No Aurora, or Parrot paranoia

"А надо  бояться только того, Кто скажет: "Я знаю, как надо!" Гоните его! Не верьте ему! Он врет! Он не знает - как надо!" But fear only the one who'll say, "I know exactly, how." Do not trust in him! Do drive him away! He lies. He does not know how. - Alexander Galich

Economics is not my forte. So I won't talk much of it - but does our ruling Party really think that "command economy", as the Soviet variety used to be called, is the way the US should take? On top of it, do they think financing it with the Barry-Hoodean highway robbery of taxing "the rich" ever more makes it more hopeful?

Why I ask? In my continued discussions with the esteemed colleague from the previous post, he has recently come to what was the logical stage in the development of his "child disease of leftism" (as Lenin termed it, albeit speaking of leftism in communism). As the stages he passes through closely correspond to those of the world view of the Democratic party, it is instructive to mark this one. To wit, in his view, the example for America to follow is China. Not the Republic of China, prosperous despite (or maybe due to) its precarious existence. His beacon of hope is the People's Republic of China, a communist dictatorship that has only relatively recently allowed its citizenry to stop starving - by making them employable by the Western corporations, decentralizing and permitting free enterprise, and making the country the leading exporter in the world. In my colleague's view, however, this inclusion of China in the world economy is not the reason for the current improvement. In his opinion, the reason is that the Chinese government massively subsidizes all that's needed to get ahead.  Because no corporation can compete with the government, the US, with its backward capitalist small-government system, is doomed, as he thinks. Unless, that is, this country follows China's guiding light and gives the reins of the economy fully to the government, growing it more and more. Big government that ensues is thus a necessity, not a burden as we the benighted "conservatives" are misled to think by the "Faux News", having no brain of our own.

You'll say, "Solyndra"? Solyndra-shmolindra - it's just an unfortunate exception. You'll say, "the Soviet Union, which failed with its command economy"? Union-shmunion - and you are paranoid. See, it's completely different. In China, corporations are there, are they not, and they are surely capitalist - but the government is always just exceedingly smart and wise. In contrast to capitalist owners and the market, it knows which corporation is to swim and grow, and which is to drown, and spreads the wealth accordingly. For instance, some corporations are "too big to fail". Like GM, saved by the bailout, i.e., the money robbed... oops, taxed out of you. It does not matter that they may fail because what they make ain't good enough to be bought. My progressive colleague would never buy a GM-made car. They are entitled to be bailed out by the People's money because too many people would suffer if they fail - like Obama's friends from GM management and the UAW that gives him so many votes. It would be unfair and socially unjust to allow them to stand on their own. See, when millions are unemployed and get their checks because of (and sometimes for) not working, it is only just for us the People to pay others for working and making something people don't buy. That's why we the People now own 500 million shares, 26% of the company whose stock is worth less than 40% of what it should be to at least cover the bailout. After all, as my colleague's argument goes, aren't we subsidizing our farmers? Yes, we are - but at least we all eat, while not all of us drive Chevrolets, Cadillacs, and literally fire-breathing Chevy Volts, Cruzes, etc. 

And who indeed says that agricultural subsidies are good? One of their likely results is the catastrophic epidemic of obesity in this country - in part due to low prices on unhealthy subsidized foods. According to CDC, more than one third of the adult population and almost 20% of the young are obese. The latter proportion has tripled since 1980's. The unfair advantage granted to the producers of those staples - soy oil, corn syrup and corn starch, that is junk food (no fruits and vegetables except, very little, apples) - not only distorts the market, but kills. Yes, it is a personal responsibility to control one's food intake. It should not be discounted, however, that humans have not had time to fully evolve mechanisms for adequately dealing with refined and concentrated high-energy nutrients at virtually unlimited availability. This combines with effects of also very recent - on the evolutionary scale - low mobility that cannot be expected to be universally offset by voluntary physical exercise. Not everybody has the means, the time and the knowledge for that. Most importantly, not everybody has the will for that even when critically needed - otherwise there would likely be no obesity to start with. The government would rather try to tax and control people who are addicted to high-calorie foods from their childhood than to change its own agricultural policies that encourage the farmers to produce the enormous surplus of unhealthy food at the cost of healthy nutrition. Unlike drugs, where governmental attempts at supply control are negative and do not work (addiction rates have not decreased in decades), the governmental control of agriculture is positive and works quite well - to our grievous detriment. The government tends to know best - like it used to in the USSR. Or in China, which will eventually be the downfall of the Chinese economy unless they change more. Or may be I am just imagining, and nothing like that has never happened.

Indeed, I have more than once heard an opinion that those who came from the now extinct Soviet Union have a distorted perspective of paranoid obsession with the ongoing communist transformation of this country. Like Monty Python's parrot, communism is no more, we are told, it has ceased to be, - even in its own cage. It is even less likely to fly in this free country, and we should not try to sell the dead bird to the enlightened US public. Well, okay, it is possible that so many of us have gone if not postal then Forrestal, at least as the legend of his yelling "The Russians are coming!" goes. There surely have been mass delusions before. Judeophobia, for one, has affected Christian Europe and has been a major component of Islam since Muhammad. Nevertheless, all cases of mass paranoia have been due to intensive indoctrination, usually from a very early age, acquired, as they say in Russia, with one's mother's milk. One may be also prepared for accepting a paranoid cult based on prior prejudice and a lacuna where axiomatic religious feelings should have resided, like in the cases of the Manson family or Adam Gadahn, the American Taliban. We, who grew up in and escaped from the Soviet Union, have successfully withstood communist indoctrination, which not only presented the USSR as the pinnacle of human social achievement, but also depicted the Western society as hell on earth, where the rich and strong devour the weak and the poor, where "millionaires and billionaires" are ready to destroy the world in nuclear fire once promised some profit - never mind how they'd use it in the destroyed world, "stupid" as they are (another favorite term of the progressives). It is highly unlikely that having been immune to the Soviet propaganda, with its virtual monopoly on legal information and the scarcity of any illegal alternative, we'd be driven out of our minds by the weak, inconsistent, and contradictory ideologic information supplied by the "conservative" sources. 

It is much more likely that our dissent from the crowd educated at a comparable level in the US is due to our scale of reference, which is extended far beyond the abstract perceptions of communism that are available to US intelligentsia. This allows us to see the social phenomena not as discrete "line-item" events and occurrences, but as indicators of larger ideological constructs. Unfortunately, it is not (just) the economy, "stupid" (why can't they do without cussing?). Human history, even not so distant, has shown that people are capable of completely disregarding economy and their own material advantage - even their own lives - for an ideology's sake. Sometimes those are self-sacrifices that may be noble, altruistic and indeed result in a better future for others. Very often they are sacrifices of others by the ideologically driven leaders who themselves are doing quite well. It does not matter what this latter category calls itself - Secretary General and the Politburo, or President and his advisors, or Rais and his Authority - the result is the same. They are beyond critique, and they know exactly, how. Naturally, they also rely on unquestioning worship, like that accorded to Stalin, Mao, the Kims, and now - oh miracle! - Obama: watch the horrific Soviet-parroting organized mantric brain-washing of American kids, no different from that in today's North Korea. Those who are brought up worshiping an idol will hate his perceived human enemies - which is everybody who doubts his divinity and divine ideas.

The polarization of the country that took good root in the 1960's, despite apparent changes soon from hippies to yuppies, has created the indoctrination climate. One could say it was not communist indoctrination, even though "commune" was the name in vogue for the hippie groups. Communism as the term had lost much of its shine since Khruschev's denouncement of Stalin and become synonymous with oppression - not a good thing to accept when you preach love. Nevertheless, while not called by the dreaded name, not marching under the sickle and hammer banner, the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist and pacifist ideology was in service if not to communist goals, then to the goals of communists. Telling examples were the Jane "Hanoi" Fonda affair, and the "peace movement", in large part set up and funded by the KGB. No, the yuppified "flower children" generation did not become communist - they fought for peace and human rights. Along with the racism of the prior generation, however, they also rejected its other values - religious and thus ethical. Today, the generations of flower children and grandchildren rule the US and decide our future. It is not by accident that communists, terrorists, America-haters and Mao-worshipers keep popping up among Obama's coterie. Nowadays, it is the time-adjusted communist ideology of the current US government itself that works to destroy the hated capitalist system or, at the very least, to enable the benevolent power of the new Politburo over the "stupid" masses. For this kind of revolution, you don't need any cannonade from the Aurora, the cruiser that gave the signal for starting the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. No shooting, no civil wars - only the soft but firm congealing of power in the Kremlin, oops, the White House. Going by the same book of slogans of fair share, redistribution of wealth, "millionaires and billionaires" (used to be "bourgeoisie") - but with the book cover and the title and "the spectre of communism" cautiously stripped off.

To illustrate paranoid thinking, Robins and Post (1997) in their Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred note that for a paranoid "[w]hile there may be merit to the aphorism 'Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get me,' it is also often true to state 'Because they have been out to get me, I had better trust no one and assume I am surrounded by enemies.'" From this "often true" statement follows that paranoia can also be readily used as a political quasi-diagnosis that dichotomizes a continuous variable of perceived risk, making it easy to assign the individual at a first "symptom" to the affected group and dismiss any legitimate fears any group or its individual members might have. The progressives like to attack their opponents as mental cases. When they are in power, as in the USSR,  punitive psychiatry becomes a method of choice for dealing with political enemies, that is anybody who disagrees. Interestingly, however, it is exactly paranoids who "do not have adversaries or rivals or opponents; they have enemies, and enemies are not to be simply defeated and certainly not to be compromised with or won over. Enemies are to be destroyed" (ibid.). The paranoid log has always been lodged in the progressives' own eye. With Obama and his unconditional supporters, mainstream media filled with sticky-sweet adulation for him and hate for the half the country of enemies, communist demagoguery and deep reach into the control of economy - the parrot is alive and kicking. And it hurts.

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.

Facebook logic and emotions

My on-occasion adversary on FB, a leftist by ideology but a good statistician by occupation, asked me in a heated discussion, "Do you think your views on the Middle East are logical and not emotional?" By which rhetorical device he, of course, meant, "Your views on the Middle East are illogical and emotional," and that logic and emotions are incompatible and mutually exclusive. A clear conclusion here is that my views are wrong for both of the named reasons, and both reasons inevitably result in error. 

I agree in part. The lack of logic would not do. My interlocutor, however, did not present any evidence that I suffer from that, and I'll simply disagree that my views are not logical. My word against his - but read on. I do agree with his other "accusation", but, again, not entirely. I agree that the Middle East events do not leave me unemotional. Having an emotional reaction, however, does not necessarily invalidate one's views. In fact, it is illogical and counterfactual to think otherwise. Emotions are usually engaged when one hears about injustice, violence, and murder. The inability to experience emotions in such cases suggests callousness and amorality - symptoms of psychopathy, but with no charm of a "classic" psychopath. It is hardly necessary to point out how injustice, violence and murder have been the inalienable part of the Middle East history, particularly that through which Israel has lived throughout its existence. From the Roman destruction and expulsion that was only the beginning of destructions and expulsions, to the genocide in Europe and Arab pogroms throughout Middle East and North Africa that preceded Israel's rebirth prepared by the millennia of the Jewish prayers of return, to the invariable Arab denial of the legitimacy of any Jewish state, to the incessant Arab terror targeting babies, kindergartens, women - anybody whose murder would produce a maximal possible horror - one has to have the cold blood of a frog, or simply be on the side of the murderers, to experience no emotion and be unaffected by it in one's views. 


It would be even more pathological if I did not experience emotions when thinking of the Middle East, being Jewish and having family in Israel. As my interlocutor was aware of that, his question was rhetorical, part of his mighty war arsenal. Nevertheless, some relevant possible meaning can be gleaned from it - that he himself is not emotionally involved. Not when the ongoing Olympics can't fail to remind him of the Munich massacre, not when his favorite news sources, however seldom they react to anti-Jewish terror, report of a family with little children slaughtered in their beds, not when Israel's "peace partners" celebrate that and name squares and schools after the murderers. Am I holding wrong views if I think, quite emotionally, that you cannot make peace with somebody whose goal is your death? Were Golda Meir's views wrong when she emotionally said that "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us”? Do emotions cloud my thinking when I recognize that the Arabs are driven by an emotion, hate, not by reason, and those who are driven by hate must be treated differently than those driven by reason? Should I then, in my FB friend's illogical inversion, be ascribed hate to Arabs - just because many of them have shown that they hate me?  

The discussion I started with had had nothing to do with the Middle East, and my opponent's asking about the latter was a red herring, illogical and combative. I think that my mentioning his leftism is relevant, however, because leftists are wont to neglect logic, as they are driven by an ideology rather than facts and logic, and this ideology does not allow dissent. As I wrote to him, like his ideological brethren everywhere, he perceives any disagreement with him as an "attack", an opponent as an enemy, and views opposing his as "ideological extremism" and "BS" (quotations from his customarily rude and very emotional messages), which makes him incapable of a civilized discussion. He naturally would like to destroy the enemy - if not physically then figuratively. His language in these inconsequential FB disputes is hardly different from that of Vyshinsky, the prosecutor at the Moscow show trials, when the triumphant Party line was drawn in blood.

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'".

Genocidal redefinitions

To be able to murder, to kill not in defense but on purpose, the murderer redefines his victim from a fellow creature into an alien, who  either threatens, or a tool providing sadistic pleasure denoting total power, or both. Nazis redefined the Jews into aliens, adding  biological subhumanity to the usual Christian depiction of the Jews as accursed for deicide and thus inherently and hereditarily evil. Even a small part of the Jewish "blood" was an intolerable threat to them. A Jewish child was a mortal danger to the mighty German nation. Genocidal Islam similarly redefines the Jews on  both biological and spiritual levels into descendants of pigs and monkeys, into which Allah turned Jews as their punishment. To reconcile with continuous Jewish existence, Allah has scripturally promised the Muslims that they would eventually murder every single Jew before ushering in the end of days. As genocide has become a desired goal, Muslims have redefined for themselves the notion of the martyr from one who is murdered for his religion to one who murders because of it. The loss of the terrorist's own life in the process is incidental, because it is redefined into life eternal, as long as the earthly life was lost while murdering Jews. Allah, "most compassionate, most merciful", has taken upon himself the personal torture of "unbelievers", giving a whole new meaning to compassion. Muslims have also redefined the notion of the "prophet". Muhammad, "the Seal of the Prophets", has prophecized nothing but murder, conquest, subjugation, and rape, which he himself indulged in. Islam means "submission", and not merely as the literal translation of the word. It means the strict hierarchy of both physical and spiritual submissions: the man to Allah (read, to whoever wields power under this name), the woman to the man (who is legally worth twice the woman), the Jew (or any "infidel") to any Muslim. Any violation of this hierarchy is punishable - often by death: conversion from Islam, woman's disobedience, Jewish independence.  

The Muslim murderers act from the pragmatic, rather than lofty spiritual, viewpoint, targeting civilians - children, women, the elderly - rather than soldiers. They know that these random murders produce a greater demoralizing impact than a death of a soldier, horrible as it is. A soldier's work is to risk his life, and he dies fighting even if it was in his sleep. Children and women, civilians, are not expected to live their life at the same kind of risk. They are not fighting. Children are supposed to be pampered, not tortured to death. Their parents and relatives are supposed to see them grow, not bury and grieve forever. This is exactly why the murderers choose to kill civilians, transforming everyday life into the expectation of death, thinking they will crash the people's spirit because everybody will be touched by death. The murderers cannot appreciate that they deal with the Jewish spirit, indomitable, inoculated by the millennia of murder and torture by the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, English, Spanish, French, Germans, Poles, Russians, Ukranians, Latvians, Lithuanians - the list can go on. Israelis rank 7th on Gallup's "happiness index" (life as a whole), just below the Netherlands (was above in 2011) and the happy Scandinavians, and higher than the UK, Germany and France. Even in Sderot, under almost ten years of incessant rocket bombardment,  only about a third of the population suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, a number comparable with that in trained combat troops - except that for the children of Sderot there is no "post" in "post-traumatic". The stress has never stopped. 

In all these innumerable slaughters, from a single person to the millions of the Shoah, the reasons have been the same: irrational hatred toward the Jews, to the very name of the Jews regardless of how different it is in different languages, and the permissibility of murdering a Jew, whatever ideology is applied - Christian, Nazi or Muslim. A Jewish baby, impaled on a Cossack's spear or a Nazi's bayonet or having his throat slashed by a Muslim, can be nothing to the murderer but a representation of the name, with all the hate that was connected to the sound and letters of this name by the murderers' parents, teachers, friends, imams and priests. The Poles who tortured to death, beheaded, dismembered, raped, and burned alive hundreds of their Jewish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne, 71 years ago this week, were led only by the name, made hateful to them by the myth of deicide justifying an utter removal of civilizational boundaries on behavior, even those that command humane slaughter of animals. They were driven by the same genocidal hate as their compatriots in many other towns and in Kielce, already after the war, when Nazis could no longer be claimed as the real enforcers of the genocide for their voluntary helpers to hide behind. Whether at the blood libel's pretext, as in Kielce, or at the Nazis' welcome permission, it was the common folk that committed those atrocities. 

Poles would never call their neighbors "Poles of Mosaic persuasion", nor would the Russians call the Jews "Russians". In fact, the Russian language distinguishes between the ethnic Russians and those whose citizenship is Russian. The former are called by the noun "Russkiy" (sing. masculine; "Russkaya", sing. fem.; "Russkiye", plural), which is also the adjective that means belonging to the Russian nation, the meaning of "nationality" in Russia. Those who are citizens of Russia but do not belong to the Russian nation are called semi-informally "Rossiyanin", i.e., only belonging to (but not "in") Rossiya-Russia rather than being of Russia like the language, which is "Russkiy". The Jews would always be alien in Russia or elsewhere in East Europe, under the fickle protection of the state, which, along with the church, would keep the hate fire going.  The East Europeans' condoning and participating in the genocide is not canceled by some Poles' and Russians' having risked their lives to save Jews, and by the fact that millions of ethnic Poles and Russians themselves were murdered by the Germans. Bulgaria, a country relatively recently liberated from Islamic yoke, was the only exception during WW2 where the church authority intervened on Jewish behalf. But we Jews coming from East Europe are now called "Poles" and "Russians" by the naive Americans and Israelis, who have a very vague notion of ethnicity.

Islam, in its foundational scripture, openly justifies the same treatment of the Jews as that allotted to them by the Nazi Germans and their many European helpers. The editor of Der Stuermer was the only non-governmental Nazi hanged in Nuremberg, executed for his speech. If not for his inhuman efforts, there would perhaps be fewer "willing executioners" (by Goldhagen's term), although it's just as likely that somebody else would have happily and as efficiently replaced him. The multitude of the Muslim Streichers, however, - from Muhammad the "prophet" himself to today's imams - are not only unpunished, but threaten the rest of the world with punishment, this time by nuclear fire. The Iranian mullahs, who head the whole branch of Islam, Shi'a, have promised to exterminate Israel - before they get to defeat the Great Satan, the US. The leaders of Sunni Islam, the other main branch of the "religion of peace", have many times called for the bloody "liberation of Palestine", celebrating terror, and blessing and glorifying the murderers. Nevertheless, nobody prosecutes their ongoing crimes against humanity, the very same for which Streicher was executed by the Allies. On the contrary, it is Israelis who are being demonized by the "world community" when they try to defend themselves - even when the defense is as passive as a fence separating the murderers from their desired prey. The same world community -  a generation back - not only cared nothing about the Jews murdered wholesale, but participated in that murder - by commission or omission. There are still old murderers that survive - but the slaughter of Jews has had no break. It seems nothing can invoke the world's outrage when Jews are slaughtered - not pregnant Tali Hatuel and her four lttle daughters killed point-blank by head shots. Not two-month old Shalhevet Pass, killed by an Arab sniper's shot in the head. Not the Fogel family, with three children aged from three months to 11 years and both parents, butchered by Arabs in their beds. No number of Jewish deaths can overcome the world's serenity - until this calm is broken into a million of screaming media pieces when the Jews attempt to hold the murderers at arm's length of checkpoints, delaying their reaching their final destinations. Unfortunately, those among whom the murderers live are also slowed down when they want to cross to the territory of Israel they hate so much but keep coming to.

The Fogel family slaughter was not viewed as worth mentioning by the leading news agencies like BBC. The priority was too low. Iran's promise to exterminate Israel is not viewed as a violation of the UN charter incompatible with membership. It's considered innocuous rhetoric, unworthy mentioning in negotiations. Jews building a house on their ancestral land, which nobody but them can legitimately claim, are called "settlers", like the British who came to colonize America. In fact, in contrast to those British, whom nobody has since been expecting to leave, the Jewish "settlers", the Natives of the land, are expected to give up their houses and orchards they grew on that land the first time in millennia - give it all up to the descendants of Arab conquerors whose names indicate their origins from Egypt, Syria, or other places subjugated by those invaders.  The Jews are not to get anything in return - except, perhaps, for another fake promise of "peace", that is of the end of terror murders that otherwise are viewed as legitimate by the world. "Palestine" is redefined from the Roman name invented to replace Judea - into the name of a future Arab state, with Arabs automatically attaining a new avatar - from the land they stole from Jews and Christians to the name they usurped. The whole world supports creation of the 23rd Arab state, despite terror that Arabs conduct under the pretense of desperately needing that state, all offers for which they have rejected. One wonders how many states would support the single Jewish state in 1948 if any Jews, for the sake of their national idea, blew themselves up in a British market and shot British children.   

No human treatment norm has been viewed by the Christian and Muslim world as fully applicable to the Jews - that is by the Christians who only recently have started changing their perception of the Jews as devil's inhuman kindred, and by the Muslims who do not consider even their own women human. Unless this changes, until civilized humanity rectifies and consistently applies its terms and definitions, our species' definition as human is false. We have a long way to go before "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (Leviticus 19:18), as the Torah commands to humans.

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.

Jewishness, an antisemite's cover

From: Vanyukov, Michael 

Sent: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:51 AM

To: 'letters@nytimes.com'

Cc: 'action@honestreporting.com'; 'letters@camera.org'

Subject: P. Beinart, To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements, New York Times, 3-18-2012

Dear Editor:

It is symptomatic that Beinart, calling for another boycott of Israel, has to refer to his Jewishness, “belong[ing] to Orthodox synagogues”, and sending children to Jewish school to offset the fact that “[b]oycotting other Jews is a painful, unnatural act”. It is indeed unnatural for any normal person, not just a Jew, to use the same weapon against the democratic Jewish state as has been used by antisemitic Arab/Muslim regimes – regardless of what he thinks of the “settlements” and “settlers”. The latter are misnomers, just as “West Bank” is, the only correct observation in his article. In his boycott call Beinart joins other unnaturally anti-Israel Jews, be it Orthodox Neturei Karta or his own J Street. Like they, he is only concerned of rendering the disputed territories Judenrein, never mentioning that the only reason they have come and remained under Israel’s control was Arab aggression and terror, which continue to this day and are codified in the governing charters of both PLO and Hamas. Beinart’s article may help him as free advertisement of his upcoming anti-Israel book as well as provide additional support to the antisemites of the world, to whom his distorted perspective ultimately caters. The Jew-haters are always happy to point out another Orthodox synagogue-attending Jew who can’t tell Israel from apartheid South Africa.

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.

Disgusting "Economist" bloggery

The Economist, to put it mildly, is not pro-Israel. The thugs... oops, bloggers to which The Economist provides its web space, are worse. In response to one of them, I sent a letter to the editor. It was two days ago. I am waiting for its publication with bated breath. Here it is, with the robot's response on top:

>>>The Economist thanks you for your letter, which will be edited if it is chosen for publication either in print or online. [skipped]

>>>

Dear Editor,

In the Soviet Union, where I came from, anti-Israel pieces in the newspapers were often published anonymously as editorials. That was intended, on the one hand, to suggest that the article expressed the Party line rather than a personal opinion, and, on the other hand, allowed the author to avoid a personal stigma of antisemitism that, when displayed openly, was still considered inappropriate in educated circles. I am not sure about the party line, but it seems that  the above referred article from March 6, 2012 (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/03/israel-iran-and-america), took the same approach at least in regard to the cowardly cover of the author's identity, protecting him/her from the personal mark of Jew-hater. As it was in the Soviet Union with its relentless anti-Israel/pro-Arab propaganda largely driven by traditional antisemitism, the article is full of distortions, as is, for instance, its implication that Israel's control over the territories is the result of its imperial ambitions, like Britain's or Portugal's. Besides the absurdity of comparison between the territories obtained for imperial colonization by those countries and the historically Jewish land captured by Israel in a defensive war, the author neglects to note that immediately after hostilities ceased in 1967 Israel offered to return all the territories it captured - in exchange for peace. The "three 'no's" of the Khartoum Resolution were the Arab response.

The author brands pathological the Israeli perception of Iranian  threat, when this threat is unambiguously and repeatedly expressed by the top of Iranian leadership, and it would be pathological or criminal for Israeli leaders to take that threat in any other way than on its face value. The "ghetto mentality", contrary to the author's view, is not the readiness to exercise strength for self-defense, which the Israeli leaders hopefully have, but cowering  in hope that the pogrom mob will miss you, which the author has reserved for Israelis. The author's derision for Israel, Israelis and the Jews in general is unmistakable in his/her referring to the "familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite", as if such an antisemite is something inconceivable, and the elimination of Israel has not been promised by Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. History teaches that promises like that are not given in vain.

In the Soviet Union, we had a name for "anti-Zionist" articles like this, hateful, lying and distorting: a pogrom paper. Papers like that used to be published on the eve of another tightening of anti-Jewish and anti-dissident policies. Those papers were usual for Pravda. It is painful and revolting to see such an article on the pages of The Economist.

Fox News: Terrorists as "Rocketeers"

Leland Wittert, reporting today from Jerusalem (America’s News HQ with Shannon Bream), referred to Arab terrorists launching rockets from Gaza at Israeli cities as “Rocketeers”. The fictional Rocketeer is a super-hero fighting Nazis. To attach this character’s name to the terrorists, whom Wittert, as many other Fox reporters, habitually also misname “militants”, is not just a bad taste. It implies that the terrorists represent good, while the Israelis are equivalent to Nazis, a frequent calumny of the Arab/Muslim propaganda. It also makes light of the crimes against humanity committed by the would-be mass-murderers – members of designated terrorist organizations, who do not recognize the right of Israel, or the Jews for that matter, to exist.  This is a disgrace for a news channel that purports to be “fair and balanced”.