Adam Smith who wrote a book called the Wealth Of Nations said that when an individual adds to his wealth, the nation is better off because the extra wealth that is created by the individual is added to the wealth of the whole nation. Someone later echoed this sentiment when he said something to the effect that what was good for General Motors was good for America. And the Chinese government is now saying that it is glorious for the whole nation when the individuals in it seek to get rich.
Adam Smith explained how this works. He said that things tend to even out in a community because the activities carried out by the individuals in it spread out to the entire community as if an invisible hand was going around doing the good work. Like it or not, history has proved these ideas to be sound because the nations that adopted them prospered while those that rejected them lagged behind both economically and in a few other ways.
But what is now becoming apparent is that the invisible hand has a finger and that finger is giving us a collective pain in the ass. The new reality is that the hand which at first seemed to stroke us with loving care has migrated to the wrong places, and the finger that used to adorn it has transformed into a hard shaft. So, how did it all happen without notice?
It happened because a law whose existence was never envisaged by Adam Smith began to make itself felt. It is Murphy’s Law which says that if something can go wrong it will go wrong. And that dreaded law hit the otherwise good work of the invisible hand despite the existence of an oversight mechanism that was supposed to oversee things and make sure nothing of the sort ever happened.
The trouble with the invisible hand is that it is invisible thus no direct detection of the way it works is ever possible. Rather, the work is detected by the influence that the hand exerts on the surroundings. This situation has led to some serious consequences which translated into the financial crisis the World is now experiencing. To better visualize this situation, I make the following analogy with a well known mechanical phenomenon.
The systems of an airplane can have one or two weaknesses leading to one or two benign failures without crashing the plane. However, what may happen at times is that a number of small failures can occur, apparently all at the same time, and result in the crash of the plane. Such development was given the name catastrophic failure.
Sometimes, the technicians and engineers in charge of safety will dismiss the signs that point to a weakness here or a weakness there in the hope that a catastrophic failure will not occur. But if the signs are ignored for too long, the odds will pile up against the systems and the catastrophe will occur as predicted by Murphy’s Law.
What happens will not be an act of God but a cascade of failures in the sense that one small thing will give way causing another small thing to give way and so on in sequence. And it will be the cumulative effect of the small failures, seemingly all happening at the same time as if by coincidence, that will ultimately cause the crash.
Something analogous to this happened to the financial crisis that started in the USA and spread to the rest of the World. Many people knew of the deficiencies in the system and several commentators warned about them well in advance of the crash. But the people in charge were lulled into rejecting the warnings with the promise that the American economy was resilient enough to withstand the strain; or they were intimidated into keeping their mouth shut under the threat of being denounced as unpatriotic if they don’t.
It now looks like the whole thing was a conspiracy of silence of some sort. Those who orchestrated it were the ones who engineered the status quo and fought to maintain it. They were the Neocons and their allies, the organized friends of Israel who advanced the argument that America can and should go it alone in the World. They repeated the refrain that America was powerful enough to need no one but a solitary ally, that entity they call Israel which they believe was destined to achieve glory by the grace and the will of the Almighty.
Practicing the Yiddish culture of insulting everyone that disagrees with them, that group of people succeeded in isolating the government of America from the rest of the World and from the American people themselves. This done, they methodically went about monopolizing the powers of governance and those of the media as if no one but their kind counted for something in what was quickly becoming a godforsaken place.
And when they secured all the powers in their hand, they engaged in a few more hair-raising activities. They took control of the means of information and used that to demagogue the nations they wished to antagonize. In this way, they managed to drive a wedge between America and those countries, most of whom had no dispute with America or were considered a friend. And when the Neocons and their allies succeeded in this task, they started to beat the drums of war and thus got America to attack some of those countries.
All the while the world watched the unfolding drama and many people shook their heads in dismay. They did so because they understood the consequences that will flow from the adoption of such behavior on the World stage. They knew all too well that the marketplace functions properly only when everybody has the correct information, and what they were witnessing gave them a bad feeling about the state of business in America.
When the friends of Israel took control of the flow of information, the dismayed people of the World anticipated that the marketplace of ideas and finance in America was going to be distorted. A few commented that the result will be the improper functioning of both the political and financial systems in that country. In fact, this came to pass as illustrated by the following three examples which are but a sample of a much larger picture.
The first example was that of the late Senator cum oil analyst Howard Metzenbaum who blamed OPEC for every gyration in the price of oil. The result of this sort of talk by him and by his kind was that he and his fellow speculators made the money, the American people paid the high price for the oil, and the Arabs were blamed for the whole thing. And this charade unfolded even as the Arabs were taking measures deemed detrimental to their own interest in order to stabilize the price of oil.
The second example is that of the Senator from New York, Charles Schumer who demagogued an Arab company, Dubai Ports World, following its attempt to buy a number of ports in America thus causing an ordinary, innocent commercial deal to sink before it could see the light of day. Apparently the Senator had a change of heart later on with regard to the Arabs investing in America but that’s another discussion.
The third example is that of an operation they called Abscam which stood for Arab scam. This was a sting operation designed by the friends of Israel and implemented automatically and without a minimum of thought by the FBI. The objective was to observe and perhaps to catch the American lawmakers who would sell their soul to Arab money as some lawmakers were already doing to Jewish money in a practice that came to be known as JewScam.
As for the Abscam operation, it turned out that no Arab ever tried to approach a single American lawmaker to buy his or her soul. No visible or invisible hand stroked anyone appropriately or inappropriately, or for that matter gave someone a pain in the ass. The Arabs, you see, are conditioned by temperament and by culture to leave this disgusting and cowardly habit to the Jewish organizations and to their allies, the friends of that glorious entity they call Israel.
It is now becoming clear that the invisible hand of Adam Smith will work properly only when it is left alone. You can learn to manipulate it and make it do other things but you cannot control it completely because it will remain invisible to you as much as it is to everyone else. What the hand will not escape, however, is Murphy’s law which will strike when you try to manipulate the hand. And when you least expect it, the law will make the hand hurt you as much as you will those you have in your crosshairs.
Finally, you need not have a special vision to see that what did America in this time around was the fact that the finger on that invisible hand speaks English with a Yiddish accent. How do you say ouch in Yiddish?
Friday, October 17, 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
A Mirror Image That Is Upside Down
You can scarcely read an article these days or watch a television show that does not attempt to explain what led to the financial difficulties the World is facing at the present time. However, the trouble is that the pundits who contribute their two cents worth of blabber do so by explaining the mechanics of the collapse and by calling it the root cause of the problem.
This is like explaining a car crash by saying the car was going too fast on this stretch of the road and the breaks failed to slow it down. The two things caused the car to skid and slam into the tree. What the pundits do not say is that the driver was drunk at the time of the accident, and this was the only reason why the car crashed.
The reality is that there has been a long history behind the situation that the World is facing today, a history that goes beyond the usual histrionics. It is a human story that is more clearly told through the incidents which make up its elements. However, because I never thought that a day will come when I shall be telling these things, I did not keep adequate notes at the time that the incidents occurred.
My memory is failing me when it comes to some details, especially the names of some of people I mention. Nevertheless, I am pulling the stories out of the drawer I call "do-not-tell history" to do the opposite of what I intended. I shall tell what I can reconstruct from a sketchy memory and a record that is less than complete. I shall then draw the corresponding conclusions with the understanding that I may not have everything exactly right.
It happened in the early Nineteen Nineties that a bank which I believe was called "Bank of Credit and Commerce International" failed. It had a small branch in the US and the failure was barely mentioned in the American press. It also happened that the biggest loser in this incident was an Arab prince whose name I do not remember and who lost something like fifteen or twenty million dollars in the deal.
The finger of blame was pointed at a man of Pakistani origin whose name I believe was Agha Hassan Abeidi and who may or may not have been an American citizen or holder of a green card. In any case, the Arab prince was the victim in this mess and nobody disputed this fact. Nobody, that is, except one person who made a big issue out of a small incident.
That person was a CNN broadcaster who, if memory serves me right was doing the weather, the sports or both. One day this man broke out in apoplectic rage at the end of his regular broadcast and he lashed out at the foreigners - meaning all the Arabs not just that one victimized prince - who mess up with the American banking system and thus endanger America’s prosperity and the wellbeing of its people.
That weatherman/sportscaster characterized the incident as the biggest financial scandal to hit America and he derided those with the power in Washington who should be doing something about it - perhaps hang all the Arabs in a public square - but were not doing it. I believe that person was Bill Schneider of CNN but I could be wrong.
Compare this with what is happening to the financial system in America today and ask why it is that no one of the same ilk is turning apoplectic at the "Friends of Israel" who managed in eight short years to ruin the once economic superstar that was America, and turn it into an economic basket case thus endangering not only the people of America but all of humanity.
The answer is simple, those who took control of the American financial system first took control of the media and used it as a stepping stone to get to the political apparatus which gave them full access to the wealth of the nation. From their positions inside the apparatus, they worked on the financial system itself in a quest to turn it into a cash cow that would serve the never satisfied interests of Israel.
Thus, if we want to understand how the history of America’s demise unfolded, we must study a tangled web that is as Byzantine as the story of the sportscaster who used the time allotted to sports and to the weather in order to make commentaries that served the interests of Israel and to beat up on the Arabs. And he did all this without giving the latter the opportunity to defend themselves or to respond to what he was spewing.
History will not be kind to that man or to such characters as Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Robert Maxwell, Andrew and Lea Fastow, and all those who milked America and transferred much of the wealth to what they called charitable causes in Israel. They were the who-is-who of two infamous lists, one called the list of those who cheated America, and the other called the list of those who were and may still be friends of Israel.
I shall let history deal with these people in the manner that it usually does and turn my attention to something that history normally forgets. What preoccupies me are the little things that paint a big picture when viewed from the human angle. The following incident tells one such story as eloquently as anything can.
Robert Scully is a Canadian broadcaster who does shows in French and in English. He used to do a show called Scully Rencontre for the French division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The French title of the show translates into Scully Meets With.
Sometime before the death of Robert Maxwell, Robert Scully met with him and had a discussion that was carried on Radio Canada which is the name given to the French division of the CBC. A week or two after the airing of the show, letters from viewers commenting on it came to Scully.
This was a time when the notorious Jewish organizations were known to engage in organizing letter writing campaigns promoting their never ending causes. Of all the letters that came to him, Scully read on the air the one that said Robert Maxwell was so excellent in that interview, he demonstrated why Jews must be allowed to take control of and to run the World.
And there goes the whole sordid story as told in a nutshell. Not only was Robert Maxwell defined as someone who would rob his grandmother of her false teeth, so vile was the man, he was also a natural friend of Israel and a character so impressive to the letter writing campaigners that they tried to make us believe he should control the World and all of humanity.
Now we have a true picture of what the CNN man and those like him attempted to accomplish then and still do now. Their cause is not that of reflecting the world through a mirror where the left hand becomes the right hand and vice versa, it is one of reflecting the world in a mirror that turns the whole World upside down.
We also get a clear picture as to what is ruining America and threatening mankind today. By repeating the accusation that a criticism directed against a Jewish organization or against Israel is a mutated form of anti-Semitism, the self-styled Jewish organizations were able to hide behind the suffering of Jews to do the thing that led to that suffering in the first place. Such organizations were the architects of their own demise, and with their deeds paved the way for the pogroms and holocausts of the past.
And to understand why no one of the same ilk or any ilk dared to speak against the friends of Israel, we must understand that by shielding themselves against criticism, these organizations put themselves beyond all checks and all balances. This done, they acquired and then monopolized the powers that the system denied to everyone else, powers they used to obliterate every opposition.
But in a country like America which used to pride itself on its system of checks and balances, a Congress that never strayed too far from a 50-50 vote on any issue yet voted nearly 100% in favor of the Jewish causes began to look like a Congress of prostitutes operating at the bottom of toilet bowl. Still daring to call itself a democracy, the American regime began to lose the esteem of the World and more importantly the esteem of its own people.
Normally, the strategy employed by the Friends of Israel works at the beginning until such time that the people affected respond to the human stories it creates, that is, when the situation hits them where it counts the most, their livelihood. This is happening now and the future does not bode well for the Jews at large. In consequence of this development, a few brave souls began to speak up which, at last, is a hopeful sign in this entire sordid saga.
These souls can use all the encouragement we can give them and we should all rally to their cause.
This is like explaining a car crash by saying the car was going too fast on this stretch of the road and the breaks failed to slow it down. The two things caused the car to skid and slam into the tree. What the pundits do not say is that the driver was drunk at the time of the accident, and this was the only reason why the car crashed.
The reality is that there has been a long history behind the situation that the World is facing today, a history that goes beyond the usual histrionics. It is a human story that is more clearly told through the incidents which make up its elements. However, because I never thought that a day will come when I shall be telling these things, I did not keep adequate notes at the time that the incidents occurred.
My memory is failing me when it comes to some details, especially the names of some of people I mention. Nevertheless, I am pulling the stories out of the drawer I call "do-not-tell history" to do the opposite of what I intended. I shall tell what I can reconstruct from a sketchy memory and a record that is less than complete. I shall then draw the corresponding conclusions with the understanding that I may not have everything exactly right.
It happened in the early Nineteen Nineties that a bank which I believe was called "Bank of Credit and Commerce International" failed. It had a small branch in the US and the failure was barely mentioned in the American press. It also happened that the biggest loser in this incident was an Arab prince whose name I do not remember and who lost something like fifteen or twenty million dollars in the deal.
The finger of blame was pointed at a man of Pakistani origin whose name I believe was Agha Hassan Abeidi and who may or may not have been an American citizen or holder of a green card. In any case, the Arab prince was the victim in this mess and nobody disputed this fact. Nobody, that is, except one person who made a big issue out of a small incident.
That person was a CNN broadcaster who, if memory serves me right was doing the weather, the sports or both. One day this man broke out in apoplectic rage at the end of his regular broadcast and he lashed out at the foreigners - meaning all the Arabs not just that one victimized prince - who mess up with the American banking system and thus endanger America’s prosperity and the wellbeing of its people.
That weatherman/sportscaster characterized the incident as the biggest financial scandal to hit America and he derided those with the power in Washington who should be doing something about it - perhaps hang all the Arabs in a public square - but were not doing it. I believe that person was Bill Schneider of CNN but I could be wrong.
Compare this with what is happening to the financial system in America today and ask why it is that no one of the same ilk is turning apoplectic at the "Friends of Israel" who managed in eight short years to ruin the once economic superstar that was America, and turn it into an economic basket case thus endangering not only the people of America but all of humanity.
The answer is simple, those who took control of the American financial system first took control of the media and used it as a stepping stone to get to the political apparatus which gave them full access to the wealth of the nation. From their positions inside the apparatus, they worked on the financial system itself in a quest to turn it into a cash cow that would serve the never satisfied interests of Israel.
Thus, if we want to understand how the history of America’s demise unfolded, we must study a tangled web that is as Byzantine as the story of the sportscaster who used the time allotted to sports and to the weather in order to make commentaries that served the interests of Israel and to beat up on the Arabs. And he did all this without giving the latter the opportunity to defend themselves or to respond to what he was spewing.
History will not be kind to that man or to such characters as Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Robert Maxwell, Andrew and Lea Fastow, and all those who milked America and transferred much of the wealth to what they called charitable causes in Israel. They were the who-is-who of two infamous lists, one called the list of those who cheated America, and the other called the list of those who were and may still be friends of Israel.
I shall let history deal with these people in the manner that it usually does and turn my attention to something that history normally forgets. What preoccupies me are the little things that paint a big picture when viewed from the human angle. The following incident tells one such story as eloquently as anything can.
Robert Scully is a Canadian broadcaster who does shows in French and in English. He used to do a show called Scully Rencontre for the French division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The French title of the show translates into Scully Meets With.
Sometime before the death of Robert Maxwell, Robert Scully met with him and had a discussion that was carried on Radio Canada which is the name given to the French division of the CBC. A week or two after the airing of the show, letters from viewers commenting on it came to Scully.
This was a time when the notorious Jewish organizations were known to engage in organizing letter writing campaigns promoting their never ending causes. Of all the letters that came to him, Scully read on the air the one that said Robert Maxwell was so excellent in that interview, he demonstrated why Jews must be allowed to take control of and to run the World.
And there goes the whole sordid story as told in a nutshell. Not only was Robert Maxwell defined as someone who would rob his grandmother of her false teeth, so vile was the man, he was also a natural friend of Israel and a character so impressive to the letter writing campaigners that they tried to make us believe he should control the World and all of humanity.
Now we have a true picture of what the CNN man and those like him attempted to accomplish then and still do now. Their cause is not that of reflecting the world through a mirror where the left hand becomes the right hand and vice versa, it is one of reflecting the world in a mirror that turns the whole World upside down.
We also get a clear picture as to what is ruining America and threatening mankind today. By repeating the accusation that a criticism directed against a Jewish organization or against Israel is a mutated form of anti-Semitism, the self-styled Jewish organizations were able to hide behind the suffering of Jews to do the thing that led to that suffering in the first place. Such organizations were the architects of their own demise, and with their deeds paved the way for the pogroms and holocausts of the past.
And to understand why no one of the same ilk or any ilk dared to speak against the friends of Israel, we must understand that by shielding themselves against criticism, these organizations put themselves beyond all checks and all balances. This done, they acquired and then monopolized the powers that the system denied to everyone else, powers they used to obliterate every opposition.
But in a country like America which used to pride itself on its system of checks and balances, a Congress that never strayed too far from a 50-50 vote on any issue yet voted nearly 100% in favor of the Jewish causes began to look like a Congress of prostitutes operating at the bottom of toilet bowl. Still daring to call itself a democracy, the American regime began to lose the esteem of the World and more importantly the esteem of its own people.
Normally, the strategy employed by the Friends of Israel works at the beginning until such time that the people affected respond to the human stories it creates, that is, when the situation hits them where it counts the most, their livelihood. This is happening now and the future does not bode well for the Jews at large. In consequence of this development, a few brave souls began to speak up which, at last, is a hopeful sign in this entire sordid saga.
These souls can use all the encouragement we can give them and we should all rally to their cause.
Friday, October 3, 2008
The Sweet Sound Of Neocon Treachery
A fable by the 17th. Century French poet Jean de Lafontaine titled "The Crow and the Fox" teaches us this lesson: Let it be known that every flatterer lives at the expense of those who listen to him. Thus, if you are a Neocon laboring to milk America for the benefit of Israel, you work to cut off America’s relation with those who refuse to bow to Israel even if they are good for America, and you promote America’s relation with those who suck up to Israel even if they are toxic to America.
You achieve all this by singing the praises of the American leaders, describing them as the perfect democratic things who need no allies except the few that the Neocons will take the trouble to choose for them. Thus, like the fox of Lafontaine who tricked the crow by praising his plumage and got him to drop the cheese in his beak, you trick those leaders into delivering to Israel what they would not deliver to the homeless in their own country, the hungry and the least healthy among their masses.
Regarded as a sucker born with the tendency to accept every sweet lie that the Neocons whisper in your ear, you believe in the fantasy world they shape for you and you live by their rule until one day the world comes crushing down on you and reality hits you in the face. You hate yourself for being this idiotic during all these years and you look for a way out of the hole you got yourself into, the hole in which you labored to milk the people of America for the glory of Israel and her shameless supporters inside America.
Getting hit in the face with reality and waking up from a dream-like fantasy is something that happens on occasion to the most careless of human beings and there is a lesson to be learned here which is not different from that of Lafontaine. What follows is a situation I witnessed long ago so let me tell you about it before I go any further.
Students in their late teens and early twenties like to brag about everything. One student I had in my school eons ago so annoyed his schoolmates when he bragged about being a connoisseur of sound that they asked for my help to test him out. I thought I should not get involved in something like this but was so intrigued by the idea myself that I did not give an outright no for answer. Instead, I asked the students to give me time to think about the matter and this answer of mine had its own consequence.
The students took my reluctance as a hopeful sign and they decided to speed up my decision process by making the student in question participate in his own entrapment. I do not know what they said to him but he came to me a little later on and he initiated a discussion on the difference in sound quality between the technology of solid state and that of the vacuum tube. I agreed with him that the tube was superior to solid state with the caveat that I was not a connoisseur of sound myself. As if on cue the student bragged about being an expert in this field and said he will submit to any sort of test that I or someone else would devise so as to prove his claim once and for all.
I called the group of students that thought of the idea in the first place and asked them to design a test. They did and it was a simple test to carry out in practice. The students took advantage of the fact that the South Koreans were beginning to make themselves known around the world for the home entertainment products they were making and were able to sell at a very low price. Among these products was an expensive looking sound system they sold at a cheap price, one that was given the impressive Anglo-Saxon name of Lloyd.
One student brought a Lloyd to the school while another brought a German model whose name escapes me now. The latter looked less impressive than the first but sold at a higher price. In the absence of the bragging student, the two systems were set up side by side one early morning and were tested back to back. I could not discern the difference in the quality of sound between the pair but some students claimed they did and they designated the German system as the better of the two.
When the student in question arrived at the school, the other students told him nothing about the origin of the two units and played a tape for him on one system and then the other. The student in question chose the Korean Lloyd as having a higher quality of sound.
They blindfolded the braggart and played a number of tapes on one system and then the other, and they asked him to choose between the two. His choices turned out to be random. And then they played a tape on the same unit back to back and asked him to guess which unit sounded better. Not knowing he was tricked, he chose randomly. They removed the blindfold and showed him the result of the test and he could not believe his eyes but was humbled enough by the experience that he began to act with a little more humility than ever before.
Finally, they showed him the purchase bill which indicated both the make and the cheap price of the Lloyd at which point he expressed an unusual fury. It was clear that the fury was directed against himself for believing in his own fantasy and for always paying a high price for the products he purchased when other products of equal quality were selling at a lower price. You see, dear friend, that boy had been his own Neocon for a long time, and when he woke up that day, he saw the world of his imagination crumble around him.
Likewise, the Americans antagonized the Arab people and those who stood by them in the mistaken belief that America will obtain the oil she needs at the price she will dictate. The Neocons and those who came before them had planted this fantasy in the head of the American leaders whom the Neocons had corrupted for the purpose of softening those very same heads. And so, like the crow of Lafontaine, they opened their beak to sing the song of a false democracy they thought was the pride of their system and dropped the most prized of their possessions.
What they dropped was nothing less than the American wellbeing which is sometimes referred to as an American cheese. It was what the forefathers had labored hard to produce and to hand over to the generations that came after them. But when the cheese hit the ground, it was the neo con artists and their Israeli allies who pounced on it and feasted with it to their hearts’ content. And then it became clear by the end of this orgy that nothing was left for the American people, not even a crumb for the leaders who made this whole calamity a possible thing.
From that moment on, things went from bad to worse and America spent all that she possessed in the futile attempt to rob the Arabs of what she could have bought at a fraction of what she spent on the misguided adventure. And while this was happening, as if to scrape the bottom of the barrel, the same crowd that got America into the bottomless pit got busy siphoning off the nation’s credit and all her reserves. Now America is waking up to the reality that the Neocons handed to her in Baghdad and in Lower Manhattan the same bitter dish that the British Empire was handed in Suez - the loss of her great power status.
Someone in America will undoubtedly hate themselves for teaming up with the Neocons as did the bragging student I had in my school and did the British and the French who teamed up with Israel to embark on the Suez adventure. But the ordinary people of America will not want to stop at the simple act of remorse and self hate but will want accountability and will demand to see the head of the culprits not only roll out of a job but roll their way to the jailhouses of the nation.
And as always, when a scandal of this magnitude explodes in America, the culprits will prove to be of the kind that call themselves friends of Israel, and the money will have been channeled not to support some social program or cultural institution as claimed by the Neocons but to cleanse the Palestinian homeland of its Palestinian owners at the hands of a Zionist regime that is as bloodthirsty as this planet has ever witnessed.
You achieve all this by singing the praises of the American leaders, describing them as the perfect democratic things who need no allies except the few that the Neocons will take the trouble to choose for them. Thus, like the fox of Lafontaine who tricked the crow by praising his plumage and got him to drop the cheese in his beak, you trick those leaders into delivering to Israel what they would not deliver to the homeless in their own country, the hungry and the least healthy among their masses.
Regarded as a sucker born with the tendency to accept every sweet lie that the Neocons whisper in your ear, you believe in the fantasy world they shape for you and you live by their rule until one day the world comes crushing down on you and reality hits you in the face. You hate yourself for being this idiotic during all these years and you look for a way out of the hole you got yourself into, the hole in which you labored to milk the people of America for the glory of Israel and her shameless supporters inside America.
Getting hit in the face with reality and waking up from a dream-like fantasy is something that happens on occasion to the most careless of human beings and there is a lesson to be learned here which is not different from that of Lafontaine. What follows is a situation I witnessed long ago so let me tell you about it before I go any further.
Students in their late teens and early twenties like to brag about everything. One student I had in my school eons ago so annoyed his schoolmates when he bragged about being a connoisseur of sound that they asked for my help to test him out. I thought I should not get involved in something like this but was so intrigued by the idea myself that I did not give an outright no for answer. Instead, I asked the students to give me time to think about the matter and this answer of mine had its own consequence.
The students took my reluctance as a hopeful sign and they decided to speed up my decision process by making the student in question participate in his own entrapment. I do not know what they said to him but he came to me a little later on and he initiated a discussion on the difference in sound quality between the technology of solid state and that of the vacuum tube. I agreed with him that the tube was superior to solid state with the caveat that I was not a connoisseur of sound myself. As if on cue the student bragged about being an expert in this field and said he will submit to any sort of test that I or someone else would devise so as to prove his claim once and for all.
I called the group of students that thought of the idea in the first place and asked them to design a test. They did and it was a simple test to carry out in practice. The students took advantage of the fact that the South Koreans were beginning to make themselves known around the world for the home entertainment products they were making and were able to sell at a very low price. Among these products was an expensive looking sound system they sold at a cheap price, one that was given the impressive Anglo-Saxon name of Lloyd.
One student brought a Lloyd to the school while another brought a German model whose name escapes me now. The latter looked less impressive than the first but sold at a higher price. In the absence of the bragging student, the two systems were set up side by side one early morning and were tested back to back. I could not discern the difference in the quality of sound between the pair but some students claimed they did and they designated the German system as the better of the two.
When the student in question arrived at the school, the other students told him nothing about the origin of the two units and played a tape for him on one system and then the other. The student in question chose the Korean Lloyd as having a higher quality of sound.
They blindfolded the braggart and played a number of tapes on one system and then the other, and they asked him to choose between the two. His choices turned out to be random. And then they played a tape on the same unit back to back and asked him to guess which unit sounded better. Not knowing he was tricked, he chose randomly. They removed the blindfold and showed him the result of the test and he could not believe his eyes but was humbled enough by the experience that he began to act with a little more humility than ever before.
Finally, they showed him the purchase bill which indicated both the make and the cheap price of the Lloyd at which point he expressed an unusual fury. It was clear that the fury was directed against himself for believing in his own fantasy and for always paying a high price for the products he purchased when other products of equal quality were selling at a lower price. You see, dear friend, that boy had been his own Neocon for a long time, and when he woke up that day, he saw the world of his imagination crumble around him.
Likewise, the Americans antagonized the Arab people and those who stood by them in the mistaken belief that America will obtain the oil she needs at the price she will dictate. The Neocons and those who came before them had planted this fantasy in the head of the American leaders whom the Neocons had corrupted for the purpose of softening those very same heads. And so, like the crow of Lafontaine, they opened their beak to sing the song of a false democracy they thought was the pride of their system and dropped the most prized of their possessions.
What they dropped was nothing less than the American wellbeing which is sometimes referred to as an American cheese. It was what the forefathers had labored hard to produce and to hand over to the generations that came after them. But when the cheese hit the ground, it was the neo con artists and their Israeli allies who pounced on it and feasted with it to their hearts’ content. And then it became clear by the end of this orgy that nothing was left for the American people, not even a crumb for the leaders who made this whole calamity a possible thing.
From that moment on, things went from bad to worse and America spent all that she possessed in the futile attempt to rob the Arabs of what she could have bought at a fraction of what she spent on the misguided adventure. And while this was happening, as if to scrape the bottom of the barrel, the same crowd that got America into the bottomless pit got busy siphoning off the nation’s credit and all her reserves. Now America is waking up to the reality that the Neocons handed to her in Baghdad and in Lower Manhattan the same bitter dish that the British Empire was handed in Suez - the loss of her great power status.
Someone in America will undoubtedly hate themselves for teaming up with the Neocons as did the bragging student I had in my school and did the British and the French who teamed up with Israel to embark on the Suez adventure. But the ordinary people of America will not want to stop at the simple act of remorse and self hate but will want accountability and will demand to see the head of the culprits not only roll out of a job but roll their way to the jailhouses of the nation.
And as always, when a scandal of this magnitude explodes in America, the culprits will prove to be of the kind that call themselves friends of Israel, and the money will have been channeled not to support some social program or cultural institution as claimed by the Neocons but to cleanse the Palestinian homeland of its Palestinian owners at the hands of a Zionist regime that is as bloodthirsty as this planet has ever witnessed.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Teaching Dogs New Tricks In The Beltway
Everyone these days is talking about changing the culture in the Washington Beltway but, to paraphrase an old saying, can you teach an old dog new tricks? To answer the question we set aside the old dogs for now and look at what goes on in the realm of the young dogs to see if there is a lesson here that would apply to that old dog and all the dogs in the Beltway.
I had a technical school in a previous life where students did theory in class and practice in the lab. The classrooms were furnished with tables and the labs with benches on which sat electronic equipment and some hand tools. It struck me one day that little damage was done to the classroom tables but a great deal was done to the benches in the labs, and I wanted to know why.
After giving the matter some thought I reached the preliminary conclusion that the students do not use tools in the classroom except the pen which would not be effective at damaging the tables. They sit in class no more than one hour at a time which they do under the watchful eyes of the teachers. And they only listen to the lecture and write notes which make little demand on them but keep them busy all the time.
By contrast, the students stay long hours in the lab and they are expected to do mental work to solve the practical problems they encounter. They use metallic tools such as a screwdriver which can be effective at damaging the wooden top of the benches. And they can get frustrated which prompts them to take it on the benches with the tools at hand.
Some students had a favorite place where to sit in the lab but most did not. Those that picked the same place every day did not vandalize it while those that sat anywhere in a random fashion were more prone to vandalize.
One day I caught a student in the act of vandalizing the bench with a screwdriver. I asked him what he was doing and he said the carving on the bench was already there and he only added to what someone did before him. I was stunned by this response and so I called the student to my office. He first expressed indignation that I saw something wrong with what he did but then relented and followed me to the office.
Once there I asked him to explain the reason for his indignation. He said he was not the first to vandalize the bench. Since someone did it before him, he had the right to do it too because I did not reprimand the one who did it first. Never mind that I never knew who the first one was but the fact that someone got away with something gave everyone the right to do the same thing and not be reprimanded.
I asked if there was pleasure in adding to the scar of a bench that was already scarred. He said it was something that relaxed him whenever he expected the test equipment to show one result but showed another. I asked if he would carve a bench that is not already carved. He answered that the first guy who did it had a clean bench to begin with but he carved it anyway, so maybe he would carve a clean bench too.
He then went back to the first question and elaborated. He said when I called him to the office I did so in front of his peers who snickered because he was caught in the act. He explained that this made him feel discriminated against. He spoke like someone who felt victimized. But victimized by what? I asked myself. It could only be one thing, he looked stupid in the eyes of his peers for being caught doing something that someone else was smart enough to get away with.
So I responded to the student with a question: Why would I discriminate against you? I don’t know, he said, I am like everyone else. Correct, I said, you are like everyone else but you are the one I saw vandalize the bench and so I called you to explain. But he kept insisting that because he told me he was not the first to do it, I was supposed to stop here and accept as normal the repeat of an act that went unpunished. I should have expected this to happen and accepted it when it happened.
With all this new information under my belt, I revised my preliminary conclusion as to why the lab benches were vandalized more than the classroom tables, and I added to it the following. School age youngsters are wired to be in a learning mode. Not only do they learn from the teachers and the books but they do from each other as well. It is therefore normal that they succumb to peer pressure, a method by which they learn from each other. And this kind of learning happens even when no deliberate pressure is put on someone. It happens by imitating what is observed.
And so the question to ask became this one: Is it possible to teach young dogs new tricks? And the answer is yes, youngsters learn all the time. Each parent, each principal and each teacher have their own approaches to fulfilling this task and they do more or less a good job, each according to their ability.
As for the old dogs in the Washington Beltway, before we go there, we must first understand something about the learning process and what happens to the knowledge we acquire after we have acquired it.
Learning begins as a mental exercise because we need to concentrate on what we do. To wit, we think when we learn to drive. But after we have completed the learning process, we drive instinctively because the knowledge gets stored somewhere in the brain where it is not necessary to recall it anymore. We must therefore conclude that we are primarily creatures of habit that do not think most of the time but act instinctively.
Our responses to external conditions and stimuli are usually automatic and habitual. Taken together, these responses are called a culture and their purpose in most part is to insure our survival. Thus, the culture in the Washington beltway is a collection of responses that were created and allowed to evolve in the manner that they did for the sole purpose of insuring the survival and re-election of those who hold the power.
So how do we change all that? First, we must recognize that those in the Beltway do not do things in vacuum. They play it up to the voters in their respective constituencies. Thus, if we convince the voters to demand a better culture in the Beltway and reject the bad one, we will go a long way toward changing the status quo. That is, we must reach out to the masses through the use of the mass media and educate them. Those who have the pulpit have access to the media and they have the responsibility to do that.
It is not going to be an easy thing to do because in reality the culture in the Beltway is but a reflection of the culture in the rest of the country. Thus, he who has the pulpit must tell the American people you must change in order to change Washington and get the sort of government you clamor for and say you deserve. But since culture is constantly evolving, those who have the wherewithal to keep it on the right track must be eternally vigilant.
Thus, what should these people tell the American masses at this time? They can tell them to stop talking as if everything good in the World was American and everything bad in America was international. The one thing that hits you in the eye when you try to understand the American culture is that these people cannot see something good happening anywhere in the World without uttering the remark that someone must be following the American model. And they cannot see something bad happening in America without speaking about it as if it were an international problem spilling into America.
Consequently, it is said that the emerging countries are doing well at this time because they are following the American model, and America is suffering a mortgage meltdown at this time because this is an international problem which is spilling into America. You see, America is so good everyone wants to invest in it, and this is what caused the cash bubble and the eventual meltdown of the credit institutions. See how bad those foreigners are to us when we are so good to them!
Not only is the American culture so skewed in some areas as to be off the mark, it also turns reality on its head. For example, the view in America is that the people in the Middle East suffer a pathology called the conspiracy theory when, in reality, all they do is see corruption in their own backyard and little of it outside their borders. The joke in Egypt is that when a gas station sells gas at 91 piasters a liter and another sells it at 92, the second is corrupt because it gouges the public. If both stations sell at the same price, they are both corrupt because they fix the price. Thus if you own a gas station in Egypt you cannot win but at least the people there do not blame their problems on foreigners, they look at themselves and apply local solutions.
By contrast, the Americans who blame foreigners for their problems look for a solution that will "kick asses." In so doing, they spend more money, time and effort applying false solutions to problems that do not exist and thus create the problems and make them worse. Like the students who add to the carving of a bench because the carving is there, these people get themselves into a hole and keep digging in the belief that this will relax them.
I had a technical school in a previous life where students did theory in class and practice in the lab. The classrooms were furnished with tables and the labs with benches on which sat electronic equipment and some hand tools. It struck me one day that little damage was done to the classroom tables but a great deal was done to the benches in the labs, and I wanted to know why.
After giving the matter some thought I reached the preliminary conclusion that the students do not use tools in the classroom except the pen which would not be effective at damaging the tables. They sit in class no more than one hour at a time which they do under the watchful eyes of the teachers. And they only listen to the lecture and write notes which make little demand on them but keep them busy all the time.
By contrast, the students stay long hours in the lab and they are expected to do mental work to solve the practical problems they encounter. They use metallic tools such as a screwdriver which can be effective at damaging the wooden top of the benches. And they can get frustrated which prompts them to take it on the benches with the tools at hand.
Some students had a favorite place where to sit in the lab but most did not. Those that picked the same place every day did not vandalize it while those that sat anywhere in a random fashion were more prone to vandalize.
One day I caught a student in the act of vandalizing the bench with a screwdriver. I asked him what he was doing and he said the carving on the bench was already there and he only added to what someone did before him. I was stunned by this response and so I called the student to my office. He first expressed indignation that I saw something wrong with what he did but then relented and followed me to the office.
Once there I asked him to explain the reason for his indignation. He said he was not the first to vandalize the bench. Since someone did it before him, he had the right to do it too because I did not reprimand the one who did it first. Never mind that I never knew who the first one was but the fact that someone got away with something gave everyone the right to do the same thing and not be reprimanded.
I asked if there was pleasure in adding to the scar of a bench that was already scarred. He said it was something that relaxed him whenever he expected the test equipment to show one result but showed another. I asked if he would carve a bench that is not already carved. He answered that the first guy who did it had a clean bench to begin with but he carved it anyway, so maybe he would carve a clean bench too.
He then went back to the first question and elaborated. He said when I called him to the office I did so in front of his peers who snickered because he was caught in the act. He explained that this made him feel discriminated against. He spoke like someone who felt victimized. But victimized by what? I asked myself. It could only be one thing, he looked stupid in the eyes of his peers for being caught doing something that someone else was smart enough to get away with.
So I responded to the student with a question: Why would I discriminate against you? I don’t know, he said, I am like everyone else. Correct, I said, you are like everyone else but you are the one I saw vandalize the bench and so I called you to explain. But he kept insisting that because he told me he was not the first to do it, I was supposed to stop here and accept as normal the repeat of an act that went unpunished. I should have expected this to happen and accepted it when it happened.
With all this new information under my belt, I revised my preliminary conclusion as to why the lab benches were vandalized more than the classroom tables, and I added to it the following. School age youngsters are wired to be in a learning mode. Not only do they learn from the teachers and the books but they do from each other as well. It is therefore normal that they succumb to peer pressure, a method by which they learn from each other. And this kind of learning happens even when no deliberate pressure is put on someone. It happens by imitating what is observed.
And so the question to ask became this one: Is it possible to teach young dogs new tricks? And the answer is yes, youngsters learn all the time. Each parent, each principal and each teacher have their own approaches to fulfilling this task and they do more or less a good job, each according to their ability.
As for the old dogs in the Washington Beltway, before we go there, we must first understand something about the learning process and what happens to the knowledge we acquire after we have acquired it.
Learning begins as a mental exercise because we need to concentrate on what we do. To wit, we think when we learn to drive. But after we have completed the learning process, we drive instinctively because the knowledge gets stored somewhere in the brain where it is not necessary to recall it anymore. We must therefore conclude that we are primarily creatures of habit that do not think most of the time but act instinctively.
Our responses to external conditions and stimuli are usually automatic and habitual. Taken together, these responses are called a culture and their purpose in most part is to insure our survival. Thus, the culture in the Washington beltway is a collection of responses that were created and allowed to evolve in the manner that they did for the sole purpose of insuring the survival and re-election of those who hold the power.
So how do we change all that? First, we must recognize that those in the Beltway do not do things in vacuum. They play it up to the voters in their respective constituencies. Thus, if we convince the voters to demand a better culture in the Beltway and reject the bad one, we will go a long way toward changing the status quo. That is, we must reach out to the masses through the use of the mass media and educate them. Those who have the pulpit have access to the media and they have the responsibility to do that.
It is not going to be an easy thing to do because in reality the culture in the Beltway is but a reflection of the culture in the rest of the country. Thus, he who has the pulpit must tell the American people you must change in order to change Washington and get the sort of government you clamor for and say you deserve. But since culture is constantly evolving, those who have the wherewithal to keep it on the right track must be eternally vigilant.
Thus, what should these people tell the American masses at this time? They can tell them to stop talking as if everything good in the World was American and everything bad in America was international. The one thing that hits you in the eye when you try to understand the American culture is that these people cannot see something good happening anywhere in the World without uttering the remark that someone must be following the American model. And they cannot see something bad happening in America without speaking about it as if it were an international problem spilling into America.
Consequently, it is said that the emerging countries are doing well at this time because they are following the American model, and America is suffering a mortgage meltdown at this time because this is an international problem which is spilling into America. You see, America is so good everyone wants to invest in it, and this is what caused the cash bubble and the eventual meltdown of the credit institutions. See how bad those foreigners are to us when we are so good to them!
Not only is the American culture so skewed in some areas as to be off the mark, it also turns reality on its head. For example, the view in America is that the people in the Middle East suffer a pathology called the conspiracy theory when, in reality, all they do is see corruption in their own backyard and little of it outside their borders. The joke in Egypt is that when a gas station sells gas at 91 piasters a liter and another sells it at 92, the second is corrupt because it gouges the public. If both stations sell at the same price, they are both corrupt because they fix the price. Thus if you own a gas station in Egypt you cannot win but at least the people there do not blame their problems on foreigners, they look at themselves and apply local solutions.
By contrast, the Americans who blame foreigners for their problems look for a solution that will "kick asses." In so doing, they spend more money, time and effort applying false solutions to problems that do not exist and thus create the problems and make them worse. Like the students who add to the carving of a bench because the carving is there, these people get themselves into a hole and keep digging in the belief that this will relax them.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Dershowitz Crucifies New Prince Of Peace
Alan Dershowitz published an article the other day under the title: "Dems Diss Jimmy Carter" He says the former President was supposed to address the Democratic convention but was disinvited in part because of pressure brought to bear on the Democratic Party by guess who. You guessed it, Alan Dershowitz himself.
The author also mentions a book he wrote under a subtitle that reads in part: "Jimmy Carter … Who Stand[s] In The Way of Peace." Dershowitz is here talking about the same American President who brokered a peace deal between Egypt and Israel which made possible the peace deal between Jordan and Israel which paved the way for the Arab League’s offer to recognize Israel and normalize all Arab relations with her which encouraged the start of the peace negotiations between Syria and Israel. An impressive chain of events by any measure.
When someone does something as meaningful as did Jimmy Carter and you accuse him of the exact opposite, the word used to describe your accusation is crucifixion. There is no doubt that Jimmy Carter has been the American Prince of Peace who worked diligently to solve the problems of the Middle East and thus secured the survival of the state of Israel like no one else did before him or after him. But look what Dershowitz is doing; he is crucifying the man as if to enforce the stereotypical view that Jews crucify all those who bring peace to them the way they crucified Jesus Christ.
How can such action be explained? The secret to understanding the mentality behind it all lies in the understanding of the Talmud. This is a book that uses the Old Jewish Testament as a base upon which to construct a supremacist philosophy. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that this philosophy has been the single most important inspiration behind all the supremacist philosophies that came and plagued mankind since the Second Century AD.
Before we delve deeper into this subject, let us look at the Dershowitz article again. This is what the author says: "I must admit … I played a role … to disinvite Carter. I made it clear that I could not support a party that honored … Carter." What Dershowitz is really saying here is this: Look how powerful and how influential I am, so admire me.
But why is he powerful and influential? Well, it is that Jews are powerful and influential, and he happens to be a Jew. In fact, before he talked about himself, Dershowitz had this to say in the paragraph just above: "Perhaps the Democrats learned … from the Republican[s]. [Pat] Buchanan’s speech … may well have contributed to their electoral defeat. Had Jimmy Carter been allowed to speak … the impact on voters might have been considerable."
What Dershowitz says here is that the defeat of Bush 41 by Bill Clinton in 1992 was due to the influence that Jews exerted on the American people and their institutions. But this is not the first time that a Jew has attributed that same defeat to a stand taken by the former President. I discussed this point when I mentioned Tom Friedman in a book whose publication was blocked by none other than the Establishment to which Alan Dershowitz and Tom Friedman, belong. Here is the relevant excerpt.
[Tom Friedman offered Bush 43 an advice that was tied to a reward and a threat. It happened a few days after the tragedy of September 11, 2001 when Friedman went to Israel and stood in front of the Jim Lehrer News Hour camera and told the President he should attack Iraq, not Afghanistan. He warned that if the President did not attack Iraq, he will be defeated in the next election the same way that his father (Bush 41) was defeated for not going all the way to Baghdad during the first Gulf war.]
And so we have it that George Bush 41 was defeated in 1992 by Bill Clinton because he did not go all the way to Baghdad according to Tom Friedman and because Pat Buchanan was allowed to speak at the Republican convention according to Alan Dershowitz.
This is a pattern that is not unique to these two characters; it is common to all Jewish authors of their ilk. But is this a conspiracy? Yes it is because it is a culture and in some sense a culture is a conspiracy. You would not have a culture if you did not have a number of people come together and agree to follow a set of self-serving principles, and this happens to be the way that conspiracy is loosely defined. Thus it is important to ask: How did this culture come to be? And what is the history behind it?
It was in the Second Century AD that a number of self proclaimed leaders who insisted they were rabbis of the Jewish faith got together and invented a movement they called Rabbinical Judaism. They fiddled with the ideas in the Old Testament and then stuffed their newly minted concoctions into a book they called the Talmud with the view to accomplish two things: First, they sought to rebuild the World so as to counter the Christian movement which was beginning to attract followers in droves. Second, they wished to leave a record instructing their followers how to go about realizing the dream they created for their movement.
To this end, every entry made by those leaders and by their successors in the Talmud aims at enforcing the following set of concepts: If you are a part of our movement consider yourself chosen by God to control the World and to fix it so as to make it safe for you and for me. Because you are so chosen, you can never be wrong in what you say or do as long as the aim is to help the cause of the movement. Cheat, mislead, deceive, distort, double-cross, double-deal, betray, make false pretenses, false presentations, have it both ways, confuse the issues and so on and so forth from here to eternity – and you will only be blessed by the Almighty. In fact, the much ballyhooed Protocol of the Elders of Zion is but a pale imitation of the more sophisticated and much more subtle Talmud.
The result has been that the truth in the hands of the Talmudists who earnestly embrace the teachings of their book is like silly putty in the hands of a child. These people give the truth any shape and any form they want when they want it to suit their current purpose. Thus, when it suited Friedman to say that Bush 41 was defeated because he did not go to Baghdad, this became the official history of that event as it was tailor-made for a specific moment. And when it suited Dershowitz to say that Bush was defeated because the Republican convention allowed Pat Buchanan to speak, this became the official history of that same event as it was tailor-made for a different moment.
But when history and the truth are distorted to this degree, reality in the eyes of the agents of distortion becomes confused with their own fantasies. Thus, to be a Talmudist or to be an innocent follower who goes along not knowing what the movement is about, is to live in a fantasy World that ultimately leads to a tragedy such as a pogrom or a holocaust. This is a law of nature that never failed to assert itself century after century almost everywhere on this Planet.
And this accounts for the fact that even though Judaism recruited from all over the World, very few people joined the wacko movement of the Talmudists whose numbers have remained small. By contrast, the other religions recruited mostly from a more restricted pool of local sources yet they managed to attract considerably more followers.
Being consummate shape shifters, the Talmudists have presented their movement as just about anything you can imagine depending on where, when and to whom they made the presentation. But when all was said and done, they proved to have only a limited number of cards to play with. At the top of these cards was the sense of nationalism which manifested itself in Germany at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and led to the mother of holocausts for the Jews and for a number of other people.
That same card is being played in America today but because the word nationalism has become a bad word in the English language, it was replaced by a synonym, and the new word is patriotism. Add to this the ability to confuse the issues that the Talmudists have developed such as when they confuse America’s interest with that of Israel, and you will understand how it was possible for these people to get away with the insinuation that Bush 41 was not patriotic when he refused to go all the way to Baghdad. And to get away with the insinuation that Jimmy Carter may not be patriotic because he refused to stand by Israel despite the crimes she committed even if the former President did not mention the most horrible of those crimes and he deliberately avoided saying negative things about Israel.
What Alan Dershowitz does not realize is that by calling for the crucifixion of the new Prince of Peace, he is signaling that we are at the end of a cycle, therefore at a crossroad. That is, the time has come for someone to define what the legitimate aspirations of the Jews are and to negotiate in good faith or the World will witness another tragedy where we shall all suffer and the Jews shall pay the highest of all prices.
Dershowitz is not the man to negotiate for the Jews and neither is Friedman. Let’s leave out the latter and concentrate on Dershowitz. Even a cursory look at his article shows he means to glorify himself and to highlight the influence he has in the corridors of power. Yet, strewn all over the article are references to anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli sentiments as if an attack on any of those were an attack on him personally. This means he defines himself by how he defines a Jew, a Zionists or an Israeli, and it shows he is confused enough to believe in his own lies. This disqualifies him from negotiating on anyone’s behalf yet he goes around behaving as if he were the chief negotiator for all the Jews and for Israel.
Also, those who know something about the man know he does not tolerate ideas that contradict his own. Couple this with the fact that even though he is merely an observer who never formally studied the Holocaust and never suffered it, he believes he is qualified to tell what happened during that chapter of history more than does Professor Norman Finkelstein who is the son of Holocaust survivors and who made the history of the Holocaust the subject of his lifelong study and teachings. Yet here too, Dershowitz has claimed he was instrumental in denying Finklestein the tenure that was owed to him where he taught and where he was deemed to be an excellent professor.
Thus, even though Dershowitz and his colleagues in the Talmudic Establishment never shy away from taking credit for the corrosive and toxic influence they exert on the public and the institutions of America, something they achieve by hook, by crook and by blackmail, they turn reality upside down when they claim that their opponents are dangerous to the principles of Democracy as he does in his latest piece where he writes:
[It is Jimmy Carter who has tried to skew the marketplace of ideas by refusing to debate. So let Jimmy Carter speak…But let others who disagree with him be invited to speak…That is debate, not the kind of one-sided propaganda that Carter insists on. So I renew my challenge to President Carter: Join the marketplace of ideas. Debate me.]
What Dershowitz is saying here is this: Carter was not fit to speak at the Democratic convention even though it is long been traditional for living ex-presidents to be invited to address their party’s quadrennial convention. I declared him unfit and had him disinvited but he can debate me if he wants because this is Democracy Talmudic style. I was not invited to speak at the convention therefore Carter could not speak in that venue either even if the subjects discussed were American subjects and not Israeli. Understand this all of you out there; either you are for Israel or you are against her. And if you are against her you are not fit to speak on any subject - American, Jewish or otherwise. And if you try to speak without my permission, your fate will be the ruin of your life if not worse.
Well folks, this is a supremacist mentality that is begging for the return of the Holocaust. Dershowitz and those like him are not only crucifying every Prince of Peace that tries to bring peace to them, they are nailing to the cross every hand such as America’s hand that feeds them and feeds Israel. And in the process, they are also nailing to the cross every Jew that says: Enough of this madness, I am not going to be a part of this insanity anymore just because I am a Jew and these most pathological of egomaniacs pretend to be Jews with the right to speak for me and for my loved ones. I am through with them.
We need more people such as these to come out of hiding and to speak up because we cannot, as a species, let this tragedy play itself fully one more time.
The author also mentions a book he wrote under a subtitle that reads in part: "Jimmy Carter … Who Stand[s] In The Way of Peace." Dershowitz is here talking about the same American President who brokered a peace deal between Egypt and Israel which made possible the peace deal between Jordan and Israel which paved the way for the Arab League’s offer to recognize Israel and normalize all Arab relations with her which encouraged the start of the peace negotiations between Syria and Israel. An impressive chain of events by any measure.
When someone does something as meaningful as did Jimmy Carter and you accuse him of the exact opposite, the word used to describe your accusation is crucifixion. There is no doubt that Jimmy Carter has been the American Prince of Peace who worked diligently to solve the problems of the Middle East and thus secured the survival of the state of Israel like no one else did before him or after him. But look what Dershowitz is doing; he is crucifying the man as if to enforce the stereotypical view that Jews crucify all those who bring peace to them the way they crucified Jesus Christ.
How can such action be explained? The secret to understanding the mentality behind it all lies in the understanding of the Talmud. This is a book that uses the Old Jewish Testament as a base upon which to construct a supremacist philosophy. And it is becoming increasingly apparent that this philosophy has been the single most important inspiration behind all the supremacist philosophies that came and plagued mankind since the Second Century AD.
Before we delve deeper into this subject, let us look at the Dershowitz article again. This is what the author says: "I must admit … I played a role … to disinvite Carter. I made it clear that I could not support a party that honored … Carter." What Dershowitz is really saying here is this: Look how powerful and how influential I am, so admire me.
But why is he powerful and influential? Well, it is that Jews are powerful and influential, and he happens to be a Jew. In fact, before he talked about himself, Dershowitz had this to say in the paragraph just above: "Perhaps the Democrats learned … from the Republican[s]. [Pat] Buchanan’s speech … may well have contributed to their electoral defeat. Had Jimmy Carter been allowed to speak … the impact on voters might have been considerable."
What Dershowitz says here is that the defeat of Bush 41 by Bill Clinton in 1992 was due to the influence that Jews exerted on the American people and their institutions. But this is not the first time that a Jew has attributed that same defeat to a stand taken by the former President. I discussed this point when I mentioned Tom Friedman in a book whose publication was blocked by none other than the Establishment to which Alan Dershowitz and Tom Friedman, belong. Here is the relevant excerpt.
[Tom Friedman offered Bush 43 an advice that was tied to a reward and a threat. It happened a few days after the tragedy of September 11, 2001 when Friedman went to Israel and stood in front of the Jim Lehrer News Hour camera and told the President he should attack Iraq, not Afghanistan. He warned that if the President did not attack Iraq, he will be defeated in the next election the same way that his father (Bush 41) was defeated for not going all the way to Baghdad during the first Gulf war.]
And so we have it that George Bush 41 was defeated in 1992 by Bill Clinton because he did not go all the way to Baghdad according to Tom Friedman and because Pat Buchanan was allowed to speak at the Republican convention according to Alan Dershowitz.
This is a pattern that is not unique to these two characters; it is common to all Jewish authors of their ilk. But is this a conspiracy? Yes it is because it is a culture and in some sense a culture is a conspiracy. You would not have a culture if you did not have a number of people come together and agree to follow a set of self-serving principles, and this happens to be the way that conspiracy is loosely defined. Thus it is important to ask: How did this culture come to be? And what is the history behind it?
It was in the Second Century AD that a number of self proclaimed leaders who insisted they were rabbis of the Jewish faith got together and invented a movement they called Rabbinical Judaism. They fiddled with the ideas in the Old Testament and then stuffed their newly minted concoctions into a book they called the Talmud with the view to accomplish two things: First, they sought to rebuild the World so as to counter the Christian movement which was beginning to attract followers in droves. Second, they wished to leave a record instructing their followers how to go about realizing the dream they created for their movement.
To this end, every entry made by those leaders and by their successors in the Talmud aims at enforcing the following set of concepts: If you are a part of our movement consider yourself chosen by God to control the World and to fix it so as to make it safe for you and for me. Because you are so chosen, you can never be wrong in what you say or do as long as the aim is to help the cause of the movement. Cheat, mislead, deceive, distort, double-cross, double-deal, betray, make false pretenses, false presentations, have it both ways, confuse the issues and so on and so forth from here to eternity – and you will only be blessed by the Almighty. In fact, the much ballyhooed Protocol of the Elders of Zion is but a pale imitation of the more sophisticated and much more subtle Talmud.
The result has been that the truth in the hands of the Talmudists who earnestly embrace the teachings of their book is like silly putty in the hands of a child. These people give the truth any shape and any form they want when they want it to suit their current purpose. Thus, when it suited Friedman to say that Bush 41 was defeated because he did not go to Baghdad, this became the official history of that event as it was tailor-made for a specific moment. And when it suited Dershowitz to say that Bush was defeated because the Republican convention allowed Pat Buchanan to speak, this became the official history of that same event as it was tailor-made for a different moment.
But when history and the truth are distorted to this degree, reality in the eyes of the agents of distortion becomes confused with their own fantasies. Thus, to be a Talmudist or to be an innocent follower who goes along not knowing what the movement is about, is to live in a fantasy World that ultimately leads to a tragedy such as a pogrom or a holocaust. This is a law of nature that never failed to assert itself century after century almost everywhere on this Planet.
And this accounts for the fact that even though Judaism recruited from all over the World, very few people joined the wacko movement of the Talmudists whose numbers have remained small. By contrast, the other religions recruited mostly from a more restricted pool of local sources yet they managed to attract considerably more followers.
Being consummate shape shifters, the Talmudists have presented their movement as just about anything you can imagine depending on where, when and to whom they made the presentation. But when all was said and done, they proved to have only a limited number of cards to play with. At the top of these cards was the sense of nationalism which manifested itself in Germany at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and led to the mother of holocausts for the Jews and for a number of other people.
That same card is being played in America today but because the word nationalism has become a bad word in the English language, it was replaced by a synonym, and the new word is patriotism. Add to this the ability to confuse the issues that the Talmudists have developed such as when they confuse America’s interest with that of Israel, and you will understand how it was possible for these people to get away with the insinuation that Bush 41 was not patriotic when he refused to go all the way to Baghdad. And to get away with the insinuation that Jimmy Carter may not be patriotic because he refused to stand by Israel despite the crimes she committed even if the former President did not mention the most horrible of those crimes and he deliberately avoided saying negative things about Israel.
What Alan Dershowitz does not realize is that by calling for the crucifixion of the new Prince of Peace, he is signaling that we are at the end of a cycle, therefore at a crossroad. That is, the time has come for someone to define what the legitimate aspirations of the Jews are and to negotiate in good faith or the World will witness another tragedy where we shall all suffer and the Jews shall pay the highest of all prices.
Dershowitz is not the man to negotiate for the Jews and neither is Friedman. Let’s leave out the latter and concentrate on Dershowitz. Even a cursory look at his article shows he means to glorify himself and to highlight the influence he has in the corridors of power. Yet, strewn all over the article are references to anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli sentiments as if an attack on any of those were an attack on him personally. This means he defines himself by how he defines a Jew, a Zionists or an Israeli, and it shows he is confused enough to believe in his own lies. This disqualifies him from negotiating on anyone’s behalf yet he goes around behaving as if he were the chief negotiator for all the Jews and for Israel.
Also, those who know something about the man know he does not tolerate ideas that contradict his own. Couple this with the fact that even though he is merely an observer who never formally studied the Holocaust and never suffered it, he believes he is qualified to tell what happened during that chapter of history more than does Professor Norman Finkelstein who is the son of Holocaust survivors and who made the history of the Holocaust the subject of his lifelong study and teachings. Yet here too, Dershowitz has claimed he was instrumental in denying Finklestein the tenure that was owed to him where he taught and where he was deemed to be an excellent professor.
Thus, even though Dershowitz and his colleagues in the Talmudic Establishment never shy away from taking credit for the corrosive and toxic influence they exert on the public and the institutions of America, something they achieve by hook, by crook and by blackmail, they turn reality upside down when they claim that their opponents are dangerous to the principles of Democracy as he does in his latest piece where he writes:
[It is Jimmy Carter who has tried to skew the marketplace of ideas by refusing to debate. So let Jimmy Carter speak…But let others who disagree with him be invited to speak…That is debate, not the kind of one-sided propaganda that Carter insists on. So I renew my challenge to President Carter: Join the marketplace of ideas. Debate me.]
What Dershowitz is saying here is this: Carter was not fit to speak at the Democratic convention even though it is long been traditional for living ex-presidents to be invited to address their party’s quadrennial convention. I declared him unfit and had him disinvited but he can debate me if he wants because this is Democracy Talmudic style. I was not invited to speak at the convention therefore Carter could not speak in that venue either even if the subjects discussed were American subjects and not Israeli. Understand this all of you out there; either you are for Israel or you are against her. And if you are against her you are not fit to speak on any subject - American, Jewish or otherwise. And if you try to speak without my permission, your fate will be the ruin of your life if not worse.
Well folks, this is a supremacist mentality that is begging for the return of the Holocaust. Dershowitz and those like him are not only crucifying every Prince of Peace that tries to bring peace to them, they are nailing to the cross every hand such as America’s hand that feeds them and feeds Israel. And in the process, they are also nailing to the cross every Jew that says: Enough of this madness, I am not going to be a part of this insanity anymore just because I am a Jew and these most pathological of egomaniacs pretend to be Jews with the right to speak for me and for my loved ones. I am through with them.
We need more people such as these to come out of hiding and to speak up because we cannot, as a species, let this tragedy play itself fully one more time.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Face Of Revolt Behind The Veil
If you believe you can change the World with money and bombs, read the story that follows and be prepared for a big surprise because you’re about to discover the power of the spit.
I lived in Canada 44 years and never saw anything like it before. I also lived about half as long in other parts of the World including the Horn of Africa and the North Eastern corner of that Continent before coming here, and I never saw anything like it either. That is, I never saw a woman wear a veil of this kind until now. What I saw the other day was a woman wearing a veil called the burka. This is the type that covers the entire face of the woman.
I saw her as she shopped at a supermarket together with another woman who was not veiled and who looked Southeast Asian. The bare faced woman was dressed like a modern Western woman, and this made her indistinguishable from the other women at the market but contrasted her sharply against the veiled woman with whom she picked fruits and vegetables.
My first reaction regarding the veiled woman was one of indignation because I felt there was something phony about her. I thought that a live woman wearing a burka in North America the way I saw women wear this thing in the movies was a phenomenon that did not evolve naturally. Someone could not have waken up one morning and decided it was better to lead a life wearing this veil than not wearing it. To my way of thinking, something artificial was injected into the mix and rendered this whole issue a phony one.
In fact, I remember a saying from the days when I lived in Egypt as a teenager. To put down someone we would call them backward and follow that by saying their women must be wearing a burka, never visualizing what such women might look like.
Moreover, the word hijab is an Arabic noun and it means cover. But it can also be used as a verb and thus, instead of saying their women must be wearing a burka, we sometimes said their women must be covering up. And this kind of talk was used equally by Christians and Muslims to put down a Christian or a Muslim. We did this as a matter of course during a casual conversation without giving the matter much thought.
And so as I stood in that supermarket half a century later, I was seized by the spirit of my teenage years and I psyched myself into believing I was about to do the right thing. This was to summon the courage to speak to the woman who was not wearing the veil. I spoke to her in English but she surprised me by answering in Arabic although it was a broken Arabic that betrayed her East Asian origin. She then switched to English which she spoke fluently with a slight British accent. After a dialogue that lasted a few seconds, I asked: why is your friend doing this? And the woman responded: why don’t you ask her?
I turned to the veiled woman and asked in English and in Arabic: do you speak English or Arabic? She responded in a youngish voice and in perfect Canadian English: Save your breath. I know what’s botherin’ you but like mom said, this is what I feel comfortable doin’ and this is what I’m goin’ to do.
I was blown away and I remained speechless so the girl rescued me from my embarrassment. She explained that her father is of Anglo-Saxon descent; she was born here and never left Canada except to travel to the United States and to make a short visit to Britain. Her father is comfortable with what she is doing and her mother is getting used to the idea. Only a few months ago her mother would not have walked with her into a supermarket such as this but that was changing as I could see.
But why? I still wanted to know; why do this at all?
The girl explained that she grew up looking at photographs in which some women were veiled and never thought there was something wrong with that. These were photographs taken in the Arabian Gulf states where her mother lived as a young woman. The grandparents who were from Pakistan had traveled to that region of the World where the father worked for an oil company.
Eventually the would-be mother met a young man who worked for the same oil company, and had roots in Britain and in Canada. The two married after a courtship that lasted a few months, went to live in Britain for a short while then came to Canada where they settled. They had a daughter who decided to wear the veil and with whom I was now speaking.
Neither the mother nor members of the immediate family were veiled in the pictures she looked at as a child but that was of no consequence to the girl who could imagine her mother wear a veil just the same. In fact, as a child, she fantasized wearing a veil herself but never did, not even on Halloween nights because it never occurred to her to fulfill the fantasy. As she explained, contrary to the current situation, this issue was not a burning one at the time.
What happened to change all that? I asked.
What happened, she said, was that for some perplexing reason the media over here decided to make an issue of the women wearing the veil over there. Like children in a schoolyard and without provocation they mocked the women, their culture, their religion and their way of life. But for what? she asked. The girl asked the question then attempted to answer it by asking another question: because we could not rob these people of their oil? Gimme a break!
This is when she started to argue in her own mind: you don’t like the veil? You mock these women because they are not here to defend or to explain themselves? Well, I am here and I am wearing the veil. Come mock me in my face and see what will happen.
What will happen? I hastened to ask. The girl thought for a moment then replied: "I’ll lift the veil long enough to spit in their faces." I was taken aback and so I exclaimed: "Spit in their faces!" And she replied that she did it before when she was 8 or 9 years old to a boy who made her angry.
She went on to explain that one day her mother drove her to school and, being darker skinned than herself whose father is Anglo-Saxon, the boy who used to be a friend asked if the mother was a Paki. This being a time when the word Paki was used derisively to put down people, the girl reacted instinctively by spitting in the boy’s face and kicking him.
I asked if she was tempted to spit in my face when I spoke to her mother about the veil. She said no but if I had mocked her she might have done it. At this point I decided it was time to thank the two women for educating me and I walked away thinking to myself how close I came to being spat on, having come close to mocking a feisty girl wearing the veil.
But this is a lesson that goes beyond what is apparent on the surface. We have in America an Administration that shocked the World but not awed anyone. It did so by exploding bombs over Baghdad and spending trillions killing countless Iraqis and thousands of Americans. But to what end did they do this? The Administration says to change the culture of Iraq and to drag the Middle East kicking and screaming into modernity.
Well, dear reader, the story I just related says they failed miserably. It says so because you can see that what was backward and primitive in the Middle East half a century ago and worthy of being mocked by teenagers in a schoolyard may well have become the wave of the future in North America half a century later. Welcome into the modernity of the veil, North America. Just don’t kick and don’t scream.
But why did this happen? Well, it happened because America’s bombs did not frighten the people of the Middle East, and America’s money did not buy their conscience. The bombs and the money only managed to revolt the locals and to revolt their descendants, including those who were born elsewhere. And together, like the mother and the daughter I met at the supermarket, these people have decided not to change themselves but to change those who came to change them.
No failure can be more colossal and more wrenching than this. Maybe, therefore, the Americans ought to call their misadventure a victory and get out of there before they get humiliated even more. After all, every defeat in history has been called a victory when the "victors" got bored listening to themselves and hearing their own lies repeated over and over without any shame and without equivocation.
The Americans went in to oust the Baathists from power and after seven years of horror, they surged the Baathists back into power to achieve the peace of the grave that even Saddam Hussein could not impose on his people. How much more victorious can one get?
Yes, this kind of victors always vanished into the night tail between their legs and the World said good riddance. But America need not wait this long if she wants to play a role in the World of tomorrow whether or not the veil will cover every woman’s face by then.
I lived in Canada 44 years and never saw anything like it before. I also lived about half as long in other parts of the World including the Horn of Africa and the North Eastern corner of that Continent before coming here, and I never saw anything like it either. That is, I never saw a woman wear a veil of this kind until now. What I saw the other day was a woman wearing a veil called the burka. This is the type that covers the entire face of the woman.
I saw her as she shopped at a supermarket together with another woman who was not veiled and who looked Southeast Asian. The bare faced woman was dressed like a modern Western woman, and this made her indistinguishable from the other women at the market but contrasted her sharply against the veiled woman with whom she picked fruits and vegetables.
My first reaction regarding the veiled woman was one of indignation because I felt there was something phony about her. I thought that a live woman wearing a burka in North America the way I saw women wear this thing in the movies was a phenomenon that did not evolve naturally. Someone could not have waken up one morning and decided it was better to lead a life wearing this veil than not wearing it. To my way of thinking, something artificial was injected into the mix and rendered this whole issue a phony one.
In fact, I remember a saying from the days when I lived in Egypt as a teenager. To put down someone we would call them backward and follow that by saying their women must be wearing a burka, never visualizing what such women might look like.
Moreover, the word hijab is an Arabic noun and it means cover. But it can also be used as a verb and thus, instead of saying their women must be wearing a burka, we sometimes said their women must be covering up. And this kind of talk was used equally by Christians and Muslims to put down a Christian or a Muslim. We did this as a matter of course during a casual conversation without giving the matter much thought.
And so as I stood in that supermarket half a century later, I was seized by the spirit of my teenage years and I psyched myself into believing I was about to do the right thing. This was to summon the courage to speak to the woman who was not wearing the veil. I spoke to her in English but she surprised me by answering in Arabic although it was a broken Arabic that betrayed her East Asian origin. She then switched to English which she spoke fluently with a slight British accent. After a dialogue that lasted a few seconds, I asked: why is your friend doing this? And the woman responded: why don’t you ask her?
I turned to the veiled woman and asked in English and in Arabic: do you speak English or Arabic? She responded in a youngish voice and in perfect Canadian English: Save your breath. I know what’s botherin’ you but like mom said, this is what I feel comfortable doin’ and this is what I’m goin’ to do.
I was blown away and I remained speechless so the girl rescued me from my embarrassment. She explained that her father is of Anglo-Saxon descent; she was born here and never left Canada except to travel to the United States and to make a short visit to Britain. Her father is comfortable with what she is doing and her mother is getting used to the idea. Only a few months ago her mother would not have walked with her into a supermarket such as this but that was changing as I could see.
But why? I still wanted to know; why do this at all?
The girl explained that she grew up looking at photographs in which some women were veiled and never thought there was something wrong with that. These were photographs taken in the Arabian Gulf states where her mother lived as a young woman. The grandparents who were from Pakistan had traveled to that region of the World where the father worked for an oil company.
Eventually the would-be mother met a young man who worked for the same oil company, and had roots in Britain and in Canada. The two married after a courtship that lasted a few months, went to live in Britain for a short while then came to Canada where they settled. They had a daughter who decided to wear the veil and with whom I was now speaking.
Neither the mother nor members of the immediate family were veiled in the pictures she looked at as a child but that was of no consequence to the girl who could imagine her mother wear a veil just the same. In fact, as a child, she fantasized wearing a veil herself but never did, not even on Halloween nights because it never occurred to her to fulfill the fantasy. As she explained, contrary to the current situation, this issue was not a burning one at the time.
What happened to change all that? I asked.
What happened, she said, was that for some perplexing reason the media over here decided to make an issue of the women wearing the veil over there. Like children in a schoolyard and without provocation they mocked the women, their culture, their religion and their way of life. But for what? she asked. The girl asked the question then attempted to answer it by asking another question: because we could not rob these people of their oil? Gimme a break!
This is when she started to argue in her own mind: you don’t like the veil? You mock these women because they are not here to defend or to explain themselves? Well, I am here and I am wearing the veil. Come mock me in my face and see what will happen.
What will happen? I hastened to ask. The girl thought for a moment then replied: "I’ll lift the veil long enough to spit in their faces." I was taken aback and so I exclaimed: "Spit in their faces!" And she replied that she did it before when she was 8 or 9 years old to a boy who made her angry.
She went on to explain that one day her mother drove her to school and, being darker skinned than herself whose father is Anglo-Saxon, the boy who used to be a friend asked if the mother was a Paki. This being a time when the word Paki was used derisively to put down people, the girl reacted instinctively by spitting in the boy’s face and kicking him.
I asked if she was tempted to spit in my face when I spoke to her mother about the veil. She said no but if I had mocked her she might have done it. At this point I decided it was time to thank the two women for educating me and I walked away thinking to myself how close I came to being spat on, having come close to mocking a feisty girl wearing the veil.
But this is a lesson that goes beyond what is apparent on the surface. We have in America an Administration that shocked the World but not awed anyone. It did so by exploding bombs over Baghdad and spending trillions killing countless Iraqis and thousands of Americans. But to what end did they do this? The Administration says to change the culture of Iraq and to drag the Middle East kicking and screaming into modernity.
Well, dear reader, the story I just related says they failed miserably. It says so because you can see that what was backward and primitive in the Middle East half a century ago and worthy of being mocked by teenagers in a schoolyard may well have become the wave of the future in North America half a century later. Welcome into the modernity of the veil, North America. Just don’t kick and don’t scream.
But why did this happen? Well, it happened because America’s bombs did not frighten the people of the Middle East, and America’s money did not buy their conscience. The bombs and the money only managed to revolt the locals and to revolt their descendants, including those who were born elsewhere. And together, like the mother and the daughter I met at the supermarket, these people have decided not to change themselves but to change those who came to change them.
No failure can be more colossal and more wrenching than this. Maybe, therefore, the Americans ought to call their misadventure a victory and get out of there before they get humiliated even more. After all, every defeat in history has been called a victory when the "victors" got bored listening to themselves and hearing their own lies repeated over and over without any shame and without equivocation.
The Americans went in to oust the Baathists from power and after seven years of horror, they surged the Baathists back into power to achieve the peace of the grave that even Saddam Hussein could not impose on his people. How much more victorious can one get?
Yes, this kind of victors always vanished into the night tail between their legs and the World said good riddance. But America need not wait this long if she wants to play a role in the World of tomorrow whether or not the veil will cover every woman’s face by then.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Bookends Of The Hate Machine
If you’re trying to express a complex idea requiring specific examples to describe a precise condition, you are happy to see a couple of examples materialize before your eyes during one and the same week, and see them line up like stars to make life easy for you. This is what happened during the week that the Democratic convention chose Barack Obama to be their nominee for the presidency of the United States of America.
The first example was the appearance of Mona Charen’s article on August 27, 2008 in the National Review Online under the title: "This Historic Candidacy," and the subtitle: "And my reservations about the politics and worldview of this candidate."
When you read the article you are prompted to ask the question: "Where is the beef?" You look closely and see that Charen begins by explaining what motivated her to write the piece. She says it was the sight of Juan Williams’ almost tearful reaction to Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic convention. Says Charen: "He shook his head in amazement that an African-American woman was in the position she was."
Charen says that she too would have loved the spectacle but only if Michelle Obama was the woman she said she was on that night. However, Michelle is not that woman says Mona because … well, because what? Mona offers nothing that is deep or insightful. She cites a 1985 thesis written by Michelle Obama in which the latter referred to American Blacks and other students from the Third World in the same sentence. This being the case says Mona, Michelle should still feel alienated and not pretend to be an American patriot.
Wow! Did you get this dear reader? What a genius must be this Mona Charen who can decipher the current worldview of someone whose wife saw at some point in her student life, a parallel between the condition of some American Blacks and the condition of some Third World societies.
How many more Americans and how many more citizens of Planet Earth has Mona Charen deceived herself into believing she understands as well as this? Is that what she writes about all the time?
Mona dear, you should sit with Nelson Mandela if he will not mind spending time talking to you. Here is a man who spent a good part of his life in jail for disliking what went on in his country to the point of doing something that the nation of South Africa said was a criminal act. But then Mandela rose to become president of that very same nation; and South Africa did not even enslave its citizens as did America.
Please explain, Mona dear, was Mandela a patriot all along or did he become one after he was elected President of South Africa? What does your genius decipher in the history of that nation? Please answer, Mona dear because the same history is being repeated with other African, Asian and South American personalities who diagnose the ills of their system of governance then march on to power and change the system. The world needs to know how to deal with these people and the world counts on you to give it guidance, Mona dearest of all.
So much for the first example. As to the second, it was the appearance two days later, on August 29, 2008 of Charles Krauthammer’s piece in the same publication under the title: "Barack Obama: International Man of Mystery," and the subtitle: "The lack of personal testimonials at the DNC coronation must leave Democrats uneasy.
When you contrast Krauthammer’s piece with that of Charen, you realize that the first, who studied psychiatry, has mastered a way of presenting his case that is vastly superior to the way of the second who studied law. The trouble with Krauthammer, however, is that he is caught in a manner of doing things that was once a potent formula but has now lost its vigor because of overuse. Let me explain.
Those who defend the Zionist causes used to be able to freeze the argument of their opponent and advance their own by pulling a trick out of their hat. It was always the same old trick pulled out of the same old hat. For example, if you’re talking about Syria, they would say they wish there was a magnanimous Sadat in Syria who would go to Jerusalem and address the Israeli Parliament. If you’re talking about Palestine, they would say they wish there was a pacifist Mahatma Ghandi in Palestine who would not grab a stone and throw it at an Israeli tank that is in the process of demolishing his or her home.
Krauthammer pulled that same trick in his current piece. He writes about the manner in which John Kerry was introduced to his convention four years ago. Things were not done the same way with Obama, says Krauthammer, therefore the process was not as valid in his eyes. Instead, he says he would have loved to see: "an honor guard … surround him [Obama] on the podium attesting to his character and readiness to lead."
No, it won’t work this time, Charles, because people know that every convention is different from every other convention even if you assert: "Such personal testimonials are the norm." Besides, if this is true then the trick has now become repetitive which renders it stale and useless in the eyes of many.
Moreover, I had the opportunity in my long life to hire people, mostly teachers, for my own school when I had one or for someone else’s school when I worked for someone else. I learned that the best way to treat the letters of recommendation accompanying an application for a job was to ignore them.
I did so because I never expected to see a letter that listed the shortcomings of its bearer, and when you hire people you need to know their weaknesses so as to take the necessary remedial action at the outset. Likewise, someone on the podium giving testimonial on behalf of a candidate will always emphasize if not exaggerate the virtues of the candidate but will never expose their weaknesses.
Another thing I learned in life is never to try and predict how a student will progress in school based on my first impression of him or her. And I never wanted to predict how the student will do at work after graduation because experience taught me that in all likelihood I was going to be wrong. Likewise, one speech at a convention is no way to have us predict what kind of president a candidate will turn out to be.
I am certain Krauthammer knows all these things. So then what is the real story behind the making of those opinions? Well, neither he nor Mona Charen want to see Barack Obama at the helm of the United States government for a reason that can no longer be brushed aside. These two have defended the cause of Israel and those of the Jewish Establishment forever. Together, along with a few other opinion makers, they have judged potential leaders not by their talent or abilities but by the intensity of their love for Israel and the other Jewish causes.
In that quest, Mona Charen, Charles Krauthammer and company concoct on the spot a convenient argument based on truth, falsehood or a combination of both to support or to attack every person that seeks a high office. Krauthammer does it intelligently by constructing a strong and deep argument; Charen does it not so intelligently by constructing a weak and shallow argument.
But why the difference between these two authors? First, we must understand that the causes they defend are indefensible. Thus, using logic and legal arguments, Mona Charen has no prayer at making a good case. Krauthammer, on the other hand, makes a seemingly better case because he has mastered the skill to be insidious and he often uses reverse psychology to make his point.
To better understand and to accurately assess the work of these two, you must see them as part of a hate machine whose sole purpose is to discredit or to destroy those who seek high office and are not diehard lovers of Israel and the Jewish causes. Like bookends, they sit at the extremities of the effectiveness spectrum while everyone else that is part of the same machine sits somewhere between the two of them.
Barack Obama has not completely done what they expect of him and, like a monkey on his back, they will stay there and they will clobber him until he knuckles under or he gets knocked off. Will Barack Obama prove to be a third alternative who will then be regarded as the miracle that saved America from itself?
In its own slow moving and merry way time will tell this story one chapter at a time as the world watches the unfolding story.
The first example was the appearance of Mona Charen’s article on August 27, 2008 in the National Review Online under the title: "This Historic Candidacy," and the subtitle: "And my reservations about the politics and worldview of this candidate."
When you read the article you are prompted to ask the question: "Where is the beef?" You look closely and see that Charen begins by explaining what motivated her to write the piece. She says it was the sight of Juan Williams’ almost tearful reaction to Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic convention. Says Charen: "He shook his head in amazement that an African-American woman was in the position she was."
Charen says that she too would have loved the spectacle but only if Michelle Obama was the woman she said she was on that night. However, Michelle is not that woman says Mona because … well, because what? Mona offers nothing that is deep or insightful. She cites a 1985 thesis written by Michelle Obama in which the latter referred to American Blacks and other students from the Third World in the same sentence. This being the case says Mona, Michelle should still feel alienated and not pretend to be an American patriot.
Wow! Did you get this dear reader? What a genius must be this Mona Charen who can decipher the current worldview of someone whose wife saw at some point in her student life, a parallel between the condition of some American Blacks and the condition of some Third World societies.
How many more Americans and how many more citizens of Planet Earth has Mona Charen deceived herself into believing she understands as well as this? Is that what she writes about all the time?
Mona dear, you should sit with Nelson Mandela if he will not mind spending time talking to you. Here is a man who spent a good part of his life in jail for disliking what went on in his country to the point of doing something that the nation of South Africa said was a criminal act. But then Mandela rose to become president of that very same nation; and South Africa did not even enslave its citizens as did America.
Please explain, Mona dear, was Mandela a patriot all along or did he become one after he was elected President of South Africa? What does your genius decipher in the history of that nation? Please answer, Mona dear because the same history is being repeated with other African, Asian and South American personalities who diagnose the ills of their system of governance then march on to power and change the system. The world needs to know how to deal with these people and the world counts on you to give it guidance, Mona dearest of all.
So much for the first example. As to the second, it was the appearance two days later, on August 29, 2008 of Charles Krauthammer’s piece in the same publication under the title: "Barack Obama: International Man of Mystery," and the subtitle: "The lack of personal testimonials at the DNC coronation must leave Democrats uneasy.
When you contrast Krauthammer’s piece with that of Charen, you realize that the first, who studied psychiatry, has mastered a way of presenting his case that is vastly superior to the way of the second who studied law. The trouble with Krauthammer, however, is that he is caught in a manner of doing things that was once a potent formula but has now lost its vigor because of overuse. Let me explain.
Those who defend the Zionist causes used to be able to freeze the argument of their opponent and advance their own by pulling a trick out of their hat. It was always the same old trick pulled out of the same old hat. For example, if you’re talking about Syria, they would say they wish there was a magnanimous Sadat in Syria who would go to Jerusalem and address the Israeli Parliament. If you’re talking about Palestine, they would say they wish there was a pacifist Mahatma Ghandi in Palestine who would not grab a stone and throw it at an Israeli tank that is in the process of demolishing his or her home.
Krauthammer pulled that same trick in his current piece. He writes about the manner in which John Kerry was introduced to his convention four years ago. Things were not done the same way with Obama, says Krauthammer, therefore the process was not as valid in his eyes. Instead, he says he would have loved to see: "an honor guard … surround him [Obama] on the podium attesting to his character and readiness to lead."
No, it won’t work this time, Charles, because people know that every convention is different from every other convention even if you assert: "Such personal testimonials are the norm." Besides, if this is true then the trick has now become repetitive which renders it stale and useless in the eyes of many.
Moreover, I had the opportunity in my long life to hire people, mostly teachers, for my own school when I had one or for someone else’s school when I worked for someone else. I learned that the best way to treat the letters of recommendation accompanying an application for a job was to ignore them.
I did so because I never expected to see a letter that listed the shortcomings of its bearer, and when you hire people you need to know their weaknesses so as to take the necessary remedial action at the outset. Likewise, someone on the podium giving testimonial on behalf of a candidate will always emphasize if not exaggerate the virtues of the candidate but will never expose their weaknesses.
Another thing I learned in life is never to try and predict how a student will progress in school based on my first impression of him or her. And I never wanted to predict how the student will do at work after graduation because experience taught me that in all likelihood I was going to be wrong. Likewise, one speech at a convention is no way to have us predict what kind of president a candidate will turn out to be.
I am certain Krauthammer knows all these things. So then what is the real story behind the making of those opinions? Well, neither he nor Mona Charen want to see Barack Obama at the helm of the United States government for a reason that can no longer be brushed aside. These two have defended the cause of Israel and those of the Jewish Establishment forever. Together, along with a few other opinion makers, they have judged potential leaders not by their talent or abilities but by the intensity of their love for Israel and the other Jewish causes.
In that quest, Mona Charen, Charles Krauthammer and company concoct on the spot a convenient argument based on truth, falsehood or a combination of both to support or to attack every person that seeks a high office. Krauthammer does it intelligently by constructing a strong and deep argument; Charen does it not so intelligently by constructing a weak and shallow argument.
But why the difference between these two authors? First, we must understand that the causes they defend are indefensible. Thus, using logic and legal arguments, Mona Charen has no prayer at making a good case. Krauthammer, on the other hand, makes a seemingly better case because he has mastered the skill to be insidious and he often uses reverse psychology to make his point.
To better understand and to accurately assess the work of these two, you must see them as part of a hate machine whose sole purpose is to discredit or to destroy those who seek high office and are not diehard lovers of Israel and the Jewish causes. Like bookends, they sit at the extremities of the effectiveness spectrum while everyone else that is part of the same machine sits somewhere between the two of them.
Barack Obama has not completely done what they expect of him and, like a monkey on his back, they will stay there and they will clobber him until he knuckles under or he gets knocked off. Will Barack Obama prove to be a third alternative who will then be regarded as the miracle that saved America from itself?
In its own slow moving and merry way time will tell this story one chapter at a time as the world watches the unfolding story.
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