Q: Mr. Secretary, I'm just curious. Do you feel at all embattled at this point in your tenure --
SEC. RUMSFELD: No.
Q: -- given the fact that --
SEC. RUMSFELD: No.
Q: -- aside from the retired two-star general calling you incompetent and asking you to step down in an op ed over the weekend, we also had a column from Maureen Dowd in which she quoted an unnamed administration official saying that you don't hold the same sway in meetings and that you're treated as, quote, "an eccentric old uncle who's ignored."
SEC. RUMSFELD: You like to repeat all that stuff, don't you? (Laughter.) On camera? Did you -- did you get that? (Laughter.) Let's make sure he got it. He loves that stuff. It's a sure way to get on camera! You'll be on the evening news.
Q: I know that you like to have the facts in the premise of the question.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Yes, I do, and you did it very well. (Laughter.) No --
Q: You can do one-arm push-ups and put all this to rest.
SEC. RUMSFELD: No. The answer is no.
Q: Do you hold the same sway in meetings?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, come on. I'm not going to get into that.
Pam.
Q: Sir, in your opening statement, you said --
SEC. RUMSFELD: If you believe everything you read in Maureen Dowd, you better get a life. (Laughter.)
What's Franklin Graham's problem with Islam?
By The Associated Press
The Rev. Franklin Graham, who outraged Muslims in 2001 when he said that Islam "is a very evil and wicked religion," told an interviewer on ABC News' "Nightline" last week that he hasn't changed his mind about the faith. Why wouldn't a devout Christian Evangelical treat a competing religion with hostility? I read nothing here except free exercise of conscience. But I think that Islam is choser to an esoteric cult, propped for elite status defense, than a bona fide religion.
Asked by ABC correspondent John Donvan whether Muslim groups had succeeded in altering his outlook about Islam, Graham said "No."
"Do they want to indoctrinate me? Yes. I know about Islam. I don't need an education from Islam," he said. "If people think Islam is such a wonderful religion, just go to Saudi Arabia and make it your home. Just live there. If you think Islam is such a wonderful religion, I mean, go and live under the Taliban somewhere. I mean, you're free to do that."
Franklin Graham is the successor to his father as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, based in Charlotte, N.C. He was interviewed earlier this month in New Orleans, where Franklin and Billy were leading an evangelistic festival.
The younger Graham angered Muslims following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when he told NBC News: "We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He's not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."
Posted by: Listen to Dogs ||
03/25/2006 15:27 ||
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#1
Ya know, he's right.
Posted by: Captain America ||
03/25/2006 17:25 Comments ||
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#3
For people who make the inevitable comparison between fundamentalist Christians and Islamists, consider the following. The bible condemns witches to death. The Koran condemns apostates to death. When was the last time you heard a Christian cleric call for the burning of Wiccans? When was the last time you heard an Islamic cleric call for the death of an apostate?
England is at an impasse. The divide between them and the Continent is far wider and deeper than the Channel. It goes back to their very roots as a nation.
It is the Common Law. It is their English way.
Continental Europe, and the EU, are products of Roman and Napoleonic Law. Likewise, it is their very definition, their foundation, meagre and flawed as it is. Their society is permeated with it.
It is their, Continental way.
And the two systems are not compatible. Common Law is the "round peg", and Roman Law is the "square hole". The round peg cannot fit within the square hole unless it is destroyed.
And England's government, and both political parties, are willing, even enthusiastic, to destroy England to make it conform to the Continental way, the Roman Law. They have so given up on the English way, are in such contempt of their own history and the Common Law, that they are willing to try reduce their people to generic nothings, so that they can belong to Europe. To strip from their people everything that they are as a people, with a sneering contempt for their Englishness, and to make of them Europeans.
That is why England is moving towards authoritarianism. In its continual, unyielding and voluntary effort to *force* their nation to be something it *cannot* be, it achieves a situation of "velvet despotism".
Not ironically, the brutal social consequences of these efforts are seen in skyrocketing alcoholism, despondency and despair. Their government, perplexed by it all, wants so badly to be part of Europe, because it loves Europe, that it has become monstrous to its own people.
They are stubborn beyond description in their arrogance. They do not want a son, they want a daughter. So each day they force their son to dress and act like a girl. They give their son only girl's toys. They tell everyone they know that their son is their daughter. They rant for hours to their son about the inherent evils of boys, and hypnotize them until they, themselves, parrot the lie.
But the truth cannot be denied. An Englishman is English, a race, and a creature of the Common Law. He is not Hindu or Moslem, or someone of African descent from Jamaica. Such people who live in England are just copies of what the English really are. People who were raised in the English way, many of whom profoundly admire and accept this way. Many who are likewise creatures of the Common Law. Even their cousins, the Americans, too, are like the English.
But they are still not English.
So how much of England must be destroyed until the English are no longer English? This is the daily question their government faces. Their government willingly faces, even looks forward to. The next possibility on the agenda. The next social experiment. The next dehumanization.
And all for the greater good of belonging to a Europe unwilling to cede even a hair's breadth of their Roman Law traditions or national cultures. A Europe aghast even at the suggestion that the Rights of Man outweighs the prerogatives of the state, or that the very authority to govern descends from the people and not the elites, born, raised, and educated to power.
#1
Europeans don't exist; they are an abstract construct from the EU's post-nationalist tranzis. There are european *people*, *Nations*, but they are being dissolved into that new concept of Europeans as well. This is not just the english here.
#2
In the context of moose's post, the distinction is meaningful. Common Law is bottom up law creation as opposed to the Civil Law which is top down. The continentals are just ethnic groups that aren't united because they won't use the same language. Chiraq's hissy fit over a speech being given in English is worthy of any Iraqi politician.
#3
I will disagree with Moose on this:
An Englishman is English, a race, and a creature of the Common Law. He is not Hindu or Moslem, or someone of African descent from Jamaica. Such people who live in England are just copies of what the English really are. People who were raised in the English way, many of whom profoundly admire and accept this way. Many who are likewise creatures of the Common Law. Even their cousins, the Americans, too, are like the English.
But they are still not English.
It is the culture more than anything that matters IMO. Although it is telling, 'Moose, that you write "English" rather than "British". For surely you are aware that Britain has been made up primarily of the Welsh (the original Britons) plus those relative newcomers the English (Angles and Saxons) and the Scots (Irish Gaels intermixed with Picts).
And these merged over more than a thousand years to form the English culture and common law you cite.
Now, you might say I'm a little sensitive to this since I have some Welsh ancestry. But the point is broader than that. 'English' common law is rooted in part in the ancient Welsh and Scots traditions of local assemblies as well as in the tribal customs of the invading Angles and Saxons and Jutes from 1600 years ago.
I'm not trying to nit pick. I think this matters terribly for our current situation around the world. Those in Britain who are embracing the continental model might well be ethnic English for generations back -- but they are no longer CULTURALLY English.
#4
"Even their cousins, the Americans, too, are like the English."
If anything, the divide is between the Continentals and the Americans, and the English are the cousins of the Americans. The cousins are transitioning from monarchy to EU authoritarianism. Velvet despotism indeed.
#5
lotp: I specified the English for a few reasons, everything from common law origins in the tribes of Gaul, Viking-Norman influences, Welsh, Irish and Scottish Law, Black's Law and the precedents of the Assizes, etc. Pretty soon it would overwhelm my point.
So tacitly, I just took English post-Civil War Common Law as the clearest and most influential example to compare with post-Napoleonic era Roman Law. Both have been relatively stable as systems of law for about 350 and 200 years, respectively.
Recognizing that both, in truth, are far more ingrained in their respective cultures than that brief time.
It is truly arrogance to assume that you can change perhaps 2000 years of culture in a people in a few generations. And yet, the basic concept of Europeanization is that all local customs, traditions, and practices be eliminated to produce a generic European, equally grey and at home in any part of Europe. A melting pot of sludge.
And yet Britain has become confused. In trying to "get along" with the Continent, they are not just surrendering their colour, and those things that lead to armed conflict, but they are surrendering to the process.
That is, Common Law is just, philosophically and practically, a better system than is Roman Law. It is foolish to give up a better, more efficient way of living, as much as if we surrendered our laws and embraced Sharia Law.
Common Law is fairer, more equitable, more conducive to creativity and business, and is filled with means to challenge the inefficient, the flawed, and the unfair.
To Americans who have studied American Revolutionary history, it seems that our entire revolt was an exercise in explaining the modern pricipals of Common Law. Our founding documents are explanations of why and how it is a better system.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States with its Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and a hundred other major documents are an astounding lecture on why Common Law, and not Royal Law or Roman Law, is better.
As a glaring contrast look to Roman Law, and the feeble document that was supposed to be the European Constitution. It is a document of, by and for the bureaucrat, an effort in a bizarre way to create the legal basis for *everything* that is, and what might be. Insanity.
This is because, just the opposite of Common Law, in Roman Law, if an activity is not expressly permitted by law, then it is forbidden. In Germany, it is a running joke that they have a police regulation for everything, and everything requires a permit, in triplicate.
The European Consitituion has no Bill of Rights, though they insist that within some unsurmountable paragraph in there somewhere that it actually gives more rights, next to the regulation governing the proper amount and type of food to feed a cow.
It has the simple message, that all laws, if not people, are equal before the bureaucracy and the state. Since the state issues laws to the people, like guaranteed welfare checks, there is only the assurance that the bureaucracy will continue to do its bureaucratic thing. And that is the "right" of the masses, of man. To be ruled over.
How is this any different in substance than being ruled by a king and his court?
Democracy is supposed to be the rule of the people; which is why the Eurocrat abhors it so, and does not wish it on his office. He was raised to be a bureaucrat, he attended the polytechnic, which all bureaucrats must attend to become bureaucrats, the elite. Why should his actions be scrutinized by people with no training or knowledge of government?
He is not "of the people", he is "above the people", and this is the Roman Law way.
For the British to abandon Common Law in favor of Roman Law is, again, as if they had decided to embrace Sharia Law, an act of foolishness.
#6
I agree re: common law, 'Moose. Perhaps I was misreading you, but I took you to say that people are pretty determined by their ancestors' culture.
If that were the case then I would be a Russian autocrat, from my father's side, and he would have embraced common law here even less warmly. But that wasn't the case at all for him and his brothers, born here of immigrant parents. They chose to come here and willingly embraced the legal culture here.
I think you're right about the trend to impose a uniform EU-ness on Britain. It is not a positive trend, IMO.
#7
Well, in a manner of speaking, they are. For example, if you look at the English language, you will see that it is permeated through and through with references to the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Shakespeare. If you try to excise those sources, the language is diminished considerably. In fact, most English speaking people would struggle terribly just to try and communicate.
And the same with Common Law. It is so intertwined with business, customs & courtesies, criminal and civil matters, etiquette, even education itself, that there is no way around it.
Social behavior collapses when the social contract is torn up. Which is why Britain is so miserable trying to adapt to Continental ways. Thousands of things that people "just did" before, now they have to ask permission from some appointed person they neither know, nor respect, nor should.
And the most aggravating part of it all is that there is no reason for the added bureaucracy, other than "because we say so." For this reason, the expression "Brussels bureaucrat" has almost become an epithet in Britain.
Nameless, faceless people far away who rule without accountability or conscience.
Does Britain face a revolution? Perhaps not yet. Their ability to tolerate amazingly oppressive situations is legendary. But then, something snaps.
In past, it was the poll tax that did it. Sooner or later, they will trod too hard on "The rights of free-born Englishmen".
Interesting read, but long, need p.49.
Hamas recent stunning victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections has forced the international community to face a precarious challenge. As the U.S. and Israel regroup to to deal with unapologetic Islamo-Fascists running Palestinian office, several pertinent questions beg analysis: (1) Why did the Palestinians utilize a democratic experiment to elect Islamo-Fascists? (2) Why are Israeli leftists using the occasion to paint the new rulers of Palestinians as forces of social justice?
To discuss these and other questions relating to Hamas takeover of the Palestinian Authority, we have assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests today:
Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of the new book The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege. He also was interviewed by FP about it, and I posted the link a while back, search for it in the archive or go to Frontpagemag's ones, it's interesting.
David Keyes, who assisted a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and specialized on terrorism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He recently returned from the Middle East where he co-authored academic papers with the former U.N. ambassador and the former head of Israeli military intelligence research and assessment. His latest paper, entitled Al-Qaeda Infiltration of Gaza: A Post-Disengagement Assessment was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
and
David Gutmann, Emeritus professor of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at North-Western university Medical School, in Chicago. As a clinician, he has practiced and taught intensive psychotherapy. As a researcher, he has conducted psychological studies of the Galilean and the Golan Heights Druse, as well as the Bedouin of the Negev and Sinai deserts.
FP: David Keyes, Kenneth Levin and David Gutmann, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
David Gutmann, lets begin with you.
In July 2000 in the Camp David talks, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 95% of their negotiating demands, their own sovereign state in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of the West Bank, and a capital in Jerusalem.
Barak offered the Palestinians sovereignty over all Arab-populated parts of East Jerusalem, over all of the Old City except the Jewish Quarter, and over the Temple Mount, with Jewish sovereignty only over the Western Wall below the Mount.
The Palestinians had a chance to enter a new era of peace, with their own state, on incredibly generous terms.
They chose death.
Yasser Arafat rewarded the Israelis for their offer by spawning another onslaught of gruesome terror the al-Aqsa Intifada.
Instead of choosing peace and their own state, the Palestinians decided it was a better idea to strap bombs onto their children and to send them into Israeli buses, cafés and teenage discos to blow themselves up alongside innocent Jews.
On the pretence of the importance of killing Jews, the Palestinians began to kill themselves along with Jews in mass numbers. The choice had been made for self-annihilation over creation. Palestinian kids detonated themselves into smithereens while their parents cheered on in ecstasy from the sidelines, proud that their children had become shahids (martyrs).
Then, as this madness ensued, we did all could to engender a democratic experiment among the Palestinians, hoping that democracy would free them from their addiction to mass death and suicide.
They finally got a democratic process. They took it and elected Islamo-Fascists.
Let me ask you a two-fold question now:
(1) What pathologies spawn a death cult like this?
(2) Many on the Israeli Left have taken the occasion of the Hamas victory to paint Hamas -- which has vowed to exterminate Jews -- as some kind of social justice party that is concerned with peace and the common welfare.
This is just as obscene as the psychology of Hamas itself. What gives here?
Gutmann: In voting for Hamas, did the Palestinians opt for warand death, or for war and victory?
I contend that they always opt for victory, but because their grandiosity leads to overconfidence and under-preparation, they end up with defeat.
In '47 an d '48 the Palestinian leadership chose war instead of the state that the UN offered them in a partitioned Palestine. It was the wrong choice: it led to defeat and to the loss of the lands designated for their state. Nevertheless, their motives in going to war were murderous, not self-destructive: they had every reason to believe that they would win a war of extermination against a relative handful of under-armed Jews - the same "Children of Death" who had gone unresistingly to the gas chambers.
And the Palestinians came pretty close to realizing this Holocaustic vision: a large proportion of Israel's precious younger generation had to die in order to stop them.
Again, the Palestinians had good reason to be optimistic in the second round of their war against the Jews, when Arafat led them into the Al Aqsa Intifada. Then, Israeli society was split between rather ineffectual Hawks and Peace-At-Any-Price-Niks, and Israel's borders were terribly porous to suicide bombers who struck almost every day.
Meanwhile, the Jewish state was condemned - also on a daily basis - by the UN, the Brits and the Europeans. Worst of all, the IDF had recently and for the first time run away from an enemy force: it had bugged out of Southern Lebanon with Hezbollah right behind it, leaving weapons, intact military installations and unprotected Christian allies in its wake.
Given this background, the Barak/Clinton offer of East Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank was not welcomed by Arafat as a token of Israeli generosity, but as evidence of terminal Israeli weakness: "The Jews are beaten, they are suing for peace. If Hezbollah could chase them out of Lebanon, then Allah willing my Fatah boys can chase them from all of Palestine."
It took the election of Sharon, Operation Defensive Shield, the PLO's crushing defeat at Jenin, and Arafat's house arrest in Ramallah to temporarily correct this grandiose, essentially paranoid delusion. But only for a short while: Islamic dreams of slaughtering a cowardly, effeminate enemy can be temporarily refuted by reality, but they die hard.
They flourish again when, in Arab eyes, the enemy reveals some shameful weakness.
Churchill once said, "The Hun is either at your feet or at your throat." Similarly with the Arabs; and I suggest that their oscillations between quiescence and ferocity are driven by the Shame/Honor dynamic that is central to Arab psyche and Arab society. Shame and loss of honor, while toxic to the Arab, cannot be metabolized within the Arab self. Instead, the stigma must be ejected, spat out from the self, and downloaded onto lesser beings: women, defeated enemy, infidels and especially Jews. Once the weakness that originated in the Arab is discovered in the Other, then - symbolically or literally - he must be killed.
The shamed enemy has come to represent some hated part of the Arab's persona, and Killing him is a substitute for suicide, for the killing of the self. This is the psychodrama that Zionist Jews and Arabs have been playing out in Palestine for almost a hundred years.
Most recently, having crushed the Second Intifada, Sharon trades Gaza, which is a liability, for the strategic West Bank settlements around Jerusalem that he intends to keep. These would be guarded behind the Security Wall - the barrier that will, in the absence of a negotiating partner, unilaterally define Israel's final boundaries. Sharon has drawn back the better to advance; but - particularly now that Sharon is comatose - Hamas spins Sharon's calculated disengagement into a great victory for their own gunmen: "the Jews are running away from us. This is only the beginning: we will make them drown in the sea."
In it's turn, the Palestinian street sees in Hamas, the "liberators" of Gaza, the agents of final victory over Israel, and votes them into power. As in 1947 and 2001, the Palestinians smell blood in the water, indulge their triumphalist fantasies, and again choose the fever-dream of total victory over peace and statehood. They are by now so seriously addicted to Judeo-cidal Dreams that, like true junkies, they will pay almost anything - statehood, peace, the future of their children, life under Sharia law - in order to feed their habit. And in this hectic scenario, Hamas is the more reliable pusher. Again, the fantasied goals are murderous, destructive towards others; it is the Palestinian willingness to pay an exorbitant price for them that is self-destructive.
Not all Palestinians share this genocidal syndrome. Some no doubt voted against Fatah's corruption, while others elected for Hamas' Welfare State (Hitler's wartime charity, Winter Hilfe, comes to mind). But for Hamas' True Believers, why is the addiction to blood-drenched fantasy so powerful? Why this overwhelming desire to see the Jews blown to pieces, terrified, and running? Again, we must refer to the dynamics of shame: I saw the Palestinians abandon their villages in 1947 without a fight, even before we of the Israeli Hagana had enough guns or men to make them run. Their resulting shame was compounded by their Arab "brothers" in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and egypt, who contemptuously shoved the dishonoured Palestinians into squalid camps. There, refugee kids grew up hearing taunts like these: "You Palestinian whores who sold your land to the Jews, and then ran away!
To repeat, Shame/Honor societies cannot manage shame except by inflicting it back on the enemy who shamed them. Until that happens, the timeless sense of humiliation festers in the soul, and breeds Psychosis: Arab leaders still bristle at the word "Crusade," and demand the return of Seville and Andaluz (Andalusia), since 1490 the "occupied territories" of Spain.
So of course the Palestinians will always sabotage - as they did in 1947, 2000 and now in 2006 a negotiated peace with Israel. For the Palestinians, the only acceptable negotiating partners are Jews who mirror the Palestinians of '47 and '48 : defeated Jews, SHAMED Jews whose terrified mobs run like lemmings to the sea. Good faith negotiations with a still powerful, still undefeated Israel means living forever with the shame of NAQBA , and giving up the wet-dream of a total, redemptive victory.
Thus far, the Palestinian addiction to such orgiastic visions has proven too strong to be broken. In some ways Israeli and American-Jewish peaceniks are even more pathological than the Palestinians: it is the former who exhibit motivated rather than incidental self-destructiveness.
If the Palestinians constitute a typical Shame/Honor culture, then by contrast, Jews - especially Peaceniks - constitute a Guilt culture. The Arabs worry about what has been done to them by way of insults and humiliations; the Jews worry about has been done to others by them, or in their name. History is a tale of blood, and statehood shoved the Jews back into history, into the middle of the battle, where the choices were to fight or die. The Israelis proved to be successful warriors, but many Jews - Israelis as well as Americans - have sickened of the killing, and are fashioning a separate peace. They have reached the point where they plead the enemy's cause against their own people, and ultimately against their own children. Currently, they are starting to spin HAMAS as the wardens of a benign welfare state Mother Teresa with a suicide belt.
The Palestinians won't be Shame-free until they have defeated the Jews; the Peacenik Jews won't be guilt-free until they have helped them do it.
Keyes: Hamas victory in the Palestinian election shatters the myth that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven by a small group of fanatics on both sides. It has reaffirmed the existence of profound radicalism among the general Palestinian community. The fact that a mass-murdering terrorist group was permitted to run in the first place was a disgrace to democracy. Just as Nazis cannot run in German elections and al-Qaeda is not allowed to run in elections anywhere, so it should have been with Hamas. In any case, the election was primarily a choice between two terrorist organizationsFatah and Hamas.
Hamas has killed about 600 Israelis, executed nearly half of the suicide-bombings from 2000-2005, colluded with al-Qaeda, and encouraged the defeat of America in Iraq. Hamas couldnt be less of a legitimate resistance group if it tried; a mere two percent of its attacks have been aimed at military targets. For these reasons and many more, Hamaslike al-Qaedamust be utterly liquidated.
So why did the Palestinians elect this wretched organization? To be sure, in part it was a rejection of the systemic cronyism and dysfunction of Fatah. But Hamas main goals since its founding have been the destruction of Israel in its entirety and the implementation of strict Islamic law. Through hardly conducted in an environment of true tolerance or freedom, a majority of Palestinians have expressed solidarity with these goals through the ballot box. At the very least, it can be said that Hamas genocidal aims did not perturb the Palestinians enough to actually sway their vote. Indeed, it is the Palestinian people who bear the responsibility for this latest calamity. Even if the average German citizens primary goal in the 1930s was not the eradication of the Jews, they clearly did not mind electing someone whose chief aim was exactly that.
Hamas influence can be blamed in part on the nearly two decades of dictatorship and oppression under Arafat. Tyranny augments fundamentalism as subjugated populations seek an escape from daily suffering and repression. Totalitarianism and the absence of basic human freedoms are the well-spring of extremism and terror. The rampant hate-speech spewed from Palestinian media and mosques have also have also fostered radicalism. Palestinian children are told daily by their leaders, teachers, preachers, and in some cases even families, that martyrdom and suicide are heroic acts rewarded by eternal bliss. The amazing thing is not that so many Palestinians have chosen to strap bombs to their chest to kill Jews, but that more have not. From childrens suicide-camps in Gaza to an-Najah Universitys glorified re-creation of a suicide bombing at an Israeli pizza parlor, generations of Palestinians have been indoctrinated into a cult of death.
As for any Israeli delusions of working with Hamas or moderating them, it can only be said that we have been here before. So much of what is being said about Hamas today is exactly what was said of the PLO two decades ago. Arafat was brought back from Tunis and needed only to sign a piece of paper renouncing terror. He uttered a handful of hollow platitudes denouncing violence in English and the world went forth appeasing this murderous tyrant. He became a frequent and honored guest at the White House. Rabin even said that Arafat could fight terrorism with greater efficiency because he was not accountable to human rights organizations. This was the warped mindset that led to the disaster of Oslo. Meanwhile, Arafat never gave up his dream of destroying Israel and certainly never stopped funding suicide-bombers. Emboldened by Israels recent unilateral disengagement, Hamas promises to be even worse than Arafat. The fact that Hamas provides social services to Palestinians should be about as relevant as if al-Qaeda handed out blankets to poor Afghanis after 9/11.
But most Israelis are tired of fighting and will do nearly anything to end the conflict. Israelis are a peace-seeking people who have been besieged by implacable enemies for so long that they simply want it to end. Some on the Israeli left have craved peace so badly that they have become delusional in the process; they are willing to sign a deal with whoever has paper. But overall, Israel has shown incredible tenacity in the face of seemingly endless terror. Nevertheless, perhaps fatigue is taking a toll. Consider the following two statements by leaders in a time of war:
Winston Churchill in 1940: "We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender
Ehud Olmert in 2005: "We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies."
That about says it all.
Levin: I agree with David Gutmann that the Palestinians' pursuit of their terror war against Israel, and election of Hamas, are less suicidal than genocidal. I also agree with his comments on the psychodynamics underlying the Palestinians', and broader Arab world's, genocidal agenda, except that I would emphasize the role of Arab leaders in cultivating and channeling individuals' psychodynamic predilections into murderous hatred toward perceived external enemies, most notable Jews.
On the recent Palestinian election, there has been much debate as to whether votes for Hamas were votes against PA/PLO corruption or for Hamas's exterminationist platform. But the distinction is based on a false premise in that - as David Keyes notes - the PA/PLO likewise promoted an exterminationist platform, using its media, mosques and schools over the past decade to further indoctrinate Palestinians into embracing Jew-hatred and believing in the illegitimacy of Israel, the necessity of its annihilation, and its ripeness for destruction.
As to Israelis, and western Jews, who ignore the other side's explicit agenda and replace it with fantasies of what they want the other side's agenda to be, fantasies that the Palestinians are simply asking for redress of supposed Israeli misbehavior and that sufficient concessions will end the conflict, they are the truly suicidal party, willing to risk their own lives and those of their children, their co-religionists and their countrymen for the sake of promoting their delusions.
The chief voice in this camp, Yossi Beilin, said explicitly that he was not willing to live in a world in which existential problems - such as Palestinian hostility - cannot be solved, and he chose to solve it not by confronting the enemy but by prettifying him, risking the very survival of his nation for the sake of his fantasies.
As I argue in my book, The Oslo Syndrome, embracing the perspectives of one's enemies is a common phenomenon within chronically besieged populations, whether minorities marginalized, denigrated and attacked by the surrounding society or small nations under chronic siege by their neighbors. It has been a recurrent theme in Jewish Diaspora history as well as in Israel.
A major counterweight to the psychological corrosiveness of besiegement must be leaders who convey to the community its true choices and bolster its will to resist. The Israeli-Arab conflict is ultimately a test of wills in that Israel has and will retain the military capacity to defend itself - despite its small population, its lack of strategic depth, and the rabidness of its enemies. It is self-delusion and loss of heart to defend itself that is likely to remain its greatest threat.
From this perspective, the 2005 statement by Ehud Olmert, cited by David Keyes, about Israelis being "tired of fighting" is an enormous dereliction of responsibility that, unless vigorously retracted, renders him unfit to lead the nation.
The Israeli people's response to the terror war launched against them in September, 2000, demonstrated that it was the Oslo era leadership, not the people, that had psychologically capitulated and was no longer willing to fight those determined to destroy Israel. The nation deserves leaders capable of reinforcing the nation's will, as Churchill did for England, not undermining it.
Gutmann: At the outset of this symposium, Jamie asked us to comment on the Palestinian's "death wish." But Dr. Levin, David Keyes and myself hold that the Palestinians have a death wish towards others, and that the truly suicidal version of Thanatos is lodged not in them, but in the Jewish Doves of Israel and the States. The Palestinians have no compunctions about killing: for them the act and its attendant fantasies have become eroticized - hence, addictive. They want to kill Jews so badly that they are willing to kill themselves in order to get at us.
Mr. Keyes and I agree that The Palestinians resemble the Germans under Hitler: convinced by him of their victimization at the hands of inferior enemies who did
not beat them fairly on the battlefield, the Germans poured their resulting "Victim's Rage" into various genocidal enterprises, including the Holocaust. Sharing similar delusions, the Palestinians turn their own version of Victim Rage against the Jew.
And as Mr. Keyes points out, too many Jews have become counterplayers in this psychodrama - enablers of the Arab psychosis. Guilty by nature, convinced of their own sins against the victimized multitude of third-world innocents, the Jewish Doves make the gestures of surrender. Turning the bared throat towards the knife they invite the Palestinians to punish them and their guilty nation for their sins.
I grew up among Jews like these, and agree with Dr. Levin that they are the truly "suicidal" party. While I'm surprised to see them proliferate in Israel, I can understand them. What I don't understand is the passive response of so many European Christians, citizens of advanced Democracies, to the increasingly arrogant, murderous challenge that they face from the Eurabian Jihadists. Like their grandfathers who appeased Hitler, the European Doves find all kinds of reasons to spin and minimize the Jihadist fury that now openly mocks and threatens their comfortable lifeways.
The appeaser's whimper, "Just give Herr Hitler the Sudetenland, and that will be the end of his territorial demands" is echoed today, vis-a-vis Hamas: "Make those Jews give Hamas title to Jerusalem, allow the return of the 'Refugees', and the Palestinians will be happy democrats, participants in the comity of nations..".
In the Christian case, I don't believe that "Jewish" guilt is the driving motive behind their covert surrender. Instead, I sense a kind of narcissistic passivity, which is much less treatable. Post-war affluence sponsored the "Me" generations the narcissistic personality of our times, which is founded in the demand for personal gratification. The individual demands for sexual conquest and material acquisition are idealized, and the capacity to revere entities beyond the self - family, nation, heritage, great causes and inspiring leaders - is blunted. In effect, the Jihadists reverse this syndrome. Despite their psychopathology (or perhaps, because of it) they are quite ready, even eager, to lay down their lives for nation, heritage, religion and charismatic leaders. They are like the Japanese Kamikazes, the suicide pilots who almost destroyed our Pacific fleet at the end of WWII. Confronted by God-obsessed Islam, the self-obsessed Europeans are finding all kinds of excuses to ignore and avoid the challenge. That kind of magical thinking did not work against Hitler and Tojo, and it won't work now.
We face a long struggle. As Dr. Levin reminds us, in the absence of "Churchillian" leaders, it is one that we may not win.
Keyes: Dr. Levin is absolutely correct to highlight Yossi Beilin as a symbol of the deep denial of reality that permeates many on the Israeli left. For Beilin, it seems, no moral red lines exist, whatsoever. No personno matter how evil or corruptis beyond empowering or negotiating with. This is the only possible explanation as to how he could have openly called for releasing arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti from prison in order to lead the Palestinian people. There is an Arabic proverb which states Stupidity is a disease without a medicine, and I think such words apply here. The warped mentality that allows someone to advocate freeing and empowering a convicted murderer and terrorist mastermind, is in large part why peace eludes us today. It will take sharp moral clarity and Herculean will to defeat global irredentism and jihad; those who ascribe to Beilins word-view, and learned not a whit from the mistakes of Oslo, certainly do not help in this fight.
Dr. Gutmann also raises important points regarding European appeasement. Undoubtedly, this is not a new story as Europe has historically done more than its fair share of appeasing the most brutal leaders known to man. In the modern sense, this means sending weapons and aid to the worst regimes on Earth. Take one look at the oil contracts and weapons deals that many European countries had with Saddam up until his final moments as President of Iraq. Add money skimmed from the UN Oil-For-Food program and it instantly becomes clear why certain nations were so adamantly opposed regime change in Iraq. European oil money funding mass-murder in Iraqthat was the real blood for oil, not Americas campaign of liberation against a fascistic tyrant.
Russia and China, incidentally, are often even worse in the appeasement department than their European counter-parts. Russia, for example, sends the government of Sudan, in the midst of their campaign of genocide in Darfur, the vast majority of its weapons. From oil contracts in Iran to unceasing appeasement of Hamas, much of Europe and certainly Russia and China, actively subjugate democracy and aid the forces of tyranny and terror.
If there was any doubt as to who is an appeaser of terror, simply observe who invites Hamas into their capitals. One by one, seemingly giddy at the prospect of defending yet another murderous terrorist group, Iran, Jordan, Russia, Turkey, and even South Africa, are granting Hamas political legitimacy and a platform from which to spew hateful rhetoric. At a time when this unrepentant terrorist organization needs to be totally isolated and indeed destroyed, certain countries are welcoming their leaders with open arms. Some even speak of sending financial aid to the government of Hamas-stan. The lesson radical movements throughout the world are learning is that if you kill enough civilians (especially Jews) then you too can be invited as an honored guest to Ankara, Moscow and a host of other metropolitan capitals. Who knows, you might even be funded by the European Union! If radical jihad and terrorism are to be quashed, then precisely the opposite message must be sent. Terrorno matter what the grievancemust never extract political concession.
Levin: None of the genocidal forces that have created havoc in the Middle East and beyond in recent decades, not Saddam's regime in Iraq, or the Iranian mullahs, or the Sudanese leadership, or Arafat's PLO or the Palestinians' Islamist alternatives, would have attained their capacity for mayhem had they not enjoyed the support of Western, most notably European, powers. The Europeans have indulged them first and foremost because to do so has been very lucrative. Profit consistently outweighed any potential concern for these forces' victims, such as Iraq's Kurds or Sudan's blacks, and it appears that for many Europeans the murderous Palestinian assault on the Jews of Israel was not even a weak counterweight to the profit motive that drives indulgence of all things Arab but was rather an additional incentive to business as usual.
Europe's cynicism has been reinforced by the narcissism described by Dr. Gutmann, a narcissism characterized by a focus on personal gratification and a perception of little beyond the personal as meaningful. This indifference to the world beyond one's self is distinct from the self-involvement found among the acolytes of the Israeli Left. In Israel, such narcissism is largely a cultivated stance with a long pedigree in the history of Jews seeking to detach themselves from a besieged Jewry. A common response among such souls has long been to ostentatiously declare themselves free of any identity beyond their individuality and so properly exempt from being the object of popular negative attitudes toward Jews. The narcissism rampant in Europe evolved in the context of an American security umbrella under which for half a century nothing significant was asked or expected of western Europe.
A consequence of both the cynicism and the narcissism is that Europe has been prepared to see large numbers of people murdered elsewhere without feeling any need to rethink or refashion its policies. The question is how much mayhem will it require at home before there is an effective shift in policies. It is likely that the body count will have to be high and both the terror assault and the backlash will turn ugly at best before Europe fully sheds its torpor and fashions an effective response. If one looks for Churchillian leadership, it is hard to find in Europe today even the remnants of a cultural milieu that could produce a Churchill.
Given the realities of contemporary Europe, almost the entire burden for fighting the Islamofascist onslaught will continue to fall - as is all too obvious - on America. In view of the popularity of the politics of self-delusion even in America, it is yet to be seen how steadfast even the American effort will be; or, more precisely, how much will be lost before that steadfastness firmly asserts itself.
FP: David Keyes, Kenneth Levin and David Gutmann, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.
#1
And as Mr. Keyes points out, too many Jews have become counterplayers in this psychodrama - enablers of the Arab psychosis. Guilty by nature, convinced of their own sins against the victimized multitude of third-world innocents, the Jewish Doves make the gestures of surrender. Turning the bared throat towards the knife they invite the Palestinians to punish them and their guilty nation for their sins.
Not just jews, but the whole West, led by the sucidalists.
#2
Article: In effect, the Jihadists reverse this syndrome. Despite their psychopathology (or perhaps, because of it) they are quite ready, even eager, to lay down their lives for nation, heritage, religion and charismatic leaders. They are like the Japanese Kamikazes, the suicide pilots who almost destroyed our Pacific fleet at the end of WWII.
I don't buy this premise. There is nothing preventing Muslim terrorists from carrying out suicide bombings in the West as they are doing in Iraq. Israel's Arab Muslim population is substantial, and yet few bombings have come from that direction. If we assume that they are willing to do anything (from a moral standpoint) to further their goals, this inaction tells me that they are not, in fact, willing to *personally* sacrifice everything for nation, heritage, religion and charismatic leaders. I mean that they might say these things, but they don't mean what they say.
#3
My basic point is that they are resentful, but not personally motivated enough to go all the way. I think it's more likely that thanks to the European welfare state, Muslims will become the majority via peaceful means, by replacing themselves in the way that native Europeans will not.
Registration required....article posted here in its entirety
I blame George W. Bush's election for many ills, and, to that list, I can now add the fact that I have been publicly shamed for not owning a gun. My unwilling confession took place a month ago, while I was being interviewed by the right-wing radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. He asked me whether I owned a gun and whether I had ever owned a gun (in what seemed to be consciously McCarthyite language). Later, he proceeded with a lengthier inquisition into whether I had friends or relatives in the military. He asked a version of this question some half-dozen times. ("Is there anyone that you want to bring up, like your aunt or your uncle, or the guy down the street?") I volunteered that my next-door neighbor and friend is a naval reservist, but this failed to mollify him. "Do you know anyone who's been back and forth to Iraq and been deployed there?" he asked. Sadly, I was unable to produce any evidence for my defense. In the court of right-wing talk radio, I was convicted of being a blue-state elitist.
In just about any court ...
This is a very odd cultural moment we find ourselves in, where there is a stigma attached to not owning a gun or not having friends shipped out to Iraq. I share his pain. I got teased all the time for not owning a gun, and even got dinged on my work reviews because of it back in Arizona....NOT!!
This isn't a moral question; military service is obviously admirable, but knowing people who serve is no more admirable than knowing people who donate to charity. It's a cultural question. Since Bush's election, and especially since his reelection, liberals have grown painfully aware of the cultural gap with the white working class. Ya think it's finally sinking in? Nope, me neither. How DARE those peasants think for themselves!
The approved liberal posture is cringing self-flagellation. We brought the catastrophe of the Bush administration upon ourselves with our latte-sipping ways, and we must repent. Conservatives are gleefully pressing their advantage. Did you mourn Dale Earnhardt? Do you sport a mullet? Well, why not?
I rarely hear liberals lamenting these things. I visit Kos, Atrios and Political Animal occasionally, and I don't think I've ever seen a liberal who cares about Dale Earnhardt, or who blames him/herself for any cultural gap. They blame the rest of us for not being as 'smart' as them (please note the BBC-style scare quotes).
David Brooks, in his 2004 book On Paradise Drive, taunted blue-state liberals: "They can't name five nascar drivers, though stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country. They can't tell a military officer's rank by looking at his insignia. They may not know what soybeans look like growing in the field." Meanwhile, The Washington Monthly has recently published cover stories on how Democrats can save hunting and win the trust of religious voters. You don't see liberals taunting nascar fans who can't name the host of "Masterpiece Theatre" ... well, at least not publically....
... or conservatives agonizing over their virtually nonexistent hemorrhaging support among intellectuals. Instead, conservatives have indulged in an orgy of reverse snobbery. Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review in the summer of 2004, asserted, with his usual insight, that liberals hate Bush because "he is an unapologetic twanger who likes guns, barbeques, nascar, 'the ranch,' and pick-up trucks." Actually, the pickups don't bother us, because we realize that Bush primarily rides in armor-plated limousines like most of us Democrats. But the barbequing is indeed a real sore point. Damn that barbeque-eating president!
In yet another nervous liberal attempt to placate the red-state hordes, The Washington Post recently started a blog called Red America. The blog's author, displaying a typical hair-trigger sensitivity to blue-state elitism, used his first entry to flay his Post editors for their unfamiliarity with the 1984 pro-gun action flick Red Dawn. He also proceeded to declare, "Red America's citizens are the political majority." "There they go, rubbing in the 2004 election results again!!"
WaPo managed to report the entire election without conceding this point ...
Except that the blue states accounted for more than half the population in 2000. Conservatives cope with this inconvenient fact by redefining blue states as a few urban enclaves and making a fetish of the political map, with its misleadingly large, depopulated red states. To take a typical example, a 2004 postelection Wall Street Journal column by Daniel Henninger announced triumphantly, "[I]f you adjust the map's colors for votes by county ... even the blue states turn mostly red. Pennsylvania is blue, but, between blue Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, every county in the state is red. California, except for the coastline, is almost entirely red." This is a persuasive point if you believe in the principle of one acre, one vote.
We don't, though it's a pleasing map for another reason: if the few goofy liberals who wanted to split off from our country actually did so, they'd eat for oh, about a week or so, until they realized that all the farmland was in Jesus-Land, and we weren't sharing.
But we recognize that most of the country is varying shades of purple, and for the most part reds and blues manage to live next to each other, work together, and get along just fine, until some snotty-nosed, whiny blue-bluer starts sounding off at the office water cooler or at a party. Then we red-staters are expected to grit our teeth and take it.
Tom Wolfe recently took this analysis a step further, declaring that the blue-state elites are not part of the United States of America. "They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lives in between." I wonder if Wolfe and his fellow travelers realize how much their analysis is correct? mau-mauing of blue staters is, well, Maoist. Mao, like the contemporary American right, saw his country as divided between the great virtuous, patriotic interior and the decadent, traitorous coastal cities. Intellectuals--or, in the Maoist parlance, the "stinking ninth category," a phrase so pungent and catchy I can't believe it isn't standard at Rantburg Bill O'Reilly hasn't picked it up yet--were forcibly relocated from the cosmopolitan cities to the countryside to "learn from the poor and lower middle peasants."
The contemporary GOP, thankfully, has yet to imitate this practice, but my neoconservative friend Lawrence F. Kaplan has taken it upon himself. Writing in this space last year, Kaplan described how, after a lifetime of living in New York and Washington, he moved to a small town in Virginia, where, at last, he found himself among his ideological brethren. Delighted to leave behind his "soft-handed colleagues" at The New Republic, he reported that the national spirit indeed runs deeper among these simple village folk. "Dozens of them are serving, willingly and proudly, in Iraq and Afghanistan," he wrote. "In the breadth of their civic attachments, it seems to me that they, more than most of their critics, most faithfully embody the American ideal." And these unpretentious patriots welcomed him. Sort of. After an awkward breaking-in period, Kaplan was pleased to report, "No one pinches my fiancée anymore; no one charges me $500 to change the oil in my car; cops no longer pull me over for fun." Grain production is way up, and sexual assaults, price-gouging, and state-sponsored harassment have all plummeted, thanks to the efforts of our heroic peasants. I bet San Francisco and the Upper West Side can't match those achievements.
#1
you know the Left > Dubya is despicable LeftLiberal, not to be compared to Motherly Conservative Lefties. America under Dubya-GOP is a Socialist nation nation moving towards Socialism, Communism and OWG but God help us all, the DemoLefties don NOT know how to stop it. All Clintonian Fascist = Half-a-Commie Male Brute Amerikans can and must fight and die for an American Nation, State, and Global Empire they must afterwards unilater give up = forcibly surrender to OWG and non/anti-American nations ergo vote for the Dems in 2006-2008. D*** YOU, Dubya, you FASCIST LEFTIE FEDERALIST SOCIALIST LAISSEZ FAIRE TOTALITARIAN, REPUBLICAN EMPIRE OF THE UNION OF THE CONFEDERACY DOMINION, ......@ HIDE!?
Generally speaking, it makes good medical sense to lance the boil when it gets ripe. Yeah, that great big sucker between your ears. Do it. Then the pain will go away.
Posted by: Jans Snomble4884 ||
03/25/2006 1:17 Comments ||
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#3
How well I know people like this writer. I too left the stuffy conformity of their "individualism", their perfectly manicured lawns, their being "at multicultural one" with their maids and drug dealers. How suffocatingly similar they are in their piety and celebration of dysfunction.
There is a world full of interesting people out there - and while I love many people like this writer - how tired and worn out I find the repetitiveness of their one track thought. They boast of travel to everywhere but I often wonder why they bother. Is it really possible to travel the world over and see nothing but what they left behind? Sure, the food is good in France, the people in India are colorful. But they see nothing but the same thing you can see in any blue state suburb.
#4
Cultures-of-entitlement inevitably lead to deficit spending, and a politics of perpetuation of debt. And any attempt to apply the affordability principle against the entitlement, inevitably leads to civil disorder. Check out this French website for pictorial evidence of a sick culture.
#5
He wrote "...how much their mau-mauing of blue staters is, well, Maoist..."
Granted I'm just a red state bubba, but I don't understand the mixed metaphor here. Weren't the Mau-Maus Kenyan terrorists who favored the machete to engage their opponents in reasoned discourse? While Mao was the embodiment of the Totalitarian communist state? Someone help me out...
#6
Fodamage, yep, the original mau-mau were bad news. But usually when "our betters in the political classes" (their self-image, not to be confused with reality) use the term it means to loudly attack or denounce with the aim of getting your opposition to shut up.
I think he just likes the alliteration, unless it's some kind of clever allusion to the Cultural Revolution. But I think I'm being generous on that second point....
#7
As one of the redneck inhabitants of blue states, (PA, MD, MA, CA) I can state with confidence that the reference is to Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers. The Flak Catchers are government welfare workers, not military personnel of any persuasion. If you have not read this book, you will enjoy it. It shows how little the blue states have changed in some ways, but how thankful we can be for the Roe effect. Very funny.
The author totally missed (or wanted to bypass) Hewitt's point: i.e. that he was criticizing troop actions and presence in Iraq without having any first hand knowledge or a Clue(tm).
#9
I'm really starting to think that instead of waiting for the blue counties and cities to secede, we should just expel them from the Union. Outside of ports, there is very little industrial capacity left in the blue zones. Almost all of them are revenue sinks instead of revenue sources. New Orleans was a big clue. We lost a major city and the economy didn't blink. I don't think that the same would have been true if we had lost Silicon Valley or Raleigh-Durham.
The blue areas typically have European-level fertility rates and unskilled work forces. An elite of Eloi are ruling masses of unruly Morlochs. Maybe they can join the EU after we kick them out.
#10
If I recall correctly, the author was the fellow who wrote the "I don't support the troops" editorial. I think it's him because I remember Hewitt asking him things like "do you own a gun" and "do you know anyone who's in the armed services".
The guy's striking the "Oh! I'm so put upon" pose for his liberal bretheren. Nothing more to it.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
03/25/2006 12:43 Comments ||
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#12
11A5S, If you think Silicon Valley isn't blue, you'd better look at the congress critters it sends to DC, Eschoo, Lantos, Lofgren, Stark; Anti-American Commies all in my book.
#15
I dunno, NS. I'm just not as ideological as a lot of the folks here, which is one of the reasons I've curtailed my participation at Rantburg (after I was attacked for posting an article written by a (gasp!) ideologically impure author even thought the information content was good). The folks in SV are capitalists. While I admit a lot of them are leftists, I don't see them really having a lot in common with the urban elites. They might be allies. I like having allies, especially smart, laissez faire ones.
I've lived there. It's just as blue as SF. Sure, they've got TJ Rogers and the Hoover Institution, but Stanford is as blue as it gets and the SJ Merkey News is no better than the SF Comical. I agree, they ought to be allies, but they aren't. It's more of a city - country divide, and Silicon Valley is California urban.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
