Preaching From The Choir

The latest Sanity Squad podcast is up.

Neo, Shrinkwrapped, and Dr Sanity, offer up insight and nuance that can’t be found anywhere else.

This week, we discuss 9/11, morality and judgement, the progress we have made and the where we have bogged down.

When we’re done with all, that, well, that’s when it gets even more interesting- and we start taking sides…

The Sanity Squad rocks. Really.

Oh, Those Tangled Senate Webs And The Fruits Of Denial

From Melanie Phillips, food for thought.

 

September 11, 2006

Five years on

So where are we now, five years on?

I am reading the response by the Guardian’s Readers’ Representative, Ian Mayes to the comprehensive analysis on Zombietime which has cast the most serious possible doubt on the claim by the Lebanese Red Cross that Israel intentionally fired missiles at two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances performing rescue operations, causing huge explosions that injured everyone inside the vehicles. This claim was repeated by ITV News, Time Magazine, the Guardian, Boston Globe, The Age, NBC News, the New York Times and thousands of outlets around the world. Zombietime argues convincingly that this scenario is exceedingly unlikely, particularly since a direct hit by an Israeli missile would hardly have left the ambulance intact, as was shown in the photographs, with merely a hole in the roof. Mayes’ response to this welter of circumstantial evidence?

The Zombietime version invites the conclusion that the Lebanese Red Cross conspired in an elaborate anti-Israel propaganda plot to dupe the world’s media. I do not think that is proven at all.

Zombietime’s claims are ‘not proven’ — so end of story. The Lebanese Red Cross claims were not only ‘not proven’ but, for anyone using eyes and a brain, were inherently implausible — and yet the Guardian (and many other media outlets) reported them as fact.

I am reading the remarks made by Muhammad Abdul Bari, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, a few days ago.

‘There are a few bad apples in the Muslim community who are doing terrible acts and we want to root them out,’ Mr Bari told The Sunday Telegraph. ‘But some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they’re all terrorists - and that encourages other people to do the same. If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists - 700,000 of them in London,’ he said. ‘If you attack a whole community, it becomes despondent and aggressive.’

What was this ‘demonisation’of Muslims? Peter Clarke, the head of the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist branch, said ‘thousands’ of British Muslims were being watched by police and MI5 over suspected terrorist links. Was Mr Abdul Bari’s reaction to this dismaying news one of shock and shame that his community was harbouring such an enormous threat to Britain, and his earnest pledge to root this out wherever he found it? It was not. It was to threaten Britain that its entire Muslim community of two million would turn into terrorists and attack the country of which they are citizens. Mr Abdul Bari is the head of Britain’s largest Muslim representative institution. What was the response of the British media or politicians to this abuse of his position by threatening violence by an entire minority community against the British state? Silence. If anyone is demonising Britain’s Muslims, is it not Mr Abdul Bari?

I am reading that the US Senate Intelligence Committee has now stated conclusively that Saddam had no links with al Qaeda. Leave aside for the moment the fact that the case for war against Saddam was not that he had links with al Qaeda but that he had not complied with the UN resolutions to prove he had abandoned his WMD programme. The Committee’s reported conclusions are used exultingly by the anti-war crowd to crow that Bush’s rationale for war against Saddam has now been well and truly thrashed.

Uh huh. Is that so.

The Weekly Standard reports:

One of Saddam’s senior intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, was questioned about his contacts with bin Laden and al Qaeda. There is a substantial body of reporting on Hijazi’s ties to al Qaeda throughout the 1990s. Hijazi admitted to meeting bin Laden once in 1995, but claimed that ‘this was his sole meeting with bin Ladin or a member of al Qaeda and he is not aware of any other individual following up on the initial contact.’ This is not true. Hijazi’s best known contact with bin Laden came in December 1998, days after the Clinton administration’s Operation Desert Fox concluded. We know the meeting happened because the worldwide media reported it. The meeting took place on December 21, 1998. And just days later, Osama bin Laden warned, ‘The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them.’

Reports of the alliance became so prevalent that in February 1998 Richard Clarke worried in an email to Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s National Security adviser, that if bin Laden were flushed from Afghanistan he would probably just ‘boogie to Baghdad.’ Today, Clarke has made a habit of denying that Iraq and al Qaeda were at all connected.

There is a voluminous body of evidence surrounding this December 1998 meeting between Hijazi and bin Laden–yet there is not a single mention of it in the committee’s report. The Weekly Standard asked the staffers ‘Why not?’ They replied that there was no evidence of the meeting in the intelligence or documents they reviewed. That’s hard to believe. Newspapers such as Milan’s Corriere Della Sera and London’s Guardian, and the New York Post reported on it. Michael Scheuer, who was the first head of the bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, approvingly cited several of these accounts (before his own flip-flop on the issue) in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies Eyes. Scheuer wrote that Saddam made Hijazi responsible for ‘nurturing Iraq’s ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors,’ including al Qaeda. All of this obviously contradicts Hijazi’s debriefing; none of it is cited in the committee’s report.

We know from various previous US and UK official reports, and from the work done by Stephen Hayes (see previous posts), that there were indeed frequent contacts between Saddam’s senior people and al Qaeda, although there is no evidence of any ‘operational’ relationship. It is clear from this and from the way much other circumstantial evidence about these links has been glossed over or totally ignored that this report was pursuing a quite different agenda. As the WS observes:

This report was never really about investigating the relationship between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. It was about giving certain senators more ammunition against the President.

I am reading that Joseph Wilson has been totally discredited. Wilson was a former US diplomat who provoked a firestorm when, following his claim that the Bush Administration had exaggerated the Iraqi threat to justify war, a claim made after he had been sent to find out whether Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger in the late 1990s, it was further said that the Bush White House had breached national security by disclosing the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame – a former CIA agent — to reporters in an attempt to smear him.

Now it has been revealed in a new book that the source of the leak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state and a sceptic about, if not an opponent of, military action in Iraq. Yet for more than two years, the US Justice Department had investigated White House aides, and even indicted one, for providing false testimony in the Wilson affair in an apparent attempt to discover the source of the leak — even though it knew all the time that Armitage was the source.

And we also learn that Saddam was indeed trying to buy uranium, as Michael Barone observes:

He reported to the CIA that an Iraqi official had come to Niger on a trade mission in 1999 — evidence that tended to confirm rather than refute the British intelligence claim that Iraq was uranium-shopping in Africa — a claim that Britain’s Lord Butler judged ‘well founded.’

What do I conclude from such reports and from a welter of other similar statements and developments? That we are caught up in a religious war, both military and cultural, that has been declared upon our civilisation but which we cannot even bring ourselves to name, let alone fight properly; and that we are in acute danger of losing this fight because of the myopia, denial, craven cowardice and rank treachery by our own side.

We are told that we are creating more terror through the war in Iraq. In the desperate fight against jihadi fascism being waged against us, we are being blamed for our own potential destruction. The same people, of course, said exactly the same thing even before the Twin Towers disintegrated into ash on 9/11. Every single event that has happened on the international stage since then, every single act of self-defence on behalf of western civilisation, has been viewed through this same distorting prism. It Was All Our Fault.

But of course the war against the west did not start with Iraq. It did not start with Afghanistan. It did not start with 9/11. You could say that it actually started in the seventh century when Islam decided to conquer and rule the world, and was interrupted for a while after Islamic imperialism was repulsed at the gates of Vienna in 1683. You could certainly say that it started with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s, which revived the call for holy war against the non-Islamic world and whose principal thinkers, Syed Kutb and Hassan al Banna, were the ideologues behind the current war. But let us be a little more modest in our perspective, in which case we might say this particular phase of this war of religion started in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran and reignited the Muslim world to the ancient cause of jihad by two things: the simple fact of the re-emergence in the 20th century of a theocratic Islamic state governed according to the principles of the seventh century; and the explicit programme of the Islamic Republic of Iran to wage war against the west on religious grounds. Nothing to do with the many Muslim grievances around the world. The aim was to impose the rule of Islam by force on those countries which were infidel.

That is what we are up against — not just from the Iranian Shia but from their Sunni rivals al Qaeda, whose fatwas call the world to Islam, and a myriad other groups pursuing the same global jihadi objective. That is why American interests were bombed and attacked throughout the 1990s. That is why countries with no connection with Iraq or Afghanistan or Israel have been attacked all over the world. This is a war of religious conquest.

Yes of course Iraq is a recruiting sergeant, as was also Afghanistan — although we hear much less of that, because of course those shrieking about Iraq supported Afghanistan — and as is the very existence of Israel. The fact is that every single act of self-defence by the free world against Islamic conquest acts as a recruiting sergeant for more would-be Islamic conquerors. It is self-evident that if those who are attacked don’t fight, the jihadis attacking them won’t continue their war. That’s because they won’t need to because their victims will have surrendered. The defeatist whinge that Iraq has merely made us even more unsafe is a bit like if people had moaned during World War Two that the Blitz wouldn’t have happened if Britain hadn’t declared war upon Hitler. And those willing on the extermination of Israel, on the grounds that its very existence is the cause of Islamic rage, are in danger also of repeating the world’s connivance at that other, previous Jewish extermination.

The real problem is that we are in a world war but few will acknowledge that fact. In the Times at the weekend, David Selbourne laid out the gross delusions currently undermining the defence of the west. An enormous fifth column of appeasers, quislings and defeatist whingers across the political spectrum has been willing the west to defeat ever since 9/11. And even the most apparently bullish in the US and UK adminstrations are still failing to follow the logic of their own rhetoric. If this really is a war, as President Bush has constantly told us, then why isn’t it being fought like one? How could the mayhem in Iraq ever have been prevented or controlled on the cheap with so few troops? How on earth can the conflagration in Afghanistan be contained with so few troops and equipment? How can order be brought to Iraq when no action is being taken against the principal causes of the disorder, Iran and Syria?

How can we act against the continuum of Islamic extremism which is providing the sea in which the jihad swims, when we are not even prepared to acknowledge that such a continuum exists, and demonise those who try to warn against it? How can we defend the free world when we are doing our damnedest to sacrifice Israel, the front-line nation in that defence, as a scapegoat instead of coming to its own defence? How can a war to defend a civilisation be fought apologetically, with two hands tied behind our backs and with the hostile camera lenses of CNN and the BBC trained against our own troops and primed to inflate every casualty into an atrocity, against an enemy that by contrast is prepared both to slaughter and to die in vast and bloody numbers for its beliefs? How can we defend our own beliefs if we can no longer even agree what they are?

Five years on, we are only now beginning to learn what it is that we are refusing to learn. But history will not wait for us to work out what the outcome of such denial might be.

Origins Of Cruelty, Legacy Of Sadism And “The sword and the book descended intertwined”

Lawrence Kelemen wrote a widely circulated piece, Learning From Sadism, in 2002. Originally published in the Jerusalem Post, the article created a stir, especially after it was posted on NY Indymedia. It has since disappeared from the archives if Indymedia, but that has not lessened it’s impact.

We have chosen to republish Learning From Sadism, in it’s entirety. While it has been republished elsewhere in a redacted form, we believe that like most things, context is in order. Although the article was written for a specific audience, it is not hard to understand why it has became a ‘must read ‘ for educators, parents, clergy and anyone interested better understanding the world we live in.

We also believe that understanding the concept of Jihad, imposed on children from an early age, is relevant to comprehending what many of our adversaries are taught- and believe.

Learning From Sadism.

Early last week Revital Ohayon, 34, was reading her sons Matan, five, and Noam, four, a bedtime story when a Fatah terrorist burst into their home on Kibbutz Metzer. She jumped in front of the children to protect them, but he shot all three dead.

A few months ago, on a Shabbat morning, Palestinian terrorists burst into the bedroom of Shiri Shefi, took aim, and sprayed her and her three children with bullets using M-16 assault rifles. Shefi, her four-year-old son Uriel, and her two-year-old son Eliad were wounded. Five-year-old Danielle, who was shot in the head, was killed.

About a year ago, a Palestinian sniper trained his high-powered rifle on 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, killing the baby girl in her father’s arms.

About six months before that, Vadim Novesche and Yosef Avrahami, two Israeli reserve officers abducted by Palestinian police, had their heads beaten into unrecognizable pulp and were then disemboweled by a waiting crowd outside the Palestinian Authority’s Ramallah headquarters who then danced, entrails in hand, through the city’s streets.

Cases like these stand out among the hundreds of murders of Israelis and foreign visitors here in recent months, not because of their evil but because of their inhumanity. They reveal a terrifying angle of the story of this war.

Beneath the strata of Islamic unity, Pan-Arabism, and Palestinian national aspiration at the root of this great campaign engineered by Arab leaders is pure, unbridled sadism, a delight in cruelty that boggles the Western mind. And even if this lust for savagery is slightly less evident in the “ordinary” shootings and suicide bombings that people suffer in this country on a daily basis, there is a growing suspicion that much of this violence flows from a visceral, Palestinian truculence a craving for Jewish pain, for blood.

Those of conscience ask not only what practical steps we can take to escape this nightmare, but also how it could ever have been conceived. What great power have Palestinian leaders tapped into? How do they draw forth so much human energy and direct it for evil? And can we learn from them how to harness the same energy and use it for good?

“The sword and the book descended intertwined” (Midrash Rabba)

The Palestinian leadership takes education very seriously. When visiting the Palestinian National Authority Web site, you will notice that the first three listings are “Ministry of Higher Education,” “Ministry of Information,” and “Ministry of Education” before the ministries of Labor, Health, or Water.

Since September 2000, the PA composed and introduced into its elementary and high schools a series of new textbooks, replacing Egyptian and Jordanian texts on four grade levels.

These books obliterate the State of Israel from history and maps, showing instead a greater Palestine that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea with Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.

These texts present the liberation of Palestine as a struggle against Jewish occupation, describe the waves of aliya as “infiltration,” and glorify Jihad and martyrdom.(See examples at www.edume.org.)

Beyond its local educational products, the PA also imports a wealth of educational materials from its neighbors: a 30-part series produced by Arab Radio and Television, featuring a cast of 400, and aired during the second half of Ramadan last year which “dramatized” the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Arab viewers were also recently treated to a popular political satire showing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drinking the blood of Palestinian children. The myth that Jews sprinkle the blood of Arab children into their matza is graphically described in The Matza of Zion, published in 1983 by the current Syrian minister of defense, Mustafa Tlas. The Egyptian mass circulation daily al-Ahram also recently reported “many cases of the bodies of [Palestinian] children who had disappeared being found, torn to pieces, without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into the dough of extremist Jews.”

One can only imagine the effect academic and media presentations such as these have on the Palestinian soul.

Hardwiring for sadism

However frightening this propaganda and its effects might be, we must confront the possibility that an even more hideous engine drives the terrorists’ cruelty. Relative to the West, life in Arab countries has always been harsh. Corporal punishment of children is thoroughly embedded in the culture. No mainstream Islamic authority has yet spoken out against slapping children’s faces, dragging them by their hair, or any of the other disciplinary approaches that shock Western onlookers.

The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that approximately 100 million Islamic girls between the ages of four and 10 have had their clitoris (and usually surrounding tissue) removed, typically without any anesthesia and while held down forcibly on a table or bench.

AAP said the procedure, typically performed with “instruments such as knives, razor blades, broken glass, or scissors,” is performed four million to five million times annually. In one of the six undisputed hadith collections (Sunan of Abu Dawud, chapter 1888), Muhammad states, “If you cut, do not overdo it, because it brings more radiance to the face and it is more pleasant to the husband,” and “Cut slightly without exaggeration, because it is more pleasant for your husbands.”

A report in Pediatrics (102:1 July 1998, pp. 153-156) explains that Muslim parents “feel obligated to request the procedure because they believe their religion requires female genital alteration.”

In January 1981, Great Sheikh of Al-Azhar (the head of the Islamic world’s most famous university) stated that “Parents must follow the lessons of Muhammad and not listen to medical authorities because the latter often change their minds. Parents must do their duty and have their daughters’ clitorises removed.” (See www.religioustolerance.org.)

Although Muslim authorities often deny the existence of this custom when speaking with Westerners, Amnesty International recently discovered that in Egypt, the PA’s closest neighbor, 97% of little girls have their genitals mutilated. In 1996 the Egyptian minister of health banned FGM, but in 1997 that ruling was challenged by Sheikh Youssef Badri, and the Egyptian courts overturned the ban, permitting FGM once more.

Sheikh Badri commented, “Female circumcision is Islamic; the court has said that the ban violated religious law. There’s nothing which says circumcision is a crime.” He later told Germany’s Der Spiegel, “Many Muslim women are pleased with this victory of Islam over its enemies.” According to both Amnesty International and the World Health Organization, the PA has not yet banned FGM.

Survival in such a culture necessitates some numbing. But this psychological component might be insignificant relative to the neurobiological effects of being beaten and tortured in childhood. It was Harvard researchers who first revealed that stress hormones released when children experience physical and sexual abuse actually impede development of that part of the brain responsible for empathy and conscience.

Brain scans of those who suffered through events common in the childhood of Palestinian children reveal an underdeveloped hippocampus and vermis. Among the behaviors associated with this sort of brain damage: impulsivity, sadism, and suicide. It is almost too frightening to consider that Israel today faces a population many of whom are hardwired for the sort of violence we have been witnessing.

More terrifying is the long-term prognosis for Palestinian society. Martin Teicher, a lead researcher in the Harvard study, reports that sadistic parents neurobiologically infect their children with the same trait: Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children.

Whether it comes in the form of physical, emotional, or sexual trauma or through exposure to warfare, famine, or pestilence, stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child’s brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next.

Our stark conclusion is that we see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, because once the key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back. (Scientific American, March 2002)

Extracting light from the darkness

In the near term it is unlikely that Israel will do much to stem the flow of anti-Semitic propaganda or reduce the violence that Palestinians commit against their own children. We must accept that Israel is locked in a battle with a population many of whom are programmed for inconceivable callousness and hatred.

Ironically, we can learn from our neighbor’s example: Islam is a powerful force. If given a chance, Judaism can be too but in a very different way. The Palestinians use the Koran to teach hatred. We can use the Torah to teach sensitivity, altruism, and righteousness.

But this would require teaching our tradition as passionately as the Palestinians teach theirs. Just as Palestinian parents speak to their children about the need to sacrifice for the Palestinian national dream, so too we can speak to our children about giving of themselves to achieve real tikun olam (mending the world).

To date, we are failing at this mission. The percentage of Jewish charitable funds directed to teaching Jews Torah is minuscule.

And Israeli leaders and heads of major Jewish organizations in the Diaspora all too often play down or outright deny the value of an immersion in Judaism.

The solution might also require changing our parenting habits. Just as the harshness of Palestinian parenthood might be wiring children for hatred and violence, so too might attentive, loving parenting wire our children for goodness.

Perhaps the moment has arrived to rethink the amount of time we spend (or don’t spend) with our children; the way we discipline them; and the media we expose them to.

Perhaps, ironically, we can be inspired by the horrors of this war to commit ourselves to raising a different sort of child.

Perhaps those of us who survive the current crisis can emerge different, better, for the horrors we have seen.

One Way Only

We want to win the war on terror. We will win the war on terror. How quickly those realities merge will determine the length of the war.

Wars are zero sum games. There are winners and losers. We will not allow our society to be broken by the Hitler Youth of today. That the ideologies of hate, encouraged by propaganda, are so pervasive in the Islamic world, only serves an indicator as to how far those ideologies- and societies will fall.

We can discuss the roots of terror, ad infinitum. We can attend UN conferences and discuss the imbalance of wealth among the nations. We can focus on an Israeli Palestinian peace process (as much of a waste of time that might be) and we can discuss the ‘alienation’ so many young Muslims feel. All noble ideas and perhaps, actually worth the effort. We help Iraq develop a real constitution and help that country takes it’s first steps toward an all inclusive democracy.

In the end, will defeat terror by blowing up the terrorists. Brute, raw, force- the equal and opposite reaction of the terrorists own behavior. Of course, that force needs to be directed- but make no mistake, only force will eliminate the problem. To be clear, we are not saying that we must eliminate everyone who disagrees with us, even virulently. We are saying that anyone that will commit an act of terror or will facilitate an act of terror, are fair game, no matter what the rationale.

Why is that? Because in truth, terror is not brought on by poverty, as we noted in our post below. Hostages are not taken and held, to be traded for economic aid. Planes aren’t flown into buildings in response to GDP of the free markets of the western world versus the GDP of the many tyrannies of the Muslim world. In fact, the terrorists aims are deliberately misrepresented by the much of the left. The terrorists don’t want to see western values and successes brought into the Muslim world. Indeed, that is what they are fighting against. Religious freedoms, abortion rights, gay rights and human rights are anathema to Radical Islamist ideologies. That ideology demands the murder of those whose behavior they find offensive- usually administered in a cruel and brutal fashion. These are truths many on the left somehow manage to forget.

Terror has never had anything to do with economics. It has always been about ideologies that the terrorists want to impose. It is true that the terrorists will use the terms ‘economic disadvantages’ as part of their justification for their outrage, but that is all for show. If they really cared about the economically disadvantaged, they would build businesses and fund opportunities. They would not build bombs and fund terror.

If the terrorists, their supporters and apologists really wanted to better the lives of their own, they would use America and the west as a model for success. They would not seek to destroy those countries. They would not seek to destroy the freedoms that brought that success.

Further, eliminating poverty does not- and cannot- change a mindset. Economic status does not determine morality and codes of conduct. Only values, born of dignity and the recognition that all men and women are of equal value, determines morality and codes of conduct. Our ideology is one that drives people to exceed their potential for good. And it is an ideology that drives people to hate and destroy. Those ideas are not determined by economic status. Terror is driven by an ideology of evil, period.

There are no excuses for it and there is no defense for it. That ideology can be clearly defined and identified: Radical Islamism. The ideologies of Radical Islamism are very clear. The goal is to destroy, punish and subjugate non believers. The real enemy are free peoples. Freedom is antithetical to terrorism because freedom usurps the power of the terrorist. With out the power to instill fear and punishment, the terrorist is nothing. What is the icon of freedom? The US, of course. Our freedoms, success and ever growing potential are what the terrorist must destroy. Prosperity is the terrorists fifth column. They cannot abide by a culture that is prosperous, because that culture seeks growth and progress. The terrorists cannot abide progress. That too, weakens their hold.

As terrorist couple noble words in a morality of hate, many in the west are being plied with the wine of that deceit. In their drunken stupor, they believe they alone are the arbiters of truth and ethics.

Of course, we cannot eliminate terror from the face of the earth. We can however, make it a very expensive game to play. It is governments that overtly or covertly support terror. If we make that support expensive, those governments might think twice about their support. There has to be a consequence to the behaviors of those governments- and our military response must be part of those consequences. Automatic weapons and plastic explosives do not grow on trees. Just this week, the British intercepted explosives crossing the border from Iran into Iraq. This is not acceptable- nor is it a matter for discussion. You wanna play, you gotta pay. America and the west must drop bombs, not hints at those that believe they can support terror with impunity.

Whether it is Iran or Syria, there are consequences for direct or indirect support of those who think and believe terror is a legitimate form of political expression. As we have noted, it is not. Terror is an ideology of hate. In the same way we dealt with the Nazi ideology of hate, so must we deal with Radical Islamism. Hate comes at a cost.

We suspect a strong military reaction to the supporters of hate- one close to home- would get their attention. As we said, dropping bombs and not leaflets, has a way of doing just that.

Yes, there will be innocent victims. That is a tragedy. But in the end, it is the ideology of hate that must be defeated.

Yes, you’ve heard all this before. Maybe now, it will start to sink in.