Art as Representation of Society and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Art celebrates the aesthetic achievements of Civilization.

I have visited the Israel Museum every time I came to Israel, at least since the 1980’s.

My mother was always perplexed by the joy I experienced visiting yet another museum.  But I always regarded the Israel museum as an old friend; familiar and comforting, like a close relative to whom I could identify with pride. But not anymore (I will explain why).

My high school education did not include art.  I can barely reproduce a stick man (or woman) and my photographic efforts are inevitably blurred. If art is universal, it is also accessible to all who seek it out without need for an art degree or an art critic to tell us why something is worth viewing.  Art courses may enhance art appreciation but are not a necessity.  I will add one caveat to my previous statement by the following illustration:

I am an active person and I do not need a public gym to keep fit. That said, when I was introduced to the treadmill, at my peak of physical fitness I managed to achieve the giddying speed of five or even six miles per hour (mph). It is because of that experience of running nowhere that I can appreciate both the effort and the sheer will of those athletes who run a four minute mile (15 mph) or a marathon, which they complete by running at nearly 13 mph or 22 kph for two hours.  Now that compares favorably to my unsustainable and paltry effort!

So while one does not need to be an athlete to appreciate athletic achievement, I can understand how some things enhance our appreciation of a subject. Nevertheless, art is universal and should not require extensive notes to explain it.

That view may well be simplistic but I suspect one of, if not the main issue afflicting contemporary society, is confusion.  We have laws that apply (but not universally), we are educated to believe in equality which is only selectively applied.  We are bombarded with messages to fuel our aspirations. Those same aspirations drive the never-ending commercialization of our culture and our dreams.  Dreaming drives progress but it is also exploited by the unscrupulous, to create misery. 

If art has a purpose it is three-fold:  to inform, to agitate or calm our emotions and to create a functional space.

The problem I have with the renovated Israel Museum is that it has ceased to be an institution with a coherent identity.  The museum has fine art, it has applied art and it has everything else.  The mundane has been elevated to a position it does not deserve to occupy. The museum has Rembrandt's and rocks, Picasso's and pillows, Van Gogh’s and videos.  It has modern art, photography and film; typewriters, chairs, butterflies and books.  It does not make sense.  The museums “three year expansion and renewal project was designed to enhance visitor experience of the Museum’s art, architecture, and surrounding landscape.”  (Israel museum website) The museums $100-million renovation project increased the museum’s architectural footprint by approximately 15%. It included a major reconfiguration of the three main collection wings.

An unintended consequence of the reorganization was that it created a muddled archaeological envelope that betrays the strength of the overall collection, a diminution of the available hanging space for fine art and a confusion of compartmentalized artistic styles that jars the nerves instead of harmoniously flowing into adjacent areas.   The entire upper floor contains a desolation of space that instead of adding to the architectural integrity of the whole creates a meaningless, misshapen void filled in with temporary exhibits which only contribute to spatial anarchy and artistic discord.

At this point, let me explain my understanding of ‘art.’ I published “Art and The Decline of Society” on this website on the 13th of June 2012.

http://thebilateralist.blogspot.co.il/2012/06/art-and-decline-of-society.html

I wrote:  “Art and poetry co-exists magically through the enunciation of light and color, shade and silhouettes through the interpretation of images,” and “what defines a great work of Art is inspiration, technical ability and skill.”

Part of the problem is that we have confused democracy with meritocracy and a classless society with no class at all.  Art is interesting.  It conveys a message, not just spatial awareness. The creative process enhances the viewers’ experience because he or she interacts emotionally even on a subliminal level. The result is visual as well as emotional.  If ‘high’ art is elitist it is only so because it costs us to view it (but if that is true, sport and theater are even more 'inaccessible' than art).  I can never own a Renoir or a Rodin but I can view them both at a good museum. Art inspires us.  I may not agree that Rothko was great and I may or may not appreciate his theory of color induction but to see a group of his canvases hanging on a wall, on their own, is still sublime even if I cannot define the  reason or use big words  to describe  my emotional response  to  his artistic creations.

Art is reflexive and high art does not need me to possess a second or third degree (or even a first in art appreciation) in order to be moved by it.

The previous incarnation of the Israel Museum was allegedly an unfocused and sequential mishmash (nonsense).  The intent of the renewal project was to create an aesthetic journey that was logical and unhurried. In this it failed. 

I recall that when, at the end of July 2010 the museum reopened after three and a half years of disruption and closures, the hoard from Nahal Mishmar (Cave of the Treasure) was no longer on show. In its place was a selection of mace heads, scepters and crowns. Instead of celebrating a unique, world class collection we got a few beautiful bits and pieces of copper. The move was clearly criticized because the museum put out a general statement that its policy was not to display the breadth of its collections but a selection only.

http://www.imj.org.il/imagine/collections/item.asp?itemNum=197941

And herein lies the problem. The Israel Museum has no more than an average sized living room area dedicated to its excellent collection of Japanese art (and an electronic searchable database that is broken).  The Israel Museum has a wonderful collection of maps; a large collection of prints by both Picasso and Escher but there are no rooms dedicated to any works of art from these collections.  Jacques Lipchitz’s maquettes are no longer displayed.  In fact few sculptures are viewed internally and the Billy Rose Art (Sculpture) Garden is a tired, scattered and somewhat limp display which now seems to attract, in the main, modernist installations.  Few are creatively inspiring.  An upside down tree denuded of its leaves cannot be compared favorably to a Bourdelle, Calder or a Maillol.

If art expresses our ordinariness what does that say about the aspirations we share in society? Much of the contemporary art market is a pastiche of incomprehensible mediocrity produced by artists who are devoid of talent or precision of purpose.  Are we supposed to draw our individual and collective inspiration from this? To aspire to be great we must strive to produce great art and while great art may share the stage with mediocrity it is to our extinction that it beckons.

James S. Snyder is only the second director of the Israel Museum (founded in 1965).   From 1986 to 1996 James Snyder served as deputy director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and from 1996 he has been the Israel Museum director.   His natural passion is modern art.

Israel needs a separate museum of modern art.  The Tel Aviv Museum of Art has a geographically distinct gallery for displaying radical interpretations of what could loosely be described as ‘art.’ The last exhibition I saw there was of larger than life photos of naked men with particular visual focus on their penises.  Hopefully that exhibition would have been even too radical for Israel’s national museum but a 50 cm by 70 cm Gelatin silver print with the word “LIFE” centered across the display area “in a sober sans-serif typeface” also approaches my idea of what constitutes vulgarity.  A table, four meters long with a boulder underneath it may tax the technical talents of museum staff (to prevent said stone from crashing through the floor and crushing unsuspecting visitors on the floor below), it may even count as what is loosely defined as installation art but it is not art that by classic definition can aspire to stand the test of time.

A national museum should express both pride and confidence in the future.  I should leave satiated, not frustrated. While collecting is an act of ego, a donation to the nation is an act of affirmation and national self-confidence. What a sad indictment of Israel is the current museum campus. The Israel Museum should stop trying to be world class; mediocrity of ambition accompanies a mediocre vision.

Holocaust Remembrance Day and British Press Antisemitism

Two incidents occurred that undermine the claim that Britain has a quality press.  Unless, that is, we redefine the concept of quality as being “news built on the sophistication of propaganda employed to further a popular stream of thought; the replacement of truth with cant being the single, most important attribute in a journalists  possession.”

Both incidents were connected to Holocaust Remembrance day. 

When assumptions are made that link past events to current events then it is of no consequence that the linkage is only implied. Links rapidly create facts. The essence of propaganda is that you decide on your message and then stick to it.  It is unimportant that there is no connection between the two events. Constant repetition creates a subliminal linkage that becomes hardwired into our consciousness no matter how spurious that linkage may be.  Making a false connection is the essence of the propagandists’ science.

The two incidents were: the BBC’s “The Big Question” hosted by Nicky Campbell and Sky News’s interview by Adam Boulton with Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mervis.

The BBC is particularly adept at cleverly manipulating audience membership and stage-managing the timing of comments made by its participants.  Sky News’s anchor uses both imagery and pithy, simple connections in order to establish truisms.

The beauty in establishing a truism is that ideas which differ from the accepted orthodoxy, when placed in competition with the accepted belief are not easily repudiated and invariably, effortlessly ignored or dismissed.

The first assault on the truth occurred in Nicky Campbell’s programme, The Big Question (which describes itself as concerned with ‘faith and ethics’). He asked whether it was time to lay the Holocaust ‘to rest?’  But within that question was also the idea that the Shoah was neither unique nor special.  In the twentieth century humanity also permitted other major crimes against humanity to occur without interference:

·        The Rwanda genocide

·        The Cambodian (Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge) mass extermination

·        Saddam Hussein’s’ attempted genocide of the Southern Shiite Arabs

·        Turkeys’  Armenian and Kurdish genocides

These are ‘just’ some of the terrible crimes of the previous century – we have not even begun to investigate Brazil for its genocide of the indigenous tribes of the Amazon basin.  There are eight nations within an area almost as large as Australia that are part of that basin and it would be naïve to think that Brazil is alone in its shocking treatment of its native Indian population.

A journalist works with an inverted pyramid (who, what, where, when and why are placed first).  This pyramid is essential to building a false narrative because it allows for necessary information to be ignored if it fails to contribute to contemporary journalism's personal prejudices.  Nicky Campbell injected two people into the debate and it was their fundamental bias that was meant to cloud any reasonable discussion. 

The first, Tom Lawson, stated that the Shoah was not unique but part of a “broader phenomena”. He argued that if it was unique it not only diminished it but stops us learning from it. Nicky Campbell reinforced this last statement by immediately adding that if something is unique it has no lessons for us.  Both are classic fascist arguments, superficially plausible but devoid of merit. Something is unique because of its nature, not necessarily because it is a “one-off” occurrence. The only thing that can possibly prevent something re-occurring is to understand it and more crucially, to learn from it.  This is one simple reason the question itself was so offensive.  In a latter exchange of tweets Tom Lawson wrote: “I took part in a program that asked ‘that question’. The answer is no. How we remember is a rather different question.”

The second person, Professor Nira Yuval-Davis, was once married to the anti-Zionist activist and Muslim convert Uri Davis.  Ms Yuval-Davis could only have been injected into the debate as a controversial sop to anti-Zionists.  Her contribution: that “political, economic and social interests” are involved in the way we commemorate the Shoah, and that Israel’s leader cynically exploits it, was gratuitous and therefore offensive. Nicky Campbell and the BBC had no right to add her into a debate about Holocaust remembrance.Yuval-Davis stated that “part of the problem is the way Israel uses this ‘Never again to Jews’ argument.” And she then added “never again to anybody.”  The only person cynically exploiting the Shoah for her own offensive agenda was this disgusting person. “Never again” is a common, justifiable refrain. Yuval-Davis’s implied allegations are politically motivated and for that reason they represent an unethical intrusion into the debate.    During the Rule of the Generals in Argentina (when members of the Left were ‘disappeared’ in their thousands) it was Israel that sent emissaries to try and stop the slaughter. No other nation bothered.  The fascist left abandoned its own. Yuval-Davis based her arguments on marginal and malicious hearsay. It is sadly what seems to be accepted practice amongst the academic fascist left that truth is no more than fashion; an articulately designed and insincere narrative meant to reinforce the prejudiced view presented by the scholar without necessarily containing any joined-up facts.

Universal questions demand universal answers and in spite of the exhaustive research that exists to try and understand the Shoah we are never given satisfaction in short and superficial televised debates. It is precisely because the Shoah is so comprehensively studied that it is an appropriate beacon from which we may examine and warn against other potential atrocities and mass extermination events.  But if our understanding of why humanity is able to carry out acts of unimaginable cruelty is subject to relativism then we cannot ever create a truth that is universally applicable to all conflicts and any warning becomes fraught with politicized objections and theological indulgences.

We should not discuss genocide without referencing the abomination of Belgian colonization during the 19^th century and early 20^th century in Congo Free State, the Arab genocide of Black Sudanese Christians, or, of contemporary relevance, the Arab-Muslim slave trade which continues to this day.  These are issues that are part of what Lawson defined as “a broader phenomena” and of course they must be studied.  But the central question of the debate was whether to stop discussing the Shoah.  The question is loaded with emotion and it cannot be addressed adequately within a politicized debate. That the BBC tried to create this politicization was a crime against the victims of all persecutions.

To quote some of the participants: there is no “hierarchy of victims” or “competition of suffering.”   The BBC, by its inclusion of two politically biased individuals, clearly attempted to show that continued commemoration of the Shoah was unsound because it implied competitive persecution as an intrinsic aspect of Shoah remembrance.

It is much easier to explain why I objected to Sky news.

Psychological brain-washing is defined by Daniel Kahneman as “a self-reinforcing pattern of cognitive, emotional and physical responses that is both diverse and integrated. This associative coherence creates a context for future developments and all it takes is the association of words in a group to an image or a page in a book.  You have psychologically been brain-washed into associating the conjunction of words as representative of reality.” (P51 “Thinking, Fast and Slow”).

Associative connections are formed with words and pictures.

Sky News Anchor Adam Boulton encouraged acceptance of a negative link between Israeli self-defence and Palestinian attacks on Israel, effectively blaming Jewish self-preservation for antisemitism.  Images of Gaza juxtaposing a discussion on the Holocaust create negative associative connections that given the previous comments by Boulton are clearly intended to justify antisemitism. News Anchors do nothing without intention. The Shoah was a mass extermination event. Gaza is ruled by people who, in their foundation covenant call for a similar mass extermination.  Operation Protective Edge cannot be linked to the Shoah unless Boulton was attempting to link the genocidal Islamic theology of Hamas with the latest war.  Given his earlier comments it is clear that this was not his intent.

Based on how British journalistic empires chose to commemorate the Shoah it is painfully clear that Britain has intellectually sold its soul to a morally impoverished class for whom scoring political points are the only reason for engaging in debate.

Bibi Netanyahu, Congress and Elections in 2015

President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade was a monumental task that was truly visionary but in the twenty first century few nations, not even the United States of America, appear to be able to have an exceptional vision for the future.  Nation states have become mired down by the constant struggle to balance budgets and keep dissatisfaction from boiling over.  Long after the Second World War ended the world had a few golden decades (that were not really so golden) when the world seemed easy, exciting and our expectations were not so inflated as to create too many opportunities for disappointment – plus of course the rest of the world was still only partially open to us so that the misery others felt was still too distant to affect our thinking.

Politics is nearly all about perception. It takes an exceptional political climate to engender political enthusiasm for multi-term projects that bare a great deal of risk with no instant benefit to sell them.  And reaching for the stars was certainly one of those dreams. Politics is about what is credible, what is believable.  As a politician, Benjamin Netanyahu was a great director of finance; as the leader of the nation his sacred duty was always to unify the nation.   Instead he has played a cheap politicians trick to bring down the government only two years after the last elections.  With threats to the state mounting, all the separate parties are once again emphasizing their differences instead of showcasing the bonds that unify them.

If it had been necessary, a National Law should have been used as a unifying force for the good of every citizen and to marginalize those groups that are trying their best to compartmentalize the state, to tribalise it as a means of bringing about the destruction of the state.

The National law could have been used to define the battle; instead it became the battleground; or one of them at least.

Before Senator Obama became President an article by a well-known Chicago journalist argued that Obama was first and foremost an African American and that his loyalty was again, first and foremost, with “his people.” It was a near-sighted, politically immature, facile and unpatriotic waste of print space.  If the nations’ leader is not the leader of the whole nation then he is unworthy of occupying the post. Special interest groups have their own lobbyists – you do not elect a lobbyist to be the leader of the nation.

When the previous elections were near, Bibi Netanyahu resided over demonstrations of booing and catcalling – the crowds behaved like beasts – celebrating the death of their (assassinated) rival, Yitzhak Rabin.  The same incitement preceded Rabin’s political murder.  Bibi presided over both rallies. Benjamin Netanyahu is a populist politician who somehow seems to convince people, no matter how much he dumps on them, that he still has their best interests at heart.  He behaves as if half the electorate is deserving of him as their savior while the other half are weak idiots who deserve nothing but the nations’ contempt. When members of his cabinet are appointed, if he cannot find a person (politician or otherwise) who will stroke his inflated ego he will leave the post (s) unoccupied for the entire parliament, or take them himself. Government administration is clearly of no consequence to him. It is always about Bibi.

And yet, he has been voted into power three times (only Ben-Gurion equals that record.)  There is no other politician able to compete with him.  Politics should be about policies, not personalities but given Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrogant self-possession we should all have understood that Bibi cannot be trusted as the leader of the nation.

After Likud Primaries were held, he once again was voted in as leader of the party.  This means that the Likud is satisfied with his continued leadership of the party and the nation, despite his divisive personality.

The people should deny the Likud their vote at the elections to be held in March 2015 and cast their vote against any party that pledges to go into coalition with him as Prime Minister.   After failed leadership, this is the next problem.  The parties are prostitutes – they will sleep with anyone willing to make them their political bitches.  The opposition only exists because they cannot make a deal to share the spoils. And those that are not ever offered a place at the trough are unlikely to have been ever offered a place (such as the communists and the Arab anti-Zionist parties).

Bibi's identity politics neither protects the nation nor provides leadership to it.

These are some of Israel’s multiple threats:

• The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is rapidly gaining respectability in universities throughout Europe and across the globe. 

• Palestine will gain recognition which will only encourage it to greater levels of irredentism. 

•  The Arab world owns the United Nations and will use its enormous financial resources and human capital to further degrade the already diminished status of Israel and the Jewish faith across the world.

• Iran and Turkey will become increasingly belligerent as their successes in the international political sphere grow (and as their internal threats diminish). They are the only serious military threats to Israel but both will be encouraged to destabilize Israel’s neighbors if they think there is the chance that it will not adversely impact their own ongoing theocratic revolutions.

• Israel’s financial success will deteriorate as the US moves away from its support for Israel, as the boycott movement bites and as European belligerence accelerates.  The corrupt contention that Israel will trade with anyone who pays will make Israel’s position increasingly precarious as unemployment rises and social services fail.  A politics of envy will lead to violence that will not be brushed aside by the umpteenth national enquiry.

• A flight of capital will lead to increased emigration and a return to the “nebbish” attitude that led to previous economic stagnation.

These are scenarios that Bibi the economist should understand if his ego did not blind him to his own failures.

His greatest act of hubris is perhaps, still to come. It is the Achilles heal of his ego. The invitation by the US House Speaker John Boehner (Republican) to PM Netanyahu (he has been asked to speak to Congress about Iran) is a Republican rebuke to the US (Democrat) President.  The idea that an American president could be usurped by the leader of the 153rd ‘largest’ country in the world (with the 96th largest population) contains more than the usual stench of arrogance associated with political prima donnas.  To place himself in between the elected president of the most powerful nation on earth and that president’s political opposition is to allow him-self to be used by both sides of the American political establishment in an unsavory internal political act of one-upmanship which could seriously damage Israel’s reputation in the eyes of ordinary Americans.

That Benjamin Netanyahu so eagerly agreed to this dubious honor is shocking.  Israel’s current dearth of altruistic and meritorious national politicians is certainly something to moan about.  Leaders on the cusp of general elections should stay at home; competent leaders focus on serving their electorate, not someone else’s.

French anti-Semitism and Muslim Violence (PART 2)

In the Spectator Magazine on the 9^th of January, Isabel Hardman wrote of the shop killers that “the attackers appear to be killing people not for what they have been doing, but for who they are.”  The Koran commands the faithful to strike the infidels neck.  For 1,400 years we have kept our silence, refusing to criticize those people who take their inspiration from a book their followers insist is the path to enlightenment and peace.

Many progressives will find any excuse for the killers – whether it is cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet, eternal Jewish guilt, or support for the only Jewish state. None of them seem willing to stop and think before they appease the bigotry that suffuses global Muslim thinking.

France is a militantly secular nation and it has been thus since the French Revolution of 1789. It has not prevented the nation which is overwhelmingly Catholic from practicing faith as an individual statement of identity.  The provocations at Charlie Hebdo were as predictable as they were offensive. But they were no different from the assaults that the magazine intermittently struck at Jewish and Christian values.

And Western Europe alongside of the English speaking world has been far more offensive towards its Jewish population without a Jewish recourse to violence.  If it has had any effect, it has been to encourage Jews with no answers to this discrimination to assimilate into society, breaking down Jewish cohesion and destroying communities. It is an ongoing act of ethnic cleansing that we seem powerless to prevent.  And of equal importance, it has spurred on racists and religious bigots whose opposition to Jewish independence has long past blurred the line between opposition to Israel and antisemitism. And yet, no violence from the Jewish community against those who incite against them and too often murder them has taken place.

So our standards are applied selectively. We demand subservience from Jews and are subservient to Islamists. Provocation and incitement against Jews is growing everywhere. It is led by universities, the media and populist politicians while we treat every aspect of Islamic faith as if all discussion of its history and its crimes were an unacceptable assault on a revered earthly idol.

We are being coerced, selectively, into renouncing our freedom.

It is untrue that disaffected youth who are under-employed or unemployed become foot soldiers for terrorism. The dedicated cadres of so called alienated Muslims are far more likely to have grown up in middle class homes, prosperous and comfortable. If their relationship with us is conflicted, if their relative affluence is impacted by anything, it is the clash of civilizations enunciated in Samuel Huntington’s book of the same name which described the challenges of the post-Cold War new world order.  The conflict is defined by the clash between the values of our Judeo-Christian civilization in Western society and the Islamic value system of the Muslim world.

If we are unwilling or frightened to discuss the source of terrorism we will never defeat it and probably, it will defeat us.

Our establishment press is cursed by its selective fear to offend.  The headline by the London Times that “France is paying price for pushing six million Muslims to the margins" summarized the prevalent idea that personal choice does not exist.  That is a Muslim religious 'value' which negates our own Western way of life.  It says to the religiously frustrated that murder is acceptable; to fight discrimination through Western law is but an occasional tool of those who want to censor all discussion.

The Left wing-Liberal Nazis at WikiLeaks blamed “the Jews” for the atrocities committed in France.  The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Nazis also blamed the Jews – well, in fact they blamed the Zionist Mossad.  This tactic of conspiracy is an important part of any fascist arsenal which desires to cloud the truth and obscure personal judgment by using prejudicial memes that cater to cultural stereotypes.

Throughout Europe and including Britain, 2014 yielded the largest surge in anti-Semitic hate crimes on record since World War 2. The European continent murdered almost its entire Jewish population and yet, it has learnt nothing from those dark years that preceded the Shoah, save the ease with which the bigot continues to be able to blame the victim for his or her ‘fate’.

I said in PART 1, our walls no longer have chains so we no longer feel bound by the laws of society that connected us all either to speak responsibly or to personally accept the consequences for our actions.

The consequences for Charlie Hebdos actions are now clear. The debate over whether the actions of their staff went too far in demonstrating a compulsive need to exercise freedom of expression at any cost has already been hijacked by the establishment press to appease Islam. Alan Johnson describes this appeasement as “The veil of euphemism that hangs over the debate about Islam and its bigots.” He says we must lift the veil. But he is too kind. There is precious little criticism voiced, it is what makes grandstanding more visible when it occurs.

Intimidation works. Fear compels us towards intellectual and physical cowardice and impels us towards a dereliction of our democratic obligation to confront those people and groups whose goal it is to extinguish our freedom.

If xenophobia and panic do not destroy immigration and cause us to re-erect borders across national boundaries everywhere, nations will have to start honestly facing up to the multiple threats posed by Islamism without being frightened to offend Muslim communities.  Ignoring problems posed by the clash of civilizations is creating ever greater levels of social unrest across Europe and that unrest will spread to North America.

  

Marine Le Pen, leader of the fascist Front National is ahead of both of her Conservative and Left wing rivals for the French national elections.  After the twin massacres and the murder of the policewoman Le Pen’s popularity will soar.  Geert Wilder MP, banned from traveling to Britain while Muslim Nazis are free to travel to and incite violence in the UK, could be the next Dutch prime minister.  In Greece, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party has for now, been eclipsed by the fascist left in the guise of Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left). Demonstrations are spreading across Germany in support of a fight against German ‘Islamization.’

The French reality is that unrestricted Muslim immigration drove the economic engine but at the price of abandoning France’s Jewish community. Successive French governments ignored incitement, dismissing it as anti-Israelism, or not caring if it was antisemitism. When it is understood to be opposition to Jewish independence it can only ever be interpreted as racism.  Dieudonné M'bala M'bala has been convicted of anti-Semitic incitement eight times and yet he continues to be a hugely popular anti-establishment figure.  He has been instrumental in making French antisemitism once more openly fashionable. The governments mishandling of him has been so inept, so incompetent we must question their commitment to ridding France of this home grown contagion. Israeli journalist Ron Ben –Yishai describes French complicity in the environment to which French Jews find themselves today as “unforgivable complacency.”

On Friday 9th January 2015 French authorities announced the closure of the central Jewish precinct of Paris (the Marais).  Apparently the irony of recreating the Jewish ghetto was missed by the French government.  The Great Synagogue of Paris did not hold Shabbat (Sabbath) services on the Friday night for the first time since World War 2.  Fear is a legal component that defines ethnic cleansing.

Unless people appreciate the threat to their freedom they rarely react to undo what they have already created.  But France could begin by revoking the right of Muslims to have Halal food served in state schools; reintroduce pork as the only meat product available in state schools.  It is only when people fear what they have already lost and what they may yet lose that they willingly, even pro-actively consider moderating their position towards their competitors (or their enemies).  People who feel weakened do not make maximalist demands.  Cease all social security transfers to any group or individual classified as racially / religiously / politically extreme.

Freedom is a gift; we should not have to pay for its detractors.

The alternative to acting now is that intermittent acts of terror will only increase in frequency, particularly if the debate as to its causes are stifled or because of intimidation, suppressed.

It is only when the bigot fears the consequences of negative exposure more than he (or she) fears death itself that peace and security for everyone will be possible to achieve.

French anti-Semitism and Muslim Violence (PART 1)

The Times of London headline on the 9^th of January 2015 read: "France is paying price for pushing six million Muslims to the margins."

Since the attack on Charlie Hebdo offices took place (on the 7^th of January 2015), the murder of the policewoman and the subsequent murder of four Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket on the 9^th of January there have been thousands of lines of print wasted on making excuses for the kind of people that carried out the attacks.

We can all make excuses for our behavior – the pedophile was abused as a child, the wife beater was beaten by his parents, the right wing racist is a product of his family environment.  But the Muslim racist is the product of poverty or discrimination in society. His or her embitterment is the fault of society itself.  Everyone is forgiven their sins of commission except of course that this is not the whole picture.

Why not?  We live in a world of choice, we all have the freedom to watch what we like, read what we desire, speak our own  thoughts and dress as we wish but magically, as soon as we cross the boundaries for what society deems  “acceptable behavior” we are condemned. Society judges us by the standards that society sets.  We abide by the rules and society protects us. It is called the “social contract”. It has inspired political reform since before the French Revolution and it can be argued that it has served imperfectly, as the cornerstone of Western Society since that time. 

But standards are not necessarily applied uniformly and it is with this issue that injustice occurs. We too often excuse the murderer and damn the innocent. It is how we perceive injustice that informs the way we see society and the press is inevitably at the forefront of interpreting both that perception and the reaction.  It is imperfect, prejudiced; the arbiter of morality, judge, and jury and by its complicity in forming public opinion, society’s executioner.

Imagine society as a room with people chained to the walls. For thousands of years those chains defined the distance we could wander. At the same time our proximity to one another was finite so that the alliances we made protected us.  When the chains were removed we were free to wander away from the group or we could choose to stay. Our freedom of action expanded exponentially, as did our choices. By the same process, action and reaction became both random (unpredictable) and disconnected.  The freedoms we have experienced over little more than the last century created challenges we are barely capable of predicting let alone adequately and equitably responding to them. Our legislative activism has been inconsistent and philosophically parlous in responding to the new world we inhabit.

We should not condemn an entire religion for the actions of a minority even though Jews appear to be excepted from this rule.  Muslims have slaughtered innocents but we cannot blame all Muslims. Nor should we refrain from debating the many sources of tension that enabled criminals to assume a right to commit murder with joy in their hearts. It says something terrible about their education system and ours that we are hesitant if not terrified to openly discuss these things.

The problem is in those standards that society set.  If we fail to apply them equitably then our standards are a sham. Polygamy and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) are both illegal in Western society. Yet we pay social security to Muslim men who control multiple wives.  Thousands of girls are physically tortured and psychologically sentenced to a life behind bars, every year, in London, England when their parents permit the abomination of FGM to take place without consequence.   Mosques that incite their congregants to hate the infidel and to commit violence against the non-believer are permitted to remain open because their free speech and freedom of belief supersedes, potentially, our right to life.  That social contract I referred to earlier is only selectively applied.  That selective application of human rights is where the fracture in society has occurred.

The question we should be asking is how we can repair it and whether that fault line is irreparably damaged?

In a New York Times oped Dennis Ross referred to the free pass given to Muslims in Western Society as “reflexive absolution.”  Not just in the West.  I recently read that over the last decade 100,000 Christians have been murdered every year in the Muslim world and in countries where Islam has a significant minority presence.  I cannot verify that figure of a million dead but the number of killed is much higher for Muslim on Muslim violence.

We appear to be powerless to prevent this ongoing escalation of Islamic bloodletting.

The outrage we all felt when over 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Muslim fundamentalists in Nigeria very quickly dissipated.  We should have boycotted Nigeria until every girl had been accounted for and returned to their families. We did NOTHING.

We share few values with those people who cannot either renounce a holy book or if not renounce it, then to accept a modern western concept of equality. The Muslim world has no sense of accountability but one heck of an over-inflated sense of grievance that treats any concessions as illegitimate.  There is a myth and it is called Islamic tolerance.  Islam’s sense of superior purpose can only be met head on.

Reflexive absolution is a great catch phrase that describes the western worlds’ selective immorality and its ethical bankruptcy towards Islamic terrorism. A paradigm shift in our attitude towards our religious competitors is needed if society is ever to be mended.

Population Transfers and Selective Political Correctness

In 1990 President Bush Senior “convinced” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir not to retaliate against long range missiles fired from Iraq into Tel Aviv.  That powerlessness meant that Israel had crossed a line in its relationship with the world that in retrospect, it should never have crossed. The message to the Arab and greater Muslim world was that Israel could be coerced into subjugation by Western pressure. Fast forward fifteen years. Israel unilaterally left Gaza.  Palestinians were given an independent state of their own, if they could behave responsibly.  Our mistake was to assume that conflicts can always be resolved by appeasing bigotry.

I am not supposed to use the four letter “N” word. But it is time to do so. It is time we all did so.  The Hamas regime in Gaza is an Arab and Muslim Nazi regime.  Its justification is theological but in the twenty-first century it can only ever be described as following a racist and genocidal ideology.  Current calls for Palestinian self-determination do not guarantee Israeli self-determination.  Ignoring calls such as the following do nothing to engender confidence or further the peace agenda.

“I say to the Jews loud and clear: The time for your slaughter has come.  The time to fight you has come. The time to kill you has come…Please do not leave in our hearts a single grain of mercy towards you, oh Jews, because when the day of your slaughter arrives, we shall slaughter you without mercy,” Omar Abu Sara calls out from al-Aqsa mosque on 28^th November 2014.

This is Israel’s problem.  Israel cannot win any current war by appealing to scales of justice.  Winning the propaganda war is all about appealing to emotions and therefore Israel must adapt or fail. Israel must begin to win over public sympathy and global support in its war with the Palestinians and their allies.  It is morally unwise to argue that Israel’s failures should be forgiven because of the iniquitous behaviour displayed by other countries, no matter how grotesque their crimes may be.   For Israel to argue that it is unfairly singled out for microscopic treatment in the international press does not make any sense when most people quite simply do not understand the conflict to be anything other than territorial.  And we are fed a daily diet of Palestinian victim-hood which makes their acts of terror no more than a sick human response, sick but understandable.   

Israel’s publicized victories are therefore paradoxically its numerous enemies greatest weapon against it.  Victory and magnanimity are the two sides of the fair play coin. The problem is that any act of grace is seen as acquiescence and it must therefore encourage more terror.

Since 911 (September 11, 2001) we in the West have gone to incredible lengths to emphasize the peaceful nature of Islam and the maverick and “wholly unislamic” nature of global Muslim crimes.  Rarely a day passes that we do not hear news of yet another Islamic atrocity, or another raid by the security services on Muslim homes (in order to thwart yet another terror attack against us). The religion of peace beheads adults and slaughters worshipers as they pray in their churches and in their synagogues, in their temples and in their mosques.  The blood flows on every continent, in so many different unconnected countries and still our leaders insist on sagely pronouncing Islam to be a religion of Peace. This Islamic exceptionalism forgives every crime against humanity committed in the name of their prophet and their god. The only thing missing is the vision of the aging hippy surrounded by a sea of bloodied corpses, proclaiming brotherly love. The message that portrays Islam as a peaceful religion seems somewhat discordant when viewed against the backdrop of massacre, crucifixion and beheading which is almost daily carried out in the name of Allah.  And rarely does the Muslim world hear words of condemnation by Muslim leaders.

Hundreds of millions of pounds is spent every year on fundamentalist Islamic education in the West.  The issue is that tolerance is not taught nor is multi-culturalism celebrated in the network of Western schools controlled from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other Muslim benefactor nations.   For the Nazi, ends always justify the means. This Nazism is expressed in Muslim bigotry and Muslim terrorism.  It is the affliction of the 21st Century.  Islamism supports slavery in all its heinous modes of expression.  Its idealization of Arabian 7^th Century codes of aggression, brutality and moral bankruptcy is responsible for terrible suffering on every continent. Islam’s claim to being the universal creed for humankind is tainted by its paranoid tribal fidelity to concepts of shame and honor and these characteristics of the faith underpin its attitude to everything and everyone.  It pre-determines the perception of insult in every failure and the need to dominate every relationship for the narrow benefit of an insular Islamic network which derives no benefit from boosting individual levels of personal or family welfare.  It views humanity as pawns in a global power struggle for the afterlife, therefore, a better human existence in our lifetime is theologically incidental.

It is politically correct to accept a one sided colonial narrative of the Arab-Muslim world which is beset by American and Western imperialism (or its fallout).  That same narrative is viewed as progressive and revolutionary rather than as the fascist and reactionary movement it has always been.

Of course there is extremism in all societies. Radicalism is simply the holding of extreme views or principles – what makes it dangerous is that it is almost always extreme in its intolerance towards a target group in society.  The issue is that when we ignore it, radicalism becomes violent, when it is granted free rein its natural tendency is towards contemptuous disregard for human rights.

Our current refusal to judge extremism in all its guises and disguises is poisoning our society. 

By ignoring radicalism we encourage the fanatic to seek to express their position with ever increasing confidence and because of the publicity it provides, escalating violence.  It is only through radical reformation that positive attitudes towards terror can ever be suppressed, even temporarily.   It is a constant battle for theologians and political leaders, which makes it too easy for fundamentalists to lapse into self-justification.  Islam has not yet started down the road of acceptance of the idea of peaceful co-existence with religious competitors. Intermittently and far too frequently it descends a gory path into Jihad because violence is theologically glorified throughout the Islamic canon of religious literature.

I recently attended a “London First” conference titled “Future Sight: The Security of London.”  In the course of a ninety minute discussion no-one referred to Islamism or Islamic education and the challenges to security raised by both. I approached two of the participants after the event.  They told me that Islamism in the West could only be changed through educating successive generations of Muslims.  They were: Michael Clarke, Director General of the Royal United Services Institute (a prominent British think tank) and Keith Bristow QPM, Director General of the National Crime Agency.   When people of such high profile (as both men are) publicly express such blind faith in very long-term solutions they both of them demonstrate the problem society faces.

We do not have “generations” to re-educate terrorists, or their mass of fellow travellers. You do not reduce terror or suppress an ideology that incubates terror by selectively excusing it.  You cannot hope to eliminate it by ignoring its presence in high profile public events.

Let’s be clear. Every human being is born equal.   Disability, wealth and personal ambition should be the only circumstances that mitigate our potential to exercise full equality.  And if there was a way to alleviate those aspects of inequality, society would benefit from the endeavor.  But society must define and it does define what is acceptable and therefore, what is legal.  And we in turn, are defined by those laws.  Multi-culturalism can only ever be limited in scope because anything that conflicts with our laws in an elemental manner must be denied legal status.  For example: Slavery is legal in Islam. It is our prejudiced attitudes to the institution of slavery that outlawed slavery in our society and those anti-slavery laws are what we wish to bequeath to future generations.   So injustice is relative and set by society. To tackle one strand at a time is not less of an act of discrimination and ignoring institutional or cultural bigotry as we define it, is a crime against society.

A politically correct urgency to accept a constant stream of refugees into western society along with the demographic pressures that accompany Muslim immigration into the West can only increase the violence in our societies because at no point is there a reciprocal demand made of our latest immigrants.  There is no demand to renounce an ideology that is anti-Western, anti-Semitic and yes, anti-Christian too. 

We have today, more openly expressed hatred, intolerance and prejudice in society than at any time since the Second World War.  The veneer of tolerance and civility in society is dropping.  Ultimately, the internal contradictions between the peaceful ideals of our society and the mounting violence we are seeing expressed in both word and deed must cause a break down of civil society.

To the United Nations and European Refugee Commissioners, with tears in their eyes and six figure salaries, the consequences that we must suffer now or in the future because of their benevolence can not ever be justified by their pleas for our mercy, not when it is at our expense.  As a first step towards de-fanging the beast, it is time to end refugee resettlement and funding.  Only then will the Muslim world start to confront its own demons.