Who wins?

Why waste money and effort? Too bad they'll never listen to me - or the Romney and Obama election campaigns would have stopped that waste and donated that enormous money to charities and to the IRS, respectively. As per the sympathies, that is: "conservatives" are known to be more conscientious than "liberals", giving more to charities despite being poorer. Which is not surprising, because the difference is ideological, not material. In the Soviet Union, always my point of reference, giving alms, personal charity, was considered a sign of contemptible weakness to the beggar's reprobate behavior. The state was supposed to be thought of as taking care of everybody - against all facts to the contrary, particularly concerning the elderly and the disabled. Their pensions, if any, were often at the starvation level, and even that meager money was frequently stolen from them by their alcoholic relatives. Under the capitalist system, the progressive viewpoint is the same: the state is supposed to take care of our needs. Of course, we need to pay ever more taxes - as much as the state says it needs for taking care of us. The state's perceived generosity is very attractive to both the progressives, because it relieves them of the pesky responsibility of a civilized person to make the uncomfortable donation decisions, - and to the prospective recipients, because they get that as a legitimate entitlement and have nobody to thank for that (but the state, sometimes also known as Dear Leader).

While being demonstrably more charitable, the conservatives are presented as vicious predators, ready to push the granny off the cliff. The progressives (aka "liberals"), like Al Gore who donated one seventh of the average for donating households, are to be thought of as striving to take off their last shirt, or perhaps the $6,800 designer jacket, helping "the poor". Regardless of what one may voluntarily donate, it is never a "fair share", as the Leader... uhm, the President, defines it. Because it is the state that determines what that share is, it can only be paid through taxes.

I digress, but not much. The administration has succeeded in ensuring that half of the population uses and is used to governmental handouts, which are firmly associated with the Democrats. Add to these the progressive intelligentsia and money-hating "millionaires and billionaires" like Soros and Buffett, and the electoral majority is clearly in Obama's hands - no need in campaigning. In fact, no need in elections: the People has spoken already - just look at the polls. Never mind that over two thirds of the population are thinking that the country is going in a wrong direction - they still prefer the one who is taking it there. Something else matters, not the facts of life. It does not matter to the black voters that a leader of the Party, Sen. Harry Reid, likes Obama because he is “light-skinned” and capable of speaking “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”. After all, Reid is no different in that from another idol of the progressives, "Che" the La Cabaña Butcher Guevara, with his insightful observations: “The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations”; and “The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing…” (The Motorcycle Diaries). 

The revolutionary icon, by the way, was also an antisemite, as comes from another quote from the same book, about "a certain Cohen, who we were told was Jewish but a good sort; there was no doubt he was Jewish, the problem was finding out if he was a good sort.” Then again, so are the plurality if not majority of Democrats, who not only list all the congressional antisemites, but are hardly half sympathetic to Israel vs. "Palestinians" (53% in 2012, but 48% in 2010) - in striking contrast to the overwhelming support of Israel among the Republicans. A progressive colleague, with his usual irrelevant cussing attributions, pointed out that this support is due to the eschatological motivations of "the lunatic fringe fundamentalists". I replied that if a Jew pays attention to these alleged hopes for the ultimate conversion of the Jews, he must believe in that as well as in all the surrounding events happening - the second coming, and the first one for that matter. Otherwise, why would he worry about that motivation that has no effect on the present, except positive? Suppose the "fringe" believe we the Jews will eventually convert, but meanwhile they help us against our sworn enemies – why would you be concerned about their dreams? Considering that they sincerely believe, it would be very inconsistent of them  –  and a reason of concern to us the Jews  –  not to worry about our redemption: it is a sine qua non for a believing Christian to hope for universal redemption. Democrats, on the other hand, believe in something else – their ideology of robbing the haves and spreading, however eventually thinly, among the designated have-nots – at their wise discretion. The ways-and-means are well described in Animal Farm. 

To get a taste of the components of that ideology pertaining to the Jews, check out Jimmy Carter’s slanderous masterpiece, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, along with another contemporary version of the Protocols –  the Walt and Mearsheimer treatise. This is who the Jewish majority in this country vote with – Carter, Sharpton, Farrahan, and their fellow Judeophobes. The latter, of course, include Obama himself, the first US president who has supported the return of Israel to the pre-1967 lines, better known as "Auschwitz borders". It is often said, and repeated by that colleague of mine, that Obama's minions' inability to name the Israeli capital is the US policy since Reagan. Well, I don't worship Reagan, like the progressives worship Obama. When I make my pick, I don’t need to make good out of bad, as they do with Obama who they think is infallible, if not immaculately conceived.  I've been well inoculated against idol-worship, much as I respect Reagan for his unique role in the destruction of communism. I see clearly the good and the bad, the latter including Reagan’s treatment of the Jerusalem issue, advised by James "f... the Jews" Baker. The fact that Obama follows in those steps, instead of the steps of the Democratic competitors of Reagan, Hart and Mondale, who both promised to move the embassy, and of Moynihan who introduced the US Embassy Jerusalem relocation bill, only confirms Obama's antisemitism and my colleague's inconsistency. Reagan, however, instructed to veto any possible UN resolutions that, prompted by Arabs, would characterize east Jerusalem as “occupied territory”. The Reagan Plan called for "Palestinian" autonomy, but not an independent "Palestinian" state, and Jerusalem as an undivided city – obviously no "Palestinian" capital. Obama did the Jerusalem piece too – only to renege the next day. Obama's sympathies, inspired by his uncommon upbringing, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, and Rev. Wright, are clear.

His motivations, which are not, unfortunately, of the fringe of the Democrats anymore but of their mainstream, - are clear too. He has been quite open on that, starting from the beginning of his career of an "organizer": 

That’s why people become involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it... With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion.

He took to heart the advice of his organizer mentor: "the last thing we need is to join up with a bunch of white money and Catholic churches and Jewish organizers to solve our problems. They’re not interested in us." Obama made them all "interested". He did need a friendly advice, though: "When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change." He has continued pronouncing that, and that has taken him straight to the White House. 

Power, which he has built so successfully, is the ultimate goal of the progressives - not “the problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland", that "become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought”. The progressives always care about humanity - not about humans. About The People - not about people. But people are just that - people, suckers for populist slogans, freebies and discounts, flattery and the "cool", their memory short - in this case often literally, as the Obama-faithful majority of the youth have none. That's why the response to the question above is so easy.

Champion of displacement

Nobody is going to be surprised that today’s article in The New York Times, “A Champion for the Displaced in Israel”, is not about hundreds of thousands of Jews who were “displaced” (expelled and murdered) by Arab pogrom mobs throughout the Middle East, ethnically cleansing it of the ancient population that preceded Arab invaders by many centuries. These Jews and their descendants constitute half of the Israeli Jewish population, and have never been compensated for their losses. No, in the inverted world of the Times, the “displaced” in Israel are Arabs, the descendants of those invaders. It is unclear what exactly makes them to qualify for that status: the only people mentioned there who are displaced and whose homes are demolished are the Jews, Israelis, the Natives of the Land of Israel, who are given the preposterous misnomer of “settlers”. And the “champion” of those Arabs, whose only geopolitical dream is to displace the Jews from any piece of land, is a Jewish lawyer, Michael Sfard.

Usually, when a person raised in the Jewish culture (or a culture based on the Jewish values) takes an enemy’s side, it requires inversion of values and shedding of morality. When a lawyer in a democracy defends a murderer, he does not need to be on the murderer’s side to perform his duties. The murderer represents only himself even if he is a gang member. It is different when a lawyer takes upon himself the defense of a group against another group and does that consistently, especially when the group – in its overwhelming majority – is an enemy of the group to which the lawyer himself belongs. And not just any enemy. With some enemies, compromise can be and has been reached, but the Palestinian Arabs have given no sign of that possibility. They are self-proclaimed enemies of Israel. Their goal, at best, is Israel’s eradication, and at worst, the world-wide genocide of the Jews. It is symbolic that the name for the country they want to replace Israel is “Palestine”, the very same name that was invented by Hadrian the Roman emperor to eradicate the notion of Judea and the Jews from the same land. His wish has in part been fulfilled already, as the historic name of Judea has been virtually replaced by the nonsensical “West Bank”, an invention of Jordan that illegally occupied the land until 1967. Whereas the occupation ended, and the Jordanian annexation of the land had never been recognized by the world (with the notable exceptions of the UK and Pakistan), the name has stuck to the degree that somebody’s use of the original and true names, Judea and Samaria, is now viewed as a tell-tale sign of “right-wing” extremism. According to the article, those are just the “Biblical names” – and who cares about the Bible in our enlightened times. Obviously, since “right” is associated with fascism, it is easy to make the next step and accuse the Jews of nazism, a calumny that is so popular nowadays among antisemites in general and in the Muslim world in particular.

Sfard pathetically juxtaposes himself with the Soviet dissidents, expressing his satisfaction that he does his subversive work unmolested in a democracy. Soviet dissidents, which now have to defend the right of the Jews to live on the Land of Israel against him, have risked their lives for the Jews to be able to live in Eretz Israel, while he abuses Israel's legal system to ethnically cleanse it of the Jews. He is not "an enemy of the right" – he is an enemy of those who stand for what is right. He is the enemy's collaborationist. Along with other deluded or immoral people whom he defends, like the draft dodgers in Israel, he is adored by the likes of the NY Times and BBC, well known for their anti-Israel bias, and despised by the Israelis. Don’t expect this “defender of human rights” to defend the rights of the “settlers” – in his book, they are not listed as humans. Morally displaced, he is indeed a champion – of the displacement of Jews. No wonder that he has Gandhi's portrait on the wall - the "likeness" of a man who advised the Jews to comply with Hitler's plans.

___________________________
April 2013. - A follow-up to this entry, in response to Sfard's talk at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is at "Antisemitism By Other Means: Lecturing Against The Jewish State", and, a shorter version, in The Jewish Chronicle, "Michael Sfard: 'I Don't Care About History'".

Obama's dusty helmet

"...And commissars in dusty helmets  

will lean in silence over me".  -Bulat Okudzhava, Sentimental March

The epigraph is from a Russian song from the late '50s, the brief period of the so-called "thaw", after Stalin's death and the official denouncement of his "personality cult" (it's hard for Communists and other totalitarians to keep from pharaonic deification of their chieftains - the bloodier he is, the likelier). 

The song's author was an immensely popular "bard", which was the vernacular and endearing term for an unofficial and officially unrecognized (at least, at first) poet who also composed and played tunes to his poetry, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. Official recognition was important because without it nobody in the USSR could publish, and any public activity like concerts would be extremely limited if not precluded. The genre was also called "author's song", uncommon in the Soviet Union where usually a special category of poets would write lyrics and a special category of composers would write tunes to be played by an orchestra - smaller or bigger, depending on the ideological value and pathos of the song. Okudzhava's poetry, when it was not naively grandiloquent, grave and full of sincere fervor (which eventually allowed him to reach official status), was also in the category of "city romance", where human feelings of love for familiar old Moscow streets, a girl next door, and the smell of freshly baked bread were themes in a pleasant contrast to the pompous hypocrisy or empty levity of the Soviet official art. The Commissars, however, were non-denominational, belonging to both official and unofficial mythology realms. The song, after all, was indeed a march, albeit a "sentimental" one. The Bolshevik commissars - the political minders attached to every Red Army commander in the Civil War, were believed to be stern but just idealists, keepers of the sacred flame and virtuous against all odds. The "dusty helmet" (aka будёновка, budyonovka), a Red Army uniform until late '30s, was shaped after medieval pointed metal headgear, but, made of felt, was much less useful. Borrowed from the imagery of Russian fairy-tales, it was part of communist myth-mongering. 

Another part of that during the thaw time was the opinion of many in the half-informed and semi-blind from propaganda poisoning intelligentsia circles  - enthusiastic young people intoxicated by the whiff of freedom - that Stalin had been bad, but Lenin on the right track. Never mind that Stalin's repressions and concentration camps were nothing new relative to the Red Terror and the camp system enacted by Lenin. The Red Army fighting the Whites in the Civil War was supposed to be good too, the war was a bloody but necessary part of the class struggle, and the millions that died were justifiable sacrifice on the altar of the communist idea - for the future generations to dwell in bliss.  It did not help that the Whites, many with a medieval mentality of serf-owning landed gentry, disdain for the plebs (literally, to the "blackness", чернь) and cruelty, were not an attractive alternative either, even though it was Bolsheviks who usurped power from a democratic government and caused the civil war.

So, in its basic messianic self-deceitful belief in the inevitability of communism for the whole humanity, the thaw generation was no different from those who had bought into the communist quasi-religion during Lenin's and Stalin's eras, the importance of some differing details notwithstanding. The thaw generation was, like the march, sentimental Bolsheviks. The path to paradise on earth, through mass graves and torture, was understandably beset with complications. Stalin, for instance, made an astonishing discovery that, of course, immediately became part of what was then the communist dogma. He stated that as the socialist (Soviet) society gets closer to its ideal of communism, the class struggle intensifies. It seemed to make no sense, as the supposed paradise on earth, the communist society, would presumably be classless. Sense and logic, however, have never had much currency among communists and the left in general. The enemy figure, on the other hand, had to be always maintained, to explain and justify the inevitable shortages and economic downfall after the commissars whom nobody elected had taken all they could from whoever had or could create anything. 

Similarly, today we are fed regurgitated Marxian slogans of the "fair share" that the nefarious "millionaires and billionaires" do not want to give back to the government - for it to redistribute to the anxiously waiting and suffering hungry masses. Those of Solyndras, Solar Trusts and other "stimulated" money pits, and of the corrupt "Palestinian Authority" that names its schools and squares after their "martyrs", otherwise known to the rest of humanity as mass murderers and child-killers. And to the new radical Muslim Egyptian government, to support its military needs - probably to defend itself from the "Zionist entity", as they call Israel, implicitly rejecting not only the peace treaty but even recognition.  It is class struggle all over again - complete with Enemies of the People, which you might have guessed who by now, the Republicans. The vitriol and hatred exuded by the progressives at the about half of the US population that still cling to their Bibles sends shivers down one's spine when that one has a history like mine. 

And so does the new morality - so alike the new "proletarian" morality of the Bolsheviks, who declared moral everything that serves the interests of "the people". There is a rarely cited but very telling quote from Obama: 

So for me, at least, the lack of wealth or significant corporate support wasn't a barrier to victory. Still, I can't assume that the money chase didn't alter me in some ways. Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums of money. - The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, p. 136. New York: Random House, Inc., First Vintage Book Edition, 2008.

One has to to admire the man’s honesty. On the other hand, one does not have to be a Freudian to see that by that statement Obama informs his fellow worshippers that he’s lost any sense of shame regarding other people’s money - in general. That would be a warning enough to heed, even without the hindsight of the money binge of his presidency. But then, it is easy to read much beyond the money verbiage in that statement. In fact, he informs his readers that he has no sense of shame at all and is “audacious” enough to say that in your face. Talmudic wisdom says that transgression in public is worse than in private, as it gives a bad example to others - definitely a powerful example when served by no less than a US President. Obama also implies that his means in getting support have been different from an average politician’s and he plays by a different set of rules that does not involve sense of shame: 

In many ways, I was luckier than most candidates in such circumstances. For whatever reason, at some point my campaign began to generate that mysterious, elusive quality of momentum, of buzz; it became fashionable [!] among wealthy donors to promote my cause, and small donors around the state began sending checks thought the Internet at a pace we had never anticipated. Ironically, my dark-horse status protected me…. 

Obama feels unbounded by conventional rules. As he poignantly observes, “the problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought”. This is for a senator. The book that was first published in 2006. A memoir of a 45-year old man with less than 10 years of public service. The “buzz” continues, and his status remains "dark-horse" - now through the willing self-deceit of his admirers who are in deep denial of Obama's dictatorship, domestic and foreign. The latter is particularly revealing, with his bowing to and serving the enemies of America and betraying America's friends, - but remains unheeded by the enthusiastic believers in the power of the state and its divine leader, embodying everything the progressive America's quasi-thaw generation ever dreamt of: a "black", young, left, multicultural and America-bashing president. Doing his utmost to "redistribute wealth" as handouts to those abstract  ordinary people in order to manage them.

Today (April 3), he characterized the Republican budget proposal as "thinly veiled social Darwinism". Unnoticed by the media, this is not the first time he uses this accusatory term - in 2007 he called that also Bush's "strategy...  that basically says government has no role to play in making sure that America is prosperous for all people and not just some." The latter formula is absurd: nobody could deny government's role in a country's prosperity. A country's prosperity, however, cannot be translated into an individual's prosperity - with or without government's role. In fact, the need in anybody's help, let alone government's, is antithetical to the notion of individual prosperity (unless you are the government). Aside from that, however, accusation in "social Darwinism" was the Soviet propaganda's staple expletive for criticizing the capitalist society, synonymous with Nazi pseudo-science. According to the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary, the "most reactionary variants of social Darwinism served as the ideological justification of the class domination of bourgeoisie, and militarism and expansionism in foreign policies".  There is no doubt that Obama invokes the same connotations - surely not from the audience of Plumber-Joes who hardly heard of Darwinism, but from the sympathetic audience of the progressive intelligentsia who would take their cues from Marxist ideological opponents of any application of evolution to human social behavior like Rose, Gould and Lewontin.

Personal wealth, a direct connection to resources, particularly when applied to a notion of a class rather than of an individual, is a threat to those who seek power as a metaphor of resources. This is why Bolsheviks, who were to become the ruling class, sought to eliminate "bourgeoisie as a class". That is why Obama, riding on the same political horse of class antagonism, uses Bolshevik slogans of redistribution of wealth and the "rich getting richer and poor getting poorer". The left intelligentsia is happy to feed him these slogans as their chosen representative, through whom they would attain power and rule vicariously. He, in turn, is happy to consume them, imprinted by his unusual upbringing and the "spiritual" advice of Rev. Wright, a purveyor of racial antagonism, paranoid antisemitism, and hate for capitalist America.

Listening as a youth to Okudzhava's song, popular as it was, I used to joke that the words used in the epigraph were a perfect description of a nightmare: silent killers leaning over their victim.

Lying tradition of "Palestine"

Somehow, Arab/Muslim propaganda does not need consistency. It asserts that there was never a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem has always been "Palestinian" capital; then the contemporary Jews are not real Jews by "blood", but Khazars, so they have no rights in Jerusalem (why would they, if that was not a Jewish city in the first place?); that Jesus is a prophet of Islam, but somehow nothing that connects him with prophecy, e.g., preaching at the Temple, is true in the eyes of Muslims (there was no Temple, was there?). No history of the destruction of the Temple by the Romans (and by Nebuchadnezzar before) exists for the Muslims - it is not even replaced by any coherent lie. 
 

They steal Jewish Psalms, like they have stolen the lands they've declared theirs - North African, Asian and European, like they've stolen Jewish and Christian prophets, following in that Muhammad's example. Plagiarism is always pathetic, an ugly child of intellectual impotence - be it by a writer or a politician like the current US vice-president, - but that is of negligible consequence when compared with the global repercussions of Muhammad's and Islam's plagiarism and distortions - of time, space, past and present, names and events. From the warp-speed night travel of Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem (Koran never mentions Jerusalem, and says, to "the farthest mosque", "Masjid al-Aqsa" - but today's Islam places it in Jerusalem where the al-Aqsa mosque was built when Muhammad had long been dead, on the Temple's ruins) - to the 500 Jenin civilians "massacred" by Israel, a Goebbelsian lie stated by  the "Palestinian" chief negotiator Erekat and (mis)Information Minister Abed Rabbo, and readily repeated by mainstream news agencies and supported by European politicians. 
 

Hard to understand how so many people, including intellectuals, can be satisfied by the Koran, a disjointed hodge-podge of inventions and ad hoc justifications of Muhammad's horrific actions, imitating divine revelation, childish in its scary-fairy-tale refrain of hellish punishment sadistically executed on unbelievers by Allah, the deity, himself. Then again, it is not surprising, as the same people, the "Palestinian" Authority, declare recently found shekels of year 66 CE, bearing the inscription of "shekel of Israel", a "Palestinian" coin. That is especially amusing because "Palestine" would not be invented, by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, for another 66 years.  Amusing, that is, if one is not thoroughly disgusted by insults to intelligence, doublethink and constant fantastic rewriting of history that is so peculiar to the Muslim culture.  "Narrated Jabir bin 'Abdullah: The Prophet said, 'War is deceit.'" (Sahih Bukhari, 4:52:269). The war goes on.

The pretty sounds of Islam

Defending Islam is a job that is dark but far from lonely. While the whole world observes if not feels the effects of Islam daily - in the continuous warfare Islam wages against it, - apologists of Islam are legion. Moreover, the intended audience for Islamic propaganda is generally quite willing to accept it, happily providing it with high pulpits of the leading newspapers and magazines, and amplifying that propaganda with its own progressive and "tolerant" scholarly commentary. This is understandable - after all, if the world refused to deal with terror-producing Muslim countries, it would have to also refuse another product of theirs, without which it simply cannot survive. Oil, you know. Then there is so-called religious tolerance , which is a definitive sign of civilization and progress. Because Islam is known as a religion, it is immune from the just criticism and accusations that could target its very existence. Thus Muslim propaganda dutifully continues to be fed to the "well-informed" Western audience, which then builds its political sympathies on this information platform. Meanwhile, politicians that are drawn from the same progressive and educated audience know that it's best for them to be in tune with their constituency, and increasingly are on the side of Islam. We now have a US president who, having received Muslim education during his formative childhood years, refers to the call to Muslim prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset”. Perhaps it is worth remembering that this sound contains the same words as heard by Danny Pearl and others who shared his fate, before they were beheaded by other lovers of that sound, - "Allahu Akbar!" and the statement of acceptance of Muhammad as the Apostle of Allah. Barack Obama recites those words perfectly and knows their meaning well. It does not matter to what political orientation the willing or inadvertent propagandists of Islam belong - whether it's George "the Religion of Peace" W. Bush or the naive leftist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times - as long as the job is done, by omission or commission. 

The printed word from the sources accepted as serious and progressive, such as The New York Times, is perceived by the "educated" public like Pravda was by faithful Communists in the Soviet Union - unquestioningly, immediately becoming part of the foundational axiom. Our omniscient intelligentsia like to think of themselves as independent but follow the media's call like Pied Piper's - pick yourself the appropriate group of his listeners. Both their ignorance about Islam and disinformation are used by the Muslim propagandists. In this disinformation, the apologists of Islam employ deceptive cliches that, thanks to the progressive media, never get tired. Recently I wrote about one that was used by the Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison. To counter Bill Maher's characterization of the Koran as a "hate-filled book" (forward the video to 2:26), Ellison quoted a wonderful passage from that book, "anyone who takes the life, it's as if he killed the whole world" (Koran 5:32). What he failed to say, of course, was that the Koran gives that passage only as a quote from what the Jews were "decreed", nowhere indicating that this decree pertains to the Muslims. The Koran mentions this decree only to accuse the Jews of violating it, among their other transgressions ("And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors"), to justify the Koranic hate toward the Jews, unambiguous and lethal. It is remarkable that hardly any other Koranic quote is usually given to illustrate Islam's pacifism - so hard is it to find expressions of tolerance in the "religion of peace". One possible and oft-repeated exception is "There is no compulsion in religion", which is quoted without mentioning, of course, that it was abrogated by verses like "Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war" (Koran 9:5). The journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, kidnapped and forced to convert under pain of death, can testify to the veracity of "no compulsion".

No wonder that the same Jewish decree, lifted by Muhammad from somebody familiar with the Talmud, was cited by the 9/11 mosque imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in his recent article, in which he tries to bring the reader to understanding that Islam is just another Abrahamic religion. That decree, having nothing to do with Islam and negated by the whole history of Muslim conquest, is the only support he could muster to his "fact ... that true adherence to Islam at its essence is as peaceful as true adherence to Christianity". These propagandist lies were published by another beacon of the Western capitalist freedom - The Wall Street Journal, which could not stay behind the progress. Now that we know what "true" adherence to Islam is, we only need to enlighten the miriad of Muslim clerics of the highest authority who swear by violent jihad as the primary virtue of a Muslim. Rauf has as much right to call Islam "Abrahamic" as a thief who stole an heirloom to claim his membership in the family he robbed. Muhammad used the Biblical names he learned from Jews and Christians who had lived in Arabia before he mass-murdered and expelled them. Pathetically plagiarizing the Scriptures while accusing the Jews and Christians in intentionally perverting Allah's word (Koran 5:13-15, 41), he distorted the meaning of and relations between those names, conflating Mary the mother of Jesus with Miriam the wife of Moses, and Haman with pharaoh. In contrast to the Pentateuch, the Koran never names Abraham's son in the sacrifice story, which results in the Muslims' belief that it was Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arabs, not Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews. Islam's founder and "perfect man" whose example is to be followed, Muhammad could do no wrong - whether he "married" a 6 year-old girl (Sahih Bukhari 7:62:64), murdered his critics, ordered genocide of the Jews, or reneged on treaties at a concocted pretext. 

As for Islam being a religion, it is telling how imam Rauf describes himself in the article's footnote as "the founder of Cordoba Initiative, an independent, multifaith and multinational project that works to improve Muslim-West relations." Usually, in expressions like that "Muslim-West", a certain symmetry is implied: "Jewish-Christian", "capitalist-communist", "East-West". The "West", to be sure, is not a religion - but so is "Muslim", a totalitarian political ideology counter to the "West" democracy, with the goal of making Muslim both the West and the East, conquering Rome of the West as it did Rome of the East, Constantinople, reconquering Cordoba and Andalus, killing and subjugating the disbelievers - truly a "multinational" project. "True adherence to Islam", Rauf says, "would end terrorist attacks" - and he is right. Of course it would, as that true adherence, from the Muslim standpoint, is when the entire world adheres, and terrorism is needed no longer. When everybody hears the call to Muslim prayer as pretty, and the sounds of other faiths are heard no more, as they are in Saudi Arabia, the land of Allah's Apostle. 

9-11: Tears, no fury...

On the first anniversary of 9-11, I wrote, "On this day, a year after the fanatic Muslim—predominantly Saudi—attack on the American soil, it seems that the affect expressed by the administration as well as the American media has largely been that of teary frustration and pain, not unlike the 'why me?' feelings experienced and expressed by anybody in grief. There has been little anger, let alone fury, in words or facial expressions of the nation’s leadership; instead, there is a lot of solemnity, quivering lips, and—especially initially—calls for reconciliation with Islam that was translated by the President as 'peace' instead of 'submission'. The mighty thunder of the only great power left on Earth, which all terrorists in the world—from Arafat who donated his poisonous blood to injured Americans, to Saudi financiers of terror—braced themselves for, has never come. The mosques, planted in the US and everywhere in the world by the Saudis to teach hatred in preparation for the whole world to become Dar-ul-Islam, the 'abode of Islam', are still churning out brain-washed fanatics ready to die while killing unnumbered 'kaffirs' regardless of their age and sex. Arafat has just recently become undesired in the administration’s eyes, but still remains the 'leader of the Palestinian people' instead of being recategorized into the oldest living terror chieftain. The 'Palestinian' state is still discussed as a desirable goal, while the majority of its potential citizens support continued murder of innocent Israelis. The administration is still trying to convince Arabs that they should support an attack against Iraq, while even its European continental allies, faithful to their familiar tactic of appeasing the murderer, deny their support. And American airlines, ready to risk passengers’ lives in fear of offending “Middle Eastern” guests, waste the effort of their security personnel, incompetent as it is, on checking the underwear of grandmothers in wheelchairs for explosive nail clippers they could hide there.”


What has changed since? Arafat's poisonous blood has eventually killed him. The portrait of that brigand now decorates the office of his comrade-in-arms, Abbas, who is going to ask the UN for recognizing "Palestine" - a nonexistent state with an imaginary president: Abbas's "term", for what it's worth, ended in January 2009. Another US president has just declared now, "I’ve made it clear that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam." Never mind that this statement is irrelevant grandiloquence or worse - a chronic delusion: if militant Islam is at war with the United States as it is, so is the United States with Islam, however unwillingly. It would indeed make sense to say, "We do not want to be at war...", but it would make no difference. 


Yes, it is difficult to identify the enemy: the wars have been between nation-states for a long time. Those wars are "normal", I guess. It seems insane and abnormally regressive to speak in terms of religious wars. In fact, however, there is no need for it, nor would it be correct. This is not a religious war not only because the United States does not represent a religion in conflict with another. It is not religious because there is nothing in Islam relevant to a religion that concerns the non-Muslim world. Does it really matter to anybody but devout Muslims that they believe in having a deity by the name of Allah, who used to have three daughters  - until, that is, that information in the Koran was abrogated in the Koran? What is of concern to the non-Muslim world is Islam as a political ideology: the Koranic claim on the entire Earth and humanity, to be brought into submission to Islam. By force and terror or by dawa, Islamic indoctrination. 


There is nothing truly unfamiliar in this sort of war that is neither religious nor against a nation-state. The Western world has never come into a direct conflict with Soviet Communism - only with its numerous and weakly connected proxies who would kick their Soviet advisers out as soon as they were sure of attaining necessary power. Nonetheless, if it were a direct conflict, it would be an ideological one. The war with Nazism was an ideological war: even though the Germans were a "master race", that notion included, in their eyes, at least the Nordic nations. Also, their allies - Nordic or not - would benefit from Nazi victories. The Nazis were not worried much about the Semitic origins of the Arabs, or the Slavic origins of their SS divisions "Galizien" and "Handschar", organized from Orthodox Ukranians, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks - the latter with the able help of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, Arafat's relative. What mattered to Germans was those troops' zeal in exterminating the Jews, the Gypsies, and the enemies of Nazism. It's easy to forget that it was indeed Nazism and fascism that the world fought against in that war - because it is so much easier to identify the noun, Germany, and forget the adjective, Nazi, or just mean it as synonymous with Germans at the time but not now. Obviously, what's changed is not the nation - inasmuch as nations have continuity. It is the ideology that has dramatically changed. Even though we may conveniently think that it was Germany that was defeated, it was, in fact, Nazism, which had taken possession of the minds of Germans, like Islam has taken possession of the minds of Arabs and many others.


It is the we-are-not-at-war-with-Islam-religion-of-peace attitude of a teary Bush that first portended today's situation, when, after Taliban has been defeated, it is still on the verge of return, when Saddam's Iraq has become Iran's Iraq with a Koran-based constitution, when "friendly" dictators are being replaced with Muslim Brotherhood, and Turkey of Ataturk has become Turkey of a new Islamic sultan, Erdogan. It is a bit like leaving Mein Kampf as the foundation of social thought in Germany after Nazi defeat. The same intentional blindness is expressed in Obama's nonsense that "Those who attacked us on 9/11 wanted to drive a wedge between the United States and the world." What about those who attacked England on 7/7 and Spain on 3/11?  Are they also about "wedges"? Or are all these terror attacks by Muslims different, as the world perceives terror against Israel? With Israel, it's always Israel's fault - it's all "occupation", even though it's the same terror that tortured Israel before 1967 and any "occupation". What is so hard for the West to understand in that it's not because of "occupation", land, or any particular grievances? It would be good if it was: if we were the reason, we could and should be able remove it. No, we are not, and we can't. It is because Islam has finally gained sufficient strength to resume violent jihad bequeathed to Muslims by Muhammad, or Allah if you will: "Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war" (Koran 9:5). Not enough strength to wage a war using armies and battles, but enough to blow up trains and restaurants, demolish buildings symbolic of non-Muslim might with thousands of the infidels inside, and shoot point-blank and cut throats of Jewish babies. It is cynical if not downright dishonest of the US president to claim that "people across the Middle East and North Africa are showing that the surest path to justice and dignity is the moral force of nonviolence". Those unnamed "people", aka Arabs, have shown nothing of the kind: ask Israeli diplomats who have just fled from Cairo, or Lara Logan, raped in the Tahrir square, a symbol of Egyptian newly acquired "freedom".  It is still tears for those who perished on 9/11 - not fury at those who murdered them - that dominate the 9/11 affect. America's post-9/11 wars, delimited by time and not by victories, are indeed not with Islam. That's why they will not prevent terror, a stratagem in the war Islam wages on humanity.

Dreams from the Smartniks

Perhaps this can be of interest to those who like linguistic trivia. There is a mildly derogatory word in Russian, умник (pronounced "oomnik"), which can be translated as "smartnik", something like smartypants. It recognizes a possibility that somebody can be smart but not really wise. I am talking about the attention that the latest "rapture" story has received. I don't mean the media - hardly any source of the "news" missed the story. I am talking about Facebook, where some of my Facebook friends - doctors and professors - to the very presumed "world's end" - just could not keep from expressing their derision for the "morons", competing for a better disparaging joke. Now, I could readily understand the educated crowd's interest to this  story, had it raised interest to cognitive dissonance, research in which started by Leon Festinger from a similar story. But no, apart from using the benighted "morons" to celebrate their own incomparably higher intelligence, my educated friends evinced no other motivations for investing their considerable time and effort into this "fun" of observing a banal inconsequential illusion.

Am I not doing the same now, but on the account of my friends? I really would not care, were it not in such contrast with the lack of attention to what may really result in the world's end, jihadist Islam, which has just been supported by the American president. Obama called for Israel to return to the "1967 lines", a euphemism for the Auschwitz borders of the 1949 armistice lines. If indeed the future borders were the 1967 lines, Israel would have full control of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and Sinai. In addition, as per Obama's diktat, Israel has to ensure that the "Palestinian" state is contiguous, thus Israel should cut itself, relinquishing its own contiguity. As usual, Obama did not mention anything tangible from "Palestinians" or other Arabs, except for unspecified "provisions" that "must also be robust enough to prevent a resurgence of terrorism, to stop the infiltration of weapons, and to provide effective border security". If such provisions were anywhere in the cards, would he himself  put the "profound and legitimate questions for Israel:  How can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist?" Doesn't it require deep cognitive dissonance of the president, who recognizes the impossibility of such negotiations, to demand these negotiations from Israel exactly when Fatah has openly joined openly genocidal Hamas? What "credible answer to that question" could these bandits in principle give? It is to these joined terrorist gangs that Obama wants Israel to make known the "territorial outlines of their state".

As usual, Obama draws false parallels between Arab terrorist murderers and Israelis who defend themselves from terror, between the victims of terrorist slaughter and Arab civilian casualties of anti-terror response that result from the terrorists' hiding behind civilians' backs. (It's hard to use military terms like "civilians", considering that the terrorists do not wear a military uniform either). He equates "suspicions and hostilities" for both sides of the "conflict" - the same "conflict" as illustrated in the video above. He equates the "issues of territory [for Arabs] and security [for Israel]", when anybody with any cognition understands that a territory cannot be taken back when security is violated. Let alone the simple fact that Israel's security is incompatible with the ruling charters of both PLO and Hamas, this incompatibility is embedded in the Koran, and no security for Israel can be guaranteed by any duplicitous verbiage of Abbas. This "president" of no country has just lied again about the history of the Arab "plight", mentioning nothing about their refusal to create their state, starting from 1947 

and many times since, as playing some role in that "the Palestinian state" is "long overdue". As Obama said, "Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist". "Palestinians" - whether Abbas's "authority", whose maps have no Israel on them, or Hamas with its call for exterminating the Jews in their entirety - have given no sign they they are stopping that denial. How then does that "never" play along with any "1967 lines"?

I find cognitive dissonance of those waiting for yesterday's rapture a healthy relief compared with delusions of Obama and his smartnik peace-mongering incompetent pro-Arab ideologues. The rapture gevalt will be forgotten tomorrow. Obama's nasty arm-twisting rewards terror and calls for more of it.

State oracles

Reportedly, Hillary Clinton has said, "We couldn't have predicted Mubarak's downfall". That is no surprise and no reason to write anything about. After all, the State Department could not predict the downfall of the Soviet Union either, a much more important and expected event, about which generations of Americans dreamed and President Reagan tirelessly worked on. What is surprising is Ms. Clinton's chutzpah in admitting her and her department's utter incompetence and lack of elementary work effort. Obviously, this is not about predicting some event that may or may not happen, anything at least as uncertain as the demise of the Soviet Empire. The only way the State Dept. could not have predicted Mubarak's downfall is if a former president's wife (it's difficult to find any other credentials that were supposed to qualify H. Clinton for her current post) and her subordinates were certain about Mubarak's immortality. The pharaoh is 82. Even if he were to live a long and happy life, it would still not prevent him from retirement in a very foreseeable future. Foreseeable, that is, if you are a sane person rather than Ms. Clinton who could not have imagined she would have to part with the dictator whose pockets she was so lovingly lining, and whose country she was supplying with weaponry that can be used only against Israel. If it were not for Israel's military superiority, the worthless piece of peace paper, for which Israel paid with Sinai's oil, would protect Israel as well as it has against rabid antisemitic incitement in Egypt. The only thing that was needed to predict Mubarak's downfall was to find out how old he is. One wouldn't even need to know, as has become suddenly known immediately after the "downfall", that both the army and Mubarak's own party had called for his resignation.

There is a good Russian saying, "Беда, коль пироги начнет печи сапожник, а сапоги тачать  - пирожник" - translated, it would be bad if a cobbler started baking pies and a baker making boots. This is what we get with the current administration of dilettantes led by a man whose relevant credentials hardly amount to a line in a resume.

Freedom of silence

The state media in the Soviet Union - and all media was state there - hardly needed political censorship after decades of the Soviet rule. The writers exercised self-monitoring very well. The most they allowed themselves was mild allegoric satire that was benignly looked upon by the powers that be as a safety valve for the teacup frondeurs. That helped the writers' popularity and created an illusion of freedom, while keeping boundaries intact. Considering that the writers' livelihood, and sometimes life itself, depended on their craft, one can hardly blame them for self-censorship - perhaps for the choice of profession.

It seems that the US media is getting the proper conditioning as well. On some issues, to remain silent is the only right. The case in point is Juan Williams, a senior National Public Radio (NPR) reporter and Fox News contributor, who has been fired from NPR. He violated the current taboo established by the government, which is a source of NPR funding. He said that seeing people in Muslim garb on a plane makes him nervous. He honestly admitted suffering from a psychological/psychiatric phenomenon, an increased anxiety. That anxiety is conditioned, as is well-known, on a very traumatic event and other similar events associated with the same system of beliefs people in Muslim garb are very likely to share - not on some "Islamophobic" prejudice. He should have kept silent. Such anxiety, and honesty in admitting it, are "inconsistent with [NPR's] editorial standards and practices". Since he could not do much about his anxiety, it is honesty that should have been kept in check, if he wanted to continue serving the organ of governmental propaganda.

One might juxtapose this firing with the recent firing of Helen Thomas by Hearst. There are significant differences, however. Helen Thomas said that Jews should should "go home" from Israel to Germany and Poland, the countries where they were exterminated. She thus unashamedly shares views of Hamas and Hizballah, not necessarily a kosher thing for a senior correspondent with White House accreditation. She was fired because of her antisemitism and support for terrorists' ideology. UPI and Hearst Newspapers, for which Thomas worked, are also not funded by the government. Juan Williams said that he was nervous on the plane seeing people looking like they were into Islam - a characteristic they share with Hamas, Hizballah and Al Qaida. It would be unreasonable not to be nervous about that after 9/11.

Juan Williams has long been an object of disdain and hate by the left for his participation in Fox News, however pro-left his position has been there. The left, taking after its spiritual ancestry, hates everybody who collaborates with what it views as "class enemy". Besides, he had chutzpah to criticize Michelle Obama (who felt OK about the US the first time when her husband was made a presidential candidate). Welcome, Juan, to Miranda rights - Soviet style.

What peace?

Another "Peace talks" charade has just started. Charade, because it makes no sense. Peace talks assume there is a war and there are warring sides, states. One cannot call "war" attempts of a terror gang (PLO, Fatah, Hamas, etc.) to kill Israelis and blackmail them into accepting the Arabs' desire to destroy Israel.

There is no war. There is continuous unrest and terror acts of the Arabs, which are ideologically motivated and can cease only if the ideology has no support. A nationalist ideology could be satisfied by attaining statehood if that ideology included the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. It does not seem to, as it is not a truly nationalist ideology. This ideology, from the start, has been focused not on the creation of a state but on the elimination of Israel. PLO was founded in 1964, before any "occupation" excuse for its terror. If Arabs had a goal of creating a state, they would have done that by now, taking one of the many opportunities they have had and rejected. The Islamic ideology, both embedded in the Palestinian Arab "nationalism" or in its pure Hamas form, in general predominant, does not allow a Jewish state at all, inasmuch as "Palestine" is Islamic waqf. There is nobody on either Fatah or Hamas side both capable and willing to suppress either ideology. Any "peace" they may achieve will consist, as usual, of Israel's irreversible tangible concessions and reversible and non-enforceable empty Arab promises. Non-agreement is fraught with Arab violence. Agreement is fraught with Israeli losses and Arab violence. I'd be happy if proven wrong.

Suppose, however, that this is a war. Isn't it the same war wherefore the Oslo accords were supposed to bring peace? That was the only justification for reimporting the career terrorist Arafat and his coterie, Abbas included. Evidently, it has not worked, if "peace talks" are needed again, after Oslo and all the rest of later talks. What would make anybody think it will work this time?

Oslo accords as well as all the later "peace" negotiations with terrorists have failed for the same reason as the most famous negotiations of this kind, Munich 1938. The "land for peace" principle did not work then and only stoked Hitler's ambitions. That should have been enough to condemn and forget this approach, particularly when dealing with spiritual descendants of Hitler. Instead, it is history that has been forgotten.

Finally, Abbas does not represent even the "Palestinian authority" (that's why he mentioned PLO and only PLO in his speech) and is nobody's "president" as of January 2009. Hamas holds sway over Gaza and over the minds of Arabs in Judea and Samaria. Both Hamas and Abbas's Fatah are terror groups committed to Israel's destruction. The way they compete for hearts and minds is by indiscriminately killing Jews. Those, however, are just small details for "peacemakers" of the Quartet, traditionally antisemitic Russia and the UN, the Arab-appeasing EU, and the US of Reverend Wright's capable pupil.

Mosque and state

I watched Fox News a couple of days ago - what else a wingnut would watch? A minister, Reverend Barry Lynn, whose main occupation is to fight for separation of church and state (he heads an organization with that mission), had a dispute with Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim and an anti-Islamist. Shoebat was translating, from his native Arabic, the "Cordoba mosque" imam Rauf's comments regarding the need for America to become a Shariah state.

Now, I understood why Lynn could have been invited to the program. After all, Islam does not consider separation of "church" and state at all: Islam was created by Muhammad to be the foundation of his perfect state. It is the only option an Allah-fearing Muslim may entertain. Witness Iraq, liberated from a dictatorship by the sacrifices of American soldiers only to ensure that "Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation" (Iraqi Constitution, Article 2). Quoting further, "A. No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established." Somehow, the next clause is that "B. No law that contradicts the principles of democracy may be established", which hardly makes sense, because any law deviating from Shariah will contradict clause A, and democracy is supposed to make laws outside of the established provisions of Islam, i.e., the Shariah. There has never been a democratic Islamic country, unless you consider voting a sufficient proof of democracy. If you do, we also had democracy in the Soviet Union, have it in Gaza, and I have the proverbial bridge to sell. Of course, when in a foreign non-Muslim country, serving Islam in the land of infidels like imam Rauf does, one has to be realistic, but nobody can stop a man from dreaming. Particularly when this man's idea of the ideal state is Muhammad's totalitarian empire.

What a shocker it was, however, when, instead of criticizing Islam for its non-separation from state, Rev. Lynn turned out to be a protector of Islam. In response to Shoebat's translation, the minister announced that it was a "misstatement". No idea whose misstatement he meant. No, he does not read or speak Arabic. He knows, however, that he can with  impunity accuse Shoebat of "misstatements" when telling truth about Islam is considered lying - that is the view of the mainstream media that sings in happy unison with the US government. Except for that repeated statement of "misstatement", and the usual straw man of the Muslims' "right to build", Lynn provided no argument.

The same straw man has been raised by The State, i.e., the US government, including the president. Nobody has questioned that right. What is questioned is the propriety of that construction in  that location. It may take a long time for the public to understand that it is a cynical distortion of justice for governmental officials, with the US president on top, to proclaim rights of a Shariah-toting imam to build a house of worship for a faith that denies that right to other faiths. It is also an obscene distortion of the principle of separation of church and state, when these officials, representing the state and trying to silence a public dispute, suggest that the nation's disagreement with construction of an Islamic monument near the mass grave of victims of violent Islam is tantamount to hate crime.

Then again, what can you expect when Barack Hussein has announced that "America and Islam ... overlap". Perhaps church and state, let alone synagogue and state, are separated in Obama's America. Mosque and state is a different matter. It would be a sure sign of Islamophobia to hold them separate.

Related posts: Monument to Murderers; Just Thinking; Thinking Ahead;  "First We Take Manhattan"; Islamophobia?

Islamophobia?

You hear that, and bad things come to mind. Claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and other similar extreme anxiety conditions disabling people. Judeophobia, which is a more precise synonym of antisemitism. Phobia is an irrational, intense fear/hate and avoidance of something that poses little or no actual danger. There are phobias related to animals (e.g., spiders), environments and situations (heights, storms). There are some phobias peculiar to a culture, such as taijin kyofusho, specific to Japan - an exaggerated fear of offending somebody. Most if not all  phobias appear to be extreme variants of normal human fears and apprehensions. It follows that once this word is attached to an entity, you know that the latter is really nothing to be afraid of, let alone hate. It is a disease or extreme prejudice not to see that.

Is that what we are dealing with, when the word "phobia" is attached to "Islam"? Is there indeed an irrational fear or hate of Islam? If so, is it as grotesque and morbid as agoraphobia, or perhaps as dangerous and murderous as Judeophobia? I won't delve much into the ancient history, because the fears or comfort of the living are not so much influenced by what happened centuries ago, unless the same events occur in the present, and then the present may not connect with the past. For instance, in the Russian language there is an archaic word, бусурманин (busurmanin), that is derived from "Muslim" and was used as recently as in 19th century to scare children and designate any enemy. The origin of that scare is in the times of Muslim raids on the Russian territories and in the centuries of Muslim khans' domination and enslavement. The word was not revived, however, when the children of Beslan were murdered by Muslim terrorists, or hostages of suicidal Muslims died in a Moscow theater, or Muslim "Black Widows" blew themselves up in the Moscow metro. Indeed, even though Chechens are Muslims, and it is hard not to see Islam's involvement in their cause, that cause is more nationalist than Muslim. Nowadays, the language is either more specific  - "Chechens", "Wahhabites"; or more generic - "terrorists". Muslims comprise a large proportion of the population in Russia, and are not persecuted for their religion. Russia, like the Soviet Union before, is good friends with  Islamic countries. Interestingly though, devout Muslims to this day call Christians "Crusaders". They also jumped at the word "crusade" (against terrorists), used by Bush in the wake of 9-11 in no connection to a Christian cause. Of course, because for Muslims the suicidal mass murder of 9-11 was an act of their faith, they considered any response to be religious  as well - Jewish and Christian. Never mind that Bush became a spokesperson for Islam, "religion of peace".

According to Obama, the explanation of 9-11 is in the "tension [that] has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies". Not according to Osama. His "fatwa" was titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places" - his grievance was in the violation of Muhammad's prohibition of any religion but Islam in that land, one of the early manifestations of Islamic tolerance. That's why the Saudi monarchy that allowed the American/non-Muslim presence on the Arab soil is Osama's enemy as well. According to Obama, "America and Islam ... overlap, and share common principles -- principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings." Not according to Islam, which denies justice and dignity not only to other faiths (unless you consider dhimmitude just), but to even Muslim women and children. OK, let's assume that Islam is not defined by Muhammad's "marrying" a six-year old Aisha and raping her at the ripe age of nine, by his genocide of the Jewish tribes in Arabia, by the bloody conquests and Islamization of North Africa, Asia and large part of Europe  - that's all ancient history. There is a lot, they say, bad stuff in any religion's past.  What good is Islam defined by in our times? What is coming out of the Muslim world that serves, or at least does not hurt and promise to hurt more, humanity? These questions are rhetorical. No, I take it back. There is good coming out of Islamic world - people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who leave us hope that Islam's hold on its adherents is not absolute even in the darkest places of Dar al-Islam.

Ancient history aside, it's hard to miss Islam's influence in present-day events. The negative stuff in the name of Islam, by Islam and for Islam happens - well, every day. Everybody knows about that, so I'd like first to consider the positive. Let's see.  Can you? I can't. What I can see is that the only way for a Muslim not to think or do horrible things - not just to others but to family members - is to become a "bad" Muslim and neglect the Koran of Allah and the Sunna (tradition on the conduct) of the Prophet, which a "good" Muslim is supposed to dutifully follow.

Inconsistent with the definition of phobia, the fear of Islam is not irrational - it is well justified by the actions of Muslims in the name of Allah, whether it is a stoning of Muslim "adulterers" or Jewish children, a decapitation of a captive,  or incessant murderous attacks on anybody, any group, or any country that Muslims view as a problem. It does not matter how small the proportion of the 1.5 billion of Muslims that commit those actions is, as long as they are committed, not prevented, and condoned or even celebrated by the majority of the Muslims. It is those actions that are justifiably hated - not Muslims, who are the first victims of the cult of Allah. As a real phobia is a mental disorder, so is a lack of fear of something that presents clear, present and mortal danger - this is the other side of the same psychological coin. It is pathological or at least not very smart not to fear a lion and jump into his cage in a zoo. It would be pathological not to fear Islam.

Attaching "phobia" to "Islam" does not make the fear of Islam prejudicial, bigoted, or morbid. It is an attempt to subvert reality and turn the norm into pathology. In the same manner, Russian fascists invented the word Russophobia, serving a similar purpose - to render pathological the fear of the antisemitic and repressive Russian nationalism. Many Russians see through that and use the term only ironically. Those who use it seriously are known for what they are - fascists, who often are so transparent as to use swastika in their symbolics. I hope, the Americans are able to hold on to their rational fears, including that of Islam. The alternative is too dire - and scary.

Aesopian media and the Pollard-Dreyfus Affair

Somebody may think that either my paranoia grows or I am becoming too painfully nostalgic about the Soviet Union. You can decide whether it is either, both, or something else entirely. Here is the preamble to the story.

It's no news that in the Soviet Union a writer would seldom attempt to publish anything openly against the regime in the open media. It would be unreasonable: the media was completely state-controlled. Nothing would be published, but the writer would be ruined. Those who could not take it anymore had three options. The easiest was to write "into the desk", with no hope for that to be published. Another was to try to somehow publish a disloyal piece abroad. That was difficult: one had to have means of transporting the manuscript.  Contacts with a foreigner who could potentially take the manuscript out of the country were risky for both him and the writer. The writer had to be well known indeed for such an attempt to justify the effort and risk, which was exceedingly seldom. Smuggling out and publishing an openly critical piece abroad could end the writer's career in the USSR. Exile abroad would then be the best outcome, but not necessarily so good for the writer whose main audience and perhaps livelihood would be left behind. Samizdat and Tamizdat did help in keeping such a publication from being self-defeating, but not entirely: very few people had access to either. Also, one had to, again, be famous enough to be exiled rather than imprisoned or subjected to "psychiatric" treatment and forgotten, if not simply killed by the KGB. The other possibility, especially for well established authors, was to use the so-called Aesopian language or some such subterfuge that formally was not an overt anti-Soviet offense. Those works would be published in some journal targeting mostly intelligentsia, both because nobody else could understand the complexities of the writer's thinking, metaphors and allusions, and because, to do its job, intelligentsia needed some valve to let out steam that accumulated in any sentient being in a totalitarian state. This would both flatter the said stratum of the socialist society and give it an illusion of freedom and a pleasant feeling of being in opposition, but safe. "Кролики и удавы" (Rabbits and Boa Constrictors) by Fazil Iskander comes to mind, published in the journal "Юность" (Youth), one of such safety-valve journals. It was, however, 1988 already, perestroika, when the moribund trinity of the Party, State, and KGB was hardly trying to maintain what was left of the Communist anti-utopia. It had been published in 1982 in America, probably after sitting for some time in Iskander's desk, but being truly an Aesopian allegory perhaps did not qualify as an openly "anti-Soviet propaganda" to criminally persecute the well-known author.

Why, one might ask, am I rehashing the Soviet experience? Definitely not nostalgically. One reason is that The New York Times published a book review today with a sentence in it exactly like those you could see in one of such journals. A single sentence. The book is about Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus, a French army captain and a Jew, was in 1894 wrongfully accused of treason, dishonored and imprisoned on Devil's Island, a penal colony where most of the prisoners died of diseases and hardship. I have not read the book and do not know whether it discusses one of the outcomes of the Dreyfus Affair - Theodor Herzl's understanding that Jews needed a state of their own to survive. The review does not mention that. What it does mention in that one sentence is that Dreyfus's "prosecutors claimed, as more recent governments have done, that national security forbade them to reveal secret evidence that would have been decisive if known, and he was convicted all over again." This vague "more recent governments" begs the question which ones. And about whom and what - it seems unlikely that it's still about the Dreyfus Affair. And why not respond to these obvious questions right there, in the review. All that seems to be left to anybody's guess.

In the Soviet Union, it would be for intelligentsia to read between the lines, admiring the courage of the writer who managed to get a "seditious" statement through censorship unnoticed and unmolested. Intelligentsia was supposed to critically evaluate the actions of the government - emphasis on "critically". I am not certain if there is a similar, however vaguely defined, wide social group here in the US. People of the so-called intellectual occupations here tend to unquestioningly support the Democratic Party, hence the respective governments, and frequently focus on non-political matters otherwise. The uncritical loyalty to the Party, combined with hatred toward anything perceived to be "the other", is sometimes terrifying. Politically, their general orientation is overwhelmingly to the left, which is alike that for "intellectuals" in the pre-Bolshevik Russia, but rather unlike that in the post-Lenin/Stalin Russia. Those who lived there have already been to where the left direction takes the nations. In fact, the demagoguery that the Party employs is also often reminiscent of the pre-revolutionary Russian left's: Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader (the one who has been satisfied that Obama is "light-skinned" and has "no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one"), freely injects in his speeches the classic Communist class struggle language - "rich and powerful" vs. "the masses".

Being on the left calls for supporting everybody "poor" against the "rich", which includes "Palestinians" against Israel. It does not matter why they are poor, and whether they are even really poor. Inasmuch as Israel is capitalist, rich and powerful, she is the predator and the Arabs are the prey to care about or, rather, to feel good about caring. Israel is at fault regardless of history, facts and logic - unsurprisingly, just like the Jews... I was going to say, "used to be", but not really. It's quite easy to see, without invoking Occam's Razor, that "Israel" is a useful substitute for "Jews" in this modern progressive climate. Not only "Israel" makes antisemitism "legitimate", it allows full participation in Jew-bashing for the self-hating left-leaning Jews without the need to join the Communist Party, as they had to before. To be sure, atheism, particularly anti-Judaism, usually remains de rigeur, as it was with Communists.

Hatred for Israel, the cover for antisemitism, is where the left and the right converge, like Chomsky and Jim "f... the Jews" Baker. You still wonder whom the "more recent governments" treated about as horribly as the French did Dreyfus? I hope it will not be a surprise that the name I read between the lines is Jonathan Pollard. An Israeli spy who stole for Israel secrets from the US Navy Intelligence for which he worked. Neither the author of the review nor I are first to draw this comparison. An article did that in 1991. Yes, there is a difference: Dreyfus was absolutely innocent, but Pollard did indeed engage in espionage. There is, however, another difference: in contrast to Dreyfus, who did have a trial, however unfair, Pollard was never tried. He pleaded guilty in passing information to an ally with no intent to harm the US. The US government horribly violated that plea agreement. Dreyfus had been accused of treason - Pollard never was. Dreyfus had been accused in spying for an enemy - Pollard spied for a friend, after its friend refused to give Israel information it was entitled to. Israel was not being informed of Iraq's poison gas supplies. When Pollard asked why, the response was, "Jews are too sensitive to gas." 

Zola's letter helped to liberate Dreyfus, but no author, including juridical celebrities like Dershowitz, has been able to do anything for Pollard - the US republic seems to be less sensitive to protestations than the French democracy. People of conscience in the whole world, including Russia, commiserated with Dreyfus, but nobody hears about Pollard, forgotten as are other Jews in captivity (Gilad Shalit's name was hardly mentioned when the Gazans' culinary "sufferings" were recently lamented by the world community). No other spy caught at working for an ally in the US has ever got anything close to Pollard's life in prison - many of those who spied for enemies received shorter sentences and more lenient treatment. 

Pollard's imprisonment was the result of an event identical to what had happened during Stalin's purges: Pollard was buried by the fiat of the Politburo, namely Caspar Weinberger, a true criminal, whose secret memorandum was the only grounds for that. Nobody still knows what was in it - for the "reasons of national security", just like with Dreyfus. The promise of freedom for Pollard has served the Clinton government to extort concessions from Israel that were harmful to her - the promise, on which the US again reneged, like it did on other promises to Israel (e.g., understandings between Sharon and Bush that, according to the current openly anti-Israel Obama government, never happened). Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Williams famously wrote his dissent about "a fundamental miscarriage of justice" in Pollard's case. It seems, however, that no justice was carried at all nor is expected to be. The meek Soviet-like hints at the continuing injustice is the only thing the mainstream "intelligentsia" media is apparently capable of. In the Soviet Union, such hints were bravery. In America, they are closer to disgrace.