The Nature of the War Against Us

From David Horowitz, at FrontPage Magazine, "Understanding our enemies both secular and religious":

Love death. This is the improbable instruction that the founder of an Egyptian sect called the Muslim Brotherhood imparted to his followers in the 1920s. A disciple named Mohammed Atta copied this instruction into his journal just before leading the attack on the World Trade Center three days before my biopsy. Was it a coincidence that this dark creed took root in a country of monuments to the human quest for life beyond the grave? The sentence Mohammed Atta actually jotted down was this: “Prepare for holy war and be lovers of death.”

How can one love death? This is a question that is incomprehensible to us unless we are overwhelmed by personal defeats. But it is the enigma at the heart of human history, which is a narrative moved by war between men. For how can men go to war unless they love death, or a cause that is worth more than life itself?

*****

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, but the summons to holy war was planted in Arab hearts more than a thousand years before. The prophet Mohammed created the Muslim faith and claimed he was fulfilling the gospel of Christ. But Mohammed was a warrior and Jesus a man of peace who instructed his followers to shun the path of history and separate the sacred from the profane. His kingdom was not of this world: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s. Mohammed summoned his followers to make the world a place for God, which meant conquering Caesar himself.

Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who was executed for treason in 1966, is recognized as the intellectual father of the Islamic jihad. His brother Mohammed was a teacher of its leader Osama Bin Laden and his texts are read by would-be martyrs in madrassas across the Muslim world. The hope that consumed Sayyid Qutb’s life was to establish the rule of Islam throughout the heathen nations and the Islamic umma, to make the world a holy place.

Sayyid Qutb regarded Christianity as a threat to this Islamic redemption. He condemned Christians for their separation of the sacred from the profane, God’s world from Ceasar’s. He called this division a “hideous schizophrenia,” which reflected the very corruption he set out to correct. Christians had created liberal societies, Qutb said, in which “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and His rule on earth is suspended.” Islam’s task was “to unite the world and the faith.” It was what Jewish mystics called “tikkun olam,” a mission to repair the world by bringing about the rule of God’s law on earth.

Qutb wrote this prescription in one of his most famous texts, which he called Social Justice In Islam. The mission of Islam, he explained, was “to unite heaven and earth in a single system.” To make the world one.

This is the totalitarian idea. When the wave of redemption is complete, nothing will remain untransformed, nothing unholy or unjust. Total transformation is the goal of all radical jihads, including the flight that burned the towers of evil in Manhattan. It is the cause that Mohammed Atta served. Like all revolutionary passions, the totalitarian hope of radical Islam is to redeem the world. It is the desire to put order into our lives and to heal the wound in creation.

But there is no earthly doctor who can cure us. The practical consequence of all radical dreams, therefore, is a permanent holy war.

Inevitably and invariably, the effort to make the world whole begins with its division into two opposing camps. In order to conduct the work of salvation, redeemers must separate the light from the darkness, the just from the unjust, the believers from the damned. For radical Muslims this division is the line separating the House of Islam from the House of War, the realm of the faithful from the world of heretics and infidels, who are impure of heart and who must be converted or destroyed.

*****

A thousand years before Mohammed Atta left on his fatal mission, a Shi’ite named Hassan al-Sabbah began a holy war to overthrow the Muslim state. In Hassan’s eyes, the Sunni caliphate that the Prophet Mohammed had established to govern Islam had already fallen into a state of corruption. It was no longer holy; it was no longer God’s. To cleanse Islam and restore the faith, Hassan created a martyr vanguard, whom others referred to as the “Assassins,” and whose deeds have bequeathed to us the word itself. The mission of the Assassins was to kill the apostate rulers of the false Islamic state, and purify the realm.

Because their mission was a service to God, it was considered a dishonor to return alive, and none did. The Koran assured the Assassins that the reward for the life they gave was paradise itself.  “So let them fight in the way of God who sell the present life for the world to come. Whosoever fights in the way of God and is slain, conquers. We shall bring him a mighty wage.” When the Assassins’ first victim, the vizier in Quhistan was slain, Hassan al-Sabbah said, “The killing of this devil is the beginning of bliss.” Revolutionaries love death because it is the gate of heaven and the beginning of bliss.

*****

Four years before 9/11, Mohammed Atta traveled to Afghanistan to join the International Islamic Front for the Holy War against Jews and Crusaders, whose leader was Osama bin Laden. Atta was a small, wiry man, the humorless son of a demanding father. After his team of modern Assassins turned the towers in Manhattan into a smoking ruin, his father told reporters, “My son is a very sensitive man.  He is soft and was extremely attached to his mother.”

Before the hour of his jihad, on the very page where he had copied the summons to love death, Mohammed Atta acknowledged that it was a call to perform acts unnatural to men. “Everybody hates death, fears death,” he wrote, but then explained why men should love it nonetheless. “Only the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, will be the ones seeking death.” Mohammed Atta had found a cause that was greater than life itself.

But was Mohammed Atta right? Did his martyrs sign up for death to gain a greater return? This presumes that the only reason people would seek to end their lives in this world is the hope of reward in another. Do they not also run towards what they fear? When we have guilty secrets to hide do we not find ways to end the awful wait before judgment by leaving the clues that betray us? Especially if we are withholding secrets from those we fear and love. Are we not all guilty in the eyes of God, and did not Mohammed Atta fear and love Him?

What if martyrs hate life more than they love death? If we look at the scanty record of Mohammed Atta’s time on this earth, it suggests that escape was always on his mind. “Purify your heart and clean it of all earthly matters,” he wrote in his instructions to his martyr team. “The time of fun and waste has gone. The time of judgment has arrived.”

In his short life, Mohammed Atta does not seem to have had much room for pleasure. His father was a successful lawyer, who was ambitious and austere. The family had two residences but lived frugally and apart from others. “They didn’t visit and weren’t visited,” said a neighbor later. The father agreed, “We are people who keep to ourselves.” An adolescent friend of Mohammed’s described the Atta household: “It was a house of study. No playing, no entertainment. Just study.” Even as an adolescent, to avoid the contamination of the flesh Mohammed would leave the room when Egyptian television featured belly-dancing programs, as it frequently did.

According to those who knew him as a young adult, Mohammed Atta was insular, religiously strict and psychologically intense. The death of an insect made him emotional; the modern world repelled him. A fellow urban planning student remembered how the usually reserved Mohammed became enraged by a hotel construction near the ancient market of Aleppo, which he viewed as the desecration of Islam’s heritage. “Disney World,” he sneered, the Crusaders’ revenge. Mohammed continued to avoid sensual images whether from television screens or wall posters. He hated and feared the female gender, averting his eyes from women who so much as neglected to cover their arms.

Others testified that he could not take pleasure in so basic and social a human act as eating. A roommate recalled that he sustained himself by spooning lumps from a heap of cold potatoes he would mash and leave on a plate in the communal refrigerator for a week at a time. A German convert who hung out with members of the terrorist cell that Mohammed headed, thought it was his morbid seriousness that allowed him to lead others but dismissed him derisively as a “harmless, intelligent, nut.” The people he lived with longed for him to leave. A girlfriend of one of them said, “A good day was when Mohammed was not home.”

Five years before his appointment with death, Mohammed Atta drew up a will in which he admonished his mourners to die as good Muslims. “I don’t want a pregnant woman or a person who is not clean to come and say good-bye to me because I don’t approve it,” he stressed. “The people who will clean my body should be good Muslims… The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won’t touch my genitals…. I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter.”

 In life, Mohammed Atta despised women, but on his way to death, he promised his martyrs many, citing the Koranic verse: “Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, ‘Come hither, friend of God.’ They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing.”

Mohammed also wrote down these instructions for the mission ahead: “When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, ‘Allahu Akbar [God is great],’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers.” Whoever neglected his will or did not follow Islam, Mohammed warned, “that person will be held responsible in the end.”

Like Mohammed Atta we long for the judgment that will make right what is not. We want to see virtue rewarded and the wicked rebuked. We yearn for release from the frustrations and disappointments of an imperfect life. Consequently every God of love is also a God of justice, and therefore a God of punishment and death. If this were not so, if God did not care to sort out good from evil, what would His love be worth?

The emotions of fear and hope spring from the love of self, and therefore make our motives suspect. Are those who claim to be God’s warriors pure of heart and above doubt? Can men serve God if they are really serving themselves? Do martyrdoms like Mohammed Atta’s represent noble aspirations, or are they merely desperate remedies for personal defeats?

Mohammed Atta was a withdrawn and ineffectual man who died without achieving his worldly ambitions. He never realized his goal of becoming an architect or urban planner, never married or had a family. Apart from his jihad, Mohammed Atta never made a mark in life. But in death he was a god, bringing judgment to 3,000 innocent souls.

If Allah is the maker of life, as Mohammed Atta believed, could He desire the destruction of what he had created? What is suicide but rage at the living, and contempt for the life left behind? Mohammed Atta offered his deed of destruction as a gift to God. In his eyes, his martyrdom was unselfish and the strangers he killed were not innocent. His mission was to purge the world of wasteful pleasures, to vanquish the guilty and to implement God’s grace.

But if God wanted to cleanse His creation, why would He need Mohammed Atta to accomplish His will?

*****

These are the questions of an agnostic, who has no business saying what God desires or does not. Nonetheless, an agnostic can appreciate believers like Pascal, whose humility is transparent and who is attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible through faith. Why are we born? Why are we here? Why do we die? An agnostic can respect the faith of a skeptic who confronts our misery and refuses to concede defeat. He can admire a faith that provides consolation for the inconsolable, and in a heartless world finds reason to live a moral life.

But murder is not moral and the desire to redeem the world requires it. Because redemption requires the damnation of those who do not want to be saved.      

*****

My father was an atheist, and a progressive who embraced the secular belief of the social redeemers. Along with all who think they have practical answers to the absurd cruelties of our human lot, my father felt superior to those who do not, especially those who take solace in a religious faith. In this prejudice, my father had impressive company. The psychologist Sigmund Freud regarded religion as an illusion without a future. But, like all revolutionaries Freud could not live without his own reservoir of belief, which was science. Progress was his human faith.

Whether they are secularists like my father and Freud, or religious zealots like Mohammed Atta, those who believe we can become masters of our fates think they know more than Pascal. But in their search for truth where do they imagine they have gone that he did not go before them? What do they think they know that Pascal did not? Their bravado is only a mask for the inevitable defeat that is our common lot, an inverse mirror of their human need...

Keep reading.

Los Angeles #Gaza Protesters Demand Extermination of Israel and Death to the Jews

Commenting on the murderous anti-Israel protests in France last week, Caroline Glick writes:

Since the beginning of the year, anti-Jewish violence and intimidation in France has reached levels not seen since the Holocaust. And things have only gotten worse since Palestinian terrorists in Hebron kidnapped and murdered Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrah and Gil-Ad Shaer a month ago. Life for Jews in France is becoming increasingly untenable.

Anti-Jewish attacks run the gamut from shouting “Death to the Jews,” and “Finish Hitler’s Work,” to delivering bomb threats to Jewish kindergartens and businesses, to vandalizing Jewish businesses, institutions and other property, to physically assaulting Jews of all ages, as well as Jewish institutions.

On Sunday, violent mass assaults on Jewish targets commenced just as a two-hour-long fanatically pro-Palestinian march was dispersing. Nearly 200 Jewish worshipers were trapped inside of the Don Issac Avrabanel synagogue as assailants, riled up from the march, threw bricks at the synagogue and attacked its Jewish defenders with metal rods.

In the US, levels of violence against Jews by supporters of the Palestinians continue to rise. In San Francisco, pro-Palestinian protesters showed their solidarity with the Palestinian goal of genocide by, among other things, calling for Israel’s destruction while wearing white gloves with red paint on the fingers and palms...

And so it was in Los Angeles yesterday, where the Stalinist ANSWER cadres organized a march on the Israeli embassy, and here's "Cassandra" at the march, tweeting the Hamas slogan, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!":

From the river to the sea, Gaza will be free! From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever! #FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/my5FEQ01Fs
— Cassandra (@CassandraRules) July 21, 2014

Cowardly communist thug Michael Prsyner tweeted from the embassy:

NOW: THOUSANDS MASSED OUTSIDE #ISRAEL CONSULATE IN LA pic.twitter.com/8Xm1TKh39M
— Mike Prysner (@MikePrysner) July 21, 2014

As you can see at the video, the protest was accompanied by a massive police presence. I was unable to attend yesterday, but my future ANSWER coverage will always be at events with transparent security, which is obviously necessary to prevent the ANSWER cowards from committing crimes in the name of censoring honest coverage of their genocidal and racist campaigns.




More at the Mad Jewess, "Why Is The ‘Anti-War’, #FreePalestine, Pro #Hamas Crowd Almost ALWAYS Violent & Nasty??"

Well, their murderous thugs, for one thing.

UPDATE: Here's the screencap of "Cassandra" tweeting the Hamas slogan from the protest, since she's now bleating "libel much?" like a pig.



And here's the report at Now the End Begins, on the Gaza protests in London and Paris, "THOUSANDS OF MUSLIM PROTESTERS STORM EUROPE CALLING FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL":

Tens of thousands protested in London Saturday afternoon against Israel’s military operations in Gaza, denouncing Israel as a terrorist state and castigating British Prime Minister David Cameron for backing Israel’s right to self-defense against Hamas rocket fire.

Led by speakers on a podium, protesters holding placards and banners chanted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans. At one point, a woman on the podium shouted “from the river to the sea” — a call for the elimination of Israel — and protesters responded by yelling “Palestine will be free.”

The left's "Free Gaza" protests are nothing more than anti-Jew hate-fests delegitimizing Israel, literally calling for the Jews to be swept to the sea, to their deaths.

Polish Historians and Nazi Germany's Final Solution

An outstanding review article from Timothy Snyder, at the New York Review, "Hitler’s Logical Holocaust." The Polish historians cited offer a fascinating --- and sometimes surprising, considering how much has been written --- interpretation of the fate of European Jewry:

To attempt to realize the program of Mein Kampf, Hitler needed to win power in Germany, to destroy Germany as a republic, and to fight a war against the USSR. As Edouard Husson notes in his book on Heinrich Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, the Great Depression made it possible for Hitler to win elections and begin his transformation of Germany and the world. In Hitler’s Germany after 1933, the state was no longer a monopolist of violence, in Max Weber’s well-known definition. It became instead an entrepreneur of violence, using violence abroad—terror in the Soviet Union, assassinations of German officials by Jews—to justify the violence at home that was in fact organized by German institutions. Hitler then used the alleged threat of domestic instability to justify the creation of ever more repressive institutions.

For most of the 1930s Hitler maintained the pose that his foreign policy was nothing more than the classic Balkan one, the gathering in of fellow nationals along with their land. This was the justification given for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of Austria in 1938. But in fact, as Husson shows, the takeover of these countries and destruction of their governments was a trial run for a much larger program of racial colonization further east.

Husson’s method is to follow the career of Heydrich, the director of the internal intelligence service of the SS, and the ideal statesman of this new kind of state.2 The SS, an organ of the Nazi party, was meant to alter the character of the state. It penetrated central institutions, such as the police, imposing a social worldview on their legal functions. The remaking of Germany from within took years. Heydrich understood, as Husson shows, that the destruction of neighboring states permitted a much more rapid transformation. If all political institutions were destroyed and the previous legal order simply obliterated, Heydrich’s organizations could operate much more effectively.

In particular, the destruction of states permitted a much more radical approach to what the Nazis regarded as the Jewish “problem,” a policy that Heydrich was eager to claim as his own. In Germany, Jews were stripped of civil rights and put under pressure to emigrate. After Germany seized the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938, its Jews fled or were expelled. When Austria was incorporated into Germany, Heydrich’s subordinate Adolf Eichmann created there an office of “emigration” that quickly stripped Jews of their property as they fled anti-Semitic violence.

Historians tend to see World War II from two perspectives: one as the battlefield history of the campaigns by, and against, Germany; the other as the destruction of European Jews. As Hannah Arendt suggested long ago, these two stories are in fact one. Part of Hitler’s success lay in denigrating international institutions such as the League of Nations and persuading the other powers to allow his aggression in Czechoslovakia and Austria. As Bloxham stresses, the weakness of the Western powers meant that the fate of citizens, above all Jewish citizens, depended upon the actions (and existence) of states. The Evian Conference of 1938 demonstrated that no important state wanted to take Europe’s Jews.

Hitler, as Husson observes, apparently believed that, in the absence of American willingness to accept European Jews, European powers should ship them to Madagascar. The island was being considered as a place for Jews by Polish authorities at the time, though as a possible site for a voluntary rather than involuntary emigration. Husson writes that Hitler seemed to believe until early 1939 that Germany and Poland could cooperate in some sort of forced deportation to the island. Poland lay between Germany and the Soviet Union, and was home to three million Jews, more than ten times as many as Germany. Hitler, who wished to recruit Poland into a common anti-Communist crusade, presumably imagined that this deportation would take place during a joint German and Polish invasion of the Soviet Union.

Because Poland refused any alliance with Nazi Germany in the spring of 1939, Hitler made a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union against Poland. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 sealed the fate of the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish nation-states, and it was particularly significant for their Jewish citizens. The joint invasion of Poland by both German and Soviet forces in September 1939 meant that Poland, rather than becoming some sort of junior partner to Nazi Germany, was destroyed as a political entity. Unlike Austria and Czechoslovakia, Poland fought the Germans, but it was defeated. Poland therefore offered a new opportunity for Heydrich, because its armed resistance created the possibility to initiate mass murder under cover of war.

Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen were ordered to destroy the educated Polish population. Poland was now to be removed from the map, its society politically decapitated. The destruction of the Polish state and the murder of tens of thousands of Polish elites in 1939 did not destroy Polish political life or end Polish resistance. Auschwitz, established in 1940 as a concentration camp for Poles, also failed in this regard. The Germans murdered at least one million non-Jewish Poles during the occupation, but Polish resistance continued and in fact grew.

Nor did the destruction of the Polish state provide an obvious way to resolve what Hitler and Heydrich saw as the Jewish “problem.” At first Heydrich wanted a “Jewish reservation” established in occupied Poland, but this would have done no more than move Jews from some parts of the German empire to others. In early 1940 Heydrich’s subordinate Eichmann asked the Soviets—still German allies—if they would take two million Polish Jews; this was predictably refused. In the summer of 1940, after Germany had defeated France, Hitler, the German Foreign Office, and Heydrich returned to the idea of a deportation to Madagascar, a French colonial possession. Hitler wrongly assumed that Great Britain would make peace, and allow the Germans to carry out maritime deportations of Jews.

The Final Solution as applied to Poland’s Jews would thus take place in Poland, but it was still not clear, as 1940 came to an end, just what it would be. As Andrea Löw and Markus Roth remind us in their fine study of Jewish life and death in Kraków, Polish Jews were not simply impersonal objects of an evolving German policy of destruction. Kraków’s Jews, like those of Poland generally, had been organized under Polish law into a local commune (kehilla or gmina) that enjoyed collective rights. It was this institution that the Germans perverted by the establishment of the Judenräte, or Jewish councils responsible for carrying out German orders. Despite a few anti-Semitic laws in the late 1930s, Poland’s Jews were equal citizens of the republic.

When the republic was destroyed, German anti-Semitic legislation could immediately be imposed. German expulsions of Jews from their homes, which would have been an unthinkable violation of property rights in Poland, demonstrated that Jewish property was for the taking. The Germans themselves seized bank accounts, automobiles, and even bicycles. Pending some future deportation, the Jews of Kraków were held in a ghetto where they suffered from lawlessness, exploitation, misery, and death from disease and hunger. But this was not yet a Holocaust.

Continue reading.

PHOTO: "Reinhard Heydrich, Acting Reich Protektor of Bohemia and Moravia, who was responsible, according to an order signed by Hermann Göring in July 1941, for organizing ‘a general solution of the Jewish question throughout the German sphere of influence in Europe’."

What I Learned as a U.S. Jew After the Pittsburgh Attack

It's John Podhoretz, at the New York Post:

Me on America, Jews, and anti-Semitism: https://t.co/ZAmYuHu7v4

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 29, 2018

Today's cover: Victims of deadly Pittsburgh synagogue shooting identified https://t.co/EZlQoiKN0p pic.twitter.com/QK18Ivp8A5

— New York Post (@nypost) October 29, 2018

On this day of all days it needs to be said: America has been a blessing for the Jewish people unlike any other blessing given any other people in the history of the world.

One crime — or 29 separate crimes, committed at the same time by a monster in human form — cannot be allowed to overshadow this extraordinary fact.

My own gratitude to America is actually greater today than it was yesterday because of the outpouring of grief and rage and common humanity we have witnessed in the response to the horror in Pittsburgh.

The philo-Semitic response to this unspeakable act of anti-Semitism reveals how American Jews are anchored in America in a way that Jews who live anywhere else outside of Israel are not anchored to the lands in which they reside or have ever resided.

We are Americans. And we are Jews. And there is no contradiction between the two. When people talk freely and foolishly and noxiously about America as having been built on racism, there is one simple answer to their libel: George Washington’s letter to a synagogue in Newport, written in August 1790.

“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington wrote. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

That final phrase, taken from the prophet Micah, was violated in the most obscene way on Saturday. But the story of America is a story of a country that has indeed served as vine and fig tree for the world’s most beleaguered peoples.

America has allowed us to sit in safety. America has allowed us to flourish due to its “enlarged and liberal policy” that assumes all human beings have inalienable rights.

From the time of the Jewish expulsion from the Holy Land in the first century after the death of Christ, Jews lived all over the world, but none of those places constituted a home. Even when we were treated relatively well, we were other. We were apart.

Because nothing is unmixed, because good can come out of bad, it has to be said that this forced separation is one of the reasons the Jewish people survived when thousands of ancient Middle Eastern tribes died out.

We believed what the Bible told us — that we had a special role, a special mission, a special place in the destiny of humankind. And that kept us alive.

America took us in, by the many millions, and the founding doctrine to which George Washington alluded in his letter made this country something vastly greater than just another dot on the millennia-old map of the diaspora.

The only true threat to the Jewish people from the American experiment comes not from hate but from love. The problem for American Jews, the late Irving Kristol used to say, isn’t that they want to kill us, but that they want to marry us. Our difficulty is maintaining the separateness necessary to the continuation of the Jews as a people — because America has so taken us to its bosom.

This is a tragically low moment, a day when the words we speak on Passover really came home: “In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” But this time it was not “they” who “rose up against us to destroy us.” And that makes all the difference.

It was not the Nazi regime. It was not the Spanish Inquisition. It was not Crusaders. It was not Russian or Polish soldiers. It was not an organized effort to extirpate.

It was the work of a lone villain poisoned by the ancient temptation that has guided the hands of Jew-haters from the days of Amalek — the temptation to believe that whatever ails you can be cured by the extirpation of Jews. Any Jews. All Jews...

RTWT.

Islamofascism

Christopher Hitchens defended the terminology of "Islamofascism" in an article yesterday over at Slate.

The notion of Islamofascism is denounced by left-wing activists, whose grumblings are building in response to "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week," a series of gatherings at college campuses around the nation to promote greater awareness of radical indoctrination and propaganda in America's classrooms. (See Little Green Footballs on the online "pro-Islamofascism petition" being circulated by members of the leftist-Islamist axis at UC Irvine.)

Hitchens asks if the Islamist ideology of Osama bin Laden can be appropriately compared with fascism:

I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden's Sept. 11 statement.)

There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?

Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of "cleansing." And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.

Hitchens does a good job in defending Islamofascist terminology as a description of our current ideological nemesis.

Yet, I would also point readers to Ladan and Roya Boroumand's, "Terror, Islam, and Democracy," from the Journal of Democracy (April 2002):

The man who did more than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology was an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna (1906-49). Banna was not a theologian by training. Deeply influenced by Egyptian nationalism, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 with the express goal of counteracting Western influences.

By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany had established contacts with revolutionary junior officers in the Egyptian army, including many who were close to the Muslim Brothers. Before long the Brothers, who had begun by pursuing charitable, associational, and cultural activities, also had a youth wing, a creed of unconditional loyalty to the leader, and a paramilitary organization whose slogan "action, obedience, silence" echoed the "believe, obey, fight" motto of the Italian Fascists. Banna's ideas were at odds with those of the traditional ulema (theologians), and he warned his followers as early as 1943 to expect "the severest opposition" from the traditional religious establishment.

From the Fascists-and behind them, from the European tradition of putatively "transformative" or "purifying" revolutionary violence that began with the Jacobins-Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death as a political art form. Although few in the West may remember it today, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which the aestheticization of death, the glorification of armed force, the worship of martyrdom, and faith in "the propaganda of the deed" shaped the antiliberal ethos of both the far right and elements of the far left earlier in the twentieth century. Following Banna, today's Islamist militants embrace a terrorist cult of martyrdom that has more to do with Georges Sorel's Réflexions sur la violence than with anything in either Sunni or Shi'ite Islam.

The Boroumands' piece is an excellent reference on the ideological origins of the current Islamofascist threat.

For some discussion of the etymological and linguistic justifications for Islamofascist terminology, see the articles from William Safire and Stephen Schwartz.

Escaping From Human Oppression

From yesterday's Orange County Register, "Passover's message can resonate with everyone":

"Why is this night different from all other nights?" Thus, at sunset Monday, will begin the ritual of questions during the Seder meal with which Jews start the celebration of Passover, or Pesach, which commemorates the deliverance of the Israelite slaves from bondage in Egypt. The youngest child at the table is expected to answer the questions, fulfilling the commandment, "And thou shalt tell thy son."

According to tradition, as related in the book of Exodus, the Israelites were made slaves in ancient Egypt. But Yahweh, the Hebrew God, instructed Moses to demand of the ruling Pharaoh that His people be released. Pharaoh refused, and Yahweh brought 10 plagues down upon Egypt. The final plague was the death of the firstborn son in every household. The Jews were instructed to sacrifice a lamb and smear its blood on the house's lintel or doorpost. Seeing the blood, the Angel of Death would pass over that house. After this final plague, Pharaoh relented and allowed the Jews to leave.

"Passover speaks to every generation because every generation sees dictators and tyrants aiming to destroy the dreams, hopes, religious beliefs and cultural identities of population subgroups within their borders," Rabbi Dov Fischer, of the Irvine-based Young Israel of Orange County, told us. "The Jewish people in Egypt, even in slavery, refused to be forcibly assimilated.  Rather, the Jews retained their language, their Hebrew names and their forms of dress throughout their centuries of slavery."

Why do we eat only unleavened bread, or matzoh, on Pesach? To remember that when the Jews left Egypt there was not time to allow the bread to rise, so the dough was baked into hard crackers. Why do we eat bitter herbs? To remind us of the cruelty the Jews suffered. Why do we dip our foods? We dip bitter herbs into Charoset made of apples and nuts, which resemble clay used for bricks, to remind us how hard the slaves had to work. Parsley is dipped into saltwater, symbolizing that spring is here, and new life will grow. The saltwater reminds us of the tears of the Jewish slaves. Why do we lean on a pillow? To be comfortable and to remind us that once we were slaves, and now we are free.

Passover is typically celebrated for seven days in Israel and among Reform Jews, and for eight days among diaspora Conservative and Orthodox Jews. It recalls the birth of a Jewish nation, freed of Egyptian oppression and able to serve Yahweh, or God, alone. The first and last days are full festivals, marked by abstention from work, special prayer services and holiday meals. Jews eat only unleavened bread during the entire observance.

Passover commemorates the birth of a Jewish nation consecrated to serve Yahweh, not the Pharaoh. It is a time to be humble and to remember what it was like to be a slave. Most of all, it is a celebration of freedom, of the joys and opportunities available when we are not forced to serve others.

"As Americans, we oppose tyranny and dictatorships throughout the world, from Saddam Hussein in Iraq to Libya's Moammar Gadhafi in Libya to the Taliban in Afghanistan.  We know that, if dictators and tyrants are not stopped, they eventually expand their sights and attack us, too," Fischer said. "We celebrate freedom, and we respect and cherish the many expressions of cultural identity and religious belief that have contributed to make America great."

Still more at that top link.

Europe: More Scenes from Worst Episodes of Anti-Semitic Violence Since the 1930s

At Blazing Cat Fur (linking to the Investigative Project), "In Europe, They Call For Death to Jews. Again":

RT @sfrantzman: Everything u ever wanted to know in 1 photo how incitement against #Israel leads to #antisemitism pic.twitter.com/JwdFYhBuCk

— Herman Benschop (@hermanbenschop) August 4, 2014

Since the beginning of the latest clash between Israel and Hamas on July 8, European Muslim groups (and some European leftists) have engaged in violent protests aimed not only in supporting Palestine (or, as in the case of a demonstration in The Hague, supporting ISIS), but in calling for the destruction of the Jews. "Slash their throats," Muslims chanted in a July 26 pro-Palestine event in Paris. "Death to the Jews." In The Hague, a group of mostly Dutch-born youths of Moroccan background repeated the now-familiar refrain: "Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the Gas," along with new ones: "Itbah ya Yahud" ("slaughter the Jews") and "Khaybar Khaybar ya-Yahud."

The outcome: over 130 incidents of anti-Semitism, some violent, reported in the UK during the month of July alone – the second highest number on record; in the Netherlands, where increasing numbers of Jews are leaving, the normal average of three reports of anti-Semitism per week has skyrocketed to more than 70; and the number of French Jews moving to Israel is approaching a record high. Jews are being attacked in the streets, synagogues burned, Jewish homes firebombed.

But what European officials conveniently overlook is that this hatred didn't happen overnight. It didn't simply emerge when the first shot was fired against the rockets being slammed against Israel from the Gaza Strip, or when Jewish extremists, in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli boys, kidnapped and killed a young Palestinian. The recent events in Israel-Gaza have formed only an excuse, an opportunity to release the venom that has been coursing through their veins for years, perhaps their entire lives. And Europe – its teachers, its governments, its neighborhood associations, its libraries – has done absolutely nothing at all to change that reality...

French Jews to Consider Immigrating to Israel After #ParisAttacks

As much as I love Claire Berlinski and her bravery, and think the trend among commentators is for the Jews "to get the hell out of France," to quote Paula Stern.

With Israel, Jews have a true home literally dedicated to their people's survival. I think Pamela Geller nailed it with her piece the other day, "The Death of the Jews of France."

The New York Times wrote yesterday on the Jews in France "weighing" an exit to Israel. And now here comes the Los Angeles Times, "Jews worry about their future in France after attack on kosher market":

A pair of soldiers toting submachine guns patrolled Tuesday outside a Jewish school on Rue Pavee in Paris' Marais district, where shoppers and tourists mingled with black-clad, ultra-Orthodox men.

Across the street, the owner of the Pitzman falafel shop eyed customers warily under gray skies and an occasional chilly drizzle in the city's traditional Jewish quarter.

At the school day's end, parents sidestepped the beret-wearing French soldiers in body armor and combat boots to pick up their children in the midst of the bustling neighborhood.

"I don't know if there will be a future for my children here in 10 years," said Joy Bengoussan, a mother of four, holding hands with two daughters, Haya, 4, and Rahal, 3, expressing a sentiment on the minds of many other Jewish people. "This didn't just start now. It has been going on for a while."

Last week's Islamist terrorist attacks included the killing of four people at a kosher market Friday, the latest blow for France's reeling Jewish community, Europe's largest at about 500,000 people. Thousands of Jewish people have left France for Israel or other destinations in recent years, many citing economic reasons and unease related to anti-Semitism.

The attack at the market, which ended with authorities killing the gunman, came two days after a dozen people were slain in an assault by two brothers on the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine targeted for lampooning Islam. The militants were at large until Friday, when they were killed by authorities. A policewoman was also killed in an attack last week.

In response to the violence, the government said 10,000 troops and additional police would be ordered to the streets of Paris to guard "sensitive" sites, including more than 700 Jewish schools. Jewish residents in the city and elsewhere generally welcomed the bolstered security presence.

But many in the Jewish community remained angry about what they see as a lapse in protecting the nation against homegrown militants mostly arising from the alienated immigrant enclaves on the fringes of Paris and elsewhere in France. A demonstration Sunday that featured more than 1 million people marching in a show of unity did little to quell some people's discontent.

"I respect the values of liberty. I am French. But the government needs to do something about this or everything will be lost," said one Jewish student, who, like many others, declined to give his name for privacy reasons. The march against terrorism "was a positive thing," he said.

The market attack victims were laid to rest Tuesday in Jerusalem, where Israeli authorities called on French Jews to return to their "historic home."

Many are taking the advice.

France has become the major country of origin for Jews returning to Israel, and the numbers are on the rise. A record of almost 7,000 immigrants from France arrived in Israel last year, according to the Israeli government, double the previous year. The figure is expected to exceed 10,000 in 2015. Experts say that a perception of growing anti-Semitism in France only partially explains the flight, which is also related to economic, personal and other reasons that may prompt French Jews to emigrate.

Some government officials are alarmed...

Yeah, "alarmed," blah blah.

Still more at the link.

Echoes From WWII: Islamists and the Jews

Dennis Prager has published one of the most profound essays I've read so far in my coverage of the Mumbai massacre.

The enormity of the terrorists' evil is now clear, as we haved learned more and more about the killings of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka.

Here's Prager:

Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize India's major city devote so much of its efforts - 20 percent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 - to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?

The question echoes one from World War II: Why did Hitler devote so much time, money, and manpower in order to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in every country the Nazis occupied? Why did Hitler - as documented by the late historian Lucy Dawidowicz in her aptly named book "The War against the Jews" -- weaken the Nazi war effort by diverting money, troops, and military vehicles from fighting the Allies to rounding up Jews and shipping them to death camps?

From the perspective of political scientists, historians, and contemporary journalists, the answer to these questions is not rational. But the non-rationality of an answer is not synonymous with its non-validity.

For the Islamists, as for the Nazis, the destruction of the Jews -- and since 1948, the Jewish state -- is central to their worldview.

If anyone has a better explanation for why Pakistani terrorists, preoccupied with destabilizing India, would expend so much effort at finding the one Jewish center in a country that is essentially devoid of Jews, I would like to hear it.

With all the Pakistani Islamists' hatred of Hindus, they did not attack one Hindu temple in India's major city.

With all their hatred of Christian infidels, the terrorists did not seek out one of the 700,000 Christians in Mumbai.

To reinforce my point, imagine a Basque separatist terrorist organization attacking Madrid. Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous. But no one seems to find it odd that that Pakistani Muslim terrorists who hate India and want it to give up control of Indian Kashmir would send two of its 10 terrorists to kill perhaps the only rabbi in Mumbai. As Newsweek reported during the siege, "Given that Orthodox Jews were being held at gunpoint by mujahideen (sic), it seemed unlikely there would be survivors." Newsweek, like just about everyone else, simply assumes Islamists will murder Jews whenever and wherever possible.

They are right.

For years I have warned that great evils often begin with the murder of Jews, and therefore non-Jews who dismiss Jew-hatred (aka anti-Semitism, aka anti-Zionism), will learn too late that Jew- and Israel-haters only begin with Jews but never end with them. When Israeli Jews were almost the only targets of Muslim terrorists, the world dismissed it as a Jewish or Israeli problem. Then it became an American and European and Filipino and Thai and Indonesian and Hindu problem.

It's always a serious thing to invoke the memory of the Holocaust to explain contemporary threats to international security and Western civilization.

But because of the ineluctable conclusion that of all the deaths last week, the killings of the Holtzbergs was the result of singularly unspeakable design and diabolical guile, the reference to the Nazi program of anti-Semitic eliminationism is completely appropriate.

Islam's Worshippers of Death

Alan Dershowitz, over at the Wall Street Journal, provides a powerful contrast between the cultures of Islam and the West on life, death, and conventional warfare:

Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."

Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren. Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led off to battle -- even a just battle -- has been a constant and powerful image.

Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women -- some married with infant children -- are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:

"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death," said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: "[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah." Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

Yes, that is a big difference between Islam and the West.

That's why is so frustrating sometimes to hear spokemen for the antiwar left denounce the administration and war backers as "hyping" the terrorist threat, or to see the anti-Bush hordes descend to cultural relativism when confronted with Islamic totalitarianism in the form of 12 year-old Taliban boys beheading hostages.

There's a lot of talk about "reaching out to moderate Muslims" in our ongoing policy debates on how best to respond to radical Islam.

I think that's an important component to our overall anti-terror policies in an age of fanatical violence.

But Dershowitz is less for reaching out than he is for eradicating the scourge of Islam's death worship:

The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable -- as the terrorists well understand.

We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the son of Zahra Maladan -- and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others like her -- decide to follow his mother's demand. We must stop them before they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores.

I would also remind readers that Islam's doctrinally a "religion of victory," and if one interprets Islamic theology strictly, the Muslim faith sees itself as being ultimately victorious in the world's (often unspoken) battle for divine supremacy. As Malise Ruthven has written:

In the majority Sunni tradition this sense of supremacy was sanctified as much by history as by theology. In the first instance, the truth of Islam was vindicated on the field of battle. As Hans Küng acknowledges in Islam: Past, Present and Future—his 767-page overview of the Islamic faith and history, seen from the perspective of a liberal Christian theologian—Islam is above all a "religion of victory." Muslims of many persuasions—not just the self-styled jihadists—defend the truth claims of their religion by resorting to what might be called the argument from manifest success.

According to this argument, the Prophet Muhammad overcame the enemies of truth by divinely assisted battles as well as by preaching. Building on his victories and faith in his divine mission, his successors, the early caliphs, conquered most of western Asia and North Africa as well as Spain. In this view the truth of Islam was vindicated by actual events, through Islam's historical achievement in creating what would become a great world civilization.

The argument from manifest success is consonant with the theological doctrine according to which Islam supersedes the previous revelations of Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians are in error because they deviated from the straight path revealed to Abraham, ancestral patriarch of all three faiths. Islam "restores" the true religion of Abraham while superseding Judeo-Christianity as the "final" revelation. The past and the future belong to Islam even if the present makes for difficulties.

Hmm, food for thought for those who argue that Iraq's been a diversion from the war on terror.

Occupy Wall Street and the Jews

The key thing about the rash of anti-Semitism we've seen out of Occupy Wall Street is not that it's shocking, but so mainstream. I'm not shocked at all by it. I write about this stuff all the time. One reason progressives work so hard to shut me down and shut down this blog is because I continually and relentless shine a light of moral approbation on their Jew-hatred. Not enough people do this, in my opinion. People must think that anti-Semitism lingers only in the extreme fringes of the aging millenarian right-wing, the last gasp of a few Nazis. But it's not that. As I've noted numerous times, Jew-hatred is the premiere organizing position of today's progressive-left movement. And while some remind us not to worry too much about Israel, say, since it's more vibrant and economically stronger than its regional enemies, I think there's never a good time be complacent about these things, especially since Jew-hatred seems to gain more mainstream acceptance by the day. The events of the last two months in New York and around the country have shown what it's like when the big media outlets and top political officials pooh-pooh the hate. "First they came…"

A particularly perverse version of such enabling can be seen in Michelle Goldberg's, "One Percent," at the Jewish magazine Tablet. Goldberg keeps stressing how Occupy Wall Street is "anarchist," and hence, there's no way to control or ostracize the "minimal" numbers of anti-Semitic members:

Occupy Wall Street lacks tools for enforcing any sort of discipline, or ostracizing troublemakers. When someone at a Tea Party rally holds a particularly offensive sign, as many have, the movement can denounce them. But there is no one at Occupy Wall Street to do the denouncing.

Somehow Goldberg can write this with a straight face, after she writes earlier in the essay that the organizing model at Zuccotti Park has "has fostered, for the most part, a spirit of volunteerism and cooperation." So which is it? Anarchy or cooperation? If there's cooperation among activists, there's not an "inability to enforce some kind of order." All these idiots have to do is get in the face of the Jew-hating freaks and have them GTFO. What's the problem?

Well, the problem is that Goldberg is a typical progressive Jew who sees the main danger to Jewish life emerging on the right. Sure, Goldberg probably really does cringe at the blatant anti-Semitism. I just think she's too stupid to realize she's attached to the wrong side. Not so for MJ Rosenberg, a Media Matters "fellow" and epitome of Jewish neo-communist extremism. See Rosenberg's piece, "Exploiting anti-Semitism to destroy Occupy Wall Street," at the Jewish Journal:

An ugly old tradition is back: exploiting anti-Semitism to break the backs of popular movements that threaten the power of the wealthiest 1 percent of our population. It is being used to undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has conservatives in a state of near panic....

Because utilizing anti-Semitism directly would not succeed in this country today, the reactionary defenders of the economic status quo are using the flip side of the coin: the fear of being labeled anti-Semitic. They are accusing Occupy Wall Street of anti-Semitism, relying on the old myth that Wall Street is Jewish and hence that opposition to Wall Street’s agenda is just opposition to Jews.

There's more at the link, and Rosenberg gets hammered at the comments. He's a really bad act, and his ravings are truly the product of the most perverse neo-communist class-warfare tropes. He turns my stomach.

In any case, the video above is the trailer for "Unmasked: Judeophobia and the Threat to Civilization." Phyllis Chesler references it at her entry, "An Open Letter to the ‘Good Liberal’ Who Ignores Occupy Wall Street’s Jew Hatred." And she notes there:

Unmasked ... shows us the Parisian mobs (leftists and Islamists) crying “Death to the Jews” in 2001. We see and hear angry, hate-choked speeches delivered on American campuses which characterize Israel as a “Nazi, Apartheid” state. We see Israeli soldiers confiscating 50 tons of ship-borne weapons in 2010 — weapons which included rockets with the capacity to attack the Israeli Navy and even more sites in civilian Israel. We see what really happened when armed Turkish mercenaries violated international law and attacked Israeli soldiers on the Mavi Marmara. We are reminded that Israel was condemned for exercising its legal right to self-defense, and that Israel brings all goods and supplies into Gaza after first checking for weapons. The “blockade” of Gaza exists to keep weapons out that are being expressly brought in to exterminate Israelis.

When I ran into anti-Semitism in the early 1970s, I at first believed it could be contained, even resolved, if Israel only Did Something Else.

I was wrong. No matter what else or what more Israel did or could do, it would ever have been enough. Israel’s crime is an essential and existential one. It exists. This is unforgivable. It remains a permanent offense to Arabs and Muslims. In 2000, when Arafat launched his Second Intifada, I knew that Wiesel’s bloody beast was back. In 2003, I published a book about it: The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It.

What I first began writing and talking about nearly a decade ago has here been brought to life, expanded, and dramatically enacted in this film.

Read the whole thing.

Chesler indicates that the war against the Jews is a war of the information battlespace. It's a battle of the minds over the social construction of right and wrong in the contemporary age. If big media silence on the #OWS Jew-hatred is any sign, we've got a lot of work to do.

UPDATE: Linked at PACNW Righty, "Occupy Wall Street and the Jews."

The Holocaust of Left-Wing Anti-Semitism on America's Campuses

These are indeed dangerous times, and the spread of leftist hatred has the imprimatur of the Democrat Party and the Obama administration. It's not just shocking. It's truly frightening. It's already like France for American Jews. A matter of life and death.

Are America’s Liberal Colleges Breeding Anti-Semitism? http://t.co/FvwzDbUXnr pic.twitter.com/gVLBXvkMvh

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 19, 2015

At the Daily Beast, "Berkeley’s Swastika Problem: Are America’s Liberal Colleges Breeding Anti-Semitism?":

A majority of Jewish college students, 54 percent, reported being subjected to or witness to anti-Semitism on campus during a six-month period, according to a 2014 survey published by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Trinity College. Not only was this survey undertaken before the violent summer conflict in Gaza, which researchers Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar said led to a “worldwide flare-up in anti-Semitism,” but they also noted that the “data suggest there is an under-reporting of anti-Semitism through the normal campus channels.”

Even more disturbingly, students reported that they often felt universities did not take their concerns about anti-Semitism seriously. “The response of many university faculty and administrators to Jewish complaints and outrage often shows that their threshold for the definition of the existence of the crime of anti-Semitism is set ridiculously high,” write Kosmin and Keysar.

At schools where students strive to protect the rights of ethnic and racial minorities, stomp out sexual and gender discrimination, and regularly remind people to “check their privilege,” hate speech against the Jewish community has become a pernicious problem.

“We still find anti-Semitic slogans written on bathrooms. We see swastikas on doors still, but they’re kind of dismissed. They’re painted over because there are just so many things that happened,” says Ori Herschmann, a senior at UC Berkeley who serves in the student government. “A lot of students find swastikas and come to me. [They see it] on dorms, on bathroom stalls, just random places on campus.”

Herschmann said the during the conflict in Gaza this summer, he also came across sidewalk graffiti on campus that exhorted “Death to Israel” and “Kill all the Jews.” (Herschmann shared a photograph of the former remark painted on a sidewalk but did not have one of the latter).

Herschmann says the Jewish undergraduates who come to him are often scared. He believes that part of his responsibility as a student leader is to make the Berkeley campus safer. Herschmann sponsored a bill condemning anti-Semitism on Berkeley’s campus and calling for the creation of a committee to deal with anti-Semitism. “I take this extremely seriously. The more I let the anti-Semitic rhetoric get me down, the less I can do my job,” he says. The Berkeley measure passed on February 25.
After initially telling The Daily Beast that they had not heard any reports of anti-Semitic graffiti this academic year, a rep with UC Berkeley later investigated and confirmed that they had been made aware of reports of swastikas on campus, as well as the “Death to Israel” graffiti.

In the case of the “Death to Israel” graffiti, the rep, Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, maintained the graffiti was technically off-campus, near a popular restaurant called Freehouse. “It looks to me like we can account for that graffiti on the sidewalk, but that was in a public area not on campus,” said Mogulof. “The restaurant was in the city, not on campus. It’s impossible to know if that was someone from the surrounding community, high school kids, or someone affiliated with the campus.”

Hershmann noted that the graffiti was “right across from campus. It's literally across the street…for the university to dodge the question and say it's not part of campus is disgraceful. Students live all over Berkeley. If anti-Semitic events occur all over Berkeley, they [the administration] should make students feel safe.” Freehouse also happens to be only 413 feet from the UC Berkeley Hillel house, according to Google Maps.

Claire Berlinski on Moderate Islam

Claire Berlinski lives in Istanbul. She's got an interesting blog post, "Is Islam Itself the Enemy?", and there's a raging debate on her Facebook page. This comment struck me as profound:

I've just walked down a street filled literally with thousands of Moslems of exactly the kind many people are seriously arguing do not exist. I saw them with my own eyes, as I have every day for the past five years. With so many other questions in the world, why waste time debating this? Book a ticket to Istanbul, spend an afternoon here, have a lovely time, drink some tea, meet friendly, tolerant, warm, welcoming Moslems (mostly), and see for yourself. They exist! They're my neighbors and my friends! Babür, is there anyone at our gym, for example, who would not describe himself as a Moslem? Would any member of our gym endorse terrorism, honor killing, forcing me to wear the hijab, or subjecting me to a dhimmi tax? The idea is so absurd it's beyond discussion -- and yet we're discussing it.

Yes, this is good. And I think it's important. Every once in a while I have Muslim students in class, and we have thoughtful discussions. But they are such a small minority that we don't get a critical mass of opinion to sort out variations in opinion within the Islamic community. So, call me agnostic on the kind of experience Claire Berlinski's having. More immediate to me is David Horowitz's experience. I've had a few similiar to this, in my engagement with the ANSWER Coalition. And this kind of experience is a good test. When Muslims come out to denounce Hezbollah, that'll be a good step toward identifying and working with the moderates Claire champions. Meanwhile, see, "The War Against the Jews at UC San Diego":

There are whole departments of this university that are sponsoring this hate week and thus the war against the Jews it encourages, including the Visual Arts Department, the Literature Department and the Ethnic Studies Department. The Thurgood Marshall College is another official entity sponsoring these incitements and lies. If you look at the codes this university claims to live by, you will see that chief among them is respect for diversity – for the ethnicities of students who attend this school. There is no respect for Jewish students at this campus when a week of hate like this is thrust in their faces courtesy of university faculties and administrators.

There are thirty campuses across the nation hosting Israel Apartheid Weeks this spring, including the University of California — Irvine, UC Berkeley, Boston University, Brandeis. Brown, University of Wisconsin, University of Houston, Brooklyn College, University of Chicago, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, DePaul, Columbia, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, University of Washington and others.

Behind each and every one of these hate weeks against the Jews is the Muslim Students Association. Many people on this and other campuses mistake the Muslim Students Association for a cultural organization that represents all Muslims. It is no such thing. The Muslim Students Association is a sister organization of the terrorist organization Hamas, and like Hamas, is part of the Muslim Brotherhood network.

Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the architect of terrorist jihad was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, whose organization translated Mein Kampf into Arabic. The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was one of Al-Banna’s heroes and is revered to this day by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas as the father of Palestinian nationalism. Haj Amin al-Husseini was a Nazi. In the twenties and the thirties he preached the extermination of the Jews and inspired two celebrated massacres of Jewish settlers. During the Second World War he went to Berlin to work with Hitler to recruit Arabs to Nazism . He devised his own plan to create an Auschwitz in the Middle East and was thwarted in setting up his death camps only because Rommel was defeated at El-Alamein. After the war, he and al-Banna led the Arab crusade against the creation of the Jewish state.

Why is the Muslim Students Association that violates the diversity principles and ethical codes of every one of these universities allowed to sponsor hate weeks against Israel and the Jews on these campuses? Where is the outrage over the lies the Muslim Students Association spreads along with its incitements against the Jewish state? Shame on the University of California for its role in this event. Shame on Thurgood Marshall College and the faculties that sponsored it. And shame on the Muslim students who use the shield of their religion to advance the Islamic war against the Jews.

And continue reading for the text of Horowitz's exchange with Jumanah Imad Albahri, the UCSD MSA activist who refused to denounce Hezbollah, the fanatical Islamist militant organization committed to the extermination of the Jews.

RELATED: "Tolerance and Suicide."

B'Tselem: The World's Most Destructive Anti-Israel Organization

A really important piece at the new Commentary, from Noah Pollak, "The B'Tselem Witch Trials." Grab a cup of coffee. In fact, you might want to print this one for reference. I'd have to post extremely long excerpts not to do damage to the argument, but two parts stuck out for me in particular. One is the discussion of Anat Biletzsky, a Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University and Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. Here's a passage, and this is even segmented:

Biletzky’s activism reached its apogee in 2004, when she helped write what is known as the “Olga Document,” a rambling tract named for the location in Israel where it was written. Israel, the letter says, is a “death trap” and “the biggest ghetto in the entire history of the Jews”; “military operations and wars has [sic] become the life-support drug of Israel’s Jews.” It goes on to state that “we are living in a benighted colonial reality—in the heart of darkness”; and that Israel seems “determined to pulverize the Palestinian people to dust” by subjecting them to “the nightmare of apartheid, the burden of humiliation and the demons of destruction employed by Israel unremittingly, day and night, for 37 years.” Out of “racist arrogance,” the document claims, Israelis across the political spectrum “depict the Palestinians as subhuman.”

The Olga Document continues: “We are united in a critique of Zionism, based as it is on refusal to acknowledge the indigenous people of this country and on denial of their rights, on dispossession of their lands, and on adoption of separation as a fundamental principle and way of life.” Besides adopting the self-evidently racist claim that only Arabs are “indigenous” to the land of Israel, Biletzky also called for the repeal of all laws and the end of all practices that make Israel a Jewish state. This, she said, along with creating an Arab majority in Israel through the Palestinian “right of return,” would finally absolve Jews of the moral stain that is Israel.

Biletzky has also acknowledged that she has been working to end Israel as a Jewish state since the late 1960s. She stated that “Israel [today] is like the Nazis or like Germany in ’34” and that life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza “is something that I do not hesitate to call a concentration camp.”

Biletzky is not merely an apologist for terrorism. At times, she has given terrorists moral support, as she did in the case of Azmi Bishara. He was a member of the Knesset from the Balad Party, an anti-Zionist Arab faction. In 2006, Bishara fled Israel after coming under investigation for espionage and high treason. When the gag order on the case was lifted in May 2007, it was revealed that Bishara had acted as a paid informant for Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War, apparently helping the group select targets in Israel for missile attacks. It was also discovered that he had stolen millions of shekels from Arab charities. Biletzky responded to these devastating revelations by publishing a statement of solidarity in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that read, in its entirety, “Azmi Bishara—we are brethren.”

Throughout her history of apologetics for violence and terrorism against Israel’s Jews, as well as her advocacy for the dismantling of the Jewish state, Biletzky has always been called a human-rights activist. For reasons that may be disturbing to contemplate, the journalists who eagerly report her organization’s accusations against Israel have never taken her biases into consideration when assessing the veracity of B’Tselem’s accusations. Most telling of all, perhaps, at no point did members of B’Tselem itself—its board, its employees, or its army of supporters—protest the extremism in its own ranks.

Also, Pollak's conclusion answers some questions relating to the development of the international campaign of delegitimation against Israel:

The story of those Israeli Jews who have made careers out of attacking Israel’s right to exist, such as Biletzky and [Oren] Yiftachel, illustrates the degradation of the once mighty Israeli peace movement. Originally, the movement sought legitimacy and prominence in Israeli politics, and received it for a time—and because it was part of the political process, it was constrained by the need for electoral support and popular legitimacy. Yet the collapse of the Oslo Accords in 2000 and the Palestinian terror war that followed presented the peace movement with an existential crisis: With whom, exactly, were Israelis supposed to make peace? The withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza five years later, and the entrenchment in the vacated territory of Iranian-backed terrorist groups, further disillusioned Israelis and called into question the central proposition of the peace movement: if Israel makes the right concessions, peace will follow. And so, over the past 15 years, the peace movement has fallen from a position of influence in Israeli politics to one, today, of irrelevance, an anachronism that no longer has realistic answers to Israel’s problems.

What remains of the peace movement is a white-hot core of activists who refuse to acknowledge their failure and yet cannot gracefully recede from the political stage. They have discovered an innovative formula for rebuilding their political relevance completely outside the democratic political arena: reconstitute themselves as NGOs and conceal their political agenda in the apolitical rhetoric of human rights and international law. In this guise, the peace movement no longer has any need to win elections or offer a serious platform for governance. The NGOs instead position themselves as a blunt opposition force working against mainstream Israeli society, which is viewed as unsophisticated, provincial, racist, and stricken with “security hysteria.” This “human-rights community” has thus not only opposed every consensus Israeli security measure—Operation Defensive Shield during the
intifada, the security fence to stop suicide bombers, the targeted killings of terror-group leaders, the Lebanon War, and the Gaza War—but has branded them war crimes and human-rights violations for which Israel should be punished.

In these circumstances, where there is no point in trying to succeed at the ballot box, leftist Israeli activism now directs itself internationally in the hopes that fomenting a narrative of Israeli criminality will invite enough sanction and condemnation from Europe, the United Nations, and America to force Israel to accede to the demands of these otherwise powerless radicals.

The policies they support would constitute nothing less than Zionism’s destruction. And they apparently have no compunction about seeking its destruction from without, since they have learned to their disappointment and rage that Israel is too strong a nation to allow itself to be destroyed from within.

The full article is here. At top is a recent B'Tselem video. The destruction of Israel. Once again, that's what all of this is about.

Thoughts on 'A Film Unfinished'

I make it a point to see most World War II films at the theaters. And I have a special interest in the Holocaust. As longtime readers may recall, my dissertation focused on the problem of "under-balancing" against the Nazi threat in Europe during the interwar period. And while not a subject of my research, the fate of the Jews has always animated my thinking on this topic, and of course in international politics more generally. It's pretty much the case that each new film dealing with WWII and the Holocaust is deeply moving (life-affirming and life-changing), and sometimes it seems each one improves on those before it in some ways. Commercial successes "Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List" showcased Steven Spielberg's masterwork on the war and Shoah. "The Pianist" was powerful in different ways, based on the life of Warsaw Ghetto survivor Władysław Szpilman --- although I get a creepy feeling seeing films directed by Roman Polanski, so while great, there's just something still not quite perfect about it. "Downfall" --- the German production on the last days of Hitler's Bunker --- was also different (being a German film, for one thing) and probably is one of the greatest war movies of recent years. There might be a few others more forgettable, and hence I'm forgetting them in this list. (And I'm deliberately omitting more commercial movies like Tom Cruise's recent "Valkyrie," which I thought excellent but in a different category from those highlighted here; and the more artsy "Life is Beautiful," both wonderful and comparable to those discussed above, is sometimes too fantastic and doesn't rank as one of the greatest for me).

Considering all of that, I'm sure Director Yael Hersonski's "A Film Unfinished" is the best Holocaust movie I've ever seen.

I've read all the news stories on the film highlighed at the homepage. Not to rehash, the key to the movie is the set of four reels of German propaganda footage that have never been put together for a single production. While widely seen in the Jewish film community, only snippets have been used in documentaries over time. Ms. Hersonski, a 34 year-old Israeli filmmaker, had worried that "there would be no Holocaust survivors left to bear witness to the atrocities they once experienced," so she saw in this recently discovered material the opportunity to make an existential commentary on the Jews and memory, the science of documentary filmmaking, and the aims of Nazi propaganda.

There is some mystery as to what exactly the Nazi propagandists were planning with the footage. A great deal of staging --- especially scenes of well-to-do Jews contrasted and combined with the poor and ragged --- was used most likely to make the case for a decadent, uncaring class of Jews indifferent to the death and dying of those with less. These families didn't in fact seem "rich" to me. They appeared the way I would expect Jewish people to live in 20th-century industrialized Poland. Perhaps there were some luxuries of furniture and style and cuisine, but these appeared not so socially exorbitant in isolation from the horrors of was happening without. In fact, perhaps it will take more viewings, but for me it's the 100 percent genuine documentation of man's inhumanity to man that is central to the experience of "A Film Unfinished." One word summed up the first half of the movie: starvation. The raw, searing clips of emaciated people, walking corpses many of them, is authentic by definition in this picture, and the viewer feels as though she's let in on a secret, since much of this kind of documentary record was destroyed. There is little physical violence perpertrated against the Jews by the Nazis seen here. It's the systematic killing by starvation that shocks the soul. Inhabitants of the ghetto received a ration of 186 calories a day. It was not known at first that the ghetto's population was to be deported to Treblinka. But we see dead bodies strewn along the sidewalks, and the most emotion generated by the film comes from the interviews with five Warsaw Ghetto survivors who agreed to watch the Nazi footage. This is astonishing filmmaking. And there's more to it, but I'll hold off on commenting on the final reel, which concludes the film.

Perhaps another Holocaust movie will come along and I'll say once again, "this is the best one I've ever seen." I don't know. I simply know that for me --- and for what I've experienced in my life, from childhood to my career --- it's been this question of Jewish 20th-century existentialism that has compelled a moral understanding of life and politics. Perhaps there are even bigger problems to humanity than the Holocaust. I think Yael Hersonski wants those who see this movie to remember and then apply their experience to improving the goodness of the world. But because there are so many things that are unique to this history, and because Americans are implicated in it in so many ways, I doubt that I'll lose my fascination with the topic any time soon.

RELATED: I posted the film's trailer previously here.

'Death to America! Death to Israel!' say Houthis in Yemen

And these guys are Shiite Muslims!

Between Islamic State and the Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen, U.S. foreign policy has its hands full.

And I thought Obama was going to heal the rifts with the Muslim world. Yikes!

At LAT:

The worshipers pumped their fists to the rhythm of the chant, the younger ones among them, including children, whipping their arms high above their heads.

“God is great!” came the refrain. “Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse upon the Jews! Victory for Islam!”

The crowd shouted it twice more  in unison, before bowing their foreheads onto the thick carpet of the Bleily Mosque.

The slogan, spray-painted on walls and cinderblock throughout the Yemeni capital, has become the calling card of the Houthis, a Shiite faction that overran the Yemeni capital last year — and in recent weeks consolidated control of the central government. Critics call the move a coup.

The Houthi takeover has brought fears that Yemen — once touted by President Obama as a success of his counter-terrorism policy — could collapse, fall into civil war or disintegrate into warring regions. The country is home to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, considered among the most dangerous branches of the global terrorist network.

The Houthis are sworn enemies of Al Qaeda. But they are also implacable foes of Washington and its regional allies, especially neighboring Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. partner that views Yemen as part of its sphere of influence and has a massive embassy here.

Last week, the United States and Saudi Arabia, among other nations, withdrew their diplomatic missions from the Yemeni capital. The U.N. called on the Houthis to relinquish control of the government.

Friday’s sermon at a signature Houthi mosque provided some sense of the mood of defiance that has come to characterize the northern-based provincial power, which has vowed to destroy Al Qaeda and cut down on rampant government corruption. The fiery collective chant followed an equally blistering political broadside from the preacher, Faisal Atef, who lavished scorn upon Yemen’s recent leadership, including U.S.-backed President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, now under house arrest.

“Those leaders do not care about your concerns and pains!” said Atef, his eyes scanning the crowd before him. “All they care about is seven-star service.”

The comments came only a few hours after Jamal Benomar, special United Nations envoy to Yemen, announced a “breakthrough” in U.N.-brokered negotiations while urging all parties to act “in the spirit of agreement.”

The U.N. envoy said the talks were nearing a deal that would help resolve the nation’s dire security and political crisis. He unveiled the creation of a new transitional council to run the country while negotiations on a comprehensive agreement continued.

The U.N. message hinted of reconciliation in Yemen’s fractured and volatile political landscape. The scene at the Houthi mosque didn’t suggest a mood of compromise...