Reform At Will (Not)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Two Hatreds

In the aftermath of the suicide bombing in Eilat, the kumbayista community (not to mention the Israel-haters) have spared no effort to say how “there is hatred on both sides”, hatred that needs to stop if there is to be any chance of peace. Presumably, drumming and chants and other tried-and-true tactics of the 1960's can “heal the rift between the Israelis and the Palestinians” and make the conflict history. But enough of ranting about the hopelessly naïve, and on to refuting their main thesis.

First off, it’s actually true there is hatred on both sides; but—and that’s the crucial, oft-overlooked point—it’s not the same kind of hatred. I hate the Muslims (not “Palestinians”) for what they perpetrate against us, and the latest event only fuels my hatred, but it must not be overlooked that if the hostilities against us were to cease, I would cease hating them. That’s a very important difference between Israeli Jews’ hatred toward their enemies and the converse.

Case in point: Anwar Sadat. The late president of Egypt had, on October 1973, inflicted an initial military blow to Israel the likes of which his predecessor, Nasser, could only have dreamed of. In the aftermath of that war, Sadat was hated, reviled and burned in effigy by the masses of Israeli Jews. He then came and signed the peace treaty with Israel, complete with a speech in the Knesset. Right after that, the raging hatred against him died out. Of course the families of those killed in the Yom Kippur war could not forget, and their grief could not be assuaged by the peace treaty, but the masses of Israeli Jews stopped their hatefest around Sadat. All because of the peace treaty.

We Jews do not turn the other cheek; we are commanded to hate our enemies. But we are to cease hating them once they have repented, and we are not to hate sons for the deeds of their fathers. In this area, the rule for G-d is certainly different than the rule for humans: He keeps hatred and wreaks revenge, whereas we are not allowed to do so. That is because He is always objective and righteous, while we are bound to fall into errors of judgment.

Thus, we cease hating Sadat once he has signed a peace treaty with us; and had Arafat not opted to continue hostilities toward us after the Oslo Accords of 1993, we would have ceased hating him as well. On my travels in Germany, I do not burn in hatred at the sight of every German, for, even if his grandfather was an SS man, he himself is not so. Jewish hatred, then, is cause-based.

As for the other side’s hatred—what is there to say? I would think it sufficient to bring a small example from the last Hajj (from the thread Hatred in a Holy City on LGF):

“The prayers of all Muslims when they cast their stones at the devil must be directed at (U.S. President George) Bush and his devilish allies in America and the Arab world.”

Ahmed al-Dosary from Kuwait agreed. “I prayed for myself, my family and for the end of the main evil, the United States.” (Emphasis mine. —ZY)

“From Kuwait”. Kuwait, the same country that the first George Bush liberated from Saddam’s occupation at their request. A hatred that continues to burn even after a good deed has been done to them.

The Muslims of the West (Europe and Israel, for example) have standards of living there that their brethren in the Middle East hell-holes can only dream of. Do they, then, live normally? (I’m not talking about showing gratitude—that’s really too much to expect.) Not a chance. Not in Britain, not in Australia, not anywhere. Wherever they live, far from integrating to their host society, they do everything to lower it to their 7th-century level. And they hate, hate, hate their non-Muslim hosts, not because of any “legitimate grievance”, but because they believe they are to dominate and not to be dominated. Their religion commands them to harbor and show everlasting hatred toward the other, no matter the circumstances. Greater a contrast between two types of hatred there could not be.

With this truth in mind, I can now review the latest moral-equivalence-fest on Daily Kos. A left-leaning Jew, once again, sees how his beloved platformed has turned into a place where “the wish for the end of the Jewish State is a laudable goal” (to quote D. Honig’s cry of distress on the “The End of Zionism?” diary I mentioned two posts ago). Eyal Rosenberg ponders the raw Jew-hatred on which “Palestinian” children are raised, and even though he posts a disclaimer saying he believes the “occupation” must end, this is a sober moment in which realizes that “no withdrawal will suffice, as the goal is All Of Palestine”. (The link is from the original quote. —ZY)

The reactions from some of the commenters? “Israel started it all”. And moral equivalence aplenty. Commenter “weasel” says:

Additionally, I must ask the eternal question of the I-P debate. If it is hate's triumph when Palestinians kill Israeli civilians, what is it when Israelis kill Palestinian civilians? Was that hatred not worthy of a denunciation as well?

Eyal Rosenberg answered the way I would:

Palestinians carry out large number of acts out of hate. From the heart. Wrathful, active against civilians and soldiers. "Collateral damage" intentional.

Israelis carry out very large number of acts out of calculation. From the head. Mechanic, reactive against perceived enemies. "Collateral Damage" unintentional.

Both cause death, but are carried out with different intent. Which is worse? Judge for yourself.

“Weasel” has no problem brushing it all off:

This is pure projection, and it makes you one more defender of the occupation you claim to oppose.

Wow. Manichean dualism from a guy who would lambaste President Bush for his post-9/11 “either with us or against us” comment. Continues:

The fact is you know nothing about what was in that young man's heart. You know nothing about what was in his head. You know nothing about what was in his history or education.

He knows nothing… yet you do know it was caused by “the occupation”. And, of course, there is nothing, simply nothing that could give us a clue as to the education given to “Palestinian” children. Continues:

The "hate and only hate" motif is simply a way of ignoring the realities of Palestine under Occupation. What drove this man? Hate is possible. At least as likely is rage at the suffering of friends and family. Perhaps a relative was one of the countless civilians murdered by Israeli "Defense" Forces. Perhaps what was driving him was hopelessness.

I’ve had a relative killed by “Palestinians”. Why don’t I feel like going into the middle of one of their towns and killing randomly there? As Eyal Rosenberg replies:

The fact is that:

1. I have lost a classmate, three friends and a family member and still do not want to blow myself up in Ramallah.
2. My Grandparent's families were exterminated in the Holocaust, and I still do not want to blow myself up in Berlin. (Nor has any other Jew for that matter).

The reply from “weasel”? Can you say, “deaf ears”? I knew you could:

Or maybe you are not faced with your country being occupied for 40 years in the past and an unknown length into the future. Maybe, those in Ramallah have not strangled your country, preventing you from having any job, or often food, health care, transportation, or decent housing. Maybe those in Ramallah have never denied you a simple passport or citizenship in any country on earth. Maybe, and I'm just speculating here, the Palestinian Occupation of Israel has been somewhat less overwhelming than the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.

And, of course, maybe this young man would have preferred to kill Israelis in the proper and civilized manner, with an Apache attack helicopter. Maybe he simply could not get his hands on one, and so resorted to his hateful means.

There’s a lot more I could bring here, but the post is getting long enough as it is, so I’ll wrap this up with a comment from “dmsarad”. Commenter “dmsarad” is among those who I have seen showing distress at the direction of Daily Kos ever since the last Lebanon War, and has a few diaries trying to remedy it (listed on his user page, if you’re interested). But in this case he makes an absolutely kumbayistic comment, titled, “1 thing you forgot”:

Abject poverty. Give a guy a job, 3 meals a day, and a solid middle class existence and he is far more unlikely to blow himself up.

This, after counter-terrorism experts have reached the conclusion that poverty is not the usual drive for terrorists. This, after 9/11, whose 19 perpetrators were all wealthy Saudi citizens.

Poverty, the “occupation” and all that. Yes, it is everyone’s right to raise hypotheses, but then it is their duty to provide falsifiers for them. Poverty and occupation (a real one, suffered by a real people!) is what the people of Tibet have been going through for decades, courtesy of a truly oppressive regime that, unlike Israel, doesn’t give a fig for the niceties of international law and human rights (but does, however, capitulate to the Muslims). So where, where, just where are the Tibetan suicide bombers blowing themselves up in the malls, markets and bakeries of Shanghai?! Does any kumbayista have an answer for that?

And where do we find suicide terrorism, apart from Israel? There was 9/11 in America and 7/7 in Britain as one-time events. There are, as day-to-day events, suicide bombings in Kashmir (Indian territory) and in the south of Thailand. Those things are, upon investigation, found wherever there is a sizable Muslim population—and nowhere else. No other people, no matter how long their list of grievances toward an oppressor is, engage in suicide terrorism. It’s a Muslim-only thing. Only Jews keep the Sabbath, only Christians believe Jesus atoned for mankind’s sins, and only Muslims kill themselves together with their enemies for divine reward.

They hate us for what we are, not for what we do. They are commanded to hate us. We are commanded to hate them to the extent of our self-defense, and no more. If they repent, we are to cease hating them; if they do not, it is up to us to defend ourselves, and it is up to HaShem alone to close the account. There is simply no equivalence between the two hatreds.

What is Kumbayism?

Kumbayism is the system of thought according to which the word “Peace” has the same meaning to all humans.

Kumbayism is centered on the belief of common dreams for all humanity—dreams of self-determination on their own lands, their ancestral lands, living there in happiness and prosperity, undisturbed by invaders from the outside.

Kumbayism purports to “embrace diversity”, while in reality denying the fundamental differences of thoughts and values among human beings.

Kumbayism denies ideological imperialism; it holds frugality to be the natural desire of all humans, and explains global supremacism away through the profit motive (“Iraqi oil” and so forth). That people should have a non-materialistic drive to subjugate the whole world constitutes kumbayological heresy.

Kumbayism is, therefore, to believe all conflicts to be solvable through negotiations and material concessions; to believe all conflicts are rooted in “legitimate grievances”; and to believe hip-hop dances could hold the key to permanent peace.

Kumbayism is to regard every word from the President of the USA as a cynical move toward reaching his goal of “stealing foreign oil”, while not even giving consideration to the idea that Osama bin Laden’s references to the “oppression of the Palestinians” as the source of his grievances with the USA might be nothing more than a cynical move on his part. Because OBL is a frugal resistance fighter living in a cave, hiding away from the money-driven Western imperialists.

Kumbayism is to exalt Mohandas Gandhi’s non-violent resistance against British rule in India, while putting him next to Hassan Nasrallah, who gladly sent his own son to die on a suicide mission, and who derides the other side’s “love of life and hatred of death” (his words), just because both are deemed by the kumbayistas to be resistance fighters against money-driven Western colonialism.

Resistance fighters, both the non-violent and the non-non-violent kind, side by side. From Zombietime.

The opposite of Kumbayism is Jingoism, which the former decry as “leading the world to the brink”, while not considering that, in certain situations, it is kumbayism that is doing just that, and also while completely ignoring the jingoism of the other side, or explaining it away as “resistance to Western colonialism”.

Kumbayism is advertised as a “reality-based view”, supposedly free of irrationality and magical thinking, yet its adherents display extraordinary faith in the magical capability of pieces of paper (those of signed peace treaties) to restrain their signers from violating them.

Kumbayism is advertised as a New Paradigm for our age, free of the shackles of Oldthink, yet its adherents think the 19th- and 20th-century concepts of race struggle and class warfare are still relevant to our age. The sight of almond-eyed Muslims murdering almond-eyed Buddhists in Thailand is no more welcome in their eyes than the sight of Jupiter’s moons through Galileo’s telescope was to the geocentrists of his day.

Kumbayism involves decrying war as the most horrible thing possible, while harboring sympathy, if not outrightly giving support, to the most jingoistic ideologies ever known to man. To quote George Orwell (hat tip: commenter Peacekeeper on LGF):

I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism.

Kumbayism demands the expunging of the word, “Evil” from the dictionary, claiming everything can be explained through rational, scientific, material causes; yet they do not even begin to attempt to explain such things as a whole society having a norm of raising children on a culture of death, or the sheer diabolical enthusiasm of the same to kill the women and children of the enemy (G-d forbid).

Kumbayism, even if its adherents are given the benefit of doubt as to their sincerity, undermines the prospect of world peace by failing to consider all the facts—especially the facts about human nature. With such enemies as confront us today, the best result of the application of kumbayism could be a ten-year truce. For lasting peace, a different approach is necessary.

What is Moralism?

Moralism is the use of the language of morality to immoral ends.

Moralism is to confine the requirement of moral behavior to only one of the sides, exempting the other.

Moralism is to require justification before one can defend oneself, and therefore to condemn any pre-emptive action outright, no matter even the explicitly stated intentions of the other side. It means, for example, editing a scene from Star Wars: A New Hope to make Greedo shoot at Han Solo first, in order to give Han the “moral right” to shoot back, even though it is quite clear Greedo is a hired hand for his crime lord, and that the chance of him missing Han from such a distance is as great as that of a seasoned gunman missing an elephant in an alley from a range of one meter.

Han Shot First—because he knew he’d be dead if he let Greedo do it instead.

Moralism is to regard religion as the cause of all wars, yet to use religious language (such as, “America’s sins”) to condemn the defensive actions of democratic, non-theocratic, states; all while exempting true theocratic movements, foremostly Islam, from such criticism.

Moralism is to declare oneself to be against racism, while diluting the term so as to become meaningless (or: please tell me what race are Muslims again?), so that true cases of racism, such as the massacre of blacks by Arabs in Darfur, are blithely brushed under the carpet. Moralism also means to confine anti-racism to a particular race and to exempt another.

Moralism is to accord full rights to perpetrators, and none to their victims. It means school bullies are never even verbally chastised, lest that hurt their “delicate souls”, never mind the injuries those bullies inflict upon the bodies and souls of schoolkids in their vicinity. It means soldiers, guardsmen and land owners everywhere fear defending themselves because of legal prosecution, while the wrongdoers can count on the West’s same “legal system” to wash their crimes white.

Morality is to stand up for those who have been wronged. Moralism is to have declared, in advance, that the weak have been wronged, without probing into the matter. It is to set a different standard for the weak and the strong, no matter the facts. In more mundane areas, it means Apple and Microsoft can employ the same predatory corporate tactics, but, while Microsoft will be decried as an “Evil Empire”, Apple will stay the “hip underdog” and be defended for exercising its right to maximize profits. In less mundane areas, it means the United States of America can have 3,000 civilians murdered on its soil in an instant yet still be considered the oppressor of the world, and that act excused as “payback for America’s imperalistic past”. It means suicide bombers entering civilian areas in Israel in order to murder as many women and children as possible (G-d forbid) can be considered, “legitimate resistance” and “freedom fighters having only their bodies as means of countering imperialism”, while a misfired Israeli shell is seized as proof of Israel’s fundamental orientation toward ethnic cleansing.

Moralism is to cloak the breaking of every taboo, including bestiality and pedophilia, under the mantle of, “freedom of expression”, no matter the harm it could cause to society; all while adhering to a careful, respectful, considerate stance of “not rocking the boat” concerning the taboos of the “other”, such as criticism of the founder of a certain religion.

Moralism is to decry the loss of every life, except those of American “mercenaries” in Iraq. It is to say, vehemently, that all people are equal, and no murder is justified, but then, in the next breath, to rejoice, to gloat, over the murder of those “war profiteers”, for it is, of course, justified.

Moralism is to decry anti-terrorism measures as being an American president’s bid to do away with democracy, while turning a blind eye toward a Venezuelan president having done exactly that, with no terrorism-related issue ever raised as justification.

Moralism is to display such a compassionate heart toward those detained in the five-star American prison of Guantánamo, while revealing its stony side regarding the Cuban prisons on that same state.

To use linguistic terminology from one of the greatest proponents of moralism today: the surface structure of morality more often than not reveals, upon investigation, the deep structure of moralism. Let us not be fooled.

World Music Never Right In The First Place

On January 8, 2007, LGF had a post named, “World Music Gone Horribly Wrong”, featuring a music album on the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage titled, “Palestine Lives!: Songs from the Struggle of the People of Palestine”. Among the tracks are, “The Testament of a Martyr” (“martyr” is Islamspeak for suicide-bomber), “The Road of Dignity” (once again, honor is shown to be of utmost important to them, more important even than the lives of their children) and “I am Enduring” (enduring self-inflicted suffering, if anything). I have already written of this “indigenous freedom fighter chic” (on December 5, 2006 and on November 17, 2006). But Charles’ title, “World Music Gone Horribly Wrong”, sent my thoughts darting in far-flung directions just as surely as Leto Atreides’ words, “The women are beautiful at this time of the year” sent Stilgar’s thoughts to faraway places in Children of Dune. This is about the phenomenon of World Music as a reflection of the relations between the “colonials” and the “indigenous”.

For the purpose of this post I have used the magazine Masa Acher, the Israeli equivalent of National Geographic. Geographic magazines, and this I realized quite from my beginning of reading them, a lot of years ago, are supposed to bring information about strange peoples and places, but in most cases fall very, very easily into the trap of value-judgments, usually the trap of Reverse Discrimination, in which they try to make up for past bias against the non-Western natives by heaping gory details of Western colonialist oppression of them. This is issue 90, from March 1999. It may seem too old to be useful, and indeed I had that thought as one of my first upon recalling it, but on second thoughts its being from pre-9/11 days makes it even more useful than if it were a recent issue, because that shows how deeply ingrained the PC (post-colonial or politically correct) attitudes are.

National Geographic does a feature on a new species of ape in Iran.

“World Music” means non-Western native music. The term is effectively the musical equivalent of Affirmative Action, since it seeks to redress the situation (whether true or false) that Eurocentrism is blocking any chance of non-Western music gaining the same high profile as Western music. The term proves problematic from the very start, as Masa Acher makes clear (pp. 18–19):

Many oppose the term, arguing that it puts world-encompassing music in a ghetto of sorts. It is also argued that the term is meaningless, because so many sorts of traditions, rhythms and instruments are concealed in it, such that it is too small to contain them all.

In other words: the push to remedy Eurocentrism has succeeded only too well in perpetuating it! Which needs to kept in mind when we come to next accusation upon “World Music” (p. 19):

And there are those who argue World Music is a Western invention, a new kind of colonialism (and on that [see] the following).

That takes us to the elaboration on pages 21–22. Here is the meat of that issue (p. 21):

This cultural colonialism expresses itself also in thefts of music from the Third World, the “primitive” [world]. White man comes with sophisticated recording instruments, and records a bunch of monks in Tibet or a tribe of pygmies in equatorial Africa, comes back to his sophisticated studio in Berlin, in Paris or in London and samples that primal music into a new hit which he sells for millions. And what about copyright? The original creators of the music are not aware of the theft, and of course not of their rights.

This single paragraph opens a whole can of worms. The only undisputed thing is the fact of Western people making money of music they did not originally create. But the argument against this practice is presented in the framework of Western copyright law. How does the writer of this article (Dubi Lenz) know Western copyright law would even be desirable to the original creators? Judging from numerous statements of spokesmen standing for the rights of indigenous peoples (the most prominent exemplar being the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality), the original creators will have nothing to do with Western copyright law—they don’t want anyone to profit from their music, and that includes themselves, for they do not see music, or indeed cultural artifacts in general, as something to reap monetary gains from.

Needless to say, not all indigenous peoples think the same way as the authors of the Lakota Declaration of War. Some are quite for standing up for their right to be the only ones who profit from their music. However, whether the original creators are against all profit from their culture or just against foreigners profiting from it, the fact today is that both employ Western copyright law to their favor. And this, for anyone who at this point may already have come to ask what this subject has to do with the current global conflict, is the heart of the matter.

Globalization, more than it is expressed through a McDonald’s in every corner, and more than it appears in the uniformity of housing and TV shows, shows itself in the ubiquity of the PC discourse. It shows itself in the readiness of many “fronts for indigenous peoples” to use Western tools, especially the courts, in order to reap gains, some of which are far beyond the requirements of “redressing past wrongs”. As Mark Steyn puts it in America Alone (p. 84):

When they want to, Islamists can assimilate at impressive speed. So we have fire-breathing Imams milking Euro-welfare and litigious lobby groups with high-rent legal teams. Neither of these are features of Arab life. Rather, they illustrate how adept Islam is at picking and choosing what aspects of Westernization are useful to it. Whatever the arguments are for and against “gay marriage,” there are never going to be many takers for it. But the justifications for same-sex marriage are already being used to advance the cause of polygamy, and there are far more takers for that. It’s already practiced de facto if not de jure in France, Ontario, and many other Western jurisdictions, and government agencies, such as the United Kingdom’s pensions ministry, have already begun according polygamy piecemeal recognition for the purposes of inheritance law. Neither feminists nor homosexuals seem obvious allies for Islam, but lobby groups have effortlessly mastered the lingo, techniques, and pseudo-grievances of each.

Islam compared to a fast food chain. Will the Islamophobia never end?

Whether you want to “keep your music unsullied by capitalistic greed” or to “exercise your rights to it as original creator”, you have the benefit of Western courts, together with a public climate now sympathetic to it, at your disposal. And whether you want to equalize the rights of same-sex couples to those of other-sex couples or to legalize the right of a man to marry four women, you have those same courts and that same friendly climate at your disposal, again. Impalement by one’s own sword of a guilty conscience for past wrongs.

Where to now? Any attempt to cut this state of affairs short, to go cold turkey on this rampant Affirmative Action and resultant Reverse Discrimination, would send the cries of, “Neocolonialism! Racism! Cultural imperialism! Apartheid!” going through the roof, with stymieing through pressure groups soon to follow. It’s a Gordian knot: letting that very category, “World Music”, stand fuels the charges of colonialism, but banning it would raise the same charges. Honor-killings, if permitted under the guise of non-interventionism (or “multiculturalism”, as it is now dressed), fuel the charge that “Westerners think the lives of immigrant girls are worth less than the lives of their own girls”, whereas if they are prohibited, the charge that “Westerners fail to show sensitivity and respect toward other cultures” is levied. How do we get out of that?

My proposal is fiendishly simple, though it requires undoing the PC-wrought total self-skepticism in order to carry out: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Join ’em by declaring, as British colonialist governor Sir Charles Napier did, that you too have a culture that needs to be shown sensitivity and respect. That you too have a heritage, and that that heritage deserves to be acknowledged and defended at least on its homeland, if not more so. We should say that it is part of our culture for a woman to show her face, and insist on visitors and immigrants respecting that, just as female tourists to Saudi Arabia are required to cover themselves up. We should say that the churches in Europe (as are the temples in India—again, it’s not about “East vs. West”; I’m using this Leftist anachronism because that’s the dominant discourse nowadays) are part of Europe’s heritage, and mosques do not belong in Europe any more than churches do in Saudi Arabia. If the West’s post-colonial guilt can be turned against it, then so can multiculturalism and indigenism be turned against those who use it to nefarious purposes.

Of course, the problem is the loss of cultural consciousness in the West. It used to be Christianity; for the purpose of cultural consciousness it doesn’t have to be Christianity, old European heritages like those of the Celts and Greeks could be just as good for that job, but the fact is “post-Christian Europe” doesn’t mean a Europe come back to its pre-Christian heritage, it means a Europe with nothing. Nothing to resist being killed or live for, in a tragic inversion of the words from John Lennon’s pathological song. Years upon years of, “We have been evil, we have done wrong, we are trash, we are nothing” have taken their toll.

“World Music” was never right in the first place—born in the sin of Western self-flagellation. It forms a vicious circle in providing a basis for continued accusation of “Western colonialism” and, subsequently, further allotment of time and space for that same “World Music”. The only way out of this circle is to declare Western music to be yet another form of World Music, and from there, to insist on its being played even to the ears of those who consider its enjoyment to be the beginning of treason.

I enjoy various kinds of music, including Arab music (as I said so many times: my writings are not against Arabs, they’re against Islam), and it is with deep regret that I have to use this topic as a springboard toward political commentary. However, I have only politicized an already politicized subject, and it is my hope this sad state of affairs will soon be put behind us by taking corrective steps. And, of course, the big picture is more important than the small sample of it, which is there only for the purpose of increasing clarity and understanding.

Left, Right: What Really Matters

I have used the term, “The Left” on my blog innumerable times to denote, as a whole, the post-colonial, anti-Western, pro-Islam column in the non-Muslim world. The term serves as a shorthand, but I am slightly uncomfortable with it. The division of politics into “Left” and “Right” is simplistic, not in that it does not reflect an existing polarity, but in that it gives the impression that there is only one polarity, and a mutually exclusive one at that.

The terms have been a catch-all for political opposites ever since it was coined after the seating of the opposing factions of the French Revolution. The polarities the terms denote are real; however, they are of more than one kind, and there is no preventing one person from being a right-winger in one area and a left-winger in another. This has some startling ramifications for the current global conflict. Here is a partial view of the areas in which the Left/Right dichotomy is expressed:

1. Economics: “Left” stands for the view that the state should intervene in the economy for the sake of economic equality of the citizenry; “Right” favors a free market.
2. Social values: “Left” stands for the view that social values are each person’s own business, and that deviation from, or entire replacement of, traditional values should be permitted; “Right” stands for the view that traditional social values are healthy to society and should be upheld by law for the public good.
3. Foreign policy: “Left” stands for intervention for the sake of international interests and against intervention for the sake of purely national ones; “Right” stands for the opposite of that. However, this distinction can be inverted depending on the situation, as the Iraq affair shows.
4. Relation of the individual to the group: “Left” stands for being for the collective good in order for the individual to benefit, “Right” for individual freedom in order for the collective to benefit; again, as above, the situation at hand can easily invert this.

Already from this very brief outline, one can see how perceptual this whole “Left vs. Right” distinction is. A political science major would tell you it should be avoided altogether if we aim for any exactitude. So why do I write about it at all? Because, as most people know well, perception matters in this day, in an age when the public image can bring governments to back down from sane steps all because of “what the polls will say”.

Granting, despite its problematic nature, the usefulness of the Left/Right dichotomy, it does not cover (even perceptually) another, very important, issue: liberalism (in the original sense of the word) versus authoritarianism. Here the Left/Right dichotomy cannot be applied at all, for this polarity is disjoint from all the others. At most, it can be said that those who lean far to one of the sides tend to be authoritarians (Far Left, Far Right). “Fascism” is not synonymous with “Right”, and “Communism” is authoritarian not because it is left-wing but because it is Far Left.

I will exemplify all this political terminology on myself:

1. Economics: probably a centrist, advocating either center-left (Keynes) or center-right (Hayek) positions according to the best fit, never far left (Communism) or far right (unbridled capitalism) policies.
2. Social values: right-wing (conservative), as in, for example, “Marriage = One Man + One Woman”, and so on.
3. Foreign policy: the folks at Daily Kos would without hesitation call me a right-winger, seeing as I stand for the national interests of Israel (Zionism), yet my calls for worldwide resistance to Islamic imperialism and my writings attempting to instill native self-confidence among guilt-ridden, self-flagellating citizens of the West would, according to the perceived tendency, ironically make me a left-winger (while they, with their now prevalent “America First” sentiment, would be right-wingers)!
4. Relation of the individual to the group: probably right-wing, as I oppose state-based collectivism; and yet, I reject the “every man for himself” type of individualism, especially in our critical time.

Once again, contradiction and lack of clarity are justifiable charges. If they are made, then I could say I have succeeded in showing how perceptual and incomplete the Left/Right dichotomy is. Lastly, on the other axis, that of liberalism versus authoritarianism, I’m for liberalism, of course. Although I believe in the Orthodox Jewish vision of G-d’s kingdom at the End of Days, I reject the idea of it being established as an earthly theocracy by human beings, for human beings cannot be trusted to stay uncorrupted by absolute power until G-d converts their hearts as foretold at the very end of His prophecies. (The present State of Israel is only “the beginning of [the Jews’] salvation”, not the real thing itself.)

All this so far has been, surprising as it may sound, just the groundwork for the heart of the matter: the relation between the perceived “Left” of today, the perceived “Right” of today, liberalism, authoritarianism, dovishness, hawkishness and, above all, Islam.

Where does Islam stand on this political compass? I will reiterate the areas:

1. Economics: no conclusive verdict; apart from almsgiving and the prohibition of usury, a wide range of economic views can exist under it. The same is true for Judaism, by the way.
2. Social values: extremely conservative, so far as to mandate the suppression of even thinking about opposing the social norms laid down by it. Far, very far, Right.
3. Foreign policy: intervention for the sake of international ideals, represented by Islamic law (the law for all mankind, according to Islamic belief), is an obligation unto every Muslim. Far Left.
4. Relation of the individual to the group: the collective (ummah) good is highest, the expectation for every good Muslim being to sacrifice even his life for it (hence British Muslims doing jihad in Somalia), and deviation regarded as treason and punished by death. Far Left.

From the above it is clear that, on the second axis, Islam is authoritarian. It shares this, fascism, with the previous two threats to the liberal world. Communism could be placed clearly in the Far Left. National socialism was Far Right in its intervention for national interests, a mixture of Left and Right in social values (social conservatism in some issues, “destroying the old order” in others), and economically center-Left (Keynesian; Hitler and Roosevelt employed similar economic policies in response to the Great Depression). In all those three forms of fascism, the Left/Right dichotomy can be seen to be of little importance in comparison to the authoritarianism. Each of them have a different basis for their authoritarianism—racist ideology in the case of Nazism, class warfare in the case of Communism, religious supremacism in the case of Islam—but all are illiberal and, furthermore, expansionist, having the whole world as their goal.

Three authoritarian ideologies illustrated. Click to view full size.

Anyone who stands for liberal values cannot possibly sympathize with, let alone support, Islam. The fact that so many left-wingers, even non-Marxists, do so is, I might surmise, because of the overemphasis on the Left/Right dichotomy and its details. If Leftism consists in opposing intervention for the sake of national interests, and the current right-wing government is thought to be doing just that, then left-wingers rush to support the Muslims as part of their ideology of internationalism. If Leftism consists in standing for individual choice of lifestyle, and in repudiating criticisms and value-judgments of unusual lifestyle, and the right-wingers (called “Christofascists” in the USA in that context) are perceived to be pushing for outlawing non-traditional and heterodox lifestyles and practices, then left-wingers support Islam as a lifestyle choice just as they support homosexual civil unions. This consideration, of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”, trumps all others and blinds a good deal (and growing) of the left-wingers, even the truly liberal, anti-Marxist ones, to the grave threat that the religion-based strain of fascism poses to them as well as to the right-wingers.

The Left/Right distraction, if not removed soon, could be the downfall of the West. It is the other axis, that of liberalism versus authoritarianism, that should be emphasized now.

Somalia the Model

On December 24 last year I posted on the Ethiopian offensive against shariah-ruled Somalia, and have kept a keen eye on developments there since. Now that the events seem to have reached their conclusion, with Ethiopian prime minister Zenawi having declared the mission completed and the troops ready to withdraw (Jihad Watch, January 2, 2007), I write my summary on the affair.

I can think of no better summing up of my thoughts on it than the commentary on Genesis 6:9. On the words, “Noah was in his generations a man righteous and whole-hearted”, Rashi says, “There are among our rabbis who commend him[, saying]: then obviously if he had been in a generous of righteous men he would have been more righteous; and there are those who fault him[, saying]: according to his generation he was righteous, but if he had been in Abraham’s generation he would not have counted for anything”. Both views that Rashi brings up represent the two minds that I, and I suspect many other observers, are at regarding this affair. The first view is the relative view of Noah’s status, with expressed optimism, while the second view is the absolute view, with the thought that that generation could have done better.

I had posted that post with the relative view in my mind, the view of it against the sad backdrop of near-total dhimmitude everywhere: the USA’s entanglement in Iraq, and consequently the report of Baker’s Iraq Surrender Group; the ongoing appeasement of Islam in Europe; India’s reluctance to take matters into hand within its own borders and in its Muslim-occupied territories (Kashmir, Pakistan and Bangladesh); Thailand’s coup installing a Muslim prime minister in order to negotiate “peace” with the Muslim invaders in the south; and last but not least, the constant bungling of Ehud Olmert, the dhimmi prime minister of Israel, both in Lebanon last summer and now with his silence in the face of having one of Israel’s towns bombarded by rockets daily. Against such a backdrop, how can Ethiopia’s initiative fail to arouse cheers of optimism on our side?

Yet it is so easy to get carried away by one’s emotions. When I try to look at it now soberly, I realize Ethiopia’s victory is of the same sort as the USA’s in Iraq in 2003. There is nothing here but the confirmation that the jihadists are big talkers and cowards who melt away in front of modern armies. They excel only at terrorism, guerrilla warfare and insurgency, where they can hide among the citizenry to deter any non-Muslim power that has some moral compunctions (which they certainly do not), and aided and abetted by the dhimmi media of the West, ready to seize upon every “show of imperialism”.

It seems to me Robert Spencer thinks that way too, and therefore has seen it fit to congratulate Ethiopia on not following America’s course in Iraq (quoting from the linked JW thread):

Their mission—to destroy the jihadist forces in Somalia—has largely been accomplished. Soon it will be time to go home. Here is an example we would have done well to follow several years ago, rather than pursue Wilsonian fantasies.

And there’s exactly the problem, in my opinion: President Bush’s failed “Iraq the Model” has given us a distorted view of this whole war. Because Bush’s experiment failed, and because people are all too willing to view this as a categorical failure of non-Muslim defensive interventionism, we can hope for toppling shariah-ruled states at most, but not for that final and crucial stage in the war, the stage without which there can be no permanent peace, only truces, however long they may endure.

In the case of Iraq, I think the progress toward failure has been made all too clear after about three years of Bush’s experiment. There have been many speculations as to what led Bush to decide to invade Iraq in the first place, from both Left and Right, such as weapons of mass destruction, terrorist ties with Al-Qaedah, Iraq’s oil, AIPAC’s lobbying, restoring the honor of his old man, and so on. That’s not germane to this discussion. Some time after the successful occupation of Iraq, Bush decided to use it as a model for the Middle East, winning the hearts and minds of the people of the region by democratizing Iraq. Iraq would reap the fruits of democracy, and other countries would follow suit, willingly. Or so the naïve policymakers at the White House thought.

We know what has really happened, of course: just as the “Palestinians” used democratic elections to vote an Islamic, jihadist, genocidal party—Hamas—so did the Iraqis democratically restore former Islamic institutions that Saddam had shut down. Even if the people truly desired a secular, democratic state, they could not cast their ballot freely, for the specter of jihadi retaliation, now no longer stayed by a strongman’s hand, would hang over their minds. But the Muslim world—and that is a fact that so many Western policymakers ignore—is more religion-minded than even the most religious parts of the West, so that many Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi’a, voted gladly for a more Islamic state with the shariah as its constitution.

The USA would have done well to regard Saudi king Fahd’s words from long ago, that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Instead, those three years passed with the dhimmi media channels and a blinkered government thinking that the insurgency and the votes for Islam were the fault of US occupation. It all culminated in the US midterm elections of November 2006, which were a vote for abandoning Bush’s Iraqi Experiment. The whole world has thus gotten the message, the wrong message, loud and clear: non-Muslims have no business staying inside Muslim countries and trying to impose their structures on them. Very likely this is the message that Zenawi had, as Spencer comments, internalized before making his decision to pull out and send the troops home once the Islamic government of Somalia had been done away with. It is better than to suffer the three bloody and hopeless years that the US troops did in Iraq, but it is, in my opinion, a long-term mistake.

Do you not realize how much our standards have been lowered? We settle for truces, for temporary armistices, instead of permanent peace; we even adorn armistices with the Muslims with the name, “Peace”. Where would we be today if, after Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had destroyed the Axis states and infrastructures, they had decided to send the troops home? This current World War III would now be waged against a resurgent Nazism instead of, or in addition to, Islam. There is a real, long-term price to be paid for not uprooting the ideology behind the physical threat. To quote Fjordman, in his essay Political Correctness – The Revenge of Marxism, from June 14, 2006:

The simple fact is that we never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have. Yes, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed. This removed the military threat to the West, and the most hardcore, economic Marxism suffered a blow as a credible alternative. However, one of the really big mistakes we made after the Cold War ended was to declare that Socialism was now dead, and thus no longer anything to worry about. […]

[…]

One of the readers of Fjordman blog once pointed out that we never had a thorough de-Marxification process after the Cold War, similar to the de-Nazification after WW2. […]

We are now paying the price for this. Not only has Marxism survived, it is thriving and has in some ways grown stronger. […]

This splendid essay is hosted, as are all others by Fjordman, on the great blog Gates of Vienna. But we need not go into an essay, for the very tagline of Gates of Vienna demonstrates the problem clearly:

At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.

What does that mean? It means that, from 1683 onward, with the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, and until the Islamic resurgence beginning (to give a specific year, though of course this is only a milestone) in 1979, with Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran, the West has had not peace with the Islamic world but a truce—an armistice, a hudna, a very long one but a temporary one nevertheless. 300 years of freedom from an existential threat are no mean achievement, yet here we are with the threat back to haunt us, with a vengeance, and even worse than before, because now the invaders are inside the gates of the non-Muslim world.

I reject both the Chamberlainians who say there is only a political solution and the ultra-hawks calling for “nuking the Islamic world back to the stone age”. On the former, it is already clear (except to those who don’t want to see) that appeasement reflects our weakness in Muslim eyes. On the latter, there is absolutely no certainty that “nuking Mecca” would end the Islamic threat once and for all. Many of the WWII enthusiasts speak of how the Allies broke the will of the enemy to fight, yet, as I said above, a will can only stay broken for so long.

People on our side speak of darura—Arabic for “necessity” or “compulsion”, according to Spencer and Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch. Fitzgerald says that the breaking of the Muslims’ will to fight will bring them to adopt a peaceful stance as a matter of necessity. Now, far be it from me to think myself as being equal to Spencer and Fitzgerald, but it seems to me, from common sense, that necessity is a shaky basis for permanent peace. They may repudiate jihad because of necessity now, but what if, a few decades or even centuries later, they decided the circumstances have changed, the necessity no longer standing? It would be the end of a hudna just as the 300-year hudna of 1683 has now come to an end.

My reservations about the US entanglement in Iraq were for two reasons: the reason stated above, that the attempt to install the trappings of democracy (free elections etc.) without instilling the soul of democracy (free minds) was futile, and secondly, that it is foolish to expend resources abroad when the Islamic threat needs to be countered at home first. The line, “We’re fighting them over there so you don’t fight them over here” becomes much less convincing once Bush has agreed to let thousands of Saudi Arabian students into the USA. And the plight of Europe has been covered all too well by Mark Steyn. The invasion and occupation of Muslim countries is only a middle stage, following the removal of the threat at home first, and preceding the uprooting of the fascist ideology lastly.

All those neglected stages require an approach to which the current political climate is hostile. At home, attempts to put the Muslim colonialist invaders in their place are shut down by the charges of “racism”. Abroad, any attempt to de-Islamify the countries (whether through secularization, Christianization, proselytization to Buddhism, to Baha’ism, and so on) would be screamed at as being “cultural imperialism”. Yet these are necessary for the survival of, and then the permant removal of the existential threat from, the non-Muslim world. Negotiations embolden the enemy, while military action, though certainly better than negotiations, is insufficient by itself, leading at best to a long truce.

The so-called “reality-based community” preaches caution against “turning this into a religious war”, against “soaking the world in blood”. But it is they, through their “realist” proposals, that are doing the most to bring the ghastliest scenarios to pass. Political correctness is enabling the Muslims to gain more states of their own, new bases for the jihad, and is ensuring that this threat, now almost 14 centuries old, will never cease. As I said on the Jihad Watch post on Ethiopia, in response to a commenter who told me to take heart at the victory: I enjoy and savor this victory; I will not, however, be surprised to hear of a renewal of this conflict in the news a few years from now.

If this world war is destined, G-d forbid, to be so desperate that only divine miracles could save us, it will be, in the greatest of ironies, the fault of the same “reality-based” voices who urged to take steps so as not to make it so. I believe it is not yet too late to prevent the worst from taking place.

R for Reparations, also for Revenge

In this installment of my exposé of the Left-Islam unholy alliance, I show how the Left’s demand for “reparations for the wrongs of colonialism” serves as its connection point with Islam, how it is fundamentally irrational, and how it truly precludes any possibility of permanent peace.

I do not give colonialism a moral clean bill of health; there were wrongs, injustices committed by the Western colonial powers, that is a matter of historical record. But then those powers did some good things as well to the peoples they ruled, and those peoples in turn were not always the innocents the Leftists portray them (see for example the article The fraud of primitive authenticity, by Spengler of Asia Times). And whatever the case, it is irrational to hold the West guilty and obliged to atone for its past deeds, for no good is served by that—not to the former colonized peoples, nor to the West itself, which by that attitude is driven to suicide through self-loathing. My theme here is the great distance between rationality and the Left’s view of identity politics.

I used to be enthusiastic about opposing colonialism, back in the 1990’s, when I was a Leftist. I haven’t changed to pro-colonialism, but my enthusiasm for that issue has been all but dampened ever since the anti-colonialist narrative started to be applied to Israel, framing Zionism as a colonialist movement and the “Palestinians” as the indigenous people of the land. For that reason, I will demonstrate my point not from the Middle East, but from Africa, where I am relatively free from the coloring of opinion that closeness to home brings.

It is argued that the effects of European colonialism in Africa are still in force, long after the cessation of European rule of the lands and exploitation of them and their inhabitants. The European powers in the 19th century divided Africa into provinces whose borders cut across tribal boundaries; those provinces, once granted independence, became the states of present-day Africa, but those states still suffer from the problem of aggregating different, often conflicting, tribes in them, hence the frequent rise of dictatorships in Africa as a last-ditch effort to give those European-imposed borders a real-world meaning. I am inclined to agree with that analysis, not having found evidence to the contrary so far. However, the things the Leftists demand from the West as reparations to this state of affairs cannot address it, and are driven by an irrational desire.

What are the demands? First, apologies from present-day Western leaders for the past colonialism of their countries. Second, aid from the same Western countries to their former colonies. The first demand, if it has been complied with once, has no redeeming pragmatic value (I mean one apology is sufficient; the Left’s demand for constant apologies, and remembrance of the past wrongs, brings no gain to those countries). The second demand could be helpful, but that is not self-evident, and indeed the representatives of many pan-African groups have pleaded with Western aid funds to stop sending money, because it was both fattening corrupt rulers and inhibiting Africa’s economic self-sufficiency. For Leftist groups to comply to such a request, however, would be deleterious to their myth of the perpetual guilt of the West.

They call apologies and economic aid, “reparations”. They are not—they are compensations, substitutes for something lost and unrecoverable, like someone remarrying and having new children after losing the family in a disaster (far be it from us). To repair means to bring a broken object to its former state, or as near to that as possible with regard to usability. Reparations for the past European colonialism in Africa would be to repartition Africa according to its tribal boundaries. But considering the Left’s frenzied opposition to such ideas, for example when proposed by the Project for a New American Century or even on a single country like Iraq, there is vanishingly little chance that we would ever hear the term used in its proper meaning. Instead, we get from the self-professing “reality-based community” a host of irrational demands, demands that have nothing to do with actually making the world a better place, and everything to do with revenge, or retribution. Let me quote a passage from the article Revenge of the Indians from the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot, from issue #2239 of the Friday addendum “7 Days”, dated December 22, 2006:

(Reporter speaking about a Native American flute-player from Arizona) Perhaps because we were foreigners or because we listened to him, his heart and mouth were opened swiftly, and when we told him about what Si Teeshire said about the Gringos, the flute-player said clearly and plainly that the World Trade Center tragedy was “the day of reckoning and retribution for the wrong done to the Indian nation. They started paying now. The 9/11 was the payback”.

Since this article is from the Mainstream Media, which in Israel as everywhere is not to be trusted to report things as is, and furthermore its author is Yig’al Sarane, a well-known and stubborn Israeli Jewish Leftist, some creative interpretation and interpolation may have been involved in this quote. But to its credit, I do not find it hard to imagine the flute-player saying those things. People might tell me to cut him some slack, for he is a Native American and his nation suffered true wrongs; my reply is that this post is not for dealing with any specific group perceiving itself wronged, but with the Leftist ideological stance on the issue of past wrongs, and I regard the flute-player’s sentiment, whether made rightly or wrongly, and whether actually voiced or fabricated by Sarane, to be the authentic echo of that Leftist stance, the stance of seeking revenge.

The desire for revenge is intertwined with the view of the world as fundamentally just. It is compatible with the view of a personal deity and with the view of karma (“reaping what you sow” as a natural law), but not with materialism. If there is neither a personal deity to dispense justice nor a natural law to work it—and that is indeed what the materialist view entails—then the view of the world as fundamentally just is irrational, and with it, by necessity, the desire for revenge. Under Karl Marx’s view of historical materialism, which underpins most of the Left today, even, on an unconscious level, many of those of them who are not Marxists, the just world view and the desire for revenge ought to be scoffed at as primitive ideas originating from religion, the “opiate of the masses”. Yet they are not scoffed at; far from it, almost every Leftist I know claims to hold justice, justice worldwide, as his most important political belief.

Yet the Marxist belief in justice worldwide is different from the Bible-based or even the karmic one. The Native American flute-player expressed a karmic belief; the Marxist agrees with him that 9/11 was fitting payment for a “long history of the USA being the world’s bully”, but he is not content with being an onlooker, waiting on the sidelines for karma to work its effect. The Marxist believes in active application of justice, by individuals. Whereas karmic justice is passive, and whereas the Biblical concept of justice is active but confined to institutions of law, the Marxist concept of justice rests on the idea that the uprising of the oppressed (“proletariat”) over those who wrong them (“bourgeoisie”) is an inevitable occurrence, and should be seized upon by the revolutionary as soon as he can. And that is where Marxist politics meets the politics of Islam.

Is Islam not a theistic religion like Judaism and Christianity? Surface appearances do not reveal the truth deep down. Yes, Islam does hold the god of the Koran to be the supreme ruler of all his creation, but in actuality it delegates that rule to men, to the Muslims. Whereas the observance of G-d’s commandments in Judaism is for crowning Him as a prelude to His coming to rule the earth, the Muslim’s observance of Islam has the purpose of letting the Islamic god rule. The goal of instituting shariah law over the whole world is not merely one of maintaining civil order or sanctifying people, but, as many an Islamic site will say clearly, it is that of “giving Allah the right to rule”; and any state not ruled according to shariah law is guilty of “denying Allah the right to rule”. Where Islam is not the law, the god of Islam is not the ruler; this in contrast to Judaism and Christianity (or most of it; the Dominionists are a fringe sect with an Islam-like mindset), which hold that the Creator rules His entire creation whether humans keep His laws or not.

So the Islamic god needs shariah law to be instituted by humans in order to rule. As a natural consequence of that, Islam offers the option of delegating the job of dispensing divine justice to individuals. This is not to say there are no courts of law in the Muslim world; but, in contrast to the Biblical worldview, which says it is sinful for an individual to take the law into his hands, the Koranic worldview leaves much room for it, and even commends it in many cases. Hence the cataclysmic effect assassinations have had on the Jewish psyche, such as that of Gedaliyahu ben Achikam in ancient times and of Yitzchak Rabin recently, while in the Islamic world these are so commonplace as to be shrugged off every time they happen.

“Resistance to oppression by any means possible” is both a Marxist and an Islamic tenet. Western Marxism has in our day fallen in love with Islam because of that shared trait, going so far as to treat the Koran as a Communist manifesto. Above all, the Western Left sees Islam as a valuable agent of fulfilling the goal of global justice, with revenge and retribution for past wrongs and all. To them, who are timorous to wreak revenge on the “powers of oppression” themselves, the Muslim suicide-bomber brings the benefit of having global justice dispensed by individual humans, without themselves (the Marxists) being held accountable for it. All they have to do is give aid and comfort to the Muslim enemy by fighting its propaganda war, serving, as Daniel Pipes said in his recent article for the New York Sun, as “the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahedeen”.

Actual peace and prosperity for all are not the goals of the Marxists, nor of the Muslims, as the case of the “Palestinians” shows: to paraphrase Abba Eban, they have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, preferring the destruction of the other side over the life of even their own children. Peace and prosperity for both Marxism and Islam have the precondition of removing all opposition to them first, even if it means destroying their means of achieving peace and prosperity in the here and now. With the individual being empowered to dispense global justice, there has never been a chance for democracy or for lasting treaties with the other side, and always been the threat of internecine warfare, among the adherents of these dysfunctional ideologies. In contrast, the Biblical view of the mandate for worldwide justice is put forth eloquently by Tolkien in his Lord of the Rings, in the mouth of Gandalf:

“Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment.”

Very many people know the Hebrew word for “G-d”: E-lohim (I have written it thus, with a dash, out of the requirement of Jewish law). Not so many know that that word is used for a certain group of human beings: judges presiding over a court of law. G-d is E-lohim, and a judge sitting at a court of law is E-lohim, going to show the seriosity, the weight of the task of deciding the fates of people. To be a judge at a court of law is the closest possible in action a human can be to G-d. It is no wonder, then, that the Biblical tradition prohibits humans from wreaking revenge. This is not out of a fluffy, kumbayistic belief that “war is not the answer” and that dialog and appeasement of the aggressor are the right way to achieve peace; it is because, if every human acted upon his perceived grievances, the result would be war of all against all. We can see right now, before our very eyes, the results of individuals acting upon their perceived grievances; such that all non-Muslims worldwide have to fear their every use of an airplane, and to check their art and literature seventy-seven times before publicizing it, to make sure it does not offend the Muslims. Because the Muslims believe in the individual’s right to dispense justice on behalf of the deity, and the Western media and academe and policymakers are either appeasers cringing with fear (that is: dhimmis), or worse, Marxists glad to aid and abet those whom they have found to share their judicial worldview.

“I bid you stand, Men of the West!” Revenge is not permitted to the individual, only to courts of law and, of course, the Judge of All Judges, G-d Himself; but self-defense, in contrast, is not only the individual’s right but his duty, a duty which, if neglected, if relinquished in favor of mercy toward the cruel, will necessary lead to cruelty toward the merciful. The West is duty-bound to defend itself, its values, its civilization, from those who would murder it, and from those who would facilitate that murder by bringing it to suicide. Under those circumstances, the demands for “reparations” should be ignored, rejected for the Marxist sedition they are. As I said, this is not pro-colonialism or pro-imperialism; this is anti-colonialism (i.e. against Islamic colonization of the West) and anti-imperialism (i.e. against Islamic institution of shariah law over the whole world). As I have written before, the Marxist anti-colonialist narrative is an archaism, unsuitable for coming to grips with today’s challenge, and useful only for pricking the West’s conscience away from taking the necessary steps to defend itself. This war is the war of the true rule of law against the threat of systems that disguise lawlessness under the mask of law.

Potentially A Great Generation

For December 7, 2006, the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, LGF had the thread Anniversary of Another War, as well as a thread pointing to a Cox & Forkum cartoon, Then and Now. In both threads, the commenters are agreed in their depression over the contrast between the American fortitude and tenacity of 65 years ago and the current state just five years after an attack on a greater number of American civilians. I too agree on the contrast and the shadow it casts upon our times; however, I do not agree in writing this generation off as lost. There is today a lost generation, but it is a generation which we have long known to be so, while the coming generation, the generation that will probably tasked with the trials of World War III, has yet to be known, to fulfill its potential.

The “Signs of the Times” are of interest to both amateur and professional historian alike. Both search for them in the artefacts of the day, particularly written ones, but not only those. The mainstream media of each day can record societal changes even unconsciously: for example, taboos like profanity can be seen to be broken, while new taboos like racist descriptions can be seen to be established. The art of the day can reflect change: the witches’ “Fair is foul and foul is fair” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth reflects the growing doubt and confusion caused by the Scientific Revolution, especially the demise of the geocentric cosmology. Language itself can tell us of the times: the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is marked by the increase in the number of spelling mistakes in written Latin, until, when we reach the Middle Ages, the mistakes suddenly cease, for the spoken tongue is now too different from Classical Latin to influence the writer. But whatever the signs of the times, one fact must be taken into account: they reflect the generation in current standing, the adults, and not the generation that is going to take the stage a few years from now.

In times past this fact was not very important, for generational changes were slow and few, so that signs from a certain generation would usually hold true for the generation after that. In recent times, however, meaning from the 18th century and up to now, gathering speed with the passage of time, societies undergo copious and rapid changes that can make a generation very different from the preceding one. Even a single event can be enough to show that the young generation, hitherto thought to be the same as that of the adults, is something else.

What could be more appropriate than TIME Magazine for demonstrating that point? In 1938 it featured Hitler as its Man of the Year. Appeasement was in full tempo then, with Britain and France shamefully betraying Czechoslovakia. From that cover of TIME Magazine and from the disgraceful moves of the public in Britain, France and the United States, one could be forgiven for regarding that generation as lost, as lacking any discrimination between good and evil, not to mention the will to fight. Yet just one year later, in 1939, the generation was jolted by the reality of a power whose hunger the mere Sudetenland would not sate, and the “warmonger” Winston Churchill was raised to be the leader of Britain in the West’s fight for survival. And the USA too, having been isolationist since the departure of Woodrow Wilson, helped Britain in the first years of the war, and in 1941, following the Japanese attack, joined it actively with resolve, until the total unconditional surrender of all Axis powers.

TIME Magazine wanted to make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the Man of the Year for 2006, but the editors probably felt it could be going too far, so instead they settled for an idea which is no less a sign of the times than the choice of Ahmadinejad would have been: to declare everyone Man of the Year. It was under the pretext that “everyone now participates in the flow of information that changes the world”, yet Robert Spencer had words cutting behind that mask:

This monumental bit of silliness on Time’s part is just another illustration of the West’s failure of will. We have no longer any standards, any distinctions, any excellence, because we are pathologically afraid of branding anyone a failure.

Along with this wholesale leveling comes an unwillingness or inability to declare any model of society or any belief-system superior to another, which saps all our will to fight against the encroachments of the Islamic jihad ideology. […]

Thus has Robert Spencer analyzed TIME Magazine’s peculiar choice as a sign of the times. I agree with his analysis; however, again, this does not teach us about the coming generation any more than did TIME’s choice in 1938.

The signs of the 1960’s have become legendary. We can now recall them one by one: the flower children, the emergence of the birth control pill, the Cuban Missiles Crisis, Vietnam, the first man to set on the moon, and so on. But the mainstream media of the 1960’s was not markedly different from that of World War II and the 1950’s. This is because the generation of that day (now called The Greatest Generation, and hailed by all LGF lizards, including me, as one whose example we need to follow if the West is to survive the coming war) was still in power. Conversely, the 1960’s were the decade in which “radical” ideas like Political Correctness, Occidentalism (denigration of the West), Indigenism, Multiculturalism, Radical Feminism, Anti-War Activism, Radical Environmentalism (an ideology, going beyond mere care for the environment and into the view of humans as a blight on Mother Earth) and other examples of “questioning all authority” and “breaking every taboo”, yet they have come to take control of our societies, or more dangerously, of the policies of our states, only in last few decades, from the 1980’s to this day; this because the college kids who hatched those ideas in the 1960’s are now adults in positions of power. Those facts are always to be remembered when evaluating a generation in our times.

One can point to the Mainstream Media of our day and lament, “Our generation is unfit for the coming World War!” But he would be wise to remember that his “Our generation” is not the youngsters coming to adulthood today, but the 1960’s kids who have grown up to be the policymakers and leaders of our day. Thus it is clear how we have an increasing number of people who are becoming aware of the threat of Islam while the leaders are stuck in Cold War thinking and appeasement of the ideologically-driven aggressor with material incentives. The aging hippies of today, reeling from their “success” in forcing the pulling out of US troops from Vietnam, see Vietnam in any US military intervention abroad. So with whoever laments that the wrong people are in positions of influence and power I agree, but I hold that the sorry state of our leadership and academe is only the generational fulfillment of the mindset that was incubated in the 1960’s—not that the coming generation is lost. The coming generation is, at worst, an unknown variable, for it has not yet had its opportunity to show how it is.

But it is not a completely unknown variable.

Why are World War II comparisons so abundant? I am of the opinion that those comparisons have been overdone; although the similarities are there, the settings of today are different from those of World War II in some important ways, not least of which is the fact that World War II, like World War I, was built upon and sustained by the aggression of nation-states fueled by totalitarian ideologies, while in the current conflict the totalitarian ideology (Islam) is perfectly capable of operating without a nation-state, as heads without bodies. As Victor David Hanson puts it:

But there are significant differences between the “global war on terror” and World War II that do explain why victory is taking so much longer this time.

The most obvious is that, against Japan and Germany, we faced easily identifiable nation states with conventional militaries. Today’s terrorists blend in with civilians, and it’s hard to tie them to their patron governments or enablers in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan, who all deny any culpability. […]

Indeed. To point at Iran, though deserved, is so convenient, because it’s a tangible threat; to point at an ideology, all the more so an ideology masked under the mantle of religion, is much harder. With the authorities in the West—kids of the 1960’s now in positions of influence and power, that cannot be stated enough—so careful not to break the taboos of multiculturalism, it is no wonder that a criminal can get away with his crime by being veiled and no-one would dare to do a thing about it. The adult generation, if not treasonously sympathetic to Islam, is accommodating of it, quick to defend it in the name of that Sixties idea, echoed by TIME’s choice for this year, that no value can be judged better than another.

What about the coming generation, then?

It was raised by the 1960’s kids, who in turn had been raised by the World War II generation. The Greatest Generation, because of the circumstances of the age (the Depression and then the War), raised their kids on frugality and on conservative (meaning non-permissive) values. As even the flimsiest survey of the 1960’s shows, their kids rebelled at all their values, and when the time came for them to shape the world, they had to give their kids all their parents had never given them: lavishness and permission.

A whole cadre of educators adhering to the humanist school of psychology saw to the application of the dictum that a child’s feelings must not be hurt under any circumstances, else they would stunt his or her psychological growth. There grew a generation of children without borders, knowing to ask but not to give. Their parents were all so very “open” and “frank” with them on the subject of sex, such that the kids reached their teens with an extensive knowledge of the relevant anatomy and… almost zero experience of even the concept of commitment to a long-term relationship. They were educated on the absolute sanctity of respecting the “other”, to such an extent that oneself was marginalized and left without an identity of one’s own.

Not all children of the Sixties Radicals were educated so explicitly, yet the influence was always behind the scenes. From Zombie’s photo report Anarchist Bookfair, San Francisco, March 18, 2006.

We’re talking about the kids of the 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s and even today. I’m one of them. Although the 1970’s kids deride the “computer game kids” of the following decade, and those in turn ridicule the “Internet generation” of the decade after that, all those kids were raised by that famous generation of radicals and taboo-breakers who “questioned all authority”. What happened to those kids—to us?

Understandably, there were different ways to go. And yet, not many were those who followed in the footsteps of their Sixties parents, just as not a lot of the Sixties kids copied the way of the Greatest Generation.

You have probably heard of the “modern, middle-class metrosexual who goes searching for himself”. It’s an apt depiction of us who inherited an identity void to be filled. Most of us have undergone at least one instance of that stage in life in which we have searched for “our true home to which we will return”. In that search, many are blown like straws along any wind that feels a little fair. I am not saying this in disparagement, I am saying this in understanding and in pity.

Some have aimed for the utmost in exoticism, and can be found today in the streets spreading the message of ISKCON or Raël, or in the woods, beating the tom-tom drums as part of the authentic practices of the ancient Smelihipi tribe, stretching all the way back to 30 years ago.

Some have gone the route which at first may have shocked their parents, but then actually made them sigh with pleasure, for it still kept to the hallowed goal of “Sticking it to The Man”. The likes of Adam Gadahn may have an adopted an ideology diametrically opposed to that of their parents, but then the parents realized it was just as effective, if not more so, in the way of smashing “Western Imperialism” and “American Hegemony” and “Patriarchy” and the rest, and accepted it as a wise choice. What a magnet Islam is for today’s children of the Sixties Radicals, letting them both rebel against their parents’ void of authority and identity and still be in their good books by fighting against their Devil!

And some have said to themselves, “Who are you to tell me to question all authority?” They have realized the error of both absolute doubt (nihilism) and absolute certainty (fascism); of both absolute permission and absolute prohibition; of both absolute temporality (the overabundance of earthly pleasures that leads one to vomit) and absolute spirituality (the escapism that leaves evil unopposed and the world unpopulated).

They have understood that the commercial globalization with a McDonalds in every spot is not the spirit’s highest aspiration, yet they have also been discerning enough to realize that Luddism is not the antidote.

They have discovered that the treasures of “free, happy living”, which their parents had coveted in the “Noble Savage”, dressing themselves up as Native American or Arab Bedouin tribesmen, were already available, and in abundance, in their own heritage. That they no longer need to stand the identity crisis of being students of every other culture but not able to be studied.

How many of those are there? Naturally, I don’t have numbers. But, even from my own setting, I know many who were raised on some kind of “child’s guide to nihilism”, even implicitly, but have found that way. They, in contrast to the elder generation behind TIME Magazine, have a clear idea of what they stand for and why they need to fight for it.

The unknown variable is their exact number. But whatever that is, they are the ones who will be on the fighting lines of World War III. The current state of leadership and academe in the Western world does not reflect them, just as TIME’s cover from 1938 did not reflect the heroes that would emerge just one year afterward. World War III’s “Greatest Generation” is presently hidden, a potential force, but I have no doubt of its existence. My prayer for it is that it should unleash its potential before the crisis is too great.

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P.S. This post is part of my effort in doing sanegoria for this generation. May HaShem judge us mercifully, amen.