Israeli author Naomi Ragen discusses some prevailing dhimmi fantasies in this new column:
I read Mr. Amos Oz's recent article: A Bloodless Victory Over Fanaticism with great interest. I too, am an Israeli author. And, according to the majority of our Palestinian neighbors who view both Jerusalem and Arad (my home and Mr. Oz's home respectively) as occupied territory, I guess we are both settlers.Mr. Oz, in his description of "settlers'" dream for the future of Israel, has created a totally fictional Jewish opponent, the same way he has created totally fictional Palestinian peace partner, willing to live together with him peacefully in the secular democratic state of his dreams. Yes, I consider myself an Orthodox Jew. But I too view a state run by Rabbis as a nightmare. In the State of Israel I have lived in for the past 35 years -- and which as far as I know all Jewish settlers live in -- Palestinians are doctors, engineers, builders, gardners, delivery men, electricians, plumbers, actors, musicians and handymen, not the hewers of wood and water-carriers he accuses us of wanting. Yes, I believe that one day the Messiah will come and redeem this world, but last I checked that wasn't a crime, or else we'd need billions of places in jails for Christians too. I also believe that religion is a private matter, and that however I choose to live my life, I can have no control over how people like Mr. Oz lives their's. This is true even when my Sabbath tranquility is blasted away by my neighbor's high volume music, and malls that insist on keeping people working seven days a week.
In Mr. Oz's fantasy of the fanatic, hate-filled ultra-religious settler, there is no place for people like me, who constitute the majority of the people of Israel, including the peaceful settlers of Gaza who, without any reasonable expectation of better security, better lives, or benefit to their country, had their lives and livelihoods destroyed to fulfill Mr. Oz's fantasies.I too, Mr. Oz, want to live in peace and freedom, not under the rules of the Rabbis (read my books and you'll see how long and hard I've struggled against them).
You want to be free from the "lasting occupation of Palestinian
territories?" Then I suggest you move back to Europe, or to America, or South America, because I have yet to hear any Muslim leader suggest that you are not, by your very existence on Middle Eastern soil, occupying land that does not belong to you.The settlers "pushed forward their vision and trampled over our dreams."
And what then, was Oslo? Was it not your dream, Mr. Oz, the idea of land for peace? Were treaties not signed? And would it have been possible if settlers were truly, as you say, "lords of the country?" And did not the realization of that dream result in national tragedy on a scale never before experienced by Israeli civilians or civilians anywhere? Over twenty thousand terrorist attacks, thousands upon thousands injured, over a thousand murdered in one of the biggest orgies of terrorist bloodshed in human history? You believe that the struggle against Orthodox Jews in Gaza was a struggle between Church and State. What, then, is the struggle between Israel and it's neighbors if not a struggle between Mosque and State? All over the world, Muslims kill, maim and threaten mankind in the name of their religion. If you think clerics have no place running a state, then what have you accomplished by throwing out the Jews of Gaza only to replace them with the fanatic Imams of Hamas?
As always, you try to portray yourself as rational and pragmatic, and your fellow Israeli opponents as fanatics. But what is rational about ceding land to the Palestinian Authority while it is still overwhelmed by terrorist groups over which it has yet to demonstate control? What is pragmatic about turning thousands of productive citizens into homeless, jobless drains on Israel's just recovening economy? What is "rational and pragmatic" about planning the next stage of withdrawals and the next round of destruction before there is any indication whatsoever that this round has not been a total disaster that will, as many fear, fuel terrorism? You plan this even
as you yourself ask the unanswered questions: "Will they (the Palestinians) reciprocate by taking bold steps against their own fanatics?" If you can't figure out the answer to that question after signing a peace treaty that was followed by four years of absolute hell on earth for all Israelis, then might I suggest that your fantasy of Israeli settlers, is only matched by your fantasies about your enemy and the world you live in? People like yourself, who live in a fantasy world, should not be involved in politics.
Amoz Oz is a suicidal, delusional, self-hating liberal, leftist looney. His books are garbage.
"People like yourself, who live in a fantasy world, should not be involved in politics."
-- from the posting above
There are others, closer to home, involved in the making of policy, who have been positively hallucinating for quite some time. Having failed to learn about Islam, possibly for fear of what they might find out, and preferring to believe the best, and then to hope for the best, without too much checking of those dusty old tomes on the theory and practice of Islam, they have proceeded to make policy in Iraq without knowing two things: the nature of Islam, and the history of modern Iraq. In essence, they failed to learn about the two things they needed most to know.
On the other hand, ask them about how wonderful "democracy" (carefully undefined) is, and how "all people love freedom" (what nonsense) and how "democracy is on the march" in the Middle East (more nonsense), and how this "democracy and freedom which everyone so desires and which is now on the march will of course be the most effective weapon in that famous war on terrorism" about which, if you can still stand Our Leader's style, the sun of this Administration's idiocy has set.
Prizes, by the way, for the first person to identify both the allusion, and the policy illusion, in the previous paragraph. Hugs and kisses if the prizewinner is a girl, and a manly, no premature-withdrawal-from-Iraq handshake and a hearty "well done" if that prizewinner is a boy.
Ah, no prizes for this guy.
But wait! "...the sun of this Administration's idiocy has set."
A line like that, not likely today even reading Hansard months on end, a line worthy of a Disraeli, the Pitts, of Fitzgerald...I won after all.
Hugh, please write more often. What a pleasure.
As far as Amos Oz goes, he has always been a political simpleton. And so have almost all of Israel's native-born writers of the current generation. Grossman, Yehoshua, all of these people must as novelists deal in nuance. As novelists, if they are to avoid looking ridiculous, they cannot possibly depict their Israelis as brave and admirable and their Arab characters as meretricious, primitive, and malevolent. Yet, in the world of politics, which deals with larger numbers of people, and must, it is largely true that the Israelis are brave and admirable, and the Arabs meretricious and murderous. But politically, where numbers do count, these summaries are close to the truth.
In their zeal to present something other than what they consider papier-mache characters, in their embarrassment at concelebrating the fact of Israel's restoration and rebirth as a Jewish commonwealth, and the renewal of Hebrew as a living language, adequate to all the tasks of the modern world, and in the refuge given to so many refugees and survivors, from the camps of Europe, and from the mellahs and ghettos of the Middle East and North Africa, in the making bloom the desert (not a myth, not propaganda -- "The Promise of Palestine" written sixty years ago by Walter Clay Lowdermilk, the American agronomist from Liberty, North Carolina)-- in all of this, they find something vaguely unsettling, something they cannot bear to celebrate or call attention to. No doubt they find that kind of patriotism disturbing. But why? The most sophisticated people in all of Europe -- Panofsky and Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, Balanachine and Stravinsky and Nabokov -- once they had found refuge here, had to trouble being patriotically attached to this country, and were unembarrassed had no trouble singing the praises, patriotically, of the United States. But there is something in the air of Israel that makes some -- not all -- but some of its so-called "intellectuals" (a term that gets one's back up), that makes them think they know all about Israel, and who is at fault, and what should be done.
But they do not. They do not know a thing about Islam. They have not read Bat Ye'or. They are indifferwent to the testimony of the Sephardic Jews. They have not read Ibn Warraq. They do know that there are nice Arabs, some of whom they call "Palestinians" and some of whom they call "Israeli Arabs," without quite knowing what difference there is between them. They do not know anything about land-ownership in Ottoman times (that 90% of the land, at least, was always owned by the government). They know nothing of the demographics of that area, of how Muslims moved in with Abd el-Kader, with Mehmet Ali, with whole villages moved by the Ottomans from formerly Muslim-controlled parts of Europe. They do not know that Arab in-migration exceeded that of the Jews in the period of the Mandate. They know nothing. But they strike attitudes. They experience the anguish of the underdog -- and that underdog, to them, is the Arabs, all 300-400 million of them, with the greatest unearned wealth in human history, and behind those 300-400 million Arabs another 700-800 million non-Arab Muslims. But still, in the view of Amos Oz, the kind of man who loves whipping off that banality, "Letters to a Palestinian Friend" (oh, this was quite a fashionable thing, especially in France, two decades ago). They are, in their cloistered way, far less sophisticated than those in Israeli society they show so little sympathy for and even, at times, mock.
It is instructive to compare Amos Oz's understanding of history with others, such as his uncle, Joseph Klausner (who wrote on the historical Jesus). Oz should not be expected to produce works of history, but he should be required to understand something of what he needs to know if he thinks his views on the war against Israel should be taken seriously. He should be asked what he knows of Islam, of JIhad and the subjugation and treatment of non-Muslims under Islam. Anything? Nothing? He should be asked what he has read of the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and whether he thinks he has a good grasp of Muslim psychology, or whether that amiable Arab car mechanic, or greengrocer, is the source for his views on what Arabs want, what they think, what they desire. Whereof we do not know, thereof we should not speak. Oz is a novelist, who takes Israel as his setting and Israelis as his characters. But this does not entitle him, without more, to make pronouncements about matters of life and death.
No sensible person would look to Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal or Toni Morrison for political or geopolitical guidance. Oz is a little too easrnest, too good, too sweet, for the reality of Islam. He could never quite comprehend such a thing. In his naivete, his obstinate innocence, and his wilful ignorance, he has become a menace, like other celebrities in Israel, to the physical security of his fellow Israelis. Some of them cannot write as well. Some of them are less well-travelled, and cannot engage in debates in Paris or New York, or obtain the kind of audience Grossman or Oz or Yehoshua can. But they too deserve to live, and in safety -- a safety undercut by those who presume that, as writers, or still worse as "intellectuals," they are exempt from the necessity of certain kinds of study in order to make certain kinds of statements. They are not.
Is his last name really Oz?....Or is that just where he lives??
Hugh,
Thank you for great comments.
Oz is playing to a specific audience whose politically correct(Taqyia?) hypocrisy is well known in the States. What is surprising is that, unlike his American counterparts, Oz has witnessed first hand, over many years, the 'manner of the Caliphate'
and yet appears not to have noticed anything.
He is 'dreaming' because that is what he wants to believe for to accept the reality would mean 'post traumatic stress disorder' for him, and his ilk.
Your first comment;
" ... , if you can still stand Our Leader's style, the sun of this Administration's idiocy has set."
They sent a Russian who knows what freedom means to try to explain democracy to an expert in Russian culture and apparently (witness the current situation in the region ) that was an exercise in futility.
Hugh,
Thank you for great comments.
Oz is playing to a specific audience whose politically correct(Taqyia?) hypocrisy is well known in the States. What is surprising is that, unlike his American counterparts, Oz has witnessed first hand, over many years, the 'manner of the Caliphate'
and yet appears not to have noticed anything.
He is 'dreaming' because that is what he wants to believe for to accept the reality would mean 'post traumatic stress disorder' for him, and his ilk.
Your first comment;
" ... , if you can still stand Our Leader's style, the sun of this Administration's idiocy has set."
They sent a Russian who knows what freedom means to try to explain democracy to an expert in Russian culture and apparently (witness the current situation in the region ) that was an exercise in futility.
Hugh,
Thank you for great comments.
Oz is playing to a specific audience whose politically correct(Taqyia?) hypocrisy is well known in the States. What is surprising is that, unlike his American counterparts, Oz has witnessed first hand, over many years, the 'manner of the Caliphate'
and yet appears not to have noticed anything.
He is 'dreaming' because that is what he wants to believe for to accept the reality would mean 'post traumatic stress disorder' for him, and his ilk.
Your first comment:
" ... , if you can still stand Our Leader's style, the sun of this Administration's idiocy has set."
They sent a Russian who knows what freedom means to try to explain democracy to an expert in Russian culture and apparently (witness the current situation in the region ) that was an exercise in futility.
Hugh,
Thank you for great comments.
Oz is playing to a specific audience whose politically correct(Taqyia?) hypocrisy is well known in the States. What is surprising is that, unlike his American counterparts, Oz has witnessed first hand, over many years, the 'manner of the Caliphate'
and yet appears not to have noticed anything.
He is 'dreaming' because that is what he wants to believe for to accept the reality would mean 'post traumatic stress disorder' for him, and his ilk.
Your first comment:
" ... , if you can still stand Our Leader's style, the sun of this Administration's idiocy has set."
They sent a Russian who knows what freedom means to try to explain democracy to an expert in Russian culture and apparently (witness the current situation in the region ) that was an exercise in futility.
Sorry about that multiple comment.
I kept getting:
"Comment Submission Error
Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:
In an effort to curb malicious comment posting by abusive users, I've enabled a feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again. Please try to post your comment again in a short while. Thanks for your patience."
Three times I received this notification and three times I tried "again in a short while" :-(
I think we need to do some serious recalculations when it comes to deciding how many individual people are in the camp of the islamofascit jihadis. Besides counting the number of active, sleeper, and in-training units of violent jihad, those individual units who either actively or passively support and enable the front line, the apologist and "PR" branches, and the exhorters and theoreticians, we also need to count as "against" us all the dhimmis and the misguided, whatever level of government they may inhabit, of the world and particularly of the West, who by their ignorance make our job more difficult at least, and pose a real danger at worst.
Don't roll your eyes and say "Well, DUH!", I 'm going somewhere with this.
Here's my point. Traditionally dhimmihood is 2nd-class citizenship with few rights. But Western dhimmis are a different breed, enabled by location with rights a traditional dhimmi could only dream of. What you have then are "empowered Dhimmi", people of the subordinate-to-islam mindset who are actually free from oppression and so have at their disposal a broad array of rights and tools, such as free-speech, right of assembly, right to practice fascist politics cloaked in religions mantle, etc.
Therefore, rather than ekeing out a substandard existence, subject to the whims of their overlords, they are free to participate in a vibrant democracy and may promote their ideas free from worry of retaliation.
Proactive dhimmihood versus reactive. That makes them part of the force active against us, not just an innocent obstacle complicating the battlefield.
Should they be treated the same as those who commit violence in islams name? Probably not, but they cannot be discounted when figuring the logistics of this war. Also, I think it should be taken into account that a portion of this group end up converting and move up the foodchain to a more dangerous role.
Oz suffers from at least one or two familiar Jewish complexes -- one to show that somehow you are a superior human being to your opposites by showing yourself to be the fairest of fair-minded to the point of stupidity, and on a larger scale, to hold Jews to a standard against which he would never hold any non-Jews. That, of course, along with the delusion that there ever was a real partner for peace.
"They sent a Russian who knows what freedom means to try to explain democracy to an expert in Russian culture and apparently (witness the current situation in the region ) that was an exercise in futility."
-- from a posting above
Sharansky knew about Western man. He thought -- he made the mistake of thinking -- that all men think alike, that everyone "desires freedom." Not true, not even alas of Western man. He came up with this glib phrase about how no democracy has ever made war on another democracy. Well, Hitler did win a plurality in 1933; it was not a coup that brought him to power. But this idea does not have enough evidence to sustain it: modern democracies are products only of the modern world. Until late in the 19th century there was only one full-fledged democracy -- the United States. Those that have come since have been almost entirely, until the last few decades, almost entirely within the advanced Western world. Do you really think that if the dictator of Pakistan were to yield to a democratically-elected leader, Pakistan would be less inclined to conduct the JIhad against India, or that an Indian-Pakistani war "between two democracies" is an impossibility? This idea of "democracies don't make war on each other" is almost as silly -- not quite, but almost -- as Tom Friedman's "no country possessing a McDonald's will go to war against another country possessing a McDonald's." This is the kind of cheap things that those audiences of businessmen pay Friedman $45,000 a speech to deliver -- easy on the mind, stupid, meaningless, but fun. They don't want anything that might really causee them to think; they simply want to pretend they have gone to a convention and had a "thoughtful" speaker like Friedman. It would be far better, cheaper, and more honest, to hire a bevy of strippers from Las Vegas, or a prestidigitator, or a pair of funambulists.
If Sharansky did not realize, and may not yet realize, what Islam is all about -- but he's not stupid, and he can learn -- the same may not be said for those in Washington who took his thesis, and ran with it. And so it came to be that Democracy Was on the March, Is On the March, Because (you see) Events Have Been Set in Motion in the Middle East That Are Now Unstoppable, and the Desire For Freedom Is Breaking Out All Over.
No, it isn't. The Shi'a want to dominate Iraq, ro leave it. The Sunni want to dominate Iraq, or destroy it. The Kurds want only autonomy at a minimum, and at best independence. Out of the tens of millions of Egyptians, possibly a few thousand want real democracy or have any idea what it means. In Saudi Arabia, hatred of the Al-Saud thieves does not mean support for "democradcy." In Syria, "democracy" would mean the end of Alawite dictatorship, and a dictatorship of the real Muslims, who would come down hard on the Christians as well as the Alawties. Democracy Is Not On the Goddam March. And if it were, it would mean nothing for the war of self-defense against the world-wide Jihad. The whole business amounts to that famous snare. That famous delusion.
Hugh, you've offered excellent analysis of Sharanski's faulty logic. I was waiting for find such commentary. Sharanski is basing his entire philosophy regarding conflict resolution between different peoples on his subjective prison experience, where he came in touch with prisoners of various backgrounds, including Islam, and they all lived happily together, sharing their hopes and fears, blah blah, etc.
I'll try to communicate to him the gist of your analysis, and I hope he gets it. The guy is brilliant, he should probably spend less time playing chess and trying to win others to his way of thinking, and a bit more time studying history, and very importantly, the Qur'an and Hadith.
If you do communicate with him, tell him to read Bat Ye'or before he compiles a revised vresion of the Zashchita Sharanskogo (the Sharansky Defense).