Mother-woman gives up whatever ghost of a unique talent she may have had

Or: Riding the Old Nag of Science to Death -- Backwards and Again

In the latest edition of Middle East Forum Phyllis Chesler is, so it seems, quite out of character carrying a torch for the Western male.

Differing Characteristics of Honor Killings and Domestic Violence

Honor Killings	Domestic Violence
Committed mainly by Muslims against Muslim girls/young adult women.	Committed by men of all faiths usually against adult women.
Committed mainly by fathers against their teenage daughters and daughters in their early twenties. Wives and older-age daughters may also be victims, but to a lesser extent.	Committed by an adult male spouse against an adult female spouse or intimate partner.
Carefully planned. Death threats are often used as a means of control.	The murder is often unplanned and spontaneous.
The planning and execution involve multiple family members and can include mothers, sisters, brothers, male cousins, uncles, grandfathers, etc. If the girl escapes, the extended family will continue to search for her to kill her.	The murder is carried out by one man with no family complicity.
The reason given for the honor killing is that the girl or young woman has "dishonored" the family.	The batterer-murderer does not claim any family concept of "honor." The reasons may range from a poorly cooked meal to suspected infidelity to the woman's trying to protect the children from his abuse or turning to the authorities for help.
At least half the time, the killings are carried out with barbaric ferocity. The female victim is often raped, burned alive, stoned or beaten to death, cut at the throat, decapitated, stabbed numerous times, suffocated slowly, etc.	While some men do beat a spouse to death, they often simply shoot or stab them.
The extended family and community valorize the honor killing. They do not condemn the perpetrators in the name of Islam. Mainly, honor killings are seen as normative.	The batterer-murderer is seen as a criminal; no one defends him as a hero. Such men are often viewed as sociopaths, mentally ill, or evil.
The murderer(s) do not show remorse. Instead, they experience themselves as "victims," defending themselves from the girl's actions and trying to restore their lost family honor.	Sometimes, remorse or regret is exhibited.

Is she? (Colouring added by me.)

In 2003 I wrote about Chesler's, then new, book "The New Anti-Semitism":

I read the book and I was disappointed. Chesler is an annoying woman, and that in more than one respect. A founding mother of second-wave feminism, she is not just a man-hater and sloppy researcher if it suits her agenda (in her 1986 book Mothers on Trial she stated that 70 percent of mothers in custody battles lost, which was based on an extremely non-random sample of 60 women, but frequently used as a feminist mantra) and, even worse, one of those irritating women who send their dignity, education and brain flying when they marry a Western-educated Muslim, followed him to his native country, find it -- surprise, surprise -- less than accomodating there and are then jumping on the victim-bandwagon.

[...]

Not to speak of Chesler's basic credibility problem. An "academic" who writes, as Chesler does in "Women and Madness", that "mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children" (inverted commas by the author!) has lost any right to have her say on any conservative cause. Correction: On ANYthing.

And to answer my own question: no she isn't. This man-hating ogre (or is it ogress?) who has presumably destroyed as many families as the average post-WWII armed conflict, is -- again -- up to her old tricks and, under the disguise of informing about the difference of "normal" domestic violence and Muslim "honour killings", fudging in her anti-social feminist drivel.

What is the truth about domestic violence?

Despite the criticisms leveled at Steinmetz and her concept of the battered husband, violence directed at husbands has been reported by others. For instance, Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, and Suzanne Steinmetz (1980) estimated that about one in eight men in the United States acted violently during marital conflict. However, they estimated a similar number of women also acted violently during marital conflict. They also noted that in a majority of these cases, violence was a mutual or bilateral activity, with only 27% of cases finding that husbands were the sole perpetrators of violence and 24% of cases finding only wives acting violently. With respect to serious violence, as judged by the Conflict Tactics Scales (Note 2), these authors stated that the rate for men beaten by their wives was 4.6%; a figure that indicated "over 2 million very violent wives." While 47% of those husbands who beat their wives did so severely three or more times a year, 53% of women who beat their husbands severely did so three or more times a year.

In a later article, Straus and Gelles (1986) reviewed both their own and other studies in the United States and reported somewhat equivalent assault rates for both male-to-female and female-to-male. In their 1975 survey, Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz (1980) estimated that approximately 38 out of every 1000 families experience severe husband-to-wife violence, while 46 out of every l000 families experience severe wife-to-husband violence. Ten years later, Straus & Gelles (1986) reported that the rates have dropped from 38 to 30 and 46 and 44 per 1000 couples, respectively. In overall acts of violence, as defined by the Conflict Tactics Scales, husband-to-wife rates of violence were 121 and 113 and wife-to-husband rates of violence were 116 and 121 per 1000 couples for the two study years (i.e., 1975 and 1985).

Although Straus and Gelles (1986) did not dwell on these comparisons, they did make a statement that seems to run counter to the prevailing academic and public perception of the time, namely, that "an important and distressing finding about violence in American families is that, in marked contrast to the behavior of women outside the family, women are about as violent within the family as men" (p. 470). The small change in the wife-to-husband rate of violence, as opposed to some change in the husband-to-wife violence, was suggested to result from a lack of attention or concern to male victimization. The case for giving due regard to domestic women-on-men assaults and an acceptance of this higher level of victimization was backed by reference to other studies finding similar levels of male victimization (Brutz & Ingoldsby, 1984; Gelles, 1974; Giles-Sims, 1983; Jourilles & O'Leary, 1985; Lane & Gwartney-Gibbs, 1985; ; Laner & Thompson, 1982; Makepeace, 1983; Sack, Keller, & Howard, 1982; Saunders, 1986; Scanzoni, 1978; Steinmetz, 1977, 1977-78; Szinovacz, 1983).

In conclusion, summarized such data as Straus and Gelles (1986) indicating that women engage in minor assaults against their male partners at a slightly higher rate than for the same attacks upon women by men. In situations in which both partners use violence, men and women were also almost equally responsible for the first blow, but in only one quarter of these relationships was the man the sole victim. At more potentially injurious levels of assault, men were considered to exceed women in their aggressive behavior and it was suggested that a relative rate in the order of 6 or 7 to 1 (male versus female) was evident for the perpetration of injurious assaults.

Can we really believe that the scientific findings from decades ago have not yet arrived at Professor Chesler's desk?

In post-Renaissance Europe, society ostracized and humiliated hen-pecked husbands. In France, for example, a "battered" husband was forced to trot around town riding a donkey backwards. It is safe to assume that enough men are, despite the worst efforts of a feminist society, still carrying some faint remnants of the patriarchal ethos telling him that a husband is expected to protect his wife and family instead of being beaten by her. Thus, a battered husband may be just -- dare I say it -- ashamed to admit that he has been the victim of female violence, which makes one wonder about the number of unreported cases.

But, thanks to the Cheslers of this world, as we children of the post-feminist age know, men do not suffer from subtle feelings like shame, victimization or humiliation. Only women do that.

I wish that hysteric woman would just shut up or at least stop abusing her academic position to deal with her personal problems. As a saviour of Western civilization she is simply miscast.

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We have dicussed "honour killings" and the matter of "honour" in Muslim societies generally (for example) here, here, here, here or here. Many continuative links provided.

A Good Opportunity Sadly Wasted

The conservative National Review Online published on November 25 an interview with the feminist, psychotherapist and women's studies professor Phyllis Chesler, professor emerita of psychology and women's studies at CUNY, headed "Liberal & Pro-Israel, Feminist Phyllis Chesler on "The New Anti-Semitism"", the latter being the title of her recent book.

Today, what's new about anti-Semitism is its extraordinary global reach. Jew hatred is being mass-produced. The Internet, films, and the media have the power to circulate these virulent opinions around the globe, 24/7. The most illiterate of peoples have "seen" the Israelis commit a "massacre" in Jenin, something Israelis did not do -- even the United Nations finally admitted this. But no matter: A false picture is more powerful than a thousand words.

What's new is that Jew-hatred has reached a surreal level in the Islamic world. The Arab Islamic Middle East is almost entirely judenrein (free of Jews), except for Israel, which remains under profound and almost permanent siege. Christians still remain endangered in Muslim lands. Historic Islamic and Koranic views portray Jews as "pigs and monkeys," to be segregated, impoverished, jailed, tortured, exiled, and massacred.

What's new is that these ideas and practices, which are native to Islam, gathered additional force over an 80-year period in which Arab Muslims collaborated -- literally -- with Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s, and with Stalinists from the 1950s until the fall of the Soviet Union. Islamic Jew-hatred, anti-Americanism, and totalitarianism now fuse both East and West.

What's new is that this hatred has, incredibly, been embraced and romanticized by Western liberals, public intellectuals, Nobel Prize winners, all manner of so-called progressives and activists and, to a great extent, by the presumably objective media. The educated elites claim that they do not in fact hate Jews. How can they -- the noblest among the "politically correct" -- be racists? They loathe racism -- except, of course, where Jews are concerned.

What's new is that Jew-hatred (disguised as anti-Zionism) has itself become "politically correct" among these so-called intellectuals. They have one standard for Israel: an impossibly high one. Meanwhile, they set a much lower standard for every other country, even for nations in which tyranny, torture, honor killings, genocide, and every other human rights abuse go unchallenged.

Today anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism. Israel has increasingly come to represent the Jews of the world, and is treated as they have been treated for thousands of years. She is demonized, isolated, and attacked while the world either actively rejoices, or simply does nothing to stop it. Israel has also become the symbolic scapegoat for America and for Western values such as democracy, religious freedom, and individual and women's rights.

The intellectuals control the masses with linguistic distortions that would make George Orwell weep. The way language is being used to misrepresent both the truth and Jews is relatively new. The intelligentsia tell us that Israelis are the "new Nazis" and "worse than Nazis." This is a new form of Holocaust denial. It lets Europeans off the hook: they no longer must wrestle with their own formidable colonial pasts and their persecutory-collaborationist-bystander roles in the Holocaust.

The propagandists go further, calling Israel the apartheid state. This is a lie. Islam is the largest practitioner of both gender and religious apartheid in the world: It persecutes all non-Muslims. Jews cannot apply for citizenship in Jordan, for example, and yet no Western group has called for divestment campaigns there. Meanwhile, the Arab leadership continues to terrorize the last Jewish enclave in the Middle East.
[...]
...I am part of a landmark lawsuit on behalf of Jewish women's religious rights in Jerusalem, asking that women be allowed to pray in women-only groups in the Kotel, the strictly female section at the Western Wall. Our case has so far received three separate decisions in the Israeli Supreme Court. Had we tried to bring such a lawsuit in Iran, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, we would probably have been imprisoned and executed. While Israeli Arabs (i.e., Palestinians) are second-class citizens, their live birth rates, incomes, health care, and freedom of worship and expression are vastly greater in Israel than in any Arab country. In a sense, those Palestinians who might find themselves fenced in by Israel's self-defense might also, theoretically, become Israeli citizens, which would improve matters for them.

Two books ago, I wrote about woman's inhumanity to woman. That was the book's title. Like men, women are not necessarily compassionate or even fair towards other women -- especially if those other women are identified as "evil racist settlers" and the enemies of a beloved revolution. Feminists are no better but perhaps no worse than other women in this regard. Female concentration-camp guards in Nazi Germany were not known for their compassion, but rather for their cruelty towards their female prisoners. Female members of the Ku Klux Klan are not known for their sympathy for African-American women. Women on both sides of a number of hot political issues do not behave in "sisterly" fashions. Most women are human beings, have internalized misogyny just as men have, have a higher standard for female than for male behavior, and are more comfortable competing with other women than with men.

Actually, in romanticizing Muslim suicide bombers as "freedom fighters," Western feminists jeopardize Muslim women, Muslim feminists, and Muslim intellectuals whose fates are desperate and tragic under jihadic Islam.

No feminist worth her salt would ever say that simply because men of color may be unemployed or oppressed, that they therefore have the right to batter their wives and assault their children. Many feminists are not thundering against gender apartheid in the Islamic world (some have done so, but in restricted ways), but feminists are thundering against Israel as the apartheid state.

If we applied a single feminist standard to all humanity, we would loudly oppose Arabs stoning women accused of adultery, honor killings, polygamy, veiling, seclusion, sexual and domestic slavery, etc. Feminists have done so in limited ways, but have relaxed their attention to this matter when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Feminists and leftists have also opposed the American liberation of both Afghanistan and Iraq. But however difficult and imperfect these plans are, what other option do freedom-minded feminists have?

Many feminists who are quite principled on certain issues (equal pay for equal work, reproductive freedom, gay rights, sexual and domestic violence, childcare, etc.) unthinkingly believe that their critiques of patriarchy and of specific American policies can and must be transformed into a generalized hatred of America -- the very country in which they practice their dissent -- and transferred to the Middle East. Many feminists are totally blind to their own Jew hatred and are now more obsessed with the occupation of disputed lands in the Middle East than they are with the occupation of women's bodies worldwide.

In my view, certain feminists seem to have a deep and abiding respect for the so-called "freedom fighter" who is willing to die for the "revolution" and to kill the "colonial oppressor." The fact that Palestinian suicide bombers, and their fascist and misogynist Iranian and Saudi funders, are not stirring a democratic or feminist revolution is cause for irony and tears. Some feminists are still fighting against the Vietnam War and have confused it with American and Israeli wars of self-defense against al Qaeda.
[...]
I am also a hawk on abolishing the global sexual slavery of women and children -- which, increasingly, the Bush administration has taken on as a serious issue and which the liberal feminist movement has opposed.

I am a religious Jew and thus have the greatest respect for other people of faith. Atheists and secularists are extremely intolerant toward religion, and do not view freedom of worship -- even for women and gay people -- as an important issue.

As I write in my book, 9/11 was a direct attack on democracy, modernity, religious pluralism, and women's rights. When Islamo-fascist terrorists are attacking my country, my culture, and my people, I oppose them. While war is hell, self-defense is a duty.

If the fact I understand all this makes me a conservative, then so be it.
[...]
We must support Israel's right to exist, and to exist free from terrorist violence. Israelis have endured the equivalent of 9/11 almost every other week for the last three years. I am a psychologist and a pioneer of trauma and healing therapies, and even I cannot imagine the level of post-traumatic stress symptoms Israelis must be suffering -- they, who have lived through so many wars of self-defense and whose parents and grandparents endured Hitler's Final Solution, the gulags, Cossack pogroms, and persecution and exile from Arab and Muslim lands. We understand that Israel cannot afford to lose a single war, not even a single battle.

We must form Jewish-Christian alliances. Perhaps we must form alliances among all the dhimmi -- Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Assyrians, Zoroastrians, Kurds, Persians, etc. -- who are suffering under Islamic jihadic rule.

We must continue to oppose the liberal media on all these issues.
[...]
... the dark side of Jewish history is repeating itself; the world is again demonizing Jews and creating a situation in which another Holocaust might be possible. I want all people of good will to make sure this does not happen.
[...]
As imperfect as American democracy might be, what we have achieved here would constitute a revolution in any Islamic or Arab country. This is a quiet view, not an apocalyptic one. Perhaps that is why so many progressive Americans refuse to entertain it. It is true that America may have risen on the backs of others, but it is also true that Islamic countries have refused to enter the modern era.

I would like us to feel proud that we are Americans, and to understand that America is really trying to bring religious and individual freedom to a region in which they do not exist at all.

I read the book and I was disappointed. Chesler is an annoying woman, and that in more than one respect. A founding mother of second-wave feminism, she is not just a man-hater and sloppy researcher if it suits her agenda (in her 1986 book Mothers on Trial she stated that 70 percent of mothers in custody battles lost, which was based on an extremely non-random sample of 60 women, but frequently used as a feminist mantra) and, even worse, one of those irritating women who send their dignity, education and brain flying when they marry a Western-educated Muslim, followed him to his native country, find it -- surprise, surprise -- less than accomodating there and are then jumping on the victim-bandwagon.

Chesler doesn't mingle words when it comes to the hypocrisy of the left, but the overall hysterical pitch of the book gets seriously on my nerves and the thought that this is what one probably has to expect from a female, and feminist, author, is of little comfort. However, what really puts me off is that Chesler clearly misses the historical opportunity to settle her score with feminism, which would have made the book more than just another one among those who ex-leftists who saw the light recently. But she obviously didn't want to do that. As it is, it leaves the impression that the left, including feminism, are just suffering from a temporary moral and ethical blackout and not from a basic problem of legitimacy and lack of truthfulness.

Not to speak of Chesler's basic credibility problem. An "academic" who writes, as Chesler does in "Women and Madness", that "mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children" (inverted commas by the author!) has lost any right to have her say on any conservative cause. Correction: On ANYthing.

The above excerpts from the National Review Online interview say almost as much about her argument with feminism and the left as the entire book does. It's a annoying waste of a damn good opportunity and I'm even trying to be kind here.

Hyperventilating Ego-Extravaganza

The old bag is at it again:

There is no peace and consequently, I (I, I, I !) have no peace. Every morning, I (I, I, I !) wake up to news about Muslims blowing each other up ... Yesterday, a friend ... told me (ME, ME, ME !) that Arab Muslims are taking over more and more Jewish Israeli land ... They are not allowing me (ME, ME, ME !) to have peaceful thoughts. Every week, sometimes every few days, I (I, I, I !) am informed that yet another Iranian woman has been ... Daily, the news from Afghanistan chills my (MY, MY, MY !) blood ... Thus, Muslims, among whom I (I, I, I !) once lived and whom I (I, I, I !) once loved, are giving me (ME, ME, ME !) no peace in my (MY, MY, MY !) older years. (The ones I (I, I, I !) knew and loved are either dead or living in exile in the West.) ... please explain to me (ME, ME, ME !) why Gretta Duisenberg ... is now suing my (MY, MY, MY !) friend and colleague the eminent Iranian-Dutch professor of philosophy and jurisprudence, Afshin Ellian, for calling her an “anti-Semite,” when she proudly calls herself an “anti-Semite.”

You get the point? The worst about the threat Islam poses to the West is that it causes Professor Chesler to suffer sleepless nights and doesn't allow her to have peaceful thoughts anymore. And now, finally, at last (we are relieved) to the purpose (apart from letting us know that the worst about the threat Islam poses to the West is that it causes Professor Chesler to suffer sleepless nights and doesn't allow her to have peaceful thoughts anymore) of this hyperventilating ego-extravaganza:

Leon de Winter and Abigail Esman are both asking us all to write on their blogs, in our articles, on our Facebook pages that we, too, believe that Gretta Duisenberg is an anti-Semite. In Dutch, de Winter says:

I invite all readers to support journalistic freedom and freedom of expression by writing ‘I, too, think Gretta Duisenberg is an anti-Semite.’

How many people can Duisenberg sue? Can she sue only one person if thousands, perhaps millions, are saying the same thing?

For Heaven's Sake! Almost exactly seven years ago, I (I, I, I !) and the Jerusalem Post called Gretta Duisenberg (and others) antisemites. Countless people must have done so as well before and since then. And now she (SHE, SHE, SHE !) needs to recruit "thousands, perhaps millions" to save her (HER, HER, HER !) "friend and colleague" from a fate worse than death? Give me a break!

In fact, a Google search for "gretta duisenberg antisemite" renders 398,000 results right now and a picture search shows countless pictures poking fun at the evil old Duisen-hag, even including the antisemitism-topic.

For Phyllis Chesler, the world revolves around one thing, Phyllis Chesler's arse. The fact that people take seriously what this lump of hormones blathers, is proof for the fact that feminism has won long ago.

America's Greatest Strength: Feminism

Under the feministically correct header "Islamic Gender Apartheid" Phyllis mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children Chesler has another hot flush power charge and writes once more about the beauty of feminism the evil of Islam.

Recently, a Pakistani-Muslim man beheaded his Pakistani-Muslim wife in Buffalo. Beheading takes great strength and planning. [As is proven by the Candian bus-beheader or that at a campus cafe at Virginia Tech. And what does this have, even if it were true, to do with anything?] The wife’s crime? After being beaten and living in fear for years, she finally dared to leave him. More: she dared to keep the children and the home. An order of protection forced him out of his castle. [Aren't we sounding a wee little bit spiteful here, Professor Chesler?] In Pakistan he would simply kill her for such insubordination. [So what did he do in America?] He would not be prosecuted. Here, American feminists and domestic violence workers refused to see this as an honor killing [Wow! Thank you, feminism!], refused to understand that a beheading is related to radical fundamentalist Islam and jihad, and insisted that if they did so, it would render them vulnerable to being called “racists.” [They insisted on WHAT exactly?]

Although America is far from perfect, it is still a more democractic, more lawful, more feminist [Yes, she really said that...], and more compassionate [Thanks to feminism, no doubt!] country than is any Muslim country anywhere in the world—no matter how charming or hospitable its citizens may also be. [Chesler is STILL apologizing that she is no better than all the other dumb cows who marry a Muslim and are then, surprise surprise, less than charmed with things in his native land.] The same is true of tiny, imperfect, amazing, and much maligned Israel. It stands head and shoulders above its Arab and Muslim neighbors in terms of human rights. This is one of the reasons it is so demonized.

To my sorrow, many western academics, feminist activists, [How does that go together with the above statement? Are they not "real" feminists, similar to those peaceful followers of Islam vs. Islamists?] and mainstream journalists actively resist this point of view.They claim that human bomb-terrorism, hate speech, child suicide bombers, honor killings masterminded, funded, and carried out by Muslims, have absolutely nothing to do with Islam blah blah yabber yabber yack yack...

Like those other "Islam critics" who see Islam either as a threat to their homosexual lifestyle, to the preservation of the white race or who disapprove not just of Islam but of any religion, specifically Christianity*, this bumbling smatteress**, whose writing does certainly not take great strength and planning but who rather makes up her shit as she goes along, sees it as something that is less-than-tolerant towards feminism. God help us, if THAT is what will supposedly save us from Islam.

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* Interestingly, whereas the first two reasons to be against Islam never overlap, at least it has escaped me so far, each of the first two individually and the third one almost always DO overlap.

** This word is, obviously, one of my home-made creations. It is derived from "to smatter".

Evil We Don't Dare Calling by Its Name

Yesterday, Tim Kretschmer, a 17-year-old boy, went on a shooting spree at his former school and later in the the small town of Winnenden in south-west Germany. After having found piles of unused ammunition, police also reported that the 17-year-old had intended to kill more than the 15 people he murdered.

As usual, a culprit was needed, because such a heinous crime can not be simply, you know, evil. The German media is full of the fact that the boy's father, a well-to-do businessman, owned (legally) guns, and that he is *gasp* an old-fashioned "patriarch". Do we really have to look any further for a culprit? Take over, Phyllis Chesler!

Of course, the "liberal German gunlaws" (they are anything but liberal) have something to do with it as well. Next we'll have to ban hammers, knives, frying pans, any blunt instruments, chainsaws, power drills, cars, aircrafts and every other thing that might take lives. Who cares that millions of people are not killed by the millions of people who use such things safely, including guns, every day. Who cares that our police is so crippled by politically correct brainwashing, including, but not limited to, the acceptance of women as patrol"men", that they have stopped functioning long ago. How could the murderer go on with his shooting spree after he left the school, killing several more people in the process? Who cares that the three gallant murdered teachers might have had a better chance of defending their pupils had they had guns and not just their bodies.

Some time ago, a case made moderate headlines when a 14-year old girl killed her six-year old sister with their father's hunting weapon. In fact, it was more the anti-hunting appeal of the case than the death of a child that got attention. The father was known as an inordinately conscientious gun owner and through a freak accident the girls had been left alone for a brief while -- with the gun. (I take it that it was a rifle, but use the term "gun" because of its generic quality.) The older girl had stated that her little sister had accidentially killed herself with the gun, which "a ballistic opinion" had proven impossible. (I don't need a "ballistic opinion" to know that a six-year old girl can not kill herself by pointing a long arm at herself, but whatever.) If I remember correctly (the case was discussed in hunting/shooting online fora), both children had been made aware by their father about the potential danger guns implicate, which means a basic tutorial on how they function. Grandfather (who had given the girl an alibi at first) and father (who claimed that HE had loaded the gun and not just left the box with bullets beside it, which is highly unlikely for the conscientious gun owner he reportedly was) have protected her and will presumably go on doing so. Now you tell me that a 14-year-old girl on the verge of adulthood, who has been made specifically aware of the danger guns implicate, kills her little sister by mere carelessness or a "prank gone wrong" and I will say that, had that not happened, we might have seen a bathing accident or something like that sooner or later.

But we can always ban bathing, can't we? Anything not to be reminded that Evil exists.

Even the brightest are suffering from delusions!

I read Alan Dershowitz' much discussed book "The Case for Israel".

Different from Phyllis Chesler's The New Anti-Semitism, on which I commented earlier, The Case for Israel is a good book and well worth reading.

Not that there is anything mind-bogglingly new in it, but even the well-worn pro-Israel arguments presented by such a sharp legal mind leave one reeling.

Dershowitz wrote that book for the Left and he isn't yet prepared to say goodbye forever to the delusion that it just needs some substantial information to make the Left, whom he regards as Israel's better supporters, change their minds.

He is wrong.

He reduces the Right to "the religious right", whom he, not totally without reason (at least so I think), only trusts to see the Jews as potential material for proselytizing.

The strongest point of the book, something that Dershowitz outlines with rare clarity, is the fact that the Palestinians elicit continuous international sympathy in spite of what ever they do or -- for that -- don't do. Absurd as it may be, it is precisely through their use of violence that Palestinians achieve the status of the world's most cherished underdog, and Dershowitz leaves no doubt WHY this is so.

Dershowitz ends the book by justifiedly concluding that the case for Israel is strong indeed. It's impossible to disagree with him -- he meticulously and conscientiously de-bunks virtually each and every one of those manifold hackneyed accusations that are made against Israel again and again on a daily basis.

Dershowitz wrote the book for the Left -- "his" Left. It obviously breaks his heart to see people, with whom he went a long way together and still otherwise agrees about a lot of serious issues, signing, kind of automatically -- and drooling like Pavlovian dogs -- anti-Israel petitions without, so it seems, ever having read them. But he is shunning (yet) the only feasible option. If he is really seeking support for Israel he will have to make a turn to the Right.

Sad, but sadly a fact.

(Big nod to Duni who gave me the book!)

Phyllis Chesler's Old Woman Bile Valiant Anti-Jihadism

New post at TMDSC!

Defining Down the Dangerous

My friend Gudrun Eussner has discovered Lawrence Auster's VFR and made me aware of this entry on Dutch novelist and writer Leon de Winter, whose oeuvre is well known to both of us:

My brain is running out of the neurotransmitters that transmit amazement. The Wall Street Journal has an article this week that calls on the Netherlands to cancel the trial of Geert Wilders--but not because it is wrong to put a man on trial for stating opinions; and not because it is totalitarian to send a man to prison for criticizing Islam. In fact, the author, Leon de Winter, does not actually find fault with the Netherlands' "hate-speech" laws under which Wilders is being tried, and his strongest criticism of the effort by Dutch prosecutors to put Wilders in prison for his opinions that it is "preposterous." He does not call it tyrannical Why, then, does de Winter want the trial to be stopped? Because the trial will expose the violent, hate-filled teachings of Islam, and that must be prevented at all costs. As he writes: "On trial is not so much Geert Wilders, but the Holy Book of Islam."

There's a secondary harm de Winter sees resulting from the trial: Wilders might be convicted. But, as de Winter makes clear, the reason he wants to prevent that outcome is not that Wilders would be fined or go to jail and that the people of the West would be scared into silence on the subject of the encroaching power of Islam. No, de Winter want to prevent the conviction of Wilders because it will make Wilders more popular and help advance his cause.

From de Winter's reasoning it is clear that if Geert Wilders had not declared at the opening of the trial on January 20 his intention to make the truth of his statements about Islam the basis of his defense, de Winter would not have called for the cancellation of the trial. He is doing so, not in order to protect Wilders and other besieged Islam critics from tyrannical leftist governments, but in order to protect Islam from the truth.

One last point. From a quick look around the Web, it appears that conservative websites think that de Winter's column is pro-Wilders, mainly because of its title, "Stop the Trial of Geert Wilders." They don't seem to realize that the column is anti-Wilders, and pro-Islam.

While de Winter's bigotry is indeed stunning, it's not all that unusual not to read past the headline and there seems to be such a dearth of followers for conservatives, that they seem to jump on any impossible partner, like a fortyish spinster desperate for a husband, or start drooling like Pavlovian dogs, only it's not the dinner bell but some random key words that match with their "conservative detection" nodes inside what is left of their grey matter. But there is more to this article, and about that later.

Again by Gudrun, I was made aware of this entry by de Winter at Pajamas Media: Obama Is Now Showing His True Colors as a Radical. No doubt that will push the salivary glands of the partner-starved conservative spinsters into overdrive. (Pardon the mixed methaphors!)

As a community organizer, Barack Obama was heavily influenced by the theories of Saul Alinsky, who was a non-partisan neo-Marxist focused on the non-violent transformation of civil society. In Germany, a similar model was called der Marsch durch die Institutionen — “the long journey through the institutions.”

This conventional Obama-critique, something I have read countless times before, and better argued, for that, is not particularly noteworthy. However, what IS, is de Winter's translation of the German word "Marsch" as "long journey". How a child of Holocaust survivors and neighbour to the German people can NOT know what the German word "Marsch" means AND IMPLIES, is beyond me. Besides, "Marsch durch die Institutionen" is an idiomatic term within political science with a defined meaning.

What about this, Mr. de Winter?

"After the violent suppression of the Jewish revolt, the Germans took a long journey into the Warsaw Ghetto."

Or this?

On September 1st, 1939, the German Wehrmacht embarked upon a long journey through Poland."

It doesn't seem to be totally off to say now that he probably doesn't know any German. Granted! But even if he doesn't know a smidgeon of that language, which I doubt (Dutch people are fond of pretending to, but usually they DO know, and even more than just a smidgeon), what about that:

English: "Right about face!"
German: "Rechtsum kehrt, marsch!"
Dutch: "Rechtsom keert, mars!"

So there! He uses a euphemism to exculpate the left, a left who purposefully chose that very military term, from any militant deportment. And in the same spirit he uses in the WSJ article Lawrence Auster quotes for the Koran the definition -- Listen well! -- "the Holy Book of Islam", as normally only a Muslim would and lo and behold, it is, like German radical leftism, not dangerous anymore. And all that by means of a linguistic little trick.

What makes somebody tick who sounds more like a disciple than a critic of Communist/Marxist fellow-traveller Saul Alinsky?

In the Alinsky model, "organizing" is a euphemism for "revolution" -- a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America's social and economic structure.

So there again! And for that child of Holocaust survivors the German militant (and antisemitic) left didn't proclaim to "march" through the institutions in 1968 but to make "a long journey" through it, and for that Jew, whose iconic country of Israel is under threat by X million hateful Muslims, the Koran is "the Holy Book of Islam". Intellectual sluttery and moral cowardice won't take you very far, Mr. de Winter. Not that Pajamas Media will stop publishing you. After all, even Phyllis Chesler doesn't give them the creeps. Your (rather interesting) novels will go on selling well. But the Germans (in spite of enjoying your books), the left and the Muslims will go on hating you and your brethren, however much you will suck up to politically correct prescribed terminology and thinking.