Will the logical fallacies never cease? How deep the self-denial runs in the Arab Muslim mind. Were it not for this we would long ago have been destroyed by them. This buffoon works at a think tank? No wonder they lost all their wars with Israel!

Posted by: Quijybo at April 24, 2006 6:16 PM

Oh please..this is ridiculous. How did Israel come into this? This is muslims M.O. From what I've heard on Fox news today, there were a lot of Coptic Christians in the area. I don't believe the Jews are out to kill Christians.

Posted by: freewoman at April 24, 2006 6:23 PM

Wow, that's got to be some sort of land speed record. They always eventually blame the Israelis, but it usually takes longer than this. Show of hands, who else wonders why this guy had a prepared statement ready to roll such a short time after the explosion?

Posted by: libbysmom at April 24, 2006 6:24 PM

Another wickedly laughable observation by one of Mo's best and brightest.

Posted by: Jumpintimmy at April 24, 2006 6:26 PM

Let them think the Mossad is omnipotent. Who cares?

Posted by: Kim Hartveld at April 24, 2006 6:35 PM

Oh for pete's sake. Are the Egyptians themselves the last people on earth who've never heard the phrase

Denial ain'ta river in Egypt??

Posted by: Caroline at April 24, 2006 6:40 PM

Don't you remember that 9-11 was caused by the Jews also....They are great at the blame game...Mo wasn't a child molestor either.

Posted by: Siciliano at April 24, 2006 6:41 PM

Oh, good grief, when the Muslims kill each other or non-Muslims, they always have to blame Isreal and the Jews. Egypt, the Nile River is called just that, not the deniel river.

Posted by: bigcatgirl13106 at April 24, 2006 6:51 PM

"The Mossad's ability to penetrate the Bedouins in Sinai is known," Salim said in an interview with al-Jazeera.

The Mossad did buy them dinner and a movie.

Posted by: Shinoliite at April 24, 2006 6:55 PM

That's right, General Salim, all those tens of thousands of Egyptian rioting in the streets are Jews!

And all those Jewish Bedouins? The Saudis better beware.

Posted by: Provoslavni at April 24, 2006 8:24 PM

Are these people so mentally inferior they have to keep repeating such common trash? No wonder why Egypt is an utter failure, it's full of brainless bigots.

Posted by: Dumbo at April 24, 2006 8:31 PM

By now, it should be clear to some of us that truth has no place in Islam. Given that Koran calls for deception and destruction, hiding behind the smoke-screen of religion of peace (it is neither peaceful, nor a religion), instead of truth and non-violence, such wild and baseless arguements have an untouchable place of their own.

Such is the deception of Islam .. it deceives it's enemies and followers alike, serving the same purpose of worldwide conquest.

Posted by: Alert at April 24, 2006 8:40 PM

Everything they see are conspiracies, and they are from the Jews. You just have to admire their intelligence ... I mean they view the Jews as so smart, that you have to wonder what they have up there. All these conspiracy theories make the Jews able to best Allah!

Seriously, all these are just a precursor to the big one that Muslims are preparing for. Afterall, Muhammad told his followers:

(Muhammad said:) The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; (Sahih Muslim Book 041, Number 6985).

You can bet there will be many Muslims who are willing to make this come true. Indeed, under al-Mahdi and Isa (the Muslims version of Jesus who is to come in the end), you can bet they will inflame the age old hatred of the Jews and slaughter them.

It is sad but many Muslims believe it.

Posted by: yaqub at April 24, 2006 8:41 PM

retired General Salah al-Din Salim a mental midget from the great country of Egypt first clue is that is has to be the Jews.. let them think Mossad are so powerful, such a tiny country, representing a very small fraction of land in the middle east and yet they control the world! l think Jews looks so superior next to some of most backward people on the earth the muslim horde and his cult he calls islam.

Posted by: Lulu at April 24, 2006 8:42 PM

"The Muslims' proclivity for paranoid fantasies is known."

Posted by: Master Shake at April 24, 2006 8:59 PM

Was it not Adolf Hitler who said somewhere in Mein Kampf that if you tell a big lie often enough; loud enough; that the masses will believe it sooner or later?

He also said something like every truely great leader knows, that in order to rule the masses; the masses must have an enemy.

They must be shown how dangerous and vile the enemy is; and how perilous the conditions are in the face of that enemy.

Hitler claimed that the Jews served that purpose for him in his hope to build the Reich.

Naturally, a good leader, he continued, will be able to identify the enemy and show that only he can lead the masses to safety.

Sounds like the islamics have the same idea and are trying it again -- in the extremes of reason.

Posted by: witness at April 24, 2006 9:13 PM

The Big Lie from the pages of Mein Kampf

"It required the whole bottomless falsehood of the Jews and their Marxist fighting organization to lay the blame for the collapse on that very man who alone, with superhuman energy and will power, tried to prevent the catastrophe he foresaw and save the nation from its time of deepest humiliation and disgrace. By branding Ludendorff as guilty for the loss of the World War [WW I], they took the weapon of moral right from the one dangerous accuser who could have risen against the traitors to the fatherland. In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick-a fact which all the great lic-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.

The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the posibilities in the use of falsehood and slander have always been the Jews; for after all, their whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race--and what a race! One of the greatest minds of humanity has nailed them forever as such in an eternally comet phrase of fundamental truth: he called them 'the great masters of lie.' And anyone who does not recognize this or does not want to believe it will never in this world be able to help the truth to victory."

He also said something like every truely great leader knows, that in order to rule the masses; the masses must have an enemy.

Standard fare played and practised by every thug who has ruled since men lived in caves.Ahmadinejad has the Jews and Great Satan, and Bush and predecessors their war on nouns.

How can you have a war on something that can't surrender?

Posted by: Nariz at April 24, 2006 9:33 PM

Attention Jews of the World: OK guys, the jig is up! If you weren't alive there would be no need for Muslims to invent excuses to wipe you out. The Kuran says so, see--

Isn't Islam positively BRILLIANT in its logic?
NO?????????????????????????????????

Posted by: pythagoras at April 24, 2006 9:33 PM

Yet another example of muslim obfuscation about the real problem that confronts their societies, the rampant terrorism and boundless killing of seemingly anyone and everyone.

I wasnt surprised in the least to hear about this attack, just about everyone was predicting such an event. What a world I now live in that I accept such atrocities as commonplace and the perpetrators as the usual suspects. Im tempted to yawn and move on to more interesting things.

My fears and hopes collide when these attacks occur; on one hand I fear that the killers will have to up the ante to get noticed, since the world seems to be getting used to such events. On the other hand, I just cant see such stupidity and ignorance winning it all.

Posted by: Dead Infidel Walking at April 24, 2006 9:39 PM

Is the ability to surrender a prerequisite to war? If the term confounds you, why not substitute "campaign" for "war", and simply consider the use of military force a facet of that campaign?

Posted by: Dead Infidel Walking at April 24, 2006 9:43 PM

If it wasn't for those Coptic residents who'd suffer (yeah, yeah, I know they are already), I'd be all in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Cairo, similar to Hamas now running the PA.

Egypt has been a hostile state to Israel since St Sadat's assassination. What Israel needs is this detente to end, so that they can have a clean war, re-conquer the Sinai, and destroy Egypt's armed forces.

Egypt's armed forces were useful in the 80's, when it came to having a military counterweight to Syria and Libya. That time has come and gone. Time for the Camp David Agreement to end - Egypt has done everything short of formally abrogating this agreement.

Do it while Dhimmi Carter's still around.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at April 24, 2006 9:59 PM

Oh please..this is ridiculous.

I am deeply offended at this wanton slander of Islam one of the world's great religions and the religion of peace.

MO BROS MO HAJIBS MO BEARDS MORE HAIRIER [SIC] MO WANTON MO [SICK] MO MO

Lemme give you a_object lesson in victimism, the 8th Pillar of Islam:

When Mohammed sent his 8-man expedition of Moslems to Naklah, and gave the captain a secret letter as they left. They squad was to surveil the movements of the enemy, Koreish caravaners.

When the squad captain opened the letter, he was that ole Mo had given them the green light to rob and murder a caravan. (Maybe this is why the color of the Islam national flag is green.)

The rationale for this military maneuver was rock-solid. Back in the bad old days of Satantic Verses in Mecca, after years of Mo threatening Koreish pagans there with murder and doom and caravan robberies (or, technically speaking, when Mo was reciting these as commandments revealed by the koranic god named Allah), the Koriesh complained bitterly to Mo's rich uncle to tell his nephew the Holy Prophet to shut the hell up.

Mohammed and the early Moslems were deeply offended and humiliated by this unfair attack.

A few years later in Medina, Allah visited Mo, or maybe it was the Archangel Gabriel who appeared, and revealed that the Koreishi complaints and their street taunts from a few years earlier amounted to religious persecution. Allah then dropped the blockbuster, announcing to Mo that murder of Islam persecutors was better than persecution. Apparently the caravan robbery thing Mo threw into the deal. Who knows.

Anyway, a couple of days later at Naklah the Moslem squad snuck up from behind on an unarmed caravan of four, stabbed one in the back, slit the other's throat, one fled to safety, and they took the fourth was kidnapped for ransom. This according to the holiest Islamic scriptures. First blood.

And thus Islam was born. The caravaners were persecutors and deserved what they got. Go to a mosque this Friday and hear about this.

The stolen goods, hides mainly, were justifiable as war booty, according to Allah, because resisting persecution and humiliation of Islam is war and the hides were fair war booty.

Islam was born and the party was on. Hoo hah!

Next, the Jew-murders started. Afak, Marwan, the banu Qaynuqa, Ashaf and the others, then the number done on the aptly-named banu Nadir, finally leading up to that infamous head-chopping orgy, a truly blessed day in annals of Islam, the mass murder of the banu Qurayza.

I won't go into the ritualistic torture and other perversion cuz I'm a nice guy and am close personal friends with many Unicorns. Don't wanna come off as extreme.

MO PERSECUTION MO HUMILIATION MO JUSTIFIABLE MURDER MASS & PERSONAL MO MO

Now, freewoman, are we clear on why the staement about the Israelis is not ridiciulous? If balderdash could be real in 622AD, why not today?

Fictive Reality. It's fictional and unreal, but the belief in the balderdash is as every bit as real and as serious as a Hollywood Heart Attack.

Just wait till "it" happens. Then maybe you'll have a healthier respect for Moslem Logic [sic].

Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at April 24, 2006 10:32 PM

APF, that reasoning sounded just like I do on the days I get re-blonded. Don't worry, it only lasts a couple of days.....then back to normal!!!

Posted by: freewoman at April 24, 2006 10:53 PM

I am saddened by the death of so many vacationing people.

"...it could not be ruled out that the Israeli Mossad was involved...."

Has Salah al-Din not heard of Occam's razor (William of Occam)? (economy of explanation: "What can be done with fewer [assumptions] is done in vain with more"). I guess not.

Interestingly, his almost namesake, Saladin (Salah ad-Din), the 12th Moslem conqueror, chose as his court physician Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon) who gave the Jewish people a logically organized Torah law handbook (the Mishne Torah), among other great works.

This shows two things:
1) Always go with a Jewish doctor (just kidding)
and
2) Succeeding generations get progressively stupider (a Talmudic observation).

BTW, three Israelis were injured in the blast, according to A-7. Also, A-7 mentioned that 25,000 Israelis went to Egypt for Pesach (Passover). How is this possible? On Pesach, we celebrate leaving Egypt. These people traveled in reverse. Go figure.

Posted by: HaMalach at April 24, 2006 10:53 PM

oops, 12th century...

Posted by: HaMalach at April 24, 2006 10:57 PM

Or, maybe the Strategic Studies Institute planned it, and is an arm of: Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, the Egyptian Brotherhood,et al. So wait 'til the one where he comes out with the announcement ahead of time...

Posted by: HaMalach at April 24, 2006 11:05 PM

I guess the Jews wrote the Koran to drive the Muslims all crazy, too?

Now that would have been clever!

MO-ham-mad...?

MO-ssad...?

Hmmm.

Posted by: profitsbeard at April 24, 2006 11:49 PM

Still waiting for Mohideen to tell us exactly how it happened. Where are you Mohideen...?

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at April 25, 2006 12:15 AM

Still waiting for Mohideen to tell us exactly how it happened. Where are you Mohideen...?

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at April 25, 2006 12:15 AM

Still waiting for Mohideen to tell us exactly how it happened. Where are you Mohideen...?

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at April 25, 2006 12:16 AM

Uh? What happened? sorry, computer is playing up...

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at April 25, 2006 12:17 AM

It's the same Jewish global banking conspiracy working in collusion with the Jewish controlled media to funnel funds to Israel through the Christian Zionist neocons to build earthquake and tsunami generators to kill off the Muslims to create a massive Zionist oil rich mega-state with headquarters in Mecca and Medina, and who will seize all Palestinian youths for slavery, and eventually convert all mosques into Zionist discotheques. Really

Posted by: Thumper at April 25, 2006 12:33 AM

"The Mossad did buy them dinner and a movie."

ROFL, shinoliite!

Posted by: libbysmom at April 25, 2006 12:35 AM

Dear President Mubarak,

This is no surprise but the Muslim Brotherhood haven't liked you, they don't like you, and they will never like you. And, if they have their way, they will do the same to you they did to Anwar Sadat. In the mean time, they are just keeping their hand in with the occassional murder or terrorist bombing.

PS. Note to the U.S. State department. Please cancel my subscription to Egyptian foreign aid. We get nothing for our bucks, so leave mine at home.

Posted by: cactus at April 25, 2006 12:59 AM

Shinoliite, I ditto libbysmom, your post was hilarious.

Posted by: skyking77 at April 25, 2006 2:31 AM

Nariz's quote from MEIN KAMPF is very much to the point (and he has my congratulations for actually managing to read that notoriously illiterate and unreadable text). Contrary to Hitler's claim, Ludendorff was really as guilty as anyone for the collapse of German resistance. The truth is that the Germans had been overwhelmed - the British were beginning to use tanks in numbers that Germany could not match; Italy had taken Austria-Hungary out of the fight, and now fifty-one victorious Italian divisions had nothing to keep them from souther Germany; and increasing numbers of Americans were crowding the western front. But in so far as any German actually made matters worse, it was Ludendorff, first, because he failed to follow through with German's near-final victory in March 1918, and second and worse, because he collapsed in terror after the battle of Arras, when the effect of the British "tank swarm" became clear. As for Hitler's reasons to speak as he did, we must not us forget that in 1923, when he was writing MEIN KAMPF, Ludendorff was the figurehead of his movement - though later they fell out. Of course his "loyal drummer boy", as Hitler himself described himself around that time, had to defend his role in the catastrophe.

Now, what does this have to do with the paranoid fantasies of a retired Egyptian general? Simply this: that as the arrogant German officers' corps was not only mentally scarred, but socially ruined, by the collapse of November 1918, which proved to the German nation that they were nothing like the leaders they had trusted for so long - so, too, the Egyptian Army officers' corps, from which comes the political leadership of modern Egypt, has been, or should have been, totally discredited by three colossal military failures - of which the worst, that of 1967 was not so much an Israeli victory as an Egyptian defeat. By refusing to manage the withdrawal, the Egyptian leadership left their wretched recruits to be slaughtered or die of heat and thirst in the desert. Generalship is never more required than when a battle has been lost - you have to get your men back, disengage from the enemy somehow, keep them marching, keep feeding them - and, if necessary to avoid further destruction, offer the enemy a surrender on terms. By failing their men at this decisive point, the Egyptian officers' corps should effectively have delegitimated itself in the eyes of the nation, just as the German officers' corps should have when the war they had promoted for five years was lost.

The answer of both groups is the same: it is not our fault, it is those damned, plotting, crafty, treacherous, all-seeing Jews! And, unfortunately, it looks as though the Egyptian common people will be as completely taken in as the Germans were.

Posted by: Paolo at April 25, 2006 2:51 AM

Good point about the Egyptian defeat in '67, Paolo.
Defense is a more a matter of not losing than actually "winning".
As the IDF is a defense force in more than just name, the Egyptian retreat should have been considerably easier than for an army being pursued by a conquering military.

The IDF exists to defend Israeli territorial sovereignty and repel invaders.

Any half-way competent general should have been able to manage a disengagement and speedy retrograde advance into friendly territory without such loss of men and materiel.

Of course, how much military or intelligence training does it take to turn on a pc, open the 'bombing theory' folder, bring up Mossad did it.doc, and hit print?

Posted by: Eisenhund at April 25, 2006 3:20 AM

... APF, that reasoning sounded just like I do on the days I get re-blonded.

Not me. As the last scales of dhimmitude fall from my eyes, I decided to go ahead transform myself into the Human Antonym of Moslems and so I shaved my entire body. No dye, no die, I am seeing things so clearly now.

MO HIJABS MO LEFT JABS MO BACK STABS MO LAND GRABS MO BODY CRABS MO MO

... the paranoid fantasies of a retired Egyptian general?

par·a·noi·a
n.
1. A psychotic disorder characterized by delusions of persecution with or without grandeur, often strenuously defended with apparent logic and reason.
2. Extreme, irrational distrust of others.

Definition #1, yes. Definition #2, no.

You saying that Moslems are skeert? Setting aside for a moment our relaxed delusion of well-being, let us shave our beards and our private area and understand this: These putatively skeert "people" are rolling out a world takeover.

Islamophobia is a reasonable fearfulness; Paranoia definition #1 is an Islamic manipulation, a form of predatory victimism.

The 8th Pillar of Islam.

Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at April 25, 2006 6:34 AM

I have sent the below to many of the media, but I bet they wont print it...
Yet once again, the Jews are to blame, this tiny little country with 6 million people of which many thousands are Arab....and if it isn't the Jews, they blame America and the west...the Muslims don't blame their constant terrorist attacks for the last couple of decades or more, they simply teach their people that it is our fault.. We are evil, pigs and dogs, the Jews and Americans cause all their poverty and problems, and we have to be eliminated...
Didn't they use the same horrific tactics to work the people up to hatred just before the second world war???? and probably all wars.
Israel is surrounded by billions of people who hate them so I can't see them stirring the pot...and they sure should be allowed to protect themselves...
While we punish our people for any little thing against Muslims, it appears that non of the groups of terrorist people are arrested and put behind bars. In fact their own let them teach this hatred in their Mosques and schools, and nothing is done???? WHY????.... So if there are moderate Muslims??? why dont they stop this teaching???? and why don't they do something?? the problem is escalating out of control and their own do nothing.

Posted by: Gaye at April 25, 2006 7:13 AM

It's worth repeating -- thank you Nariz for the quote; and Paolo for the background info.

"In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.

Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true.

Dang! I fell out of bed this morning; then I burned myself with hot coffee!

(expletive deleted) Jews!

Posted by: witness at April 25, 2006 8:48 AM

libbysmom asks: "Show of hands, who else wonders why this guy had a prepared statement ready to roll such a short time after the explosion?"

We don't even have to assume a more sinister connection. Because the exact same type of prepared statement always gets issued from all the usual suspects at around the same time: the Hamas government of the Palestinians, the Muslims in the West who rush to rationalize these attacks, the Western Leftists who do the same thing. I'm sure they all have standard Microsoft Word templates for all their standard talking points:

"We condemn all forms of terrorism." [Always impresses the Western media!]

"Nothing can justify attacks on innocent civilians." [They never define whom they consider "innocent."]

"Israel has committed attacks on civilians too." [they never mention that those "civilians" were wearing suicide bomber belts]

"The U.S. killed many in Vietnam; supported the Shah; opposed Allende; etc.." [That's to win the sympathy of the Western Leftists.]

So when a terrorist attack like this happens, all they do is take their standard templates, cut and paste them together and print them out. Just compare the statements we got immediately after 9-11, immediately after the 7-7 London bombings, and now this. It's always the same drivel.

They are so knee-jerk predictable that we can write their talking-point responses to terrorist attacks in advance.

Posted by: Steven L. at April 25, 2006 11:59 AM

Paolo, one of the things that adolf h. did not mention in his tirade is that it was imperial Germany that put Lenin on a sealed train and sent him back to Russia in order to get Russia out of the war on "pacifist" grounds. That was one of the desperate last moves of the kaiser's govt. Of course, hitler liked to condemn the bolsheviks although he himself showed much influence from Marxist writings and Soviet political practice in his own writings and practice [or should I say "praxis"?].
Anyhow, the world is still paying for Lenin's sealed train, in more ways than one. Getting back to our concern with Islam, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires were allied with the Ottoman empire, and of course generously helped the Ottomans wipe out Armenians. After their October putsch, the bolsheviks helped too. In late November-early December 1917, Stalin's Commissariat of Nationalities issued an "Appeal to the Muslim Toilers of Russia and the East" [naturally, the bolsheviks appealed to "toilers," not to emirs and sultans and sheiks, Heaven forfend]. This manifesto is one of the ways in which the world is still paying for Lenin's sealed train. The appeal is actually a declaration of Muslim superiority of rights. See link:
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2005/10/bolsheviks-for-jihad-genocide-stalins.html

Several months later, in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Soviets agreed to withdraw the Russian army from areas of historic Armenia and Georgia conquered by the Russian army in the 19th century, thus exposing Armenian subjects of Russia to the ongoing genocide who had been hitherto safe within the Russian empire. See link above. The "Left" still follows in Stalin's footsteps in supporting Islamic aggressors, at the same time converging with a certain strain of British foreign policy that also supported Arab and Muslim aggression. We may call the latter trend Toynbeeism, and see it described by Elie Kedourie in The Chatham House Version [Chatham House = Toynbee's Royal Inst for Int'l Affairs], and by Marjorie Housepian in her article in Commentary magazine, The Smyrna Affair [or some such title], back in the late 1960s.

Posted by: Eliyahu at April 25, 2006 2:15 PM

Eliyahu, you are correct, of course. And you might add that Lenin signed his shameful peace treaty, which surrendered enormous territories and made the Crimea literally a German colony, against the wishes of the nation, which wanted to carry on the war against Germany to the Urals and beyond (in the same style as Clemenceau promised to move the French government to Algiers if necessary). The peace nearly destroyed the Bolsheviks, who were forced to allow the Moscow population to show their fury by anti-German riots in which many people died. Lenin wholly intended to make Russia a German client state, so long as he and his party could be its sole rulers; although I do not doubt that, had the Germans won - which they were on the verge of doing in March, 1918 - he would have proved a most treacherous ally.

But the part in the German/Bolshevik partnership which was most pestiferous, and from which we still suffer today, was the "peace" offensive that the two governments carried out in tandem before and after November 11, 1918, by roundly assaulting the character and intentions of the Allied leaders, pushing an extreme kind of pacifism, and teaching the world the vocabulary of moral equivalence. The history of this secret war has only begun to be told (I recommed DOUBLE LIVES, by Stephen Koch), but it was carried out for decades by the combined resources of two great and ruthless powers, and it has instilled in our mind that odious bacillus of moral equivalence and moral nihilism that this site and so many others are trying to fight.

Posted by: Paolo at April 25, 2006 2:39 PM

Eliyahu:

German and Austrian complicity in the genocide against the Armenians is news to me. Would you be so good as to cite a reference to this connection? Thanks.

Posted by: Chatillon at April 25, 2006 3:02 PM

I had not noticed that. I think Eliyahu is factually incorrect; at least, German and Austrian local diplomats became aware of what was happening and protested vigorously - their records are among the strongest and most detailed evidence of events. However, the Germans were deeply involved in Turkish military arrangements, and towards the end of the war the Turkish Army tended to be commanded by German generals. So at least in their case, the verdict has to be the same as against the German regular army in WWII - that even granting that they did not take parts in the massacres by irregular SS troops, they at the very least knew and did nothing, thus allowing the butchers to go on butchering.

Posted by: Paolo at April 25, 2006 4:31 PM

Hi Paolo:

Your thoughts concerning the blind eye presumably turned by German officers towards their Turkish troops might be correct, but offhand seem to be a bit of a stretch. German leadership was most needed to counter the Allied thrusts against the Ottoman Empire. Turkish depredations against the hapless Armenians needed little more leadership than pogroms carried out against the jews in Europe. In fact, the beginning of the Armenian genocide precedes the First World War by a decade or more. But maybe you're right.

In any event, I agree whole-heartedly with your comments on the odious bacillus of moral equivalence. It's vary easy to fall into that trap when expedients run afoul of absolutes. German officers that were aware of the genocide probably resigned themselves to this as an expedient to waging their war. Their justification may have resembled US President Roosevelt's statement some years later concerning Anastasio Somoza Garcia of Nicaragua: "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Moral? The end does not justify the means. Not then. Not now. The perpetrators of the latest bombing outrage in Egypt and the liars and/or buffons that seek to deflect blame to Israel only verify once more the maxim: "By their fruits shall you know them."

Posted by: Chatillon at April 25, 2006 5:08 PM

Chatillon: if I had only said that moral equivalence is unmitigatedly bad for the brain, I would have said nothing more than what almost any JW/DW reader and contributor, beginning with Robert himself, has been saying pretty much from the start. What I was trying to say is this: that this bacillus has been introduced into the body of the West by acts of deliberate policy, intended exactly to produce the effects it did, by two great powers - Germany and Russia - bent on breaking the result of World War One, and on making the victors ashamed of winning it.

HOw did this happen? On the Russian side, there is little mystery. Relativism and moral equivalence are necessary to Communist propaganda. Modern American conservatives like to blame the Italian Communist philosopher Gramsci for this policy of storming the commanding, "hegemonic" heights of culture; but in fact, although Gramsci's statement is lucid and convincing, what he recommends was being already carried out by Lenin and his cultural plenipotentiary, Willi Muenzenberg, before Gramsci even began writing. Muenzenberg's name is little known, but it ought to loom as large in the history of Communism as those of Lenin and Trotsky: he was the man who created, in the West, the myth of the Soviet revolution, who was directly responsible for hiring and manipulating intellectuals by the thousand, even for such details as the iconic status of Eisenstein's movie "Battleship Potemkin". In this he was greatly helped by the fact that the first ten years of the Revolution, before Stalin imposed his petty-bourgeois mind and reactionary tastes, were years of genuine artistic experimentation and red-hot modernity; they were enough to forge an alliance between Communism and artistic modernism that survived even the bloody suppression of any artistic endeavour under Stalin's long and monstrous reign. Thanks to Lenin's genuine interest in modernity in all its forms, and Muenzenberg's brilliant manipulation of culture beyond Russia, sympathy between artists and Communism became a tradition that has not yet altogether died. And the tremendous significance of that success is best understood when you look at the arts ten years before Communism - say, in 1907 - and wonder where they were going; and it seems clear that, to any unprejudiced observer, the dominant note was aristocratic, militant, Nietscheian, eugenistic and violent - in short, all the features that were later to form Fascism. Muenzenberg and Lenin effectively hijacked the development of modern culture (not that I think the alternative direction was any better).

On the side of Germany, the aggressive international propaganda for relativism and moral equivalence had a strong aspect of injured self-love. Germany had come to the war in 1914 with her hands already dirty from previous aggressions and a general sense that she was the Bully of Europe. When she committed the public crime of invading Belgium, that was it: from that moment, the Allies might commit any crime, and the Germans be as pure as angels, but world public opinion would still regard them as the aggressors. And as a matter of fact, the Allies (except for the Russians) committed very few crimes, and the Germans, especially in the early months of the war, quite a few. The effect was that from the beginning of the war onwards, discussion in neutral countries was strictly between remaining neutral and intervening against Germany; intervening on Germany's side was never contemplated, even on the part of Italy, Germany's supposed ally, and of the United States, who had good reason to dislike Britain, France and Italy. The Germans had effectively made themselves international outlaws. But, not wanting to recognize this or its implications, they simply decided that they had been beaten on the propaganda war front, and they resolved to intensify and deepen their own propaganda war - which placed them in a community of interests and feeling with the Communists. This jolly agreement in the use of massive propaganda and cultural manipulation to destroy the very notion of international morality lasted practically into World War Two.

Posted by: Paolo at April 26, 2006 2:01 AM

Chatillon & Paolo,
an Armenian historian wrote a book on German-Austrian collaboration with the Ottoman forces in the Armenian genocide. The book was reviewed in some detail several years ago in the Times Literary Supplement. I read the review but not the book. Sorry but I forget the author's name. However, Paolo is aware [as I was before reading the TLS review] that German & Austrian military experts abounded in the Ottoman empire during the war, such as General Liman von Sanders, who was very influential in strategic planning for the Ottoman forces. There were also German & Austrian contingents fighting on the Ottoman side against the British, such as artillery units including enlisted men, not just officers serving as advisors. Pierre van Paassen reports on what he was told by German and Austrian veterans of the Middle Eastern campaigns after the war [That Day Alone; Earth Could Be Fair?]. The TLS review reported that German [or Austrian] artillery bombarded recalcitrant Armenian towns that were not submitting to deportation. Anyhow, even without the details in the abovementioned book, how could the Germans & Austrians been so close to the deportations and other atrocities against Armenians without collaborating in some measure?

Paolo,
As to modernist culture, the pro-fascist Futurist movement in Italy was fairly close in its thinking and concepts, in my opinion, to the early Soviet art of the 1920s that you mention. The very name Futurist shows how close those guys were to their Soviet contemporaries. Could somebody compare Marinetti [is that his name?] with Mayakovsky?

Posted by: Eliyahu at April 26, 2006 5:38 AM

Eliyahu, yes, that is exactly what I meant. It was the very same many-headed modernist, rebellious, anti-naturalistic movement or movements that was hijacked by Lenin and Muenzenberg; not, indeed, without any resistance from Mussolini (who, in a number of ways, fashioned himself after Lenin) and his talented Culture Minister, Bottai, who kept Italian art alive between the wars - the only positive achievement of the dark years. However, Italy simply did not have the international resonance of Russia, and by the time Mussolini set out to be a dictator, Lenin and Muenzenberg had been active for years. The result was complete Communist victory on the cultural battlefield - even though in fact all the greatest artists of the time, from Thomas Mann and Andre' Gide all the way to Jack Kirby, were anti-Communist. But what mattered was not the great heights of genius, who always could, when the time came, be sent to the Gulag to keep Russian genius company; it was the mass of workers in the various "intellectual" areas, academia, the Press, book publishing, broadcasting, arts retail, cinema, etc. And in this the Communists succeeded admirably.

Posted by: Paolo at April 26, 2006 5:58 AM

Further re the Armenian genocide.
I can't agree that it was like a disorderly pogrom. It was planned on the high echelon of Ottoman policy, by the Young Turk government. It used the telegraph and railroads in its execution. This I have seen in various accounts. As I understand it, there were two main stages at least in execution of the genocide. First, Armenians were driven out of their towns and villages towards the Syrian desert, in particular towards Deir ez-Zor near the Syrian-Iraqi border of today. Many died on the way. Able bodied men may have been separated out at an early stage, I am not sure. Kurds, Arabs, and other Muslims took attractive young women, boys and girls, from the processions of deportees, if I am not mistaken. In the final stage, around Deir ez-Zor, the deportees, weakened by heat, thirst and hunger and by marching, were massacred.
The Jewish Nili spy group supplied information on the Armenian genocide to the British. In fact, it was knowledge of what was happening to the Armenians that decided the Nili group to oppose the Ottoman empire [otherwise they would have loyal to it], since the same could be done to the Jews. Moreover, not did only the Ottomans deport from Israel about 30 to 35,000 Jews from the country during the war on the grounds that they were enemy subjects, mainly Russian subjects [that Jews had no love for the Tsarist regime meant little to the Ottomans at that time], but they planned to do the SAME to the Jews. This was discussed at the time by Jabotinsky and others. Prof. A.S. Yahuda sent protests to various govts. and influential personalities on the matter. I believe that Isaiah Friedman has written about it.

Posted by: Eliyahu at April 26, 2006 6:04 AM

The next thing is that "people will discover" that the real hand behind terrorism in Kashmir and the recent explosions in Delhi is the Mossad - and not PAK ISI state sponsored terrorism after all ...

Posted by: drk at April 26, 2006 7:30 AM

Eliyahu and Paolo:

Thanks for your responses.

My own rather thin understanding of the Armenian genocide was based upon a small book written by the grandson of survivors, entitles something like "Remembering Ararat. The initial phases of the genocide seemed as apontaneous as the outrages visited upon non-Moslems these days: mobs bursting into neighborhoods, murdering a number of the locals and then receding. The process was repeated endless times. By the time of WWI, the organization had advanced to deporting entire villages. My recollection was that the trip was supposed to kill the deportees, that was the point. The image of frightened villagers, being led meekly from their homes by reassuring guards eerily presages events 35 years later in Europe.

The connection between Fascism and Communism has always been the underlying understanding "You're a victim. It's not fair. Someone has done this to you. We know who. We have a way of striking back. All we have to do is stick together." Such reasoning is all too human, appealing to our tribal instincts. Indeed, we in the West must invoke it now, but we need also to be mindful of the inherent dangers in tribalism.

The events described at the heading of this thread, the bombings in Egypt and lame denials by one of the authorities, is a chilling throw back to the Armenian massacre and a cautionary tale in the process. The tribalism run amok that is Islam must be countered forcefully and decisively, but not by tribalism of our own. WWI was just such an intertribal bloodletting and might have been avoided had there been clear enough, principled enough vision (Ah! Dream on. I must have taken one of the hallucination pills). By the time WWII came around, there was no choice. The process seems to be repeating. I just don't know exactly where we're at in the cycle.

Posted by: Chatillon at April 26, 2006 9:04 AM

Chatillon: now don't take this the wrong way, but your reference to WWI as "just another intertribal bloodletting" shows that you have the lame post-war orthodoxies preached by Germany and Russia down pat. WWI was a dreadful bloodletting (though WWII was worse), but it was fought for very good reasons. What they were, I hinted at when I mentioned that Germany had made itself an international outlaw. The fact is that Nazism is nothing but a distillation of ideological poisons that were circulating in Germany long before the war. Visitors in the late nineteen-oughties and early nineteen-tens were all astonished and rather horrified to find that the most friendly and courteous Germans simply regarded war as inevitable and their victory as equally certain, that they regularly denied any notion of international legality, and that their ideology had shrunk to a crude Darwinism with heavy professorial superstructures. The fact that 28 countries, each of which had within living memory been at loggerheads with many of the others, not only banded together to stop Germany but refused, even in the most desperate and deadly circumstances, to so much as consider surrender (I mentioned that the Russians were disposed to fight as far as the Urals and beyond, and would have, had Lenin and his gang of desperadoes not hijacked the nation); the fact that within each nation, hereditary enemies such as the Catholic Foch and the fire-eating atheist Clemenceau should feel that their ancient hatreds were nothing compared to the prospect of German victory; all this should tell you just how hateful everyone found Germany. It was not tribalism; it was loathing of the German ideology. The Alliance stood for international law and the sanctity of treaties. Germany stood for oppression, international lawlessness, the insignificance of "pieces of paper," and Social Darwinism, all imposed by the jackboot. And the assault upon the motives and morality of the victors, which is the first example in the modern age of the moral equivalence lie, was the first success in the German/Soviet alliance's Kulturkrieg upon the victors.

Posted by: Paolo at April 26, 2006 10:13 AM

Chatillon, I do think that the public needs to know a lot more about the Armenian genocide that it does now. It is a subject that has been unfortunately much neglected heretofore.

Posted by: Eliyahu at April 26, 2006 10:20 AM

Hi Paolo:

I'll take your comments and consider them, but for the moment I'm afraid that we shall have to agree to disagree, mostly because there are incongruities between what I know of history and what you're telling me, so there are many dots that I have yet to connect. Here are some of the reasons why.

Germany's entry to prominence on the world (European?) stage didn't happen until the rivalry between between Prussia and Austria was resolved in the first of the limited wars orchestrated by von Bismark. Prior to the unification of the German principalities under von Bismark, they were an amalgm of contiguous jurisdictions, sharing to some degree aspects of language, religion and culture after the first Reich was dissolved by that first Little Corporal. The French, you recall ran roughshod over Europe for twenty years. In spite of the furore created on the Continent by Napoleon's imperial ambitions, the German principalities gave the West much of the culture that we still recognize as fundamental to Western identity.

German unification was again challenged by the French in 1871, led by Napoleon's clownish namesake. France wanted no rival on the continent but failed to impose its will upon the unified German states. Wilhelm I was crowned Emperor of the Second Reich. His son, Friedrich III, as you know was related through marriage to the British royal house (itself of German origin and influence, e.g. Prince Albert) and was influenced by the liberal leanings of his wife, the Princess Royal Victoria.

So far, so good. Nothing particularly sinsiter in any of this, but tribal? In the sense that nationalism appears to me to be made from the same cloth as tribalism, yes. Concentrating on European history and not the Islamic problem that has plagued to world for centuries, German imperial and colonial aspirations in the late nineteenth century were no different than those of the French (mostly in Africa), the Belgians (mostly in Africa), the Italians (mostly in Africa), the Dutch (mostly in Indonesia), the Russians (mostly in central Asia) or the British (mostly everywhere).

Germany's rise to power was fast and frightening to the established powers, particularly France and Britain, to the extent that those two powers buried their traditional (tribal) enmity to oppose Germany, together with Russia: the Triple Entente. Germany made nice with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their traditional enemies, the Turks, to counter-balance this. My favorite description of what later happened in 1914 is provided in the opening chapter of "The Good Soldier Schweik." Insanity.

Here's where I would be glad for your guidance in reading: where was German social attitude faulty or substantively different than that in the populations of its rivals? Germany's collective behavior up to this time seems hardly worse than that of other European polities. I do not think that colonialism is a good thing, although there are degrees of tolerability forms of this injustice. Beyond that, please recall that the British were minutes away from declaring war upon Germany when they received Germany's declaration of hostilities. The German violation of Belgium's neutrality is the first outrage that I am aware of. But was the bayonetting of Belgian babies by German troops, as reported eagerly by the British of the time, ever substantiated? If so, how wide-spread was it (systemic and systematic)? If not, what does this say about the MSM of that era? Was there perhaps some British "tribal" bias? And what lessons do we bring forward to our time?

My point is this: there is a profound human susceptibility to seek justification, within their personal and collective existence. Humanity shares this foible (I call it "tribal" but somebody who knows what they're talking about might have a more appropriate term). The great tragedy of both world wars is that the putative Judeo-Christian West lay down its birthright of conscience and perosnal responsibility, indeed if they had ever been fully embraced. These issues are going to be pushed evermore to the fore as the half-truths, outright lies, murder and deceits of the jihadists are likewise pressed upon the world.

Posted by: Chatillon at April 26, 2006 2:07 PM

Chatillon: I do not have the time to answer all your questions here, nor is this the proper forum to do it. Robert has my private e-mail address and identity, and I will e-mail him to authorize him to release it to you. We can continue this in private, or on my online diary/blog, which is in my actual name. Let me just say that what I put down in writing I regard as true, and I am disposed to defend it.

Posted by: Paolo at April 26, 2006 2:33 PM

Thanks for your patience and courtesy, Paolo.

Posted by: Chatillon at April 26, 2006 3:00 PM