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.
______
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/

Peaceful bandits

As Debkafile reports, Erdogan may further escalate provocations against Israel, involving Turkish military, after the Turkey-supported attempt to break the Israeli naval blockade of terrorist Gaza succeeded in having several of suicidal attackers¹ on Israeli commandos killed. It is hard to imagine that Turkey, a member of NATO, would contemplate not only supporting any escalation, but even that "Free Gaza" flotilla, without permission from the US - if not explicit, then inferred from the actions of the US government. The latest such action is the US-sponsored attack on the supposed Israeli nuclear defense. One only hopes that Americans' dislike for Bush, which has brought a nobody, an impostor, to power, will not be sufficient to justify Obama's lethal retreat, appeasement of fascists and help to terrorists. Since Obama is not a madman to act against himself, his policy expresses whom he wants to see as friends and enemies. Perhaps the continued ascendance of the barbarians, which so obviously follows Obama's policy of punishing friends and rewarding enemies, will open eyes and bring about political change  in the US, and in the world. The price for eye-opening, however, is already too high and is going to grow higher.

1. see MEMRI video: "Gaza-Based Yemeni Professor Abd Al-Fatah Nu'man: As Much as the Heroes on the Flotilla Want to Reach Gaza, The Option of Martyrdom Is More Desirable to Them"

Look who is talking

Imagine how American colonists would react if, after they fought Indians, built towns, cultivated lands and raised families, they were told to leave and go where their government would direct them, on the conditions dictated by the government, or be removed by force and punished. Let's assume for a second that the rationale they were given would be that the Indians needed their own state where no whites would be allowed. Keep in mind that the lands the American colonists settled were indeed Indian, with hardly any justification for any settlement there bar the dubious argument of "Manifest Destiny", whereas no renaming can erase the Jewish character of the Holy Land.

The only reason it is considered holy is because it has been holy for the countless generations of Jews. The Arabs in the Land of Israel are recent settlers and descendants of invaders, who never thought about creating their own state there before the Jewish state was reestablished. For that matter, Arabs' nationalism, which has resulted in their having a unique number of 22 states, had never existed before Britain and other colonial powers induced it in order to divide (the Ottoman Empire) and conquer.

The Arab "Palestinian nation" is also unique in that it is the only one in the world that has no self-name and calls itself by the name of a territory, which itself was invented by the Romans in 2nd century CE to replace and erase the name Judea. "Palaestina" was derived by them from the Hebrew name of a tribe of ancient enemies of Jews. The origin is the same as for the word Philistine, meaning, of course, a boorish, barbarian and antagonistic person. Moreover, in the geographic sense, until creation of Israel and even into 1960's, the name "Palestinian" denoted Jews who lived in the Land of Israel as opposed to the Diaspora. The desire of the Arab world to create a 23d state, as Judenrein as is Jordan, and governed by life-long terrorist chieftains and enemies of Israel and the rest of the free world, is understandable, but does not deserve respect. Since 1948, their goal has been not to create a state, but eliminate Israel. There is no reason to think it has changed.

"Arizona to Palestine"

As seen on TV, demonstrators protest the new Arizona “immigration” law. The law, needless as it is if the much stricter federal law were enforced, cruelly says that if you are arrested for some legitimate reason, which appearance is not, you have to produce your documents. They hold the sign, “From Arizona to Palestine apartheid.” The protests are based on the presumption of police’s guilt and Pravda-like disinformation about another evil deed of American imperialists against – who? A new race, “browns”? “Hispanics” are not a race – it is officially classified as “ethnicity”, whatever it means. One can be “Hispanic” while racially white, black, Native American, etc. I know that because in the papers one has to fill out to account for recruitment of participants in government-funded studies there are two ethnicities only, Hispanic and … non-Hispanic, and another classification, racial (white, black, etc.). The sum totals for these classifications should be equal.

No wonder that lies about fascism in the Arizona law are combined with the double lie about “Palestine apartheid”. Double, because the area implied in that phrase is not Palestine by any definition, and there is no apartheid in that area. There is no apartheid, strictly speaking, even in the part of historic Palestine that is called Jordan. It is simply Judenrein: Jews are prohibited from settling there by the country’s fascist nationality law. That law must be a good thing in the eyes of the current US administration, which would like Jews to stay away from Jerusalem as well. No wonder that in the same eyes the Arizona law is bad.

Occupiers and natives

I'll start, indeed, with duplicating one of the items located on my Israel on My Mind website. Not for better, but for worse, nothing that made me to write it has changed.

July 19, 2003. - I was invited to celebrate Independence Day by a nice American couple. Almost everybody there, with a rare Canadian exception, was a US-born American citizen. I would like to emphasize this ''US-born,'' the point close to the root of the problems discussed here.

As usual where a group of Jews is gathered, the conversation turned to Israel. I had known that the hosts were far to the left from me. For this reason, and because of the traditional voting pattern, I expected everybody to be a Democrat (which I, increasingly reluctantly, was myself). Unexpected, however, were the opinions regarding Middle East conflicts. First, even though support for the Iraq war, according to the polls, is the same among Jews as in the rest of the population, in this highly educated group it was scarce. More dramatic, it was even scarcer for Israel. There was little time left to find out why exactly, but two main points were clear: Israel was considered a cruel occupying power, and Arabs were unreservedly viewed as the suffering party.

I do not need to go into the much discussed issue of why Israel's rule in the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza is not occupation - an interested reader is referred to the in-depth and definitive treatment of this issue by Eugene Rostow (former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, 1966-1969, and one of the drafters of UNSC Resolution 242) and Dore Gold. Jews have full legal right to live anywhere in these territories - the same as the right to live in Tel Aviv or Haifa. Clearly, however, the pro-Arab propaganda, operating with lies and distortions, has suppressed the influence of any objective information. Indeed, the human mind is selective in its information processing. It assimilates better what goes along with a pre-existing perspective (which, if not based on objective knowledge, is called prejudice), and, within the time limits afforded, can absorb only a limited amount. This is why the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, can comfortably lie about "500 victims" of the Israeli operation in Jenin, perfectly knowing that this lie will be disproved. He does not care about his credibility - he knows he has none. What matters to him as an experienced disciple of Goebbels is that this abhorrent misinformation is thunderously amplified by the media and fills the limited information space, feeding on old prejudices and supplanting truth, just as poisonous carbon monoxide supplants oxygen in the blood. This means that even if an equal amount of truth were to follow, it would be inadequate to set the record straight.

Any truth, however, is hardly forthcoming from major media sources, whose reporting standards have been hopelessly compromised by outright fraud compounded by anti-Israel bias. Nobody is surprised any longer that The New York Times published that photograph of a bloodied Jewish youth, Tuvia Grossman, protected from the Arab mob by a vicious-looking Israeli policeman – with the title “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount” - and this is on the clearly seen background of a gas station (see Mr. Grossman's own account of that lynch attempt). BBC’s reporting in Israel has deserved its comparison with another notorious media source, Nazi “Der Stuermer,” which incited Germans to genocide.

The gross distortion of truth about Israel is promoted by a distinct group of intellectuals, whose left, right, Muslim, socialist and other platforms converge on one point – their Jew-hatred. The difference from the Nazi situation is two-fold. First, as observed in a comment attributed to Martin Luther King, “the times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews.” Second, the left were themselves persecuted by Hitler, so that they had little chance to join him in his genocidal effort. The same is true about Jew-haters among the Jews themselves, whose participation in Nazi crimes was limited to the few collaborationists who served in Judenrats (ghetto councils) and ghetto police. The times of war usually polarize people’s positions, and gradations in politically charged opinions become less likely. Nowadays, in what we – erroneously - perceive as peace, the Jewish opponents of Israel vary in shades from disliking the thought that they may be identified with whatever antisemitic/anti-Israel stereotypes and prejudice the Gentile population may entertain (which in Steven Rose's case extends to disliking the source of his misfortune of being born Jewish – his parents) to acting as a supporter of the mass murderers of Jews. These supporters, the contemporary candidates for the ghetto police and Auschwitz kapo jobs, include, but are not limited to, Stanley Cohen, the narcissistic Hamas attorney paid from the money this terrorist group gets from Saudis and Iran for murdering Jewish babies, and the Jewish members of the International Solidarity Movement who "recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle".

Regardless of psychological and historical roots of anti-Israelism, the result is the same – the unshakable belief that Israel is illegitimate and occupies the land whose natives – Arabs – have been treated as (or more) unjustly as were American Indians. The peculiar interweaving of these roots has resulted in the cancellation of a simple truth that the natives in the Land of Israel are Jews. Arabs are invaders or, at best, settlers, just as, before them, were Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans and whoever else tortured the Holy Land. The only difference from other invaders is that Arabs have never even ruled over “Palestine,” except when 80% of it was cut off by the British in 1921 and handed over to their puppet Abdullah bin Husayn for his service as his fiefdom. It is ironic that the emirate, and later kingdom, where Jews have been prohibited by law from settling, was given a Jewish name – the name of the Jordan river.

The Jewish presence in the whole of the Land of Israel has never been interrupted, despite all efforts of invaders. But even in places where it was, as it happened in Hevron (Hebron) after Arab pogroms instigated by the Nazi mufti Amin al-Husseini, this does not make invaders natives - just as nobody would think of white New Yorkers as Native Americans, even though the tribes who used to live on Manhattan may not even exist anymore. Being US-born, even in several generations, does not make you a native of the land. The difference in the perception of “nativeness” is all the more striking considering that Indians left no cities on Manhattan, whereas the “Palestinian” city of Hevron, under this very name, was the first capital of Israel under King David, when nobody had even heard of Arabs. The tombs of the Jewish patriarchs are there, in the place bought by Abraham. That Jews could come and worship there again only after the Six Day War, after 700 years of prohibition under Muslim “tolerant” rule, had not made the cave of Machpelah Arab. It is the Jewish names under which this land is known to all humanity, despite all efforts to rename Hevron into al-Khalil, Jerusalem into Aelia Capitolina (Romans) or al-Quds (Arabs), and the whole land into Syria Palaestina (Romans), Palestine (British), or Filastiniya (Arabs). No Orwellian effort to rewrite history can change the fact that Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) has been the capital of the Jewish - and no other - State since King David. Hevron is located in Judean Hills, Judea, the land of Jews.


PS. Little that I knew then, in 2003, that in 2010 an American administration would be first to introduce the Arabic replacement name into the official lingo.

Watch, and think about who those students “from Palestine” were, in the ‘70s in Egypt, who taught him “to live in peace and security” and “to practice our faith freely” (unless, of course, he is a Muslim, and "our faith" is Islam). You probably know that the Saudi duties as “custodians of the two holy mosques” include not allowing any non-Muslim to the land of the two "holy mosques", let alone building anything Jewish or Christian in the whole of Saudi Arabia.

If you ever travel to "Palestine", perhaps you’ll visit "Al Quds". I am not sure who will be its custodians, if this administration of Saudi supplicants succeeds in its hard work of creating the new pale of settlement for Jews, this time in the Land of Israel itself.

First Post

My daughter, a graduate student at my university, told me that my political and religious views are not very common in academia. She was right. It seems much easier to find there, as well as on the Web, a Che Guevara fan than somebody who has heard of Natan Sharansky, and a critic of Israeli "occupation" rather than of the expressed desire of Arab and Muslim groups and countries for Israel to disappear from the map. It is easy to find pictures of Stalin, idyllic and complimentary, right on my university's web pages, but not those of his victims. The pressure to conform with the outlook that is often described as "progressive" is substantial. In this climate, not only students but even faculty sometimes feel uncomfortable to express views that deviate from this mainstream into the "conservative" direction. People do not go there, they stay away from that - sometimes because they think they are alone. Hence, the name of this blog. My daughter tells me I could write something helpful. I hope I will, time permitting. I'll probably start with relocating here some items I deployed earlier at my site hosted by the university