Category Archives: Islam

Subsidizing “Freedom” for the Arab Street

America, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Government, Islam, Middle East, Military

“We are not part of the picture” [in Libya], Ehud Barack told Greta van Susteren, who recounted to him the familiar war-for-Israel-and-oil accusations circulating in some Arab quarters vis-a-vis the offensive in Libya. This, even as the US commits itself to furthering the whims of the seething Arab Street—whoever it comprises, wherever it is, and whatever it wants. American warriors, in arms and in armchairs, seem to believe that repeating the word “rebel” enough times will transform the shady ragtag factions we are fighting for as a princess’s kiss transforms a toad.

Ehud Barack, Israel’s Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister (bio information), has politely applauded NATO and the US for rescuing the Libyans, but he also expresses a conscious thought about the feel-good operation, the kind of thought that will never be floated stateside:

“It’s up to the Arab people to struggle for their rights; to change regime or impose corrections and new procedures in their internal political life.”

My sentiments exactly:

If indeed we’re subsidizing “freedom” for [the Libyans] and are fighting their battles—then we’ve also increased their impotence and diminished their initiative. Subsidize individuals because you believe they are helpless—and you’ll get more learned helplessness.

Besides, what are these people? Wards of the American state? Whatever happened to fighting your own revolutions?

UPDATE III: The Fogel Family, RIP (Tiny Tamar Speaks)

Crime, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Law, Palestinian Authority, Propaganda, Terrorism, Uncategorized

Their detractors—and yes, this butchered Jewish family, the youngest of whom was three months old, has detractors—claim that they were settlers, occupiers of Palestinian land. They deserved to be slaughtered by Palestinians as they slept, their gruesome deaths (images below) “celebrated with carnivals by Hamas which handed-out sweets to passers-by.” (HERE)

The “settler” exculpation—used indirectly by Obama to condemn the victims, not the perps—still does not explain away the existential meaning of stabbing “an eleven-year-old in his heart and slitting a four-year-old boy’s throat.” (HERE) Remember: the Arab citizens of Israel proper prefer to live surrounded by a Jewish majority than migrate to the Palestinian Authority. Shouldn’t they be “encouraged” to pack up and relocate to the PA? Evidently not. For one, their civilized, peace-loving Jewish neighbors have accepted them and granted them full citizenship rights: “They vote. They elect leaders to the Knesset. They serve on the Israeli Bench. They publish Arabic-language newspapers. They preach anti-Semitic hate sermons in their mosques. There is almost no limit to the freedom bestowed on Arabs of any faith within Israel.” (HERE) Why are they not considered occupiers of land not theirs?

Watch the scene of the crime. (Read a write-up.) I’ll continue this tack below.

From “THE SATANIC SHEIK AND THE ENABLERS OF EVIL”:

“In The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor and indefatigable civil libertarian, elucidates the moral components of the vortex of terror and counterterror, action and reaction into which the Palestinians have plunged Israel. He observes that the number of innocent Israelis killed intentionally by Palestinians is considerably higher than the number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed accidentally by the Israel Defense Force.”

“The vast majority of Palestinians killed by Israelis are directly involved in terrorist activity. Those not directly involved were killed accidentally in the course of legitimate military actions against terrorists. ‘Israel’s moral responsibility for these accidental, although often foreseeable, casualties of war,’ he avers, ‘is in no way comparable to the responsibility of Palestinian terrorists who have deliberately targeted every single Israeli civilian victim.'”

“This distinction, one would presume, is a no-brainer: ‘Every reasonable school of philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and common sense distinguishes between deliberately targeting civilians and inadvertently killing civilians while targeting terrorists who hide among them.’ Nevertheless, anti-Zionist bigots, who understand the difference between accidental death and willful murder in ‘other contexts,’ embrace moral relativism when it comes to the Jewish state.”

Professor Dershowitz makes one other particularly chilling observation:

Israel has nothing to gain and everything to lose from inflicting civilian casualties. The opposite is true for the Palestinian terrorists. Palestinian casualties play in their favor, and Israeli casualties play in their favor.”

[SNIP]

I have vehemently opposed Israel’s anti-terrorism reprisals as disproportionate in their use of force. Still, everything said above obtains.

UPDATE I: BECK BREAKS FROM THE PACK.

UPDATE II (March 16): Justice is Not Vengeance. The right thing to do is catch the perpetrators, try them, and kill them. Beck is missing the meaning of the grieving father’s words; refracting them through his Christian beliefs. Said Ruth Fogel’s father, Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Yishai:

“I have worked in education many years, and as an educator, I try to strengthen and teach people faith. I understand that I cannot be satisfied with words and that I also must implement the same principles on which I have educated others. This is a test of my faith, and therefore I agreed to be interviewed.
I believe in the country, in our strength and in the strength of the army, and I ask how did this strength not save our children?
… We will take upon ourselves the difficult task and pave for them the path so that life will be victorious.
Their mother and father will pray for them from the Heavens, their grandfathers and grandmothers will give them a lot of love, and the People of Israel will hug them and encourage them to grow and continue in the path of their parents.viewing them through the prism.”

[SNIP]

The above is profound, simple and beautiful, but it is hardly a statement of loony Christian forgiveness. To forgive evil in Jewish thinking is evil. Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Yishai simply expresses his love for his surviving grandchildren and his determination to help them. There is nothing as unhealthy here as forgiveness. That’s a Christian hobby horse. There can be no justice without proportional punishment. Jews get that.

UPDATE III (March 20): TINY TAMAR SPEAKS. This gifted little orphan articulates ideas and has a depth of understanding absent among her peers in the West/US. For those who understand Hebrew:

The Brotherhood’s Steel Magnolia

Democracy, Islam, Israel, Law, Middle East, Religion

“Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood,” I wrote here. For the sake of accuracy, let’s remember that Mubarak was not an equal opportunity oppressor; he went after members of the Muslim Brotherhood, mainly.

The BBC concedes as much in an upbeat expose on the Brotherhood’s Egyptian acolytes. “For decades, keeping the Brotherhood and other Islamists from power was the main justification for the authoritarian rule of President Hosni Mubarak.” (Here.)

Here are some of the musings of gentle Doha, a Muslim Brotherhood steel magnolia:

“The first thing to do is to sever all ties with Israel because it is the cause of our ruin. And Mubarak was their agent.” …

“Egypt follows French law, and we do not want that, because when someone steals for example, he spends a month in jail and then he’s released to do the same again. But under Sharia law he gets his hand cut off and that’s better.” …

And the least unreasonable of Doha’s beliefs:

“Sharia doesn’t allow women to participate in government because women are emotional. Women should be responsible for their houses and their jobs, but not government,” she said.

The BBC correspondent says that “some of [Doha’s] views reflect the official Muslim Brotherhood line.”

The BBC would never entertain the notion that where the radicalism of dear Doha doesn’t jibe with that of her “moderate” Brothers—it’s because the latter practice Takiya: lying to advance and protect the faith.

UPDATE II: ‘Un-American Revolutions’ (Un-American America)

America, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History, Islam, Liberty, Middle East, Nationhood, Political Philosophy

Having grown up in the Middle East, and lived through a war or two, I’m not optimistic about the outcomes of a democratic revolution in the region. I said as much in “Media’s Sickening Sentimentality On Egypt” (HERE). That’s why I mocked (in 2005) the continual comparisons Bush and his gang used to make between “the carnage in Iraq and the constitutional cramps of early America; between the feuding Mohammedans and the followers of John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu.”

Niall Ferguson, writing in Newsweek, also thinks that the slobbering will soon give way to an uneasy silence:

“Time and again, Americans have hailed revolutions, only to fall strangely silent as those same revolutions proceeded to devour not only their own children but many other people’s too. In each case the body count was in the millions.

So as you watch revolution sweeping through the Arab world (and potentially beyond), remember these three things about non-American revolutions:

* They take years to unfold. It may have seemed like glad confident morning in 1789, 1917, and 1949. Four years later it was darkness at noon.

* They begin by challenging an existing political order, but the more violence is needed to achieve that end, the more the initiative passes to men of violence—Robespierre, Stalin, and the supremely callous Mao himself.

* Because neighboring countries feel challenged by the revolution, internal violence is soon followed by external violence, either because the revolution is genuinely threatened by foreigners (as in the French and Russian cases) or because it suits the revolutionaries to blame an external threat for domestic problems (as when China intervened in the Korean War).

To which an American might reply: yes, but was all this not true of our revolution too? …”

Read “Un-American Revolutions.”

UPDATE I (Mar. 6): Regular readers should know better than to attribute my quoting of Ferguson to an ideological affinity for his neoconservatism. Hell, Myron, as a man with a particularly critical and curious mind, don’t you get sick of tinny ideologues who mouth-off opinion without reference to the facts of history? I like deductions that cleave to facts. Ferguson is a good source of information. The article is cited for its juxtaposition of the American and The Other Revolutions. These contrasts demand Derb-worthy pessimism, not silly, happy faces. A lot of people refuse to ever cast aspersions on Thomas Jefferson’s blind spot: France. As much as I revere him, Jefferson was somewhat enamored of the “Revolution in France,” Edmund Burke’s precise, and derisive, characterization.

UPDATE II (Mar. 7): UN-AMERICAN AMERICA. Right you are Nebojsa. Vox writes: “Americans themselves do not even enjoy the democratic freedoms which their leaders are claiming to support elsewhere.” Which is exactly the point I belabored in “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn,” over a month ago:

“The ‘planners’ society’ I inhabit is ‘dominated by a bureaucratic elite.’ This unnatural elite, ‘manages its people’s principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances. … Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent.'”

“What remains of the rights to property and self-ownership in the soft tyranny that is the USA is regulated and taxed to the hilt. When they travel, Americans are routinely patted down, and irradiated with photons like meat in a packaging plant. In contravention of their naturally licit rights, many thousands of my compatriots languish in prisons for ingesting unapproved substances, or for violating information socialism laws (so-called insider trading infractions). Others are hounded by democratically elected despots for daring to form militia (as many Egyptians have recently done) in order to repel the trespassers who traipse across their homesteads on our country’s Southern border, killing their cattle and imperiling their kin.”

BESIDES:

“More often than not, Americans who yearn for the freedoms their forbears bequeathed to them are labeled demented and dangerous. I’ve yet to hear liberty deprived peoples the world over stand-up for the tea-party patriots. When they do — I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf.”

BASICALLY, when Egyptians and Libyans stand up for my tea-party rights, I’ll love them and their freedoms back.