Do not read this -

[fpb]

- if you disagree with me on some political issues. http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-02-18-1.html

Comments

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

In fact, anti-semitism is now becoming quite fashionable among American "intellectuals" -- proving once again how easily people can talk themselves into moral obscenities as long as they only talk to other people who think exactly like them.

Ha! Brilliantly put!

[guarani]

Disagreement should not be a reason to refrain from reading someone else's opinion. Impossibility to maintain a civilized discussion, on the other hand, should.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, I just give a warning that the opinions contained in mr.Scott Card's article might annoy some people. The thing is that I have known plenty of people who complain about certain points of view being stated at all. Now they are warned.

I read your warning ...

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Oh, but I'm clicking on it anyway! Sometimes I need to be stopped!

Re: I read your warning ...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I doubt that you are the kind of person for whom that warning was intended.

Re: I read your warning ...

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Well, it was pretty vaguely worded.

Ive read a bit, and havent been offended yet.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Too late! Too late! Orson Scott Card’s site is already on my regular reading list.

Actually I agree with him, but with that kind of rhetoric I fear he’s only preaching to the converted.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I suspect the rhetoric level jumped abruptly because he is touching on moral premises dear to his own heart as a writer. I don't find his other War Watches quite so vehement.

[notebuyer.livejournal.com]

Thanks -- I've read Card before with profit, and this was a good example of why I do.

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

Meh.

Card's little rant there is just as rabidly anti-Arab to the same degree as accuses the author of that book being anti-Israel. He's painting the Palestinian Arabs as a horde of murdering, bloodthirsty, prideful genocidal maniacs bent on slaughtering ever jew that draws breath.

The fact is that neither of these two groups are innocent of wrongdoing.

Card having wrote this article diminishes significantly my respect for him as a writer, though. I don't think I'll be finishing "The Worthing Saga", or buying any more of his books, after all.

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

Sigh, I'll elaborate on what I just said. I know that if I don't, I'll be instantly labeled as some kind of nazi jew-hating anti-semite, simply because I don't approved of every single action that Israel has ever made, ever.

Israel and the Jews have suffered hugely through history. They've been persecuted, and been dominated and oppressed by a series of foreign empires and peoples through much of their history. (Though, I should point own, their own holy book, and mine, says that it was God himself who directed this to happen, because they were unfaithful in their worship to him.)

However, that doesn't excuse them from civil behavior. Many Arab and Palestinian extremist groups might be their enemies, yes. But that doesn't imply that they have license to act with impunity against all Arabs or Palestinians, nor excuse the Airstrikes & Tanks employed in retaliatory strikes against the home neighborhoods of suspected suicide bombers. (Which, by the way, was done *before* the current advent of the PGM, a technology which might, just barely, make something justifiable. Israel didn't have PGMs for the longest time, and they did it anyway.)

What I'm basically saying is that two wrongs don't make a right. Just because Israel has been treated badly doesn't excuse them turning around and treating others (who might not even be related or responsible at all for the first incidents) badly. Not any more than the United States was justified in rounding up Japanese-American civilians and putting them in camps during World War 2 just because Japan had attacked us..

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that you show your ignorance of Israeli history with this ill-informed attempt at being even-handed. In 1948, the stated object of the five-army alliance which invaded Palestine, armed to its teeth by Britain, was to "carry out a massacre like the Mongols" and not to leave a single Jew alive. They had sufficient precedent: before Hitler had ever been heard of, genocidal feelings had been running riot in Palestine. In 1929, the whole Hebrew community of Hebron, the most ancient in Palestine, had been wiped out. The Arab intent to destroy the Jews of Palestine informed the foreign policy of the whole region during World War Two, when the Mufti of Jerusalem went into exile in Berlin and encouraged the Nazis in their most genocidal enterprise, repeatedly visiting death camps and approving, and helped raise Muslim SS troops including a whole division. At the same time, Iraq rose in arms against Britain; when defeated, it indulged in wholesale massacre of its own native Jews - and Britain, showing its nastily anti-hebraic face, stood by and let it happen. Egypt, repeatedly invaded by Italy and Germany, never once acted as an invaded country is expected to, and clearly showed that it only waited for an excuse to go to war against Britain. The British were glad enough to raise large amounts of soldiers among the Jews of Palestine, but they did nothing for them in return, and in effect encouraged their enemies to attempt massacre in 1948; and it was only pure Jewish courage, plus the skills acquired during the world war, that allowed the outnumbered, outgunned and surrounded Jews to survive. You speak like a man with no idea of the history of the region beyond the distorted trash spouted by contemporary mass media.

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

Can you please tell me which statements he made that you disagree with?

And how you'd rather Israel responded?

Realities of the Situation

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Dirigibletrance, I strongly disagree with your attempt to draw moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian actions.

The Israelis settled on land that they purchased from the Turks. It is true that the Turks had, in some cases, stolen this land from the Arabs via confiscatory taxes. But it is also rather notably true that the Palestinian Arabs, after helping the British drive out the Turks in World War I, did not focus their wrath on the Turks, but rather on the Jews, who had purchased the lands in good faith from what had been the legitimate government of the area.

The Israelis attempted to live at peace with the Arabs. The Arabs repeatedly spurned these offers of peace and continued to launch lethal and unprovoked attacks on the Israelis. During World War II, they allied with Hitler, and did so not in spite of, but BECAUSE THEIR LEADERS KNEW AND APPROVED (!!!) OF THE HOLOCAUST.

The British, despite this, did not favor the Israelis over the Jews. Led by a pro-Arab faction in their own government, they armed the Arabs and tried to prevent arms and men from reaching the Israelis.

The Arabs then invaded Israel in 1948. Their declared intent was the annihilation of the country and the massacre of its inhabitants. In the course of this fighting, many Palestinians fled and some (even some civilians) were killed by the Israelis. (This is when the Deira Massacre occurred). This is, however, in the context of many more massacres by the Arabs against Israeli civilians whenever they were victorious.

After 1948, Israel has repeatedly tried to make peace with the Arabs, especially the Palestinian Arabs. Their peace offers have been repeatedly rejected -- or, in some cases, accepted but then treacherously dishonored by the Palestinians. The Palestinian attitude seems to be that no decent person could possibly expect them to stop killing Jews, and as a result no Palestinian regime is willing to treat terrorists as criminals.

This is the reality of the situation. Another reality of the situation is that if the Arabs won, they would exterminate the Israelis -- and then, that affair taken care of, would select another target in the West.

Cowards like to assume tha the problem is Israel, because that makes it easy -- just betray a minor ally to annihilation and live at peace with the Muslim world. But cowardice, denial and dishonor will not save the West from attack: we must fight back, with courage, clarity of vision and honor, and remind the Muslims precisely why they wound up colonized in the first place.

Speaking of Politics

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

On a completely different topic, also controversial, I was wondering if you had seen this item:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_hooper/2007/03/shallow_grave_shallow_convicti.html

Re: Speaking of Politics

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have. I have a particular view on this specific matter - the silence of modern feminists on the matter of radical Islam. I think that, beyond the usual lot of looneytoons left attitudes - misguided belief that the Muslims in question are among the oppressed of the world, radical hostility to America and Christianity, belief that my enemy's enemy is my friend (rationalized, as I swear I read it on the Italian Communist daily Il Manifesto, in the following terms: "the Islamic movement is a revolutionary factor in the current world order") - there is also something which is specific to modern feminism. Modern feminism is essentially a careerist, entryist, upper-class movement, whose chief concern is with the legendary "glass ceiling". Its chief concern is with promoting women to top positions. The delusion that this has anything to do with improving the lot of the female sex, even in the West, as a whole, is a thin one, but enough to keep them going. In point of fact, no modern feminist has great concern with the way that the MacDonaldization and WalMartization of work - cheapened, casualized, de-skilled - hits at women in particular, treating them as Karl Marx' "industrial replacement army" - those who are always willing to work for less, undercutting the price of work and depressing the status of workers. That this touches many more women than any wbo are concerned with "glass ceilings"; that it really does depress the status of womanhood as a whole; that it places intolerable strain on families and single mothers; this does not register on the modern feminist mind at all. The most savage and justified comment on modern feminism I have ever heard is the following (uttered, of course, by a woman): "Behind a great women there is another woman, cleaning her floors".

That being the case, how should Muslims, let alone Muslim women, seriously register on the feminist screen? In Western countries, Muslims are few and rarely well off. They are, in effect, of the servant class. And the classic feminist college professor or lawyer is not really concerned about whether her daily woman is being beaten at home or has been mutilated as a child. In fact, the more there are, the better: the servant market will be larger and less pricey.

A less coldly exploitative point is that the feminists really do think that in forcing more and more women in positions of power, they are really changing the foundations of society - from above; they imagine that upper class relationships will sooner or later spread downwards (an idea curiously similar to the equally valueless Thatcherite belief in the trickle down of wealth). And that applies to other cultures. Feminists, like other liberals, really believe that the liberal optimum is the ultimate goal of all cultures, and that all of them will sooner or later come to imitate them. Therefore they do not concern themselves with what is going on among Muslims now; the laws of history dictate that Muslim societies must evolve in a pro-liberal direction. What is going on now is just the last kick of a dying patriarchy. This is why so many of them manage to convince themselves, against all evidence, that Christians and Muslims are natural allies and that they will sooner or later come together in one grand anti-female, anti-gay, anti-everything coalition. That this is a delusion, and an elitist delusion at that, I do not have to tell you.

If this seems surprisingly left-wing to you, I may point out that where economic relationships are concerned, I am not very sympathetic to unearned wealth: http://fpb.livejournal.com/13532.html. It is in matters of social and sexual ethics that I am deeply conservative - including the matter of patriotism: http://fpb.livejournal.com/22050.html.