On the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize on December 10, 2009, President Obama of the United States of America said he recognizes the fact that he is at the beginning and not the end of his labors on the world stage. It is a good thing that the President recognizes this reality because there is much that he needs to iron out with regard to his views on evil. He also needs to work on the means by which he plans to stand up to that evil and defeat it.
First and foremost, President Obama needs to work on the concept of the “just war”. He says that launching a war would be justified if and when it is fought as a last resort or in self-defense; when the force used is proportional and when care is taken to spare the civilian population. These are nice things to say but they come as no revelation to us who live in the Twenty First Century. Yes, the man is President and his word carries weight but he is also a lawyer, therefore he knows that millions of nice words are said everyday which, in the end, mean nothing because in this day and age, only the insane would say the wrong thing and stand to be condemned in a court of law or the court of public opinion. Even criminals who are caught red handed are instructed by their lawyers to say nothing that may prejudice their case, and to plead not guilty when entering a plea, and thus put the onus on the prosecution to prove the case against them.
What this leads to is that Mr. Obama’s nice sounding words need to be illustrated with examples if he wants them to rise above being just rhetoric. He needs to tackle difficult examples such as the following two. First, what if someone comes from afar and butchers your family and friends using the deadliest of weapons when you have nothing with which to defend yourself or your loved ones but crude homemade weapons whose use is admittedly revolting but not more revolting than the weapons used by the invader? Would you be justified to use such weapons when you have nothing else? Second: Suppose you do not have the ticking time bomb that the enemy believes you have and for which he is torturing you to give up or to tell about. On the other hand, you have the means to pull a Samson on the two of you and bring down the house in a suicidal act that will put an end to your misery and to his. Does the President consider this suicide to be part of the just war or does he consider it to be part of the unjust war?
Now consider the ongoing situation in Palestine where the Palestinians have been occupied by the Israelis for several generations and where the occupier is armed to the teeth while the occupied has nothing with which to defend himself but his bare hands and the stones of his demolished home around him. Yet despite this shockingly unbalanced situation, more Palestinian civilians than combatants are killed in every clash while more Israeli soldiers than civilians are killed. What does this say to the President of America, the country that supplies the Israelis with the weapons to kill and the money to live on as they murder with impunity and murder with biblical savagery? Who, in the eyes of the President is fighting a just war and who is fighting an unjust one?
Even though he did not address these questions directly in his Nobel speech, Mr. Obama made reference to a situation that could be thought of as analogous. He said this: “And while it is hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished.” Well, I can only say that the President must have misunderstood the intent behind these words because he is not the kind of person who would associate with an idea as evil as this. It must be that the words were inserted stealthily into the speech by a speechwriter, and the President read them innocently. This is business as usual seeping back into the Washington scene with possible nefarious consequences.
What the speechwriter did was to serve notice that you can kill civilians all you want but only if you do it for a strange reason that applies to some people and not to others. Those of us who spent a lifetime studying the insidious propaganda done in English by the Jewish organizations recognize this approach as coming right out of the Talmud. When such words are uttered by the President, a situation is created that is picked up by the princes of darkness and utilized to justify evil activities like those routinely conducted by Israel. And there is an example that corroborates this observation. Some thirty or forty years ago Alan Dershowitz told the world that Israel had the right to commit any evil that was previously committed by someone; and Israel has been doing just that ever since. Now that the American President seems to have given the “green light” to kill more civilians than combatants because the thing was done before, Israel will have a field day killing civilians to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories which is something that the invaders have wanted to do since they invaded Palestine.
Still, we must recognize that the notion of uneven distribution of rights resonates not only with the Talmud but also the English culture which asserts that “might makes right”. According to this state of mind, if the Nazis had won the war, everything they did would today be called just; and everything the Allies did would be called evil. And so I ask: What does Mr. Obama say about that? The notion of might occupying a high place in a culture is a phenomenon I regard as being a cultural deficiency and I trace it to the Common Law which hangs on to tradition no matter how ugly a particular custom may be. The most striking example of this sort is the American civil war where those who adhered to the idea that slavery was a good thing were persuaded to let go of it only over the dead bodies that littered the battlefields of the nation. When nothing else could do it, the might of the North was the force to convince the South that slavery was a bad thing.
This does not mean that the entire body of the Common Law ought to be rejected but that parts of it must be neutralized by an antidote. This will be the Civil Code which is also known as the Napoleonic Law. In reality, Napoleon did not invent this law and neither did the French legal establishment. What we have in the Civil Code is the codification by the French of thousands of years of human wisdom calling on reason to transcend our animal nature and see things the way they can be without being overly idealistic. Consequently, physical force was given a lower status in the Civil Code than it occupies in the Common Law, and reason was given a higher status in the Civil Code than it occupies in the Common Law.
What happens when we introduce reason into the discourse is that we come to see the weakness in the argument which says might makes right. The reasoning goes like this: When might is the thing that counts, we go back to the law of the jungle; and the social compact which compels us to treat each other with civility is trashed. To someone who has nothing with which to fight back but his bare hands, the temptation is strong to use them in the most effective way to defend his people and bring relief to them. This leads to a free for all where everything is fair but the complaint that the other side is not adhering to the rules. Savagery of biblical proportion on both sides becomes the order of the day and humanity sinks to the level of the animals. And this is where the Common Law is trumped by the Civil Code.
Now, having a military might that is superior to the Palestinian military, the Israelis and their cohorts in America have a different interpretation of the subject matter. To explain the strange reason by which they should be allowed to kill all they want while denying the same right to the Palestinians, they invented a circumstance which they say applies to them and to no one else. They claim they are the chosen children of God, a reality that makes of them the saints who were created with good intentions while the Palestinians are the devils who were created with bad intentions. The Israelis and their cohorts then go on to argued that Jewish killing is more kosher than Palestinian killing can ever be halal.
Yes, life is complicated and made more so by the masters of confusion especially when they are versed in the ways of the Talmud. But sometimes when things get complicated and it is difficult to see our way clearly, those who are lucky enough to live the simple life employ what we call the horse sense, and they usually provide clear answers to the difficult questions. In fact, we were introduced some 30 years ago to something called “inner strength” by people who appeared to be so low on the totem pole it was thought they will never amount to anything. Well, my dear friends, these were the Chinese and the other people of the Asian cultures who have risen to prove that inner strength is a force that can challenge traditional might and win big time.
But what is this inner strength? It seems to me that the ancient civilizations which are now going through a renaissance have managed to combine the empirical method as reflected in the Common Law with the analytical method as reflected in the Civil Code. It is a philosophy of transcendentalism where the two parts combine not as antidotes that neutralize each other but as complementary parts of system where the value of the two exceeds the sum of the parts. And this combined value is the inner strength to which the Asian people refer with pride. They baffled those in the West who had no clue what it meant or what its potential was; and many people today wish they had paid more attention to it 30 years ago.
Can we, in this part of the world, adopt that philosophy and make it work for us? “Yes we can,” as Mr. Obama used to say when he was a candidate running for office. The first item on his agenda must now be to make it clear that the power of America shall only be deployed to defend America and to promote her interests, not those of Israel. In doing this, the President will alleviate the confusion that comes in the form of noise and that is deliberately injected into the discourse. One source from which confusion comes like a gusher is the Jewish lobby where everything that these people do is done at the expense of America and to the detriment of her children. The reality is that by the twisted logic of their ideology, these people are allowed to do only the things that benefit Israel and the Jewish causes.
And the confusion they inject into the discourse bites harder when they speak of America as if it were Israel, and speak of Israel as if it were America. This is the intellectual Kool Aid that is concocted and mixed in hiding by the agents of Israel working under the protection of the syndicate known as AIPAC. The witch’s brew they make is then handed to the media and to the televised churches for dissemination throughout the land. Those who understand Jewish propaganda recognize these activities as being the slow indoctrination of the American people to accept going broke or even die for the glory of Israel. Ultimately, the American people are made to believe that America is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and that Israel was chosen by God to rule over them and rule over the world.
To remove the confusion and restore the sense of normalcy, the American President must tell the Israelis and their cohorts that from now on they are on their own. They must earn what they want in life and must learn to live with their fellow human beings as equal. But if they insist on being treated like Gods, America will no longer emasculate itself to procure this impossible gift for them. If they cannot change their desires or change the way they go about obtaining them, they should look for miracles elsewhere because America will not deliver anymore. Simply put, America has quit the business of inflating the coffers, the arsenal and the ego of the war criminals in Israel and their cheerleading clowns in America. All of humanity is saying enough is enough, and because change has come to America so says America too.
This is the second installment in a trilogy relating to Mr. Obama’s speech. The final installment will appear some time in the coming weeks.