 13:1–16, which deals with HaShem’s commands to the Israelites to be carried out once they have entered the Land of Israel. That is Zionism. “The land of the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, which He swore unto thy fathers to give thee”, it is written there (verse 5)—giving the Israelites land currently inhabited by other nations. I guess the left-wingers are now going to call for hauling God to the International Court at The Hague…

Each day, he would say the Sh’ma in the morning prayer, in the evening prayer and before going to sleep. In the Sh’ma, Deuteronomy 11:13–21 brings the message that doing HaShem’s word is necessary if the Israelites are to say on the Land of Israel. Numbers 15:37–41 speaks of the deliverance of the Jews from the land of Egypt. Stressing the historical Jewish connection to the Land of Israel—that is Zionism.

The heart of each daily prayer (morning, afternoon and evening) is the Sh’moneh Esreh (Hebrew for “eighteen”; it contains 19 blessings, because one was added during days of hardship under the Romans). Just before it, the Jew says the portion, “Ga’al Yisrael”, meaning “Savior of Israel”, where God is praised for bringing our forefathers out of Egypt and into the Land of Israel. That is Zionism.

In the Sh’moneh Esreh itself, here is one of the blessings:

Blow a great shofar to our liberty, and raise a banner to assemble our exiles, and assemble us speedily from the four corners of the earth to our land.

For 2,000 years, Jews have prayed for being assembled back to the Land of Israel. Most of the time they did not believe it was a call to action, but never did they abandon the view that the Land of Israel is the Jews’ only homeland! That is Jewish nationalism.

Here is another blessing from the Sh’moneh Esreh:

And to Jerusalem Your city may You return speedily, and may You dwell in it as You have spoken; and build it soon in our days an eternal building, and prepare the throne of David Your servant speedily in it.

2,000 years of praying to return to Jerusalem as our capital, and for rebuilding the Temple in it, no matter what any other people had built on top of its ruins in order to cover its Jewish history. Jerusalem is Zion. That is Zionism.

Neither were mundane activities free of Jewish nationalism. After eating a meal, a Jew would say Birkat Ha-Mazon, the Blessing of the Nourishment, one of whose passages is the following:

We thank You, HaShem our God, that You have given to our fathers as inheritance a pleasured, good and large land, and that You have brought us out of Egypt, out of the house of slaves.

Given the Land of Israel as inheritance. Brought out of Egypt to it. Jewish nationalistic ideas dating to the time of the Babylonian Talmud, when the Roman Empire was still at its height.

Another passage from Birkat Ha-Mazon:

The Merciful—He will break the yoke from over our necks and He will lead us upstanding to our land.

Yes, long before the “Spring of Nations” in Europe in 1848, this indisputable expression of nationalism had been recited daily by Jews everywhere.

There is more from the prayer-book than I can list here. There is the Passover Haggadah with its famous “Next Year in Jerusalem!” (famous, therefore all the sharper a condemnation of those who deny the antiquity of Jewish nationalism), and the recurrent comparisons, made during the Jewish marriage ceremony, of marriage to the re-inhabitation of the Land of Israel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

The Jew is commanded to study the Torah. The Written Torah itself is full to brimming with the connection of the Israelites to the Land of Israel, and has many mitzvot that cannot be carried out on any other land (but don’t expect the world to show consideration for that; only those who are ready to blow things up in a temper tantrum get their wishes aplenty, such as a foot-washing basin in every Western university). The Oral Torah and the rabbinical commentaries are not lacking either:

The Holy One, Blessed Is He, will in future assemble all of Israel from the four corners of the earth; like that gardener who plants from bed to bed, so will the Holy One, Blessed Is He, plant them from an impure land to a pure land. (Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, 19; 1st century CE)

Again the idea that all the Jews will one day return to the Land of Israel. Zionism.

And here is a commentary explaining why the king Omri, otherwise remembered as a bad king in Jewish tradition, was given the favor of ruling the Kingdom of Israel:

For what did Omri win the kingdom? For his adding one town in the Land of Israel, as it is said: “And he bought the hill Samaria of Shemer for two talents of silver; and he built on the hill, and called the name of the city which he built, after the name of Shemer, the owner of the hill, Samaria”. (Sanhedrin, 102, p. 2)

For building a new Israelite town! For acting to make the Land of Israel more inhabited with Israelites! That king was more Zionist than the crop of weak, world-praise-craving and Jewish-settlement-destroying “leaders” the state of Israel has now.

From the day-to-day life of rabbis in the Land of Israel at the end of the 2nd century CE:

Rabbi Hiyya the Great and Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta were walking in the valley of Arbel and saw the light of dawnbreak. Said Rabbi Hiyya the Great to Rabbi Shimon: “Such is the deliverance of Israel: at first it is little by little, but the more it goes the more it gets stronger”. (Yerushalmi, Brachot, 81, Halachah 1)

A foreshadowing of the Zionist movement that came to be in the 19th century: starting with a trickle, then ending up as a magnificent edifice. And the anti-Zionists dare to imply that Zionism arose in the 19th century from scratch.

And finally, lest you think Jewish nationalism is all confined to the realm of prayers and blessings and dreams, here is a halachah (Jewish religious edict, meaning that it is a requirement for Jews to go by) regarding Jews who reside in the Land of Israel:

It is prohibited to go out from the Land of Israel to outside the land, ever, except for studying Torah or marrying a woman or saving from the Gentiles; and he [who goes out for those reasons] must return to the land [after that]. And so too [if] he goes out for trade, he must return [afterward]. But to go out of the land and reside abroad is prohibited. (Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, Chazon Ish’s addendum of Laws Dependent on the Land of Israel, 42).

The background here is fascinating: Kitzur Shulchan Aruch is an abridged form of the Shulchan Aruch, the comprehensive codex of Jewish law compiled by Rabbi Yosef Karo in the 16th century CE. Because the Kitzur is an abridged form, this halachah does not appear in the original, the version by Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried from the 19th century. It, along with all the injunctions pertaining to the Land of Israel, was added by the Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Avraham Yeshaiah Karelitz (1878–1953; also known as the Chazon Ish), when he saw the number of Jews residing in the Land of Israel had become considerable.

It is fascinating for two reasons: first and obvious is that the Shulchan Aruch predates the modern Zionist movement by three centuries; second is that Rabbi Karelitz was an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi at a time when the Zionist movement and traditional Judaism were in a great clash, and the Ultra-Orthodox universally considered them irreconcilable (still the view held by Neturei Karta; it is a testimony of our times that the NK’s are now pariahs in the Jewish world. Blessed is this nation that can overcome internal strife). And yet, if you were to read this halachah before someone who didn’t know, without giving him that background, he would think it a piece of Zionist legislation. Again, the inherent, integral Zionism of Judaism is demonstrated.

This survey was brief, very brief; you could spend long months cataloging all the Jewish nationalist rules and sentiments in the traditional, orthodox sources of Judaism. With such a great amount of material, even a Jew of secular upbringing gets the idea that Jewish nationalism is ancient. Now you now why I—why most Jews—find it shocking to hear that we are “colonialists” on the Land of Israel, and that there is another nation that deserves to be called its “indigenous people”.

What is our enemies’ answer to such a mountainous corpus of evidence? The Muslims usually turn to accuse us of what they specialize in: forgery, fabrication and revisionism. They, believers in the wildest of conspiracy theories, are beyond reason; there is no choice—not just for us but for all non-Muslims—but to fight them, for they know no other language. Their sympathizers in the West, mainly the Marxists, are sometimes a little better—at least they couch their Zionism Denial with intellectually-sounding arguments.

Some of them try to play God, saying we’re not worthy of returning to the land of our forefathers (strange, then, that HaShem let the modern Zionist movement pass through all the hurdles, not least of which was the war with five Arab armies in 1948–9). Others try to invoke the Torah against us, usually plagiarizing the Neturei Karta, and always arguing that “Thou shalt not steal” means the whole setting up of the Jewish state on expense of “the indigenous Palestinians” was a violation of the Torah. They conveniently overlook the many parts in the Torah where God tells the Israelites to take the land from the Canaanites, and by force at that. One wonders if they’d act as advocates for Esau in his case against Jacob, who “stole” his birthright.

But the argument from the Left I have encountered with increasing frequency over the last few years is the argument that Jews of European origin are not ancestral Jews at all—our old friend the Khazaria Hypothesis. Those ever-moral people, ostensibly so intent on making racism history, think Jewishness is a racial matter, a genetic matter, something dependent on DNA. Do they not know that that argument still leaves millions of Israeli Jews who are (according to their twisted, profoundly racist view) eligible to “Semitic inheritance”? I think they probably do, but they maintain that argument nevertheless, because it supports their entire house of cards: Ashkenazis are not real Jews but converted Khazars; Zionism in the 19th century was started by Ashkenazi Jews; therefore Zionism is a European, non-white, non-Semitic colonialist movement, on a par with the French colonization of Algeria. The enthusiasm which Leftists take to show how non-white Jews suffer discrimination in the state of Israel (something that’s been history for about 30 years now) lends support to my theory. The idyllic portrayal of past Jewish–Muslim relations is another lynchpin here, implying that Zionism was foisted upon unwilling Jews in all the Muslim countries.

The quotes above, when presented before an anti-Zionist, can serve as litmus test, to check if he holds his position out of mere ignorance—which is no sin per se, only the refusal to educate oneself is—or out of a vested interest. Those who keep their Post-Colonial hypothesis, of Zionism being a 19th-century white colonial settler movement, even after being presented those quotes, are the latter. Here is the difference between those who are “pro-Palestinian but also pro-Israel” and those who are anti-Israel.

Sentimentally, it is possible to be both pro-Israel and pro-“Palestinian” at the same time; in practice, it is not. What I mean is: when people say, “I’m both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine”, they are usually telling the truth, their sincere stance. But what they do not know is that they have been duped—that there is no concept of a “Palestinian nation” apart from the plan to destroy the Jewish state (God forbid).

You saw that sampling of quotes of above. Now try compiling a similar sampling for the much-touted “Palestinian nation”. I’ve seen attempts at that, and they go like this: the love of the “Palestinians” for olive trees; the Arabic script; the Al Aqsa mosque; a few cartoon characters like Handala; the kefiyyeh; and resistance, resistance and more resistance. No list of “Palestinian” kings. No scriptural quotations about the significance of this land, except some damning passages in the Koran saying Allah has given this land to the Jews (one day, HaShem willing, this will be Ishmael’s way off his high horse, and on to repentance), and Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in that book. Not a single demonstration of how, before the 20th century, the Arabs of the Land of Israel differed markedly from those of Syria, for example, or how they could be considered a group of any cohesion at all. My brief collection of quotes from Jewish sources has made it patently clear that there is no other homeland for the Jews than the Land of Israel; the “Palestinians”, in contrast, have failed to even begin making such a case. And if “Palestinians” are strangers in other Arab lands, this is for the same reason that Iraqi refugees today are shunned in Syria: Arab society is a hypertribal one, to the point of insane xenophobia toward anyone outside one’s own tribe.

And if, God forbid, the “Palestinian” dream were to come true, with the demise of the hated Zionist entity, what would be of the “Palestinian nation”? It would be absorbed into the larger body, that of the Arab nation or (more likely today, now that pan-Arabism has fallen out of fashion) the Islamic collective, the ummah, like water dropped out of a bucket into the sea. The fact is, the idea of the “Palestinian nation”, from the early 20th century onward, has been maintained only for its usefulness as a tool against the Jews returning to their land. As a tool for contesting the historical connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel. And how well it has worked. So well that even good-intentioned people have quaffed the Kool-Aid cup.

I have coined the term, “Zionism Denial”. If more Jews had eyes to see the present, instead of being stuck in past paradigms, they would lessen their obsession with the Holocaust, Holocaust Denial and imprisoning Holocaust Deniers, and wake up to the far more dangerous fact of Zionism Denial, this denial of the connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel, this twisted idea that the Jews are colonial invaders while the “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of the land. Oh, I do not disagree that Holocaust Denial is malicious, offensive, preposterous and a sin against truth; but, unlike Zionism Denial, it is not life-threatening. Remember: Jew-hatred is dangerous only when it is in a form acceptable in polite, cultured society. Holocaust Deniers are condemned universally, even on far-Left, anti-Zionist sites like CounterPunch. Zionism Denial, on the other hand, is all but acceptable—acceptable, moral, progressive, enlightened.

Zionism Denial is, whether intentionally or not, incitement to murder of Jews (God forbid). By construing the Jews of present-day Israel as colonials, the “Palestinians” are given the moral right to murder Jews, be it even tacitly. Tom Paulin’s statement, that the “Brooklyn-born Jewish settlers” (again the angle of, “white colonial invader robbing the indigenous brown people”) in Judea, Samaria and Gaza “should be shot dead” (God forbid), because “they are Nazis, racists”, is an instance of saying out aloud what a lot of people who have bought into the “Palestinian nation” narrative think in their hearts. And even Paulin was being reserved, because today this sentiment is no longer confined to the 1967 territories.

Forget David Irving. Forget Ernst Zundel. Leave them all, they’re just distractions. Turn your eyes onto Desmond Tutu, onto Jimmy Carter, onto Bill and Kate Christison, and onto all the rest of those who not only adhere to, but also preach to the world, the Big Lie of Zionism Denial, the fiction, fakery, fraud, forgery and fabrication of the “Palestinian nation”, and its accompanying false narrative of Zionism as “a 19th-century European, White colonial settler Blut und Boden nationalism”.

The Holocaust is applicable today in one thing: it has taught us that such a horror can happen. It has taught us, then, that we must never, ever take threats lightly. How many of us would have given everything to go back in time and make all effort to forestall the Holocaust that was? That isn’t possible, but it is possible to act now, against a gathering of clouds that looks mighty similar. Consider the Muslims who call for a full application of “The Right of Return” (70 percent of all the “Palestinians”, according to Ali Abunimah’s latest screed) as Nazis, and the non-Muslims who support that as Nazi-sympathizers. Treat the callers for boycotts of Israel as equivalents of Tom Paulin in support for the murder of Jews (God forbid). And, more and more as the means become more plentiful, do everything to silence the opposition to Zionism. Maimonides described the Messianic Age as one that differs from all others in only one thing: the absence of subjugation, meaning the Jews are totally free to lead the Jewish life. The goal, then, implied by the deeply Zionist Maimonides himself (one need only read his writings regarding the future sovereignty of the Jews on the Land of Israel—an example of Jewish nationalism dating from the 13th century), is that there be no contest to the idea that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews, by divine right and ancient historical connection, and that their laws are the only acceptable laws for the land to be governed by.

Since the source and powerhouse of all opposition to this claim and idea and goal comes from the “Palestinian nation” narrative, it is clear that the great Jewish war of this age is the war against Zionism Denial. It is the war of minds for the Jewish moral right to the Land of Israel (even by force if need be, as it was in the case of the Canaanites) and against the Fakestinian Fraud. The first historical recording of the name of Israel by another nation is Pharaoh Merneptah’s Stele, saying, “Israel has been wiped out, its seed is no more”; it encapsulates the reality that all the various kinds of anti-Jewish theories, whether the Protocols or Zionism Denial, never had a chance against the truth, which is protected by a mountain of evidence, but were there only for that purpose, expressed in the words of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh and a modern Muslim Iranian president, that Israel be wiped out, God forbid. Our ancient nationalism cannot be compromised even just a little, for the purpose behind the present assault on it is nothing less than total.

Jewish Reaction to Hatred: Right and Wrong

2007-08-27T15:23:00.000+03:00

The greatest mistake, made by Jews thoughout all ages: the assumption that the friendship of those who hate us can be won by “dispelling the stereotypes”. Click image to view full size.

Those who love us will love us even more when we act like Jews. Those who hate us will keep hating us no matter how much of our Jewishness (whether the garb or tenets of the mind like Jewish exceptionalism) we shed in order to win their favor.

“HaShem will give strength unto His people; HaShem will bless His people with peace.” (Psalm 29:11)

Selling Expulsionism to the Public

2007-08-26T15:54:00.000+03:00

Two years after the uprooting of the Jewish inhabitations in the Gaza region, bringing us Kassam rockets and not bringing us the “legitimacy in the eyes of the world” that had been hoped for, and one year after the war with Hizbullah in Lebanon, again the aftermath of withdrawing for the sake of peace, and again a case of an unsympathetic world (“Disproportionate response!”), the Jewish public, in Israel at least, and I presume much of it in the Diaspora also, is marked by a change: disbelief in the capability of concessions and treaties to secure peace for Israel. Only those who put the blindfolds of kumbayism and self-flagellation on their eyes refuse to change their view.

However, the change, for most Jews, has not been complete. Thanks be to God, they are now clear of the irrational belief in the magical properties of pieces of paper, but they have not yet come to the solution; they are stuck in the limbo of knowing what the way is not but not knowing what the way is.

Such has been my experience of talking with old friends of mine, good and feeling Jews who, like me, have let reality be their guide and left the unfounded belief that the other side wants peace other than on its own, Israel-free (God forbid), terms. “What’s going to happen, then?” I ask. The answer is the same every time: “I don’t know. We’ll just have to fight it on, slogging it for years and years, indefinitely, until something gives”. That reply saddens me no end. The Torah-based view goes against such thinking, and offers the way out. Those friends of mine, still secular Jews, have gotten out of the mindset of moonbattery that breeds irrational pacifism—God be thanked for that! But without the traditional Jewish view (a view that even among religious Jews has been dimmed by the long years of exile and its thought-imprints), the only alternative to Leftist irrationality they have is the non-alternative of, “War Without End”.

That is an un-Jewish view. “War Without End”, or in God’s phrasing, “And by thy sword shalt thou live” (Genesis 27:40), is the “blessing” given to the wayward sons, to Ishmael and Esau, while Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (peace be upon them) were promised peace. For the descendants of Ishmael and Esau, war is the end; for the descendants of Jacob, war is but the means, for defending themselves and for claiming that which HaShem has given them, while a peaceful existence is the end. HaShem did not lead our forefathers out of Egypt in order to be at war without end against the Canaanites and other indigenous peoples of the Land of Israel; and now neither, it is not our fate to be deadlocked with war against the Muslims, the spiritual descendants of Ishmael, but to enjoy lasting peace in the Land of Israel. Then as now, the way to that peace is simple: the threat to Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel must be physically removed, by driving it away, by expelling them all, en masse. The failure of any prospect of reaching a negotiated peace agreement with the Muslims means war, but not war without end, but war just until there is no contest to the idea that the Land of Israel is under Jewish rule.

But I talked of my secular Jewish friends. Having friends and family who are not yet religious, even though—thanks be to God, again and again—much more sympathetic toward religion than they ever were in the post-Zionist, postmodern 1990’s, I know that it is prudent, for the sake of averting all possibility of internecine warfare, to go with HaShem’s pace in reaching out to them, and not to alienate our brothers and sisters by any form of pushiness. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen Kook (ZT"L) foretold that the holiness of the Land of Israel would bring all the Jews back to the Torah; it is wonderfully happening right now, so let us not ruin it by the mean-spirited disparagement that characterized that ugly decade. For myself, I take it as a call to sell expulsionism to the Jewish public with a slightly more secular appearance. Quoting Numbers 33:50–56 may be enough for me, but I will for the time being avoid it when addressing our secular Jewish brothers and sisters (with one exception which I will come to later). The key point is to show that expulsionism is by no means the exclusive idea of a few religious fanatics—to show that expulsionism makes a tremendous amount of pragmatic sense, as well as sense even from a secular-idealistic point of view.

I will now address the most common objections to expulsionism, and after that, lay out the clearest benefits. The objections are:

It is inhumane.
It will wreak psychological havoc on our soldiers.
It is contrary to international law, constituting a war crime.
It will make Israel a pariah in the world.
It will confirm the allegation of our enemies that we are robbers.
It is racism, or ethnocratic action at the very least.
It is contrary to Jewish values.

The benefits are:

A clean, non-genocidal solution.
It will free all or nearly all the huge resources Israel currently devotes to defense, both internal and external.
The resultant permanent peace will attract foreign investors in droves.
It will be the first step toward world peace, by being a dazzling show to the Muslims worldwide that jihad doesn’t pay.

And now the elaborations. On the objections:

“It is inhumane.” It is inhumane, from the secular-idealistic point of view, to force more than a million men, women and children to move en masse. For the contention that is not a thing to be wished upon anyone, there is no argument here; but as with the dentist’s infliction of some (indisputably real) pain in order to prevent more pain later, this is a step that has to be taken, for we live in the real world. The real world, the reality before our eyes, which so many Jews have in the course of the last seven years commendably acknowledged, shows that it would infinitely more inhumane to leave the “Palestinians” where they are.

Reality bears witness that the “Palestinians” are a failed society: with their poisoning of their children’s minds with the heritage of suicide-“martyrdom”, with such role models as a Mickey Mouse lookalike preaching Islamic supremacism, a killer bee that engages in cruelty toward animals in the zoo and the routine use of children’s cartoons in the service of hateful agendas, their society goes beyond the vaunted, Left-admired resistance and into the Nazi-style territory of nurturing hatred toward the enemy for the purpose of liquidation. To enable the staying of this failed society on this soil, whether by giving them what they want (concessions) or through endless war, is inhumane—it is to condemn countless children to a life of education to death.

“Palestinian” demonstrators showing support of Saddam Hussein, on November 6, 2006. Note the egg-thrower at the front.

This is a society that does not want to improve itself; a society that prefers to destroy greenhouses rather than use them productively, a society that drowns in excrement because it has used its sewage pipes for making Kassam rockets, a society that keeps living in “refugee camps” just to gain propaganda benefits against the Jews. There can be no crueler act than to let them stay here. Driving them away could prompt soul-searching, leading to self-improvement; the status quo, in contrast, means a reward for their self-destructive mode of living, and an incentive to continue their death-worshiping way.

From a Hamas summer camp activity for children, on July 5, 2007. Note the egg-thrower with the Carlsberg t-shirt on the right. If the self-portrait they sell to the world, of them as “starving, crushed under the Zionist occupation”, is a fraud, what else could they be fabricating?

Mass expulsion would be unpleasant, just as disciplining a spoiled child who loves to wallow in self-pity, does nothing to improve himself and conditions his happiness on being top of the class is unpleasant. Unpleasant, and the most humane and loving thing to do.

Second objection: “It will wreak psychological havoc on our soldiers.” Possibly, but that would be a one-time event, instead of the current, continuous state. Anti-“occupation” Israeli Leftist activists say the assignment of our boys to the checkpoints and to “Palestinian” centers of population is having a deleterious effect on their psyche. They say the necessity of being callous toward pregnant women at the checkpoints, for example, or being brutal toward children, take their toll on Israeli Jewish society later when those soldiers finish their army service. Granting that for the sake of the argument: this is one of the best pragmatic arguments for expelling all the Muslims from the Land of Israel. It does away both with the old concessionism, for conceding our lands to the Muslims will only move the “brutality” further inside (there were no checkpoints until the suicide-bombings within the 1949 Armistice Line borders took place), and with the newer “War Without End” view, which is a hopeless vision of psychological deterioration.

Mass expulsion may or may not damage our soldiers’ psyche, but no more so than the damage they are already undergoing under the present regime. Any damage done will be offset by the fact of having ended the status quo of necessary callousness, thus restoring the mental health that our would-be Freuds so crave.

Third objection: “It is contrary to international law, constituting a war crime.” This is a valid objection, but it assumes a priori that international law is the highest standard. Even without reference to the Torah (which I take to be the highest standard), international law is nothing such—survival trumps international law every time. Just as states have no moral right to exist if they do not stand up to their job of providing protection to their citizens, so too international law is null and void if it opens the gates of victory to our enemies.

International law, as currently written, has the effect that the enemy need only hide among its women and children in order to be victorious, for it criminalizes retaliation when such a situation arises. This enables a ragtag bunch of guerrillas like Al Qaeda in Iraq to do serious damage to US troops, and more importantly to US public opinion, despite the US being the best army in the world.

Of which Captain Mifune (of The Matrix) would say, “You just handed them their victory on a silver platter”.

Either international law is substantially rewritten, so as not to serve as an enabler of Islamic imperialism, or there is no choice but to ignore it. For the issue of mass expulsion, the chief relevance here is that such war crimes as are often decried by the Mainstream Media, foremostly collateral damage, can be brought to an end by expelling all potential sources of insurgency and terrorism. Since there is no way of distinguishing between active jihadists and Muslims who are just supporters, the only clean way to end this is by expelling them all.

Fourth objection: “It will make Israel a pariah in the world.” It already is one, and becoming more so with each concession, each humanitarian act and each reprieve we make. If the world is capable of regarding the painful uprooting of all Jewish inhabitants from the Gaza region as “a ploy to make Gaza a free-fire zone” or “a move to strengthen the West Bank settlements”, then it ought to be perfectly clear that its attitude toward us is independent of our actions. Whatever we do, the intransigence of our Muslim enemies always means we would have to maintain our peaceful lives, even survival, by actions that cannot end with just a few stones shifted slightly. We can learn from the Lebanon War of 2006 that even our clearly defensive actions can be turned to be acts of aggression in world opinion, thanks in no small part to the lack of compunction the Muslims have against using the lives of their own women and children as propaganda-money. From that, we can conclude that even a last-ditch defensive war of the Tel-Aviv region against an attack by all 57 Muslim states (God forbid) could be turned into aggression on our part. The Jew is always called to fight fair, as we all know.

Survival trumps world opinion just as it trumps international law. To be a global pariah but alive is better than to be a slaughtered sheep eulogized by that same world. In addition to this obvious truth, it is reasonable to believe that the worldwide condemnation, though strong, will be relatively short, to be replaced by praise at showing all the non-Muslim world the right way forward (see elaboration on that later, under “Benefits”).

Fifth objection: “It will confirm the allegation of our enemies that we are robbers.” Again, we already are such in their eyes. The idea that not just the taking of territories in the 1967 Six-Day War, but the very founding of the State of Israel in 1947–9 “on expense of the indigenous Palestinian population”, is a grievous wrong that needs righting has taken a strong foothold in the West over the last seven years, and it can only get worse, no matter what we do to improve our image. In enquiring for the answer to the question (an exilic question, a question that goes against everything that the founders of Secular Zionism, Herzl and Pinsker of blessed memory, stood for), “What can we do in order that the world may be pleased with us?”, we increasingly find out that the answer is, “Give up everything”. Increasingly, the world can be seen to demand nothing less than the transformation of Israel into “a state of all its citizens”, in which an influx of millions of “Palestinians” by the application of their hereditary “Right of Return” would give them the majority they need to turn Jewish life in the Land of Israel to be like Jewish life has been in the Diaspora (both Christian and Islamic) for 2,000 years. (And that is the best-case scenario.)

No Jew who has bowed to the reality of the failure of negotiated peace could possibly agree to the vision of Israel being turned into “a state of all its citizens”, that which Steven Plaut calls “The Rwanda Solution”. Even Uri Avnery, moonbatty as he may be, likens the proposal of the One-State Solution to a swimmer wishing to try his hand at crossing the Atlantic after repeated failures at crossing the La Manche channel. Since the One-State Solution is the demand that is taking hold in the world, a demand that is fast becoming the only way to “get right” with the world, to “atone for our primal sin”, then it follows that we will stay robbers in the eyes of the world no matter what we do. Again, we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Robbers though we may well be considered after the mass expulsion, we will be alive and enjoying lasting peace, while currently we are both considered robbers (because of the “primal sin” of “robbing the lands of the indigenous Palestinians in 1947–9”, see above) and suffering under the yoke of the Islamic terrorist threat.

Sixth objection: “It is racism, or ethnocratic action at the very least.” It is not racism, because Judaism is not based on race. Judaism is an ethnicity that spans multiple races (compare an Ashkenazi with a Yemenite Jew for proof). It is an ethnocratic action; assumed a priori here is that ethnocratic controls are automatically a bad thing. As the situation in the whole world shows, the lack of ethnocratic controls is the cause of the deterioration of conditions in formerly peaceful countries, by virtue of cultural breakdown. Even in a melting-pot society like that of the USA, policy had always been ethnocratic, because the immigrants were strongly encouraged to assimilate to the norms of the host society; now, on the US–Mexico border, the abandonment of that demand has led to the situation of anarchy there. An ethnicity, unlike a race, does not demand conformity of inborn traits; it demands only homogeneity in cultural and social values. Today’s lack of insistence on that homogeneity, which is comparable to letting cannibals into a Western country without demanding that they leave their dietary habits, is the source of havoc in the Western world.

Israel, as the Jewish state, is founded on Jewish values (far stronger than the connection of the USA to Christian values). The demand is not that all people in Israel be Jewish; the demand is, however, that they not undermine the Jewish character of the state, just as cannibals cannot (in a normal world) stay in a Western country if they keep to their traditional cuisine from the homeland. The Muslims, even within the 1949 Armistice Line territories, refuse to recognize Israel as the Jewish state, therefore cannot be allowed to stay. Any self-respecting nation would think that way—ethnocratic controls are not “the fruit of bigotry”, they are the stop-gap of a healthy society against the multicultural slide toward anarchy! Cultural homogeneity is not based on “hatred of the other”, but on the simple human observation that, without shared cultural values, a society cannot stand. Immigration is a privilege, predicated on acceptance of the host culture; once accepted, it would be wrong not to naturalize the immigrant. But if the immigrant refuses to accept the host culture, then he should be deported. Mass expulsion stems from the same issue.

Seventh objection: “It is contrary to Jewish values.” Here it is that I can bring passages from the Torah, such as the oft-mentioned Numbers 33:50–56; for, once the question of Jewish values is brought up, what is better than verses from the Torah in order to make the point? As the passage shows, mass expulsion is not contrary to Jewish values. It applies only to the Land of Israel, not to the whole world (thus refuting the charge that Judaism is a Nazi-like supremacist ideology), and it is definitely not contrary to Jewish values, not “a blot on Jewishness” as detractors say. Beyond the specifics, there is a more general point here, that Jewish values are much more down-to-earth than many people think. The high-flown doctrines of “not hurting any living being, not even a fly” belong to other religions; Judaism, while being most vehemently against violence for the sake of violence and cruelty for the sake of cruelty, commands doing the utmost for the sake of self-defense. It is a Jewish value to be merciful to those who deserve mercy; to be merciful to those who do not, such as those who raise their children to be suicide-bombers, is contrary to Jewish values. Among Jewish values is to withhold all mercy from those who you know will not show mercy to you.

Judaism raises peace above all else, even saying that Peace (“Shalom”) is one of God’s names, but Judaism does not necessarily agree with the methods of attaining peace that certain non-Jewish ideologies hold. Once it has been clearly understood that concessions to the enemy’s demands only lead to a state of less peace, it is contrary to Jewish values to do anything but wage war on that enemy. Mass expulsion, because it brings the promise of lasting peace, is currently the most Jewish thing to do.

Here end the answers to the objections. Now to the benefits:

A clean, non-genocidal solution. The problem is the massive support that the active jihadists enjoy among the Muslim populace. Some have wrung their hands in despair, saying, “So what are we going to do—kill them all?” Mass expulsion is the alternative that both takes care of the problem and solves it in the most humane way possible under such circumstances. No atrocities, no Killing Fields, no sliding to the abyss of World War II days.

Second benefit: It will free all or nearly all the huge resources Israel currently devotes to defense, both internal and external. One of the objections Israeli Jews used to have (and a small number still have) to the settlements in the 1967 territories was the allocation of resources for defending them. Land concessions do not free those resources, they just move them to tighter borders. With our without the 1967 territories, the reality of having to open your bag and pass through a metal detector at the entrance to every public place in all of Israel is there. With all the Muslims expelled, all these costly and intrusive defense measures will be rendered needless, for there would then be no terrorist threat. The money could then really be used for better things, just as the former advocates of withdrawal had called for.

Third benefit: The resultant permanent peace will attract foreign investors in droves. The dreamer Shimon Peres had always envisioned how Israel, when in a state of peace resulting from conceding lands to all its neighbors, would become the Monaco of the Middle East, a magnet for foreign investors. He was right in the sense that investors are attracted by a state of peace and repelled by the prospect of impending war. It follows, then, that the lasting peace achieved through mass expulsion would bring about the vision which Peres, because of his misconceived means, could not fulfill.

Fourth benefit: It will be the first step toward world peace, by being a dazzling show to the Muslims worldwide that jihad doesn’t pay. After the initial cries of condemnation have subsided, the world will see that, despite all reservations, mass expulsion works. The world has forgotten how the mass expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in 1945 has made that region a non-news region ever since, and has to be reminded of it. In all the world, our actions could well spark a flurry of second thoughts about mass expulsion or deportation. Finally, there is a chance that a reformation of Islam for the better could be kick-started, for there is nothing that fuels the worldwide jihad more than the conviction that jihad pays, a conviction currently fed daily by acts of concession, whether in land or in culture, toward the Muslims on the part of non-Muslim leaders everywhere.

Here end the benefits as well. As you can see, this whole exposition has been sparing and pointed in its use of religion-based arguments; the pragmatic arguments for mass expulsion are strong enough as they are. I hope this will lead people to reconsider their stance, despite years of cultural-Marxist indoctrination to regard such a proposal as the most heinous crime. In any case, some years from now there might not be a choice in the matter.

Wikipedia: Golding Digitized

2007-08-24T16:59:00.000+03:00

From time to time a new scandal arises, such as the Siegenthaler affair and now the launch of a tool for listing anonymous Wikipedia edits by organizations, raising to the fore the problematic nature of an “encyclopedia anyone can edit”. This post, however, is not an addition to the already saturated opinion-market of essays telling the world how Wikipedia sucks; Wikipedia is here used only as an illustration, an exemplar of a general problem. In the world of computing, Wikipedia is just a vivid and expanded demonstration of the truth that “permit all” is usually followed by “delete all” (or, as Unix buffs say: chmod 777 usually comes before rm -r -f). In the world of culture and human anthropology, which I have an inordinate interest in, Wikipedia is an illustration of the tabula rasa (blank slate) fallacy.

Wikipedia is just another in a slew of anarchist ideas—the idea of “a smoothly-functioning anarchy” (the words of Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Project), the idea of “a self-policing system”, the idea of “a consensus-driven community”, the idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, and you get the drift. It doesn’t matter if Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is an anarchist or not; the idea can be traced to that pedigree, even if Wales developed it independently. Whether intentionally or not, Wikipedia has its place in the long list of enterprises in which the creator or founder really plays God, making an experiment whose pillar is creation from scratch—the aforementioned tabula rasa. A very interesting fact, for the Bible describes how God Himself, because of the free will and the passions He has given humans, voices His total rejection of the concept of tabula rasa.

Successful art is usually deemed as such because it stands the test of time. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is relatively recent (1954), but its ideas are timeless, and its core idea (as far as I gather) is that Biblical idea that tabula rasa utopianism is a grave error. A bunch of little kids is stranded on an island paradise: they have a goal (returning to civilization), they have their needs provided (the fruits of the trees on that island), and they have minimal sources of friction (no girls to fight over, for example). It is really a clean slate, and by rights it ought to function smoothly. Yet little time passes before they partake of the same afflictions of all other societies: factionalism (the Merrydew schism), murder and—finally—the burning of the trees, the source of their sustenance. The beast is indeed within those kids, no matter how favorable the external conditions have been from the start.

Wikipedia’s lack of professionalism is the hot topic, the popular point of discussion; under the radar, however, slips the issue of what Wikipedia was conceived to be as opposed to what it has become. Bureaucrats, administrators, piles upon piles of rules, vital actions bogged down by procedure, pages put under protection or semi-protection—a complex, elaborate, monstrous, labyrinthine system that belies the entire initial concept. Yes, you don’t need to tell me: those changes were necessitated by the circumstances. No argument here. But this is proof of the fallacious nature of tabula rasa utopianism. This is the same, exact same idea as in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and in its (conscious or unconscious) source, the Bible, the Word of HaShem.

How many times have we seen that happen? “Such if we do, heaven will be created on earth”, only to prove dismal at best, forcing the founders to take a turn diametrically opposed to their original vision. The “smoothly-functioning anarchy” envisioned by Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond is most popularly demonstrated by the Linux kernel, but the Linux kernel is free of the schisms and bureaucratic creep that have plagued other open-source projects because it is under the rule of a dictator (Linus Torvalds), even if that dictator is semi-jokingly called a benevolent one. The Marxist experiment, spawning one of the cruelest dictatorships in history (Stalin’s, long may he roast in hell, amen) and 100,000,000 deaths in its wake, was another attempt to solve humanity’s problem by creating from scratch, as if human beings were program source code to be cleaned by doing a complete rewrite.

Or religious reforms. Many an attempt at religious reform aims to clean up the religion from what are considered sinful accretions, such as commercialism, ritualism, legalism and getting entwined with the state, only to become a religion in its own right, moreover usually succumbing to the same accretions that the reformer-founders aimed to dispose of. For example, the Jewish reformer who is described to have railed against the commercialism near the Temple, turning the stalls, spawned a religion in which, a few centuries afterward, many of the men of cloth engaged in their own forms of crass commercialism (such as the sale of relics). Similarly, Protestantism had the goal of “ridding the religion of all the priestcraft, of the priests and popes telling people how to read the Bible”, but ministers and reverends fill the niche quite nicely. The Muslims pride themselves of belonging to a religion without priests, to contrast with the “Jewish and Christian corruptions”; true, Islam has no priests, but, once again, it has a class that fills that hole well. Buddhism may have started as a rebellion against the excesses and empty piety of the Hindu Brahmins; Buddhist functionaries can compete with the best (worst) of those. Sikhism was meant to purify religion of empty ritual, focusing instead on “God’s True Name”; there is no shortage of ritual that has accumulated there over time. And finally, scientific rationalism aimed to purge humanity of all the “primitive superstitions born of unreason”, all the religions, all beliefs in the supernatural; secular religions quickly took to fill the void, and, on the way, drenched the world in blood in the course of the 20th century.

All this consistent track record, of the failure of tabula rasa experiments, could have been avoided, had mankind listened to what God has to say on the matter. The Bible lists these occurrences from start to finish, and even if some parts of it are not taken literally, the lesson is a stupefying one. Adam and Eve; the post-Flood generation that built the Tower of Babel; and then the periodical fall into transgression by the one nation that HaShem had consecrated for His purposes, the Israelites. A clean slate, followed by a fall into weak human lapses. Golding set out the idea in another form, but it’s God’s lesson unto us anyway you put it.

These falls into transgression from an initial pure state—are they oversights on God’s part, as the unbelievers say? Perish the thought. It is not but our Creator drumming the truths of our nature—and He knows best, for He is the manufacturer—into our thick skulls. God says (Genesis 6:5):

And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And he also says (Genesis 8:21):

For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. (&c)

Now the Jewish view differs from the Christian one, in that the latter says humans are incapable of standing up to their evil inclination while the former says they are (based on HaShem’s words to Cain, in Genesis 4:7: “[…] But thou mayest rule over it”). But the view that humans are inclined toward evil is shared by the two religions, because the Bible (in the above two passages, for example) is absolutely clear about this. God’s word brings the rational explanation to the phenomenon that every eye—every eye not letting the predetermined opposite doctrine get in its way, that is—can see. Every eye can observe the scrapping of tots with each other at kindergarten: the selfishness, the vindictiveness, the cruelty. And all of this, unlearned. Did the parents teach them to be that way? No, most chances are that the parents, when they see it, react in shock and try to do something to counter it. Untaught to be evil. Unimparted propensity for bad behavior. Goodness has to be taught to the child, and fought for throughout all his life; badness comes naturally.

Do you now realize the secret behind the tabula rasa fallacy? God tells us: there is no such thing. There is no clean slate. There is no escape, not even an island paradise setting as in Golding’s book! Those kids had the benefit of an external clean slate, yes, but internally they started with the same fully-occupied slate as every human being—the basic fact of human nature, the inclination of human beings toward wrongdoing. Judaism says it can be overcome, through effort—but Judaism rejects the idea that good and thoughtful planning by human beings can guarantee the neutralization of that basic evil. It’s not ours to create humans anew; God has the first, last and only say in that matter.

So many times, before I got religion, I looked at passages in the Torah and said, “This is open to abuse!” I was reading it with the critical eye of a hippified anarchist, regarding it as a book authored by humans for furthering their tyranny over the masses. “This is for giving an unlimited supply of food to the priests! How convenient”, I said. “This passage means the rabbis have unlimited power over the common man”, I said. But now I see, that even if the spirit of those thoughts still has a grain of truth in it—there is free will for everyone to abuse his power, after all—I know that such attempts at correction as humans (particularly leftists like I was then) have undertaken have never led to the desired effect, to the utopia hoped for.

The fact is there is no human guarantee in anything. From the 18th century, scientific rationalists envisioned a world in which science and reason provided the solution to most (if not all) of humanity’s problems. Quite apart from the world wars caused by non-religious ideologies, the fact is technological advances have brought a mixture of blessings and curses, which add up to the same situation as humanity has always been. Courses on “success in business”, rationally-sounding though they are tailored to be, are a mass of superstitious nonsense that would make any Middle Ager proud. Just as you can take all the steps detailed in a book by Bill Gates or Donald Trump telling you how they got rich, but to no avail, there is no reason why scientific rationalism should improve the human condition. And the various medical suggestions given for evading the mortal diseases of our time (HaShem guard us and save us) can only improve statistical probability, which is no help if genetics or some other unexpected thing gets in the way (example: a young, healthy sportsman dying of a heart attack in the middle of a game, HaShem guard us).

Therefore there is no good word except HaShem’s mitzvah from last week’s Torah portion (Deuteronomy 18:13):

Thou shalt be whole-hearted with the LORD thy God.

Tamim: whole-hearted, complete, childlike in trust. Working with what He created, not trying to get around it through sophisticated attempts at improvement. Recognizing that His creation, because of the very fact of being His creation, is not a blank slate. Not attempting to play God by creating a micro-world or micro-humanity, but building on what He created. Asher bara E-lohim la’asot (Genesis 2:3): literally “Which God created to do”, and our sages of blessed memory say of it: He created it for humans to build on it. Not for humans to dispute it and try their own hand at creation. If you have any doubts about the error of that, just look at the track record.

Shabbat Shalom!

A Brief Commentary on l’Affaire ADL

2007-08-22T16:14:00.000+03:00

By now, probably everyone has heard about the disgrace wherein the Anti-Defamation League, in order to stay in good terms with Turkish officials, refused to condemn the Armenian Holocaust of 1915–8. The topic, particularly its moral implications, has been covered to the utmost in the Jewish blogosphere, and is one of the very rare occasions where I can agree with the diaries at Daily Kos (though the piggybacking of some of the commenters there in order to score their usual anti-Israel points remains as despicable as always). All I can add from the moral point of view is an analogy: it would be as if I were to cozy up to Stormfront just because of the prospect of them being allies in the resistance to Islam. (In practice, the Stormfronters are more likely to be allied with the Muslims, for the same reason Hitler was: their hatred of the Jews is stronger than their hatred of non-“Aryans”; but I had to bring up the Stormfront example, because their being the scum of the earth is a pretty wide concensus.) I hate Islam intensely, but no so much as to sell my soul.

On August 21 the ADL issued a statement, an feeble attempt at damage control. The closing paragraph of the statement reveals the thought-pattern behind the whole disgraceful affair:

Having said that, we continue to firmly believe that a Congressional resolution on such matters is a counterproductive diversion and will not foster reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and may put at risk the Turkish Jewish community and the important multilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel and the United States. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

It was upon reading this that I felt the need to write this post. I cannot add much to the slew of criticisms from the moral point of view, but this pragmatic standpoint is right in my ballpark. The ADL’s pragmatic case for supporting Armenian Holocaust Denial is totally lacking.

I will say it forthright: Turkey is a “staff of bruised reed” (Hebrew mish’enet kaneh ratzutz, which the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel called Egypt, in whom the Judeans trusted to save them from Babylon), as is any other Muslim-majority country. Yes, there may be a large portion of secularists loyal to Kemal Atatürk’s original vision, but the recent electoral victory of Islamic theocrats there did not appear from thin air, there had to be an even larger portion of people who are opposed to that vision. Yes, the military can reverse the rise of an Islamic government by a coup, as happened already in the past, but if a military coup is all that stands between a secular, pro-Western regime and a shariah-ruled, jihad-supporting one, then the state cannot be said to be a reliable ally, let alone worthy of making such soul-sacrifices to as the ADL just did.

The transformation of Iran from pro-Western to jihad-supporting in 1979 should be the most instructive example: wherever there is a Muslim majority, there is a push for the implementation of shariah and for making the state a base for the global jihad. Pro-Western puppets like Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Abu Mazen of the “Palestinian Authority” (oxymoron) are no good in countering that, for they are both hated by the Muslim populace for their collaboration with the non-Muslims, and, in an attempt to reduce that hatred, compromise on their aid to their non-Muslim benefactors (witness Musharraf’s gift of Waziristan to the jihadis a few months ago). No Muslim-majority state can ever be relied on for help against “radical Islam”, for the enemy is Islam itself, of which the jihadis are not an aberrant strain but the mainstream (active jihadis may number very few, but their supporters make up the majority of Muslims worldwide).

If it is pragmatic benefits we are discussing, then the best course of action, pragmatic as well as idealistic, is to support the expansion of non-Islamic states and steps toward de-Islamification of new territories taken by them, whether it be mass expulsion or an aggressively maintained system of incentives for leaving Islam and obstacles in the way of practicing it. It is far better pragmatically to support Greece and its retaking of former Greek lands in present-day Turkey, and from the other side, to support Armenia and its expansion. To support Turkey, even if it now seems Turkey can still hold on to Kemalian secularism, is to commit a long-term folly, just as it was Clinton’s folly to intervene in favor of a Muslim state in the Balkans (Bosnia), and the current Bush’s folly to try to democratize Iraq instead of de-Islamifying it. Throughout all the world, it is not in the interests of non-Muslims to support Muslim-majority states. Islam is the enemy, and politically incorrect and culturally imperialistic models are required in order to repulse the threat of subjugation to shariah law.

But don’t expect the ADL to alight upon these truths. The ADL is basking in former glory; it is now irrelevant, or nearly so, because it is trapped in the old view of anti-Semitism, in fighting the same enemies as it did decades ago. The ADL devotes precious little effort to shedding light on (let alone combating) the New Anti-Semitism, Jew-hatred in the form of anti-Zionism, of the Left, and the Left/Islam alliance that is working in tandem to make a repeat of the Holocaust (God forbid). Furthermore, the ADL’s mode of operation is now widely copied, by the enemies of the Jews in particular and of Western civilization in general, one of the most prominent examples being the Council for American–Islamic Relations (CAIR). This is a different age with different realities than when the ADL came to be, and the task of fighting for freedom and against Jew-hatred must be entrusted to those who are cognizant of the present situation. The ADL Affair serves as a demonstration of that truth.

[UPDATE, August 23, 2007] Seppuku-committing Jew Philip Weiss suggests that the reason for ADL’s stance was to stall the coming into awareness of the expulsion of the “Palestinians” in 1947–9, in the course of Israel’s War of Independence. A grain of salt with everything such people say, but assuming for the sake of argument: genocide and expulsion are not equivalent. Advocating mass expulsion, as I do incessantly, is nothing to be ashamed of when such an enemy is concerned—it wasn’t immoral to expel all the Sudeten Germans in 1945, and it’s not immoral now to expel all the Muslims from within and near non-Muslim states over all the world.

I have no problem with what happened in 1947–9. If anything, the only flaw was it wasn’t done thoroughly enough, and not at all when we took more of the Land of Israel in 1967. HaShem willing, we’ll do it right next time.

And to the Leftards: it’s either mass expulsion of the Muslims or “I for one welcome our new scimitar-wielding overlords”. You may think there are other options, but you’ll find out there aren’t any.

Desert, but no Manna

2007-08-21T14:53:00.000+03:00

It is one of the countless examples of the hypocrisy of Cultural Marxism, that it can lump Judaism, Christianity and Islam together in “primitive backwardness, Abrahamic morality and divinely-ordered atrocity”, but then turn an admiring eye to the one religion that has not been tempered by any form of Enlightenment, the one religion whose adherents are overwhelmingly in the mindset of an age which in the Western world is now deemed to be all but a historical curiosity. I find no more interesting an endeavor than unraveling the system that makes such seeming doublethink possible.

I have seen the phrase, “Desert Monotheism” used in the conflation of Biblical and Koranic religion. The Cultural Marxists say it refers to the origins of both: the giving of Torah at the foot of the mountain in the middle of the Sinai Desert, and, l’havdil (“to distinguish”), the alleged revelation of the Koran to Mohammed in a cave in the middle of the Arabian Desert. To frame both religious traditions as desert monotheisms because of a single event is already something to be suspected of superficiality; in truth, the Marxists do not believe in it themselves, but use it as their tu quoque (“You too”) club, whenever someone points the violence of Islam from the Koran. If they believed in it, they wouldn’t accord Islam a special status. Is it a cynical ploy? Is it born of fear, fear of the one religion whose followers are not reluctant to wreak revenge for any perceived slight to their feelings? Or is there something real, inner and spiritual about this exception-making? My attempted answer cannot cover all of them, and I am sure there are a few of them who parrot words without inner conviction, but my experience with the modern Left tells me there must be some inward convergence, otherwise there would not be such zeal and fervor in the Left/Islam alliance as we see today. And I believe the phrase, “Desert Monotheism” is where it begins and ends.

As with many foundations underlying the Left/Islam alliance, the “Desert Monotheism” grouping of Biblical and Koranic traditions is a lie. The role and perception of the desert in the Biblical tradition is far different from that in the Koran. If cultural truth were allowed to have a say in naming names, then only Islam would be called a desert monotheism. Only Islam was born in the desert, is culturally bound to it and brings it along to every place it comes. Judaism was not born in the desert, despite the location of its founding event, and is not culturally tied to it. Christianity, having the Greco-Roman world as its background, is even less so. In the Biblical tradition, the desert occupies a place in the sidelines and is a tool in HaShem’s hands; in the Koranic tradition, the desert is the whole setting, the stage on which the entire drama takes place, and without which the religion cannot be fully understood.

The founding narrative of the Jewish nation is based on three points in a line:

Egypt: the gilded cage to be escaped.
The Sinai Desert: the necessary route to take in order to reach the goal.
The Land of Israel: the goal, the hard-won but spiritually unique destination.

Egypt, the rich land, whose generosity is guaranteed by the regular flooding of the Nile, is a gilded cage, both spiritually and (later, and also symbolized by that) physically. Because of the confidence in the Nile, the Egyptians’ eyes had no need of being raised upward in beseeching of the divine, with the result that they created their deities in such images that even the Greeks and the Romans, masters of creating the divine in human image, were shocked. Our sages of blessed memory tell us how defiled Egypt was, how filthy with dark spiritual practices, like sorcery, divination, necromancy and sexual immorality. After generations of living on the fat of the land, the time came for the Israelites to pay up, with the currency of physical slavery—real, but also a symbol for the high price paid by those who are lost in their estrangement from HaShem, slavery of the worst kind.

The reality behind the most famous tourism site in the world is necromancy.

To an outside observer, the Land of Israel would not look as rich as Egypt; in our day, the joke about Moses meaning to bring the Israelites to Canada, but saying, “Canaan” instead because of his stutter, comes to mind. But they err that compare Egypt and the Land of Israel through physical eyes alone. The Land of Israel has the vast, incomparable bounty and advantage over Egypt—over any other land in the world—in that it is under the direct rule of HaShem. It can produce ample physical bounty—a land flowing with milk and honey—but it does so in direct proportion to the spiritual rectitude of its inhabitants. The Torah warns us of this so many times: walk with HaShem and you will prosper in the Land of Israel; disobey (God guard us), and the Land of Israel will spew you out. The bounty of the Land of Israel cannot be measured, because it is a spiritual one.

The focus of Jewish hopes for generations, and why they desire no other land than the Land of Israel.

Between Egypt and the Land of Israel is the Sinai Desert. No other way to get from Egypt to the Land of Israel by land. The desert is an ambivalent place, a place full of doubt: physical hardship that, on the one hand, prepares one for an existence of trusting in HaShem, but, on the other, is the opposite of both Egypt and the Land of Israel as regards permanence. Nowhere is this more illustrated than by the Tabernacle, which was dismantled and rebuilt each day, while the Temple in Jerusalem was a permanent building.

We received the Torah there, but it was not the destination.

The Biblical story of the Israelites’ passing through the desert cannot be told without reference to the manna, the bread given from above. Our forefathers did not desire to adopt Bedouin ways; when they sensed the hardship of desert life, all the more so after Egypt, they cried out to HaShem. He answered them, and sustained them all the years with food from above. It was another symbol of the impermanence of the desert: since one cannot live on miracles forever, it is clear that the manna was only a temporary measure, until the arrival at the Land of Israel. The desert was where we received the Torah, but the Torah given at Sinai contains such mitzvot as the Sabbatical Year (one in seven years of ceasing to work the fields), which cannot apply to the desert. And the desert was also a punishment: for believing the lies that the Ten Spies uttered about the Land of Israel, the entire generation was condemned to roam the desert until dying out. All in all, the desert was a necessary evil, the place of Israel’s birth-pangs. The Biblical narrative is conclusive: it is not HaShem’s requirement for mankind to be desert-dwellers in order to be spiritually fulfilled. The desert was preparation for a life of trusting in Him, but the life itself, a life of completeness through carrying all His 613 mitzvot, was to take place in inhabited land, in the Land of Israel.

Islam sprang out from a totally different setting.

Islam emerged in the Arabian Desert, in the area of two oases surrounded by uninhabited desert. The desert was not merely a transition between Mecca and Medina; those two cities were enveloped by it, and served as a life-belt from it. The contrast was not between a rich but defiled land and a rich and sacred land, with a desert separating them, but between desert and non-desert: between the sanctuary and life hanging upon a thread. The Arabian desert-dwellers would come to those fertile points to set their livestock to graze—another important point. Whereas Egypt was marked by lethargy, born of the consistent flooding of the Nile, Arab Bedouin existence was marked by a life dependent on taking what one had not toiled for.

Bedouin existence was, spiritually, a little better than that of Egypt, in that the circumstances forced the desert nomads to raise their eyes upward; but they did not raise their eyes in expectation of manna, they raised them for a reprieve from the fate of next day or month or year. For the Israelites, desert life was a transition, and continuous roaming of the desert was a punishment; for the Bedouins, desert life was their main existence, punctuated only by forays into fertile fields worked by others. The Bible is centered on the arrival at the Promised Land; but for the Arab Bedouin, in contrast, there is no Promised Land, there is only an oasis for refueling, a race to reach there before dying of thirst.

The tenuous existence in the desert shaped the whole worldview of the Bedouins, and consequently of the religion of Islam.

The Koran advertises itself repeatedly as a “clear guidance”. The term for that, huda, according to Malise Ruthven’s Islam and the World, means “desert guide, the tribesman on whose navigation skills the tribe depends in order to reach the oasis”. The word “shariah” itself means, “the way to water”. Islam views mankind’s entire existence as a roaming in the desert, with Allah being the only reliable guide to the oasis. Desert life being such a stark struggle between life and death, it is no wonder that Islam’s afterlife paradise is described in the most lurid of physical terms. Jewish commentators on Islam have long faulted the religion for promising its adherents a reward that can be had in this life. It is only natural for adherents of a Biblical worldview to look down upon that, just as it is natural for a religion born in the harsh world of the desert to promise rewards of this kind. The Biblical worldview promises the follower that God will take care of his physical needs if he does His will, leaving him with the leisure and desire to seek out God Himself, His spiritual splendor; in contrast, the Koranic worldview, desert born, has the physical promises running over, splashing out from the cup of this life onto the afterlife. “A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity”, said Winston Churchill on Islam, more than a century ago.

The desert nomad sustains himself by punctuated forays into fertile lands; he sets his livestock upon fields tilled by others. This modus vivendi has been carried over to Islam and its adherents to this day: appropriation of the accomplishments of others, both physical and cultural, has been the hallmark of the Islamic colonialists from the 7th century to our times, each appropriation often followed by a fraudulent claim to original ownership. The golden cow-udder standing on top of the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem is the most prominent example of this, along with the usurpation of the Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel by means of the Fakestinian Nation narrative.

And it is an object of admiration for many Cultural Marxists worldwide.

Oh, the desert! Pristine land, unsullied by the hands of capitalism, industrialism, commercialism and other forms of man-made modifications of the original state! Oh, the Bedouins! Free as the air, authentic, sprung from the soil, untouched by the artificial mannerisms of townspeople! Oh, all that we had but have lost! All the things we once were (according to the Primitivist narrative, conceived by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Father of All Hippies) and would wish to have once again! Can we have them? Can we turn the clock back? Maybe, maybe not, but if not, at least we can support the Bedouins in their moves against that hated Western, Bible-based civilization, use them as proxy avengers of our wrath.

Those Cultural Marxists understand what eludes many scholars: the primitivist affinity between Marxism and Islam. Marxism longs for return to a mythical world “Before Capitalism”; the Bedouin nomad looks like an authentic remnant of that long-lost paradisical age; therefore the alliance between the Marxist primitivists and the active representatives of Bedouin life, the Muslims, is a natural and spiritual one.

It is also natural because Marxism is built upon legalizing theft. Communist regimes had their upper class and their vast stratum of poor, downtrodden people, just as—usually far worse than—did the hated capitalist countries of the world, but the upper class justified it as “taking from the rich in order to give to the poor”, and with the mindset, both internalized and externally voiced, that the wealth never belonged to the original owners in the first place (“Property is theft”). As today both Venezuela and Zimbabwe, once rich countries reduced to financial ruin under their Marxist dictators, show, the micromanaged economies espoused by the Far Left are total failures at production; therefore, the only recourse for those countries, or for their rulers, is to live off the work of others. Marxist robber, meet the Bedouin setting his livestock to graze on another’s field—or the Bedouin’s representative on the modern geopolitical stage, the Muslim.

This World War is between those who wish to desertify the whole world and those who believe in the Promised Land, in eating the fruit of one’s labors (Psalms 128:2); between those who believe mankind’s pristine existence is a canonized goal, and those who believe the world was meant to be worked, those who believe the Garden of Eden is not the initial state but the result of mankind’s toil (Genesis 2:15); and between those who are trapped in viewing prosperity as either a brief respite from the harsh day-to-day reality (an oasis in the desert) or a fantastic, patently unrealistic cornucopia (a lustful carnal paradise), and those who set their eyes onto bountiful, yet moderate and spiritually conducive, prosperity.

This war begins with the idea of how the world should be, and there it also ends.

Beyond Offense

2007-08-17T16:30:00.000+03:00

Via Elder of Ziyon I came to the article, You have the right to feel offended, by Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl (HY"D). Like Elder, I think the article makes some good points yet don’t agree with everything. The reason I see it fit to write a whole post about this article is that I have a fundamental disagreement with it—a difference of opinion about its very root thesis, not just about its specifics.

Professor Pearl rightly tells of the vile slurs that the anti-Zionists heap on us, though he mars his point by saying, “Zionophobia is no less revolting than Islamophobia” (because a phobia is an irrational fear, a fear not founded in fact; Zionism is accused of being a Jewish plot to rule the world, which has no basis in fact, while Islam’s goal of world domination is expounded clearly in the canon of the religion, and stated unabashedly by multitudes of Muslims worldwide). He observantly points out the offense of the libel of portraying Zionism as something that was created in 19th-century Europe from scratch:

Some claim that Zionism is not entitled to such defense, since “Zionism is a political movement, not a religion”, or “Zionism is a recent phenomenon, a product of 19th century European nationalism”.

These claimants know little about Jewish history or Jewish identity or how Jewish history and identity were shaped for centuries by the Zionist idea of the “return of the exiles”. They certainly have not read the Mishna, or Nahum Sokolov’s "History of Zionism (1600–1919)" or my grandfather’s siddur (e.g., Veholichenu Kommemiut Leartsenu—“and thou shall walk us in sovereignty to our country” [Birkat Hamazon]).

That is an act of historical negationism more dangerous than any Holocaust Denial, and cultural theft every bit as pernicious as New Age appropriations of indigenous customs. Pearl is to be praised for raising this issue, which is far too often neglected by those who would rather focus on outdated and nearly impotent threats such as the classical anti-Semitism of the White Aryan Nations. But I opine that the central weakness in Pearl’s article lies in the following quote:

We, as Jews, have been grossly negligent in permitting the dehumanization of Israel to become socially acceptable in certain circles of society, especially on college campuses. Our silence, natural resilience to insults and general reluctance to confront colleagues and friends have contributed significantly to the Orwellianization of campus vocabulary and the legitimization of the unacceptable. Most of our assailants are even unaware of the shivers that go down our spines with utterances such as “apartheid Israeli regime” or “brutal Israeli occupation”. [Both emphases mine. —ZY]

I have said it before, that the problem with talking about “being offended” is that it shifts the discussion from objective (even if debatable) realities into subjective feelings. Once feelings are brought into the mix, there is no possibility for discussion, and there is no end to the demands that could be made. “This offends me” is not a good basis for either discussion or action. Schoolkids beat each other up because of swear-words, until they grow out of it (not a very common occurrence in our age of “self-esteem”, but I digress), while grown-ups use their “feeling of being offended” as the basis for litigation, for the defamation lawsuits that are the blight of Western civilization today. And let us not forget the masters of overreacting at feelings of offense, the Muslims—“Mohammed Cartoons”, and not another word needs to be added.

Once, I stumbled upon a provocative photo of a tzitzit wrapped around bare female legs. I was offended. More than once, I have read the anti-Zionist abuse on left-wing sites like Daily Kos. I am offended, no question about it, but more than I am offended, I am distressed. There is a world of difference between my reaction to that tasteless photo and the anti-Zionist libels. I can dismiss the former with a retort in my head, saying, “Grow up, already”, while I cannot react in such a way to the latter. Why? It has everything to do with the distinction between swear-words and death threats.

I support free speech and open discourse nearly absolutely. Even Holocaust Denial, as well as the anti-Zionist vitriol I read on lefty websites. But while things that are merely offensive, blasphemous photos and other such equivalents of schoolkids’ swear-words, can be shrugged off as people’s misuse of their right to free speech, the anti-Zionist sentiments cannot, for they are the equivalents of death threats. I support the right of the anti-Zionists to say what they say, but as with death threats, I hold that there should be consequences for saying them.

Look at this choice collection of comments from the article Boycott Movement Targets Israel by George Bisharat, on Common Dreams. First:

Takamine2002 August 15th, 2007 6:42 pm

why do we allow dual citizenship, dual nationality passport holders to hold political office in the USA?

Second:

jaalle August 15th, 2007 7:35 pm

Israel is a blot on the collective conscience of Mankind. […]

Third:

citizen1 August 15th, 2007 10:11 pm

It’s about time. Israels [sic] is a racist and genocidal country. I never, ever buy anything from Israel. [Your computer is probably powered by a chip that is the fruit of both Israeli research and production. —ZY]

But you know what? No one ever talks about the other Israeli occupied territory, which is the US Congress.

Fourth, and definitely the winner (of the Golden Swastika Medal):

truthteller August 15th, 2007 10:39 pm

Citizen1;

How right you are. The entire leadership of the U. S. Congress is full of sops for Zionism, both parties. They go to the annual AIPAC convention to perform acts of contrition to their masters and beg for more funds to continue in office to support more of OUR tax dollars going to Israel. It is past high time to call for an end to ALL U. S. government support (military and financial) to the Zionist fascist state of Israel. We support genocide against the Palestinian people every bit as wrong as what white European settlers did to native Americans.

Maybe by cutting off Israel’s sources of funding and arms their neighbors will finally have a chance to drive all of them into the sea where they belong. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

These comments are typical of every thread on Common Dreams, Huffington Post, TruthDig and other such sites that discusses the Israel/“Palestine” conflict. So it’s not that I’m surprised by those comments—take them as vindication for Judea Pearl’s observation that the dehumanization of Israel and Zionism has become all but acceptable.

Do I find the comments offensive? Extremely. But that’s not the point. Not the point at all! The point is that the comments are dangerous. They’re one with the genocidal comments of Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah (may they both go to hell soon, amen) in saying that it is right and just to kill Jews (God forbid).

The entire portrayal of Zionism as a “19th-century European White Colonial Settler Movement” is not just an offense, a smear, a swear-word writ as an intellectual thesis—it is a death threat. It says, “You Jews have no right to be on that land, and the human race will be better off when the Palestinians wipe you out there”. It is a underhanded, acceptable-sounding way of expressing agreement with the Hamas Charter: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. […] The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished […]” [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

Hamas logo. Supporting the “Palestinian Right of Return” means supporting their genocidal goal, even if that’s not the intention.

Let us stop treating anti-Zionism as an offense, as something that hurts our feelings, and start treating it for the threat to our lives that it is. I support the right of the anti-Zionists to say what they say; I call for a future, truly Jewish administration to bring them to justice for that, to the hangman’s noose. To treat anti-Zionism as a matter of offense feeds the global fashion of elevating subjective feelings above objective reality—the core of the very postmodernism, multiculturalism and Political Correctness that is being used as a club against Zionism in particular, and by the Muslims against non-Islamic states in general. If framed as a matter of guarding our lives instead, it both achieves the benefit of countering the threat of this latest form of Jew-hatred and avoids doing the damage of giving strength to the Legal Jihad of the Muslims against the West.

It’s not about our feelings, it’s about our lives. “Rise up early to kill him who rises up to kill you”, said our sages of blessed memory.

The Poor of Your City

2007-08-16T01:28:00.000+03:00

Long before the NY Times, the BBC and Haaretz, there were the geographic magazines.

Starting from an issue I got as a birthday present, I’ve been a consistent reader of geographic magazines, such as the local Masa Acher and international ones like National Geographic. When I started reading them, Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet (just kidding—I meant to say this was before the popularization of the ’Net in the early 1990’s), so these were truly my first window onto the large world. Fascinating reads, all of them: chock-full of descriptions, narrations, background stories and, best of all, photos. Intriguing cultural customs from all over the world. Many instances of shattering misconceptions as to what was universal throughout humanity and what was not.

Formation of political opinions was far off—this little kid was still at the stage of believing everything his parents said. And yet, the more I read those magazines, the more I found something disturbing.

One thing adults tend to overlook in little children is the fact that, because of their innocence, they are the most rigorous comparers of the ideal with the reality. I was sold on the idea that geographic magazines were unvarnished descriptions of other places and all that is in them. I thought, in simplicity: the writer would go to the destination, take notes and photographs, return to his offices, prepare the article, and that would be what every reader would see. Only a child could think like that, of course. How educating, then, howbeit in a shocking way, to find otherwise.

More and more as I read, as I became aware of it, I found out a proliferation of statements which, I realized, were not descriptions but opinions. They were usually integrated seamlessly into the descriptive whole, but the more I thought about it, the less I could mistake it: those were opinions. Not merely reports of the locals’ sentiments, which were OK, but interjections by the writers themselves. I did not yet have a good eye for the themes, which I do now, but I did not have to recognize themes in order to know that the subtle hints of pre-colonial bliss, of Western blame and of the curse of mechanization were opinions and not descriptions. I did not yet know the exact system behind an article describing life in traditional villages in Ladakh as a good model contrasting with the “soullessness, cheapness and despair” of modern life in the West, but I did not have to know that—even for a little kid, it was crystal-clear that the message here was educational, not informational. It was all clothed in the semblance of telling of exotic things, as if in the tradition of Marco Polo, yet it had an agenda.

Long, long before our Mainstream Media started giving us our daily dose of self-skepticism, nay, self-flagellation, in the mantle of reporting, reporters of the Other had been doing that for thousands of years. Already in Herodotus one finds criticism of his own society inserted into his descriptions of other peoples. Tacitus’ Germania contains a wealth of information on the Germanic tribes that is true and has been verified, yet the opportunities which he took to use his work as criticism of contemporary Roman society necessitate caution. And I need hardly mention Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Diderot’s descriptions of exotic tribes and the rest of the offerings of Enlightenment writers—all social criticisms presented as descriptions of the Other. Bias and agenda in the form of unbiased description.

Those were in the days when the media was open about its biases. The media has never been unbiased, but the difference is that in our times it takes after the geographic magazines, impressing the readers with the cloven hoofs of neutral-sounding language, while the inside, the spirit, the facts that a trained eye could see, was deep and unrepentant bias. Today, the more neutral-sounding the name of an organization is, the better its chances of being an organization with a single-minded agenda. Take the website Information Clearing House. Such an innocuous name, is it not? Judging by the name, it sounds like a repository of plain facts, much like a telephone book. But in truth, that site is a conspiracy theory website, one of the wackiest and most uninhibited on the ’Net.

Why did it begin that way? How did covert bias, and self-flagellating bias at that, creep through what was supposed to be mere reports of faraway places? What is it about the Other that attracts people, in such a way that it dominates today’s political discourse? How have we reached this state in which it is possible to reduce all the problems in the world to “racism” and “xenophobia”? How have we come to a world where the cycles of victimization, guilt and reparations now trap all discussions of policy, even to the detriment of national security?

I said geographic magazines were my first window to the world. For those who have not found answers to the problems besetting their societies, whether out of ignorance or by rejection of traditional answers, the window to the world is their beacon of hope. They crave the global view of humanity because it might provide them with answers. The parochial view, they think, cannot provide answers, because of the very fact that it is parochial, while a larger view of humanity could inform us of human universals, the key to answering the human problem. Utopianism and cosmopolitanism often go hand in hand, and in the past century have done so spectacularly, with more to come for sure.

The window to the world has grown ever wider. When I started reading geographic magazines, the old method of word-of-mouth was still the best way to rally people; a few years afterward, the entire globe was connected by computer-to-computer interaction. With the popularization of the Internet in the early 1990’s, the famed (and worn-out phrase) Global Village was born. There could no longer be a situation in which humans no longer cared for the plight of other humans elsewhere—or so it was believed, even when events like the Rwanda Genocide of 1994 showed otherwise.

A big mistake. A mistake identical in cause, even if not equal in victims, to the mistake of Communism. The mistake of assuming the malleability of human nature.

Olam chesed yibaneh—the world is built by charity (Psalms 89:3)

The sages of Judaism say: “Aniyei irkha kodmim”, meaning, “The poor of your city precede”. It is in the framework of discussing the duty of giving to charity, but it touches human nature deeply. It is both descriptive and prescriptive. And it is more relevant than it ever was.

Geographic magazines, then media outlets, and now the Internet have supposedly brought humans closer, thus increasing the awareness of human commonalities and shared troubles, thus leading to greater empathy in the world. Or have they? No. Not by a long shot.

Contributions to Live Aid or Live Earth concerts are a good way to assuage one’s guilt over enjoying life while others are struggling with the necessities, but the things a particular human involves himself—really involves himself—with are the same as they have always been: the causes that are close to his heart. To his heart, not to his sight on the computer monitor. Of those who say, “All humans are my brothers and sisters”, how many act it? To which the reply will inevitably be a list of good deeds and philanthropic activities, but that misses the point: people who claim empathy for all humans don’t have that. Oh, they do have empathy—I didn’t say they didn’t—but their empathy is limited to a set of concentric circles. Greatest empathy to friends and family, then to people they are familiar with, then to those of the neighborhood, then the town, and so on. And whenever you find they have empathy to those faraway, then on further investigation you always discover that this is because those people faraway have some affinity, some emotional similarity, with the empathizer.

Or take activism for animals as another example. How much of it is for the welfare of dogs, cats, mice, horses and monkeys, and how much for flies, mosquitoes, fish and worms? Is it a coincidence that human empathy for animals is nearly always reserved to those animals that share important features with humans, foremostly the ability to show pain and other emotions? No, there is none of the fabled “Empathy toward all creatures, born of the feeling of Being One With The Universe” here; it is all “Like attracts like”, the tendency of humans to open their hearts to what those hearts regard as kindred, while—by necessity—closing their hearts to what is remote. Remote, in a sense that all the geographic magazines, media outlets and websites cannot counter.

How many of the “Free Palestine!” crowd have exhibited even a quarter of their zeal for the cause of Tibet, or for righting the (true) wrong of the setting up of an Islamic state on historically Hindu lands (Pakistan)? They will all say, of Darfur, “Yes, I agree, we must do something”, but where is the zeal? Giving to charity can easily be perfunctory; zeal, in contrast, bespeaks something inward. The anti-Zionists do not care much for the “Palestinians”, for they did not make the tiniest squeak when “Palestinian” refugees were forcefully expelled by the Kuwaitis after their liberation from Saddam, or more recently the Naher al Bared massacre in Lebanon. The causes of Iraq and “Palestine” resonate only because of some affinity with the activists’ own purposes. Just as my empathy with the victims of Islamic terrorism in Southern Thailand (and elsewhere) can only be explained by the affinity of the situation in Israel. Like attracts like.

The mythical Global Village is nothing but conceptual smoke and mirrors; in reality, we are as parochial as ever, choosing even our worldwide interests according to our very, very local leanings. More: the towering Marxist catchphrase, “We are all Citizens of the World”, has proved to be bankrupt by none less than the sons and daughters of pluralistic education themselves.

You are Citizens of the World? Really? Then why do you try to find your identity? Why do you play Indian? Why do you seek out a shaman from the Wannabi Tribe, in order that he may initiate you into the mysteries of the Smelihipi Tribe? Why does Abe Cohen, a Jew brought up on the idea that Jewish tribalism is an outdated, even dangerous, concept, seek out the tribal knowledge of a Hawaiian Kahuna, after having been indoctrinated against his own tribal heritage of the crown of kehunah (priesthood)? Why do Citizens of the World so often exchange the “elitist, Eurocentric” (et cetera) philosophy of Greece and Rome with the philosophy of India and China? (Not that that’s bad, but I’m pointing out the inconsistency here.) Why is there such a tendency for activists against white racism to excuse, even condone, anti-white racism? Why are those that issue the strongest condemnations of “dualistic divisions”, calling for the end of all distinctions as the only way of bringing world peace, so keen on propping up divisions themselves (support for the “Palestinian” and “Iraqi” nations, to name just one example)? Because, when you think about it, being a “Citizen of the World” is a state that is contrary to human nature. Humans cannot feel all-embracing empathy toward the whole world; their empathy, as I said, is a set of concentric circles.

Some rootless kids embrace Trustafarianism, others wear a keffiyeh.

Geographic magazines pioneered the demonstration of human diversity. Diversity has become such a potent watchword today, to the effect that it can be invoked to shut down sane initiatives against threats of terrorism. But diversity, like empathy, is not absolute. It could be absolute only if every human were his own group—his own ethnicity, his own religion, his own culture, and so on. There is no diversity in humanity except the diversity of groups, and that cannot exist without—oh, the horror—sameness within each group. Sameness, or more accurately a sufficient amount of affinity between the members. “Affinity” again. That dreaded, reviled parochiality once more.

There is no “near” for humans except “near and dear”—that is human nature, and no window to the world can change that. It is not possible for the state to replace the family, hence the need for repression whenever an attempt to do that has been made. A bureaucrat can never be a true helper, even if he does do his job of giving the applicant the desired government handout, for in most cases he does not know the applicant. The wider the circle becomes, the farther it is from having your interests in mind. If the state is uncaring to the individual due to its distance from his life, then the superstate is sevenfold so. The European Union and the Islamic Caliphate cannot be anything other than monsters of bureaucracy or repression or both.

“The poor of your city precede” is not a call for apathetic withdrawal into one’s tiny shell—far from it, it is the only way you can realize those human traits you have been raised to cherish so much. Charity begins at home because that is where charity really flows from an inward source—love, empathy and the “up close and personal” angle that no geographic magazine can give you. The farther causes are built on top of that, and not the other way round. In our day and age more than ever, redemption is brought to the world by local efforts, made enthusiastically therefore thoroughly, widening and widening, until the feeling of “all in the same boat” forms the needed cohesion. In this period of government betrayal, this is the only way. It is the only way because it is authentic, while all-embracing cosmopolitanism is fake.

If there is just one thing for which I am grateful to the geographic magazines for, it is this: the realization that happiness in our age lies in turning away from being a global tourist and reporter, to finding one’s particular heritage and local existence—turning into one of the groups which a rootless, world-citizen geographic magazine reporter would describe in one of the issues of his magazine.

“Be strong, be strong, and we will be strengthened”.

Not a Suicide Pact

2007-08-14T16:40:00.001+03:00

Imagine—it isn’t hard to do—an entire school that suffers from lack of discipline. Throughout all the classes, from the kids in the lowest to the young adults in the highest, each day is marked by disruptions, insults to the teachers, brawls, eggs and refuse thrown all about, you get the idea. The manager has tried everything (within the bounds of PC rules, of course—otherwise the school would never have gotten into such a state in the first place), but to no avail.

Suddenly, one day, the manager has an idea—a Compact Fluorescent Lamp flashes inside his head. The idea: to pick just one of the many classes, work on it to make it well-behaved, and set it as the example that the students in all the other classes should follow. That shouldn’t be hard, thinks the manager to himself, because working with one class alone brings things to a manageable number. He pats himself on the back for brilliance.

Along the way, there is a pedagogical conference, and that manager, in a friendly talk with one of his colleagues, tells her about the plan. The colleague becomes wide-eyed, and says: “My friend, I commend you for attempting to find out a way to bring order back to the school, but have you not thought this over?” The former asks what she means by that, and she replies: “The best case could be that your model class will simply be ignored by all the others. The more common case will be that the others will take advantage of your model students’ good behavior, which they will call softness, with the result that those students will be the punching-bags of the whole school”.

“You’re right”, he replies. “You’re just right. In my rush to think up a plan, and in my euphoria at having come up with one, I just didn’t think things over. Now that I come to think of it, my plan strikes me as woefully naïve”.

“Woefully naïve”. I think most people would agree. And yet, a lot of people, without even being aware of it, ascribe the same to God, concerning the Jewish people. Some people go further, cynically using it against the Jewish people.

Yes, the Torah is plain about the evil inclination of the human heart, from Adam and Eve, to Cain and Abel, to the Deluge Generation, to the Generation of the Tower of Babel, and so forth. Yes, the Torah says, plainly, that HaShem has chosen the Jewish people to be a nation apart. But touching the last point—for what purpose? If the purpose was that there be one nation setting a good example to follow, then God is in the same position as that school manager in my fictional story—naïve, a fool, perish those thoughts. Yet this is what so many people, even Jews, believe about Jewish chosenness.

There are instructions to good and moral behavior in the Torah—in fact, the Torah is the only legitimate source for such instructions, for all other sources are but the opinions of men like you and me. And if other nations see us when we are good to each other and decide to copy that behavior, then well and good, and may HaShem reward all the righteous of humanity. But that is not the purpose. Being an exemplar for good behavior is not the purpose. The purpose is stated, among other places, in Exodus 19:6:

And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.

There is no question that morality, that good behavior, are required for that purpose. God let the Second Temple be destroyed because, while we were fully observant of the sacrifices there, our behavior toward each other was abysmal. Later, 40,000 disciples of Rabbi Akiva, the greatest of the generation, died in a plague because they did not behave respectfully to each other (Yevamot 62 p. 2). But both the rational mitzvot (“Thou shalt not murder” and the like) and the auditory ones (separation between milk and meat and the like; called, “auditory” because, unlike the rational ones, we would not know God wants them performed if He hadn’t revealed so to us) are for the one and only purpose of holiness—to be a holy people fit for crowning God as King when He comes to descend to a dwelling in the lower parts (that is: this world, this physical world).

The error of those who do not know this is compound: not just in the very idea that the purpose of the Jewish nation is to make an example of good behavior for all other nations to follow, but also in the details of that example. Indeed, were people, especially Progressives, to take a closer look at God’s commands to the Jewish nation in the Torah, they would shun and abhor the idea that the nation of Israel should be an example for all other nations. Look at the following mitzvah, from the coming weekly parashah, in Deuteronomy 20:16–18:

[16] Howbeit of the cities of these peoples, that the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, [17] but thou shalt utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; [18] that they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods, and so ye sin against the LORD your God.

This is a command to do genocide—there is no point in whitewashing it, and the orthodox rabbinical commentaries interpret it so as well. (Note: I do not advocate genocide of the Muslims; per the Rambam, they are not idol-worshipers, so the mitzvah cannot apply to them; mass expulsion, however, is applicable.) If the Jewish nation is to serve as an example for all other nations by its deeds, then the world is in deep trouble. It is only when viewed from the true purpose of the Jewish nation, holiness, that this mitzvah makes sense: the Land of Israel must be made holy, and that is to be achieved through the one-time act of purging it of all idolatry. It is obvious to me that this explanation still won’t assuage the horror of the Progressives, those advocates of cultural pluralism (even if said pluralism is expressed in not so savory ways), but it should suffice for showing that the concept of, “Jews exhibit good behavior, nations imitate them, voilà! The world becomes a utopia” is a total misconception.

The particular mitzvah I chose also illustrates how selective a lot of people are in their view of Jewish morality. This distorted view is captured best by a quote by the true skeptic Eric Hoffer (HaShem bless his rest), from May 1968:

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.

Given that the Christians themselves are required to turn the other cheek only as individuals, while Christian states have the mandate of going to war for defense, I would say Jews are not expected to be Christians; they are expected to be good Hindus and Buddhists, they are expected to be the only real observers of the practice of ahimsa.

I am not being fair to the Hindus or Buddhists with that remark: one has only to look at, for example, the writings of the Hindutva movement to see that the Hindus are having second thoughts about the Gandhian doctrine of, “ahimsa at any cost”. In their cause, they marshal particular Hindu scriptures that mention warriors, fighting kings, a heroic ethic and a mentality of uncompromising self-defense. They realize all too well that blind devotion to ahimsa, in the face of such a merciless and unscrupulous enemy as Islam, is suicide. And the Buddhists too are thinking, in the view of what is going on in Southern Thailand, that it might not be such a great sin to help Muslims reach the next station on the Wheel of Reincarnation. Even in the religion or philosophy where pacifism and non-violence are most entrenched, the Islamic threat puts the adherent before a clear, sharp and stark dilemma: resist or be subjugated. Reminiscent of a quote from Dune: “After all, one’s own profits come first. The Great Convention be damned! You can’t let someone pauperise you!” Welcome to the real world, a world of survivalist choices. Or, to use another quote from the same book: “Arrakis is real. The Harkonnens are real”.

So if Christians can lay off turning the other cheek in case of a threat, and even Hindus and Buddhists can overcome the hurdle of the doctrine of ahimsa when the situation demands it, then why are we Jews still stuck in the idea that we should walk as sheep to slaughter? We, whose religion is the religion of Joshua and of the Hashmoneans? We, whose Torah and its orthodox interpretations declare without reservation, “Rise up early to kill him who rises up to kill you”?

I know why. Rabbi Meir Kahane (HaShem avenge his blood) explained it so clearly in his article Regretting the Exile: 2,000 years of living stateless and defenseless in exile have imprinted onto us the exilic mentality of accepting pogroms as a matter of fact. You will not find laws pertaining to a Torah-based state, army and rules of warfare in the authoritative codex of Jewish law from the 17th century, the Shulchan Aruch; for that, you will have to go four centuries earlier, to the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah. That is because those laws have been irrelevant to Jews up to this age, therefore not subject to the halachic development (responsa etc.) that went into the writing of the Shulchan Aruch. The Rambam expanded on those laws out of the belief that they would come again into use one day. This, this Zionism, is a basic Jewish belief, but by the time Secular Zionism emerged in the late 19th century, most of the Jews had come to regard the return to Zion as a far-flung future, wrought totally by a divine, miraculous hand. Hence, by the 19th century, Judaism was pictured in the eyes of many as a culture, a repository of gastronomic peculiarities, a plethora of Yiddish jokes, and, not least, the misconception that the Jew’s purpose in the world was to be a guter mentsh, a good human being, in fact to be the best mentsh in the world, even if that entailed turning the other cheek and adhering to ahimsa.

But that isn’t what Judaism is about. People gloss it over, in accordance to the Politically Correct fashion of our day, but Judaism talks of a righteous God, of His wrath as well as mercy, and of His appointment of His people to be His priests, not just to be the nicest mentshen in the world. In order to fulfill their role as a nation of priests, the Jews have to—sounds so obvious to say that, but apparently it isn’t—survive. In the Diaspora, where we couldn’t do much to defend ourselves, we had to do it diplomatically; but now that we have our state and army, and furthermore when we see how our diplomatic efforts are progressing (with every Kassam rocket on Sderot an indication), we need to transition to a new, but very old, mode of survival.

No milquetoast is our God, nor has He given us the duty of being milquetoasts ourselves. The psalms of King David sing equally of moral behavior and merciless crushing of Israel’s enemies. Judaism is about being God’s nation of priests. It is not a suicide pact. And if you can’t do without the idea that the Jews play an exemplary role for the world by their behavior, then here’s a thought: maybe, just maybe, when we finally get our act together and repulse the Islamic invader through warfare as expounded by the Torah, then the rest of the world will find it good, follow our example and remove this threat everywhere. How about that as a vision for making the world a better place?

Presentation

2007-08-12T12:34:00.000+03:00

I made a presentation, “Anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism”, explaining why the equation is not only appropriate, but in fact anti-Zionism is the form of Jew-hatred in our day and age. The presentation uses Tom Paulin’s (may he go to hell soon, amen) quotes for the illustration of the “New Anti-Semitism”; Paulin differs from many of his fellow Leftist Israel-haters only in that he speaks out those thoughts. Having viewed the problem, I then offer an unoriginal (decades-old, but people would rather die than be labeled, “racist”) proposal for solutions.

The files for the presentation are hosted here. Because of bandwidth issues on the host, only about 4 megabytes can be downloaded at any given hour, so the presentation may not be available when you click the link. But it will be later, and I think it’s worth it.

A slide from the presentation.

Oh, and about my blog: I just don’t know. I feel like I’ve covered just about everything. As my latest posts show, as well as this presentation, I’ve passed on to making my points more visually. Blogger doesn’t provide for hosting presentation files (or any binaries apart from images, for that matter), therefore I have to use other venues.

Still worth looking at: one of my recent comments on Gates of Vienna ended up as a post there (August 10, 2007). My thanks to Baron Bodissey and Dymphna.

EOB

2007-07-16T23:30:00.000+03:00

Picture a comment like the following in a thread in Guardian’s Comment is free:

The only truly just two state solution and the best chance for a lasting peace in the region, is for some region in an unimportant and currently uninhabited part of the world to be recognized as the de facto Jewish State and for all the Zionist settlers currently occupying Palestinian land in the West Bank and within the Green Line to bequeath it immediately to its rightful owners and resettle in that new homeland. Of course, the world is not fair, so—barring a sudden and miraculous change of mindset on the part of the Palestinians and Israelis—this will never happen and the Zionists will eventually get the West Bank and Gaza one day.

What would be the reactions? A meager contigent of pro-Israel commenters protesting such a statement, eclipsed by a thick slew of pro-“Palestine” commenters commending it as a just and fair solution, a necessary proposal if there is to be “just and lasting peace” in the Middle East, and in the world as a whole.

The actual comment, by “deronda”, on the thread One option: two states, from July 16, 2007, is this:

The only truly just two state solution and the best chance for a lasting peace in the region, is for Jordan to be recognized as the fato [sic] Palestinian State and for all the Arab squatters currently occupying Jewish land in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to bequeth [sic] it immediately to its rightful owners and resettle in Jordan. Of course, the world is not fair, so—barring a sudden and miraculous change of mindset on the part of the Palestinians and Israelis—this will never happen and the Arabs will eventually get Judea and Samaria one day.

And here are some of the reactions. By commenter “Yesterday”:

Deronda’s talk of ‘the Arab squatters currently occupying Jewish land in Judea, Samaria and Gaza’ sounds very much like the way the Nazis talked about Jews in Europe. I don’t think Israel needs friends like Deronda.

And by “Highbury”:

This is the kind of racist b******t that produced the ethnic cleasnsing [sic] and theft of Palestinian property.

And by “GrandOldMan”:

@Deronda: Well others have already torn into him and it’s a bit late to add my voice, but just for the record, I too find his statements omn [sic] this thread to be grossly offensive, patronising and racist towards the palestinians.

And the clincher, by “Shachtman”:

Deronda : Shut up please.

While a comment by “Lakeside”, similar to my hypothetical turn-around of the comment by “deronda”, has so far not been given such treatment:

If America invaded England and decided to split it in to two, will we ever accept it? After all its thanks to the British that we have/had the black slavery in the world and the issue of the Aborignies in Austrailia [sic].

So would it be just for Enland [sic] to be invaded and carved up to make room for the Aborignies [sic] or the Blacks? Lets say give Liverpool to the English and the rest of the country can go to the blacks or aborignies [sic]?

We Brits would never accept that and so similarly the Palestinians can not be robbed of what is theres [sic]. The fact is jews, christinas [sic], and Muslims all lived in harmony in the land of Palestine till the illegal state of Israel was created or should i say planted by the British, since when its only been a river of blood.

The land belongs to the Palestinians.
Its the Palestinians who have lost most life.
Its the Palestinians who need justice and this will only come via a single state soloution [sic]. If the British government or the Amerians [sic] have a problem with it then let them create an England Israel or an American Israel.

They should give London to the Jews or let them have TEXAS and get rid of the real problem.

A simple answer for a simple problem- Give back to the Palestinians what is theres [sic].

At most, the reaction to “Lakeside” would be that his proposal is impracticable—cannot be carried out right now, is not the most pragmatic course to take, needs refinement, and other objections in that vein. Objections to “Lakeside” from morality, like saying his proposal is unjust or inhumane, would be rare, made only by those who are in the class of “deronda”, and subsequently shouted down like his comment.

As one of the right-wing columnists of Yediot Achronot (either Uri Elitzur or Uri Orbach, I don’t remember which of the two) said: a Jew who says publicly to the world that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews by right is called an “extremist” and “fanatic”, while a “Palestinian” who demands a Judea, Samaria and Gaza emptied of all Jews, but just agrees to postpone the discussion on the “Right of Return” to a later date, is hailed as a “moderate”.

Now for some more, some relevant arguments. From Howard Jacobson on the British boycotts of Israel, via Engage:

On this occasion, though—a meeting called to oppose the proposed academic boycott of Israel—I felt I had to depart from the principles of my profession because academics in this country had departed from theirs. You don’t silence other voices if you’re a scholar, that’s where I stand. You don’t, if you’re a thinker and a teacher, remove from the unending conversation of the mind those of whom you happen, rightly or wrongly, to disapprove.

[…]

[…] Those in favour of excommunication weren’t removing Israeli voices in the sense of gagging or silencing them, they were simply refusing to listen to them. […]

[…]

Most of what Socrates did was listen. No longer to listen is no longer to engage in the dialogue of thought. […]

Indeed. The boycotts can be summed up in that quoted comment on Grauniad Ciff by “Shachtman”: “Deronda: Shut up please”. In other words: Shut up, we don’t want to hear your view; we want to hear only the view that portrays the “Palestinians” as the indigenous people of the land, and Zionism as a colonialist movement started with the nefarious intent of robbing the indigenous of their land.

1400 CE: It is justified to kill Jews because they are well-poisoners. 1850 CE: It is justified to kill Jews because they’re an inferior race infecting the pure Aryan gene pool. 2000 CE: It is justified to kill Jews, uh sorry, I meant Zionists, because they’re racist, Nazi-like settlers dispossessing an indigenous people, starving them with blockades and locking them inside bantustans. As always, it isn’t about merely saying bad things about the Jews—it’s about making an acceptable justification for murdering us (G-d forbid). That is the issue. That is why I sound the battle-cry, “To the Islamonazis and their Leftist enablers no quarter!”

Fact one: the other side isn’t interested in listening.
Fact two: today’s libel is every bit as dangerous to us as the libels of the past.

I don’t know what’s the use. As long as the other side is willing to listen, even if just a little, then it’s all worthwhile. But the eyes can see it is not so. And if they aren’t interested in listening, there’s no way of making them, short of reaching the state that many of them accuse us of having long achieved, namely control of the media. We don’t, of course—that’s why Israel’s targeted incursions in Lebanon last year got us a global opinion hailstorm, while the Lebanese army’s horrific, indiscriminate offensives against the “Palestinians” in their camps haven’t gotten so much as a squeak from the mainstream media channels.

I feel I can’t say anything of more use than I’ve already said. I’m preaching to the choir, the other side won’t listen, the arguments go in circles, reading the enemy’s libels just fills me with rage, and to top it all, my financial situation isn’t good right now.

Dialogue is closed, as per the other side’s insistence. They have asked, and soon, if HaShem wills it, they will receive, a new model of interaction wherein a combative and unapologetic Jewish State of Israel, headed by Torah-believing leaders, will hunt the anti-Zionist enemies of Israel just as Simon Wiesenthal hunted Nazis, and bring them before the Sanhedrin to be accorded justice. I for one would love to see people like Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu end up the same as Saddam Hussein. As it is written:

Let the saints exult in glory; let them sing for joy upon their beds. Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand; to execute vengeance upon the nations, and chastisements upon the peoples; to bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron; to execute upon them the judgment written; He is the glory of all His saints. Hallelujah. (Psalm 149:5–9)

Make our enemies tremble, O HaShem! Destroy them all!

Existential Threat, Radical Appeasement

2007-07-11T10:06:00.000+03:00

It is not hard to find Leftist articles telling us the Muslims hate us because of our actions. (Random pick from yesterday: Prescribing World Terrorism, by Eric Margolis.) This idea, that Muslim rage is fueled by “Western imperialist aggression” meted upon Muslims, is so commonplace on the moonbat side of the blogosphere that I now hardly consider it worthy of mentioning (but see Herbert E. Meyer’s recent article on The American Thinker for a well-considered write-up). I have, however, found an article written from the self-blaming, appeasing point of view that is significant and worthy of a post of its own: US Role in Islamist Terrorism, on Antiwar.com, by Ivan Eland. The title may make it look like another one of those “our bombs made them hate us” articles, but inside there lurks a new and important kind of argument: the existential argument. The argument that says the mere being of US troops on non-Muslim lands is fueling their hatred. First quote:

To fully understand Islamic terrorism, one needs to understand what triggers this extraordinary rage. And throughout history one factor stands out above all else: the occupation of Muslim land by non-Muslim forces.

This is something else, beginning with the word, “land”. This isn’t the usual talk of bombs and projectiles and body counts; it’s about mere existence. The argument is reinforced the deeper we go down the article:

There is much the United States could do to defuse the problem, and a good place to start would be by removing land-based U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf.

Even Osama bin Laden claims he attacks the United States primarily because of its military presence in the region. Other reasons, he claims, are secondary.

This, never mind that the writer approaches it from an entirely erroneous point of view (appeasement), is perfectly true: the weapons of the non-Muslims, whether American or Soviet or Israeli or anyone else, are only a secondary affront; the real red rag in front of the Muslims’ eyes is the idea that parts that once were under the rule of Islam are now under non-Muslim control, with a non-Muslim presence in them. A core issue, an issue which makes the post-colonial rantings of other Leftist writers sound childish in comparison. Eland sees the truth on that matter. He writes also:

Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 Six Day War and its military interventions in Lebanon triggered similar reactions, as did the U.S. military presence in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Israel’s very existence—a non-Islamic state in land claimed by the Muslims—is part of the same pattern, as is the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

An accurate perception. Military intervention, “Apartheid Wall”, checkpoints and all that yang are not, and never have been, the issue—from the start, indeed from the beginning of the 20th century, the disproportionate opposition of the Muslims to the peaceful and most un-colonialist-like Jewish acquisition of land cannot be explained except by the idea, a basic Islamic tenet, that Islam is programmed for perpetual gain of land and against the smallest loss of it. The demand of the Muslims, in all times, has been nothing less than the demise of all non-Islamic polities on earth. Gains for shariah could be postponed in the case of lack of feasibility, but losses of shariah-governed lands had to be countered immediately.

Eland sees the truth of this existential struggle, but if he reacted to it the way any sane, self-preserving non-Muslim would, he would be on our side, and I would not be writing this piece. Instead, he reacts in precisely the wrong way, counseling appeasement:

Only by minimizing the permanent U.S. military presence in Arab and Islamic lands can we hope to stem anti-U.S. terrorism.

A half-truth can be worse than a lie. Eland has half of the truth in that he perceives Muslim enmity to be rooted in the issue of governance over lands, and not in military actions against them. But he is missing the other half of the truth: the vision of Islam is not limited to the Middle East or to any of the lands now currently under Muslim rule. The vision of Islam is not limited, period. He shows his error near the beginning of his article:

From the time of the Crusades, the pattern has been consistent.

Like all of this article, that sentence is a maddening combination of deep insight and sheer blindness. The deep insight is that of winding the clock back to far-off ages, something that many on the Left refuse to do because (in ironic Occidental snobbishness) they do not imagine people could retain the memory of events so ancient. And he shares with me the emphasis on Muslims rather than Arabs, a necessary step if one is to succeed in understanding the current global conflict. But he does not go far enough in riding the Wayback Machine: he neglects to go further beyond the Crusades, back to the beginning of it all—to the 7th century CE.

Go to the beginning of the 7th century and you will see two kingdoms locked in combat: the Christian empire of Byzantium, and the Zoroastrian kingdom of Sassanid Persia. The Land of Israel, Syria, Egypt, Lybia and the Magreb were all Christian lands, part of the Eastern Roman Empire; and Mesopotomia and Persia boasted of a history and culture already stretching back more than a thousand years. Then, in the 30’s of the 7th century, Arab bedouin tribesmen, motivated by the religion of Islam, took it all: the Byzantines were left with Asia Minor and the Balkans, whereas Persia fell whole to the invaders, whose religion, heritage and values they subsequently imposed upon it, in what was one of the most egregious acts of cultural imperialism in all of history.

The attacks, invasions and conquests were unprovoked; under the standard Leftist “tit-for-tat” view, they would have to be on the side of the Crusaders, excusing the Crusades as blowback for the Islamic aggression of the 7th century. But it would not fit the agenda of allying with the Muslims to defeat the hated white, capitalist, Bible-believing (et cetera) West. So Eland does as he must in order to prevent cognitive dissonance, and avoids going any further than the Crusades, thus securing their place as the first instance of Western aggression toward Muslims in his narratives. But that is not the truth.

Spain sheepishly withdrew its troops from Iraq after the Madrid terrorist attack of March 2004. Surely, pace Eland, this should have been the end of all Muslim enmity toward Spain? Ah, the difference between what we wish and what really is… No, Spain has not been freed; of the rallying cries for jihadis worldwide, less known than the “Palestinian” cause but no less real and significant, is the call for “liberating Al-Andalus from the infidels”. Al-Andalus is the Arab, Islamic name for Spain. What was once brought under Islamic rule, say the Muslims, is to stay there, and to be prevented from being taken away by the non-Muslims; and what has never yet been under Islamic rule is to be brought under it eventually. The goal of Islam is world domination. “Islam will dominate”, say the signs.

The crucial half of the truth that Ivan Eland missed.

The existence of any land in the world not under the rule of Islamic law is the one and only root cause of Muslim rage. Entitlement to the whole world is that which, when deprived of it, the Muslims react in anger. Reasoning is not possible here, only resistance, resistance by those who know the whole truth and wish to preserve their freedom intact. The alternative is, at best, dhimmitude—an apartheid system where non-Muslims are second-class subjects constantly at the mercy of their Muslim overlords.

Closing quote:

The lesson learned is that empire does not enhance security—it undermines it. U.S. power on Islamic soil is especially problematic.

Only a few changes are needed for the truth: “The lesson learned is that caliphate does not enhance security—it undermines it. Islamic power on non-Muslim soil is especially problematic.”

To use a Leftism in an appropriate place just for once: to resist is to exist.

[UPDATE, Wednesday, July 11, 2007, 14:17] Ivan Eland is not a left-winger but a paleoconservative—a member of the Old Right, remnants of the bad old party of Charles Lindbergh. That I could mistake him for a Leftist is testimony to today’s shift of isolationist, appeasement-supporting and fascist-sympathizing positions from the Right to the Left in the West. My thanks to Jason Pappas for the correction.

Lefty Blog Roundup for July 11, 2007

2007-07-11T10:02:00.000+03:00

This is a roundup of some more noteworthy of the Leftist articles I’ve recently read. The most significant, US Role in Islamist Terrorism by Ivan Eland, has been given a post of its own. A reminder: the purpose of these links is to show the mainstreaming of Jew-hatred in the Western Left under the cover of anti-Zionism.

Slouching Toward A Palestinian Holocaust, by Richard Falk, from July 7, 2007. The “Zionists = Nazis” comparison is already in the title, as you can see. The author says of himself:

Against this background, it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust.’ [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

But despite his pain, he is conclusive in his verdict:

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.

I have a question too: Is it an irresponsible lack of foresight to make a comparison which could easily lead to the international acceptance of a real repeat of the Holocaust (G-d forbid)? And I too am conclusive in my verdict.

From Left I on the News comes an ominous headline of the day for July 9, 2007, where, after citing Jerusalem Post on the likelihood of a strike on Iran, the blogger says, “Expect Joe Lieberman (D I-Jerusalem) to pick up the call tomorrow.” It was “D-Jerusalem” before an edit, as can be seen in the screenshot I took:

The principle, however, is the same: sentiments with which I’m familiar from my reading of the history of 1930’s Europe are now being repeated, only by the Left rather than the Right (except the most extreme fringes on the Right, which now form a mutually symbiotic system with the Left on that point). It’s in the form of anti-Zionism and “criticism of Israel’s occupation”, and framed in the narrative of post-colonialism, but underneath nothing’s changed. In Yiddish we have a saying for that: Der zelbe dreck mit an andre dekoratsye (“the same excrement with a different decoration”).

From Daily Kos, the diary Israel/Palestine; Violence, the State, and Democracy for Some, from July 9, 2007, from a poster with a username that screams out his obsession: “jon the antizionist jew”. (Who knows, maybe it’s Richard Falk himself.) Of a solidarity concert held in Tel-Aviv for the people of Sderot, he has this to say (after a “please do not get me wrong” passage I don’t find very convincing):

Just look at the intent, that the people of Sderot should live just live the ‘safe’ citizens of Tel Aviv. I can imagine that the Euro-American settlers felt much the same way on the constantly expanding borders of the American frontier, vulnerable to attacks from the ‘barbaric’ violence of the natives, which of course, they were just defending themselves from, of course. But that is the way of the colonial settler society; the central, thoroughly ethnically cleansed homeland is much less risky than the rough borders of such activity, whether we are talking about Sderot and Tel Aviv or Little Bighorn and New York City.

And he gives us a subtle hint of the idea that Sderot is getting something it deserves:

And let’s also not forget that this is not new; Sderot was built on/next to the ruins of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Najd, and has, like many areas bordering Gaza and the OPT, has felt its share of violence from the conflict.

Now, I’m not saying Jon the ~~quisling~~ anti-Zionist Jew is representative of the stance of all Daily Kos posters (though the fact that he feels comfortable voicing such ideas there goes to show something); however, the casual brushing off of the continuous suffering of the inhabitants of Sderot by the charge of “blowback for settler colonialism” is something that has taken firm hold in the thinking of Western Leftists. Significant also is the fact that Sderot is within the 1949 Armistice Line border of Israel, i.e. it’s a pre-1967 part of Israel, meaning that the old and cold comfort of being spared the ire meted on the “West Bank settlers” can no longer be sustained. Ultimately, it means there are many on the Western Left who wouldn’t be shaken much by a Muslim massacre of Israeli Jews (G-d forbid).

To make lemonade out of these lemons you can see above: we can scarcely be under more condemnation and vilification than we are now, so let’s put down our reins of “civility” and accountability to “international law” and do what G-d says.

Seder Olam

2007-07-11T09:59:00.000+03:00

“Out with the family!”, said the revolutionaries.
“We don’t need need that old-fashioned establishment
That unenlightened men did create.”
So in the revolutionaries’ new utopia
Was born a new, very extended family—the state.

“Out with patriarchy!”, said the radical feminists.
“Women must do away with this tool of male rule,
Forged for the control of men over each woman’s life.”
So in the rad-feminists’ new utopia
Women were liberated, doing the work of both husband and wife.

“Out with class distinctions!”, said the Marxists.
“Exploitation by the rich is the source of all woe.”
So in the Leninspired new utopia
A thin stratum of fat cats took post, and were called the Politbüro.

“Out with religion!”, said the hardcore atheists.
“Religion is the source of all bloodshed and wars,
Undebatable, the desire of despots all.”
So in the fanatical secularists’ new utopia,
Secular religions, such as earth-worship, held people in thrall.

“Out with nationalism!”, said the internationalists.
“Mankind’s division into nations should be finished,
For it does all enmity between humans hatch.”
So in the internationalists’ new utopia,
Support was pledged for new “indigenous peoples”
Created by colonials of old from scratch.

“Out with fascism!”, said the Liberals.
“Creeping authoritarianism is the plague of our time,
Demanding constant vigilance for every hole in the dam.”
So in the Liberal-Leftists’ new utopia,
All aid and comfort was given to fascistic Islam.

“Out with the old, in the new!”, said the Progressives.
“Change is inevitable, you cannot that path abort.”
So in the Progressives’ new utopia,
Life returned to be what it once was:
Solitary, nasty, brutish and short.

“A book of myths, irrelevant in our age”, so we were told.
But to HaShem is the last word:
Truth eternal ceases not being so by being old.
To believe in a literal Adam and Eve there is no need;
But of the changeless verities of human nature one should ever take heed.
There is no escape! Every attempt to rebel has only led to different forms of the same.
So come and let us reason together, and hear the word of His Holy Name.

(“Seder Olam” is Hebrew for “Order of the World”.)

Choice is Free

2007-07-11T09:57:00.000+03:00

I don’t know if comment is free, but I’m sure choice is free, at least as far as the choice of who to boycott goes. I can’t choose for other people, but I can help them decide.

Boycott away, me hearties…

Tip: Haveil Havalim #124

2007-07-11T09:54:00.001+03:00

Issue no. 124 of the great Jewish blog carnival Haveil Havalim, for July 8, 2007, is hosted on Malachi Rothschild’s blog, V’HeChadash Yitkadesh, which gets kudos from me for 1) the radical innovation of using an exclamation mark instead of a hyphen for spelling “G-d”, and 2) including my submitted post. The second reason, as usual, merits my reciprocal, with the posts I liked best.

Top post goes for empathy this time: Cry for the Children, by Seawitch, from July 5, 2007, where the Jewish lament over cruelty toward the merciful, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, caused by mercy toward the cruel, is raised. No child deserves to be raised to be a suicide terrorist!
Almost knocking it, Jacob-like, for first place, is Make Noise! – A Heroine’s Cry, by SerandEz, from July 3, 2007, on the plight of Sderot.
In Suicide bombing doesn’t work, from July 6, 2007, Mr. Bagel, the Bagelblogger, otherwise disposed toward jokes, takes some mathematical analyzers of the pragmatic merits of suicide bombing to task for their failing to grasp the psychological effects of it. In other words: no country should ever have to live with this threat. Why this is so hard for people, especially statesmen, to understand is beyond me.
Speaking of leaders: a youngster like me is having trouble Rembering Entebbe: When Israel’s Leaders had Guts, but fortunately, Yid With Lid doesn’t, and in his post from July 5, 2007 he reminds us. It’s also a reminder of why we Jews set up our state in the first place. Aspiring leaders who wish to call themselves Zionist, please take note.
On with the theme of leadership: it appears that 38% of Israeli Jews prefer Bibi Netanyahu, according to a Tel-Aviv University poll, cited in the post Waiting for Bibi, from July 6, 2007, on Rick Richman’s site, Jewish Current Issues. Bad move: as I showed in my link from the previous issue of HH, Bibi is no less an appeaser than the rest of them, proved clearly with his latest stunt of proposing to invite Jordanian troops to “secure” Judea and Samaria. No, we need a strong, Torah-believing, expulsionist leader who’ll kick all the Muslims out of the Land of Israel. On the bright side, the same poll has it that 24% reject all three candidates (Netanyahu, Barak and Olmert). I think that last figure is much higher, though.
In his post Whatever… just don’t show up on my doorstep!, from July 3, 2007, David Bogner of Treppenwitz calls for Jews to calm down on the recent issue of the restoration of an old wording in the Catholic Mass. My take: even if it has real-world consequences, they are next to nothing compared to the danger we Jews now find ourselves in because of Marxist replacement theology. Fellow Jews, please update your list of enemies: not Nazis and Christian supporters of theirs, but Muslims and their Marxist sympathizers.
In her post In Search of Pluralism, from July 5, 2007, Irina Tsukerman of The IgNoble Experiment voices doubts about the identification of Jewish values with “Progressive” values. I agree: those of the “Progressive” values that are not antithetical to Judaism are only a subset of Jewish values. G-d puts human systems in the pockets of His system, not the other way round.

That’s all for issue #124. My post featured there: Between Golus and Joluth, from July 4, 2007, where I attempt to uproot the misconception that Jewish life in Christian lands was all oy and in Islamic lands was all joy, by showing that they were the same, Jewish life being a series of ups and downs in both. That for the purpose of choosing our friends and naming our foes more carefully.

Thanks. ’Til next time, HaShem willing!

Spreading the Word: Julia Gorin’s Article

2007-07-09T20:44:00.000+03:00

Blogger 1389, on the Serbian front of the resistance to Islamic imperialism, has requested a blog swarm to turn people to read Julia Gorin’s article, Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker. This is very important, because if writers staffing a neoconservative American blog like AT can get it wrong about what’s happened in the Balkans, there’s about the chance of a snowball in hell that any Mainstream Media (or should that be Dinosaur Media) outlet could give the public the correct view.

Please read and spread the word. Non-Muslims under attack by Muslims in all the world should know that there is no cause for those attacks other than the basic, inherent imperialism of Islam. Don’t let opinion-shapers anywhere get out their “Our action X made them do it” punditry unchecked.

May HaShem bless all those who resist Islamic fascistic imperialism.

P.S. From Gorin’s article:

Poole’s spelling and pronunciation Kosova impugns him as well. “Kosova” is the nationalist/Islamist/Fascist and dhimmi pronunciation. “Kosovo” means “of blackbirds” in Serbian. “Kosova” has no meaning in Albanian. The intent of inventing the word “Kosova” was to de-Serbify the name of the land. […] [Link original. –ZY]

ZY comments: There’s something very familiar about this…