Hatred and 'Context'

In a Jewish Chronicle article of 5^th April 2013 I was stunned by a title (“Hatred that needs no ‘context’”) because by including a single word (‘that’) in the title, it created an ethical minefield which I am certain, was not the intent of the author, Geoffrey Alderman.

Hatred is an emotional response, not logical; it is based on feelings and fears, on negative experiences and learned behaviors.  We can hate poverty and pollution but even that is a learned response to external stimuli.  When applied to human beings or illogically, to nations, it runs counter to our Judeo-Christian ethical base-line of how we should react to others.    Nazi Germany felt it necessary to create a Nazi Church because in theological terms there was a basic incompatibility between Nazism and Christianity.  In the old Soviet empire communism simple banned the teaching of Judaism as it discouraged the teaching of other faiths.

Surely in the 21^st Century we should all understand that hatred is no more than an excuse for intemperance by the weak, the damaged, or the simple-minded and that while we are all of us born ‘empty vessels’ we are all given choices of what we may place in those vessels.

As a Jewish child, growing up in the generation following the Shoah I naively believed that one who had suffered must be pure of heart and that by extension, all of us who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War should be similarly touched by virtue.  It was a bit of a shock to be woken from my reverie.

To expect someone else's ideal of virtue to be lived by those who have experienced pain or by those who live in existential dread is to have no understanding of human relationships, no empathy at all. It is simply racism concealed as faux concern. Suffering is fear.  We rarely fight back but given the opportunity (and of greater importance) the means to resist, we should fight back.

I only understood this when someone with whom I became acquainted expressed hatred against another group.  I was repelled by her.  I did not understand how she could feel, let alone express such terrible emotions.

She had been gang raped.

I could not hate as she did, but it humanized her. She was a Jewish bigot. I still find that juxtaposition of two words uncomfortable to express.  But hatred can have roots, whether imagined or real, mythological or by a concerted act of creation, determined by a sick mind.

My history should make me bitter and hateful but my religion makes me uneasy and even outraged by prejudice. But being human I cannot deny the fact that it is a very human fault. As emotional entities we are all subject to its battering of our fragile psyches.

It is why the medium of electronic communication has become the battleground in the Israeli-Arab, Muslim-Jewish conflict over Israel-Palestine.

Prejudice serves to preclude debate by making the crime of simply being, so egregious as to refute the opportunity for discussion. It is why the walk-out by British Member of Parliament, George Galloway was so hateful. It demonstrated that the founding member of Britain’s “Respect” Party was a fascist, no more than a propagandist for antisemitism.  It is rumored that he is also a Muslim. If this is true it shamed his identity on all levels: as a coward, as a fascist politician and as a religious bigot.

I do not say that the State of Israel can do no wrong. But any crimes it has committed in its pursuit of survival in the Arab ocean are no more than its imperfect quest for national independence while in the presence of a cornucopia of hate drenched Islamist opposition.  Its failure is in its inability to confront this maelstrom of hatred. Israel remains in the toddler stage of its independence. The Arab and Muslim world still refuses to accept its legitimacy and this is inevitable.  The former created Islam as a vehicle for conquest, their failure to decisively overcome any opposition denies the authenticity of their endeavor.  And the internal conflict within Israel is the essence of a democratic society and is intrinsic to the creation of an identity its enemies are desperate to obliterate.

Nations are like people.   If we are hurt, how long does it take to forgive the crimes against us? How long before we can trust our adversary or our enemy? We, as a people have been persecuted by Islam for 1,400 years and that is a long time to suffer, at the very least ridicule, occasionally torture and worse, death, in the name of Muhammad or his god, Allah. It is without an iota of relevance that the transgressions we have endured as proof of Muslim superiority are a violation of Muslim behavior.  How many generations must pass before the Islamic world is even capable of accepting our theoretical equality? 

“It is easier to run against a threat than it is to articulate a vision of where we should be headed and how to get there” David Rothkopf (Foreign Policy May/June 2012)

Oppositional defiance dressed up in the Geo-political / quasi scientific psycho-babble of ‘misunderstood signals’ and ‘failed opportunities’ cannot equate to an acceptable excuse in the 21^st Century. Fourteen hundred years of Jew bating (and everyone else bating) by a monolithic Muslim people may have created an (almost) genetic if not instinctual antipathy towards the rights of the ‘other’ but it explains intolerance, bigotry and racial hatred, it does not excuse it.

The crescendo of conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic pronouncements excreted from the bowels of the Liberal-Left and Muslim world do not and cannot contribute toward peace or co-existence and those people who think that it is always darkest, moments before the light are deluded in their assumption of benevolent tyranny.  Hate is a drug and cannot be cured by giving way to it.

A culture of hate and incitement has always been part of Arab – Muslim society; it has been a central feature of the European churches as well.

When Britain’s own minister for the Middle East, Mr Alistair Burt contextualized hatred in February this year, he was committing a crime against humanity.

According to Professor Alderman, Alistair Burt, the British government minister “urged his audience several times (seven by my reckoning) to be mindful of ‘the context’ in which such hate-speech was aired.”  Mr Burt also stated that “to place it all in terms of the rhetoric and not to understand the wider context will not help us to get to where we need to be.”

So according to this genius, we Jews should have the right to revenge ourselves on the Muslim world for its crimes against us over the centuries, and, likewise, for Britain’s crimes against us.  It sounds like someone should ask the honorable parliamentarian how, in the context of ongoing Muslim incitement; the world should react to Muslim cries of innocence?

To contextualize Judeophobic hatred or for that matter anti-Black or any other form of hatred, is always unacceptable. To understand it does not provide it with a stamp of respectability.  And those that try to say it does?

They are at best ‘mistaken’ but more likely, they are spiritually tainted, corrupt or simply evil. 

Death By a Thousand Cuts

There has been some discussion in the newspapers about ‘contextualizing hatred’. It was Britain’s own minister for the Middle East, Mr Alistair Burt who said this. We must never accuse our politicians of ethical thinking. ‘Context’ is a nice way to say that we can justify bigotry and even, joy of joys, sympathize with racial prejudice.  There is nothing as comforting as familiarity. I grew up in Australia and my winters were ‘cold’ but the flora was green and the skies grey. Our suburban flora changed very little between the two seasons of summer and winter. I immigrated to an even colder, temperate climate and discovered the reality of experiencing two more seasons. Spring and autumn were spectacularly beautiful but winter was filled with deciduous death and decay. It was visually depressing. To many people born into this cycle, winter induces a recognized psychological illness called SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). My point is that we are as accustomed to celebrating our fears and our prejudices as we are, our seasons of hibernation and renewal.

The problem is that in times of disruption and change in our life we cling to the familiarity of our past experiences and learned behaviors because the familiar, even the negative, is a kind of comfort. Racism and religious bigotry does not need logic to flourish, just a means of dispersal and a justification (or ‘Context’).

The pampered years that followed the 1970’s nurtured us towards an understanding that anything was possible and that instant gratification was desirable, because if you did not get there first someone else would. It was fun while it lasted but it also taught us that we did not need to respect those with whom we disagree because having the self-confidence to achieve an aim is not dependent on that aim being correct or desirable, only achievable.

When the bubble burst it dashed the hopes of the many that missed out!  And it led us into the worst economic crisis since the Depression of 1929.  It also led us into a democratic crisis of confidence that continues to unfold across the globe.   The British media corruptly obtained information through subterfuge and dishonesty but everyone did it and only the (foreign) Murdoch Empire was punished for it. The judicial public inquiry (The Leveson Inquiry) that examined the overall industries failures and made a series of recommendations was a waste of time because no-one in the industry accepted their culpability – except of course Murdoch. It was a classic snow job.

Frustration and anger requires an outlet.  Traditionally, we human beings have engaged in warfare to satisfy the urge for revenge. It remains a ‘necessary’ release that protects the ruling classes from the inability of the ruled to accept that they are powerless to attain justice when they are wronged. It is why Western law accepts that justice must not only be done but must also be SEEN to be done. The cynic would modify the aphorism to: Justice does not need to be done; it only needs to BE seen to be done.

This is where we weave warfare into the social tapestry. With its royal tentacles spread throughout Europe (the Russian, German and British Royal Families were all related through Queen Victoria’s offspring) World War One was seen as an exciting adventure by its most upper of classes, an adventure that ultimately led to the violent deaths of over fifty million people.

In order to foment conflict, humanity bathes itself in a comforting pool of self-righteous superiority and self-assured contentment. When we are all wrapped up in multiple layers of a familiar and consoling prejudice it is easier to accept a bleak future knowing that deep down it is all someone elses' fault.

And so we return to ‘contextualizing hatred’.  It is reason enough to fight every insult or imputed slander.   In an era where identities are confused or in transition we should be wary of any slight. It is not oversensitivity but awareness that the cumulative effect of the accusation or lie is more important than the single barb. It is not necessarily a single cut that kills. Methodical slicing incapacitates the victim until the delivery of the coup de grace.

Descent into Darkness

My Rabbi wrote in our local synagogue magazine that as a youngster she was never “allowed to say ‘I am hungry’ in front of adults” – It was in deference to those who had experienced the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when many Dutch scrambled to survive starvation by eating grass.  I worked alongside of Russian factory workers who remembered the Great Patriotic War (of 1941-1945).  They still carried a hunk of bread in their trouser-pockets.  It was a habit for those who never knew from where or even when the next meal would be.

Compare that to the ‘me - obsessed’ generations that have followed on from the 1970’s and we could be excused for feeling smug in our so-called moral superiority. It is not that we are by necessity, more ethical in our behaviour but our saving grace is our perception of consciousness.  We may not follow our consciences but we are at least aware of our actions.

The resurrection of the Left, in particular the hard Left, is only possible because it harnesses the frustration felt by many of us within the post-Communist consumer driven wasteland.  These comfortable followers of liberal politics experience a deep dissatisfaction which unlike previous generations of fascisms’ foot soldiers has not prevented them from fighting their battles from the safety of their homes.

One alternate justification is that we are all too easily led and a substitute for the spiritual wilderness of our current age leads many young men and women to the seductive embrace of a rigidly prescriptive faith such as that of the casual bigotry of Islam or the hard left.

In any case, extremists are only able to manipulate dissatisfaction because of the paucity of competing philosophies, and once ensnared, the gullible are susceptible to ethical corruption.  Because of this it would be arrogant to believe that a barren spiritual life is any more desirous in our secular age than a life of spiritual seclusion or material deprivation. But the opposite also applies here. It is only through knowledge that we can choose.

During the Roman era, two thousand years ago, allegiance to competing gods and goddesses was as common a fashion statement as this year’s fashion labels are to us.   If we no longer bend our knee to Zeus (Jupiter) it is because we prefer football teams, pop icons and fashion labels.  In relative terms our following of modern idols is probably no less time consuming or expensive than the latest sculptural offering of Dionysus (Bacchus) or Aphrodite (Venus) was.  We still talk about fate, we fear the tempests and it does not matter whether they were created by nature or the gods; we have not much more control now than we did then (when at least we could beg for the intervention of our favourite deities).  We have bad luck or good fortune and ascribe both to something that is beyond our control.

Perhaps the reason that our idols are now a mindless but glittering theatre of the arcane is that they are an alternative ritual to religion while politics is become a passionate expression of belief.  They do not require much of our input apart from what we take out from our pocket.   The competition for souls may have had its basis in ignorance of our physical world but ‘knowledge’ was clarity in ancient times.  How are we better off today? Are we any different now that our heads are filled with constantly changing truths presented to us as fact? We may not be as susceptible to peripatetic allegiances but our clarity dips into and out of focus leaving most of us alienated from our spiritual sources, confused, frightened and insecure for the future.  It is much easier to worship celebrity, fashions change. A life without spiritual depth still requires an emotional anchor and it may as well be Versace or Manchester United as God or Brahma.

And hence the dilemma for our society.  The shallowness of contemporary society robs us of the opportunity to confront the issues that divide us by providing us with a world of benign distractions and credit card funded comforts on one side and on the other side, selected biases defined by cant and comfortable prejudice.  Those people that do choose to engage with society do so from the safety of familiarity and too often it is the extremists that define the direction because only they care enough to scream and shout. It is society that encourages them because it empowers them in order to render them less threatening to the majority. Their tactics of intimidation work.  With no organised opposition to confront them their path to power is assured and like sheep we and our descendants are skipping backwards into darkness mostly oblivious to the gathering storm.

Trusting our Friends – the Dilemma

There are people who argue that the Koran, the Muslim bible, is a book of peace.  Having read this ‘book of peace’ I have found that it incites the faithful to hatred for those that reject Islam and justifies eternal warfare against those of us of inferior faith. Earlier verses are tinged with tolerance but this is almost certainly because it was written at a time when the faithful were insufficiently strong to impose their will on the majority.  The earlier verses are therefore prescriptive of conquest by deception. The Doctrine of Abrogation states however that earlier verses are cancelled by the later contradictory verses.  Most of these latter verses are both militant and oppressive towards non-Muslims.

“Let not believers take disbelievers as allies (friends)” (Koran 3:28)

“O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies (friends)” (Koran 5:51)

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last day …and who do not adopt the religion of truth [i.e. Islam]..” (Koran 9:29)

Prejudice is the true barrier to peace. 1,400 years of Islamic history ridicules the infidel nation.  Islam is an Arab blueprint for domination and central to Arab self-understanding; in order to be a true Arab one must also be a Muslim.  Edward Said (the father of Occidentalism) in one of his rare moments of public honesty stated that to genuinely experience the ‘joy’ of being ‘Arab’ it was preferable that one was also a Muslim.

How does this affect the Arab – Israeli conflict and the conduct of its Arab and LibLeft protagonists?  Indoctrination as a substitute for scholarship clouds any issue and effectively proscribes serious debate.  Cultural programming has sanitised Arab colonial crimes so effectively, it has occluded any discussion.  But then, it was pointed out in a recent article that Islamic Turkey is incapable of apologising for its genocide of Armenians and Kurds and its crimes against the Greek nation.   It is not just the Arab world for which the concept of guilt is unidirectional.

It is assumed that that which does not create advantage for the faithful and does not assist in imposing Islam on infidel individuals and nations, is of no value for study or, cultural retention. It is the death of intellectualism and a return to darkness.

But it is also the key to understanding the Arab and the Muslim antisemitic mindset.

The Jewish community has an unbroken presence in the Holy Land in spite of Arab attempts at eradicating their history.  Israel has been victim to the threat of, if not actual ethnic persecution for all of Islamic history.  For this reason Hebron was ethnically cleansed of its ancient Jewish community in 1929.  Jewish communities throughout Israel have suffered ethnic persecution since its conquest by Muhammad’s forces was completed in 638 AD.  Those people who for political or religious reasons have closed their hearts as well their minds to any evidence to the contrary, accept the revisionist history that denies any connection between Jews and Israel.  Therefore, by logical furtherance of this argument, they also deny the Christian connection to the Holy Land (unless they subscribe to a racist concept of supercessionism).

The constant threat of being stoned or murdered circumscribed then as it does today, every activity carried out by Jewish communities and not just in Israel but anywhere that Islam is present.  It is not something new as the Left tries to tell us, it is not a post 1948 phenomenon.

The reason that Jewish Israeli settlements are fenced-in is the same reason that every home owner possesses a fence, it defines ownership. But whereas fencing harks back to a romanticised era of knights, castles and moats, Israel’s gated communities are imperfectly prevented from being slaughtered down to the last baby by walls and wire fences.  The Boston bombers created IED’s (improvised explosive devices) of malevolent intent. Their construction was meant to cause indiscriminate carnage. Similar IED’s were a casual but deadly visitor in Israel’s public places before the construction of the barrier that separates it from its Palestinian Arab enemy.

The conflict between Israel, and Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has always been in its essence a refusal to grant Jews equal rights.  The right to Jewish self-determination was the subject of discussion between Jews in British Mandate Palestine and Arab leaders for over twenty years prior to independence but it was an idea with no currency whatsoever amongst Arab leaders.  The kernel within Zionism was Jewish self-determination but it also assumed equality for everyone else. Its failure was in its idealised, romantic view of the peaceful Arab, that same Arab who, it was presumed, would enthusiastically embrace his Jewish brothers and sisters, in peaceful co-existence. It was a dreamy universalism that had no anchor in the reality of Arab identity and in the casual cruelty of that identity.

300 Jewish civilians were murdered by Palestinians between the declared ceasefire of 1949 and 1956.  Arab bellicosity and threats of extermination culminated in the 6-Day War and Israel’s re-taking of Jerusalem.  Cycles of violence and hatred expressed internationally did not start with conquest in 1967.

In a Jewish Chronicle article of the 5^th of April the title summarised what has always been the issue: “Hatred needs no context.” But if we need it then we have inspiration in the form of incitement in the mosques, in schools and on their TV screens. We have the Koran and Hadith from which prayer leaders across the globe quote with enthusiasm. Hateful statements from leaders and senior government figures in both Egypt and Turkey do no more than mirror the ‘holy’ writings of Islam.

And meanwhile, the European Union and various United Nation agencies fund quasi-Nazi activity without a moment of shame.

And then we are told to trust, and to show faith in politicians and nations whose track record towards us is at best demonic.

Zionist values of yearning for peace and tolerance towards minorities will suffer as a result of drawn out experience of war and terror. Delegitimisation does not help to encourage trust. Prolonged battering cannot encourage faith.

Intelligent Idiots

Long ago I ceased to be surprised at the feigned or actual naivety displayed by Israel’s critics and their assorted antisemitic fellow travellers.  Is it fair to lump them together as one amorphous stain? If we see that the consequence of their behaviour results in the spread of an abomination then is there a difference between intentional silence that chooses not to ask the questions, and the apparent greater evil practiced by the racist-bigot who by their choice embraces the path of anti-Zionist/anti-Jewish hate?  

I have a cousin. He is a Mensa – that is to say that he scores in the top 98% of a standardised IQ test.  So he is very, very smart, but what does that mean?  When Israel grew tired of turning the other cheek and responded to attacks by Lebanese militias in the 1970’s he informed me, with smug superiority, that the conflict would be easily solved if Israel ceded “a couple of miles” of its territory in the north of Israel, to Lebanon. This unprecedented generosity would solve all territorial disputes.  I gently explained to him that the State of Israel was four miles wide at its narrowest point (at the Lebanese-Syrian-Israeli border). In fact I was wrong. It is three miles (five kilometres) wide at the narrowest point.  The idea was entirely impractical because rather than resolving anything, it would have encouraged greater bellicosity and aggression by the Arab world.

He ignored my response. Those with ‘greater intelligence’ often possess the knowledge to solve all conflicts if only we will listen to them. Intentional ignorance protects them from counter-factual arguments that may complicate their uncomplicated self-image.  Violence or intimidation – either intellectual or physical precludes even limited discussion and is a necessary part of the arsenal of the activist which discourages even the superficially fair minded from acknowledging the duality of conflict.

I recently read an analysis by the Australian anti American journalist John Pilger. He thoroughly rubbished the idea that Western society has a right to preserve its cultural identity. In particular he objected to any measures that were taken against imported bigotry - particularly where it harms his multicultural ideal.

We are afraid to acknowledge the dynamic mutuality of reciprocity that strengthens as well as demeans humanity. By example, if cultural integrity means that we respect the full body cover of the niqab and the hijab, (the head to foot covering that completely conceals the Muslim woman and is worn once the female reaches puberty) then equally, in a Western nation a woman must have the right to walk naked any where she wishes to do so, because that is her right to express her freedom of action in any way she feels it suitable. But both actions demean the female sex and neither is a pre-requisite of our society.  A woman must have the right to (un)dress as she feels appropriate, without being held hostage to the lack of masculine self-control or the benighted ethical values that characterised the caveman and is certainly, not the hallmark of a society that labels itself as ‘civilised’.

In the Muslim world, women and minorities are inferior, either through religious custom or legal statute. If, in the Western world, women and minorities have equal rights it is because our society acknowledges equality and legislates to ensure that we all adhere to current law, and not because it is a normal state of affairs.

The intelligent idiot applies one standard to the majority and another to the minority. Worse still, he or she places ‘the Jew’ in the category of being a member of the majority and thus excludes them from the protection offered to the minority. As a member of the majority, numeric superiority and custom provides automatic protection from the worst excesses of the minority.  But being categorised as part of a group does not vouchsafe acceptance by the group.  They exclude Jews from that group as well, thus isolating them from both. 

The intelligent idiot has no time for Jewish rights and that means he or she has no time for Jewish equality. He or she has no time to examine the nature of racism or religious bigotry and therefore Jewish self-determination is an unnecessary impediment to the noble (Arab or Muslim) savage practising their right to self-expression even though it is at the extreme expense of Jewish and other minorities.  This indifference, just in one example, has facilitated the Syrian orgy of blood-letting over the last two years.

“Peace, according to the great seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, is not merely the absence of war but rather a state of mind: a disposition to benevolence, consideration and justice.”     (Palestine Betrayed. Ephraim Karsh)

Our antagonists do not want peace with us, they want it without us. If boycotts are part of their arsenal then they must also be part of ours.  Our tactical armoury must equal the wealth of resources employed by them, against us. If we cannot reason with them, then as they attempt to isolate us, they themselves must be isolated.

We can win this war but it will be a long, drawn out conflict which will demand of us eternal vigilance.  “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."  Arthur Schopenhauer

Zionist Propaganda

Part 1. 

A home is demolished, a protester dies and gunships hover overhead as placard waving innocents face off an Israeli juggernaut. A picture really is worth a thousand words.  Its accuracy is of no consequence.  Winston Churchill made it simple for us when he said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on”.

After the 6-Day War of 1967 David and Goliath magically reversed their roles. I say ‘magically’ because the status quo remained unaltered while slowly and methodically only the perception radically changed. Success and a fundamental inability to appreciate the threat posed by a public opinion war camouflaged the corrosive effect that mounting criticism had on Israel and by extension, Israel’s supporters.  That Israel became an excuse for resurgent antisemitism is not relevant to renewed public prejudice.

It was not enough to change Israelis into a nation of Goliaths. In order to humiliate supporters and Israelis alike; in order to foreclose debate, the Israeli became the ‘Jew.’   Israel encouraged it, they were wrong to do so.  It made it easier to isolate them and to polarise the Diaspora.

Israel then became the Zionist entity and because the focus in Israel had shifted from the pioneer era to economic expansion, defending Zionism (as a unifying force for social cohesion) was forgotten in the scramble for wealth.   Prosperity was not a unique Israeli goal. Israel joined a Western cultural battleground.   Maybe the only difference was that Israel had failed first to resolve its national identity or the strategic threat to its national security.

To conflate Jew, Zionist and Israeli into one monolithic virus has made the task of opposing Israel even easier, particularly if you are Jewish.  An identity that is built on the negation of a part of that identity demonstrates both commitment and 'sacrifice'.  To be a vociferous and Jewish Uncle Tom legitimises prejudice.

Zionism, like democracy is always easy to blemish because unlike totalitarian ideologies it is easily misunderstood.  In its simplest form Zionism is the right of Jews to self-determination in their own homeland.  But to others, successfully labelling a people with a word they are not interested in understanding makes easy work of shifting the meaning from a blessing to a curse. This is how from bathing in our virtuous birth our public perception changed and we returned to a much more familiar, sinister historical portrayal as devil with horns.

That we permitted our enemies to dominate the media is our crime. That we continue to allow the pro-Palestinian, Arabist version of past and present history to be unchallenged is to blithely march towards extinction.  The irony is that if we successfully challenge our enemy they will accuse us of controlling not just the media but everything else; if we fail to challenge them we are still accused of controlling society. This is the classic fascist tactic that ensures we are damned with either course of action. That is their genius.  Do you have any suggestions how we can fight them?

There is more than one type of fear.  We are frightened to shout out loud our history of physical loss and we are reluctant to demand an end to prejudice even as it infests our society.  Rarely are our enemy forced to defend their tactics or their deceit. The intelligent bigot attempts to soothe our fears while we accept that the racist will despise us and work to undermine us because they are the living proof of our multicultural virility.

What we should be doing is attacking every ‘misinterpreted’ diatribe our enemies make. The Palestinian Spokeswoman, Hanan Ashwari gave us a 2013 Passover gift when she accused us of blood libel.  It is a timely reminder that co-existence is not part of the deal that the Arab world desires.  Every lie is one more stone thrown at our window, one more drop of poison in our well. We should neither forgive nor forget State sanctioned libels because they create a legacy that crosses the generations.

The only way to stop this debilitating struggle is to assault the senses as they have done and to shame the Left and their Liberal allies for their complicity in this antisemitic conspiracy. 

Part 2.

Fact 1.             The Arab world, and that includes the Palestinians, have persecuted Jew and non-Jew alike since Muhammad appeared just 1,400 years ago.

Fact 2.             The Arab world and that includes the Palestinians commit cultural genocide against us.  They steal our past, they violate our present and there is no reason to believe they do not intend to extinguish our future. A simple example is the claim that the Jewish Jesus was a Palestinian (Muslim); another, is that having ethnically cleansed East Jerusalem of its Jews they now state at every opportunity that ‘the Jews’ are trying to ‘Judaize’ Jerusalem.  This is a term that was used by the Nazis.  The people that have adopted this epithet have no shame.

Fact 3.             The Arab world and that includes the Palestinians never apologise for their lies. In fact, with the complicity of the international media (and the United Nations) they have made a virtue of deception and an ethic of dishonesty. If no shame attaches to the most heinous of crimes then dishonour becomes something with an entirely non-Western meaning.

Here are the failures of Western understanding and of Jewish propaganda (if we may use such a term):

We cannot appreciate that a lie is a relative term and that to repudiate deception is to dishonour honour.  An Arab who kills a female child for being raped has committed the murder of a child in our Western eyes only.

We have accepted despotism as part of our democratic fabric even as it contaminates our democratic political narrative and pollutes our education system. When values are relative to the place of ones birth or ideology then they lose their universal significance and this undermines the basis for our legal system.

To defeat an enemy you must first understand their tactics and second (when possible) use them as they have.  There can be no peace while the Western press is dominated by a pro-Palestinian narrative because it encourages Arab and therefore Palestinian lies.

We, of all people should remember that the greater the lie the easier it becomes for the next generation of fascism's foot soldiers and their intellectual betters (on the extreme Right as well as the Left) to erase our right to life.

Peace in our Time

There are people who believe that an apology for the deaths of nine people on the Mavi Marmara, in 2010 is completely undeserved.

This appears to have been proven correct, when following the apology by Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Erdogan told Turkish reporters “It was too early to talk about dropping the Mavi Marmara case against the Israeli soldiers, and that normalising diplomatic relations would come gradually.” (FrontPage magazine.com)

President Morsi of Egypt has uttered some horrific statements of religious bigotry. This isn’t, as some would hope, a kind of religious mania, or even insanity – when society as a whole displays behaviour we view as being aberrant it is not they who are viewed as misguided, but we, those of us who are 'out of step' with the consensus.   Egypt is a country where female rape is becoming a national sport; sanctioned by the state to control its females. “A study by the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights said that 62% of men admitted to harassing women, while 53% blame women for ‘bringing it on.’ Nor is this phenomenon limited to Egyptian women: while 83% of Egyptian women have experienced sexual harassment, so have 98% of foreign female visitors.”  (Middle East Forum) Egypt gave the world the Muslim Brotherhood, the institution that has spread across the globe as a cross between the Institution of the Inquisition and the Knights Templar.  It is noteworthy that in a country without Jews to blame, they blame Christianity for the failure of the Arab Spring.

President Erdogan has been known to defend Jews against Turkish jingoism and xenophobia but he is also a demagogue and ultimately his loyalty is firstly towards his faith and second to his nation. His veneer of civilisation is a pragmatic response to how he perceives other countries will react to his behaviour.  In 2012 he used chemical weapons (as reported in the German Press but no where else at the time), against the Kurds.   His one fear is for the failure of his Islamist revolution; ethical considerations are entirely absent from his behaviour.  Statements made by Erdogan, his Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu and President Morsi of Egypt reflects the written word of primitive societies, bestial worshippers of chaos and war. These are all rational, highly intelligent men so their carefully chosen words of incitement mark them out as sinister figures whose corrupted souls are steeped in the stagnant and foul smelling prejudice of the dark ages of history. The danger is that with 7^th Century attitude they posses 21^st Century weapons.

Neither Egypt nor Turkey are societies that are entirely dedicated to obscurantism and bigotry but neither Egyptian Fundamentalism nor Turkish neo-Ottoman imperialism are political ideologies that are tolerant of diversity. The West cannot ignore nor trust either. If containment contributed to the fall of Communism then we must question why we have not actively encouraged the containment of Turkey and Egypt (and Iran.)

There is a psychology of confidence that Islam and especially Arab society engenders that we must not ignore.  Even if we do not understand the cultural antipathy that both of them holds towards us (and the Occident), we cannot ever ignore their consequent contemptuous hope concerning our ultimate demise, in particular, when it manifests as openly expressed derision. 

Sticks and stones will break your bones but with words begin the slaughter.

Most of the Near-East was created by Britain and France after the First World War. The San Remo Conference in 1920 created a legal basis for carving up the defunct Ottoman empire into artificial states. Those states were always dysfunctional and could only ever be ruled by force of arms and dictatorship.  It is possible that what we are now living through is the unravelling of the artificial mess that Europe created.  The dismemberment of the Arab world may be the only hope the world has, for peace.

A nation starts the way it intends to continue. It is important that we remember this. 

Societies are formed over centuries, not decades and certainly, not over electoral cycles.  America’s Constitution is 225 years old.    It may have taken almost that long for true equality to exist, perhaps it remains a work in progress.  There will be many people who by denying that it exists mean to undermine it. Nevertheless without the visionary founding fathers, the Civil War of the 19^th Century and the Civil Rights Movement of the 20^th Century may not have had a moral basis.

Zionism has an equally idealised foundation.  Zionism created The Declaration of Independence which forms the inspiration behind Israel’s Basic laws.   It is worthwhile to repeat part of that founding Declaration:

“The State of Israel will ….be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…”

A nation begins as it intends to continue.  Israel has suffered 65 years of warfare, 65 years has it been threatened with annihilation and yes it remains militarily, the most powerful nation state in the Near-East.  But the military threat remains and it has created, by necessity, a militant nation which must continuously remain vigilant against the threats to democracy and civil liberties that a militant society will encourage as a by-product of its survival in a hostile environment.

It is something that has skewered Israeli political as well as moral thinking. In Israel full equality exists in law but not in practice, just as it does not exist in practice in any other country.  There exists full integration in most facets of Israeli life with one exception – and that is religious communities of all faiths.  All the faith communities remain segregated and they choose to remain so – it is Israel's greatest challenge and its most difficult battle yet to be fought – It remains the most significant  impediment to  Israeli tolerance within national life.

The barriers that exist are equally entrenched throughout all the religious communities in displaying universal opposition to religious assimilation. 

One of the biggest barriers is that Judaism has no outgoing contemporary experience of proselytising.  Non-Jewish minorities in Israel have aggressive and long established missionary activities and if they are not now engaged in such activities it is because delegitimisation is another form of denial that works to undermine the essential equality of Israel’s majority Jewish population.  Prejudice keeps disparate religious communities apart as each safeguard's its own theological or ideological position and is a wholly negative response that is intended to prevent people from seeking ways to live alongside of each other, peacefully; to integrate or even to assimilate a new national identity.

European and Arab (Mizrahi) Jews have a greater than 50 per cent rate of intermarriage, but Arab and Jew?  This must be the area of greatest attention in the 21^st Century.

Egypt and Turkey lead traditional, racist societies.  Any tolerance they feign has been historically dependent on a strictly enforced Islamic hierarchy and an institutionalised hierarchic inferiority imposed on their minority populations.  It is not that their societies have become more bigoted.  Severe economic problems combined with well organised, inherently violent religious groups (the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists) have contributed towards a consequent lack of physical security.  These were already weak and dysfunctional societies.

Morsi and Erdogan both proudly display their racism and their ethnic hatred as essential elements of their national identities. No excuse, diplomatically delivered, can provide a defence for the original sin of Turkish and Egyptian national endeavours.

Prime Minister Netanyahu would be wise to remember this point when he negotiates with one of our existential enemies.

You really do start as you intend to continue.

Americans and Israelis seem to have forgotten that point.