Sunday, October 12, 2014

Bad Joke metastasizing into a Calamity

You can see a bad joke at the start of the piece written by the editors of National Review Online which came under the title: “Time to Help Syria's Kurds” and published on their website on October 10, 2014. They begin with this: “the situation in the area demonstrates the inadequacy and incoherence of President Obama's strategy.”

People who know the history of the region know that no imported strategy ever worked in there because they were links from the same chain of Jewish strategies, each unveiled with the promise that it will fix the failures of the one that preceded it. In reality, the only strategy that worked in the Middle East was the one devised by the Arabs when one of their own, Saddam Hussein, violated their charter and invaded Kuwait, an Arab country.

Thus, for the Jews to claim that the latest strategy has failed, is to do what they have been doing for decades, which is to promise they have a new strategy that will fix the problems of the Middle East – problems, they say, were caused not by them but by someone else. The difference this time is that having run into a push-back from the current American Administration, they started to blame the problems on the President himself rather than an enemy in the region they wish to see deposed. Barack Obama is now their number one enemy, and has been for some time.

But things are changing again. As it happens, even their most ardent supporters have grown tired of them repeating the same performance over and over again. They began to laugh at the Jews each time that the latter came up with a new link to add to the chain of attempts aimed at fixing the Middle East. Thus, their latest attempt at doing just that would have been taken as another bad joke and laughed at. But something new came up this time. The idea is metastasizing in different directions, taking on a different color each time.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone because the Middle East has always been a cosmopolitan place, forcing the metastasis to adapt to every condition, displaying a different color each time to suit the moment. One such adaptation is shown in the Tom Friedman column that came under the title: “I.S. = Invasive Species,” published in the New York Times on October 12, 2014.

Friedman constructs a theory based on what he says is a true story related to him by an Iraqi official. The trouble is that the story stands on shaky grounds. Friedman says this: “the Sunni jihadist fighters in ISIS, many of whom were foreigners, went house to house. On the homes of Christians they marked 'Nassarah,' an archaic Arabic term for Christians. But on the homes of Shiites they marked 'Rafidha,' which means 'those who reject' the Sunni line of authority.” And so he claims that according to the Iraqi official, this demonstrated the Wahhabi influence of Saudi Arabia on the ISIS jihadists. As can be seen, Friedman's goal here is to blame the ISIS phenomenon this time on Saudi Arabia.

That story is unlikely to have happened for two reasons. The first is that the words Nassarah and Rafidha (more likely Rafdha) were learned from reading books rather than from someone – such as an Iraqi official – explaining something to an American Jew. Instead, that someone would have used “Nusrani” and “Rafedh” for the same reason that we see the words Sunnis instead of “Sunnah,” and Shiites instead of “Shi-ah.” And this has to do with an Arabic grammar that differs markedly from the English by the fact that in Arabic, you do not stick a letter like an “s” at the end of a word to turn it into a plural. The Arabic grammar is a lot more complicated than that.

The second reason is better explained by two events, one purported to have happened in ancient times, and one that happened in full view of the world in 1968. First, the Jewish bible tells the story of the Jews who decided to do the Jewish thing and hurt their Egyptian benefactors by looting them, and by inviting the angel of death to come and kill the firstborn in every family. For the angel to differentiate between an Egyptian home and a Jewish one, the Jews marked a cross painted in blood on the Egyptian homes.

Second, when Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to quell a rebellion there, the first thing that the Czech dissidents did was to switch the street signs, thus confused the tank drivers, sending them to the wrong addresses – an act that gave the resistance time to redeploy. With these two examples in mind, go ahead and reread what Friedman says. You will realize how phony it sounds. Here it is: “the Sunni jihadist fighters in ISIS, many of whom were foreigners, went house to house. On the homes of Christians they marked 'Nassarah,' but on the homes of Shiites they marked 'Rafidha.'”

Did these foreign fighters know who was who in the city before coming to it? And why would they go to the houses on a first round, marking them without doing right there and then what they wanted to do? Why mark the houses first only to come back later and do their deed?

I'm afraid; once again, Tom Friedman has proven to be a big mouth bullshiter. And he found the right newspaper to carry his columns – the New York Times.