Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the Lesser Jihad and the Greater Jihad, by which he means not the distinction between warfare and the struggle within the soul, but the struggle against Israel and that against the rest of the world.
It by now should be clear that the war against Israel is a Lesser Jihad, and always has been. It was such before the Infidels, in this case Jews, dared to buy land and dared to dream of possessing a small sliver of land in which they would not have to live as they and Christians, and all other non-Muslims had had to live: as dhimmis under Shari'a law or some version of it. This was true whether the overlords were Arabs or, as for the past four centuries, the Turks."Should be clear." But the Israelis themselves have done everything they can to hide that painful recognition. They would prefer to believe that Islam, and especially the most virulent form of Islam, that possessed by the Arabs who have no other identity to conceivably draw upon, contains no elements that are not benign, and that their struggle is against nationalist Arabs. Yet those same Arabs’ sense of Islam is interwoven with "Uruba" or "arabness." This makes even many Christian Arabs (though not the Arabic-speaking, but non-Arab Maronites and Copts) accept, parrot, and promote the Islamic agenda, including the Lesser Jihad against Infidel Israel that, were it to be successful, might actually improve the prospects for a continued Christian presence in the Middle East.
Israelis do not wish to contemplate the notion that the relentless war against them has no solution. Yet the Cold War also seemed to have no solution, and in the end, Soviet Communism crumbled because the West held firm, and a sufficient number of people realized that Communism had failed to deliver on its own terms. Whether that will ever happen to the Islamic jihad is unclear, but it is not impossible for its role and its power, and therefore its menace, to be sufficiently reduced -- say, to what it was in 1930, long before the oil money arrived, or those millions of Muslims were permitted to settle behind enemy lines, in Western Europe.During the Cold War, the American government, and with it the rest of NATO, paid little attention to Islam. The Muslims were without OPEC oil money. There were only a handful of Muslim migrants within Europe; in Holland, for example, even by 1970 there were no more then 50,000 (now there are a million). Why worry about Islam? Islam was then thought of mainly as a useful "bulwark against Communism" -- which meant that left-leaning Nasser could not have been a real Muslim (but he was), and anti-Communist Saudi Arabia was to be supported to the hilt (which it was). This brought about the silly CENTO military alliance of Great Britain (the initiator), the United States, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. CENTO collapsed when the old regime in Iraq was overturned in 1958; it had never amounted to anything except as a way for Muslim armies to begin to extract military equipment and knowhow from the Western powers. Then the Americans favored those Pakistani generals, and of course Turkey, where Kemalism, it was believed, was solidly entrenched and was making Turkey ever more modern, more secular.
The Israelis committed the same error -- or a variant on that error. They tried to woo, naturally, the one non-Arab country in the region -- Iran under the Shah. From sentimental invocation of the pre-Islamic alliance between Persians and Jews to the appeal to the Shah's advanced, westernized, and largely secular court, which would want to distinguish the advanced civilization of the "Persians" from that of the "Arabs," it seemed to work on both sides. But the Shah was temporary; Islam was permanent. And the same happened to that very brief alliance of Turkey and Israel -- which the government of Erdogan has so discouraged, except in those moments when Erdogan shows up in Washington to be introduced at a think-tank, by Richard Perle. Then the anti-Israel viciousness is muted for the audience.
The Lesser Jihad against Israel was the one that has attracted the most attention. Who, outside of India, paid any attention to the steady persecution of Hindus in West Pakistan or East Pakistan, or after 1971, in the renamed Bangladesh or what was now called Pakistan? Who paid attention to what Col. Ojukwu forthrightly called a "jihad" against the Christians in Nigeria during the Biafra War? Who saw the Muslim dimension to the war against the Christians in East Timor? In the Southern Sudan? In the southern Philippines? In the statements by Izetbegovic about reinstituting a Muslim state, and the full Shari'a -- statements which terrified the Serbs but which no one else paid any attention to?
Since the early 1970s, several things permitted the Muslims, and especially the Muslim Arabs who run Islam (for they brought it to the world, and the Qur'an was in "their language" and they "are the best of people" and all Muslims, everywhere, must look to seventh-century Arabia, or failing that, to the Arabs today, for spiritual/political/intellectual guidance) to become more aggressive.
These were:
1. OPEC, and the manipulation of the market that permitted the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973. This has led in the past one-third century to the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, that from the oil-consuming to the oil-producing nations. The Muslim oil states have taken in approximately $10 trillion. They have failed to create modern economies or societies. They exist on the basis of wage-slaves from outside. But they have bought arms and more arms, of every kind; they are by far the largest buyers of armaments from foreign suppliers in the world, with hundreds of billions spent. They have paid for mosques all over the world, and especially in the capitals of the Western world. They have paid for madrasas. They have paid for Da'wa -- Muslim missionaries. They have paid for every sort of propaganda, beginning with those special inserts in The New Duranty Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, and so on. They have established, or bought up, or contributed to, academic centers carefully chosen -- usually in capitals (as at Georgetown, which has both a Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and a Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding -- both of which are exactly what you suspect they are). They have paid for hirelings all over the Western world to run their propaganda. These hirelings are often chosen from among the former diplomats and former intelligence agents who were posted in the Arab countries. Many of them, even before they retire from their official duties, are made keenly aware of the sums they can make if they play their cards right, starting in their present job. The incredible failure of successive American governments to realize that gasoline had to be taxed, that oil consumption had to be forcefully, and forcibly, diminished, is a tribute to the Saudis and to such people as James Baker (whose Baker Center, just like the Presidential libraries of Bush Senior and Clinton and Carter, has received major donations from -- do I really have to tell you, or can you guess?).
2) The admission of millions of Muslims into the countries of Western Europe. Cupidity and stupidity -- the Esdrujula Explanation -- help to explain this. Few in the governments of West Germany, France, and England, as they admitted Turks (as gastarbeiter who didn't leave), realized the implications of what they were doing. They admitted them as single male workers, who then were permitted to bring in their "wives" and children, for it was believed that this would diminish the evidence of what was wrongly perceived as sociopathic criminality, when it was merely Muslims treating Infidel women, property, laws, and customs with the contempt all things Infidel deserve. In England, it was Pakistanis, who kept being referred to as "Asians" as if the problems in Bradford or Manchester or anywhere else had to do with geography. Yet the Hindus were, and remain, loyal and inoffensive, and lumping them in with the Muslim immigrants is deliberately meretricious.
3) The ability of Muslims to exploit Western technology -- audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite television stations, the Internet -- for the purposes of disseminating the doctrines of Islam. Examples include the role of audiocassettes of Khomeini's speeches that flooded Iran before the Revolution; the decapitation videos; and I.E.D. bombings in Iraq. All serve as recruitment tools for proud mujahedin showing examples of their handiwork.
All these developments have enabled Muslims to go from the Lesser Jihad that focused on Israel (and which continues, of course, unabated, though now there are two schools: the Abbas school of Slow Jihad, and the Hamas school of Fast Jihad), to the much wider Jihad. The latter is wide enough to take in the entire world. This should by now be apparent, if not to everyone, at least to those who should, in Washington and London, in Paris and Rome, in Madrid and Amsterdam and Oslo, have been studying the tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam nonstop over the past four years. They should have studied as well the history of Islamic conquest of non-Muslims, and the subjugation of the latter as dhimmis, a status clearly of permanent degradation, humiliation, and physical insecurity.
That is where we are today. But many Israelis, and those whose belief that their hearts are in the right place, because they "support Israel" (what does that mean?), believe that they are exempt from the duty of finding out exactly what it is that menaces Israel. Understanding what really menaces Israel would involve learning enough about Islam to realize that further surrenders of the legal, moral, and historic rights that the Israelis have been so consistently been so willing to surrender (and certainly for the past 30 years have been unable, or unwilling, to articulate forcefully), will merely whet, not sate, the appetites for Jihad. For the very idea of an Infidel sovereign state on land once possessed by Muslims is intolerable -- especially one ruled by the contemptible, and supposedly weak, Jews. Borders mean nothing. The size of Israel means nothing. The "state" of a recently-invented "Palestinian" people (invented for the purposes of disguising the Jihadist impulse -- and done most successfully, because the world was eager to believe that this was merely a case of "two tiny peoples, each...etc.") means nothing.
Yet in the face of the Lesser Jihad and the Greater Jihad, and all we get from Washington is talk about that "war on terror." Look at the population figures for Rotterdam, for Malmo, for France itself. Look at the demands made for changes in local customs and laws. Look at the demands at the international level, at the U.N., to force Infidels to accept Muslim ideas of what free speech should be. Look at the mosques opening. Look at the Da'wa being conducted among the most vulnerable populations in the Western world. Look at the fear of "reverts" who, one suspects from what they have written, might now wish to leave Islam, but are frightened to do so. At least one such revert appeared, from his postings at JW, to have such doubts. He no longer appears, apparently infuriated by the mockery which greeted his attempts to inform all of us of his Spiritual Search and Dilemma and so on, which not all of us found quite as fascinating as he did.
Look at all that, and tell me what you want to do when you hear someone blithely say "we have to win this war on terror" or "we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we won't have to fight them here."
Tell me what decibel level is reached by your scream of frustration and fury.
If Jihad means "struggle of the soul for Islam" using any means necessary, there should be no distinction between "lesser" and "greater," for the promotion of the goals and objectives of Islam is the objective of Jihad, whether "lesser" or "greater." Jihad is Jihad, throughout time against all that is not Islamic and all that are not Muslim and is eternal. There is and can be no solution to the problem that we in the West are experiencing except separation.
The words "Lesser Jihad" and "Greater Jihad" do, of course, have a use that I was deliberately ignoring, and instead taking those phrases and putting them to better, and more accurate, use.
Among Muslim apologists, along with 2.256 ("There is no compulsion in religion") and a half-dozen other phrases (out of the many thousands in the Qur'an), a favorite item for use with Infidels is that business of Muhammad returning from some war to his busy domestic bliss, and reportedly saying that he had returned from the "Lesser Jihad" of warring against Infidels to the "Greater Jihad" that a man wages within his own soul. This is a minor, and inauthentic Hadith -- but much beloved of the karen-armstrongs of this world.
I thought I should simply appropriate those terms, since they are presented by Muslim apologists in such a misleading fashion, and simply point out that the local Jihad that originally received the Western world's attention (not Kashmir, not Nigeria, not Sudan, not the permanent persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh) was that of the Arabs against Israel, and that this Jihad had been carefully disguised by the Arab Muslims as something else -- a "nationalist" fight for the "legitimate rights" of "(the post-1967 invention)the Palestinian people." The fact that many Arabs and Muslims know perfectly well that almost no one in their ranks can conceivably begin even to try to study the legal, moral, and historic claims of the Jews, because the land in question was once possessed by Muslims, and even the most advanced Arab Muslims, the most secular ones, often have great difficulty pondering that matter of the invented "Palestinian people" and simply refuse, for example, to study the actual demographic and cadastral records pertaining to that area of the Ottoman Empire that later became that of the Mandate for Palestine.
The next time you are at some "Muslim-Christian Dialogue" or "Muslim-Jewish Dialogue," and somoeone mentions that the "real Jihad" is that of soul-searching, as shown in that Hadith of Muhammad etc., speak out. Tell everyone that thta is an inauthentic Hadith (according to the system of ranking devised by the most authoritative muhaddithin), and that the phrase "Lesser Jihad" should be applied most aptly to the war against Israel (and then to other local campaigns, as in Kashmir) and that the sum of all of these Lesser Jihads, which were conducted both against Infidel states, and against Infidels within both lands already ruled by Muslims, and within lands where Muslims now lived but that were still peopled largely by Infidels.
State it clearly, and convincingly. Ruin the apologists's evening. Start to get that crowd of innocents -- or at least those among the Infidels who are truly innocent and not sinister -- to start thinking about Islam and the behavior of Muslims. In the Moluccas, in Nigeria, in the Sudan, in London and Paris and Madrid and Amsterdam and Moscow and New York and Washington, and also in Karachi, in Alexandria, in Baghdad, in Saudi Arabia.
Make it a night.
Great article, thank you Hugh, as always. However as an Israeli I'd like to add some points:
"It by now should be clear that the war against Israel is a Lesser Jihad, and always has been. It was such before the Infidels, in this case Jews, dared to buy land and dared to dream of possessing a small sliver of land in which they would not have to live as they and Christians, and all other non-Muslims had had to live: as dhimmis under Shari'a law or some version of it. This was true whether the overlords were Arabs or, as for the past four centuries, the Turks".
the creation of Israel as a nation was triggered mainly by European and Russian Jews (Zionist movements), aiming the creation of a country for Jews to live in freedom and security, unlike their lives in Europe and Russia of these times - unsecured and unstable due to nationalist Europe movements and support for Nazis, and nationalist communism in former soviet union, also a harsh and deadly place for Jews, regardless of their endless attempts to integrate themselves into European and Russian societies.
Before that, Islam was nothing of an issue for European Jews, and they were probably unaware of its ways, just like most Europeans of the time. Until of course they came to Israel.
Middle-eastern and Sephardic Jews (from Arab countries and Asia) were occupying Israel during the Ottoman period, and much before. (The oldest known community was mainly Jews that originated from Yemen). In their ancient communities in Arabia, Jews were accustomed to Islam, and actually held quite along time until the 50's when there was a great emigration of Jews from Arabia, with the Zionist plan to bring the world Jews to Israel.
"Israelis do not wish to contemplate the notion that the relentless war against them has no solution".
I can say most certainly most of us know that... We know about Islam probably better than any other non-Muslim nation. We know about European dhimmitude, and despise it.
This claim by Hugh is depicting our governments' actions that are mostly influenced from international pressure to acknowledge the "Palestinians", make "peace process", activating the IDF in a dhimmi mode and give slices of priceless territories in a tiny land, lying among 54 gigantic Arab states.
Every leader or a party to do that will be glorified in the media and probably dollars and euros will find their way into his pockets. (Rabin and Sharon, for instance). And today - Olmert is happy and wagging his tail, as he plans another territory give out, waiting for the cash and glory.
We have our right movements, but always, the dhimmi candidates (also the corrupt ones) are getting the most funding for campaigns and advertising every election time, boosted by the Israeli media.
In short - Israel is not a free country. If even the US republicans are mumbling about "Islam is a religion of peace" and about the "peace process" - believe me - Israel will have to comply to these notions, and not by the will of its people.
Only a civil uprising will result a stronger, reasoned, National Israel, led by Jewish orthodox and not dhimmified money grabbing seculars, who could not care less about the holly land. This uprising is glooming in the distance - most Israelis are enraged, lacking any sympathy for the government and yearning a change. It's a matter of time.
*excuse my English and my phrasing...
I have no problems reading though :-).
Thinking about the life of Moses thousands of years ago, I find myself more interested in the travails of 7th century Arabia, and Jewry's other forced out-migration.
It all started in 724 AD in the Jewish-Pagan city of Yathrib, only 1,282 years ago when Mohammed ordered Salim Umayru to murder the Jew Abu Afak.
Based on ensuing bloodbath, Israel and Jews have been put in an odd position. Islam as an ideology is verily based on antisemitism, with a measure of antichristianism thrown in. We are all Jews now.
One would think that that blinding malady called Marxism couldn't possibly exist among Israeli Jews. But the opposite is true.
Watching Moslems take over a civilized culture is like watching a tree grow. You can't see it happening as it happens before your eyes.
Incrementalism, the 8th Pillar of Islam.
I would add a number four:
4) The ability to exploit Western historical amnesia about Islam.
Without this amnesia, the first three would be far less effective.
"The ability to exploit Western historical amnesia about Islam."
-- from a posting above
Until a decade after World War II, the Western world -- or its recognized experts on Islam -- understood Islam perfectly. They were not fooled. But several things damaged European morale, and lucidity. There was all the destruction, human and materiel, in World War II. There was the recognition that the pusillanimity of the Western powers might have prevented that same war. There was an unstated shame so great that it required silence, and decades would have to go by before that shame began to be recognizned and discussed, over the mass murder of European Jews, not only by the Germans, but by their many collaborators, and those who had eagerly seized the property of Jews sent to their deaths, in country after country, with only Bulgaria and Denmark emerging with a record that was not shameful. There was decolonisation, which appeared to put certain Arab countries -- Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria -- in the position of "victims" even though the first two had been under French rule for a mere 40 years, and all three had benefited from the French presence, with the schools and hospitals and development of agriculture and the cultural mission civilisatrice of the French.
From 1950 on, as the Cold War seemed to distract, and the Algerian War distracted further, and as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles seemed to believe, and spread the notion, that Islam should be seen as a "bulwark against Communism," and as the old experts in Islam retired or died, and were replaced by others who lacked their depth, and who were children of their age, in their reflexive sympathies for the Arab countries that appeared to be "victims" because they were not part of the West but always lumped in with the real victims of colonialism, and cleverly played, even as they became the possessors of the vast sums handed to them as producers of oil, the role of poverty-stricken victim even up to recent times.
Arab money has helped to buy academic centers and individual professors, and has bought influence of every kind. The "historical amnesia" referred to above did not just happen; it was carefully brought into being. It took a vast propaganda campaign. That campagin was paid for, undertaken, and until a few years ago, was a great success. Now things are beginning to change, because the evidence is mounting that the old version of things grows more implausible with each passing day.
Query: Will enough people learn enough about Islam to stop the Jihad, and its instruments, in time? Or will understanding come just a little too late?
I agree with Hugh's assessment of the Western amnesia, but I also think that Western amnesia had precursors that perhaps were explained by the fact that Islam had become so weak and peripheral during Western Colonialism of the rest of the world, it rather shrank in the popular (and intellectual to some extent) consciousness into something quaint and exotic, where even its shocking barbarousness was seen as "charming", not dangerous to the West.
Reading Pierre Loti's journals about Constantinople during the years he spent there before WWI, one sees, I think, a certain representative Western mentality of irresponsible and almost nihilistic disenchantment with one's own West, too readily supplanted with a willingness to be snake-charmed by the [Islamic] "Orient" -- a willingness made possible by the privileged vantage point of a civilizational superiority taken mindlessly for granted.
addition to my last sentence:
"a willingness made possible by the privileged (yet ungrateful) vantage point of a civilizational superiority taken mindlessly for granted."
Hugh: in general, historians mention Italy among the countries where the record on Jews was not shameful. The country hid Jews by the tens of thousands, and not even the puppet Fascist regime did anything to help the occupying Germans - they had to do everything on their own. But you neglect one feature of Nazi war crimes. As the Nazis did not just kill Jews - roughly speaking, for every murdered Jew they murdered one non-Jew, including a member of my own family - it became easy for everyone who had not been an active supporter of Nazism (and most Europeans from occupied states had not been) to identify with Jewish sufferings. The Jews had suffered worst, but all of Europe had been in Hell together. (At the Nuremberg Trial, dietologists testified that the rations allocated by the occupying German authorities to French citizens seemed deliberately intended to starve the population, weakening it physically and leaving it open to infection and disease. That was just one instance of Nazi malignancy, which extended systematically across all aspects of life.) What this meant at first was a sense of genuine fellow-feeling and sympathy with Jews. In the fifties and sixties most Europeans admired Israel, were impressed by its economic growth and how they had "made the desert blossom." But as time went on, and the War changed from a direct memory in which most people shared to a cultural institution handed on to children in classrooms, so the meaning of this changed: the common feeling that Europe had suffered atrociously under Nazi occupation became a local feeling, a sense that it was "we" who had suffered, even an increasing annoyance at the constant reminder that the Jews had suffered most. There was an instinctive drift towards what might be called "doing a corner in the Holocaust", seen most disgracefully in the squalid squabbles about whether Auschwitz ought or ought not to have a Catholic convent within its grounds and a memorial that Poles as well as Jews were murdered there. Jews and Israelis, of course, were not innocent in this drift towards exclusivism; but at least the Israelis built memorials and monuments to what they call "righteous Goyim". The outburst of lying propaganda aimed at besmirching the image of Pope Pius XII, did not help - like the squabble over Auschwitz, it placed Catholics against Jews and made both defensive and unreasonable; even though Jews who had actually lived through the war and knew how thins had gone could not say enough to thank the work done by the Pope to save them. No doubt, even now, there are a few people even among JW readers who take Cornwell's lies seriously.
I guess that this drift from memory is largely natural; but it is extremely unfortunate, because it gives the enemies of Israel, of the Church, and of the West - I mean the enemies of each of these entities, who overlap but are not necessarily always the same - all kinds of handles to exploit. And God knows they are not slow to do so.
"It by now should be clear that the war against Israel is a Lesser Jihad...."
"...the Israelis themselves have done everything they can to hide that painful recognition. They would prefer to believe that Islam, and especially the most virulent form of Islam, that possessed by the Arabs who have no other identity to conceivably draw upon, contains no elements that are not benign, and that their struggle is against nationalist Arabs."
The struggle between Israel and "the Arabs" has gone on not for the past 400, 700, or 1400 years. It has gone on for at least 3500--4000 years, as testified by Sara insisting that Avraham kick out Hagar and her son Ishmael (the "wild ass of a man")from the camp.
The struggle between Israel and the Arabs is not simply "religious" or even territorial or a power issue, but for the Arabs a basic ideological necessity:Islam borrowed the core of its initial teachings from the Tanach and so must usurp and demolish Israel in order to establish Islamic/Arab lies (of origin and claim to the Holy Land)and bury the Jewish truth.
Any religious Jew either in Israel or the Galut (diaspora) can and often does identify the Palestinians (or the Arabs collectively) as Amalek, the enemy that arises in every generation based purely on hate of Israel. Amalek is known for attacking the weak first; one can see from the terror bombings in Israel is that the majority of bomb masters choose areas with the most vulnerable people--often near bus stops or stations.
So actually there is a large segment of the Israeli people that understand that Islam is not at all benign; however, Israel in its heyday (King David) as well as currently has always had a general policy of making war only selectively and where possible pursuing peace, even with enemies. One can see this struggle throughout Israeli history; the Jews in general have not ever sponsored wars of conquest outside of a circumscribed area (an exception during the period of the Idumanean kings). In this, they have been totally opposite from the Arabs, who in general have always either sponsored wars of conquest or hired themselves out to do so.
The corruption, lack of clarity, or baseness of certain current Israeli political leaders should not be apprehended as the Israeli peoples' not understanding the Arab or Islamic mentality. Further, the lack of clarity on the part of some of the Israeli people has been noted since the time of and by the prophets. Everyone has to understand this issue in his or her own time and in his or her own way.
Every time I am almost inclined to think of Fitgerald is a very astute individual -- as opposed to someone merely informed on the designs of Islam -- he blathers some RANK HORSESHIT LIKE THIS:
...The incredible failure of successive American governments to realize that gasoline had to be taxed...
Excuse me, Sir; but those *fucking assholes* on the Potomac do not have an ethical right to compel *their* jizya out of me any more than the camel-jockeys. Especially where they're the same jerkwads who won't open the spigot of Alaska up to the free-market (probably because they're taking the payoffs Fitzgerald alludes to -- that being the readiest explanation for ANWAR remaining off-limits despite environmentalist sentiment being a non-factor in a Republican-dominated Congress in an era of $3 gas).
Figure it out: The government HAS been jacking taxes, collecting the plunder, and shoveling it straight over to the UN and Araby. Your government, which you scream should raise taxes on gas even further, IS IN THE JIZYA COLLECTION BUSINESS.
You rail about it about about once a week, but the starkly obvious conclusion that you're asking us to pay MORE jizya via taxation doesn't seem to occur to you.
"Until a decade after World War II, the Western world -- or its recognized experts on Islam -- understood Islam perfectly."
But there were already very early on pioneers eager to do the bidding for Isalm.
James Vincent Forrestal (1892-1949) was the first secretary of the U.S. Department of Defense. Believing that the oil-producing states in the Middle East were of strategic importance to the United States, Forrestal opposed actions favorable to the creation of the state of Israel in 1947 and 1948.
Forrestal, was mentally disturbed in his last months of life. In 1949 he resigned as defense secretary, and shortly afterward he was placed under psychiatric care. He committed suicide that year.
During World War II, who else but Jim Baker's uncle and partner in the family law firm, W. Browne Baker, was selected by James Forrestal to head up the Navy's contract negotiation section. For his service, uncle Baker was awarded the Distinguished Civilian Service medal, the highest honor the navy can bestow on a civilian.
It sort of still runs in the family.
James Baker, has been aiming to undermine Israel from its inception. As Hugh has pointed out on this Site a couple of times, this figured already in Baker's senior thesis in Princeton. Micheal Ledeen writes, way back in 1952, when young Jim Baker was graduating from Princeton then at the age of 22, he wrote a senior thesis on the British Labour Party, in which he came down solidly on the side of the "pragmatic" Ernest Bevin for rejecting the call for a Jewish state in Palestine. Bevin was an "expert negotiator," wrote Baker admiringly. "He never became lost in the idealistic. He was always very practical." What Bevin always sought, said Baker, was "concrete advantage.
"Bevin was as concerned as the next fellow about the sufferings of the Jews," James Addison Baker III observed in 1952, but "supporting two million Zionists would mean incurring the enmity of the sixty million Moslems in the Arab states."
At Princeton's History Department, Baker found in Walter Phelps Hall an advisor for his senior thesis who maybe wasn't unfamiliar to the ideas of fellow Princetonian Forrestal. Professor Walter P. Hall had co-authored a history book with Robert Greenhalgh Albion. That same Albion who later wrote a biography of James Forrestal.
Baker's professor, Walter Hall, wrote amongst other a biography of Gladstone, the British politician who pro-claimed "Egypt for the Egyptians". I have no idea if this reflects on Hall, it's necessary to find some of Hall's old histroy books to really ascertain that. Maybe some JW readers own some of Hall's books and could enlighten us.
Albion and Hall come out less favorably on Disraeli whose policies in their book History of the British Empire, pp. 705-706 they deemed "frankly imperialistic". Personally, I don't think Disraeli was wrong to acquire control of the Suez canal, and Egypt certainly for a certain period of time was all the better for it. Even Gladstone, whom Hall so admired, Gladstone, the adversary of Disraeli's alleged 'imperialism' wouldn't in the end let go of Egypt, and it became invaluable for Britain during the World Wars. I would't condemn Disraeli for this.
Whatever. What we do know for certain is that Jim-"f**k the Jews"-Baker himself remained uncomfortable in his later policies with what he calls the "vision thing." When he was Reagans chief of staff, Baker once said he didn't need to have a vision "because the guy down the hall (Reagan) has one. I'm more interested in the game than in philosophy."
"Gladstone...."
-- from a posting above
Gladstone was the most outspoken British political figure on the subject of the Turkish massacres of the Bulgarian Christians in 1877-1878. His speeches on the subject were published separately and helped arouse the public in the Western world. He was well aware of what Islam was like, as many were in those days.
James Baker is another matter altogether. He never cared for Israel -- and this just a few years after World War II, when sympathy was at its height. No sir, when support for the Jews trying to defend themselves was at its height, James Baker as a cossetted student at Princeton was totally immune to any sympathy; supporting Israel would have been, at that time, the easy and popular thing -- but James Baker was brave enough to go against popular opinion in his utter lack of sympathy, a lack based on his ignorance or indifference to both history, and to the poetry of the whole thing, the poetry of creating a Jewish commonwealth against impossible odds.
Baker's views need not have come from a particular professor (as the one mentioned above). Baker is most famous as being a fixer, an uncultivated and barbarous, even if well-heeled, wheeler-dealer, a great admirer of those who possess a great deal of money, and no one can outdo the Saudis when it comes to that. Baker's favorite form of exercise -- and he recommends it to others -- is the recycling of petrodollars. At that sport he, just like John Connally, or all those ex-ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, no matter what state of physical decrepitude they may appear to be in, turn out to be veritable Lance Armstrongs.
On Gladstone, some paragraphs devoted to him in Bertrand Russell's "Unpopular Essays" are memorable, especially because of the way that Russell(in his pre-slighltly gaga-ish days) did it -- using the fanatical Lenin as the point of comparison.
Bevin on the other hand -- Ernest Bevin, not to be confused with Aneurin Bevan -- was simply an antisemite, of the leftist, Keir Hardie, variety. See the memoirs of R. H. Crossman, who served in the government in this period, and revealed that Bevin planned to let Israel be destroyed. He was disappointed with the result of that first Arab-Israeli war. No doubt he would be in the Respect Party today, if George Galloway would make room for anyone else.
A poster above is disturbed that anyone would wish to tax gasoline, or oil otherwise, and he appears to think that we can "drill our way out of this." Would that it were possible, but it isn't. And oil, and gasoline, must be made more expensive to drive down demand, to change the size of cars that are sold and driving habits. Why he thinks that this particular tax will, as opposed to any other tax, simply be sent as "Jizya" -- i.e. foreign aid to Muslim states and peoples -- is completely unclear. There is no reason to think that. In fact, all such taxes could and should be used to develop other sources of energy (nuclear, wind, solar, ethanol, hydrogen-based fuels, and so on). Perhaps that would not be enough to satisfy him. But how else does he think demand for oil, the source for almost all the revenues now funding the world-wide Jihad, including mosques all over this country, should go down?
Furthermore, taxes on oil and on gasoline would have the effect of pricing things too high for the Saudi calculation. At any time T, the Saudis have to figure out what price for their oil, or for OPEC oil generally, would maximize the total value of their oil revenues, not just present revenues, but future ones. They have to consider the effect on demand of a price rise: how much is likely to lead to what drop in demand, at what rate. If the price of oil is not, right now, $1000 per barrel, that is because the market could not sustain it. It is not because the Saudis are taking pity on us. So let us assume that at time T they peg the ideal price, for them, at Y. That is the price that will maximize the value of their reserves, supply them with what they need now, and have the least long-term effect on demand.
They then arrange -- or at least they in the past could arrange -- for production quotas that will cause that price Y to be the new market price. But what if the world's major oil-consuming country, the United States, now taxed gasoline at the pump? The Saudi calculation had been based on a price Y for a barrel of Saudi crude, and that in turn would have lead to a gallon of gas costing, say, Y/n. If, however, there were a Federal tax of, say, 50 cents a gallon, the new cost of gasoline would be Y/n & $.50. That would be too high, by Saudi calculations --- too high for their own best interests. Now they have a choice. They could do nothing, and live with that new price, higher than what they would have wished. Or, more likely, that will lead them to charge not the price Y, but some price less than Y so as to make sure that the full effect of that $.50 tax is not felt fully and does not dampen demand as much as it might otherwise. And that diffrence between the price that they would charge without that tax (and of course that price would be for the world market) and the new, slightlly lower price, is all money that the oil-consumer would save. Meanwhile, the tax on gasline goes entirely to the governemnt, for its energy programs (if so specified).
In the same way, the much higher taxes on gasoline in Europe, which we admire but fail to emulate, help drive down European, and hence total world demand, and so help keep the price of oil lower than it might otherwise be. And if China, for example, were to decide to put a tax on gasoline, that would also dampen Chinese demand, and in the end put downward pressure on the OPEC (i.e. world) oil price. Every act of such taxation, by any oil-consumer, helps to lower OPEC's take. This helps to recapture oligopolistic rents.
For more on this, google "oligopolistic rents" and "Posted by Hugh." See if you don't agree that this makes economic and all other kinds of sense. And it is only the group of officials and retired officials, directly or indirectly on the Saudi take, who have continued to have us all believe in the kindness of Saudi Arabia instead of coming to our energy senses back in 1973, and by taxing oil use have slowly, calmly, managed to adjust things, and to promote other kinds of energy. Now we face, or refuse to face (as with Bush) the desperate situation we are in -- both as regards Islam, and possibly irreversible environmental change and catastrophic damage.
In both cases, stupidity and cupidity have played their part. And in both cases ingratitude -- for the Western civilizational legacy, and for all the gifts of kindly Mother Nature, who did nothing to deserve what she is now getting from Ungrateful Man.
Hey!
Who are you calling "lesser", chump?!?!
Come over here and I'll punch you right in the nose!
Alarmed Pig Farmer: Watching Moslems take over a civilized culture is like watching a tree grow. You can't see it happening as it happens before your eyes.
Islam doesn't take over "civilized" cultures; it conquers castrated kleptocracies previously taken over by lampreys who've bled their host so dry it cannot mount even the most feeble defense.
Like all predators, Islam specializes in eliminating the weak and the stupid. Islam itself, however, is also weak and stupid; and will invariably eliminate the very bullwarks that *protect* it from reprisal: Western socialist governments. -- The very, very dumbest thing the nutcases could ever do would be to nuke Washington, immediately lifting the financial and legal chains pinning down 300 million pissed-off people, who'd immediately commence to ventilate every sonuvabitch advocating Shari'a and tear down anything with minarets.
Even sans such a drastic scenerio, Western governments are already so soft and lethargic, particularly in Europe, that it won't be much longer before opposition spontaneously develops. When it does, it'll go through Islam and its Quislings like the Spanish treasure-hunters went through Aztec priests -- and with the same kill-ratios.
Hugh: A poster above is disturbed that anyone would wish to tax gasoline
Why, yes; I am distured that anyone would wish to plunder private property, let alone authorize consciousless and self-perpetuating government bureaucracies to do it -- because in any decently civilized culture, such persons should rightfully and immediately be horsewhipped and pilloried by an incensed citizenry, then tarred, feathered, and rode out of town a rail. Lest, of course, their institutionalization of robbery take root and bring about the very destruction-from-within of the culture as described in the above post.
Is not violation of property rights the principled basis of your objection to the jizya?
Maybe your objection is just whiny socialist hypocrisy...? Or, alternatively, pragmatic rationalizations to the effect that eggs have to be broken to make omelets, or that lesser evils must be supported to thwart greater evils (with "lesser" and "greater" always being defined by the person advocating the stealing)?
Who knows, who cares.... Anyway you slice it, it's the same old shitty COLLECTIVISM in the end; and yours would differ from Muhammad's only in degree, not principle. In principle, BOTH of you would subject my liberty and property to your whims as you saw fit.
I.e., the King commands and the peasant obeys (or else), and whether the King bans liquor and bikinis in addition to pilfering pockets is merely ancilliary to the then already-established degredation of the peasant's rights.
....kindly Mother Nature, who did nothing to deserve what she is now getting from Ungrateful Man.
Hyperbole or not, that's still a Pathetic (AKA: Animist) Fallacy.
Hugh: higher taxes on gasoline in Europe, which we admire
Who's this "we", Kemo Sabe? (Alert! Bandwagon Fallacy!)
....but fail to emulate, help drive down European, and hence total world demand, and so help keep the price of oil lower than it might otherwise be.
Well Hell's Bells, if that's all that matters -- and if ethics don't mean shit -- let's just burn all of their cars so they can't drive.
Again, Mr. Fitzgerald, I am unconvinced that a gasoline tax is necessarily a solution. Sure, it'd be nice if Americans were able to slake their thirst for gasoline so we'd stop enriching the Saudis, but is a tax the right way to do it? Cheap energy is one of the primary reasons for our unprecedented prosperity, economic growth and rise to world power status... I don't admire Europeans' $5/gallon gas now and I won't ever. I'm horrified that we're at $3/gallon. Life "on the margins" here in Europe is decidely lacking in a quality comparison against life in the US, specifically because the Europeans can't live as large as they might like to.
And after watching one of my rather broke friends invest in a brand new Dodge Ram two years ago when oil prices were still rising and he was looking for some new wheels (he was previously driving a '90 Nissan Sentra, voted best family car of 1990! and got damn good gas mileage too!) I'm not entirely convinced that the US consumer often thinks rationally about the price of gas when making a car-buying decision... not to mention the fact that oil also fuels power plants and factories (are we talking about a gasoline tax specifically or an oil tax in general?)
And what is the government going to do with this tax? Fatten up on it and do a little bit more pork barrel spending? It's going to waste it, Mr. Fitzgerald. The government always wastes money, it's one of the most inefficient collectors and spenders of money in the world. It doesn't matter if it has an energy department or not (you never really detailed, how, specifically, such a department would use its tax money to do research and discover these new energy sources you speak of) it's going to do a rough shod job of whatever it is trying to do.
The point is, I have a lot of reservations about enlarging the government even more, especially in a sector (energy development) that is best left to the private sector for innovation and efficiency.
But I am open to more persuasion if you can do a better job of explaining yourself!
The bottom line is we have to rely on imported oil because of a do-nothing government. Democrats were in power from 1973 (the oil embargo) to 1994 and they did nothing. The Republicans have had power since 1994 to the present, and nothing has been done.I realize that government believes American taxpayers have bottomless pockets, but they also tax domestic oil just like foreign oil. Brazil this month declared itself free from imported oil.We could too, if congress stopped making its main goal incumbency.Politics over patriotism is wearing thin. In the end, there isn't a dimes worth of difference between politicians, only their stated aims.The main divide in this country is not racial but economic.The haves are causing the have nots real economic hardship.Citing environmental reasons for not drilling for oil is just a ploy to rake in more votes. Stop pandering to wealthy environmental pressure groups. Congressional cupidity is not amusing.
None of those who think that taxes, all taxes, are illegitimate, are liable to be convinced by any arguments. They are not against a gasoline tax. They are against taxes, big government, the very need for govnement, and so on. They worship some idol they call Private Property, and nothing must ever be done to diminish it. They assume that Private Property is its own justification, no matter how acquired, no matter what other costs might be associated with it.
As for the remark about destroying China's cars -if an American President could, instead of praising to the skies every Chinese effort at economic development, would instead, in a chastened spirit, suggest that the Chinese try to avoid our own mistakes, and not to destroy their cities for the sake of the automobile, not to discourage what used to be a country of bicycle-riders, but to do everything to preserve that mode of transportation, and to mock the newly-rich who insist that the more cars they own, and the bigger those cars, the better -- well, that would not only help China, but help all other oil-consumers. Every drop in demand for oil helps all consumers of oil. Every drop in demand limits the discreetionary income of the Arabs who fund the Jihad, through the mosques, madrasas, army of Western hirelings, propaganda of every sort.
Some things, believe it or not, are more important than the unhindered race for money. Property is merely a means, or should be, to an end. And what good will even the most fanatical of libertarians find in their no-government or no-tax system, if we are left with a natural world with irreversible climate changes?
Just how much fun would it be to dive, Uncle-Scrooge-like, into that pile of money if the coasts disappear, the world's ice-caps melt at both ends, and so on? And just how much of a consolatin, too, would be that money if you were forced to live in a state of permanent anxiety because of the spread of Islam through Western Europoe, and even here in North America?
It would pain me to pay more for gasoline. It is a pain I would be willing to endure. You, apparently, do not see the need as acutely as I do, and would not be so willing.
Mr. Fitzgerald, your cynicism in this instance is overwhelming and unnecessary. There is no worship at the idol of Private Property (though I wonder, from your fiery and emotional rhetoric, if you worship at the idol of Mother Nature) but there is cause for concern when tax dollars are at stake. You yourself have many a time lamented, long and hard, might I add, about how our tax dollars are being wasted in Iraq fighting the wrong fight.
I'll treat your lambasting of the topic in an honest manner and assume you are concerned because you see your tax dollars being spent inefficiently or unwisely in such a case, and not because you worship at the idol of Pacifism. In the same way, myself (and others, whether we're all raging, unruly, irrational libertarians in your eyes or not) have reason to be concerned when people suggest a tax on what has become, whether we'd prefer it to be or not, a necessity for our modern lives. Even more alarming is the suggestion that the money collected from this tax will be put to use by the government's energy department, who are now to be tasked with finding an energy solution beyond oil... something cheap, efficient and able to be produced domestically. I just don't think the panacea will be that easily found, and if it is, the government won't be the brave explorer with its flag planted firmly on top.
Just imagine you've been stricken with a costly and deadly ailment (addiction to oil) and a man in a shiny white labcoat (the government) comes up to you and promises a cure, if only you'll pay a little bit for it (energy research funded by a gasoline tax). You dutifully pay this man everyday for years, and every year when you ask him why you aren't cured yet, he says, "Just a little more time, and a little more money!" And how long would this go on before you got tired of doling out your money to this man and his cure-less cure-all and said to hell with it, angry that you'd spent all that money on a flop?
Of course, this man could produce you the cure and make it all worth while, but if anyone is going to find the cure, I'd put my money on the other guy who has been patiently and studiously working on a cure in his garage, without anyone even asking him to, rather than this government guy who showed up and started begging for money. How many great inventions, medicines, etc. have been given to us by the government?
I understand your position, that maybe this is a threat big enough that even us people for a smaller, more responsible government should be willing to go back on our principles just a little bit so that we can better arm ourselves for the fight. I understand your concern, and I share it, I just don't know if I see a gas tax as being as effective as you imagine it to be in curbing our appetite for oil while simultaneously denying the oil countries our money (enemies abound in oil rich nations, Venezuela among them!) and building a new energy research sector from the ground up that will magically produce an alternative and viable source of energy.
Government is a necessary evil I am willing to endure. And I am willing to give the government what I think it needs to do its job, which is to enforce the rule of law, protect the individual and ensure his rights and freedoms, enforce contracts and property rights, regulate interstate trade and provide for national defense (these are all things I'd be unable or unwilling to do on my own without tearing apart the civil, social fabric of our country). I just don't trust the government to make any useful scientific leaps, whether we prod it with more money or not.
And don't give up on the libertarians just yet... the terrorism perpetrated by the jihadists is one of the greatest, most widespread violations of individual liberty the world has yet seen and I am sure any libertarian with their head in the right place is outraged by all of this. In that sense, they're some of our strongest allies, so don't get frustrated with them just yet!
Hugh: None of those who think that taxes, all taxes, are illegitimate, are liable to be convinced by any arguments.
What is the logic of this argument, Hugh? Does it not also apply in reverse? I.e., "None of those who think that taxes, all taxes, are 'necessary', are liable to be convinced by any arguments."
So what was the logic? What animates it? The notion that "arguments" (i.e., rational persuasion) don't work, and that therefore FORCE is needed? You wanted something of mine, but couldn't meet my For Sale price ...so shrug-of-the-shoulders and just-take-it-anyway? -- Certainly that is indeed how Islam wins its converts, and collectivists obtain their monies.
If one is in a conflict irreconcilable by reason (e.g., a market, where values obtain their relative value via a bidding process, etc), then ethical judgements are rendered according to who initiates force -- the initiator is immoral, and the defender has the right to protect himself. When a regime (whether externally imposed or authorized by my own rotten neighbors) threatens me with, ultimately, death if I resist its force, it is simply a predator -- nothing more.
If two predators would do battle...good luck to the pair of them; and may they both mete out mortal injuries to their foe.
...if we are left with a natural world with irreversible climate changes?...
"Stay on target....STAY ON TARGET!" Hugh? You're a specialist on Islam; when you wander into the minefields of funding-corrupted junk-science*, you really annoy those of us who specialize in THAT topic.
(* http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220 )
I've been listening to this Chicken Little alarmist horseshit for over thirty years, since before Carl Sagan's "Nuclear Winter" hokum and Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bomb", and the oceans have yet to lift an inch. Instead, the climate on earth is correlating quite nicely to sunspot and thermohaline cycles stubbornly in defiance of scaremonger-for-profit scenerios, and there hasn't been a stretch of weather yet as remotely aberrant as the Dust bowl -- let alone the Maunder Minimum.
Please do peruse that article linked above. As is frequently said on this site: "Read it all".
It would pain me to pay more for gasoline. It is a pain I would be willing to endure.
"Willing"ness has bloody fucking *nothing to do with that*, Hugh. You might as well bluntly suggest that I be "willing" to pay off a mugger in an alley to save my life, and, not only that, but that I should be pleased to do provided the mugger has promised to "protect" you and me from some external danger.
Soloque: Even more alarming is the suggestion that the money collected from this tax will be put to use by the government's energy department, who are now to be tasked with finding an energy solution beyond oil... something cheap, efficient and able to be produced domestically. I just don't think the panacea will be that easily found, and if it is, the government won't be the brave explorer with its flag planted firmly on top.
Exactly so. Good response, through and through.
If the "something cheap [and] efficient" were, say, a domestically- manufactored automobile that achieved 70mpg at 70mph, here's an object case-study* on why it'll never, ever happen HERE until the leeching vampire is down with a stake in its heart. (And please note that the vampire in question is not the UAW, but the NLRA which animates it -- a product of the very same undead critter it is proposed should steal even more of my money to "protect" me further from Islam.)
* Where Would General Motors Be? ....Read it all.
Soloque: Government is a necessary evil I am willing to endure.
"Necessary" for whom, and how do their needs morally entitle them to compel the servitude of others?
Attend to your principles; and realize that "necessary evil" is an oxymoron.
I have to agree with the "Stay on target!" Star Wars reference, I was thinking the exact same thing but didn't know if that would've been too nerdy, haha. There is so much derision on this site when posters' comments devolve into right-vs-left debauchery that I was suprised to see Hugh go off on a tangent on the environment. Not to jump on Mr. Fitzgerald's back or make a big deal out of this, it just seemed uncharacteristic. And frankly, I am not so convinced the world is about to over-heat and destroy itself do to our human endeavors just yet, either.
My whole problem with the gas tax (beyond what I have repeated, over and over ad nauseum already, I think) is that it just won't be as easy to implement and it won't solve the problem as quickly and easily as Mr. Fitzgerald would think/hope. There are so many different uses for oil in this country, and others, that it would be very difficult to target and punish all of them for using oil... not to mention that the marketplace would push back, angrily, might I add, for messing with it with an unnatural gasoline tax. GM won't be too happy if their already bankrupt asses have to invest in new engine technology for this new fuel source... but neither will Honda, Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Daimler-Chrysler, etc. at least not in the short-term of 5-10years (which may as well be an eternity financially) despite many of these companies already having alternative energy source research under way.
As for me attending to my principles... whose to say those are my principles? I realize the heart of the libertarian position is that necessity is dictated on a case by case basis and thus defines personal liberty, but I at the same time can understand that a world with no government would simply devolve into the man-with-the-biggest-gun, lawless tribalism that passes off for "civlization" in so much of the world to this day. It doesn't sound pretty... but I am open to persuasion if you can provide me with a compelling argument for why I should think otherwise. I'll check out your links, but in the meantime feel free to visit my website and get in contact with me through there (you can find my e-mail on the "Contact" section at the site).
I at the same time can understand that a world with no government would simply devolve into the man-with-the-biggest-gun
You're proposing the anti-thesis of government as being what is already essentially the *definition* of government.
I'll check out your link...
Please do. Addressing retorts like the one above is pretty much the basis of the entire thing.
My whole problem with the gas tax....is that it just won't be as easy to implement and it won't solve the problem as quickly and easily
The "whole problem" with the XYZ jiyza is that I am being robbed without my consent, and must suffer the further indignations and humiliations of mandatorily (or else prison, or death if I resist arrest) carrying around the robber's "victim's ID number" on my person at all times -- as if I were an ear-clipped animal in a feed-lot pen.
"...won't be easy to implement..."? "Implement", in this usage, is a euphemism for enforce. But that very blunt word, "force", causes queasiness and unease as it drags the conciousness of the utterer toward the realization that he is promoting an immorality -- and so the subconscious beats a hasty retreat from that blinding light and selects a different, more neutered and arbitrary term.