"Islamism" vs. Occam's razor: Made in West

Dr. Daniel Pipes is a knowledgeable commentator on Islam. His expertise has been sought by policy-makers up to the level of US president. That's enough for me to get interested in Dr. Pipes's opinion, trying to form my dilettante own. Sometimes it is different from his. But first things first.

When America, helped by its few remaining allies, defeated Saddam Hussein, a bloody, bestial and bloated with pride autocrat, it found nothing better than to elect Barack Hussein as President. This is as if to prove that the inevitable associations with Saddam, with Osama, with 9-11, with anything Islam, are of no concern to the home of the brave. The symbolism of this is significant, even though, of course, there is little similarity between the two rulers. If there is any, however (perish the thought), it includes the fact that both have had a relatively thin connection with the religion that provided them with their names.

Saddam was a socialist—of his national kind—and would turn to Islam as a matter of convenience. Just as Islam's founder used to, Saddam used his “religion” to justify his atrocities. Like Muhammad, he had to do that quite a bit, and in his environment Islam generally has wider currency than in the US, being integral part of tradition. While Barack is undoubtedly a socialist of a kind too, his environment gives him much less opportunities to apply his love for the “prettiest”sounds of Islam, and much more for applying the version of Christianity that he was taught by Rev. Wright—the only one he's ever known. Nevertheless, one can't accuse Barack of fully neglecting his “grandfather's” religion. As need be, he recites the Muslim statement of faith, curses those who insult Muhammad, strenuously protects women's "right" to wear hijab, and extols Islamic “learning.” Occasionally, he even (mis)speaks  of himself as a Muslim.

Like his predecessor Bush II, he considers Islam “religion of peace”— despite all the proof to the contrary, from the Islamic scripture to the bloody history of Muslim conquest to the incessant and growing terror committed in the name of Islam. Individual and group terror, which has replaced Muslim nations' terror due to their military inferiority, is very successful. The West, ridden with guilt and ashamed of its religion, lacks moral clarity and ideologic spine. In fact, ideology is a curse word. Because of that, the reaction to Islam's terror is the opposite to rational: instead of Westerners' protecting themselves from the carriers of the murderous ideology, as they would from a foreign invasion, more of those carriers are imported to spread it. Just as Israel, under the same post-ideologic Western pressure and wishful thinking, gives up its hard-won territories for nothing in return, the West loses its territorial and ideological integrity to the alien invasion as well. The losses are tangible: Muslim settlers in the West tend to congregate geographically, squeezing out the infidels, and tend not to assimilate culturally. In effect, parts of countries become off limits to their prior inhabitants. This is combined with the political changes resulting from politicians' seeking votes from the growing Muslim block. Progressives—some from ignorance, others from the need to fight the evils of capitalism, yet others simply sharing antisemitism that is so respected in Islam—provide an abundant supply of collaborationists.

The argument is, of course, that it is “Islamism” that is bad, while Islam is as good as, if not better than, Judaism and Christianity. By implication, Islam should be as acceptable to the West as Judeo-Christian beliefs. Muslims do list those beliefs on the same breath: “Jews and Crusaders.” They do not, obviously, list Islam on the same breath, supposedly another “Abrahamic religion,” nor does anybody with a scintilla of knowledge in the West seriously consider it as another facet of the tripartite system. It does not take much to prove that both “Abrahamic religion” and “Islamism” are Western inventions.

Clearly, even in a culture that fully accepts death sentence, not everybody would want to be an executioner. Similarly, it is no proof of Islam's general rejection of terror that not every Muslim is a terrorist. Anybody familiar with Islamic writings and history knows that terror has played a central role in the spread of Islam.  But why not listen to the prime-minister of a Muslim country, elected from a Muslim party—shouldn't he be trusted as a better expert than the Western thinkers when he says there is no “moderate Islam”? In Erdogan's words, “If you say moderate Islam, then an alternative is created, and that is immoderate Islam. As a Muslim, I can't accept such a concept.” Then, as behooves a fine logician he is, he goes on to state the opposite to what he said: “Islam rejects extreme concepts. I am not an extreme Muslim. We are Muslims who have found a middle road.” Middle—between what and what? If he is not an “extreme” one, what is he if not “moderate,” if confused? His point is, anyway, that he is not a terrorist (who said he was?), and that terror cannot be called “Islamic” just as it could not be called Christian or Jewish. Of course, it could—such as when terror is committed in the name of Christianity, as it was during Jewish pogroms in Russia. Terror committed in the name of Islam, accompanied with proclaiming glory to the Islamic deity, Allah, is Muslim terror. The Turkish army chief General Buyukanit puts it succinctly: “There are certain circles that want to add the title of 'moderate Islam' to the Republic of Turkey. The source of such a title does not come from within Turkey but foreign circles.”

All these facts, and more, are considered in Dr. Pipes's blog entry of 2004 and its updates—without much discussion of whether Erdogan and other Muslims who reject the concept of “moderate vs. immoderate” Islam are right or wrong. Those facts are also recently revisited in Dr. Pipes's May 2013 Washington Times article “Islam and its infidels: How extremists distorted a religion of millions.” There he mentions the same arguments, but as given by his opponents, which is to say the opponents of the division of Islam into "moderate" and "Islamist" that he supports.

Unfortunately, that article presents no support for an entity termed “Islamism” to counter the continuities and consistencies in Islam. Contrary to Dr. Pipes's view, Muslims never needed to “absorb” from Europeans the concept of ideology: Islam has been a totalitarian ideology, by both intent and implementation, from Muhammad's times. Cultural and other achievements listed in the article, the fluctuating proportions of the “extremists,” and variation within Islam that includes “quietists,” are irrelevant. Variation exists among the followers of any ideology, as humans are thankfully not a eusocial species. After all, Schindler was a card-carrying Nazi too. That is no proof of “moderate Nazism,” however.

“Islamism” remains a redundancy invented in the West, however convenient and comfortable it might be to add an “-ism” and thus truncate the distribution of individual devotion to Islam's scriptural ideologic principles. Collapsing that dimension into the categories of “secularism,” “apologism,” and “islamism,” as suggested in Dr. Pipes's article, has no foundation in reality, if only because there are no natural/scriptural boundaries between these groupings. “Quietism” of Sufis, so frequently thought of in the West as meditative mystics, wine-imbibing poets and whirling dervishes, did not prevent Shamil Basayev and other Sufis from multiple terror acts, including the mass murder of non-Muslim children in the Beslan school. Hopefully we won't try now to invent “extremist” and “moderate” Sufis—like the rest of Muslims, they obviously represent a continuum. Historically, Sufis, organized into knight-like orders with blind obedience of members to the leader, have been fanatical warriors spearheading Islamic conquest.

Contrary to Dr. Pipes, adding an “-ism” to Islam is not at all similar to creating a term like fascism—rather, the analog to “Islamism” would be “fascismism,” a clear redundancy. It might be comfortable to think that “Islamism” allows us to fear only “10 to 15 percent of Muslims”rather than all 1.3 bln of them—even though I'd fail to take any comfort in the 10%, especially when it translates into 130,000,000 of vicious “Islamists.” There is no need, however, as Occam's razor warns us, to multiply entities when not necessary—and necessity cannot result from our need in comfort. The attempts to reify a novel entity of “Islamism” only show how well religious mimicry continues to serve Islam to mislead the wishfully thinking West.

J Dead-End

I am not a journalist to track the news. So it is only recently that I have come across a month-old column in The Jewish Chronicle authored by the two co-chairs of J Street-Pittsburgh ("Obama: ‘You must create the change you want to see’"). By itself, it is of little interest and was not a news item even when it was published. It only regurgitates approvingly some points made by Obama in his speech to Israeli students when he finally descended in his presidential glory on the bothersome country with its insufferable Prime Minister. Remember the president's sharing Sarkozy's hot mic revelations about the "liar" with whom poor Obama has to "deal" so often? The column is hardly made more interesting by its arrogant absurdities, which include calling Obama’s decision to talk to young people (instead of the Knesset) “a way to elevate the discussion about peace above the typical rancor of their leaders.” Ah, those benighted rancorous Israeli leaders - so beneath the station of our soaring president and the "co-chairs" whom I'd call paternalistic were they not women. What is interesting is not what is in, but what is not in that column – nor is it in the Obama speech.

First, missing are not only the Members of the Knesset. Obama addressed young Israelis but not young Palestinian Arabs. This is consistent with what he, along with his many mouthpieces including J Street, considers the cause of the lack of any progress in the "peace process". Nevertheless, even his words could have provided a clue to the only realistic solution. He said, "Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland..." - and the logical conclusion could well be, "the Palestinian Arabs should build theirs". That would place some responsibility on the Arabs' shoulders. The Jewish state had been built and existed de facto before it was declared in 1948. All the attempts, if any, that the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza have made to create a semblance of a working state have failed - the latest with Fayyad's resignation. Lo and behold, we now find out, he "feuded" with Abbas, the "Palestinian president" (whose term, for what it had been worth, expired in January 2009). These are the two people whom Obama, in torturous English making two persons into one entity that is on a par with a state, called Israel's "true partner" - half of which is now gone. The only state structure that functions in the "Palestinian state", declared recently for the second time, is the numerous "security forces" that double as terror groups.

Unfortunately and illogically, instead of Arabs' responsibilities, Obama concluded that sentence with the non-sequitur of their rights: "Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land". Put this way, that right - paraphrased by Obama from a verse in the Israeli state anthem - is denied to them by external forces. Not by the corruption of their own rulers and their dreams of vengeance and violent takeover of entire "Filastin", Israel included, but by the Israeli government, to pressure which the young Israelis were called by Obama. Unsurprisingly, no mention of the Arabs' responsibilities was made by the J Street writers of that column either. In the co-chairs' view, "the existential threat to Israel’s future" is not the Muslims/Arabs' refusal to reconcile with the Jewish state and to end the war they've been waging for as long as it exists, but "the lack of a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinians conflict" - which is, you guessed it, Israel's fault. Simple logic, however, should have told them that when one side has all the responsibilities while the other has rights only, the solution is as possible as the sound of one hand clapping. 

It is hard to imagine that neither Obama nor J Street are capable of seeing that. They cannot have missed that the only concessions ever made in the "peace process", and in the Arab-Israeli "conflict" in general, were Israeli. Those were not merely some formal diplomatic steps, but colossal territorial sacrifices - the land that had been paid in the blood of those who had recently survived a European genocide only to be promised another one by the Arabs, over and over again.

Nobody expects territorial gains made by other countries in the aftermath of defensive wars to be relinquished to their prior possessors: ask Russia about Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg. Or ask the Czechs about the Sudetenland, with the after-war wholesale expulsion of Germans from there, characterized by Churchill in 1944 as "the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting." No Arab country had ever been a legal possessor of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which were captured by Israel along with oil-rich Sinai during the defensive Six Day War, won under Nasser's and PLO's promises of genocide. Nevertheless, after its stunning victory Israel offered to forgo those gains - in exchange for peace. It was at the time not peace with the "Palestinians", who had not yet been invented, but with the Arabs in general. Nobody had talked then about another Arab "Palestinian" state in addition to the already existing one, Jordan. The Arab response was the "3 No's" of the Khartoum Resolution: "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." After another victorious defensive war, Israel ceded Sinai to the thrice (at least) defeated enemy - for the empty paper of "peace", which would last only as long as Egypt is sure of its defeat if it starts another war. Then Israel ceded Gaza - to the nonentity of the "Palestinian Administration" - for nothing at all but hopes for a peaceful development, which had been seen as unfounded and lethal by whoever was willing to open an eye. Rockets from Gaza have pounded Israel ever since.

Why then, certainly knowing all this, Obama and his J Street fellow travelers do not address Arab responsibilities - the only thing that has always been needed for any positive change in the status quo? Why don't they ask for peace those who have ceaselessly waged the war - since the time when the Jewish state was at its embryonic stage? Why don't they ask Abbas who chairs the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was created to exterminate Israelis, in 1964, before any "occupation"? The PLO, whose ruling Charter calling for the violent liquidation of Israel has never been changed, and which has never stopped being a terrorist organization just because the West decided it no longer was? 

The reason is simple. They don't ask because they know it would be futile. They know they have nobody to address there - neither Abbas, the halved "partner" of Israel, the fake president of no country and a doctor of Holocaust denial, nor the assorted terrorist gangs including the Gaza rulers of Hamas, nor the Arab population of Judea, Samaria and Gaza as a whole, which is ever ready to elect terrorists to rule them and celebrates mass murder including 9-11. It is a revolting hypocrisy when the J Street peaceniks, from the safety of Squirrel Hill (a cozy Pittsburgh neighborhood), call for Israelis to "demand from their political leaders to take the necessary risks for peace". They do it in full knowledge that those risks, taken by Israeli leaders so many times, are for continuing war and terror while the gains are mirages. This has been proven again and again whenever such risks were taken - with irreversible territorial losses, encouraging further terror.

Obama and his J Street cohorts are eager to submit Israel to those 100% risks for the sake of their political utopias. Knowingly unrealistic as those utopias are, they serve their purposes: to present Obama as a peacemaker statesman, and to fill the J Street co-chairs' leisure with self-important political activity and satisfy their leadership ambitions. Just like so many among the Jewish pacifist "co-chairs" in the US before and during 2nd World War, they care for nobody's peace except their own. It is no wonder J Street has decided to stop pretending to be "pro-Israel" to attract the kind of campus support it needs to "elevate" discussions to nowhere. With its vacuous pro-Arab rhetoric of unconditional "restraint" for Israel, J Street is a blind alley, a path leading to a deadly abyss.

Antisemitism by other means: Lecturing against the Jewish state*

I went to Michael Sfard's lecture** with a heavy heart. Why would I be hesitant about listening to this young and famous Israeli lawyer? Because of his fame's source: Sfard is what is called a "Human Rights Lawyer". In other words, so that nobody gets confused, his clients are mainly Palestinian Arabs. The human rights of the Jews are not under his purview, unless those Jews, like he has eventually done himself,  refuse to serve in the Israel Defense Forces or are otherwise anti-Israel. He defends Arabs' rights - but surely not from fellow Arabs. For instance, not from the Palestinian Authority, which sentences to death those who sell land to a Jew, an act of "national treason", and whose courts sentence journalists to jail for "insulting" Mahmoud Abbas by a cartoon on Facebook. As Sfard informed the audience, the PA has merely "the power of a city council", executions notwithstanding. 

Why did I go then? To ask the question that had long preoccupied me: why would somebody choose to defend members of an enemy population - against his own state that protects him and has been under attack from that population for as long as his state existed? The population whose leaders have been financiers, planners and perpetrators of terror, where murder of innocent Jews and Americans is celebrated and schools and stadiums are named after the murderers, where the murderers' families are congratulated and their enormous portraits adorn city walls. I prefaced my question by saying that as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, it was particularly strange for me to hear that in the "oppressive" Jewish state it was usually sufficient for a Palestinian Arab to petition the court with a help of a lawyer in order to get a satisfactory solution to his or her problems.  I also briefly reminded Sfard of the Arab violent animosity towards the Jews that had long preceded the re-creation of Israel, the history that included Amin al Husseini, a major Nazi collaborator and Arafat's and Abbas's hero. 

The response was striking. Sfard said, deliberately and clearly expecting the audience's reaction, "I don't care about history." I too thought there would be a reaction. I thought, this educated audience , albeit visibly sympathetic to the speaker, would now rise in disbelief and indignation. After all, shouldn't they all have been familiar with George Santayana's maxim, "Those who forget history are destined to repeat it"? One does not need to be an historian to understand how dangerous that forgetfulness would be - for the Jews in particular. Some aspects of our rich history are better to stay in history - but we keep being promised their genocidal repetition, by the likes of the Arab League at the creation of Israel, Nasser in 1967, and Ahmadinejad these days. Alas, no objection arose from the future and present lawyers. On the contrary, Sfard was applauded - especially when he said that he did not believe in the Jewish state. That prompted me to interject, "How about 'Judenstaat'?" No, he did not know what it was, the title of the foundation of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl's book "The Jewish State". Of course, Sfard's not believing in the Jewish state leaves him not believing in the state he lives in, created as "a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel", according to the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948. It seems when people don't care about history, they don't care about the present reality either.

It is really hard to briefly summarize Sfard's talk, misinformation by both omission and commission. As usual, it started with the terminology. Long gone are the times when the disputed territories were called Judea and Samaria in general parlance. Those historic names have been ethnically cleansed into the meaningless "West Bank", adopted from Jordan that  illegally occupied those lands from 1949 to 1967. It is also forgotten that Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria to its own east bank  - of the Jordan river, which is, interestingly, the Jewish name, appropriated also by the Arab state created by Britain's fiat in Eretz Israel, which was entrusted by the League of Nations to the UK for the "close settlement by Jews on the land". Amazingly, the UK had no trouble recognizing annexation of Judea and Samaria by Jordan, which captured that territory in a war of aggression. Even "West Bank", however, is too neutral for Sfard, who prefers calling it "Occupation". According to him, Israel began to "colonize" that land in the 1970's. Never mind that Israelis only by then had restored Jewish access to the heartland of  the Land of Israel, including the old city of Jerusalem with its Western Wall and Temple Mount, the most sacred site for the Jews. While no law except Jordanian ever prohibited Jewish settlement on that land, the world had no qualms when Jordanians murdered and expelled Jews from there. This is how east Jerusalem was turned into the "Arab East Jerusalem"  of today's media. Never mind that this part of town until the 20th century was the only Jerusalem, with a Jewish majority there until the Jordanian murderous invasion in 1948. It is also through bloody pogroms that Hebron, the first capital of ancient Israel, and other parts of Eretz Israel became Judenfrei "Arab cities". If, as is often repeated, the territory cannot be obtained in conquest, why should this rule start being implemented with Jews who captured it in a defensive war, and not with Muslims, who took it in aggression from Crusaders, who took it from Muslims, who took it from the Roman Empire that violently took it from the Jews and exiled them from their land? Let alone the many contemporary examples of the land captured in the defensive war and kept, like  the Kuril Islands or Sudetenland. But Sfard does not care about history.

His main problem is the security barrier. He misnames it "separation wall" - despite the fact that the wall is less than three percent of this largely chain link fence. Never did he mention that the only reason for the construction of the fence that began in 2002 was the terror war that Israel's "peace partners" headed by Arafat started in 2000, after he rejected another Israeli proposal that would create an Arab state. Only in 2002, before construction started, terrorists from the territories murdered 457 Israelis. Already in 2006, before the construction of the fence was finished, the number dropped to 10, and to no fatalities in 2012. Sfard does not care about security -  he derisively calls it a "Jewish obsession". His only focus is his clients' inconvenience, as he shares their conviction that Israel's goal for the barrier is land grab. He lamented that while discussing changes in the "separation wall"  route, the main concern of the Israeli officials was security. Needless to say, the "oppressor" did change the route as per Sfard's petition, and he tells the truly horrific story how an Israeli officer thanked him for letting know about the inconvenience to Arab farmers, since remedied. In fact, Sfard intimated, the evil authorities satisfy his clients' grievances even without any court rulings, "in a shadow of the court". Why? Because, to his satisfaction, they are "willing to barter land for legitimacy. Legitimacy is in very short supply." Just how much legitimacy of the Unites States depends on the route of its security barrier built on its Mexican border - with no terrorist threat?

There is no doubt in Sfard's mind that Israel is oppressor in regard to the Arab population of Judea and Samaria. Never mind that this oppression has resulted in the immense growth in the Arabs' longevity, education, and living standard that is higher than in the surrounding Arab countries. Never mind that no military would be needed in Judea and Samaria, or in entire Israel for that matter, if there were no constant and thousands of times realized threat of death from the Arab population. The threat that is maintained by the incessant antisemitic and anti-Israel brain-washing that Arabs undergo from the beginning of their lives. 

As to the question I asked Sfard, I still do not know the answer. The phenomenon of a Jew crossing to the enemy side, while rare, is not new, however. It used to require apostasy, and the apostate could become an inquisitor burning Jews at stake, or a blood libeler, inciting lethal pogroms. Nothing as dramatic as apostasy is needed nowadays, when religion has largely become for many merely a slightly embarrassing tradition - at least, among the progressive intelligentsia. Today's secular apostates merely defend those who attack the Jewish state's security measures that not only protect Israelis - Jews and Arabs alike - but also obviate the need for military action and casualties that would inevitably result from it, if terror acts were not prevented. Sfard did not see it that way, all the lynchings of random Jewish victims who fell into Arab hands, terrorist suicidal massacres and other murders notwithstanding. A possible motivation used to be the apostate's conflict with the community, or the desire to break from the persecuted minority. These days, all it takes is to become a "Human Rights" lawyer like Sfard. In Israel, this ecological niche is unique enough to avoid competition with other lawyers, kept out of it by their conscience. In that rarefied niche, even a mediocrity can earn his bread and butter - perhaps, with caviar and international travel on top.

I do not know why this annual lecture cycle has been renamed from The Martin Luther King Lecture to Lawyering For Social Change, but I think Dr. King would be happy that his name is no longer associated with it. The "social change" it stands for is not consistent with his vision of Israel, so dramatically different from Sfard's: "Israel is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security, and that security must be a reality.” Peace through security is exactly the human right that Sfard the "Human Rights Lawyer" denies his compatriots and, ultimately, his Arab clients as well. As for the Pitt law students, they were denied truth, and for their $25 education credits for this “lawyering” lecture received not education, but anti-Israel ideological indoctrination. 

_____________________

*The published version of this entry is in  The Jewish Chronicle, titled "Michael Sfard: 'I Don't Care About History'". There is also a prior entry in this blog, related to Sfard, "Champion Of Displacement".
** “Can the Occupier Provide Justice? The Dilemmas of Human Rights Litigation in Israeli Courts,”  7 p.m. March 28 in the Teplitz Memorial Moot Courtroom of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, 3900 Forbes Ave..

RE: Radical

Subject: RE: Radical
From: Vanyukov, Michael
To: 'Neera Tanden'
Date Sent: 12/26/2012 12:48:41 PM

Dear Ms. Tanden,

Although I understand that yours was a mass mailing to solicit donations, I can’t help replying to it. This is because, as an immigrant from the Soviet Union, I am well familiar with the ideology you espouse or employ, giving rise to the hateful rhetoric demonizing your political opponents. In your brief message I see no difference from what used to be published in the Soviet newspapers about the “sharks of Wall Street” as a symbol of accursed capitalism. It contains as much truth about the plans of conservatives as any article in Pravda and is worded similarly. I hardly hope you’ll read this message, let alone being affected by it, but on the off chance that happens, I’d suggest that you take some time from your “fight” and read the history of the Soviet Union, where your ideology reached its full bloom. A change in your perspective that might follow could help make your new year truly happy, which I do wish you.

Best regards,

Michael

From: Neera Tanden [mailto:progress@americanprogress.org]
Sent: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 12:00 PM
To: Vanyukov, Michael
Subject: Radical

	Dear Michael, We saw many progressive victories in 2012. But we’re still facing down a radical, conservative ideology espoused by politicians who won’t stop until they get their dream country: One with powerless unions, women blocked from making decisions about their own bodies, and education and health care luxuries reserved for a privileged elite. Our work has been a safeguard against their conservative misinformation campaigns, but we can’t let it up. We need to raise $150,000 by midnight on December 31 to continue being the leading voice in support of progressive causes. Click here to rush us a tax-deductible donation so that we can keep up our work—no gift is too small to make a difference, even $5. Our work depends entirely on your support. With your help, we’ve succeeded in defending policies that are at the core of progressive values: Medicare, Social Security, affordable health care, voting rights, and environmental protection. And we’re not going to give in on these issues. They’re too important. We have to keep fighting and we have to do it now. Rush a tax-deductible donation of $5 or more immediately to help the Center for American Progress hit our 2012 goals so we can keep fighting for the values you believe in. Thanks for all you do. We promise we won’t stop fighting. Best, Neera Tanden President Center for American Progress
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Political trompe-l'oeil

The paintings creating illusion of 3D reality on a 2D surface are fascinating. While looking online for ways to fix our living-room fireplace whose beautiful century-old face bricks had been mercilessly painted over by previous owners, I found suggestions to paint a trompe-l'oeil fireplace if a room was lacking a real one. This could be a solution particularly in an apartment, where a real fireplace is unfeasible or unusable. This also reminded me of the Pinocchio fairy-tale, where the painted boiling pot was so realistic that the hungry wooden boy's nose grew two inches longer out of frustration that he could not take the lid off.

In the Soviet version of Pinocchio, The Little Golden Key, whereby the story was transformed into a class struggle of oppressed and exploited puppets against their evil owner, behind the trompe-l'oeil painting there is a door that is opened by a golden key, and behind that door there is a wonderful puppet theater, miniature and mechanical, but as realistic as life. There is nothing at all, let alone reality, behind Obama's politics. 

Or behind himself, to start with. I am not even talking about his nonexistent credentials for being the choice to lead the most powerful and wealthy nation on earth. I am talking about his gaining and losing dimensions at will, as a painter can do to depictions of reality. The millionaire Obama, born from a native well-off Kenyan by a white mother and raised by a well-off Indonesian step-father and white grandparents under affirmative action and no influence of racism, is a trompe-l'oeil of poor black Americans who descended from slaves and only in the 1960's gained civil rights. In contrast, his millions of dollars, made with no responsibility for any business, disappear from the mental view of the masses. Of course, Romney's millions, to which he contributed his talents and efforts as a businessman, are an unforgivable vice. 

Romney's religion was the atheist progressives' favorite topic during elections: he was a "Bishop", possessed "magic pants", was a hereditary polygamist, and, in the most uncool fashion, used no intoxicants. It did not matter that Obama belonged to a fascist church, and had Farrakhan's friend and America-hater as his spiritual advisor, his daughters' godfather, as dear to him as his own grandmother. Because the Christianity of Mormonism is suspect in the religious Republican base, Obama's kind of Christianity could not be raised as an issue in the Romney campaign. Being the first president who had admitted to drug abuse to the point of being a junkie deducted no points either from Obama in the evolving surreality of America. 

The magic of illusion does not stop at home. Here is a recent example of how Obama and Arab fascists mutually benefit from each other, painting the trompe-l'oeil of peace-making. Muslim Brotherhood, by its Hamas arm, conducts terror war against Israel.  After years of bombardment by thousands of rockets causing mass posttraumatic stress disorder in children and adults, let alone fatalities, Israel finally intends to put a stop on this. A ground invasion and decisive elimination of the terror cadre and infrastructure - much more feasible than it was in the abortive 2006 Lebanon war - could solve the problem for a long time. To be sure, the calm would not last forever, considering that Islam doctrinally hates the Jews, the Land of Israel for the Muslims is Islamic waqf that can never be relinquished, and every true Muslim is duty bound to wage jihad against Israel as the Jew and an aggressor on the Muslim land. The removal of the terror organization would give Israel a respite and a chance to resume a semblance of normal life. Obama knows that but is not interested in the welfare of Israelis (and, for that matter, Gazans). He will paint himself a peacemaker by using what he knows will work with Egypt - a threat of withholding the $2 bln help to the fascist regime. Responding positively to that threat is a multiple win for Morsi: the money, the recognition by the US as a legitimate government, no loss of face because the result is presented as victory (everything short of radical defeat is a victory for terrorist Muslims), the showing-off of the ability to control the situation and manipulate the terror force. 

After I wrote this, Morsi showed the world another "win" of his: immediately after "arranging" the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel at the behest of Obama, he issued a set of decrees conferring dictatorial powers on him - the price of Obama's "peace". It is a win-win for Obama as well: he will dispense the tax-payers money to make a false vision of supporting Israel, but will not allow the weapons to be used for Israel's defense even though the case for that is clear; it will be the Jews' fault that the US has to spend more  money, which will feed into his antisemitic agenda; he will (already has) co-opt the Republican threat of depriving Egypt of the money while losing no political standing by that.  Although the rocket rain on Israel has stopped, the only loser in this game is Israel: it is a matter of time that the terror starts again, as it is Hamas's main goal, identical to its means. The intensity of the Hamas rocket bombardment of Israel justified invading Gaza with the potential of Hamas's liquidation or at least substantial damage. Now, if, or rather when, the bombardment restarts, there will be no such justification. Israel's threats are now empty: no benefit except from the temporary cessation of rockets is apparent - whatever empty promises they got from Hillary. No point in mentioning any Hamas's promises.

More peacemaker illusion by our Commander-in-Cheat: Obama's informing the Taliban enemy of the departure schedule renders unnecessary the losses the enemy would suffer through the continuous fighting. The low intensity of the war also protects Obama from the responsibility for active military actions - those could be dropped in full onto the successor. Alternatively, the enemy takeover that will render all US sacrifices senseless is postponed and would also be somebody else's, not Obama's, fault. 

The Benghazi story started as a very convincing trompe-l'oeil of the administration's victory over terrorism: it was all spontaneous and vaguely righteous if wrong reaction to a bad YouTube video blaspheming Islam that Obama had sworn to protect as one of his duties as a US President. Albeit slightly shaken, the illusion still works, because the discussion now is whether that was an intentional illusion or just some miscommunication between the diplomacy and the intelligence - not about the fact that Muslim terrorists successfully attacked a sovereign American territory and killed Americans - again - and again on 9/11.

There is no depth behind the painting drawn by Obama's junta to entice its willing followers - just the tireless populist slogans, largely translating into coveting neighbor's wealth, now that religion is a sign of backwardness just like it was in the leader of all progressive forces in the world, the Soviet Union. There is no reality behind the pitifully petty arguments the progressive intelligentsia puppets repeat after their political puppeteers, using at will the agitprop tools of Bolshevism. 

"Progressive" as a term originates from among those tools, the Soviet propaganda machinery, designating fellow travelers and - the same thing - enemies of capitalism, colonialism and Zionism (e.g., "всё прогрессивное человечество", "all progressive humanity"). In other words, allies of communism who have just not had a chance to enjoy political victory. Progressivism, like any totalitarian ideology, does not tolerate alternatives. It is thus eliminationist. The opponent is not to argue with, but to annihilate. The thought apparatus for such annihilation is there, and only a slight historical turn is needed - to incite and justify pogroms and "defend" order by abolishing the hard-gained American freedoms (does the arrest of the anti-Muhammad "movie"-maker tell you anything about the 1st Amendment?). By the time that happens, the masses will be only grateful for that to the dear fuhrer, scared by another "spontaneous" riot to death. This will finally puncture the canvas of the illusionist painting. No golden key will be needed to open the abyss hidden behind it. A bad dream? So thought the incredulous Russian intelligentsia in 1917 and later, relieved of its possessions for the sake of "fair share", of its freedoms for the sake of the triumph of communism, and of its freedom and lives for the sake of state security and order.

The Benghazi trial

"...weighed on the scales and found wanting." Daniel 5:27

Perhaps not since the Moscow show trials have we seen such rhetoric as directed by our progressive intelligentsia at the reactionary "right-wing". Which is only fitting, considering that those trials were exactly against the "right opposition". As well as against the "left" one. Here is what one of my progressive comrades is dreaming about: "I think joe [Biden] would headbutt him [Ryan] right in his perfectly shaved chest thereby exploding his blackened, right-wing heart." Apart from the suggestive body imagery, the only thing different is that the dreams of those who called for death of the enemies of the People in Moscow of the 1930's came true - often just before the dreamers themselves were tried as well and executed. This mind-paralyzing hatred, producing verbal vomit of vulgarity at the slightest attempt of the opponent to bring up information to the contrary, makes impossible any discussion.

Supposedly capable of thinking critically, intelligent scientists recite as if on command - without a second thought (or a first one) - the trivial and pathetically petty talking points offered to them by the party apparatchiks via the tame media: free contraception for women, dog on Romney's car roof, Romney's "magic underpants" and "binders". This is at the time when the terror attack and murders in Benghazi draw into the sharpest focus the incompetence, cowardice and dishonesty of Obama's junta. The free minds of intelligentsia suspend their abilities and repeat those talking points like a character in a science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, The Snail On The Slope: suddenly a little violet cloud would form around his head, taking over control of his mind, and he would start announcing senseless but jubilant headlines about the Glorious Girlfriends' successes in the ongoing transformation of the Forest.

It is painful to watch the grimacing of the dissembling Obama Politburo, unable to disguise their lies, and the sad slant of Obama's speechifying head 1.5 months after the Benghazi events that the next day did not prevent him from enjoying his trip to Vegas and his laughing there at his own jokes. Or was a day not enough for the four deaths he observed happening in real time to sink in? To understand that he was responsible for them - that it was due to his and his coterie's negligence or willfully fatal decision that the people were dead? "Sacrificed their lives", as per the trite and false solemnity of Hillary Clinton's, whose honorary position of a former US president's wife, shared in part with others, made her eligible to be a foreign minister of the only superpower. The sacrifice was indeed made - but not by the ambassador and the fallen heroes who, denied any support, held for hours against the incredible odds, fighting mortar-armed thugs. They were sacrificed - by Obama,  Biden, Clinton, Panetta and who knows who else - on the altar of Islam-appeasing progressive ideology and self-congratulatory conclusions that "al Qaeda is on its heels". 

The Benghazi 9-11 would be the downfall of any administration - and not through its natural convenient removal by the upcoming elections, but by the public outcry demanding immediate impeachment and criminal prosecution. In the show trials of the 1930's in the Soviet Union, the guilt was invented - to get rid of Stalin's possible competitors and to suppress any dissent, the perennial dream of the progressive intelligentsia. The actual 9-11 crime and lies of Obama's clique should be enough to shatter that dream and put him out of his political misery. 

Everybody knows...

Everybody knows the deal is rotten.

                                             Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows"

Everybody knows Obama lies, but admitting it requires comprehending the ugly reality of Obama's incompetence rather than unquestioningly worshiping him. This worship allows one to consider those lies pia fraus, pious fraud, and justify them fully. If the words are taken for what they fully are, one can see it was with regret that Obama said in his UN speech, "There is no video that justifies an attack on an embassy. There is no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon". There was indeed no video Obama and his clique could use for these purposes - they lied there was. He inadvertently admitted that.

On top of these lies, Obama apologized for our freedoms: "I know that not all countries in this body share this particular understanding of the protection of free speech. We recognize that. But in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete." See, they would really like to control, to cancel that pesky protection of free speech - but just cannot in 2012. Perhaps they'll be able to in 2013.

Don't forget Romney's carcinogenic properties and his Dog-On-The-Roof never-ending drama (I expect a Broadway musical to be made soon by Michael Moore). Dead ambassadors and invasions of sovereign US territory on 9-11 11 years after 9-11 are truly trivial in comparison. What jihad? All is quiet under The One's watch. Once the YouTube Muhammad movies are dealt with by the capable Obama censors, finally controlling the flow of information, we'll sing kumbaya and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.

Nobody should say Obama's presidency was a complete failure. Obama asked for an "incomplete" grade, and we have seen nothing yet indeed. It will be complete - and we'll be done too - if he gets his second term.

"Grandfather was...", Or Obama's faith

Why is so little attention paid to the choice of vice-president? Unless, that is, this is somebody of whom the left entertainment business can make a bogey like it was made of Palin. Why is there only one debate between the VP candidates, when even on the memory of the present generation the VP has become a POTUS twice? Moreover, aren't they supposed to be a team, in consultation with each other? I would suggest then that the debates should be conducted between the candidate POTUS-VP teams, with the same question answered by both in the couple, first by the prospective POTUSes and then by VPs, with the latter then being able to show their ability to contribute and, if needed, to replace the president. To be sure, the inability would also manifest. Perhaps at some point the debate rules will be so changed. No rules, however, need to be changed in order to discuss the president's convictions. Here we go, with no segue.

I don't care what religion anybody professes, if any, as long as that anybody leaves mine alone. One would think that this criterion should leave me indifferent to the issue of Obama's faith and religiosity. Shouldn't Obama's religion, anyway, concern only those firmly assigned to the category of wingnuts, in the company of "birthers", those certified paranoids who keep pointing out that Obama was listed as "born in Kenya" until after the start of his first presidential campaign? Shouldn't Madonna only  be allowed to call him a "black Muslim in the White House" without raising an outcry? Obama himself has emphatically called himself a Christian, attended a church for 20 years, and held a Reverend from that church as a member of his family until he was told he should not anymore (can happen to anybody). That's what he is then, right?

It seems, however, that the hypothesis of Obama's Islam is viewed as offensive by the Democrats and the media not only because of all  the above, but also because it has been considered to be detrimental to his candidacy - despite his handlers' supposed view of Islam as a religion at least equal to Christianity. Sometimes the stridency of insistence on Obama's Christianity is reminiscent of Clinton's "I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman". Even mentioning his second name is considered an affront, as if it were something shameful and "Barack" were not a Muslim name as well. I have been reprimanded by an Obama faithful for using his three initials, as if that was any different from FDR, JFK or LBJ. A progressive colleague of mine prefers "BO" instead, which is, I think, a real insult. Is it Islamophobia among Democrats, including Obama himself? I can't see any other possible reason for these consistent attempts to dissociate Obama from Islam. Be it as it may, apparently, nobody has been ready to celebrate the first Muslim-born President (in Islam, one is a Muslim if born to a Muslim father) - at least, as much as the first "black" president was celebrated (even though Morgan Freeman says Obama is not "black" - and Freeman should know). 

Do I then smell hypocrisy in Obama's declaration that "part of [his] responsibility as President of the United States [is] to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear" - a promise he has made to no other religion? Not to Christianity in Islamic countries, where conversion to it is punished by death, and Christians are persecuted into extinction, as they are in Egypt and in the "Palestinian" territories. Not to Judaism in both the realm of institutionally antisemitic Islam and in some Christian countries where the Jews are still routinely maligned as hell's spawn. Can you imagine Obama traveling to Jerusalem and telling Israelis that it is his responsibility to fight against antisemitism everywhere? It is hard to imagine him traveling to Jerusalem at all,  the city he called the undivided capital of Israel in front of a Jewish audience - just before he took his words back when no longer facing it. Now nobody in his entire administration can find Israel's capital on the map.  

It is this smell of hypocrisy that drives me wingnuts about Obama's beliefs - that and some concrete facts. For instance, if one is to believe Obama's memoirs, a barber once asked him, upon learning his name, “Barack, huh. You a Muslim?”. To which Barack Hussein gave a rather evasive response, "Grandfather was". The question was not about his grandfather, and he did not say "yes" or "no". Or did he? Hardly any curious barber would be satisfied by this response. 

Then the reader of "The Dreams..." learns that the "Muslim faith" was in Obama's mind "linked with the Nation of Islam". Nowhere in the book that has any negative connotation, while "the much-admired success of the Nation of Islam in turning around the lives of drug addicts and criminals" is noted more than once. He "would occasionally pick up the paper from these unfailingly polite men, in part out of sympathy to their heavy suits in the summer, their thin coats in winter; or sometimes because my attention was caught by the sensational, tabloid-style headlines (CAUCASIAN WOMAN ADMITS: WHITES ARE THE DEVIL)" - but that "sensational, tabloid-style" is the extent of his criticism of the fascist movement. I can't imagine how such a headline could catch anyone's attention, unless it evoked interest rather than disgust. It is then not surprising he got no criticism - until forced to have it - for the man "who helped introduce [him] to [his] Christian faith", another fascist. The latter quote suggests that before Wright's "introduction" he had no such faith. Whether that was the case, and whether he was a Muslim or tabula rasa in that regard, I can't know for sure, but I do surmise that Christianity was more promising in his political  "mind" of an aspiring "community organizer" than Islam, his obvious alternative choice.

What kind of Christianity - is a different matter. As it happens, the religion of Rev. Wright, Obama's spiritual father who baptized Obama's children and connected him to the black community, was such as to give Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to Farrakhan  - because, in Wright's view, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam "truly epitomized greatness." The award was a year before Obama's election and his abandonment of the Trinity Church under the campaign's pressure. That award must have been part of what Obama called "the much-admired success" of the Muslim faith. Indeed, in many ways, the odious "Christianity" of Wright and the "Islam" of Farrakhan, the fellow antisemites and racists, are alike. It would be an insult to everybody's intelligence to insist that Obama was unaware of that similarity and the mutual sympathies between Wright and Farrakhan, just as it is unlikely he had not heard anything truly revolting throughout the 20 years of his attendance of Wright's sermons.

One would think, however, that by the election time Obama had found out that the Nation of Islam's Islam was a bit different from historic Islam, however diverse that historic one still is. Perhaps that "link" was weakened, but not Obama's with Islam. When the time came for his foreign affairs, he declared "A New Beginning" for the relations between the US and... not another country, as one would think appropriate in those affairs, but with Islam, supposedly a religion. Now, that makes Islam a polity, doesn't it? His first TV interview was with Al-Arabiya, and in it he addressed "the Muslim world" - an entity that exists only in the minds of those who think that Islam unites countries and separates them from the other countries, a split into the world of Islam and the world of "disbelief", a familiar structure of Dar ul Islam and Dar ul Harb, the realm of Islam and the realm of war. Whereas in fact there is no "world of Islam" among the eternally conflicting "Islamic" countries and groups and tribes within them, Obama's declaration of America's reconciliation with the "Islamic world" creates that world in full accordance with Muslim mythology.

Then, of course, came the much-discussed Cairo speech, in the Al-Azhar University, "a beacon of Islamic learning" as the president, ostensibly knowledgeable of that learning, referred to the place. That's the same place whose Grand Imam, Tantawi, legitimized suicidal terror and wrote a 700-page book on antisemitic Islamic exegesis. His death in 2010 was lamented by Obama, as spoken of in his spokesman Gibbs's statement. It is this murderous source of "Islamic learning" who "graciously hosted President Obama last June in Cairo". Sure, Obama did admonish somebody anonymous in that Cairo speech that "Threatening Israel with destruction -- or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews [which is done any time when the Jews are mentioned in a mosque] -- is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve." Bad memories, you see - as if the "peace process" has not resulted in hundreds of terror murders and is not by itself a war negating peace. 

Then Obama negated that admonishment anyway by equating terror and wars that Israel has been subjected to since before its reestablishment in 1948 with "the pain of dislocation of the Palestinian people" they "have endured" for "more than 60 years", that is, since 1948. No word about how those dislocated came to be dislocated, and what "occupation" he means that he speaks of in the very next sentence. There was no occupation "more than 60 years ago" - unless Obama agrees with the "Palestinian" narrative of "Naqba", whereby it is the very existence of Israel that is the occupation. To Obama, Israelis and Arabs are just "two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive," even though it is only for the "Palestinian people" that the situation is "intolerable" in his view. To Obama, the war waged by Arabs and Islam against Israel is nothing more than finger-pointing - "for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond." In his opinion, to see this conflict from the Israeli side is as wrong as seeing it from the Arab side and means to "be blind to the truth". What is Obama's truth? Simple: forget who the aggressor is and meet the "aspirations of both sides... through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security". Never mind that even in the poisonous internationally doctored prescription for that, "land for peace", Israel's part is "land". Peace is denied by the Arabs, regardless of how much land Israel is willing to give up.

While paying lip service to the need for the "Palestinian Authority" to "develop its capacity to govern" (Abbas's capacity to govern should have expired in January 2009), he demands that "Israelis must acknowledge [Palestine's right to exist] just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's" - as if that "right" of "Palestine" has not been asserted by Israel since Rabin. If Obama thinks that acknowledgment is still lacking, just as the Arabs do, nothing can convince him it's not. It is all the same to him that "privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away" and that "many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state" (obviously, not privately). Aside from the question about how he could penetrate the private thoughts of "many Muslims" - how exactly can one compare the alleged private thoughts and the official position of the Israeli governments? Another question is why those thoughts are still "private" - despite all the Osloism and "peace process". The response is, of course, that those who might have such thoughts run the risk of being murdered by the "many Muslims" if they make those thoughts public. To Obama, it is "continued Israeli settlements... construction" that  "violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace" - not the continued Arab terror, incitement, the official glorification of "martyrs", and the fact that the articles calling for the annihilation of Israel have never been removed from the "Palestinian" ruling Charter, despite the "peace process". Sure, Obama said that "Palestinians must abandon violence", but in the very next sentence he calls it "resistance", exactly what terror is called by Fatah, Hamas, Hizballah and all other terrorists and terrorism supporters. He is concerned that this "resistance" will not succeed "through violence and killing"  - not about that "Palestinians" have no right to that "resistance", moral or otherwise. This is exactly what is expected from the pupil of the antisemites and Israel-haters Rev. Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and Edward Said.

Just as he whitewashes terror by calling it "resistance", he whitewashes Islam by using the standard lie that "The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as -- it is as if he has killed all mankind.  (Applause.)  And the Holy Koran also says whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.  (Applause.)" As other disingenuous apologists of Islam, he does not give the complete quote of this Koran 5:32 verse, 

"Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors." 

There is a teaching, but it is Jewish, indeed found in the Talmud. It is referred to as a Jewish belief in the Koran, which is "holy" only to the Muslims. Nowhere is it seen that Islam accepts this belief despite all the applause of the Al-Azhar audience. What sounds much more genuine is another statement of Obama's that caused applause, the one expressing his pride that "the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it". One wonders why the US government does not yet punish those who interfere with the "right of women and girls" to wear burqa - in fact, it wages a war against people who "protect" that right, in Afghanistan, wasting, as it were, the lives of young Americans.

In the end, it does not matter whether Obama's choice is antisemitic Islam or Wright's racist version of Christianity, the "black liberation theology". Both are terrible. What matters is Obama's position on the concrete issues that is defined by his ideology. This position, in which the perfectly legal building construction is equal to murder, Israel is called to return to the pre-1967 "borders" with no tangible obligation on the part of Arabs, and Jerusalem is no longer Israel's capital. This is the position where America's enemies are to be mollified and promised "more flexibility", while America's friends are to be let into the White House clandestinely, if at all, and maligned behind their backs.  It is of no interest what Obama's grandfather's faith was. His grandson's is no good, whatever its name.