The Roots Of Irrational Thought

As head teacher working at a private school, I thought that to do the rational thing meant to do what was good for the students. At least this is how I saw things in the privacy of my thoughts. Consequently, when a problem came up, I searched for a solution that would deliver a better service to the students. That is, I tried to improve on the learning environment, the curriculum and the way that the teachers delivered a lesson.

But this was not the best way to do things according to the owner of the school. Instead, he wanted to hear about plans that would beat the competition and strategies that would make our school look good compared to the others. He wanted all of us, teachers and administrators, to dabble with ideas on the adoption of visual attractions such as making the teachers wear a uniform. And he wanted ideas on how to invite students from the other schools to come and visit our school so as to compare them and hopefully switch to our side.

When I probed him as to the possible negative effects that his proposed activities may have on our ability to deliver a good education, he did not show any concern. He did not say it to my face but he acted as if I were irrational for suggesting it was better to beat the competition by improving on the delivery of our service than playing games.

Believing I only met one bad employer, I quit my job and went looking for peace of mind at another school and then another only to discover that the situation was not better at any school. So I started my own school, and to my horror discovered that the ministry of education itself was powered by the same mentality. The bureaucrats at the ministry did not say it to my face but they acted as if I were irrational because I would not do something for myself.

Baffled by this last remark, it took me a long time before I understood what was meant by doing something for myself. It dawned on me one day that the people at the ministry were saying I had it in my hand to become rich if only I abandoned the idea of working to improve the service I was delivering to the students and concentrated on becoming part of the team. The idea was that if I embraced the games they were playing, they would shower me with referrals to come out of my ears and cash subsidies to fall off my wallet.

What the people at the ministry did that appalled me most were two things. First, they manipulated the part of the system under their control not as their turf which it was but as their backyard which it was not. In this regard they established contact with a handful of highly placed employees in each school and played them against each other. They also played one school against another, played the students against their schools and played everyone against the elected Minister of Education and his staff.

Second, they used the power to grant subsidies not to influence the quality of education but to implement a political agenda of their own. For example, the federal government was preparing to privatize the post office which meant that people were going to be laid off. This prompted the provincial bureaucrats, including those at the ministry of education, to work for the expansion of the employment ranks everywhere they could. And so, there came to the private schools the unofficial directive which said that there were subsidies to be had if we hired people even if we had nothing for them to do.

This is when I began to understand the cynicism that made the students behave as oddly as they did. To take one example, I had a student who was hanging around a group of guys even though he did not like their company. After some probing into his thinking, he revealed that he will not sever his relation with the guys because his father did not like them either. Thus, the student stayed with the group just to annoy his father whom he did not really dislike but wanted to see annoyed because it made him feel good to know he can annoy his father.

The word empowerment had not yet been abused by that time and so, the people who wanted to appeal to a segment of society did not run around the media promising to empower this group or that one. But the idea of empowerment was already here and everyone sought to be empowered which meant to have the power to annoy someone just for the sake of being able to do so.

I began to think of the possible implications that this mentality may have on the wider world but discovered that the mentality was already prevalent and that it was reflected everywhere because the culture was swimming in it. One example would be the critics of the Arabs who praise the Zionists even though they hate them more than they hate the Arabs.

A little probing into the thinking of these people reveals that they do the praising because they believe it would annoy the Arabs, an experience that apparently rewards them a great deal. But when these people discover that the Arabs could not care less what they are doing, they feel dejected and thus hate the Arabs a little more than they would have liked to.

But what was it that created this situation in the first place? It was the daily humiliation of having to knuckle under the unreasonable demands of their Jewish bosses. Then as now those dejected people believe that the Arabs possess the means to neutralize the power of the Jews but are not doing it. Consequently they feel justified to hate the Arabs openly which, some will admit, is a disguise to hating the Jews which they do silently anyway.

Somewhere in this muddled maze there is supposed to be a definition of rationalism. True or not, to my mind rationalism depends on the perspective of each individual. And to tie rationalism to the notion of individualism, I see things this way: Individualism means to take the initiative and do something positive for the community. When I was teaching, my community was the student body and that is where I concentrated my effort.

To some other people, however, individualism means to do something for the self even if that comes at the expense of everyone in the community. Thus, what was rational to me was irrational to the owner of the school where I worked because he only cared about his interest. I was also irrational to the bureaucrats at the ministry of education because I did not care enough about my interest to be interested in the bribe they called subsidies.

But this is only a static snapshot of reality when in fact, reality is a moving target therefore a dynamic and complicated thing. This is illustrated by the fact that the folks at the ministry of education wanted me to conform in order to receive more of what the individualists cherish the most which is wealth. Given that conformity is the opposite of individualism, there is here a huge contradiction. How to explain this logic?

Well, if you begin with the notion that being rational means to look after the self, you will do whatever it takes to satisfy your needs including the redefinition of the words. Thus if the word individualism is good and in vogue today, you call yourself individualist. If conformity is the good word then you are a conformist. But if the two words are good and in vogue simultaneously, you attribute them both to yourself even if they contradict each other. But don't worry because there is a way out of this dilemma.

Here is how you do it. Define an individualist as one who chooses to conform because he or she has the free will to do so. Contrast this with the definition of the conformist who lacks the free will to make an individual choice and so, he or she conforms to the norm. More succinctly, you are a good individualist because you are free to conform and he or she is a bad conformist because he or she is not free to make an individual choice.

There it is. I believe I got it airtight now because it seems I have managed to show that hypocrisy is at the root of irrational thought. But did I? Because if I did I should be able to answer this question: Is hypocrisy practiced out of individual choice or out of conformist habit? Never mind; there will be another time to think about that.

Cheer Up, Hillary Clinton !

Cheer up my fair lady; it is not as bad as it appears. I do not know exactly what it is that Barrack Obama lifted from your speeches because I have more important things to do these days than investigate this sort of thing but whatever it was, it cannot be as bad as you make it sound. In fact, if there is any truth in what you are saying, Hillary, you should be flattered that someone saw fit to imitate you.

Let me remind you of something that has to do with a speechwriter and organizer to your husband's campaign in the early 1990s. I forget his name but he is the one who came up with the phrase: "It's the economy, stupid!" By all accounts the phrase had a huge impact on Bill Clinton's campaign and contributed enormously to his election as President of the United States even though the US economy had not yet deteriorated a great deal when all this took place.

Let us now switch to Canada and recall what was going on here concurrently with those events. Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister of Canada and the country was in the middle of a campaign of its own as we were inching forward to a referendum on a new constitution which would have brought the Province of Quebec into the fold. By far the most intellectually honest politician to grace this land, Prime Minister Mulroney wrote me a letter asking me to join the debate and I responded positively.

Things went well as we approached the day of the vote and the consensus was that we were going to win this thing. In fact, the Prime Minister was so certain of such outcome he intimated to someone in the press gallery that he rolled the dice and was confident of victory.

Since our economy was in a worse shape than yours and was sliding fast towards a recession thus threatening to add to the problem of unemployment, I thought I could take time off from discussing the cultural and constitutional issues related to the referendum and do something for the economy.

Another of our problems was that our dollar was losing value because your country and the rest of the World were not buying as much of our resources which included gold. Not only that, but the International Monetary Fund was talking about selling some of its gold reserves to help the poor nations alleviate their debt. In addition, some gold producing countries such as South Africa, Australia and Russia were selling huge amounts of gold to smooth over the cash crunch they were experiencing.

The net result was that the price of gold was depressed to such an extent that it threatened not only gold mining in this country but the entire mining industry which comprises the precious metals and the base metals.

I came up with a plan to help both the currency and the employment situation. I wrote a letter to then Minister of Finance, Don Mazankowski suggesting that the Government of Canada keep the gold mines of this country from laying off people by buying the gold they cannot sell on the World markets at a reasonable price.

Turning that gold into reserve at the central bank would maintain the value of our dollar if not help it rise. In the meantime the gold miners will be spared the pink slip, something that was going to ripple through the rest of the mining industry and the economy as a whole thus shoring up the employment picture in all the sectors.

But little did I know that the letter was going to be leaked to the press. Even though I had tried to avoid making a link between the issue of "keeping Quebec inside the Federation" and something as crass as making money, the discussion that ensued overshadowed the cultural and constitutional incentives to Quebec and replaced them with the economic incentives for staying inside the Federation.

Even though no one here put it in those words, it sounded like people were saying to each other: "It's the economy, stupid!" And guess what, Hillary, the next day someone in your husband's campaign put it succinctly and said the magic words: "It's the economy, stupid!"

The words came at a time when no one was confronting the economic issues in your country but the words acted as a catalyst to spark the economic debate both in the United States and here in Canada.

No one here or in your country doubted where that had come from but no one said it was plagiarism ether because there is a difference between being influenced by something and using the thing without giving proper credit to its source.

Taking this into account and applying it to the present situation, since you and Barrack are locked in an open campaign where the public is aware of everything that he and you are saying, you may point to where you believe he copied you but you cannot call it plagiarism. Instead of complaining, I am of the opinion that you should thank your opponent for flattering you and maybe take the opportunity to brag about it. I am sure it will make you feel better.

As for me, you may think it is a little too late to do this now, but I thank you, I thank your husband and I thank the speechwriter in the first Clinton campaign who felt there was enough merit in the letter I wrote some 15 years ago to be inspired by it.

Cheer up, Hillary, it's a good day when someone says you're good at what you're doing.

How The Amerisrael Monster Was Bred

Aside from the writings of some supremacist nuts, I never came across the view of a biologist who advocated racial purity as a way to breed a superior race of humans. On the contrary, it is now universally accepted that inbreeding produces deficient offsprings. Examples abound as to what happened to royal families from antiquity to recent times when in order to keep the power and the wealth in their hands, the royals married in the family.

The trouble was that this practice resulted in the production of children who were physically handicapped, mentally deficient or both. It was therefore concluded that since the goal of a matrimonial union was to produce healthy offsprings, inbreeding was to be avoided. Of course, the corollary of this is that cross-breeding produces strong and healthy offsprings which is something that is now regarded as a universal truth.

Another universal truth is that the continued existence of the Cosmos depends on the maintenance of a balance between the forces of nature. In fact, the Cosmos is still here after fifteen billion years or so because nature adjusts itself in such a way as to alleviated the stresses that randomly generate within it. If not for this, the Cosmos would have disappeared in the first fraction of a second of its existence. Consequently, we may define balance as the absence of stress and consider it a good thing to have, but only if it does not hide a stress which unfortunately is something that can happen from time to time.

Now, if you combine those two ideas and use cross-fertilization to breed stress, you will have put together a creature that can deliver a punch of unprecedented destructive force. And if you find a way to use this creature as a weapon against your neighbors, you will have discovered the means to disrupt their lives in a way that surpasses the wildest imagination.

Let us now look at an example of balance that may or may not be what it seems. The Jewish rule which says: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," is supposed to represent a concept of balance. But if you tell a shifty Jew that Christianity is a better religion because it is based on the concept of forgiveness which is one of imbalance, he will want to know more about the subject. When you illustrate the point by giving the example of the Christian saying: "If someone slaps you on the left cheek show him your right cheek," the shifty Jew will respond that the Jewish rule means exactly the same thing or close to.

Even if you do not ask, he will want to elaborate that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth does not necessarily mean you must restore things to an absolute balance. He will go on to say that the rule sets the maximum limit as to what you can exact from someone who has done you wrong. That is, he will claim that if someone gouges the eye of a Jew, the latter will react by cursing the gouger, by kicking him or by gouging his eye but this is the most that a Jew will do and never go beyond that.

So you look at Israel's actions in Palestine, you consider the almost universal expression of support that comes from Jews everywhere for such actions and you realize that you have been lied to. You conclude that what you see is not civilized balance but a savage imbalance where Israel repeatedly exacts thousands of times as much from the Palestinians as the Palestinians will ever exact from the Israelis.

And the reason why this situation exists at all is that the Jewish lobby in America has taught the political crowd in Washington a thing or two about balance Jewish style. The result has been that the Americans have agreed to supply Israel with the most lethal weapons ever built by their military industrial complex so that Israel may collectively punish and kill Palestinians at will.

All that inhumanity is allowed to happen even though the Americans are aware that the Palestinians possess nothing more than their bare hands, their bodies and the stones at their feet to defend themselves, their families and their homes against the ravages of those weapons.

If you try to discuss these realities with the Jewish leaders, you never get a straight talk from them. But in a roundabout way, they will reveal that they are the chosen children of God therefore have privileges that no one else has. And the Jews were granted these privileges, they say, for reasons that a non-Jew cannot begin to comprehend. But the bottom line is that the rule which says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth applies only among disputing Jews and cannot be invoked when adjudicating a dispute between a Jew and a non-Jew.

And the authority for this logic is to be found in the parable of the Exodus. This is the story of an Egyptian who apparently was seen by Moses mistreat a Hebrew. The punishment that Moses decided to impose on the culprit was a collective punishment of the Jewish kind in that he inflicted a number of plagues on the whole country of Egypt, including the murder of the first born in every Egyptian family.

But even after that, Moses was still not satisfied with the balance he had achieved so he told the Hebrews to go ahead and loot the gold, the jewelry and all the valuables that they can grab from the homes of their Egyptian neighbors while the latter were busy burying their murdered children and mourning them. The moral of this story is that there is no balance like Jewish balance.

And this is still not the end of the story because Moses then took the whole kitten caboodle and ran with them in the direction of Palestine before the Egyptian police had the time to organize and to come after them. When the gang approached the land of Palestine, Moses sent in a few spies to see what was in there. When the spies returned with stories about a place that was full of milk and honey and a few other riches, Moses said let's have an encore right here and right now. But God had a better idea because He struck Moses dead before the man could set foot in the land of Palestine. And the moral of this story is that there is no balance like God's balance.

Thus, we clearly see that in the Hebrew-Jewish tradition what is labeled as balance is in reality an imbalance of biblical dimension. When the pretence is turned into a weapon which is often the case and when it is used against unsuspecting people, it has the power to disrupt their lives with the same devastating effect as the ancient plagues that were inflicted on Egypt and the modern plagues that are inflicted on Palestine.

But given that the modern World is a vast and complicated place, the energy that is required to power such weapon must be amplified by a corresponding amount lest it have a diminishing effect. To achieve this amplification, the method of cross-fertilization is added to the mix. And this, in fact, is what happened when the Jewish Defense League went mainstream because going mainstream is the way that all the mafia groups, the biker gangs and the like disappear into the community and seem to be a part of it.

To get from here to there, those groups begin by making money illicitly then use the money to buy their way into the various marketplaces of mainstream society. In fact, there was little or no distinction between the Italian mafia and the Jewish mafia at the beginning of the Twentieth Century in New York when the two co-operated to terrorize and to loot the place. But when the opportunity presented itself, the Jews double-crossed their Italian partners, denounced them to the authorities and went "legit" ever after.

Once in the mainstream, the Jews cross-fertilized with the existing establishment, first by injecting their insidious ideas into the debate, then by mixing socially and biologically with their hosts, and doing all this while slowly but surely taking control of the levers of power. The Jewish Defense League became the Jewish establishment and co-existed with mainstream America for a little while.

When they felt that their roots had become solid enough, the Jews crowded everyone out and almost monopolized the system. In the meantime they labored to turn America into a version of Israel which they did by first twinning the two nations then fusing them into a single entity that may be called Amerisrael.

Thus was born a monster which, by everyone's estimation, is a creature that has the powerful muscles of America, the cold heart of Moses and the evil mind of a demon. It is capable of committing such horrors as Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Guantanamo, waterboarding, the declaration that the United Nations is irrelevant, promote the idea of pre-emptive strikes and so on. In fact, America has become an inflated replica of Israel, a full blown caricature of everything that is grotesque about the human condition.

Only the American people can now change all that, but will they do it?

From Huddled Masses To Scared Masses

They say America is the land to which people are dying to go as evidenced by the waves of illegal immigrants who try to reach her borders and her shores. This is true but what is misleading about the statement is that it ignores the fact illegal immigration is happening all over the World not just towards America.

It happens to the nations that normally take in immigrants such as Canada and Australia, to the wealthy nations that do not take in immigrants such as those in Western Europe and to the poor nations that have enough problems of their own they cannot worry about someone else's. For example, nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East are constantly overwhelmed by refugees that come from neighboring countries and from afar when they can barely cope with the demands of their own populations.

This is not to minimize the fact that for a long time America stood as the land of opportunity for many people. Since the days when the potato famine was deliberately inflicted on the Irish, America has spoken to the ancient lands and said: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless to me…" as these words are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island in New York.

But America is no longer what she was. An honest look at what is going on today reveals she is closer to being the land of the huddled and scared masses than a land for the huddled and hopeful masses because things have changed on two fronts. First, the existing population is asked to change its outlook on life from one of self confidence to one of fear. Second, the immigrants of today differ from the immigrants of the past in that they come to America out of unprecedented desperation. Worse, they come devoid of the dreams that were the stock in trade of their predecessors, such dreams upon which America built a once glorious culture.

Things began to change in America in line with a sick and twisted doctrine known as the Alan Dershowitz doctrine which gave Israel and the Jews the right to do to others anything they imagine was done to them or done to someone else. The Jewish Establishment in America adopted the doctrine and used every vehicle of the culture to stir the audiences with the aim of making the American people fear their Arab and Muslim neighbors at home and abroad.

The model that the Jewish lobby has followed came from an era that is rooted in the Nineteen Fifties. It was the McCarthy era when a senator by that name tried to make the American people fear their neighbors. The senator went after the Communists but this was a euphemism that meant Jewish in the minds of many people at the time. And this was enough of an excuse for the Jewish lobby of today to revive the McCarthyism of yesterday and set it off against the Arabs and the Muslims.

Hate and fear are the two legs upon which stands every campaign of demagoguery. The Nazis discovered this reality in the past and the lobby is rediscovering it now. When married to McCarthyism and to the culture of insult which is what the Yiddish culture has brought to the American Administration, the Congress and the media, a method is born by which to hurt innocent Arabs and Muslims more potently than McCarthy could ever hurt the Jews.

Once that plan was firmly implanted in America, the lobby worked to make the culture and the accompanying demagoguery spillover to the rest of the World. To this end, the operatives of the lobby devised a plan that may be called Recipe Of The Day. The plan has two columns, one that may be called Who Hates America and the other Who Loves America.

The way the plan works is this: instead of telling the Americans in a direct way that they ought to hate a people or a country which would sound bad, the operatives of the lobby tell a lie that cannot be proved or disproved. For example, they would say that so and so hates them. The idea is to invite the Americans to hate the haters back without being accused of promoting hatred. Thus, the Jewish lobby picked an Arab or a Muslim country one at a time and told the Americans that these people hate them.

Another example came at a time when the President of Iran had not yet made it clear where Iran stood vis-à-vis Israel. An ironic consequence was that the Jews in Israel and America thought it would be a good thing if Iran developed the nuclear bomb as this would be a potential threat to the Arabs. And so the Jewish lobby blanketed America with "informed opinions" on the notion that young Iranians were madly in love with America if only because of her irresistible made-in-China denims. The message that the lobby hoped to knock into the heads of grown up Americans was that they must reciprocate and return the love until further notice.

That notice came when it became clear that the Iranians were not in a hurry to love America or Israel back as it was articulated by the President of Iran. The infamous Jewish lobby then transferred Iran form the love column to the hate column. The lobby went further and declared that the Arabs fear Iran, therefore the President of the United States must travel to the Middle East and show the Arabs how to hate Iran in turn. The poor thing took the advice to heart and tried to pull the stunt upon which the Arabs told him to take a hike which he did.

But fear seldom remains in a static state especially when you have the means to hit back. This is how and why the Americans were persuaded by Israel and the Jewish lobby to invade Iraq. Things happened exactly as planned at first but then the situation got out of hand and developed to such an extent that the American people are now being told: We are fighting "them" in there so that we won't have to fight them in here.

QUESTION: But who is "them" and how long will the fight last?

ANSWER: They are the Arabs and the Muslims and the fight may last a decade or a century or longer. We stayed in Europe, Korea and Japan a very long time and as you can see everything turned out all right.

QUESTION: Yes, it seems so, even denazification worked well in Germany. But then, debaathification did not work so well in Iraq. How do you account for that? Is the parallel between those two situations a false one?

ANSWER: I don't know.

In fact, to use the Second World War as a model according to which you conduct the modern clash of Civilizations is a bad idea. This is because the quarrel of then pitted sister ideologies against each other as each strove to achieve supremacy over the others. Whereas the modern quarrel pits an ideology that is vying for the same old supremacy against an ideology that was surprised by the fact her old assumptions were no longer holding true.

One assumption that is shattered every day is that the Arabs used to believe the Americans had a minimum level of class, self respect and dignity below which they will not sink. But the Jewish advisors and speechwriters to the American President and other prominent people explode this myth every day of the week. They do it by inserting into the official pronouncements the wrong things to say to an Arab then go ahead and do those things even when there is nothing to gain from them.

For example when the President speaks of Islamo-fascism without speaking of Christian-fascism where fascism started or Judeo-fascism where it is in full swing, the Arabs and the Muslims hear it from the horse's mouth as to who is in control of America. Seeing that the Jewish lobby is, they surmise that it will not be long before America is ordered to do to them what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Palestine.

The reality is that America has managed to inflame an entire Civilization comprising nearly a billion and a half individuals who have come to believe America is out to annihilate them and their Civilization. Realizing that their own countries do not have the military might to blunt the threat, a growing number of the young in those countries are willing to take matters in their own hand and fight back in a manner that is bound to be unconventional. They fight not only America but their own elders who try to prevent them from undertaking such a futile enterprise.

The Americans responded by virtually closing their borders to those who come from there and from places near there. But without a steady infusion of immigrants like those who used to come to America in the past, the country will go back to being just an ordinary power, no more but maybe less. The good news is that the American people will not have to count on the war lasting a hundred years or more because without immigration, America will not last this long as a military superpower. The bad news is that America will also cease to be the economic superpower that it is today.

And this ought to be the scary part to frighten the American people, not the handful of Arab and Muslim kids whom the Jewish lobby wants the mighty American military to spend a hundred years chasing around the globe.

What a glorious moment for these kids to be awarded such honor instead of being reduced to play cops and robbers in the back alleys of the Middle Eastern cities and towns. And what a shameful moment for the American people when three hundred million of them are reduced to whisper what is destroying their country in a communist style deliberation because they fear the expression of such thought in a democratic style deliberation.

They Cannot Think Outside The Box

On February 17, 2008 the New York Times published an article by Michael Slackman under the title: "Stifled, Egypt's Young Turn to Islamic Fervor."

Reading the article you certainly get the impression that this is what the writer was seeing but in fact he was experiencing an optical illusion. The young in Egypt as everywhere else are turning to religion not because they are stifled but because the world is changing too fast before their eyes, and the ground is shifting under their feet. They look for answers to their many questions but the media such as the New York Times are not providing them because they are just as confused themselves.

Let me digress for a moment before I get back to that article. When the old Soviet Union broke up there was a bigger jubilation among the American pundits than there was in all of Russia not because the Americans had become more patriotic about Russia than the Russians but because of a more selfish reason.

The American pundits were seeing visions of the Russians recreating their own version of the Federalist Papers. The pundits foresaw their own American history coming back to life as if they were about to go back in time and live through such precious moments as they could only read about in the history textbooks.

Well, this did not happen in Russia but something bigger is happening in Egypt right now which the New York Times is missing because it cannot find a better reporter to send there. What is happening in Egypt is the transformation of the most ancient society on Earth from an agrarian one to an industrial one.

Over and over again in the New York Times as in other publications the reporters are told by an Egyptian "Nobody is helping anymore." Instead of stopping here and probing what this means, the reporters let it slide and keep on thinking inside the same old box without realizing that what they just heard was the uneasy expression of someone yearning for a simpler time. That was a time in Egypt when you could not let out a whisper of distress without seeing everyone rush to offer their help to you.

In essence then, those young people in Egypt are not stifled because the economy is stagnating, they are entranced, almost paralyzed by the speed of the change that is taking place around them. The Industrial Revolution which took two hundred years to mature in Europe is being rushed through at ten times its natural speed in Egypt and the people don't know how to keep up with it. They look around for help but see that everyone else is swept by the same current including the government and all its departments.

Perhaps it is because of the experience that the pundits in America have had with the Russian transformation or perhaps because the Industrial Revolution does not mean as much to them as the Federalist Papers but to neglect to chronicle the redoing of the Industrial Revolution is a dereliction of journalistic duty.

The local journalists cannot do this job as well as those who grew up in a society that has already industrialized, and it is a shame that a publication such as the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle waste paper and ink to report on the shallow and the trivial while missing out on something as valuable as the live re-enactment of history.

Waterboarding And Racial Profiling

After several years of wretched doubletalk and twisted arguments, the US government has finally admitted that waterboarding was used on some prisoners, and this being a form of torture, the practice was illegal both under US and international laws. This episode was but one in a number of practices that have resulted from the September 2001 attack on the United States. Concurrent with waterboarding came racial profiling which was also a questionable practice.

When studied together these two practices lead to a wealth of insights on the subject of modern communication especially as it is handled in the United States at this time.

Let us consider this statement: "I shall neither confirm nor deny that we do waterboarding because I do not want to telegraph to the enemy what we are up to." This sounds straightforward and reasonable enough. Now let us consider this other statement: "Because the acts of terrorism against us were committed by brown skinned Muslim young men, we profile this group of people at our airports." This too sounds straightforward and reasonable.

There is no doubt that each of these statements by itself makes sense. In fact, given the power that is packed into them, each may fit a bumper sticker and thus carry the punch of the one-liner. However, the reality is that the statements were not made in a vacuum but were meant to refer to an existing situation. When juxtaposed and seen in the context for which they were made, they become the ingredients for an explosive mix that does not even go off properly but proves to be a dud.

Let us see how this can be: "I shall neither confirm nor deny that we do waterboarding because I do not want to telegraph to the enemy what we are up to. On the other hand I am telling the enemy to avoid sending brown skinned Muslim young men to our airports because this is the kind of people we profile." Puff! The thing goes off like a thud.

This is where racial profiling is seen to be the farce that it is. The more you think about it the more you realize that the practice was adopted not to stop terrorists but to use terrorism as an excuse to advance a different agenda, one that is more dangerous to America than terrorism. And so the question poses itself: how can a situation like this develop and how could it have gone on for so long despite the criticism that was leveled against it?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that there is two kinds of writing therefore two kinds of expression; fiction and non-fiction. When you write non-fiction and there exists someone to scrutinize your facts and propositions, you cannot stray too far or you will be corrected. And so, to go farther than non-fiction will allow you; perhaps as far as your imagination will take you without being hindered, you must consider writing fiction. Here, not only will you avoid meeting any sort of resistance; you will be praised for the power of your imagination and encouraged to imagine more so as to delight your audiences.

But be careful of the temptation because if you write fiction, pretend it is reality and manage to get away with it once, you will have discovered that you possess a potent way to persuade people of what you are advancing. The trouble is that you can pull a stunt like this only a limited number of times and only if you already enjoy such standing in the community that people will trust you with something they cannot verify. But sooner or later someone will want to verify what you say, the truth will come out and you will lose your credibility.

Still, the statements concerning the practice of waterboarding and racial profiling have lasted a long time even though they were non-fiction, absurd and were met with a great deal of opposition. Why did they last? The reason was that someone had the ability to monopolize the public forums, shut up the opposition and pretend that the system in which they operated was democratic. In short, the secret for the success of the farce concerning racial profiling depended on the success of another farce, the playing of the democratic con game.

Look what powerful impact the following smart-alecky remark can have on the audience: "An 80 year old lady from Sweden is less likely to highjack a plane than a young Muslim male from the Middle East." When a version of this statement is played over and over but never challenged, it has the effect for which it was designed which is to make the audience believe that racial profiling will make America safe.

But why is it that the absurdity of that statement did not jump out of the newspaper pages or out of the television screens to hit the audience in the face? Why did the audience not realize that those who want to harm America will by virtue of that discussion decide to send terrorists who do not fit the expected profile? The answer is a bit complicated, and to get to it in the shortest possible way, I must begin with an illustration and follow with the discussion.

A number of years back I found myself spending two weeks in the hospital of a small town waiting to be transferred to a city hospital where they did heart bypasses. Other patients came from all over the region for the same purpose, and the hospital held four men at a time in a spacious and comfortable room. Since none of us looked too juvenile to want to monopolize the remote control, we decided to rent one television set among us.

We developed a kind of camaraderie not only among ourselves but also with the families and friends of each other. The result was that we had a number of people visiting at any given time, all eager to keep us company and to service us beyond what the hospital staff would do.

One Sunday morning we watched the talking heads on television. And there was this head who opined that a young male from the Middle East is more likely to hijack a plane than an old lady from Sweden, and the statement sparked a discussion among patients and visitors. What I usually do at a time like this is keep my ears open and my mouth shut to get a sense of what the others think without influencing the discussion myself. So I grabbed the remote control, turned the sound to very low and listened to the people around me.

At first they danced around the subject without hitting on the essential point which was that this sort of talk told the terrorists to avoid sending people who fit the profile of a terrorist. Eventually, a patient offered the view that one of the talking heads looked more Jewish than the other panelists and may be trying to push an agenda that will make life difficult for the Arabs living here. Another patient agreed then followed with the name of that talking head: Charles Krauthammer, he said, upon which the eyes of a young woman sitting beside him opened wide.

The father of this woman was a patient who stayed in a bed next to mine, and I knew quite a bit about him. He had come to Canada from Holland right after the war having joined the resistance there where he was wounded, captured and imprisoned by the Nazis. The man gave his wide eyed daughter a loving look knowing that she was going to react, and I could only imagine what was racing through his head.

The woman looked to the person who mentioned the name of the talking head and repeated: "Krauthammer, you said? Well, he certainly has a nose like a hammer but his head is not that of a Kraut," by which she meant that Krauthammer looks more like a Semitic Middle Easterner than he does a blue eyed German, the type that was preferred by Hitler and by the SS. And we all had a big laugh.

It turned out that the woman taught history and she explained to us that if the white supremacists take over America, the first to be led to the gas chamber will be those who look like Krauthammer. The discussion turned even nastier when it was revealed that not only the man has the wrong look but is handicapped and sitting on a wheelchair. The woman said he would be useless to the grand design of a master race and would be done away with before he had the time to ask for a glass of water because to acquiesce to his wish would be the needless wasting of a valuable resource.

And then it happened that someone suddenly realized Krauthammer had just told the terrorists they can avoid getting caught at the airport by changing their looks. And we are now faced with a new question: why did it take this long for someone to see something that is this obvious and that simple?

My view is that there is a great deal of truth in the old saying: Necessity is the mother of invention. A more generalized form of the saying can be formulated like this: Motivation is the generator that powers the brain. I believe that the natural state of the brain is to be lazy but the brain will spring into action and search for a solution when danger becomes apparent.

We call motivation that which triggers the brain to respond to a threat or a need, and it took the people in that hospital time before they hit on a good idea because the motivation to identify the problem and search for a solution was lacking at the beginning of the discussion. In turn, the motivation lacked because there were no honest discussions on the subject in the North American media given that all discussions concerning the Middle East were monopolized by the Jewish lobby whose sole agenda was to trigger a clash of the Civilizations.

That clash has come and has fizzled without yielding something useful to the Zionists except that they did something evil and something satisfying to their twisted sense of what it means to be fulfilled. Two consequences of this episode, waterboarding and racial profiling, will become a footnote in the history of America but will figure as a full chapter in the book on Talmudic Horrors.

Congressman Tom Lantos

In the book I wrote and whose publication was blocked by the Jewish Establishment I discussed many of the views that my Jewish friends were kind enough to share with me. Under the heading: Rise Of The East, a section of Chapter Seven mentioned Congressman Tom Lantos of California who passed away last week. I thought it fitting to use this column and share those thoughts with my readers.

RISE OF THE EAST

By the end of the Twentieth Century, the East was beginning to rise thanks in part to the Arab oil embargo which was prompted by Israel’s continued aggression against its neighbors using financial, military and political support from the United States. The embargo and the rise in the price of oil made the small Japanese cars popular and boosted the Japanese economy to heights no one imagined before. Supplying the car market being a zero sum game, what Japan gained America lost. And the car industry being the backbone of the advanced economies at the time, America’s economy lost ground against Japan’s. This in turn facilitated the growth of the other Asian economies such as the four Asian tigers followed by China and India. And the East as a whole continued to forge ahead.

Instead of rethinking their approach to try and find a way to live with others in harmony by forging normal relations with their neighbors, the Jews started to discover roots they had in far away India and Japan. And they tried to use these roots to play the same old game of identifying with someone while badmouthing someone else. They tried to find roots in China too but failed to make headway there, so they settled for the establishment of commercial ties between China and Israel. But these ties soon began to irritate the Americans because trade and military secrets started to be funneled to China through Israel.

My Jewish friend in Montreal was starting to say that the trouble with finding Jewish roots in a place is that it scares the hell out of the people who live in that place. I believe the first time he said something like this was in the Nineteen Nineties when the Israelis suddenly became adamant about keeping the town of Hebron under their rule. The excuse they gave was that there are deep Jewish roots in Hebron. The town being situated in Palestinian territory, the Israelis wanted to make it a Jewish enclave inside the proposed Palestinian nation.

And as always, the Jews in North America lifted the idea from the war torn Middle East and brought it to Canada seeking to Hebronise the districts of Montreal where most Jews live and where they claim to have roots. The Jewish leaders proposed to make these districts part of some place else such as Ontario or New York and they sent envoys to New York to agitate for the implementation of the scheme.

This alarmed my Jewish friend so much that he predicted if the scheme works in one place, the Jewish Establishment will want to make it work everywhere. The consequence will be that every time the Jews will say they discovered they have roots in one place, the people who live in that place will be terrified as they will think that the Jews will want to declare it part of some place else. And so my friend warned: “Watch out when the Jew discovers he has roots in your backyard because his next move will be to take over your house and move it somewhere else.”

Another trend that disturbed my Jewish friend was caused by the activities of the Jewish Congressman from California Tom Lantos. My friend used to say that this man behaves as if he owns America, and this cannot be healthy especially in view of the fact that Lantos speaks with an Eastern European accent and makes no secret that he is motivated by the Holocaust of which his family was a victim. The trouble is that America was not the perpetrator of the tragedy but the liberator of the victims yet it is asked to feel guilty and make reparations as if it had been the perpetrator. If America is asked to do this much for the Jews whom it liberated from the Nazis, said my friend, think how much it owes the Blacks whom it enslaved and exploited for several generations.

My friend’s theory is that the Jews made a mess of their lives everywhere they went which was from East to West. But California is as far West as you can go because long before Tom Friedman was told that the World is flat, my friend had discovered that the Earth is a sphere, and if you go more West than California, you will find yourself in the East. And that is where you will never be allowed to con the people because these cultures have been around since before recorded history. And if you try to tell the people there how to run their lives, they will politely explain that you cannot teach daddy how to make babies then throw you out with the bath water. My friend, you see, is a genius at mixing metaphors.

Something else my friend saw on television really disturbed him. Apparently, within one month or so, the famous Barbara Walter did an interview with the Black leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan and with Henry Kissinger. To Farrakhan, Barbara Walter said that ten years or more had passed since Blacks won all their rights, and it was time to put the bad memories behind and move on. But she took Henry Kissinger to the town in Germany where he grew up and asked him to tell of those moments forty or fifty years ago when he was not treated well by school kids because he was Jewish. A double standard so stark, it poked my friend in the eye. Just think what a Black person would feel watching something like this, he said.

What preoccupies my friend and those Jews who think seriously about their place in the World is that without a reason to stay together, the Jews will assimilate in the other cultures and disappear, a scenario that the Jewish Establishment is well aware of. And it is for this reason that the Establishment contrived a paradigm of anxiety which can only be sustained by irritating everyone else. The result is that a permanent state of anxiety and not an ethnic or a religious bond is what keeps the Jews together. This state of anxiety has become the Jewish identity and the Jew has been condemned to remain an irritant to everyone else.

But what about the Jews who live in Israel? Can they create a nation on the American model and forge a distinct identity of their own? My friend doubts the ability of the Israelis to forge a common identity in the style of the American melting pot because he believes that the American pot is itself an illusion that is sustained by an economic paradigm based on the laissez faire attitude which is built into the system. This attitude attracts a special class of people who are daring and who take risks. But this is not the sort of Jew who would go to Israel because no one will go to that country when they can go to the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand and do much better there.