Cyberfutility

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.

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[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

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

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.

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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 niqabveiled 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.

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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.

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

Standing for Nationalism

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:

1. Islam is a mortal threat to all non-Muslim host states.
2. National sovereignty should be defended from the encroachment of superstates.
3. The governments are no longer in any synchrony with the people they are supposed to represent.
4. Uncontrolled immigration is disastrous and should be done away with.

To contrast, the disagreements:

1. The role of race in shaping human cultural differences.
2. 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

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

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!

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)

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.