It is generally accepted that the way we ask a question will spark a debate that is different from the debate that would be sparked if we asked the same question a little differently. For example, we may ask the general question: Does the end justify the means? Or we may ask the specific question: Is this the best way to do this thing? In the first instance the question will lead to a debate that would be familiar to the general public. In the second instance a different debate will follow whose nature will depend on the context in which the question was asked. What the two approaches will have in common, however, is that if either debate is allowed to run its full course, it will tend to cover both the generalities and the specifics of the topic that was taken up at the start. And what this means is that whichever way we may ask the question, all free and full debates will in the end come to look the same.
Let us take an example of the first case. Ask if the end justifies the means and someone will be inclined to answer yes, it is morally acceptable to proceed in this manner or he will be inclined to answer no, it is not morally acceptable to proceed in this manner. Whatever the case, someone else will take the opposite point of view and before you know it, you will all be debating points that seek to resolve anyone of many derivative questions. For example, you may find yourselves attempting to resolve this question: Does the end of war which is victory justify the means we employ to score that victory? Or you may attempt to resolve this question: does the end of business which is profit justify the means we employ to make that profit? And the list goes on.
As we can see, the general nature of the question that was asked at the start has led to a debate on specific matters pertaining to the waging of war or the making of profit. And this happened because international relations and the conduct of business are the foremost preoccupations on the minds of the general public at this time in this culture. If, however, the context is changed -- which can happen when you move from culture to culture or can happen with the passage of time -- you will find that the specific points taken up by the debate will reflect the preoccupations of the new culture or the new times. And this will happen no matter what the nature of the general question will have been at the start. The certainty is that both the generalities and the specifics of the topic will be covered during the ensuing debate if the debate is allowed to run its full course.
Let us now take an example of the second case where the question at the start is a specific one. A group of people in a farming community may ask: Will the purchase of a tractor help us do better than we do now? And the debate that follows will most likely sound like a business discussion because it will inevitably take up the question of making a profit. But the debate will eventually change to revolve around a more general point -- the comparison between mechanized and traditional farming, a principal preoccupation of the people who live in farm communities. In short, the debate will end up tackling the familiar question: Does the end which is the size of the harvest justify the means which is the use of a tractor? And here too, the certainty is that both the generalities and the specifics of the topic will be covered during the ensuing debate if the debate is allowed to run its full course.
The analogy we may draw to represent that situation is the distinction we make between the forest and the trees. In fact, there is already a saying about seeing the forest for the trees. And this saying exists because there are in every discussion the singular points which may be represented by the trees, and there is the general view of the subject matter which may be represented by the forest. And the challenge in every debate is to get the opposite debaters to see beyond their cherished idea and consider the idea of someone else as being valid because it is of the same forest even if it is a different tree. The problem, however, is that people who have a vested interest in the outcome of the debate often refuse to see that their cherished idea is but a single tree in a forest where the other side also has a tree. At best, they might think of their tree as representing the entire forest while giving no consideration to what the tree of the other fellow may represent; at worst, they will paint in their own head a negative picture of the other tree.
Mediators and moderators have the task of bridging the gap between negotiating parties who often begin the discussion with a point of view that is so narrow, they can only see the width of their own tree trunk. As a first step, a mediator or moderator will make the parties see that their tree is not the entire forest. This done, the point of view of each party is gradually pried to a larger width to make the people see the size of the forest and appreciate the variety of trees it may contain. The ultimate success comes when the parties accept a compromise that allows room for the other trees to exist and to flourish. It takes a special set of skills to bring opposite parties to accept a compromise and this is why good mediators and good moderators are appreciated.
And so we let the mediators and the moderators do their work and turn our attention to a subject matter that has plagued mankind since the beginning of time. We then look at the people who make it near impossible for some debates to run their full course. The subject matter is the ideology of people who have popped up in all the places throughout history and have claimed to be above everyone else thus entitled to special privileges. Such people believe that if the privileges they seek are not bestowed on them voluntarily by everyone else, the privileges should be acquired by force and held on to by means which may not be savory but would be justified under the dictum that the end justifies the means. The ideology adhered to by these people is called supremacy and it comes in many forms because it is based on one of several attributes such as ethnic origin, religious belief, color of skin or even the ideology that is embraced by someone.
We do not have to go too far to understand how the phenomenon of supremacy came into existence. Like a pervasive forest, it is all around us in the natural world where the alpha male or alpha female in many a species are considered to be above the others. As such, they are entitled to occupy the highest position in the pecking order where they enjoy the privileges that go with the position. Also, human children grow up accepting the supremacy of the adult crowd until they feel strong enough to challenge the existing setup and claim a higher ranking for themselves in the order of things. As if to duplicate this pattern, leaders have arisen among groups of people as small as a tribe and as large as a country to rule over the rest of the population. Some of these leaders started their career ruthlessly and remained ruthless to the end but most have preferred to maintain the loyalty of their subjects by using the argument that they belong to a special class of beings called gods. And so they anointed themselves as kings, pharaohs, sultans and what have you.
Then came a group of landless nomadic people calling themselves Jews who went to Egypt, the superpower of its time, to seek food. Once there, they were blown away by the magnificence, the power and the opulence of the land of the pharaohs who were themselves treated as gods by their people. And the Jews who had gone looking for something to eat became so greedy they desired to acquire for themselves what they saw the pharaohs were enjoying. But they reckoned that to have any of that, they must have a land of their own. And to have a land, they must gather around them a large number of converts who will fight alongside them to steal the land from someone else. And the Jews set out to implement such a plan by calling themselves the children of a God who promised them a land and promised to adopt as his children all the converts to the cause. And the converts were also promised that they will belong to a race that occupies the highest ranking in the pecking order among the peoples of the Earth. And they were told this will make each of them a pharaoh in his own right able to rule over humanity.
The scheme worked well and the Jews together with the new converts stole Palestine, the land of milk and honey as it was called. But then came the Romans who kicked the Jews out of Palestine and thus proved that those who were calling themselves the children of God were nothing but fakes and quacks. Beaten and thrown out of the land they stole from the Palestinians, the Jews scattered around the world. They remained quiet for two centuries until a group of them got the idea that they can revive the old ideology and seek once again to become pharaohs over humanity. They appointed themselves leaders over the Jews and have plotted ever since to do just that, undeterred by the repeated defeats they have suffered since that time.
What can be said about the methods used by the self appointed leaders of the Jews as they implement their plan is that the methods are honed to confuse the people they seek to exploit. The first thing they do is inculcate the population with the notion that it suffers from a defect called anti-Semitism which makes it imperative that everyone refrain from criticizing the Jews no matter what the latter do because criticism may lead to their extermination; something that was attempted before. With this trick, the leaders manage to eliminate every opposition that may arise before it arises, and without someone to correct them, they make it near impossible for some debates to run their full course. This done, they set out to implement the next trick. And to do this, they grab something in the news that may be of little significance and spin it so hard as to blur the specific with the general thus create a new blended concoction which they use as weapon to fight for the cause.
To see the full extent of this approach and to grasp its many levels of complexity, we need to go back in history and recall something. The country of Vietnam which today is unified, at peace and rushing headlong to modernize is still a very backward place. Now imagine what the communist North Vietnam alone was like forty or fifty years ago. Now compare this image with the might of an America that was still basking in the glory of its triumphs in Europe and in the Pacific. Now put yourself in the shoes of the North Vietnamese leaders as they fought the Americans who were in the South of their country trying to prevent its reunification. What do you do when, as a nation, you are this weak and you are taking on America which is that powerful?
If you said you would try to humiliate the mighty America, you said the right thing. And since the mighty is a forest made of trees, you capture some trees; you humiliate them and in so doing humiliate the American forest. And so the North Vietnamese captured the American soldiers who were fighting in the South and captured the American pilots they brought down as the latter were bombing the North. Doing this, the communists acquired a few American prisoners but they were more than prisoners because they were also trophies. Before the North Vietnamese threw the prisoners in jail, they put them in a cage on a truck like the cages they were using to transport wild animals. And they paraded the Americans through the streets of their cities in the animal cages to show their own people and to tell the world that America is a forest of wild animals and that they had the trees to prove it. The individual Americans were humiliated and so was America.
This method is a weapon used by the weak when they know they are weak, and it is one that Israel has used with dubious results. In fact, the Israelis have failed to score points in the eyes of the Arabs but have succeeded at scoring points in America. Here is what happened. Using the pretext that young Palestinians may be carrying weapons, the Israelis forced the little ones to strip naked and walk with their hands over their heads in full view of television cameras that had come from the four corners of the world. Having so humiliated the Palestinian children, the Jewish propaganda machine got into gear and worked to confuse the image of those kids with the image of the entire Arab population. The Arabs who could see the difference between the trees that the children symbolized and the forest that the Arab countries symbolized, responded by expressing anger at the savagery they had witnessed but did not feel humiliated by the display of depraved Jewish behavior. In the eyes of the Arabs, the Jews had humiliated themselves more than anything else which is probably the worst that has happened to them since the days when the Nazis used to humiliate them for fun.
On the other hand, many Americans -- especially those who were employed on the civilian side of the military when it was headed by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz -- got the message that it was acceptable to try and humiliate the Arabs no matter who they are or where they happen to be. This sort of thrust by the Jewish propaganda machine coupled with the constant drumming of the notion that Saddam Hussein must be humiliated led to the disastrous war in Iraq and the depraved behavior of the American military at Abu Ghraib. The result has been that the few sick American trees who took orders from the Jewish lobby became the symbol that has represented the American forest ever since. And that symbol remains so badly soiled, it may never get cleaned up.
Finally, it can be said that the Jewish propaganda machine has done to America's good name around the world what the Japanese Imperial Navy has failed to do to the US Navy at Pearl Harbor: completely wipe it out. And the people in America who have listened for decades to Jewish writers like Tom Friedman of the New York Times tell them about Arab pathologies have seen nothing about the Arabs to suggest a disease. But looking at the way that their country has been ruined at the level of its economy, its military and its good name, many Americans are beginning to wonder if the pathology plaguing their country and plaguing the world is not Judaism itself. The Nazis said that Judaism was a disease; Friedman says better use the word pathology instead.