New Anti-Semitism in Russia?

DEBKAfile has the following note this morning:

Some 500 Russian nationalists including 19 parliamentarians demand ban on Jewish groups. They declare Jews are anti-Christian and anti-human and hatred of them is justified. Their fierce published diatribe recalls old Anti-Semitic symbols including blood libel.

This is disturbing news. I haven't been able to find any other information on this story; if anyone knows more, please get in touch.

Update

More information at AP and the BBC (hat tip -- OJ).

Life After Feminism?

 
This is a response to questions raised by commenter "truepeers" in my previous post, Utopian and Parochial -- Why Western Feminism Won't Do.

¤ ...the blogosphere is a reflection of our desperate cries to speak truth and live again with honour.

Yes, the blogosphere is a virtual community born from the failure of "real" communities to meet the need for authentic connection -- that is, a connection shorn of the surreal demands of political correctness.

¤ ...can you imagine men and women interacting in future in ways that will not further reduce men to undignified shrews.

Do you mean that the interaction as it is now emasculates men? It turns men and women into adversaries. Or rather, being based on scarcity beliefs, men and women scramble for perceived shortages in the public sphere.

¤ How can the phallic be self-sacrificing in productive ways, and not be reduced to participation in some PC blackmail in order to get, well, laid, or otherwise reproductively used?

It is damnably difficult to be authentic in the face of the demand for "correctness" -- to maintain one's sense of true self and not die of loneliness. In this, we are like every other generation, only the outward gestures have been changed and made more lethal(a young man I know hasn't been able to ask girls out for coffee after class without being reminded that she's not ready for a relationship. Drinking coffee is a relationship??). But your notion of "productive self-sacrifice" is illuminating. That is what both men and women do in order to bring forth the next crop...

¤ There has always been a code of silence in feminism on the question of how women treat women.

Indeed. It's confusing for women, too. The betrayals and back-stabbing and humiliations are as rampant in the halls of feminism as ever they were in the cells of The Party. The secrecy of these misdemeanors makes them fester all the more. Individual women are left wondering what is wrong with me rather than what is wrong with the feminist worldview, the feminist utopian faith that any group of like-minded women will, of its very nature be egalitarian and non-hierarchical. Right. But this kind of posturing is patently silly, and the reason many women are vehement in their "I'm not a feminist..." declarations.

¤ How are we to raise the young girls in our families? Feminism, old and new school, combines to promise them everything, while not necessarily offering the corresponding reality checks.

There you have it. The utopian promise and the trivial prize. Feminism, mostly middle-class with lots of leisure time, looked at life in the public square as men had fashioned it and decided that this was the worthy goal. They designed a utopia based on what they claimed to despise. Theies is a copy-cat universe, not a different one. The ludicruous feminist "Bring Your Daughter to Work Day" is the outcome of such stultified thinking, so pathetic it makes one look away in embarrassment for those who buy into this.

And don't forget,girls need fathers every bit as much as boys do. Strong fathers produce strength in their children.In The Way The World Works, Jude Wanniski dubs the Democrats and the Republicans as, respectively, the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party. The Dem/Moms want all the kids to be happy and enjoy the fruits of entitlement. Maternal love flows to the neediest of her children and she is adept at making the stronger ones "play fair" with the less-fortunate in the family. The Republican/Daddy Party wants his kids strong and competent; to him their security lies in strength and stamina. The dispiriting studies of single-parent families, of the effects of divorce, of the pernicious sequelæ of problems of aggression, anomie and suicidal gestures in many latch-key children, are telling. Families have been sold a bill of goods concerning the ability or even need to "have it all." How narcissistic is that?

¤ If language and religion began as a male-dominated institution, as I'm sure they did...

Pooh. Language is partly in-born and partly socialization. It has a window of opportunity, just like vision does (and hearing to a lesser extent). The rare cases of feral children who are discovered after the language window closes are never able to move beyond simple words and gestures -- to the heartbreak of those who work with them and hope for them.

In some cultures there are male words and female words and gender taboos are firmly in place. Our culture displays this in the greater freedom it grants men to use either profane or publicly taboo words with impunity. Might this "greater language freedom" be a male prerogative in most societies? At any rate, creoles can arise spontaneously among children of diverse languages. An example is what happened in the Hawaiian Islands: thrown together by the vicissitudes of economics -- e.g., the Portuguese, English, Japanese, Chinese, etc. families who came to there in search of work -- the children quickly created a patois to which the adults had no access. Born of necessity, it worked.

BTW, early on Christianity had many feminine images/ikons in its spiritual life. The church as Sophia, the Holy Spirit as a feminine spirit,etc. The early gatherings of Christians were in the homes of women who had converted to this new idea.

¤ ...the need for young men to engage the frontier between the language-bound community and the outside world of warring enemies and nature.

Well, that's what the Boy Scouts are for. Seriously. And the attempt to harm this group by the pernicious ACLU won't kill it by any means; a working group cannot be legislated or adjudicated out of existence. To the contrary, such attempts just make the Boy Scouts stronger. Having in the last few years shepherded a young man through his Eagle Scout project (he chose to do an oral history of the remaining WWII vets in his community)one could see that the male strength and demands made on this group of boys was changing how they viewed themselves and others. Despite attempts to marginalize the Boy Scouts they flourish. A healthy Red State phenomenon, one which includes a good number of Hispanic and African American children. Black and white may attend separate churches but their Scouts meet in integrated groups.

¤ ...there is some truth in the idea that conservatives "welcome" the terrorist threat...

"Welcome" as in "apprehend and appreciate" that the terrorists' outrages are born of impotence and envy? Cain and Abel all over again. The ongoing insane and narcissistic insistence that we play nice is a Blue State, Mommy idea. These people infest the State Department. They are the ones who hold candlelight vigils as a way to express their solidarity with those who would kill them. They read everything through the prism of innocent victimhood. They pronounce "forgiveness" of atrocities without consulting the victims. Their demand to remain bystanders at their own funerals beggars belief.

¤ But if men have it bad in this respect, arguably women can have it even worse.

No, we're all in this together. But Freud was right: biology is destiny. Would that the feminists could accept this fact of difference, rather than attempt to silence whomever would put it forth for debate. There will be a post on this in the near future.

¤ The feminists may be taking over the humanities in the universities but if you were to send your young women to them, wouldn't that be like giving them a prolonged initiation into a tribe with no reality checks, self-righteously reproducing the utopian dogma of the sisterhood?

Agreed. But that's why I tiptoe away from people who send their children to these ghettoes. The gulf between our realities is so wide that no bridge is wide enough to span it. At some point, argument is a waste of resources.

¤ So how do we raise our young boys and girls to be worthy of each other in a world in which they are not simply consumers for the nanny state...?

You'll be sorry you asked.

• First thing to do is get rid of TV. Keep a VCR/DVD player and monitor on hand for worthy movies, of which there are many. The good films go almost immediately to DVD anyway.
• Second, refuse to purchase name brand things without a good reason. "Everybody has one" is not a good enough reason.
• Third, question any acquisition you make -- all those gimmicks you didn't know you needed until you saw them. Unless you work in emergency medicine, cell phones fall into that category.
• Four, live below your means. But don't tell anyone.
• Five, give to charity unfailingly, not just in the heat of the latest disaster.
• Six, do some kind of community work and make sure the children do also.
• Seven, make sure your children are as musically and aesthetically and spiritually literate as they are with language.
• Eight, make sure they learn another language with enough depth to compare it to their own.
• Nine, spend time with them: listen, observe, respond, let them laugh at you. Read humor stories to them. Develop any silliness genes they might have.
• Ten, and maybe most important for their safety, teach them to say "no" by permitting them to refuse you when it's not a crucial matter. Believe it or not, a little one who can say "no" to Dad is a safer child, one who can refuse what strangers want because their critical faculties have been developed in their interactions with you.
  
  

The Ten Commandments of Parenting, as handed down from the mountain by Dymphna.

The Power and the Glory of Islamic Women

Part Three: Utopian and Parochial
Why Western Feminism Won't Do

A commenter on Belmont Club, Michael McCanles, says:

...feminists have destroyed the willingness of males in the chattering classes to talk seriously about the military as anything other than a manifestation of the fact that all males are bloodthirsty rapists, and if women had their way there would be no more wars.

Mr. McCanles is sadly correct. The feminist world-view, which includes an over-the-top hatred of men and of all things male, is malignantly deviant from reality. In what has become the commonplace Alice-in-the-Looking-Glass metaphysic of American feminism, "masculine" does not mean assertive or strong, or capable. In their lexicon, masculine equals evil. And not just bad, either; men are also stupid, inept, and lost without a woman to somehow alchemize their base nature. Further, with women leading the way to utopia there would be an end to war because women are essentially peaceful and choose to work cooperatively rather than arrange themselves in a patriarchal hierarchy. Those who believe that women aren't as aggressive as men obviously haven't spent time in an all-female workplace. A totally feminine environment is rife with in-fighting, betrayals and vying for power , made all the more vicious for the lack of men to leaven the mix.

The men of the chattering classes (one way to recognize this group is the fact that, no matter how old they are, they still know their SAT scores) have scuttled their integrity in order to belong to the "in" group. Currently, the In Group is composed of those who consider victimology life's highest calling. The driving force behind their work is enshrinement of the victims of whichever demonized Oppressor is being dunked in tar at the moment. Take your pick of the victim roles which allow you to rail against the unfairness of men: Native American? Good. Differently-abled? Very good. Female? Yes! Native American female and handicapped? Ah, the summum bonum! Notice that this highest good has nothing to do with achievement and everything to do with railing against life's inherent unfairness.

It has become a waste of time to ask how we got here. Using the analogy of rescue work -- say digging victims out of the rubble left behind by the tsunami -- what has become critical to fixing this cultural mess is saving those we can and mourning those we can't. Even in metaphysics there is triage.

The awful irony and failure of American feminism lies in its parochial and utopian nature. Women all over the world suffer grievously at the hands of the more powerful. Just how important is the notion of glass ceilings or hiring quotas or sexual "harassment" when your fellow women are sold into slavery, endure clitoridectomies, rape, and finally merciful death, thus being spared the mourning they would be forced to do, having witnessed the brutal death of their children? And while this is going on, we teach our girls how to be aggrieved.

This elitist version of what it means to be female has done our culture great harm, both here in our institutional life and abroad. Here our boys are pilloried for being proto-men, our girls are given vapid, trivial and cruel aphorisms to which they are supposed to aspire. "Girls rule" is not a message to live by.

Meanwhile, in the opposite and equal reaction coming to your screen via Al-Jazeera, girls die. Other cultures see our ever-increasingly dissatisfied women and, politely or brutally, decline to go there.

The Enemy Within, Part II

No-God is on Our Side

My previous post ended with an unanswered question: can this battle against the enemy within be fought without a religious regeneration in our own culture?

It is difficult to discuss religion under Secular Orthodoxy, since it discourages the idea of God. Observant Christians and Jews are relegated to the same essential status as theosophists -- that is, they are people who have forsaken science for superstition. What is obscured by this false dichotomy is the fact that the secular worldview derives its belief system from the heritage of Christian Europe (and thus also the Jews). One may remove the theological philosophy behind it, but Western concepts of right and wrong, of the universe and man's place in it, have not yet diverged significantly from what they were in a time when almost everyone believed in God.

The fact remains that we are in the midst of religious war, whether we want to be or not, or whether we even know it. Our enemies have decided that this is a war of faith, so it is a religious war that we must fight. If nothing else, the atheist fights to preserve his right to believe in No-God.

This may make a secular person uneasy -- after all, bible-thumping Baptists and Islamist zealots are two sides of the same coin, are they not? Yet there is a difference: fervent Christians have accepted their coexistence with other faiths in America for over two centuries. Can anyone believe that Muslims would reciprocate if the Jihad were to realize its fondest dream?

After all, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Mormons, atheists, and even Wiccans can make common cause in this fight, since Islam does not distinguish one of them from another, and would exterminate all of them if they do not bend the knee to Allah. This unfortunate fact is what distinguishes Islam (at least in its most virulent strain) from the rest of the religions. One can point to the historic intolerance and brutality of Christianity, but that was 500 years ago. Islam, for whatever reasons, has remained trapped in a medieval mindset.

The ultimate question, which cannot yet be answered, is whether a devoutly secular society can muster the spiritual resources to fight a religious war. Secular culture is, after all, spiritually enervated, and our tolerant society has allowed a popular culture to emerge which is unprecedented (at least since the late Roman Empire) in its decadence, degradation, and materialism. When Osama bin Laden points his finger at this cesspool, he touches a responsive chord in those of us who are opposed to him and yet recognize that something is indeed wrong.

The Islamists propose a spiritual solution to a spiritual problem. Their religion is full of righteous zeal, and yet it will release unparallelled evil into the world if allowed to spread.

Once again, the question remains: Do we have adequate weaponry in our spiritual armory to fight this enemy?

The Enemy Within, Part I

The Little Wicked Wicket Gate

During the weeks following the events of September 11th, 2001, the lines of the following poem by Edwin Muir ran repeatedly through my mind:

The Castle All through that summer at ease we lay, And daily from the turret wall We watched the mowers in the hay And the enemy half a mile away -- They seemed no threat to us at all. For what, we thought, had we to fear With our arms and provender, load on load, Our towering battlements, tier on tier, And friendly allies drawing near On every leafy summer road? Our gates were strong, our walls were thick, So smooth and high, no man could win A foothold there, no clever trick Could take us, have us dead or quick. Only a bird could have got in. What could they offer us for bait? Our captain was brave and we were true... There was a little private gate, A little wicked wicket gate. The wizened warder let them through. Oh then our maze of tunneled stone Grew thin and treacherous as air. The cause was lost without a groan, The famous citadel overthrown, And all its secret galleries bare. How can this shameful tale be told? I will maintain until my death We could do nothing, being sold; Our only enemy was gold, And we had no arms to fight it with.

We had indeed been at ease that summer, with our arms and provender (and aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines) protecting us from our enemies, the ones who seemed no threat to us at all. But a bird did get in, and the famous citadel was overthrown...

To make the analogy complete, what would stand in for our only enemy, gold? The easy answer is "black gold"; that is, we allowed our security to breached by the Visa Express program -- arranged for the benefit of Saudi Arabia -- that admitted a number of the 9/11 hijackers into the United States. However, there were larger issues at work, ones that made us vulnerable in 2001 and keep us vulnerable today.

An aggressive spiritual force is working its way through American culture, one which might be called Orthodox Secularism. Though it lacks any belief in a Supreme Being, it otherwise has all the characteristics of a religion, and it is regnant in academia, the media, and large swathes of the "permanent government". It manifests itself in well-known ways, such as the demand for the removal of religious symbols from the public square, or the promotion of abortion-on-demand, but there are other, more subtle, ways in which it affects the conduct of our defense against the Great Islamic Jihad.

Three general areas of this new religion are worth pursuing:

1. The Theology of Doubt

Orthodox Secularism requires that adherents subscribe to radical doubt. We must doubt that our culture is superior to any other, that there are any moral absolutes, that the free market is a way to create wealth, etc. Not all propositions are open to doubt -- otherwise the system would de-construct itself, like Postmodernism -- but the major cultural pillars of the West are all questioned.

This is a legacy of Communism, a credit to the proficiency of the KGB. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union poured enormous clandestine amounts of money into the left-leaning and radical organizations of the West, in addition to feeding them propaganda and disinformation designed to discredit the principles and institutions of the Free World. Communism is gone, but its legacy lives on in our weakened institutions, which continue to peddle the same old nihilistic themes.

This makes the West constitutionally reluctant to take on our Islamofascist enemies, to name them for what they are and counter them in the realm of ideas.

2. Race Trumps Everything

As many politicians (especially Republican ones) know, it is impossible to say certain things in public about race. Statements are constrained by the shibboleths of the age of Orthodox Secularism, with many thoughts on the subject now considered doubleplus ungood, at least for white people.

Thus, the fact that virtually all acts of terror perpetrated since the Twin Towers fell were committed by Muslims, most of them from the Middle East and South Asia, is well-known to just about everybody. But if mentioned publicly it immediately throws the speaker open to charges of racism, and it cannot under any circumstances be used to track down terrorists or to prevent another horrific attack.

If one steps back from the scene to regard the situation, it can hardly be viewed as anything short of mass insanity.

Race trumps border security, preventing us from stanching the flow of illegal immigrants into this country, a flow which may well conceal al Qaeda members. Race trumps any attempt to track the terrorists down once they are in the United States. Race trumps airport screening, leaving us with only random searches; in other words, avoiding giving offense to people with our "racism" is more important than preventing the deaths of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of innocent people.

The internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War is used as the model of "racist" behavior to avoid. But, as Michelle Malkin has demonstrated, the internment decision was a reasonable one to make in wartime, given the fact that a large network of Japanese spies was known to be in place in the United States. It is only with the luxury of hindsight, and through the lens of political correctness, that this can be seen as racism.

It is racism if we seek to profile potential terrorists by their nationality or appearance. It is racism if we draw attention to their repugnant religious beliefs. It is racist to expect immigrants to assimilate to American culture and adopt American values. Any attempt to combat the Islamofascists within our own society simply reveals our inherent racism.

3. Toxic Tolerance

A liberal democratic country like ours is an open society, which requires that its citizens be tolerant of those who differ in their appearance and customs. Tolerance becomes toxic when it demands an acceptance of behaviors which run counter to the basic rules of liberal democracy and undermine its very existence.

If radical Islam demands our tolerance and respect, then we must abide by its tenets and institute an intolerant and illiberal polity. In the name of multiculturalism, Canada has officially sanctioned sharia. But, when applied, sharia will impose legal principles, such as restrictions on the weight of women's testimony, which violate Canada's own legal principles and constitutional norms. Problems like this cannot be wished away in an attempt at multicultural harmony; the tolerance of intolerant cultural institutions generates irreconcilable conflicts.

If the West were not defending itself against the Great Islamic Jihad, such issues might remain interesting intellectual puzzles, suitable for reasoned academic debate. But in the context of a post-9/11 world, they are a recipe for cultural suicide.

Throw open the doors! Welcome all who wish to enter, even those who strive to slit our throats!

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   

Orthodox Secularism is a spiritual force, drawing on the same wellsprings as religion but without acknowledging religion. This suggests the question: what is the religious analogue to the collective doubt, self-hatred, and impulse to self-destruction as outlined above?

One word: Sin.

Orthodox Secularism does not include evil in its theological structure, and it does not admit the existence of sin. But our human nature cannot be denied, and human beings are inherently aware of their sinfulness, consciously or not. Environmentalists rely on this: in their dogma, humans are inherently destructive of the environment, and sin against Mother Nature.

The feeling of sinfulness can lead a religious person to confession and absolution, or it can be projected onto others. Since Secularism denies sin, only the latter course is open -- sins are committed by corporations, Republicans, America, the West, or even humanity itself.

This unconscious and unacknowledged sense of sinfulness generates the tenets of Orthodox Secularism and breeds a reluctance to act against the evil forces which threaten us. It is the wizened warder who has let them through.

A larger question remains: can this battle against the enemy within be fought without a religious regeneration in our own culture? Does liberal humanism provide enough spiritual might to counter the Great Islamic Jihad?

If not, then we have no arms to fight it with.

The Power and the Glory of Islamic Women

Part Two: Silence in America

In an earlier post, Gates of Vienna addressed the problems facing the women of Baghdad as they attempt to earn their college degrees. We waited to hear the outpouring of concern when reports of their abuse -- acid-in-the-face, kidnapping and rape, etc. -- surfaced in the MSM. Where there should have been a massive outpouring of support, there was only silence.

Where were the demonstrations to publicize the plight of women under Islam? How can thousands of women, in sisterly collegiality, converge on Washington D.C. to oppose the mythical repression of their abortion rights and fail to mention the all-too-real murderous captivity of their Muslim sisters?

American feminism is becoming a joke, especially to the younger generation, who see it as irrelevant to their lives:

"For women today, feminism is often perceived as dreary. As elitist, academic, Victorian, whiny, and passé...calling themselves girlie feminists, lipstick feminists, or sometimes just Third Wavers, they [the younger generation] have taken to flaunting the very femininity that Feminists had scolded would lead men to objectify them."

Such an attitude angers The Old Feminists who see themselves as pioneers. Because of their hard slog, they say, women today have a depth and breadth of equality they wouldn't have otherwise.

The Old Ones cannot see much past the mirror of their own reflection. Nor can they move beyond the walls of their Feminist Studies, a cloister which does not allow its postulants to deviate far from the received wisdom, the collective orthodoxy of patriarchal obstacles to freedom, an orthodoxy which increasingly is believed only by the inmates and their immediate superiors.

In other words, with their silence re Islam's treatment of women (among other acts of omission) modern feminism has brought about its own irrelevance. Having missed the boat -- actually, having failed even to appear on the wharf when the boat sailed -- American mainstream feminism is doomed gradually to disappear as the 1970's 'pioneers' age and shuffle off this mortal coil. None too soon, say those who follow.

Who among the young and idealistic cares to continue to batter the dead horse of abortion choice? Roe v. Wade is thirty years old; it's not going anywhere. However, the insistence that the extremism of partial birth abortion is a legitimate "choice" turns away young women who might otherwise join the fray.

Who among today's college students has not noticed that women now outnumber men in academia? Except for the cloistered postulants of Feminist Studies, who reads Carol Gilligan's discredited work?

Who among these young women are willing to sacrifice their children on the altar of women's autonomy? Today's young women remember their own painful latch-key childhoods. They are in no hurry to inflict that history on their own progeny.

Today's regnant feminism will eventually be replaced by the new generation of women with a form that more clearly meets the needs of these young women. Meanwhile, the banner protesting the abuse of women in Islam is going to be carried by others. The Old Guard has let its chance go by.

The Problem of Good

 
In the comments section of a recent Belmont Club post, just before the tsunami disaster in South Asia, a discussion began concerning Kevin Sites. Responding to one of the commenters, Wretchard wrote:

If Mr. Sites has been deleting critical comments, I would be very disappointed in him. Belmont Club is exhibit A in the policy of giving every opinion, short of incitement, the freedom of the site. Yes, even DoubleStandard. Paradoxically, I think criticism sharpens the quest for truth. What should anyone fear except error?

The real value of this blog is that it encourages readers to contribute their opinions. The process of thinking through a situation, writing out an opinion and then discovering that it is no worse and frequently better than the stuff dished out by talking heads is a powerfully liberating experience. It is the process, not necessarily the result that is really subversive.

The longer it goes on the more dangerous the revolution becomes. Someone compared the rise of the Internet to the invention of the printing press. When books were the province of a few you could only come to knowledge through someone else. When books became common, people could learn for themselves, which put quite a few mediocrities out of business. Doubtless there will be those, as happens with people who interpret scripture do-it-yourself, who will get it all cockeyed. But on the whole mass produced books were a good thing.

There are some who are shocked, shocked at the act of a private person musing out loud about what seems like a staged photograph. 'How dare you, how dare you raise these questions'. Yet to those who grew up on the Internet, this attitude is puzzling in the extreme. It's a natural as breathing, a wholly different tradition. There must be hundreds of sites out there saying I'm a jerk. So what? This blog is just a meme, that's all. I am nothing. I don't even have a name. There must be zillions out there who disagree with my ideas. But so what? If my ideas are wrong they'll die. If they are right, not even I can stop them. Scary when you think of it.

But I forget that people out there in the old media have got a consciousness of status which they value. Some may subconsciously think of yours miserably truly as a one of them wannabe. I can't even aspire to what I don't understand. Merry Christmas everybody.

Buddy Larsen then responded to Wretchard:

Merry Christmas to you, too, Wretchard. You've fought the good fight all along, but on this, you alone looked twice at that pic, and asked the right questions. The rest of us had already looked at it, registered it as hellish stuff, and moved on, a little sickened. Just as we were supposed to as always sheepishly do. What you did with your "Whoaaa, hold on a minute" was to give a real gift to the world. Pretty good work for a mere meme, a nameless entity in cyberspace.

Wretchard's response was:

Buddy,

The one thing Saddam left out of reckoning was the existence of people who wouldn't go along. When you think of it, the Problem of Evil is the dual of the Problem of Good. The chief problem with accepting the existence of God is the fact that evil exists. Yet the mirror problem afflicts those which would deny God. Why does beauty, why does superfluity of good exist? Against the ichneumon wasp there is the problem of accounting for a Francis of Assisi.

And so it is here. Men of good will are the problem from a certain point of view. They are the obstacle which must be removed at all costs. A little more money, intimidation and corruption should do it. But the bad guys are left scratching their heads in wonderment at why victory is denied them.

But they are part of the scenery; a curse, if you will. "For the Shadow was only a passing thing and Frodo knew there would always be truth and high beauty beyond its power to corrupt."

Pure goodness is always a surprise when it appears in the world. To cite a recent example:

A man walked into a homeless shelter in Denver last night and handed out 35-thousand dollars to the residents.

He gave five-thousand dollars to a family of six for housing. He passed out 100-dollar bills to 300 people.

One man who's been at the shelter since last month says, "It was like seeing Santa Claus and God all at once."

Or look at the way Western Civilization has responded to the tragedy wrought by the tsunami: relief efforts, spearheaded by Australian aid agencies, are entering the Indonesian province of Aceh on the island of Sumatra to begin the process of aiding the injured, bringing food, water, and clothing to the displaced, and stemming the inevitable onslaught of epidemics. As it happens, Aceh is a hotbed of Islamist activity, home to the Free Aceh Movement, which aims to create an independent Islamic state. This region has been a refuge for some of the terrorists belonging to groups that planned and executed the Bali bombing which killed so many Australians.

So how does Australia respond? By coming to the aid of Indonesia, even at the risk of giving possible succor to some of its enemies.

Another quote from The Lord of the Rings is apropos: Frodo says, "I wish it need not have happened in my time." Gandalf responds, "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

King of America?

 
The English word "king" is derived from the Old English cyning, which in turn is derived from the Germanic stem cyn, meaning "kind" or "people", and cognate with the word "kin", the German könig, and the Latin gens (this last is related to "generate" and "gentile"). The suffix ‑ing means "representative or exemplar of". Thus the original sense of the word would have been "he who represents the people". The king stood as an exemplar of his kind, the leading avatar of his kindred.

The first king of England is considered to be Alfred the Great, during whose ninth-century reign the Anglo-Saxon regions of England united for the first time, in defense against the Danes. One of the characteristic strengths of the English was their unusual ability to unite against a common threat, something which their Celtic neighbors in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland found hard to do.

But if the English found unity against their enemies, they remained an individualistic people with a suspicion of central authority. From the time of the Magna Carta, through the early parliaments and the height of the British Empire, England was a constitutional monarchy in which restraints were placed on the power of the king by both law and custom. It is through this tradition, with its emphasis on the freeborn yeoman and the common law, that parliamentary democracy came into the world, the great gift of the English to Western civilization.

The English carried the tradition of their "ancient liberties" to the New World, and in the United States, with the monarchy removed, the first constitutional republic was formed. However, in America, the culture of the English was mixed and merged with another one, that of the Celts.

In his book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America , James Webb describes the effect on America of the great Celtic migrations. After the initial English settlements, waves of Scots and Irish came to the English colonies in North America, possibly comprising more than half of the influx of new arrivals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Irish were fleeing oppression, the Scots were fleeing marginalization, and all were fleeing poverty. They brought with them a fierce individualism, a warrior spirit, and a deep-seated distrust of all authority. They spread through the Appalachians and later moved west, bearing a strong religious sense and an ethic of hardy self-reliance that has become a major thread in the American cultural fabric.

The marriage of the English system of law and government with the temperament of the Celts has produced the modern American character. It gives us on the one hand a genius for organization and an impetus to unity against outside threats, while on the other hand we are fractious, doubtful of authority, and ready to fight when confronted.

So, if it were possible to have a king of this hybrid race, who would it be? He would have to represent us, to be one of our kind. He must be an individualist, with a fighting spirit and a fierce loyalty to his own people. He would have a rock-solid religious faith, one that can withstand the challenges and pitfalls that life places before him. He would believe in the rights inherent in a free citizen, as opposed to the dictates of the state. And he would stand as a pillar of strength against all threats to his kin.

Thus, if America could have a king, it would be George W. Bush, for surely he represents us. People who hate him do so for that reason: he holds up a mirror to reveal the American character, and they do not like what they see. Perhaps they want an America that is more nuanced, more sophisticated, more erudite and European. But that is not who we are; we are simple folk with an ingenuous open-handedness, a nation of hayseeds and rubes who stormed the beaches of Normandy, raised the flag at Iwo Jima, and made the march up to Baghdad, a fierce, indomitable, and untiring folk. President Bush is the exemplar of our kind, the one who best represents the qualities which make us what we are.

The Anglic Reach, Part III

The Kaiser's Jihad

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, one of Britain's war aims was to secure the Suez canal and its access to the oilfields of Mesopotamia. The British had a long history of cultivating contacts among the natives in the populations they ruled, and of fielding men who became immersed in the local culture. During the war they benefited from this policy, since they already had a number of experienced Arabic speakers in place in the Arab world, the most notable among them being T. E. Lawrence.

The Kaiser also had his eye on the same strategic area, and, at the opening of the war encouraged his Turkish allies to raise a jihad against the British and French. The Turkish sultan, Enver Pasha, followed the German advice, and the Turks rallied to the call, fighting successfully with ferocious Islamic zeal against the British and Australians in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915.

But the Ottoman Empire consisted of more than just Turkey, and the Arab provinces were not the sultan's to command. Despite all their pre-war espionage and intrigue, the Germans miscalculated the behavior of the Arabs. Donald M. McKale writes:

During the war, while the conflict between Constantinople and the sharif intensified, Berlin eagerly pushed the Turks to allow German contact with Husayn and even direct involvement in Hijaz, the region bordering the Red Sea in Arabia which he ruled. German objectives were confused and their policies toward the sharif were incoherent. At times Germany solicited the sharif's support, but in other instances it sought to use Hijaz to pursue its imperial interests in Africa.

Part of Berlin's difficulty resulted from its failure to understand the sharif, his tense relations with the Turks over his rule in Hijaz, and his political goals. In June 1916, Husayn revolted against the Ottoman government after it refused to guarantee him a hereditary, autonomous amirate (territory under the jurisdiction of an Islamic prince) in Hijaz. The sharif wished to secure his position not only against Turkish interference but also against such rival Arab chieftains as Ibn Saud in northeastern Arabia. The Germans, like the Turks and the British, believed Husayn had greater ambitions. They thought that he sought to acquire the caliphate from the Ottoman sultan and to break completely from Turkish political and religious suzerainty.

Lawrence's invaluable contribution was to see the strategic possibilities inherent in Arab nationalism. His understanding of the Arab character allowed him live amongst the Arabs and influence their decisions. An Ottoman assault on the Suez canal failed, at least in part, because the Arabs would not come to the Turks' support. In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, the British were able to persuade the Arab tribes to revolt against their Turkish masters. Later in the war Lawrence and his Arab allies retook Baghdad, entered Jerusalem, and eventually pushed the Turks out of the Hijaz. The Germans were never able to threaten British access to the oilfields.

But the Law of Unintended Consequences had the last laugh. The Germans raised a jihad; the British raised an Arab revolt to counter it. In later years, as the Arab states became ungovernable from a colonial standpoint, they also became sinkholes of despotism under their local rulers, creating a fertile seedbed for the Great Jihad which has emerged to confront all of us in the West. Awakening the slumbering monster of Arab nationalism led inexorably to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Gamel Abdul Nasser, Yasser Arafat, Hafez Assad, Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, and Osama bin Laden.

The Anglic Reach, Part II

The Alipore Bombing

The British Empire governed its dominions loosely. Imperial India originated as a commercial operation, and when the East India Company was disbanded and reorganized as a Crown Colony, the rulers of India continued to run the colony in a way that facilitated profitable commerce.

To this end Britain delegated a relative autonomy to its local representatives, and organized the education and advancement of natives of India so as to make them capable functioning in a modern state. The schools, government, and cultural institutions of India today still reflect the enormous influence Britain exerted for more than two centuries.

As India became a modern industrial state with a relatively well-educated elite, it took part in the awakening nationalism that emerged in Europe and other parts of the world in the late 19^th century. In the birth of the Congress Party, India embarked upon the course that led eventually to its independence in 1947.

As the members of native elite became educated, they also became restive under their colonial masters. In 1905 the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, announced that Bengal would be divided into two province. Ostensibly this was for administrative reasons, but its intended effect was to impede Indian nationalism.

Indians objected strongly to Curzon's decision, and in 1908, after strikes and boycotts, the situation came to a head:

...the unrest also manifested itself in a series of terrorist attacks on British officials, culminating in a bomb attack on a British judge on 30 April 1908 that misfired and killed two British women. There was a police crackdown, and investigators found out that the terrorists were not mere disaffected lowlife thugs, but prominent Bengali officials, the Indian elite. The investigation led to the arrest of 26 young men, all of them highly educated and of elite backgrounds. One, Aurobindo Ghose, had gone through the university system back in Britain and achieved stellar honors.

The 26 were put on trial in Alipore. The trial demonstrated the way the British mind was becoming more and more conflicted over colonialism. As mentioned earlier in this series, in some ways the British Empire was the "wrong empire", based on colonial dominance and not on the British system of rights and democracy. In fact, even the wrong empire couldn't shut out those ideals completely, and instead of a quick sham trial leading to swift executions, the Alipore trial dragged out for almost seven months. Aurobindo Ghose was acquitted, and even though the ringleader of the group, Aurobindo Ghose's brother Barendra Kumar Ghose, was sentenced to death, the sentence was later commuted.

The Ghoses could be seen as early 20^th century versions of Mohammed Atta. They was not a poverty-stricken victims of imperialist oppression, driven by despair and anomie to strike out at their white oppressors, but the children of privilege, whose families benefited enormously from British rule.

Unlike the September 11^th hijackers, the Ghose brothers acted not primarily from religious motives, though Hinduism played a large part in the nationalist movement in India. Nationalism itself was the issue; having learned the concept of human rights from the British, they wished it to be applied to their own people.

This is where Mohammed Atta was different. The culture of the West contributed to his education and economic well-being, but, as he became aware of the principles and ideals inherent in Western civilization, it was global Islamofascist ideology, rather than nationalism, that caused him to reject those principles and ideals emphatically.

Standing Together for the Jews

 
In a the comments section on Belmont Club, a regular commenter, Buddy Larsen, responded to an anti-Zionist commenter with the following post, which is worth reproducing in its entirety:

Cedarford, I'm not gonna ignore you; you are no dummy, and you're trying hard to present an alternate Israel narrative. So let me be blunt. I don't give a rat's ass if Israel has stepped on toes. Birth is not a pretty process. If Sharon and Bush are licking each other's boots and they make a little room on the side somewhere, I'll crawl up and lick boots, too.

I Like Israel. I like Jews. They're smarter than anyone else except maybe Chinese Nukuler Fizzassists, and their women are gorgeous. Jews and Blacks make almost [all] the fun and wit and music in America. Us honkies just watch, and Thank Jesus we have more than Ingmar Bergman and Monty Python.

Israel is a bona fide Heroic Saga, the only modern story that harks back to our mythic heroic western cultural birth. It is a heroic archteypal little nation that has held its shit together surrounded by 500 million ravening death demons and a corrupted old whore of a U.N. so soaked in Jew-hatred that it squishes bile everytime it lifts a flabby ass-cheek to fart at America and her friends.

And yet still, still, Israel holds optimism up and and keeps the faith, so that the best part of the world has an example of the indomitable nature of the human spirit.

So, I don't care that much about your case. You may be right, but I don't care. I need, I personally need, for Israel to thrive. The Israel story to me is a strong validation of the triumph of good over evil. Should Israel fall, that to me would be a signal of the final fall of mankind.

Do you see what I mean, Cedarford? Israel is SPIRITUALLY correct, so it doesn't matter a flying fig to people like me whether or not she is politically correct.

And, thank you for clarifying my feelings for me. Never would've drilled into it this deeply, without your comments. But, I can't understand your position. You might as well be from Mars as far as I'm concerned. What would YOU like to see happen to Israel, Cedarford? And you still haven't discussed the 'Protocols'.

The Anglic Reach, Part I

The Magdala Hostages

For two centuries before the advent of American hegemony, the British Empire was the greatest power in the world. At its height it encompassed more than a quarter of the world's land surface and governed approximately the same proportion of the world's inhabitants. The British ruled their colonial peoples with a light hand, and, though they were often cynical and brutal in maintaining their rule, their dominion was incomparably more liberal and enlightened than any alternative form of governance during the same period.

It was through the British diaspora that the concepts of the rule of law, individual rights, and democracy were spread to the extent that they are known today. The atrocities and excesses of British rule were always exposed and decried not by other nations, but by dissenting groups in Britain itself. This process of self-doubt and moral debate culminated in the dissolution of the Empire in the 20^th century.

It is natural for United States to have continued this process. After all, the American revolution sought to reclaim the "ancient liberties" which the colonists knew to be their natural rights as British subjects. The common culture of the English-speaking nations includes shared concepts of political economy and governance. This collection of nations is referred to here as the Anglic Reach, and includes non-white heirs of the British Empire, such as India and Singapore; after centuries of British rule, the latter countries have evolved and developed their own versions of the same political ideas.

Because it is the pre-eminent power of the Anglic Reach, it falls to the United States to perform the functions that the imperial center in Britain performed in earlier times. The American imperium is different from the British, since it declines to govern, seeking only to create the conditions in which commerce and ideas may flow freely among nations. Nevertheless, some of the parallels between the British Empire and the current struggle against the Great Islamic Jihad are striking.

The Magdala hostage incident has a resonance for modern America:

In 1866, the "mild Hindoo" (and his Sikh and Muslim brethren) were sent overseas to deal with a crisis. The Emperor Theodore (Tewodros) of Abyssinia had written the British government to request diplomatic recognition. The British Colonial Office didn't even bother to reply, and Theodore, though justly angry at the snub, went off the deep end by arresting all the Europeans in his country and locking them up in his remote mountain fortress at Magdala. A diplomatic mission was sent to try to resolve the crisis peacefully, but ended up prisoners as well... In April 1867, Queen Victoria sent a request to the Emperor Theodore for the release of the prisoners. It wasn't answered, and so the orders went out over the telegraph cables to create a plan for a rescue mission.

The commander entrusted with the rescue mission, Sir Robert Napier, went about his task in a way reminiscent of the 21^st century American military. A huge expeditionary force in India was created, and in November 1867 the immense logistical task of equipping, provisioning, and moving it to Africa was begun.

It took a few more months of getting the details together before the expedition could set out. By modern standards, such delays would be intolerable, but things moved more slowly in such times and in fact the expedition was a monster undertaking. There were 13,000 British and Native troops, backed by 26,000 support personnel, mostly coolies, with tens of thousands of animals, including 44 elephants. Napier's kit even included a prefabricated harbor with a lighthouse, and all the parts for setting up a rail line to keep his force supplied.

It took the British three tough months to march to Magdala. In another element of the story that has a modern feel to it, the fight for the fortress turned out to be appallingly one-sided: the British force inflicted 1,900 casualties on the Abyssinians, with only 20 Britishers wounded in return. The hostages were rescued; the Emperor Theodore committed suicide rather than be hauled off in chains. The troops sang "God Save The Queen" as the fortress went up in flames, to be wracked by a enormous explosion when the fires reached its magazines. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli received the Emperor's necklace.

This story strongly resembles the first Persian Gulf War or the recent war in Iraq: a technologically advanced nation projects massive power halfway across the world, engineering an enormously complex logistical feat to do so, and conducts an asymmetrical war against a militarily inferior foe, taking almost no casualties in the process. Abyssinia was a Christian empire, however, so the parallel is not exact.

In the 20^th century Britain stood resolute under the onslaught of a succession of empires far more brutal and barbaric than its own. In the process its strength was exhausted, and it relinquished its empire peacefully after the Second World War. Its heirs in the Anglic Reach have much to learn from it.

A Sheik Spreads the "Franklin Prophecy" Hoax

 
MEMRI reports today on a sermon given by Sheik Abd Al-Jalil Al-Karouri on November 19^th from the Al-Shahid Mosque in Khartoum. An excerpt from the transcript:

"What is America's interest in this mess [i.e. Falluja]? Many Americans, after their president won a second term, opened a small window toward Canada: The electronic escape window [sic] to Canada has become increasingly popular because they want to escape the land of freedom and democracy. If America wants to preserve the country it has established, it must listen to [Benjamin] Franklin's advice, who warned them against the Jews. Now the Jews are leading them into these battles and this mess."

"Franklin's advice" is a reference to a supposed speech made in 1787, a transcript of which somehow evaded the notice of historians until the 1930's. Along with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the blood libel, and innumerable other anti-Semitic hoaxes, it entered the arsenal of propaganda used by hate groups to smear the Jews, from the Nazis down to the present day.

In 1954 the Anti-Defamation League investigated and debunked the hoax:

The late Carl Van Doren, a biographer of Benjamin Franklin made this report:

"The speech against the Jews which Benjamin Franklin is alleged to have made [at] the Constitutional Convention of 1787 is a forgery, produced within the past five years [1933-38]. The forger, whoever he was, claims that the speech was taken down by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina and preserved in his Journal. The forger presumably knew that, in a letter to John Quincy Adams dated December 30, 1818, Pinckney said he had kept a Journal of the proceedings at the Convention. But this Journal, if it ever existed, has never been found. The forger claims that Pinckney 'published' the Journal 'for private distribution among his friends' with the title Chit-Chat Around the Table During Intermissions. No copy of any such printed Journal has come to light. Not content with these two claims, the forger has further asserted that the original manuscript of Franklin's speech, apparently from Pinckney's Journal, is in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. The Franklin Institute does not possess the manuscript.

The forger's authority for his document is nearly as mythical as could be imagined. He cites a manuscript which does not exist, a printed book or pamphlet which nobody has seen, a Journal which has been lost for more than a hundred years. There is no evidence of the slightest value that Franklin ever made the alleged speech or ever said or thought anything of the kind about the Jews."

A level of Jew-hatred found only on the outermost fringes in the West is part of the mainstream in the Muslim world. In the Middle East the Middle Ages never ended: the sneaky conniving Jews still skulk around eating children, poisoning wells, and, despite their miniscule numbers, contriving to influence events and leaders by some form of infernal mind control. If only America had heeded Franklin's warning!

Göbbels would be proud.

The Power and the Glory of Islamic Women

 
What gives with Western feminism? Families of Muslim women rape, torture, behead, crucify, and hang them in public squares - all because they have committted the truly mortal sin of being female - yet the silence here on the behalf of these victims is deafening. Compared to the suffering of their Islamic sisters, the indignant chatter about 'oppression' emanating from women in the West is obscene.

Feminists in the U.S. claim that girls in school do less well than boys, and this happens because "America today is a girl-destroying place. Everywhere girls are encouraged to sacrifice their true selves...girls come of age in a misogynistic culture in which men have most of the political and economic power, and girls sense their lack of power." Misogynistic? Girl-destroying? Is America, the destroying place for girls, a recognizable country?

For contrast, try these cautionary tales:

• in Sudan women who refuse to convert to Islam from Christianity are gang-raped, their breasts are cut off. Then they are left to die.
• in Pakistan laws are structurally biased against women, especially since the advent of the Hadood Ordinances in 1979. Now when coerced sexual assaults cannot be proved, the victim becomes an offender, one who enjoyed illicit sexual activity. She is therefore liable to punishment. Safia Bibi, a blind eighteen year old was raped, subsequently becoming pregnant. Since there was insufficient evidence to prove rape ("sufficient" evidence being eye-witness testimony of four adult Muslim men), the pregnancy itself was evidence of her immoral behavior. Thus she was sentenced to three years in jail and fifteen lashes for having sex outside marriage.
• In Yemen on learning that his daughter had eloped with a man from another clan, a father gathered sons, brothers, uncles and cousins, and headed a convoy of twenty cars to storm the bride's new home. Upon retrieving her, she was thrown into one of the cars. As the convoy returned, and reached the edge of her village, her father hurled her to the asphalt and had every car drive over her.
• In Jordan, a man received a six-month prison term for stabbing his younger divorced sister thirty times. The murder, termed a misdemeanor by the tribunal, was minimized because the father of both brother and sister dropped charges against his son. The defendant was also sentenced to one week for intoxication and to two months for carrying a knife.
• In Palestine a sixteen year-old was raped by her younger brother. Once her pregnant condition became known in the wider community it fell to her older brother to kill her in order to avenge the family honor. "She made a mistake," said one of her male cousins. "She had to pay for it."

Ah, the absolute power of Muslim women, holding Islamic men by the short hairs; indeed the old Arab saying is true: "a man's honor lies between a woman's legs."