As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.
This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.
The Educated Terrorist
What more is there to say?
Here’s something. Tarek Heggy is a prominent Egyptian intellectual and dissident. Nonie Darwish, my friend and also an amazing truth-teller, has just introduced us. Recently, according to Heggy, he had lunch with a former Crown Prince of Jordan and a dozen other Egyptians, “none of us without a Ph.D from a world class university.” Nevertheless, Heggy, a businessman, a leading liberal political thinker, and the author of fourteen books, was the only one who believed that 9/11 had indeed been perpetrated by Al Qaeda against America. All the others still believed that America either attacked herself or, like so much else (blizzards, earthquakes, poisoned well-water), that the Zionists did it.
I first wrote about this dispiriting, unyielding phenomenon in 2002 and I published it in 2003 in “The New Anti-Semitism.” Since then, nothing has changed. Actually, everything has changed–but for the worse.
Education–especially advanced education–in both the West and in the Islamic East does not seem to challenge or triumph over vulgar prejudice and really Big Lies.
Nobel Laureates (Saramago for one) believe that Israel is essentially evil and the cause of world suffering–but so does the Ford Foundation which continues, post-Durban, to fund those who continue to engage in such rank racism including John Mearsheimer and Joan Wallach Scott, both of whom will share their anti-Israel views at Columbia. Of course, their panel is being touted in grand Orwellian style as a shining example of free speech and academic freedoms which are otherwise under siege but, with the help of Ford and Columbia, will be briefly freed.
They share Osama bin Laden’s views which he recently shared with the world on videotape, live from No-Man’s land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most of what he said consisted of Big Lies–but they are distressingly indistinguishable from what is taught on most western campuses today.
Only the West has engaged in Holocausts he says. Agonizingly true but also not exactly true. Let me remind Osama that Mohammed himself ordered the genocidal extermination of the Jewish tribes of northern Arabia and thus set the pattern for such subsequent pogroms of both Jews and Christians and of other dhimmi populations.
Ethnic Arab Muslims are genocidally slaughtering black African Muslims in Darfur; they are also enslaving them. The only humanitarian aid to reach these poor people comes from Jews and Christians and from America. Arab and Muslim nations and leaders are not settling this matter and are not sending food or medical supplies to their “brothers.”
My point here: Osama is educated and wealthy. So were the maniacs who flew planes into American buildings on 9/11. So are my colleague, Tarek Heggy’s Egyptian intellectuals. So are all their American counterparts who firmly believe that the tragedy on 9/11 was either caused by America and/or Israel or that America deserved it because, like Israel, we are essentially, existentially, evil.
Leading European and American intellectuals believe that America is a terrorist nation-state and that Osama is a freedom fighter.
These are very dangerous delusions which have only begun to gather steam.
May a miracle avert all the coming disasters.
September 10, 2007
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4 Comments
George Jochnowitz:We do indeed need a miracle. The hatred atainst Israel that we find among gays, feminists, and human rights activists is so powerful and so illogical that it too is a miracle—a negative miracle, if one can talk about such a thing.
Apr 25, 2008 - 4:11 pm Bill Warner:Osama is educated and wealthy. So were the maniacs who flew planes into American buildings on 9/11, and all their American counterparts who firmly believe that the tragedy on 9/11 was caused by America ?
After all of this time, with all the truths about who was behind 9/11 and the upcoming trial of KSM, the pendulium in the USA is ever more swinging towards “the inside job theory”, we did it to ourselves ?
I just don’t know what to say to people I run across who believe such nonsence, and there are more of them everyday, it is almost like the liberal left (and Media) has been able to brainwash thousnands and thousands of citizens that what they witnessed on TV on 9/11/01 didn’t really happen that way.
No major network or news channel is willing to replay the events that happened on 9/11 in prime time (can’t watch people jumping out of WTC), it is almost like they are ashamed, and do not want to offend Muslims or put any negative spin on the 19 Arab males that tried to destroy us.
bill Warner
Apr 25, 2008 - 9:40 pm Mike:Some interesting quotes:
“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property … must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a power among men. ”
“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities… but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
Winston Churchill, 1899 “The River War”
Apr 26, 2008 - 1:49 am Lorna Salzman:I urge you to read the powerful statements of Phyllis Chesler on misogyny, rape, anti-semitism and the abdication of moral and social justice by today’s so-called feminists and liberals.
Their refusal to acknowledge, much less confront, the demonstrable evils that have destroyed the lives and futures of women all over the world - from Bosnia to Pakistan to Saudi Arabia to Sudan to Turkey, to the religious Mormon brothels in the western US; and most recently in western Europe where islamic patriarchy and misogyny have been allowed to take hold in the UK and Netherlands - is a blot on this country and on all of those who preach human rights and then avert their gaze.
These issues are not issues of Left or Right but of humanity and its struggle to preserve civilization from the forces of evil. Tragically, these forces have their “useful idiots”: middle class women who shun victims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali; the male gender in virtually its entirety as it seeks to preserve its privileges; the post-modern deconstructionists who deny truth and believe evil is a relative and culturally dependent term; religious leaders pleading for peace but refusing to identify those who commit violence; and, not least, those in this country who every two years elect white collar male liars, louts and lechers to congress and then lash out at Hillary Clinton for (purportedly) being no better.
The double standard by which Clinton is judged - or Israel - or Islam - or all women - is rampant and detestable. But it is undeniable, and those who do not speak out as Chesler does bear responsibility for the continued lies and atrocities committed in the name of religion and male dominance
On a final note: the tremulous hesitancy of the world, and the UN, before the Myanmar government that is allowing its people to die, was prefaced by its refusal to confront Sudan, Rwanda, the Congo; the decision, finally and belatedly, to bomb Serbia and acknowledge its atrocities, is still decried by leftists in this country, led by the tribal chiefs of hypocrisy, Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky (the latter well known for his apologia for the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, the former for his unflinching defense of Milosevich).
May 15, 2008 - 7:22 am