Howard Rotberg on the cult of "proportionality" in the use of violence

Howard has an excellent post up, one of the smartest rebuttals of the inherently antisemitic idea that the economically and militarily accomplished, free-thinking, modern (and yet nationalist, self-ruling) "chosen people" are just too successful and must be hobbled in their nation's defense (after more than sixty years of failed Arab attacks). The idea that Israel must only use "proportional" and duly-sanctioned violence (sanctioned by some post-national, neo-feudal mandarin class of "international" academic "experts" and "lawyers") that the Jews' original vision of a covenantal nation, their great contribution to human liberty, must give way to some Gnostic dream of overcoming all that nation stuff in some post-national Utopia, amounts to little more than Judeophobic resentment.

Howard writes:

...I experienced hatred from recent Arab immigrants shouting out that I had no right to give a lecture at Chapters (despite my invitation by Chapters) and when the audience asked them to allow me to speak, one shouted out with hatred, "he is a fucking Jew".

The Tolerists with their moral equivalency (typified by the Judge who equated the rights of a lecturer with the rights of thugs to break up the lecture) hold that in any dispute the truth must be in the middle, and that all violence equates with all other violence.

Accordingly in Gaza, Hamas indoctrinates its young in Hate, and lobs rockets at Israeli civilians, and enlists women and children as human shields, and it knows that any disaster it brings upon its own people will be viewed by Westerners as at least 50% the fault of the Jews.

And, if Hamas is fortunate enough to lose the war it started and cause the death of hundreds of its own fighters (and the civilians who encourage them and are used as human shields) then it can rely on the puerile doctrine of "Proportionality" to rob a liberal democracy of victory against Islamofascist thugs.

The idea that a democracy, when faced with fascist attacks on civilians, must be limited to a "proportionate" response is so stupid that it would not bear commentary, if it was not so frequently used, especially by Europeans. You see, the Americans when they and the Brits and the Canadians and others defeated Nazi Germany were not handicapped by criticisms of "proportionality". Not even when they droppped atomic bombs. That is because our forefathers were smarter than we are, and understood that in the face of such Evil as the Nazi and Japanese regimes, a disproportionate response, leading to quick and total victory and defeat of Evil, is needed to stop future deaths caused by the Evil regimes. The nuclear bombs were morally justified because the number of people that would have been killed by Japan in the time that it would take to defeat Japan by conventional weapons would surely have exceeded the number killed by the Atomic bombs. A justifiable decision was made that the Japanese who supported the Evil would bear a disproportionate burden rather than the people who would be continued to be slaughtered by the Japanese.

Likewise with Hitler. Those who criticize the Allies for carpet bombing Dresden lack a moral compass.

In fact, "proportionality", being a concept most attractive to Europeans (who have never quite gotten over their anti-Semitism and their realization that Europe produced the most evil people of the 20th century) now delight in accusing the Jews of "disproportionate" responses. That is because the idea of "proportionality" is in fact a standard so bizarre in the realm of war, that it discloses that its proponents have something else in mind than justice or morality.

In fact, the critics of "disproportionate" response are classic anti-Semites. Who can blame them for thinking they can get away with this approach, when the best American Jewish director, Steven Spielberg, used proportionality as an immoral standard - when viewing Israeli actions after the moral travesty at the Munich Olympics (including the preposterous responses to the murders by both the Germans and the IOC, as I have written previously).

As I have previously written, the great William Shakespeare understood the foundations of anti-Semitism, and wrote his brilliant The Merchant of Venice, which unfortunately is not properly understood even today. Shakespeare shows that the vile Shylock is driven to his disproportionate response of insisting on the contractual pound of flesh, because he is facing a society which has completely marginalized him, and then he cannot receive a fair trial, as the Judge in the trial allows an adverse party to pretend to be the Judge; Shylock is trapped by the anti-Semitism of his time.

And so, the Europeans and the university students and the journalists who criticize Israel for disproportionate response ignore how Israel is trapped by hostile and hateful Arabs all around it, now armed by Iran, and now mostly making clear what has been true all along - that no two-state solution is acceptable and the Arabs want to drive all the Jews into the Sea, and end the Jewish state, and do who knows what to the Jewish civilians.

Now I return to the situation in Canada.

I have written about the blatant anti-Semitism of the anti-Israel rallies, the spitting, the shouts that more "ovens" are needed for the Jews and Israelis, the trotting out of a few token Jews willing to criticize Israel, the intimidation and the violence, which, since my problem in 2003, has ony gotten worse.

I have written how the Canadian Jewish organizations were still worrying about Nazi skinheads and stopping Ernst Zundel by organizing Human Rights Commissions, at the same time as Canada was allowing tens of thousands of terrorist-supporting, anti-Semitic Arab immigrants into the country, without so much as a small attempt at screening out those who had cultural values inimicable to the freedom and safety of Jews who have contributed to Canadian society for generations.

In the guise of cultural relativism and Tolerism, not even an elementary attempt has been made to stop the immigration of people who hate, who are violent, who seek to impose their religion on others, who abuse women and children, and who wish to form a dual society and Justice system where Sharia Law if their present and our future.

Go ahead, call me a "racist", but I care more for Muslims than their own leaders do. I suggest you look at the backlash caused by Mohammed Elmasry's bizarre statements and then ask the Muslims that I have dealt with in my years of law practice, how much respect I have given them and how much help.

It is not racist to insist that the Muslims we accept to Canada have a chance to live just as we have always done - in peace, dignity, courtesy between ethnic groups and religions, and with a chance for our children to particpate fully in our civic culture and have the protections of our Justice system.

As I end my blogging, I am prepared to state unequivocably that our leaders are making a fatal mistake that will cost our children dearly - we are importing hate. It is not racist to state the obvious - let Muslims immigrate, but only those who are in fact moderate, who in fact are prepared to stand up and support a Jew's rights to live in peace in Canada, and not just scream about Islamaphobia, every time someone objects to some extremist action or words.

Read the whole thing...

Obama to be sworn in as U.S. President

And in other news, it was damned cold in Vancouver, Canada today. Most of the recent snowfalls have melted, due to rock salt rather than a change in temperature, I think. I shivered all the way home from work, even though I was walking quickly. I stopped at the corner store and got some food for dinner. It was an OK day financially, not much but i didn't lose anything. I think I'll be ahead in the long run. Later in the day I went for coffee with Jane, and she read the paper while I read more of my book, Paul Johnson, Modern Times. It's bed-time for me.

I'll see about up-dating this four years from now.

Radio Memories: Coming Home

It’s Sunday, the new home for our weekly Radio Memories series, where we take a respite from current events in order to renew our connection to our past, by listening to the diminishing echoes of a time gone by.

For several decades, radio gave its audience a serving of plays to entertain the ear, exercising the imagination of a generation of homes. And inadvertently captured a people and their world in audio amber.

This week we present a show where such results were not so inadvertent...

Our offering was first broadcast on May 18, 1951. Unlike our previous entries, it’s not a radio play, but a news program: Hear It Now. Innovative for its day, this brainchild of veteran radio newsman Edward R. Murrow (now returning to our cultural radar screens through a recent film) had a gimmick that made it different than other news broadcasts of the same period, where past events would be recounted by reporters reading from a script: Hear It Now presents the newsmakers themselves, as well as news events, recorded and replayed for the audience at home, so that they can “hear it, now”.

I see that the Wikipedia entry for the show seems to only discuss the very first episode from 1950, which doesn’t exactly do the rest of the series justice. Hear It Now evolved as it went along, getting better as they kept trying to top the efforts of the week before.

While Hear It Now improved, the format, however, remained the same. Like a news magazine, then and now, some smaller “human interest” stories follow the Headline stories that are addressed up front; here the headline story is the Korean War, and in particular the controversy engendered by President Harry Truman over the dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur. Many of the Hear It Now episodes were produced smack in the middle of this contentious decision, and feature a tremendous feast of speeches and interviews giving one side and then the other of this half-remembered chapter of American political and military history.

This week’s particular broadcast, however, is selected because of its memorable second half, the concluding story that starts at approximately 36 minutes into the hour-long program. We get to follow a captain coming home from the Korean War, seeing his 6-month old son for the very first time, and trying to fit in to a world that kept spinning during his long absence. It’s the most arresting moment in the whole Hear It Now series, as far as I’m concerned. There aren’t many unscripted recordings of such slices of family life that have survived from almost sixty years ago; these candid glimpses into how America welcomed its returning Korean War veterans make us regret the rarity of these recordings all the more.

The Hear It Now series was short-lived, thanks to television; a video version of the same program idea, called See It Now, was launched later in 1951, and that spelt the end of the half-novelty of merely listening to stories in the news… the audience could finally see them at home, as well.

Still, there's something to be said for letting the audience get to fill in for ourselves the mental picture of an older mother's pleasure at holding her son again, a father's excitement from seeing his first child, a wife's relief at having her husband returned to her safe and sound, a neighborhood's pride in welcoming home their returning hero, and more... I can just begin to see all that as clearly in my mind as I might have on a television screen, and smile in the way that our imagination stirs us to do, courtesy of these radio memories of what it meant to Come Home:

Recent Radio Memories posts:

Escape: Vanishing Lady

Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

Truce in Gaza, a little of the truth trickles out

We all know that when it comes to war, the MSM will leech onto any horrific propaganda and repeat it often if it fits their pre-conceived narrative. But this does not make it any easier to accept that we are being lied to - whether or not those uncritically feeding lies to us know what they are doing - especially when it comes from the likes of our tax-payer funded CBC where I have heard many claims that Israel is using white phosphorous on civilians.

Anyway, the New York Times is now covering itself for past misreporting, in the final paragraphs of a recent story on Gaza:

Mr. Kellenberger of the Red Cross said that Israel had facilitated his trip to Gaza and added that he had seen no evidence of the use of white phosphorus, an obscurant used in military conflicts that can be dangerous for civilians under certain circumstances. Palestinians say Israel is using it in Gaza.

Last week, the Red Cross issued an unusually harsh condemnation of Israel for refusing to allow its personnel into Gaza to rescue people trapped in battle. On Wednesday, Mr. Kellenberger said that although the situation remained critical, rescue missions had not been entirely shut down. The organization rescued 100 people trapped in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, on Tuesday.

This news was discussd by Marty Peretz in his blog (ht:contentious centrist), one of whose anonymous commenters writes:

As a Navy Seabee veteran with experience on 60mm and 81mm mortars, I have fired my share of white phosphorus ("willy peter") shells. WP was used during vietnam for illumination for night fighting and for brush clearing, and rounds were fired directly at the enemy as well. WP burns at 5000 degrees F. and will not extinguish until it completely burns up--it will even burn under water. If it gets on you it will burn right through you. Hence the danger to civilians "under certain circumstances."

Having seen the footage in question I can say that in my estimation, having seen WP up close and personal many times over, Israel is NOT using WP based on that footage.

Wouldn't it be nice if our media could fill their stories on war with a few sober military experts and not the sentimentalization of (and hence encouragment to produce more) victims that we get from the NGOs?

A Blur Of Contradictions

Vaucluse, France: It's 8:00 AM and a mother is driving her sick young son to a doctor, when a sudden fainting spell makes her lose control of their car; it leaves the road, hits a guard post, skirts a row of cypress trees before perching itself on an embankment above a thirty-foot drop.

Once the car steadied itself from this unorthodox stop, 9-year old Arthur Pipard springs into action, to save his mother. Despite the shock of the last few moments, young Arthur has the presence of mind to dig through his mom's purse, to make a call on her cel phone, selecting to phone his father, a firefighter whom he knew to be on duty that day. The child then examines his unconscious mother, adjusting her head, which had been stuck between the headrest and the seatbelt as a result of the accident.

His father, no stranger to heroics himself, given his career as a volunteer firefighter for the community of Voconces, as well as a member of the GRIMP mountain rescue unit, remarks with pride on his son's response to the crisis: "Usually, in these types of situations, reactions tend to be more self-oriented. One tries to first protect oneself. Which is normal..."

[Translated from Le Dauphine's reports here and here.]

Studying events like the one above leave us with a blur of contradictions. It's always amazing to me to read of situations like these, where individuals seem to be able to act against all expectations. That it can happen at all ages makes it even more revealing about what it says about potential as human beings... and how foggy might be our appreciation of the fullness of that potential. When it would be normal for people to be hesitate, they act, like 11-year old Dustan; when they should panic, they remain calm, like 9-year old Drew; when every impulse is to flee, they stand their ground, like 8-year old Drayden, even leaping into the fray, like 7-year old Alexis.

Of course, we've all been given an unforgettable example of accomplishing the impossible this week, courtesy of Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III and his staggeringly succesful piloting of US Airways Flight 1549 to safety in the Hudson River. He should have lost hope, he should have been numb from despair, his fear should have crashed that plane.

On the outside looking in, we might presume that there simply wasn't any fear to overcome; maybe that's how these heroic children, as well as the Captain, were able to think, and act, as they did. But that's not seeing the big picture:

In recent years, neuroscientists have been able to see what happens inside the brain when people, like Sullenberger, are forced to make decisions under pressure. Though the typical assumption is that some people don't feel fear -- that they are somehow less scared than the rest of us -- that assumption turns out to be false. The fear circuits in the brain, such as the amygdala, generate their response automatically; it's almost certain that everyone on board Flight 1549 was terrified.

What, then, allows people like Sullenberger to make effective decisions in harrowing circumstances? How do they keep their fear from turning into panic? Scientists have found that the crucial variable is the ability to balance visceral emotions against a more rational and deliberate thought process, which is centered in the prefrontal cortex. This balancing act is known as metacognition -- a sort of thinking about thinking.

Pilots have a different name for this skill: They call it "deliberate calm," because staying calm under fraught circumstances requires both conscious effort and regular practice.

This is where flight simulators enter the picture. The advantage of these realistic simulators, which have been in widespread use since the early 1980s, is that they allow pilots to practice extreme flight scenarios, such as a total loss of engine power over water. The training provides pilots with important technical skills -- they can practice flying crippled planes -- but it also teaches them something more important: how to draw on an optimal blend of reason and emotion.

I’d like to think that, for those of us without access to such high-tech gadgetry, who might be interested in learning the same self-discipline for own times of personal crisis, there's another simulation more readily available, one that aims to provide the same balanced resolution: humble prayer.

Prayer is a study in contradictions: in our stillness there is a flurry of activity. By temporarily shutting out the world we try open ourselves up to its possibilities; by closing our eyes we strive to imagine, with as much clarity as we can summon, everything from our most dreaded fear to our most cherished wish. In doing so we think about how to think about them... how to possibly survive the arrival of the former, how to probably bring about the arrival of the latter. We pause our life in order to review whether we're heading in the right direction, usually recognizing a need to take a step back so that we can resume our way forward. We measure our past actions, stretching them out into the fog of an unlived future, to dare to see how they may weigh in a more long-term balance.

Whether it's seeing children behaving with the utmost calm when our natural expectations of childhood tells us that there should be little such reserves to draw strength from... or busy people dropping everything in order to be of maximum service to total strangers, when “everybody knows” that city people aren’t friendly to strangers… we have many examples of incongruities and impossibilities to help penetrate the fog to let us see the unimaginable: an emotional light to find hope in a darkness where reason tells us there should be no hope, an emotional faith in solutions when reason denies us the likelihood of success… a simulation of the miracle of balancing contradictions.

Grand Wizards of Oz

A picture of a few words is worth a ... well, a lot. Thanks to Gramfan at JihadWatch.

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/nazis_needed/

David Solway and Franz Kafka: takes on Jewish faith

From whence comes the patience to recognize hard human realities and prepare to live with them, without having recourse to fantasies of a final victory? Clearly such patience is not found among those taking to the streets of Canada in hate-the-jew fests.

The ideal spirit for those defending Israel and Jews everywhere, it would seem to me, would be to be eternally vigilant but never despairing. Somehow, I don't think David Solway quite expresses the need for Israel to be open, for centuries and millennia to come, to the unexpected, responsible, responses to its ever necessary, evolving, deterrence. Solway:

Under existing conditions, the best the Middle East can hope for is a long cold peace and even this is probably an Arcadian notion. We must learn to live with the situation as best we can, just as people who are afflicted with serious illness must take the proper measures in order to survive, stick to their medications, expect relapses and seek treatment no matter how stopgap. There's no point wondering what might have been had they not contracted their infirmity by having acted differently in the past or expecting that somehow the disease will be pacified and magically disappear by some sort of “talking cure.” The Middle East is sick with an incurable disease; all it can strive for is occasional remission and approximate recovery after yet another malign episode. This is what Reality is telling us; pious hopes only make things worse, as the last sixty years should have made clear by this time.

In the real world there are some “problems” for which there are no satisfactory solutions.

Yes, this is true of every genuine problem, not just Israel's.

To believe otherwise, to assume that negotiation, dialogue and diplomacy can eventually resolve even the most intractable predicament or standoff, that it is only a matter of time until belligerents of whatever stamp or provenance can be made to see the light, and that all peoples desperately want nothing more than peace, prosperity and equitable arrangements between them, is a utopian delusion of the first magnitude. Its effect can be catastrophic and frequently is.

Perhaps, but then I think it wrong to suggest that our belief in negotiation always stems from the fantasy of some great peace just out of grasp. Perhaps we need to discover a faith in negotiation (starting with deterrence) as a process of eternal deferral of the problem, and not ever of its final resolution.

The Middle East has been ailing for 3000 years and will not be healed tomorrow, next year, or even next century, if we get that far.

Yes, but then what are the medications you speak of, as an alternative to this dream of complete healing?

One thinks of Irving Kristol’s insightful remark that “Whom the gods would destroy they first tempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Some mistakes have to be abided—and controlled, if necessary, by aggressive countermeans, just as a chronic ailment requires constant supervision and appropriate remedies. As for Israel, it's only hope for survival is to bring about an armed truce from a position of deterrent power. Whether or not Israel is a “mistake,” as long as it continues to exist it will have to remain on a war footing.

Yes... but there must be more than one road to our only hope... what about those members of the Other who can learn from our "aggressive countermeans"? Can they help us keep the truce? Can they be rewarded? Can some even one day want to be us?

I, for one, do not believe that Israel is a mistake—its millennial hereditament alone renders it a legitimate nation. But even if Israel is regarded as a mistake by its critics and revilers, it would be no more of a mistake than some of its most intransigent enemies. As I replied to my correspondent, let us be honest for a change.

At times like this, a few Kafka aphorisms might be of interest:

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. That is not the sort of belief that indicates real faith.

Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in the world unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not.

Theoretically there is a perfect possibility of happiness: believing in the indestructible element in oneself and not striving towards it.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man’s wish to rest for a moment — an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.

Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.

There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.

Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.

What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last day

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

Pro-Hamas Supporters Rampage In Nice, France

It's just not news anymore, is it: another European anti-Israel protest deteriorates into a winner-take-all rampage. The backdrops change, but the story doesn't.

This latest riot erupted in, of all places, the coastal city of Nice, along the French Riviera. Last Saturday, January 10th, hundreds of the participating 5,000 protestors deviated from their pre-arranged marching route through the downtown core; the result was smashed cars, broken windows, looted shops, terrified innocent bystanders and assaults on outmaneuvered police with rains of stones and other projectiles. The report in the Nice Premium calls it "virtual guerilla warfare" [my translation]:

Approximately 200 youths set upon the Casino Rulh and the McDonald's, then went over to place Masséna. What followed was two long hours of thrown stones, or other objects against [store] windows or cars that were driving by. Police responded with tear gas, affecting both rioters and passersby.
... In the middle of the chaos, merchants had no choice but to close down their doors... locking themselves in with their customers. They found themselves trapped inside for about an hour and a half.

Another newspaper, the Nice Matin, adds that several police were wounded in the assault against them, and that a baby can be included among the injured pedestrians. A baby...

(For a series of shocking photos of the pro-Hamas rampage, go here.)

The city is bracing for another anti-Israel protest this coming Saturday.

[Hat tip to Tiberge at GalliaWatch]

Vote for Israel

Because no one can yet vote freely in "Palestine".

Ari writes me about this web poll:

Apparently CNN is pushing a poll showing that 66% vs. 33% of Americans favor "Palestine" over Israel in the war in Gaza. We must respond with numbers and be heard. We must stand together. Thousands of these emails are going out across the world right now. Be a part of supporting Israel. See also the hateful messages being left if you need motivation to become involved. Please pass this to all concerned.


If you have not already done so, please click on the link and then
simply click on the Israeli flag.

http://www.israel-vs-palestine.com/gz/

PLEASE contact everyone you know to vote...

It will take only an instant of your time

Of course opinion polls can be easily manipulated. If CNN is only doing a web poll for its audience to respond to, one would expect they take to heart and reflect the false sentimentalization of the victims of war that CNN pumps out. Most people can respond to a picture of a dead person with basic human revulsion; most people cannot understand why war is sometimes an evil necessity.

In fact, what I think is going on now is a further polarization in world opinion between those who now more certainly see what kind of a threat the ideology promoted by Hamas is to to the world and to the Palestinian people themselves, and those who want to live all the more in a fantasy where war is outlawed and the UN exists to keep the peace, rather than what it presently exists in large part to do: scapegoat realistic and modern nations like Israel for reminding us that there is something wrong with our fantasy about one day transcending war. And then, of course, there are the many who support Jihad for a similar fantasy about a world at peace once Islam conquers all.

See, for example, this report from the Christian Science Monitor on how many in Europe are turning to support for Israel because they see all-too-close-to-home the real nature of the Global Intifada. When the street violence becomes a daily nightmare for Europeans, clearly directed at them as "Infidels", many can no longer believe the global media when it scapegoats Israel as the cause of Islamic rage.

What is really sacred at the EU?

My regular computer's hard drive is broken and I am blogging on an old machine that doesn't seem to want to let me post photos. Anyway, I am about to invite you to have a look at a photo, by linking to it. BUT don't immediately read the caption below the photo. First, see if you can see what the artist is representing. Here it is

The Czechs have a distinctive and loveable sense of humour. This artwork, it seems to me, raises a question: how to show Europeans that the EU cannot be a cultural project of any great significance, and thus likely not much of a political project? Answer: make fun of their national identities and watch the EU members take the insult to heart (see article).

It seems to me, if you look at the whole slide show at the above link, and read the accompanying article, that it probably was the artist's intent to emblazon Germany in a sign evocative of a swastika.

HT: Belmont Club

It's coffee time in the big city

That's right, folks, the gang at Covenant Zone are taking a break to sit down and have coffee from 7-9:00 p.m. (every Thursday) in the atrium at Vancouver Public Library just outside Blenz coffee bar.

Sit in with us and let's talk about the state of things. Have a cookie. Give your opinion. If I don't like it, then you can pay for the coffee.

Look for the Israeli flag on my baseball cap. I'm usually under it. Hope to see you.

Putin: The Green Cham'peen!

That Putin. What a guy!

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3743#comment

He's so concerned about Global Warming! that he's doing more than most to cut back on the hot stuff. Thanks to him the world might survive after all. If Chavez will start fueling his economy with green stuff like cocao leves, then the world is surely headed for Utopia. All these progressive types get condemned for no good reason. Must be a conspiracy.

Denmark no longer protects its Jews, no longer willing to fight fascists?

It is no secret that many Canadian parents actively seek to isolate their children from the children of poor immigrants from countries not-yet-modern, much of the time. Middle-class Canadians often do this at the same time as preaching multicultural pieties. They often speak of their choice to enrol the kids in French immersion(when they can't or won't pay for private schools: for anglos in cities like Toronto and Vancouver, French immersion is the state-subsidized alternative to state schools full of English as a Second Language students and often with racial/gang problems) as taking a stand for multiculturalism. How long can we sustain such polite hypocrisy?

Are we not avoiding the hard work that would come with apprehension of the need to insist that newcomers only maintain (but also expand) their old-world cultural preferences after signing on to what is required by a civilized country in the way of modern behaviour and reason? Can we look forward to becoming even more like Denmark?

Unless we are willing to expel evil from our midst, the violent thugs will rule:

A number of school administrators have come forth in recent days to confirm that they recommend Jewish children should not enrol at their schools.

According to school administrators, law enforcement officials and social workers, the on-going conflict in Gaza has led to heightened tensions between Jews and Arabs - particularly Palestinians - here in Denmark.

And although few headmasters of schools have faced the situation, most of those at schools with a high percentage of children of Arab descent say they try to prevent Jewish parents from enrolling their children there.

On Monday, headmaster Olav Nielsen of Humlehave School in Odense publicly admitted he would refuse Jewish parents' wish to place their child at his school.

The comments were made following an incident last week in which two Israeli citizen's were shot and wounded at a city shopping centre. Police believe the incident was a reaction to the Gaza conflict.

Other headmasters have now come forth to support Nielsen's position, adding that they are putting the child's safety first.

At Caroline Skole in Copenhagen's Østerbro district, video cameras watch over the playground and entrances of the school, which is surrounded by a 2.5 metre-high barbed-wire fence.

One parent whose child goes to the Jewish school said thinking about the extra security can be disturbing at times, but she felt it was necessary.

Rabbi Bent Lexner called the headmasters' concern 'theoretical. In reality, Jewish parents would never try to enrol their child in those schools.'

Yeah, but that's a sign of a scary lack of freedom in Denmark, and not just for Jews: great education the Muslims must be getting. I mean, what kind of idiot headmaster do you have to be to think that this problem will go away with the Jews, that one can avoid the need to tackle the thugs, to fight a war? I guess they're just hoping that their pensions and state benefits will keep being paid, that they will die before Denmark. And tough luck for any in the younger generation.

Violence And Vandalism At Brussels Peace Protest

Belgian member of Parliamant Richard Miller can personally attest that Sunday's high-profile pro-Hamas "peace" protest staged in Brussels degenerated into violence: he was hospitalized after being hit in the head by a piece of gravel thrown by one of his anti-Israel allies.

Translated from the Belgian news site 7sur7:

"Everything was going well during the demonstration when suddenly, there were incidents during the dispersal of the procession in front of the railway station", explained M. Miller. "That's when I was hit by the cobblestone. I was groggy and found myself bloodied", he said while waiting to be evacuated by ambulance. He participated in the protest at the request of the president of his party so as to represent the MR [Reformist Movement], he added.

It was not reported whether the parliamentarian's assailant was one of the 143 vandals arrested during the "peace" protest for destruction and mayhem caused along the Albert II boulevard, and elsewhere. Three policemen were also wounded by day's end, one with a broken foot. A dozen cars were vandalized and several store and restaurant windows smashed. Police are now wading through the surveillance footage filmed that day by security cameras, matching suspects to actions.

Organizers announced that between 50,000 and 60,000 people participated in the protest march; police give a much lower figure, of 30,000.

Paragraph nine of 12, this phrase in the middle of sentence.

"[H]amas politicians are riding out the war in a bunker beneath Gaza City's main medical center, Shifa Hospital,..."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/12/AR2009011203013.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Thomas Bertonneau now writing at The Brussels Journal

I am greatly pleased to see that The Brussels Journal has acquired the services of one of my favorite essayists, Thomas F. Bertonneau.

A few quick notes on Bertonneau's latest contributions:

In his previous outing for TBJ, Bertonneau reviewed Sylvain Gouguenheim’s recent book, Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne, a work which seeks further to dispel the PC myth that the Renaissance in Europe was highly indebted to Islamic scholarship. Bertonneau writes:

Long before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners – Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold – to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. The sultan and dervish look with amused tolerance on the gaucheries of the European rubes. The rubes swing their elbows and knock over the pottery. It was the Eighteenth-Century philosophes and illuminati who coined the pejorative term Dark Ages to refer to the centuries immediately following the collapse of the Roman imperial administration in the West under pressure of the Gothic assertions of the Fifth Century. Liberal discourse often casually extends the same term to apply it to all of medieval European civilization up to the Renaissance. Specialist historians have, however, long since demonstrated that no such absolute discontinuity as the term Dark Ages insinuates ever existed, which means that the Enlightenment version of history is at least partly wrong. And yet the usual story retains its currency, as an item in a kind of liberal folklore.

Part of that story is the motif of the Islamic middleman role in the transmission of classical knowledge to Christendom. According to this motif, the West in the Eleventh Century possessed no first-hand knowledge of the Greek and precious little of the Roman classics. Fortunately (so the story goes) the Muslims had translated Plato and Aristotle into Arabic, knew all about them, and bestowed the gift of their lore on the benighted monks of Italy and France. The benefactors under this notion behave suavely and generously, while the beneficiaries are – to paraphrase a line from a David Lean film – ignorant, barbarous, and cruel.

In the spasm of western Islamophilia that followed the terrorist attacks of 2001, the myth of medieval Muslim learnedness and medieval European illiteracy gained strong new power for the Left whose acolytes have disseminated it with vigor from their ensconcement in the colleges and universities. Facts might have dispelled the myth had anyone cared to notice them.

Read more...

The jolly idea of Muslim competence in classical learning, as Gouguenheim argues, rests on a misunderstanding: what Islam knew of Greco-Roman wisdom, which it possessed at no time extensively, it knew largely thanks to Syriac scholars. “The Syriac [Christians] were in effect the essential intermediaries of the transmission into Arabic of the philosophical texts of the ancient Greeks,” who generously gave far more than the reluctant takers took. Obtuse westerners betray their lack of discrimination and their poverty of real knowledge in failing to differentiate between Syriac culture and the Arabic-Muslim culture that, by means of the Jihad, conquered and cruelly stamped out Nestorian (and Coptic and Byzantine) society.

Unlike their Muslim beneficiaries, however, the Syriac Christians could assimilate the full range of Greek logic and speculation. The Johannine Logos stemmed from the Greek Logos and the Christianity of the Patres – whether Greek, Latin, or Syriac – therefore comported itself as a rational theology; already in Late Antiquity, Cappadocians and Syrians stood out as the chief developers of Neo-Platonism; emperors both Pagan and Christian sought counsel from the professors of Antioch’s renowned Daphnaeum. In a chapter on “Islam and Greek Knowledge,” Gouguenheim notes that for Muslims, on the other hand, the Logos constituted an inassimilable scandal, subversive of the absolute submission to Allah’s commands, as articulated in the Koran, that the name Islam denotes. Islam kept of Greek thought “in general [only] that which could not come in contradiction with Koranic teaching.” Furthermore, “Greece – and so too Rome – represented a world radically foreign to Islam, for reasons religious, but also political”; and, unlike the Latinate and Frankish peoples, “Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”

More aggressively, “Muslim rejection – or indifference – to Greek knowledge manifested itself again through the destruction of the cultural centers that were the monasteries, the Muslims not acting in this way any differently from the Vikings.” One could remark here, however, that the Vikings at least had the decency after two centuries to cease their predatory behavior and settle down as members of Christendom.

Multiculturalists and Islamophiles have pointed to the Abbasid establishment in Spain (Andalusia) called the Bayt al Hikma or “House of Wisdom” as proof of Muslim enthusiasm for classical learning. Gouguenheim demonstrates that this is another “seductive” misunderstanding, to which the fanciful eagerly yield. The “House of Wisdom” never functioned other than as a Koranic school, and even in that capacity it enjoyed only a truncated existence.
[...]
Christianity was ready, moreover, to receive, not only the philosophy, but also certain basic political principles, of the ancient Greeks, particularly of the Athenians, such as “liberty, reason, and democracy.” Christian Europe in the medieval centuries was, indeed, in a position to admire from the ancient heritage – and to adopt critically – whatever might enhance its Gospel-based conviction of the free will of the individual. Thus the Attic achievement in particular lies at the elective root of a paradoxically self-identifying European culture. Islam knows only that it is Islam whereas Europe, when at its best, has always understood that it is itself and yet something else at the same time. A European sense of intellectual insufficiency and need gave unexpected strength to the progress and consolidation of the medieval mind. Europe would prove itself “permeable” in a way that Islam could not – convinced as it was of its own perfection ab origine. Thus, concludes Gouguenheim, “the Hellenization of medieval Europe was the fruit of Europeans,” who discovered, on their own, their filiations with the ancient societies.

Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel is one of the most significant publications of the last few years. It is, I believe, destined to become a classic – not only in its original French, but also in the other European languages, once it has been translated. It dispels a myth, an invidious one that has long been central to the perverse palaver of western self-hatred. For those who, like me, command their French a bit unsurely, Gouguenheim’s prose is a miracle of balanced sentences and clear meaning. I would say that Gouguenheim’s study has a potentially large audience outside the academy and could become something of a popular success in the Anglophone nations.

All among us who fear we have entered a new "dark ages" and that only a renewal of the eighteenth-century spirit can save us, would do well to spend some time with this essay and the works to which it refers. Those familiar with Bertonneau's other writings might assume the writer is himself fearful of a looming darkness, but he certainly seeks the roots of our proper modernity in the full length of our Western history and not in some singular moment of englightenment. It is remembering the many events of our civilization's renewal that will kindle our passions and help us renew iconic models and a sense of our purpose in dark times.

Similarly, in his latest TBJ piece, Bertonneau reflects on the basis of our faith in respect to a great problem of modernity: people's desire to overcome their loneliness by playing the boy who cried wolf, to take the short cut to appearing morally righteous by playing with and denying a proper apprehension of reality:

No period is so richly guilty of abusing the primary ostensive function of language – of shouting Wolf! – as modernity. I recall [Eric] Gans saying once in a throwaway remark during a lecture that modernity specializes in creating specious differences while simultaneously denying the positive reality of actual differences. We can observe such specious differentiation most especially in current social and political rhetoric.

Take the vocabulary of equality, one of the obsessions of the self-denominating democratic societies. Modernity uses – or rather abuses – the term equality in two incompatible and self-canceling ways and in a verbal sleight of exasperating slipperiness. First, modernity posits equality as a moral absolute and as an eschatological project of the saints. Never mind that otherwise modernity hotly denies the existence of moral absolutes or that elsewhere it despises sanctity. Next, modernity claims that any and every instance of inequality signifies a moral offense and an intolerable injustice. The advocates of equality (their dubious name for which is “social justice”) invariably take the opportunity of their allegations to indict putative authors of inequality, whom they promise to chastise for causing the wickedness. Notice that the scheme of leveling all differences requires the difference that the plaintiff always be morally superior to the defendant. It was on this basis of this morally superior attitude, to which he was keenly sensitive, that Eric Voegelin declared modernity to be essentially “Gnostic.”

What agenda stems from the penchant of the levelers? If the inequality or difference in question consisted, for example, in the empirical fact that certain children at the end of twelve years in school spell well while certain others spell badly or cannot spell at all – were that so, the modern subject in his outrage would urgently equivocate between spelling well and spelling badly and he would urgently seek to nominate as generative of the difference any cause that shifts attention from direct linear explanations thereof (some students had better teachers than others or some students simply paid closer attention to their lessons than others) to extrinsic, “third party” explanations that permit the laying of blame against supposed malefactors. (Never, of course, the teachers or the school or the curriculum.) One might encounter the exculpatory claim that makes of spelling an arbitrary standard imposed by a ruling elite to stabilize the existing unjust establishment.

Read the whole thing...

Local readers will immediately recognize the figure of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation in these remarks, that body of professional Gnostics who are so keen to outlaw the duly-elected government's desire to have standardized testing of students, lest the results of these tests be publicized by that most egregious of bad boys, the pro-free market think-tank Fraser Institute, to actually show the concerned public which schools are incapable of teaching certain children a basic competency in maths or letters.

But indeed the ranks of those who would invoke the presence of an absent wolf are legion, "educatedd" by just such wishful teachers, weakening us for the work of properly apprehending harder realities to come.

The Brussels Journal, at least, is getting better and better.

"I Felt Like I Was In A War": Pro-Hamas Violence Plagues France

What kind of "peace movement" is this?

There's been a series of disturbing attacks on the Synagogues of France, as vandals are no longer satisfied with scrawling vulgar anti-semitic graffitti, they are graduating now to attempted arson. Here are a trio of cases, loosely translated from French media sources. First, from Strasburg and Paris:

Molotov cocktails were thrown against a private home serving as a religious gathering place for the Jewish community in Schiltigheim, Bas-Rhin, a suburb of Strasburg.

Two molotov cocktails were also thrown against a synagogue in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. The window of a Jewish restaurant was broken and the wall damaged by the beginning of a fire.

Next, from Toulouse:

A burning car was rammed into the front of a Toulouse suburb synagogue last Monday night. A second car with three molotov cocktails inside was then rammed into the first car, but did not catch on fire.

A rabbi was conducting a class within the synagogue when the attack took place.

Neighbors gave the alarm, and investigators hypothesize that this quick-thinking action kept the would-be arsonists from completing their intended plans.

Even smaller French cities are not being spared from the violence accompanying the pro-Hamas "peace" movement. For instance, the southern coastal city of Perpignan; who would have imagined such a scenic place would ever see the kind of stone throwing and feral rage attributed more commonly to dangerous suburbs such as Seine-Saint-Denis? The local newspaper L'Indépendant chronicles the emotional as well as financial toll that the thugs' behavior takes on the civilized residents of the community..:


A store was attacked while the owner, his wife and two daughters, aged 6 and 10, were still inside, at work. The little girls are still traumatized by the fury of the assault. A translation of an interview conducted with their mother, in the aftermath of their nightmare:

"Why?... I felt like I was in a war! I didn't sleep at all last night, I worried that they would [return and] set fire to the store. They threatened us", she says while slipping her finger across her throat.

Others shops were attacked as well, but most were closed, and a few were so well fortified against vandalism that damage tended to be minor. Many merchants in the neighborhood where the "peace" protest took place, chose to close their doors that Saturday, prefering to lose a busy day's sales rather than go through the kind of terror that the family quoted above had to endure. Some of these entrepreneurs found that they were forced to stay closed a second day, in order to repair the damage done in their absence by the anti-Israel protestors. There was apparently no police presence in the neighborhood adjacent to the "peace" protest, accounting for the scale of vandalism; the forces of law and order only arriving on scene after the attacks started taking place up and down the street. The report concludes by underscoring the stress that shopkeepers will undergo at the annoucement of any future "peace" protests downtown.

Where is this all going? Are even those who haven't forgotten their European history, being condemned to repeat it?

Radio Memories: Paris Conspiracy

Tired of the everyday routine? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all..?

This was the enticing opening to the old radio anthology program Escape, this week's offering in our Radio Memories series. Once a week we take a break and tune in to radio's dramatic past, when the medium broadcast plays for the imagination more often than music or news. Escape is one of a handful of series that went almost unnoticed in its time, only to become a favorite among modern-day collectors and fans. In fact if you wanted to introduce someone to what old-time radio drama was all about, you'd do well to give them an episode or two of Escape to listen to... in many ways, it tended to represent North American radio drama at its best.

The episode of Escape we'll be listening to below is entitled "The Vanishing Lady", first broadcast almost sixty years to the day, on January 10th, 1950. You might recognize the plot: on the eve of France's 1889 Exposition (introducing the world to the Eiffel Tower), a mother vanishes from her Paris hotel, her hotel room vanishing with her, leaving her daughter, unable to speak a word of French, panicked and confused in a strange city full of people who suddenly claim to have never seen her before.

After a bit of googling, I was shocked to learn two things about the story this episode is based upon. One: that it is not true! I've encountered this story for years, in one medium or another, always with the caveat that it was an adaptation of an actual event. Turns out that it is an urban legend, one of those stories that we believe to be true because we need to believe that it could be true.

A second surprise was the supposed source: Alexander Woolcott's 1934 collection of short stories "While Rome Burns". I have a beat-up 1942 edition of this collection, and it does not contain any mention of a lady vanishing in a Paris hotel room, even though my copy stresses that "This book is NOT a digest or condensation of the original, it is the COMPLETE book". I wonder if the attribution of the Vanishing Lady urban legend to this anthology is, in itself, an urban legend..! (Maybe Woolcott himself discovered that the story was untrue, and therefore had it removed from later printings.)

Befitting it's Paris setting, there are significant stretches of dialog in this radio play that are spoken in French, which makes listening to the show a different experience for those of us who understand the language... I think we lose out in some ways, because we are prevented from fully sharing the terror of the daughter's point of view. We know what everyone around her is talking about, but for her, and her nightmare, there is no... Escape:

Five Feet of Fury Versus the Jihad

A handful of normal people went to the HAMAS rally yesterday at the Vancouver Art Gallery plaza to protest Islamic and Left dhimmi fascism. It snowed on us. It snowed on the fewer-than-last-time crowd of jihadis and their cheerleaders. But all was not well with us, though we were more than last time. Too many people on our side were intimidated by the rumor of violence from the jihadis. Our group, to give credit where it's due, did have the sense to come in from the rain, out of the freezing wind and the snow. We went for coffee and chat. Our disparate group, some who are little different from Leftists on most political points, sat with the rest of us and we talked about jihad and the future of our nations. A by-stander joined us. A good time was had by all. No, it's not enough. It's a start that we meet and talk. We do need to do more.

Take a look at Kathy Shaidle's experiences at Toronto's HAMAS hate-fest.

And then consider joining us for yet more talk on Thursday evening at VPL from 7-9:00 p.m. in the atrium for yet more coffee outside Blenz in the atrium.

Pro-Hamas Demos Turn Ugly Throughout Belgium; Pro-Israel Rallies Don't

One side burns flags, the other waves them. In Belgium, however, the flag-burning side are escalating the flames of rage beyond mere symbolic acts... What follows are a series of translated articles from the Belgian media over the last week on the bad fruit falling from the pro-Hamas tree.

Things are getting so bad that it has resulted in the government having to raise the threat level scale normally used for measuring terrorism:

The [Foreign Affairs Crisis Center] decided to raise the level of alert due to the impact that Israel's actions in Gaza are having in Belgium. "The participation in the organized protests increases with each day. We recognize that the situation is becoming more explosive", notes Peter Mertens. He therefore decided to increase attention and keep a closer eye on Israeli and palestinian interests in Belgium.

Concretely, this means that "the police presence would be redirected and added to, as necessary." A meeting will be held [last Tuesday] with the Anvers and Brussels police to determine which groups might require additional security precautions.

Mr. Mertens specifies that the threat level has nothing to do with risks from terrorism, and is more the case of a threat against public order.

No doubt incidents like the one taking place on Friday, January 2nd, led to this decision to ratchet up security precautions throughout the nation. At an anti-Israel demonstration of a thousand people on the steps of the Brussels Stock Exchange Friday afternoon, young protestors launched a volley of stones that damaged six cars. A store window was also smashed after the protest. No arrests were made.

The Belgian city of Charleroi, previously given its 15 minutes of infamy through the shocking 2004 suicide bombing of Charleroi resident Muriel Degauque in Iraq, saw the results of this increase in security in action, as the forces of law and order succesfully prevented several dozen masked youths from engaging in vandalism at the tail-end of an anti-Israel protest:

A pro-palestinian protest gave way to several outbursts Saturday afternoon, in the neighborhood of Ville-Haute, in Charleroi ...
Several hundred protestors first gathered together while displaying banners at la place Charles II. A delegation submitted a statement of protest to burgomeister Jean-Jacques Viseur.
This part of the protest went without incident.
However, as the protest dispersed, several dozen youths, several with their faces masked, hurtled down the nearby rue de la Montagne, threatening to smash windows, but were prevented from doing so.
The police had taken the precaution to equip themselves with water pumps but these ended up not being necessary.... Local police made several arrests likely to lead to a hearing by the deputy public prosecutor in court.

Last Monday, January 5th, unknown persons started a fire in front of a Brussels synagogue, blackening the front door. Investigators were not certain about how the fire started, but discounted the possibility of it being a molotov cocktail. The spokesperson for the police suggested, through a tactless analogy, that it might simply be a case of practical jokers taking advantage of the situation in Gaza to throw a little "oil on the fire"...

2 molotov coctails were, however, found among the 93 protestors arrested at a spontaneous, unauthorized "peace" protest in Antwerp two days before, on Saturday January 3rd. They had text-messaged each other about the protest, but made no provisions with authorities to seek the proper permits for their public demonstration; the police, in consultation with Anvers mayor Patrick Janssens, told the gathered crowd to leave, arresting those who would not disperse as directed.

This protest ended better than the one which took place in Antwerp on Wednesday December 31st. Anti-Israeli protestors descended upon Antwerp's Jewish community, which had been heavily defended by a strong police presence. (Watch the following (Flemish-language?) tv news account of the incident, as of the 1:00 mark...)

A protest undertaken on January 9th with the participation of a left-wing Belgian political party turned into a bit of a mess thanks to the undisciplined exuberance of the "anti-violence" protestors in attendance. Almost a thousand people had assembled on that late Friday afternoon at the place du Marché in Liège, where the crowd's spontaneous pro-jihad chants drowned out the official speakers' standard anti-war rhetoric:

The protest went on through a certain confusion, as the organizers' speeches were rendered inaudible by the more virulent cries coming from a core group of young protestors. In-between the "Israel assassin", "Zionist terrorist", "Bush, Olmert, assassins", one could also hear praising the glory of hamas, hezbollah and jihad. ...

The Ecolo party had announced its participation in the protest... the green party announced that they had proposed a resolution demanding that Europe put pressure on Israel for an immediate cease-fire, a proposition that will be tabled in the Chamber's foreign relations commission this coming January 13th.

Police in Brussels are very concerned about a scheduled protest this coming Sunday, January 11th. Over 100 organizations, including Belgian political parties such as the environmentalist Ecolo party, the center-left cdH (Humanist Democratic Centre) and the Socialist Party, are participating in an event expected to draw several thousand protestors. Expectations from the organizers are that the numbers will in fact top those of their previous protest in Brussels on Wednesday December 31st. Because of the bad publicity resulting from their previous efforts, thoughtful guidelines are being established by the organizers:

The League of Belgian Muslims (LMB) has asked the participants to not burn flags during the protest, and to not shout "certain slogans".
...
Policing measures will be very important. Sensitive areas such as synagogues and certain embassies will be secured...

In the middle of all this flag-burning, stone-throwing, and pro-jihad chanting, Belgium's Jewish community organized a demonstration in support of Israel. The CCOJB ("Comité de Coordination des Organisations Juives de Belgique", the "Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations in Belgium") held a pro-Israel rally in front of Iran's embassy in Brussels. From the CCOJB's official site:

1,000 people were in attendance to denounce the responsability of Iran in supporting the terrorist organization Hamas. CCOJB President Joel Rubinfeld and federal deputy Denis Ducarme delivered speeches offering their support for the populations [Israeli and Palestinian] in the region who are taken hostage by Hamas and its backers in Iran.

Need we even ask, if police found any molotov cocktails among these protestors..? Was there even a remote chance that they would burn flags, riot, and storm the embassy in a fit of violent rage..?

"By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs from thistles?
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit..."
__Matthew 7:16-18