British Anti-Zionist Committee

As reported in the Jerusalem Post, the "leadership" (for what it's worth) of the British Jewry has been "de-Zionized". In other words, it has consistently taken a "critical" position towards Israel (quote marks, because it is consistently one-sided and calumnious). Worse even, the head of its self-appointed Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), Mick Davis, has suggested that Israel's policies should be corrected because they poorly reflect on him, thus repeating one of the main antisemitic ideas, according to which the Jews bear collective responsibility for actions of fellow Jews, whether real or imaginary, just as they have had for the slander of deicide.

This reminds me of my home country. In the Soviet Union, antisemitism was officially banned but its official expressions were well understood by the population from the incessant "criticism" of Israel, with printed propaganda including cartoons hardly different from those in Der Stuermer. Everybody could readily connect this "criticism" and its fluctuations with the official and not so secret policy regarding hiring Jews, accepting them to universities, and allowing them emigration. In the antisemitic Soviet Union, there used to be "Anti-Zionist Committee" comprised of famous Jews - actors, writers, lawyers, scientists, and headed by a general, a World War II hero. The AZC, "voluntary" as it was called, was created in 1983 by the KGB and the Propaganda Dept. of the Party (basically the same animal). It was popularly known as the "Antisemitic Committee". Its goal was to malign Israel with the added legitimacy of "Jews themselves" doing that, and to convince the "abroad" - whoever would need such a pathetic pretext, particularly in the USA and Israel, - that the Soviet Jews needed no Israel and there was no antisemitism in the USSR. Needless to say, if anybody thought to organize a Zionist committee, he would see the other side of the KGB in no time, as people like Sharansky did indeed. Those AZC members were partly duped by the continual Communist (anti-capitalist and anti-Israel) brain-washing, partly scared of the KGB for themselves or for family members, partly the official and popular antisemitism had brushed off onto them. I do not know how many well-known Jews were approached and rejected the KGB's kind offer to join. I am not sure how many of the members were "invited" by the KGB rather than volunteered, but there were those among them who did the latter, ashamed of fellow Jews and vocal in "criticizing" Israel. That was nothing new. Right after the Bolshevik revolution, young atheistic Jews had created "Yevsektsiya" (Евсекция; the "Jewish Section" of the Communist Party), whose function was eradication of the Jewish religious and national culture - following Marx's suggestions on the Jewish emancipation by emancipation from Jewishness.

As in the USSR, the "Jews themselves" argument attaches - in the eyes of so many willing beholders - additional legitimacy to slander and antisemitic canards about Israel in the old tradition of blood libel. That's why the Jewish slanderers of Israel - Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Steven Rose - are so popular among neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Muslims, as well as the antisemites of the Left. Under strong pressure, traitors appear with regularity, and provide the ever-interested public with all needed argumentation for why their enemy is right.

I am not sure how strong the pressure on the Jews is in England. I appreciate the possibility that some of them have been brain-washed by the increasingly antisemitic environment in Great Britain into seeing the root of the Arabs-Israel problem in Israel's attacking innocent Arabs rather then in the sworn rejection of Israel's right to exist by Arabs. I do know, however, that compared to the Soviet Jews imprisoned in the Soviet Union, the British Jews and their "leadership" have an additional and much nobler option than slander and betrayal: emigration - to Israel. Instead, they have succeeded - without any KGB pressure and truly voluntarily - in organizing "Anti-Zionist" antisemitic committees. Mazel tov.

Europe's revolutionaries & Hamas

As reported in Jerusalem Post on October 18, Proinsias De Rossa, an Irish member of European Parliament, said that Hamas should be officially recognized by the European Union. De Rossa is not your average politician, of the kind that seek offices in the forthcoming midterm elections in the US. He is also a former  President of the Workers' Party of Ireland. The Party originates from the Official IRA, whose activities included bank robberies. The latter, while probably profitable, still did not cover funding needs, and in 1986 De Rossa, who was at the time "Chairperson Executive Political Committee" of the Party before its split, signed a letter to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union requesting such funds for "special activities". Those activities, in quotes in the letter itself, were of such variety that it was "not possible to detail ... because of reasons we are sure [Secretary of the CPSU] will understand." The letter appealed to the Soviet comrades with touching sincerity: "The 'special activities' are unable to always be effective and so on occasion the party has to seek loans... We are confident of achieving in time all that we have set ourselves to do, but what we urgently need now is an injection of capital to enable us to devote our time to the tasks in hand and to relieve us of the daily burden of financial constraints". De Rossa and his comrades knew they could rely on the generosity of the CPSU (more precisely, KGB), because they knew "well the tremendous sacrifices made by and the support the Soviet Union rendered to liberation movements and Revolutionary Parties struggling all over the world". As reported in The Independent, the KGB and the CPSU did approve the one million of Irish pounds requested, albeit it took quite awhile, three years, when perestroika was already in full bloom. According to the article, since then De Rossa "has taken a consistently anti-IRA position, organising 'peace trains' between Dublin and Belfast to protest at the bombing of the trains by the IRA". Nevertheless, the "special activities" that have become bad for the revolutionary Irishman (after all, it's hard to be a politician and still support bombing trains in your backyard), may still be viewed as good for "liberation movements... all over the world".

One of those movements is surely Hamas. It is indeed only fitting for Europe to recognize Hamas, as proposed by De Rossa. While for him Hamas are fellow revolutionaries, supported by KGB and its current successors, Europe has for a long time had the same aspirations as Hamas and has only recently been actively engaged in the same business as Hamas. Moreover, Hamas can so far only dream of Europe's success in murdering Jews. De Rossa ridiculously claimed that "Hamas has said it is willing to recognize Israel; we have to ask why this is not reported in the media very often." The answer is simple: there has been nothing to report, unless one is willing to lie like De Rossa - not that recognition by and negotiations with terrorists could be reasonably desired by any state. Of course, Hamas has never changed its foundational Covenant that not only rules out  recognition of and negotiations with Israel, but follows Muhammad's call for the genocide of the Jews, quoting the famous hadith about the Muslims' need to kill the Jews for the Judgment Day to come.

Europe faces perhaps the worst thing in its history - an ideology openly declaring world domination as its goal, whose followers prefer death to life and thus are deaf to anything rational, taking over Europe's cities already - and all it sees is the hated Jews it did not manage to finish off.

Some time after

Let's just think for a moment what would happen if the "Palestinian" state were created as a result of current talks. Besides a couple of new Nobel peace prizes. Let's think of the "best-case" scenario, when the "refugee" problem is solved (I put the word in quotes because few if any of those people are actual refugees), the borders are mutually agreed on, and Jerusalem is not an issue. The disemboweled Israel has finally conducted another ethnic cleansing of its own loyal citizens, depriving them of their homes, land and life they have invested into their fields, vineyards and the Zionist idea. There is nobody left with whom that idea would have any physical traction anymore. The Judenrein Judea and Samaria emerge as "Palestine", named after the ancient enemies of Jews who never lived on that territory. Plishtim, as their Hebrew name was, the Philistines, whose name has come to stand for rude and uncultured ignoramuses, 3,000 years ago occupied part of the Mediterranean coast and had nothing to do with the Arabs. Mahmoud Abbas is enthroned as the President - finally, not of some "Authority" but a state. He has a new kunya perhaps, Abu Filastiniya. He sits in Ramallah, or even Jerusalem - behind the presidential desk under the portrait of the great Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, aka Yasser Arafat. Al-Husseini is also the name of Arafat's revered relative, Haj Amin, a good friend of Hitler and Eichmann and the first leader of "Palestinians". Wikipedia lists "Yasser" within that long train of names, but Arafat took it only when he studied in a university in Cairo. In Cairo he was also born, that great "Palestinian", who adopted the tale of his Jerusalem birth under the direction of his KGB handlers. But I digress.

Now, the "Palestine" of this sweet dream is surely a democratic state. That is, if Abbas, or whoever may dethrone him, does not decide to become a life-term president, which any other self-appointed Arab leader would do, especially given support of his multiple American-taught "security" forces. Is Gaza with its Hamas government part of that state? Hamas's Charter does not allow it to recognize or conduct negotiations with Israel. Thus, whether Gaza is not in that state, or is accepted as an entity within it, it has nothing to do with any agreements. How long will it take for an independent Gaza to start lobbing rockets at Israel again? Alternatively, how long will it take for Hamas to be elected to rule over the united "Palestine" and denounce these fabulous "peace" agreements or simply disregard them? Even before that, what will force Abbas to prevent murders of Israelis committed by "his" citizenry, if he is naming city squares after the terrorist murderers? As happened after the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, it will be immensely more difficult for Israel to protect itself against terror, capture terrorists, or retaliate, if Israeli troops are not deployed in "Palestine" anymore. How long will it take for its terror gangs to get equipped with weaponry readily provided via Jordan, which would likely soon become united with its long-suffering brethren into a terrorist fuehrer-led democracy, getting rid of that old import from Mecca, the Hashemites? There will be people willing to remind Abdullah of his father's Black September and of his own stripping them of their long-held Jordanian citizenship and rights. Whatever illusions may have existed before Israel's self-defeats in South Lebanon and Gaza, following the same pattern again is madness. Don't tell me how well it worked with buying peace from Egypt - does anybody doubt that only Israel's strength has protected it?

Squeezed tightly between the terror states of Jordistine and Hizballon, with the antisemitic "international community" guaranteeing "peace", that is, Israel's non-response to terror attacks for which those states would always have plausible if absurd deniability - with whom will Israel negotiate away the rest of its minuscule land? This time, for safe conduct?

PS to "What peace?"

Sometimes, in trying to be laconic, precision is sacrificed. To be sure, the description of the EU as "Arab-appeasing" in the prior post does not mean that it is not "traditionally antisemitic" as Russia or the Muslim-dominated UN. This point has just been illustrated by the EU's Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, a Belgian, who noted that, regardless of religiosity,“Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are  right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational  discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.” Upon hearing some concerns, he explained that his comments were wrongly interpreted as antisemitic, and he regretted that. He did not think it would be offensive - and the EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton did not either. She too was confident that he "did not intend any offense" - why, indeed, antisemitism should be offensive, especially in Europe? At the same time, she was "encouraged by the positive outcome of the launch of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority." No surprise, considering that the only "outcome of the launch" has been the murder of four Jews (five; one of the women was pregnant) and severe wounding of another one. Seven orphans. I hate to think what can make Catherine Ashton happy.

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.

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.

An obscure folio, evolution, and Islam

Rabbi Hillel first introduced the Golden Rule - in its negative and feasible form, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow" (Jesus, many years later, reportedly put the rule in its positive form). R. Hillel considered this main rule of social behavior to be as important as to summarize the entirety of the Torah. He also famously said, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" (Pirke Avot, 1:14). As befits a true genius, these sayings have universal applicability. That is probably why they also apply to the half-selfish topic of this entry. It concerns a monograph, The Science, Treatment, and Prevention of Antisocial Behaviors (Vol. 2), published six years ago. The monograph is not advertised - there is not even an editorial review on Amazon.com (and it was not originally sold there) - because, as the publisher once explained to me, the book does not target general audience but is intended for policy makers, experts, etc. I am not sure whether this is the best policy even for the alleged target audience. The book ranks 3,163,794 in Amazon.com sales, which likely means that it sells less than one copy a year - and there should definitely be more interested  experts than that.

How do I know? Why should I worry? And how R. Hillel's maxims are relevant? It is obvious that antisociality contradicts the Golden Rule. As for Hillel's triad, I contributed a chapter to that book, and it's about time another couple of people found out about it. Admittedly, it is not popular science, but it is not a trigonometry textbook either, and some information in it may be of interest to an educated reader. 

The chapter (Chapter 4) has a vague, or rather too generic, title, Evolution, Genes, and Environment - Neurobiological Outcomes. It does deal, however briefly, with all these areas as pertains to antisocial behavior. What the title does not immediately reflect, however, is one of the sections, which is germane to the general direction of this blog. The section is titled Logic of Suicide, Mass Murder, and Altruism. In addition to the general issues relating evolution to these titular phenomena (it is not straightforward and requires some discourse, for instance, how suicide can be "beneficial" from the evolutionary standpoint), it includes a discussion of Muslim "martyrdom". The discussion addresses the role of the uniquely human function of the human brain, metaphoric thinking, truly amalgamated in the Muslim tradition with reality, in simulating reproductive benefits in the acts of self-destruction. Considering that this amalgamation results in the suspension of the powerful self-preservation instinct in shahids, the murderous "martyrs", it is not surprising that regular human sympathies are suspended as well. That point is highlighted by the scarcely noted in the media but telling story of how schoolgirls in Saudi Arabia were forced to die in fire by the "religious" police: the girls were pushed back into their burning school because they did not have a chance to put on their abayas, black robes worn over dresses. The text explains sex differences in suicidal terrorism and the mechanisms of xenophobic indoctrination. It compares the eusocial behavior of Hymenoptera insects (such as bees) and the boundaries of altruism in humans, relaxed to malignancy by both Islamic metaphors and material gains of the families of suicidal murderers. Some attention is paid to the contribution of the media in poisoning the information space with lethal misinformation that cannot in principle be remedied by truth even if it were to follow, which it seldom does. 

Despite the rather grim picture arising from this discussion, the conclusion is cautiously positive: "the history of cultural evolution leaves some hopes for the future of sociality. In particular, one of the trends that has expressed itself in the religious codes corresponds to the extension of inclusive fitness to the group, tribe, state and alliance levels. Torah in Leviticus (19:18) commands, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself; I am the Lord”—the word “neighbor” covers all humans (Hertz, 1980). The same metaphor that allows inclusive fitness [the summary effect of all factors that promote or hinder reproduction of the individual's genes] to cover non-relatives in aggression and underlies xenophobia, can thus be turned into its [truly] prosocial form. This creates an opportunity for the fulfillment of Darwin's dream of humans' extending their “social instincts and sympathies” to “all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him,” and then to “the men of all nations and races” (The Descent of Man). We may soon find out whether this conclusion is too optimistic and a much darker evolutionary outcome is on the horizon.

Dershowitz's choice

I have again come across a pre-election piece by Alan Dershowitz, placed by him in Huffington Post, and thought that it is helpful to understand the convoluted rationale of well-intended people who elected Barack Hussein. It shows how wrong assumptions and unidimensional thinking can drive one to wrong decisions, and, at the same time, help explain the problems we suffer from these decisions.

Let's suppose Dershowitz was indeed so credulous as to decide that Obama "strongly supports Israel" based on the information that "[d]uring the debates each candidate has gone out of his and her way to emphasize strong support for Israel as an American ally and a bastion of democracy in a dangerous neighborhood". Considering that pre-election verbiage is well known to be unreliable, mildly put, while Obama's associations with antisemites and Israel-haters had been well known, Dershowitz would have to be daft to buy it, which he is not. He must have known - but disbelieved - that Obama's professed love for Israel is opportunistic and false. It was and is true, however, that, as Dershowitz wrote, "Obama's views on Israel will have greater impact on young people, on Europe, on the media and on others who tend to identify with the liberal perspective." That's exactly what Obama's views, turned into his anti-Israel policy, do now, supporting the rise of antisemitism on campuses and in the world. It is because of his policy that his support in Israel dropped to the unprecedented 4% - not because of his middle name as he put it, slandering Israelis as racists.

The problem with Dershowitz is that the falsity of attributions and predictions that he made was obvious at the time when he wrote his Huff piece to anybody whose critical abilities were not suspended. It is unfortunate that they were suspended in so many, and so many usually smart and well-informed people were and are guided by the left ideology and wishful thinking. Then again, whole nations were blinded by them, leading from one disaster to another.

Nadson

I did my best to translate a poem by Semyon Nadson (Семён Надсон), a Russian poet. His father was son of a baptized Jew; he died when Semyon was two. Nadson was sincere, talented and immensely popular. His life, as often happens with poets, particularly in Russia, was hard and short: he died of consumption at the age of 25 (1862-1887). The original does rhyme - I did not have much time and had to choose between rhyme and rhythm. The translation is virtually literal. I would not do it if I could find one online - I have not looked for any hard copy ones. I did it at my wife's request. She thought it was still relevant and instructive. I agree. Please point out and forgive any errors - my English is far from perfect.

Я рос тебе чужим, отверженный народ, И не тебе я пел в минуты вдохновенья. Твоих преданий мир, твоей печали гнет Мне чужд, как и твои ученья. И если б ты, как встарь, был счастлив и силен, И если б не был ты унижен целым светом, - Иным стремлением согрет и увлечен, Я б не пришел к тебе с приветом. Но в наши дни, когда под бременем скорбей Ты гнешь чело свое и тщетно ждешь спасенья, В те дни, когда одно название "еврей" В устах толпы звучит как символ отверженья, Когда твои враги, как стая жадных псов, На части рвут тебя, ругаясь над тобою, - Дай скромно стать и мне в ряды твоих бойцов, Народ, обиженный судьбою! 1885

I've been estranged from you, the nations’ outcast. It was not you, to whom I sang my songs, inspired. Your tribulations’ weight, your torments' burden are All alien to me, as are your tales and teachings. And if you, as of yore, were happy and were strong, And weren’t, as you are, debased in every corner, - It wouldn’t be to you, to whom I would belong. I wouldn’t come to you, consumed by some endeavor. But when, aggrieved, in vain, you lower your head, By miseries beset, you’re crying for salvation, And when your very name, derided as is “Jew,” Is on the crowd’s lips a symbol of pariah, When enemies of yours, a pack of greedy dogs, Are tearing you apart, defaming and maligning,- Allow me to stand with you, confronting fate, And let me take my place among your humble fighters!

Israel's aggression

Still ongoing!

Islam: Religious mimicry

This is part of the page titled On the Brink I posted in August 2006, upon returning from Israel after spending vacation with my family in a miklat, shelter (see a little story about that here). Although the whole page is still relevant, this text on history in particular provides the perspective on the July 2006 war with Hizballah as well as current events.

Islam was founded by Muhammad in the first half of the VII century. Muslims are taught that Islam and its holy book, the Koran, had existed as long as had the Universe, and all Jewish and Christian prophets had been Muslims. The truth, however, is that nobody had heard about Islam until Muhammad, an illiterate, poor and mentally unstable husband of a rich and much older wife, decided to turn his dreams or hallucinations into a message to humankind under her insistence. Perhaps her plan was to solve her family problems. In the patriarchal Arab society, Muhammad’s dependent status might have been considered not quite kosher. That could have contributed to his frequenting caves and sitting there, depressed and prone to scary visions under sensory and alimentary deprivation – these were the conditions under which he received his first revelation. The divine character of that was far from clear to the future Messenger of Allah, who was scared to death by his vision and needed his wife’s reassurance.

Reassured, however, he realized the benefits of his newly acquired Messenger status, and proceeded in his career from a pathetic charlatan, laughed at by the people who knew him the best, to a highway robber chieftain, to a genocidal mass murderer and totalitarian ruler, removing any opposition, real or imaginary, literally by sword. That removal was really an equal opportunity treatment, as he murdered regardless of the sex, age, and ethnic origin of the opponent. This included his extermination of all men of the entire peaceful Jewish tribe of Banu Quraiza and enslavement of children and women. This was the first recorded application of the Nazis’ Babiy Yar method, long before Hitler. Jews were brought in groups and murdered on the brink of a ravine that was to be their mass grave. By Muhammad’s desire, expressed on his deathbed, Jews cannot settle in Arabia, which had been their home for centuries. The same rule, incidentally, was introduced by the British for Jewish immigration to the part of the Land of Israel they decided to call Trans-Jordan (later shortened to Jordan), assisting Hitler in murdering Jews. This has since been the rule enacted by Jordanian rulers, who consider themselves Muhammad’s direct descendants. No wonder, as Muslims are bound to follow the Sunnah (the example) of the Prophet, as they have followed it in their barbaric conquests.

Muhammad’s revelations would come to him conveniently when he had to justify another crime of his, perversion, political expediency and, eventually, the social order he created to facilitate his autocracy. That divine order (the Islamic state is supposed to be perfect) collapsed immediately upon his death into the war between the followers of Muhammad’s daughter and her husband, Muhammad’s nephew Ali, and the supporters of Muhammad’s favorite wife Aisha and her father the strongman Abu Bakr. The conflict was of the same type as the one between Anna Nicole Smith and her late husband’s children. Except that Aisha probably had a better claim to the spoils, as Muhammad “married” her when she was six and consummated that marriage when she was nine (the paragon for all humanity himself was over 50). The stakes also were much higher, and the two groups, respectively Shia and Sunni, have been killing each other since – just observe the endless slaughter in Iraq. Imagine how easy it is then for both to kill infidels.

By sword has been the way Islam has spread from the Arabian peninsula, brought under the Islamic yoke by Muhammad by the time he died in 632, to North Africa, to a large part of Asia, and – for a long time – some parts of Europe. Nowadays, helped by the boundless tolerance of Western democracies to everything they perceive as underdog, the Islamic violent takeover, still in full force with a weaker adversary as in Sudan, is supplemented by unstoppable Islamic immigration and the ensuing demographic and political changes in the world of the infidels – Crusaders and Jews. This perceived underdog position of the 1.3 billion-strong umma sitting on the oil treasure of the world has served the dual function of lulling the Western societies into deafness to Islam’s inhuman teachings while raising Muslims’ anger at their “humiliation,” which the true believers perceive as any state in which Islam is not über alles, superior. Naturally, Islamic immigration has no intention of assimilation – quite the opposite, its leaders have overt plans of (gradual) government change.

Muslims have no right to befriend Christians or Jews (Koran 5:51), let alone non-monotheists. They believe Jews are cursed by Allah (Koran 5:64) – because of the Jewish beliefs that are nowhere to be found except in Islamic teachings. They believe that Christians and Jews are to either convert to Islam, or keep their faith but assume a subhuman dhimmi position in the society under what is called “protected status” (of the kind of mafia protection), or die if they violate these conditions. Non-monotheists have no choice but to convert or die. Whether to offer a choice or not is under Muslims’ discretion. There is no choice as to who will eventually rule the world, currently divided into Dar al-Islam, the realm of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, the realm of war. Democracy, with its freedoms and human-made laws, is incompatible with Islam. Adding free elections to Islamic ideology as an attempt to introduce democracy is less meaningful than holding free elections in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Freedom does not necessarily create good neighbors – not when a neighbor is a criminal.

Whereas Islam is thus first and foremost a political doctrine and movement, the “religious” facet of Islam adds to the picture not merely the neutralization of the instinct of self-preservation but indeed its reversal. The brain-washed Muslim suicidal murderers perceive their certain demise not as death but as the virtually only way to ensure their staying alive (and well in Paradise). They are also convinced that they do a great favor to those Muslims who unintentionally get killed in a terror act because those are supposed to attain similar benefits. Most importantly, this eternal life is contrasted not with death, but with the almost certain alternative of their ending up in Hell, which is described in great detail in the Koran and the Sunnah, leaving little to imagination. Hell is virtually unavoidable for a believing Muslim, unless he is committed to jihad. Therefore, both negative and positive reinforcements are employed in the Islamic indoctrination, which has shown a great efficiency with a large number of people – not only when they receive it from their childhood, but – tellingly – with new converts as well. The usual straw-man counter-argument that only a small proportion of Muslims are in this altered state of consciousness is clearly invalid because there is no need for more than a minute proportion of 1.3 billion Muslims, properly educated and armed, to achieve a catastrophic effect. It is true, as human rights defenders in the US declare, that it is bad in general to discriminate in accordance with faith. It is not true, however, when the faith includes the current and actively enacted mainstream notions of human sacrifice and the subjugation or extermination of the other faiths. However highly developed the Aztec civilization was, had it survived till now, its bloody rituals would be forbidden, and if they were an inseparable part of the Aztec religion, it would be categorized into cult and banned. Islam, the ideology whose followers, led by Muhammad’s example, rape, enslave, behead unarmed civilians, execute “blasphemers,” and commit mass murder of children, thrives. The concept of Islam as a monotheistic religion serves this political ideology to protect it from the eradication that would certainly be in the cards for it due to its fascist and violent character. This religious mimicry, first used by Muhammad for ennobling, nay, sacralizing his morbid desires and immunizing himself from human critique, is still employed for the same purpose and perfected by Muslim spokespeople.

It is uncanny how the ongoing events resemble the pre-WWII layout. Russia, jealous of what it perceives to be the imperial position of the US, is playing, again thinking that it will gain dominance through pitting today’s Nazis against the West. France, true to its colors, stubs its allies in the back and is trying to appease the enemy. The rest of Europe keeps silence, thinking that if it keeps its head low, it will keep it – with profit. Antisemitism, reinforced by anti-Israelism, is as rampant around the world as in 1930’s, if not more. The left intelligentsia, ignorant in the matter as usual, but omniscient regardless by default, supports a totalitarian ideology – as long as that claims to fight for the “insulted and humiliated.”

Despite all experience with Nazism, the world has yet to grasp that violent ideology can only be fought as an infectious disease: by correctly identifying the agent, and by stopping its propagation by eliminating it and/or raising immunity against it - not by trying to appease it. Translated into the situation with Islam, that would mean first and foremost neutralizing those who spread the violent ideology - imams, mullahs and sheikhs, whose almost uniform obesity and penchant for hoarding female resources suggest that they themselves are not in a hurry to see the huris. This gives a strong hope that they can be persuaded to relay to their flock that jihad is about learning the multiplication table, brushing teeth and doing good deeds rather then cutting infidel throats, as the believers are used to erroneously think. Ataturk knew that well enough to deal with mullahs and employ healthy anti-Islam safeguards that have survived and protected Turkey till now as a relatively modern and open country, despite all its mosques and muezzins [again, this was written in 2006]. This is what should have been done in Iraq, instead of allowing its post-Saddam constitution to be based on the Koran - which is a bit like if Germany were allowed to use Mein Kampf for the same purpose after WWII.

“War on terror” may be a convenient shorthand. It is politically correct, but is as senseless as would be a war on guns or tanks, because terror is only a tool of war. The war that has been conducted by Islam, with variable intensity, against Dar al-Harb. Now is the first time, however, when the means of waging a truly decisive jihad have become available. Unless the complacent Western world learns from past lessons, it will be taught new apocalyptic ones, already under preparation by true believers in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and wherever there is a mosque with a properly thinking imam. One who knows that

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. (Sahih Muslim, Book 041, Number 6985; also Sahih Muslim, Book 041, Number 6981-6984; and Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 176-179, 56: 791).

If you are a good Muslim, you must follow the Sunnah. I doubt there are so many Gharqad trees around.

Yahoo divided Jerusalem

As brought up by HonestReporting, Yahoo has engaged in the political SimCity game and created two virtual cities, "East Jerusalem" and "West Jerusalem". The weather data for them are grabbed from the real Jerusalem, Israel,  weather station, and duplicated under the two respective headers. The city of Jerusalem, the holiest Jewish city (some people say it even means something to Christians and Muslims), known as such for 3,000 years, and the capital of Israel, has ceased to be - in the Yahoo universe. To be sure, the data for the virtual cities are identical, underscoring that the city is one. Perhaps the next step for Yahoo will be providing that weather report in Hebrew for the "West" one, and in Palestinian... oops, there is no such language or nation, for that matter - in Arabic for the "East J".

Or Arabic will be used for both: in Yahoo's opinion, according to its directory, the City of Jerusalem is under the "Places in Palestinian Authority". Thank G-d, it is still listed among Israeli cities as well - for how long will it remain so?

PS. June 16, 2010. - Sometimes truth prevails!

Gazans' spices crisis

Reena Ninan, reporting from Israel for fair and balanced Fox News, is another member of the glorious journalistic profession. Her main interest has always seemed to be in unmasking Israel's horrific behavior violating the inalienable rights of brave terrorists and those who elect them to rule. Nevertheless, telling about cruel Israelis who just boarded another "aid ship" (whose organizer, Greta Berlin, had informed everybody who could hear that it's not for any aid but for breaking the blockade), Ninan somehow could not understand why Israel does not allow deliveries of  cardamom and coriander (cilantro, as she made sure to clarify) to Gaza. Doesn't she know that  Gazans starve (see the facts here), after they righteously destroyed the revolting Jewish hothouses, and spices induce appetite and make you even hungrier? What hypocrisy, to pretend she cares, while inviting torture of Gazans! (Or perhaps, worse even, she wanted to insinuate that she could not find any food shortage, except for spices, while the goal of the heroic flotilla is to stop starvation, as Berlin said?) Even Israelis, in all their cruelty, could not devise such a dastardly brutal plan.

And cruel they are. As Greta Berlin let another honest source of information, The New York Times, know, Israeli commandos "opened fire on sleeping civilians at four in the morning”. Now that everybody has seen the videos,

it is certain: these civilians were tight asleep, albeit sleepwalking with their kitchen knives (to cook their breakfast) and metal rods (for supporting themselves).  Suddenly woken up by Israeli paint balls, they could not help their reflex response, and hit those Israeli pirates with whatever they had in their hands.

Unfortunately, even the Rachel Corrie, another ship just intercepted by Israelis, did not carry cardamom, coriander and curry, which may be Greta Berlin's oversight or perhaps they knew that Israelis again would not allow those spices. And that is because Israelis know that cardamom is a necessary ingredient of Arabic coffee. And coffee is needed to keep vigilance while working on a bomb or a suicide jacket, to prevent "work accidents". Although it's OK when the bomb-maker dies in the explosion, immediately getting to Paradise and the 72 virgins, many a bomb-maker are maimed and lose their extremities. At least the Rachel Corrie is bringing wheel-chairs to take care of them.

PS. Uh-oh, Hamas does not allow the wheel-chairs in! No cardamom, no wheel-chairs - where are human rights organizations when an honest bomb-maker needs them?

PPS. June 21, 2010. I shouldn't have worried: not only spices but other materials too will now be allowed into Gaza, relieving terrorists' sufferings and providing them with much needed means to keep construction of bombs going. I wonder how much coriander Gilad Shalit gets.

White House and its Corps

Helen Thomas, a White House Press Corps member, ordered Jews to "get the hell out of Palestine".
This was followed by robotic cackle, of the Joker's kind. Or Streicher's. "These people", she said (Arabs, I guess), "are occupied." - When people are occupied, it means they are busy with something. She must have meant a territory, but which? - The entirety of Israel, because the home of Jews, in her opinion that she shares with Hamas and Hizballah, is Poland and Germany. And USA. Herself, she is at home, a rabid antisemite, who, as daughter of Lebanese immigrants, is confidently enjoying comforts of the land whose natives - the few that survive - gave her full rights to settle there. I guess. There is little difference between her and Obama, however: both think Jews are in "Palestine" only because of the Holocaust. Who knows which one of them is more upset by that pesky presence. Thomas's is the real ugly face of the fighters for the rights of "Palestinians", whose only actual desire is to get rid of Israel, having failed in their prior attempts to exterminate the Jews.

6-07-10 PS. What is the analog of "swan song" for a vulture? She suddenly retired today, fired by Hearst. The news reported that she was a trailblazer. She may well be one - for open antisemitism in the mainstream media.

“Scientific” Atheism

The popular (bestselling!) book, “The God Delusion”, tells more, and definitely more convincingly, about its author, Richard Dawkins (and so many others of his mindset), than of its purported subject. Inconsequential as it is from the enlightenment standpoint, it is definitely not The Guide for the Perplexed. If anything, it may add to the confusion of Dawkins's audience, adolescents, who are biologically driven to distance themselves from parents and therefore their beliefs. Because of that, and since nobody asked me to write a formal review of this book (no surprise here), I’ll just have some thoughts about and around it.

Scientists are primates (in case you had doubts)
Scientists' supposedly high intelligence is but a thin veneer on their human, primate, nature, sometimes making that nature shine all the brighter. As other humans, they are often vain and petty - and not just with their pet theories, which are proffered with intensity fitting a prophet, regardless of how small their impact could be. My statistics professor found nothing better on which to focus than on his long-lasting conflict with a colleague, who, in his obstinate benightedness, used x bar to denote average, whereas our esteemed teacher wisely used capital M. Talk about Lilliput and the Big- vs. Little-Endian conflict. Methods in research, when only possible, are as subject to fashion as dimensions of pants at some royal court, which everybody was supposed to maintain if he were to have a chance of being 'in'. I’d list some funny examples of the changing vogue from genetic research, my field, if they were not so boring and banal at the same time. A researcher's attainment of a position in academia frequently imbues him with the sense of infallibility - not just in his scientific judgments, but in anything where a lack of knowledge may pass unnoticed among the like minds - e.g., politics, international relations, religion. (Yes, I may be afflicted as well).

Dawkins the prophet

Which brings me back to Dawkins. Rarely have I seen such sincere and unchecked infantile messianism as in that book of his. It does not matter whether the new prophet rejects "religion" (it's his business); what matters is that he "hope[s] that nobody who reads this book will be able to say, 'I didn't know I could'." Oy-vey! This is the same  hope, nay, confidence, that Muhammad had - you remember, the one whose pictures may leave you headless. Surely, in that other "prophet" case the repercussions for humanity have been more drastic: because it is not possible, after he blessed humankind with the Koran, to say, "I didn't know", there is no other way than the global acceptance of Islam. Muhammad's jihad against non-believers is certainly deadlier than Dawkins's disdain for them (oops, his non-believers are "religious"). This, however, doesn't change the essence of this primate behavior: the desire to dominate - if not over body then over mind. Any doubts are verboten.

As would any "prophet" who has just been blessed with epiphany, he demands of his followers purity of the doctrine, relegating, as did Muhammad, the rest to the hypocrite category. The only options he entertains for those infidels are either their lack of intelligence, or their acting cynically to get the Templeton prize (as Dawkins half-jokingly cites a half-joke of Dennett that he should do that if he falls on "hard times"), or, at best, their self-deception while deceiving others. The first option becomes less likely if you are in the select group of "elite scientists". But then you simply are a statistically negligible case, still likely to merely "sound Christian" while most likely being atheistic in reality. In any event, Dawkins knows better: he even "satirically" imputes thoughts to Dyson, one of the "elite", who had the dishonesty or stupidity, if you believe Dawkins, to accept the prize (Dawkins condescends that "Freeman Dyson is way above being corrupted", clearly meaning the opposite).

Logic
Dawkins decides which arguments are worth considering, what attributes of God to dismiss, and how this term should be defined for this 'scientist' to better disabuse the public of such a preposterous notion. Intellectual dishonesty is always characteristic of false prophets. Dawkins invited himself to be not only judge and jury, but prosecutor and defense attorney. This allows him to safely but fruitlessly argue without an opponent. This is a game of chess with himself, with the outcome preset. Surely he can defeat any argument of the 'opponent', straw men sitting at the table with red herrings – logical fallacies abound. Among those, there is repeated appeal to authority, i.e., to "elite" scientists, many of whom did not endorse some poll's statement about a personal god. Correlation (of high intelligence with doubts of this nature) does not mean causation and, least of all, objective support for atheism. Not only scientists are prone to mistakes in anything that is not their immediate domain (and in that too, by the way), but they may be more prone to some of them than a common Joe Blow is.

The ability to believe is necessary for information transfer. Those who produce information (scientists nowadays) should be less likely to uncritically accept anything, especially something that they cannot in principle verify by commonly available scientific means. Clearly, the proportion of information producents has always been small - ever since some of them (surprise, priests) separated from the crowd. The role of priests, who were the original scientists (Mendel, the founder of genetics, included :)), was the same as today's scientists'. This is probably why some of the latter, when immature like Dawkins, have Oedipal fantasies toward the “religious” or simply are anxious because of perceived competition.

Rhinoceros horn

Spinning Darwinism to satisfy his agenda, Dawkins applies at will, when it suits him, obnoxiously conceited and banal value judgments to phenomena deserving much better, particularly in the evolutionary context. For instance, the native legend that the horn has aphrodisiac properties is 'fatuous' to him, despite his earlier citings about the placebo mechanisms of homeopathy, which make it thus very different from 'magic' he invokes. Were he not so ideologically engaged, it would not take him much to infer a clear evolutionary benefit to the human ability to employ effective placebo mechanisms in the absence of other means to deal with disease, grief, stress, etc. He would also see that a placebo effect does not rule out the real one, which can be even further augmented by the placebo effect. This, however, would require exercising some logic.

...ex machina
For all the absolute rejection of religion, professed by Dawkins, he could find nothing better to offer than the expression of what he calls "our consensual ethics" (p. 298), which, in his opinion, "has no obvious connection with religion". Well, except for the name, "New Ten Commandments", and a little detail that the first commandment is the negative Golden Rule (do not do unto others...) as formulated by the great Jewish sage, Rabbi Hillel. That was a century before the same rule, but in its positive form (do unto others...), is said to have been pronounced by Jesus. Hillel formulated that rule in response to a question about the essence of Torah (Judaism) as can be taught while the student stands on one foot. "This is the whole Torah," he said, "the rest is commentary. Go and learn."

The "New Ten", written by a plagiarizing "ordinary web logger" (definitely no sage, to see which the reader does not need Dawkins's comment), are either redundant or trivial. Dawkins qualifies as neither a new Moses nor a new Hillel by adding to those ten his own 'progressive' four, the first being his order to enjoy one's sex life. He cautiously (probably so that it would not be perceived as sanctioning rape for those who like it) adds, "as long as it damages nobody else", leaving the reader under impression that one's sex life inevitably damages at least him/her, if not more people.

It is hard to imagine that Dawkins does not know the origin of the Rule, again illustrating his dishonesty or, at best, ignorance. The Bible-plagiarizing Moral Code of the Builder of Communism in the atheist Soviet Union was another example of “consensual ethics”, apparently coming from nowhere. At least the communists did not plagiarize the title.

It is simply not interesting to see his tried and tired and recycled Marxian spiel, his Old Worldian comme il faut derision for America, and newly fashionable antisemitism (the ominous influence of the nefarious Jewish lobby - he does not even attempt to gentrify it by its 'Israel' moniker). In general, unless you are a Dawkins, another man’s faith is not of your concern - as long as it does not drive him to change yours or kill you. Whatever your faith is, mine, Judaism, says it’s the deeds that matter. As Maimonides wrote (translation in Am J Psychiatry, 2008, 165, p. 426),

As for religious commandments, however, the harm and benefit that they bring are not evident in this world. The fool might, therefore, imagine to himself that everything that is said to be harmful is not harmful, and everything that is said to be beneficial is not beneficial, because these things are not clearly evident to him. For this reason religious law compels one to practice good and punishes for doing evil, for the good and evil will only become apparent in the world-to-come. All this is benevolence toward us, a favor to us in light of our foolishness, mercy upon us owing to the weakness of our understanding.

Dawkins will not change anybody’s faith with his arguments, much as he tries. Naïve, they are so much alike those we heard during classes in 'Scientific Atheism', which were mandatory for every student – back in the USSR.
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03/27/2018. An update: Dawkins has finally been scared by Islam into lamenting Europe's atheism, https://www.christianpost.com/news/atheist-richard-dawkins-warns-against-celebrating-demise-of-relatively-benign-christianity-in-europe-221909/