Islamophobes are Insane

Despite the fact that I have some critical views about Islam myself, I continue to hold that the Islamophobes of the world are insane. They make no sense at all. Another commenter noted recently that the Hindutvadis of India (really nearly all middle to upper class high caste Hindus) have a hatred of Islam that makes no sense whatsoever and is completely irrational. I would agree with that. The Hindutvadi commenters on this blog have a truly irrational hatred of Islam.

To some extent it is true that Islam is a menace, and it is a violent religion, but it’s mostly a problem in the various sandboxes that are ruled by Islam. In other words, Islam is mostly a problem for Muslims and not for the rest of us. To the extent that it is a problem for the rest of is is mostly due to the fact that we can’t seem to stop attacking and killing Muslims. As long as we do that, they will wage defense or revenge based Islam on us.

The truth is that that most Islamophobes are motivated by reaction. There are very few progressive Islam-haters (there are some in Afghanistan and Iran) because Islamophobia is not a progressive value.

Almost all Islamophobes in the West are motivated by political reaction. In other words, they are beasts themselves – they are the very beasts that they accuse the Muslims of being. In Europe, Islamophobes are associated with the most reactionary elements of Europe – European and even White nationalists. They are also associated with all of the fascist and quasi-fascist parties in Europe.

They are strongly aligned with Zionism, a vile imperialist and settler-colonial fascist project that occupies and conquers Arab lands and has expansionist aims on the rest of it.They are politically reactionary, and many of them have begun to rail against socialism and the welfare state and have started to rail for radical neoliberal economics. In the UK, they are responsible for Crusade-like invasions of Muslim lands in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Russia it is much the same, except the Islam-haters are even worse – more racist, more fascist and much more violent. They are associated with a violent project to deny the majority-Muslim lands in the Caucasus their right to self-determination, which is their inherent right after all. Instead, like Crusaders of recent European colonizers, the Russians have made much of the Caucasus into colonies. In the meantime, they committed genocide against the Muslims of Chechnya.

In Israel, the Islamophobes are associated with the most fascist,  backwards, conquering and expansionist elements of the Jews. I should note that these same elements hate Christians and non-Jews about as much as they hate Islam. These are the monsters of the Jewish people, as wicked as they accuse the Muslims of being. This group is also politically reactionary, and is responsible for imposing radical neoliberalism on Israel which has resulted in many social problems, including widespread homelessness.

In Lebanon, the Muslim haters are associated with the Maronite Christian Falangist movement, a true fascist movement that has the distinction of being the first movement to bring European style fascism (like the Nazis) to Lebanon. The founders of this movement worshiped Hitler. This is a true monstrosity, a blood and soil fascist movement that has deep roots in Maronite society. In addition, this group is politically reactionary, supporting the closest thing to radical neoliberalism anywhere in the Arab World.

In India, the Muslim haters are the most poisonous, backwards, fascistic and casteist elements of Indian society, strongly associated with the high caste Hindu elite. There is a lot of evidence that the hatred of Islam by Hindutvadis is because the Muslims humiliated the high castes and removed them from their position of privilege in Hindu society. This is an extremely fascist movement whose leaders also worshiped Hitler. They are responsible for a genocide against Muslims in Gujarat in which 2,500 Muslims were slaughtered with state support.

This movement is associated also with radical neoliberal economics and hatred for socialism and the poor and lower castes of India. It is an elite movement designed to deepen poverty in India, enrich the high castes and restore the high castes to their position of privilege which they felt was denied them in a movement since Independence. They represent the most primitive and barbaric elements of Hindu culture, which is backwards, cruel, amoral  and parasitic anyway. These are the monsters of India and the monsters of the world, a danger to the SubCon and to the rest of us as they spread out like a plague around the globe. They are every bit as vicious and monstrous as the Muslims they hate so much.

The bottom line is that Islamophobes are simply bad people.

Everywhere it exists on Earth, it is associated with idiotic and barbaric religious fundamentalism, either Jewish, Christian or Hindu. It is generally associated with the most reactionary elements in every society, and it usually wishes to impose radical rightwing economics on society in the form of neoliberalism.

This is an elite project designed to enrich the top 20% of society while impoverishing when it is not starving or killing off the bottom 80%. It has been responsible for many millions of deaths in the last few decades, mostly via denial of medical care through mandated state kickbacks. In some societies like Israel, Europe and Russia, it is associated with racism in the form of ethnic nationalism – Jewish nationalism in Israel and White nationalism in Europe and Russia.

If Islamophobes were decent people themselves then we might have a movement to counterpoise the backwards and violent nature of Islam. Instead they are just as bad as the Muslims and in fact in many cases, they are probably even worse. They vastly exaggerate and lie about Muslims and Islam, and ridiculous overplay the dangers associated with this religion, which is mostly a danger to its own adherents anyway.

Hindutva and the “Unfinished Partition”

Aakash is an interesting Indian Hindu living in the US who rejects much Indian Hindu culture as insipid, toxic and diseased, yet still embraces a Hindu identity. He also admits that caste is crap and it needs to go. Surely a casteless Hinduism could be formulated since all religions are human creations.

If religions are human creations, than Hinduism was created by man. If so, it could be constantly molded by men too.

Many religions have been through Reformations. The horrors of Early Christianity are long gone and probably never to return. Not long ago, non-Catholics were told to convert or die. That’s not happening anywhere no, and there are no Inquisitions on the horizon either. Lands are no longer conquered by Christendom, nor are heathens put to the sword. Christian heathens are not burned at the stake. Religious authorities are no longer in charge of Christian states via the throne or otherwise. In all of Christendom, separation of church and state is nearly complete. No Christian justifies slavery anymore or owns slaves.

If Christianity can go through a Reformation, Hinduism surely can too since it is generally less divinely inspired than Christianity.

Aakash:

Robert

While the attempt to finish partition is indeed a primary driving force for the Hindutvas, the bigger picture needs to be understood here.

Ask yourself the question: was the partition of India on religious basis fair or Justified? If anybody believes that it was, it was the most unfortunate event in the history of Hindus. The fact that by force (as in west Pakistan) or genocide (east Pakistan), Hindus have been eliminated in Pakistan and Bangladesh while Muslims still to this day have a strong presence in India has to hurt even the most rational of Hindus.

Ironically, this is where the Hindutvadis are barking up the wrong tree. Instead of focusing on the objective to expose the “nations” Pakistan and Bangladesh and showing solidarity with whatever number of Hindus that remain there, their hatred extends to all Muslims in general including Arabs, Turks, Persians etc who have nothing to do with present day India.

Hindutva movement is at best a display of high entropy randomness swinging from hating Muslims in general extending all the way to couples holding hands (most of them being Hindus themselves). There is no identity and will never be one simply because it has zero left wing element to it. Majority of poor in India are Hindus themselves and the Hindu right wing does nothing for them.

If, on the other hand, you believe (like I do) that the partition of India, if at all, should have been based on a more logical basis such as language/region, I urge you to start writing articles calling for the elimination of the rogue state of Pakistan and the shitty country that is Bangladesh.

I can understand Hindutva rage and where it is coming from. But the way they go about their business lacks reason and subtlety to say the least. This is in line with other South Asian crazies like Muslims.

Aakash is absolutely correct. The partition in a sense was a crime. Hindus were more or less ethnically cleansed in one way or another from both Pakistan and Bangladesh. In Pakistan, they were mostly just made to disappear via emigration and conversion to Islam (some of the conversion was pretty much forcible). In Bangladesh, Pakistani Muslims and their often Islamist collaborators massacred 3 million people, maybe 80% if whom were Hindus. It was truly a genocide. There are about 13% Hindus left in Bangladesh, and they are subject to regular serious persecution whereby their neighborhoods are burned to the ground and some of them are killed. It’s not quite Gujarat, but it’s nearly Kristallnacht.

Blaming Bangladeshi Muslims seems wrong as Bangladeshi society is horribly divided on this question. The more secular minded folks associated with a Congress-like party are outraged at the genocide, perhaps because a lot of Muslims were also killed. The more Islamist-minded mostly think the genocide was all well and good. An Islamist was recently put on trial for war crimes committed during the war, and this ignited passions in Bangladeshi society that have left a number of folks dead amid serious riots. Indian Hindus need to realize that a large section of Bangladeshi society thinks the genocide of 1971 was a horrific crime.

But on the surface, it does look unfair. Bangladesh and Pakistan were nearly cleansed of Hindus, yet there remains many Muslims in India. However, in the case of India and Bangladesh, the comparison is not a good one. India is 13% Muslim, and Bangladesh is 13% Hindu, so the proportions are the same, though the Hindus of Bangladesh look to be on the decline, and Muslims in India are set to rise.

One problem is that Islam always offers an out to the persecuted infidels, which does make Islam better than most forms of racism. In most racism, there really is no way out. In Nazi Germany, even converting to Christianity was enough to save a Jew as the persecution was racially inspired. One can hardly change one’s race at any rate.

Persecuted infidels in Muslim nations can always convert to Islam, and then the persecution will generally grind to a halt. This option is often heavily encouraged in Muslim nations as infidels are often under varying degrees of pressure to convert. Infidel females in particular are often kidnapped by Muslim men, raped and forced to convert. Intermarriage is another way as a Muslim man can marry an infidel woman and the children will all be raised Muslim, hence the infidel woman’s offspring are lost to the infidels. Female Muslims, the breed stock of Islam, are forbidden to marry out or if they do, the infidel man just convert. Islam gets the intermarried either way.

Muslims, no matter how they intermarry, end up having their offspring raised as Muslims. This is the sort of religion that is nearly programmed to multiply like a bacterium, a weed or an amphibian. In most societies, the Muslim population will tend to rise as the infidel population will tend to decrease. This simply another form of Islamic conquest, this one being the “jihad of the womb.”

I do not believe that Bangladesh or Pakistan should be broken up, at least not now. Pakistan actually needs breaking, but not until India breaks too. Neither one will split without or before the other, so neither will break up. If India breaks up, they lose to Pakistan. If Pakistan breaks up, they lose to India. Both nations are paranoid of the other, China and the US and they fear assimilation by outside powers.

The Saffron Brigade

Frightening video about Hindutvadis (Hindu Nazis) in India. Note how the Hindutvadi talks about sending all Indian Muslims back to Pakistan. This is the “unfinished partition” that the Hindutvadis are always talking about.

They talk about a “genocide” of Pakistani Hindus and imply that there needs to be similar treatment of Indian Muslims. The truth is that there was no genocide of Pakistani Hindus. The population did decline from 20% to 2% from 1947 to present, but the vast majority of them were surely not killed, though some were. Most simply converted to Islam (though there were a number of more or less forced conversions, often of young Hindu women). The rest simply emigrated to India.

This collapse of a minority in a Muslim state is typical of most Muslim states. The minorities are persecuted so much that over time, they slowly convert to Islam to get better treatment. In some cases, there is mass emigration, though historically this has not been typical.

In many countries, a Muslim minority conquered the land and ruled over a non-Muslim majority. Once again, over time, the infidel majority simply converted to Islam to avoid persecution. In a few places such as the Balkans, Iberia and India, this did not occur. Muslim minorities ruled Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Bulgaria in the Balkans, Spain and Portugal in Iberia and all of India for centuries though the populations remained either Christian or Hindu in the case of India.

It would be interesting to see why some non-Muslim majorities refused to convert to Islam while others did. Hindus do not have any special immunity to Islam. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, there was mass conversion of Hindus to Islam for some reason, while in the core of India, “the cow belt” and in the South there was little conversion.

Nor do Christians have special immunity to Islam? Neither do they. Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Egypt were formerly Christian lands that mass converted to Islam.

The pre-Muslim religions of Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, the Gulf, the Gulf, the Stans, Xinjiang, the Caucasus and Indonesia are not well known.

In Iran, the population was mostly Zoroastrian with some Christians mixed in. The Zoroastrians probably experienced one of the worst mass conversions to Islam ever seen for unknown reasons.

Indians and the “Diabolical Little Secret”

India Land of Rapes writes:

I have chosen my identity after many ugly experiences with Dirty Hindus, I am more comfortable with Muslims,Iranians,Arabs-Germans and French.

I admire Americans, I detest Hindu fake idiots and Chinese Copy cats with no originality .

Yes I realize there are a lot of problems with Islam. That much is so obvious. But on an individual basis, Arabs are so warm and friendly. Even Muslims in general are warm and friendly. Here in my town, we have many South Indians. Mostly Sikhs, but we also have South Indian Christians, Hindus and a few Muslims. The South Indian Muslims are very friendly!

The Christians are the nastiest of all, and the Hindus are extremely standoffish. 100% of the Hindus are Gujaratis – I do not know why that is. They are pleasant enough say behind the counter, but you cannot make friends with them in any way whatsoever. If you say anything about India, Gujarat or Hinduism, they just completely shut down and end the conversation and walk away! Often they have this evil little smile on their face like, “I see you are onto us and our evil, wicked ways!” Especially if you say something about caste, they get this diabolical little Satanic smile on their face like you have uncovered this evil little secret they have. Then they sort of walk away and end the conversation.

I know this Punjabi guy who is a very wealthy physician. I was talking about India and Punjabis once. Like most such people, he tends to shut down the conversation as soon as you mention his ethnic group for some reason. But somehow today we were talking. I told him that Sikkhism opposed caste, but nevertheless, many Sikhs practice caste anyway, and then I saw that diabolical little smile like the guilty devious look of a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar combined with the shit-eating grin of a cat with a bird in its mouth plus a sort of diabolical conspiratorial grin like you just uncovered someone’s evil little secret like their illegal stashed money account.

Indians are very strange people. Most people who act wicked will simply act terrible and then pretend that they are good. If you tell them they are wicked, they get very angry. A lot of Indians seem to know that their behavior is evil and wicked, but they either don’t care or they like to be wicked. It is very disturbing. Like a people in love with Evil. Like a Satanist or a sociopath. You wonder if Indian society doesn’t produce some sort of mass semi-sociopathic mindset.

A couple of the South Indian stores are now being boycotted pretty much by me due to their meanness and rudeness to me. One is run by Punjabis, and the other is run by Pakistani Christians.

Good Versus Evil, Film at 11

In the battle of Good versus Evil, who wins?

In Herman Melville’s works, Good and Evil often play a large role and they are pitted against each other. However, in many of his works, in the battle of Good and Evil, paradoxically, Evil somehow wins. This was one reason why his books were attacked as “immoral,” and “evil,” in his time. Melville was no Satanist. He was raised Christian, but his belief kept waxing and towards the end of his life, there was little remaining of it.

Nevertheless, he read extensively in the Bible, in particular, Song of Songs, Solomon and Ecclesiastes. All of these were written by or were about King Solomon, the son of King David. He also read extensively in the Book of Mormon. Biblical and other Christian religious allegories are sprinkled liberally throughout his books, in particular, the 600 page poem Clarel, about a journey to the Holy Land.

When Good and Evil go to war and Evil wins, this poses a serious problem for most religious people, in particular the Abrahamic religions which believe in an activist God. For if God exists and is an activist, when Good and Evil go to war, in most if not all cases, Good is supposed to win over Evil, as God is always thought to be stronger than the Devil. After all, no religion suggests that the Devil rules the world. All Abrahamic religions hold that God rules the world. The Devil tries to intrude and do his mischief of course, but when they go mano to mano, God ought to be able to deal with The Evil One quite handily.

Therefore, if there is a fight between Good and Evil and Evil wins, something has gone horribly wrong, and this poses a dilemma for most religious people. Melville interpreted this to mean either that there was no God at all or that if He existed, He was more or less sleeping on the job, and perhaps he ought even to be fired!

The religious have all sorts of explanations for how an activist God allows bad things to happen. They say he is testing us. They say that the Good people are not so good. This is reminiscent of how Puritanical feminists say Nice Guys (TM) are not really so nice after all, this is why women treat them like crap (and this is not the only way that feminists are similar to modern Comstocks). For instance, the Abrahamic Orthodox Jews said that the Jews rebelled against and defied God, and God responded with the Holocaust to punish Jewish rebellion. The solution is for the Jews to act better.

As you can gather, these explanations are quite weak when they are not grasping for truth and morally repugnant. I think we ought to just reject them all for now as lacking evidence and so strange as to seem false on their face.

So we move to Melville’s moral dilemma. We can either go towards atheism or agnosticism, or we go move into Deism. My father was actually a Deist, at least towards the end of his life, but he always hated Christianity and generally refused to go to church much to my mother’s chagrin. Deism was popular around the time of the US Revolutionary War, but it no longer has much popularity. After all, it is rather depressing to feel that you are on your own.

Another possibility is some sort of modified Deism. When I was working as a linguist for an Indian tribe, I asked a prominent anthropologist, Sylvia Broadbent, about the religious beliefs of the local Indians. They are now all fundamentalist Christians, but this is a modern thing. They also insist that they believe in a Great Creator, but this is another modern addition, as I deduced after a while. After the Indians became Christianized, many Indians across the US decided that they believed in a Great Creator, a notion that they took from Plains Indians tribes who apparently did have this notion pre-contact.

Yet pre-contact, there is little evidence that California Indians were much more than animists who believed that the world was alive with magic and spirits which could be manipulated by those who could do so. They did believe in life after death. Souls went to the West, to the Land of the Dead.

However, there was little belief in an almighty God. Broadbent felt that there was some notion of a Creator God, but this was more Deistic than anything else. Broadbent described the theory as Deux Obtusa, or the Lazy God. This was sort of the idea that God created the world, but He has not done a whole heck of a lot ever since. He mostly just sits up there in Heaven taking bong hits. Every now and then, when he is not too stoned, he wakes up and intervenes in our world a bit. Then he goes back to the bong. I like the notion of a lazy God, and even though I am a Christian, this is the sort of a God that I believe in.

How can we reckon that Evil often defeats Good? We can say that we live in a naturalistic world, and bad things happen to good people, by chance more than by design. And in a naturalistic world, a lazy God could indeed exist.

Real Revolution Versus Fake Revolution

The Syrian Revolution as fake revolution.

I honestly do not think much of this Syrian revolution. Almost all of the revolutionaries are Sunni Muslim Arabs. Few to none of them are Shia, Alawite or Druze Arabs. There are almost no Christians in the ranks. And there are few to no Kurds in the ranks. In fact, the revolutionaries are hostile to all of these groups last time I checked. That’s why those other groups are not signing up. There have been many attacks on Syrian Christians, Shia and Alawites by the revolutionaries. Many from these groups have been kidnapped, beaten, tortured and murdered.

In a city of 50,000, all of the Christians were ethnically cleansed from the city. They received a “leave or die” order from the rebels. Many Syrian churches have been blown up or damaged by the rebels. The Druze are not signing up for the fight, and the Sunni Muslim rebels may not like the Druze very much. No doubt they see them as some sort of heretics or possibly even infidels.

The Syrian Kurds do not like the regime very much, as the regime has not been too kind to them to put it mildly. However, the regime made some huge concessions to the Kurds in recent days, and the regime has now vacated the Kurdish area and the Kurds are more or less in control of their own part of Syria. Why the regime vacated the area, I am not sure, but the Kurds are hostile to the rebels and maybe the regime just felt that the area was not worth fighting for.

A political party which is frankly the Syrian arm of the Turkish PKK has now taken over that part of Syria. The result is that Turkey has threatened to attack and occupy that part of Syria as it is serving as some sort of a PKK base. These threats have not been carried out. The Kurdish government in Iraq has refused to support their brethren in Syria as they are seen as too close to the PKK, and the Iraqi Kurds want to distance themselves from the PKK. The best description of the Syrian Kurds at this point would be to say that they are hostile to both the regime and the rebels. The rebels do not like the Kurds because the Sunni Arab rebels are Arab nationalists and see the Kurds as secessionists.

The revolution has a strongly Islamist character and has had it from the very start. Al Qaeda type groups now form a large part of the rebels. Al Qaeda types from Iraq and hardline Islamists from around the Arab world are going to Syria to fight in the “jihad.” It’s a jihad because they are fighting against the Alawi, who are seen as heretics by many Sunni Muslims. The fight is being manipulated from abroad. The rebels get much of their money and arms from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf Arabs hate the Syrian regime because it is made up of Alawites, who they see as heretics.

Turkey has also helped the rebels a lot for reasons that are not clear. However, they are Sunni Islamists who have an Alawi type group in their country that they don’t treat very well. Turkey is also trying to be seen as the light among Sunni Muslims and is attempting to gain points with them that way. The United Snakes is also involved because Syria is one of the pillars of the resistance front against the Zionist regime in Israel. Syria and Iran along with Hezbollah and Hamas make up the resistance front at the moment, although the Egyptian regime may be leaning in that direction. Lebanon is also a sworn enemy of Israel, but they are usually not thought of as part of the resistance front.

Iran is listed because they support Hezbollah and Hamas with arms. The Syrian regime helps ferret those arms from Iran to Hezbollah and also gives Hezbollah a lot of arms of its own. In addition, Syria is still a sworn enemy of Israel because Israel occupies Syrian land in the Golan Heights. It’s also said that Syria supports Hamas, but all they do is give refuge to their leaders. Qatar also gives refuge to Hamas leaders and no one talks about that.

Israel also continues to occupy Lebanese territory in the Shebaa Farms and makes all sorts of phony excuses as to why they can’t give it back. One of the excuses is that the land is really Syrian, but Syria says that even if that is true, they don’t want the land, and Lebanon can have it. Israel is such a disgusting country! This occupation is the stated reason for Hezbollah continuing existence. I really don’t see why Israel doesn’t give the land back to Lebanon to get rid of Hezbollah. I don’t get it.

It is true that another issue is three Lebanese villages that Israel conquered in 1948. Israel invaded far south Lebanon during this war and conquered three villages. They ordered all of the Shia Muslims out at gunpoint, and they went to Lebanon as refugees. I am not sure of their status now. The towns are now 100% full of Israeli Jews. Lebanon says she wants those towns back.

If the Syrian regime can be removed, one leg of the Syria – Iran – Hezbollah axis can be eliminated. The new regime will be Sunni Muslim and will be hostile to both Iran and Hezbollah since Iran and Hezbollah have both helped the regime during the war. They would have been hostile to them anyway though because Sunni Muslims in that region are notorious Shia-haters and both the Syrian and Iranian regimes are Shia.

With the new regime in power, Iran would no longer be able to supply Hezbollah via Syria. She might be able to supply them directly, but that might be pretty difficult. Iran would then be even more isolated in the region. Without the support of its main patron, Hezbollah may wither on the vine. Hezbollah has currently moved into Syria to protect some Syrian Shia villages on the border. The Syrian rebels have ordered the Shia residents and Hezbollah both to evacuate these villages. They refused to leave, and there has been some heavy fighting in the area lately. There have been many reports that Iran has advisers in Syria helping the regime. The reports have been hard to validate, but they are probably true.

So the whole reason for the US supporting Syria is part and parcel of US support for the Zionist regime in Israel. It’s just more “USraeli” foreign policy (the two countries can be seen as one merged entity that I call “USreal”).

Run of the Mind – Book Review

Repost from the old site.

I received this book, Run of the Mind, by Vijendra Rao, to review and frankly, I was not expecting much. Many of the writers I read on the net are ok, but many are also flawed in some way or another. Plus, I am hard to please as far as writing goes, being a severe critic, especially of my own work, the result of which is a chronic case of writer’s block.

So, I was expecting no more than a mediocre to average text. When I received some advance reviews of this book, raving about a “literary genius” and “the voice of the new India” and “a great writer”, I was still cynical. I figured these were friends of the authors who were engaging in the usual hyperbole, and I don’t like hyperbole in book reviews.

But when I started dipping into this book, I was just stunned. This was some really fine writing here! As I turned the pages, I was often dazzled by his style and a glimpse into a brilliant and wise mind at work. Various influences come to mind, including Milan Kundera. At his best, Rao can actually be compared with Kundera.

There was something else here, metaphysical wisdom, the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of the India. We here in the West can get awfully arrogant. But when it comes down to it, people are the same everywhere.

And when it comes to the really important questions in life, the philosophical questions about morality, the meaning of life, death, the timeless truths of the human experience, all of our Western science has really taught us very little. For centuries, Christianity was actually a block on the study of the deepest questions of our existence.

But in the East, where Buddhism and Hinduism encouraged spiritual exploration rather than thwarting it, I think humanity has progressed further on the metaphysical wisdom scale. As modern science tests out such Eastern mysteries as yoga and meditation, we are learning that these funny folks with dots on their heads and thousands of Gods have really been onto something all of these centuries.

As one who believes in the superiority of the West, I found this book a humbling experience. Even most Leftists are ethnocentric. Reading Run of the Mind and seeing how the Indians have done an end-run around the scientific West in terms of wisdom and gleaning the meaning of the timeless essences of the human experience was a challenge to my Western ethnocentrism.

I came away with a new-found respect for India, a much-maligned society that combines, paradoxically, outrageous poverty and oppression with the wisdom of ages.

Rao is an Indian journalist from Mysore, a large city in the state of Karnataka, in the South of India. He is a Hindu and a bit of an Indian nationalist, though not of the Hindu ultranationalist type. He is a Brahmin, but is not a casteist.

In this book, we see the injured pride typical of Indian and Chinese and Arab nationalists, the pride of what were once the greatest cultures on Earth, since surpassed by the West.

High-caste Hindu nationalists like Rao tend to be hostile to British colonialism, but that feeling is not universal amongst Indians. The Brahmins were insulted when the British told them their culture was backwards and demanded that they change it.

On the other hand, lower-caste Indians and especially Dalits often think colonialism as the best thing that ever happened to India, for it directly attacked the caste system as cruel, backwards and uncivilized. As you can see, hostility towards British colonialism is not universal at all amongst Indians.

Rao’s book is a series of essays he wrote for Indian papers that he worked. Given the often-dazzling prose, it is amazing that he often banged these out in the hour or two before work at the office in the morning.

Although gourmets of fine writing like me can appreciate this book as merely an exercise in great writing, most non-Indians are likely to find this book alienating. The subject of most essays is situated in modern Indian society, with references to Indian politicians, actors, musicians, authors and Hindu Gods. If you don’t know these topics, you lack a frame of reference.

The subjects of a number of these essays are located specifically within modern-day Mysore and Karnataka. For these reasons, I feel that this book will be of most interest to Indians, especially Indian expats in the US and Britain, and in particular those from Southern India, especially those from Karnataka and Mysore.

On the other hand, anyone who appreciates metaphysical and philosophical wisdom and wonderful prose may also want to dip into this delightful book, as one savors and admires a glass of fine wine.

Rao, like many great writers, is not an easy writer at all. Hemingway he is not. Quite a few times, I found myself having to reread sentences to figure out what he was trying to say. Those who enjoy stimulating their minds with mental puzzles will appreciate the workout, others may just be frustrated and put the book down in exasperation. Depends how one likes one’s prose.

Run of the Mind is unfortunately available only as an e-book at the moment, but it is still an affordable $12. Rao’s work is as good as, and often better than, many authors crowding the shelves of our American chain bookstores. This author deserves to be bound, published and on a shelf. Interested publishers and agents may contact Rao via me through the email address on this blog.

The Run of the Mind e-book can be purchased here, at White Cottage Publishing, for the moment.

The best way to give you a feel for this book is to excerpt some wondrous tidbits from it, reprinted below:

*****

The more the ego is sought to be dressed with the robes of exclusivity, the more naked it stands.

*****

Why does wisdom elude us? Just when we have felt we are ascending, we slide. It is a tempting need of the soul to fly free of the body that has got habituated to harlotry. All of us are accustomed to hosting such transient nobility as our mind’s guest.

It is he in whose mind nobility has found a permanent home that gets through the life’s examinations. Is it any wonder than that the number of candidates succeeding in this tedious examination is so few? The examination is undoubtedly tough, but it is an examination where we are allowed to be accompanied by the guide.

*****

Belief in the mortality of doctors is a sure way of gaining freedom from the fear of death. In this state of fearlessness, love of life sustains the will to transit into non-life.

*****

The rat race for power has wiped out the ideological distinctions of our political parties and reduced their leaders to one mangled mass of unidentifiable bodies without life, soul or character. … the need felt in secular circles (of intellectuals, not politicians) for propagating secularism has the similar potential to reduce India to a land of cultural zombies, uniform in their lack of distinctness.

*****

Mysteries appear most enchanting when not disrobed of the shroud of non-inquisitiveness. Probing quest of the senses and the mind divests phenomena of their element of mystery and parades them shamelessly as naked facts, insipid shreds of information and commonplace knowledge.

*****

Greed kicks reason out of its habitat.

*****

Mangoes don’t seem to smile any more. Or, do they? They pluck the fruits and incubate them. Why young mangoes, even children hasten to maturity prematurely these days. They are plucked from their childhood and subjected to treatments with a view on the yield.

*****

Absence of commercial activity means not only innocence and longer life, but also no knowledge or need for arithmetic. Where there is no arithmetic, there is no counting. No counting results in birthdays not being kept track of. Where there are no birthdays, there are no annual reminders of the wear and tear of life. The time one gains by merging with nature is both relative and absolute.

*****

Time, like light, exists as both wave and particles. We don’t feel that the person who borrowed money from us has done us justice in returning the amount in installments, whereas his timely repayment in one large chunk – just the way he borrowed it from us – gives us immense satisfaction.

This is the difference between living in a city and living on the countryside. Time, broken into so many fractions over the day, and over a life span, does not mean the same when spent in a village in its undivided whole.

*****

LIFE, the eternal journey through space and time, also seems a race against them. Much of man’s inability to be elsewhere when he wants to be, and his sheer mortality, are both absolute limits that space and time place on his existence.

*****

Man, in turning the middleman in celestial transactions, has put a spoke in the water cycle’s wheel.

*****

Knowledge is the veil of the ignorant.

*****

The torch that the heart holds out to light memory lane is not bright enough to illuminate the path. It is like an arduous drive in insufficient light through an unpaved way on a moonless night.

*****

Sorrow has lost its intensity. The mind pathetically attempts to relive those intense moments. Like the woefully futile effort of the lover to maximise the benefit of coition; like the banal attempt of an incomplete soul to reap a higher quality of meditative yield.

*****

How we crave for solitude and when solitude is granted, we take liberties with ourselves! We drop our guard and shed all inhibitions. We become our true selves. When we are alone we have nobody before whom to guard our image.

The heavy payload of sin is launched on to the space vehicle of solitude and with the power of our greed as the fuel, is dispatched on to another orbit, outside our mind. But, the guilt is all the time circling around us like the satellite propelled by the negative energy that we keep emitting all through our lives. Thievery is a very private act. Solitude is its only accomplice.

*****

Modern existence has left us with malnourished sorrow, a peculiar state characterised by a sense of latent incapacity for feeling. It is not happiness alone that we always feel is not enough; the shallowness of our experience of sorrow leaves us unfulfilled as well.

*****

New Year resolves are marked by a pronounced denial of warranty. The dead weight of the discarded resolutions is lighter only than the guilt that their discarding induces. Drinks are gulped less in celebration of ushering in the New Year than in downing the guilt associated with the celebration of nothingness which, every preceding year, to most of us, would mean.

*****

Anti-neocon Book Scuttled

According to the rather dubious Wayne Madsen Report, planned English and French editions of a book written by German journalist Jürgen Cain Külbel, “Mordakte Hariri,” (first published in German, then in Arabic) have been scuttled after it was attacked by Tony Blair, the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL) and various Israel Lobby-linked groups in the US, Britain, Israel.

The USCFL is a neoconservative-funded organization with strong links to the Israel Lobby. Its main players are Lebanese Maronites who have fled Lebanon and are linked to the former Phalangist Catholic fascist forces in Lebanon. When one talks of the “poor Christians in Lebanon” it is useful to note who exactly we are talking about.

Unfortunately, many of the Lebanese Catholic Maronites are associated with a reactionary, fascist-like grouping called the Phalangists. This group is loosely modeled after Mediterranean-style Catholic blood-and-soil nationalist fascism of the Greek, Mussolini, Salazar and especially Franco types.

As the Angry Arab said of one of the most prominent Phalangists, Pierre Gemayal, who was recently assassinated, his family (the founders of the Phalangists) did more than anyone else to bring fascism to Lebanon.

The Maronites are apparently not descended from the ancient Phoenicians as their blood and soil crap would have it but instead are descended from an Arab tribe that resisted the conversion to Islam and moved to Lebanon around 700 years ago. Although they are culturally Arabized and speak Arabic, they often refuse to be called Arabs and regard it as an insult.

Many of them spoke Aramaic until 200 years ago or so. They tend to live in the mountainous center of Lebanon. Centuries of resistance while hiding in their mountain roundabouts, against Muslim aggression and attempts at forced conversion have radicalized them in an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim manner.

When the Crusaders invaded the region centuries ago, tragically, many of the Maronites sided with the invaders against their Arab brothers. And so it has been ever since. The Maronites have always looked West, not East, and saw themselves as part of Europe, not the Arab World.

This shows even in their religious affiliation – linking with Rome instead of the Eastern Orthodox as many Eastern Catholics have done. The arrival of Israeli Jewish settler-colonial invaders in Palestine was cheered by many Maronites, as they were seen as a European colonial group injecting European culture and values into the Arabized and Islamicized region.

Many Maronites, instead of resisting the colonization of Lebanon by the French, sided with the colonizers along with many other Christians and Jews in the Arab World. The very state of Lebanon was lopped off of Syria by the French in order to create a fake “Christian state” where one had never existed.

Syria and pan-Syrianists have resisted this severing of the motherland ever since. The purpose of this diversion about the Maronites is not to bash them, but instead to regard them as the inevitable victims of history. There is another way to be a Christian in Lebanon, and not all Maronites have gone the way of the Phalange.

Other identities are possible – it is not necessary to wallow in fascism. The Greek Orthodox have embraced a form of pan-Syrianism that, while problematic, is at least anti-imperialist, pro-Arab and patriotic.

Anyway, back to the book. Külbel’s book strongly suggests that former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated not by Syria but by neoconservative elements trying to spark a civil war that in Lebanon that would ultimately benefit both Israel and the pro-Israeli Phalangists.

This theory is highly dubious. No one knows who assassinated Hariri. The killing is being blamed on an obscure radical Islamist – and a strange Islamist group claimed responsibility for it – but the argument is that the Islamist was duped by Syrian intelligence. This “patsy” argument is currently not proven.

Possibly Syria did it – I would not put it past them – but the evidence is not really there yet. Hariri signed on to the imperialist and Zionist plot known as UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which threw Syrian forces out of Lebanon and more importantly, demanded that Hezbollah disarm its forces.

Syria has one main objective in the region – the return of the Golan Heights illegally stolen by Israel in the 1967 War. In pursuit of that goal, it funds Hezbollah as a means of keeping up the heat on Israel.

Syria will sell out everyone and everything – Arabism, the Palestinians, the works, to get the Golan back. 1559 would have resulted in the loss of Syria’s last card in its deck to get back the Golan. By signing onto 1559, Hariri may have signed his death warrant.

Madsen reports that neoconservative propaganda efforts against Western journalists are run out of numerous blogs. In particular, GIYUS (Give Israel Your United Support), funded by the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) was singled out.

A pro-Israeli Lobby cabal has also been revealed as operating in the German media, including Der Spiegel, Die Welt, and the NTV network (a CNN affiliate). Victims of their character assassination charades include Elfriede Jelinek (a Nobel laureate for Literature), actor Sir Peter Ustinov, and singer Cat Stevens.

For Starters, Let’s Have a ‘Reality Show’ That’s Really About Reality

Repost from the old site. This is basically a guest post by a young female college student in the US. It takes on Jews in a pretty serious say, so prepare yourself. My comments in bold brackets.

I Don’t Hate the Jews, I Hate Everyone, published in February on this site, was one of the most widely read and linked articles to have appeared on this blog so far. It’s been read over 2000 times so far.

Although it was published seven months ago, I continue to get hits for it to this day, and it is still being linked. Hotly controversial, the piece was vilified by many as anti-Semitic, while others praised it as anti-racist.

This dual view of the piece was exemplified by a spate of recent Indymedia posts of the article. Some of the commenters praised it as an anti-racist piece, and it was filed under “Anti-Racism” at one Indymedia site. Of course, that is how the piece was intended.

On another Indymedia site, it was attacked as “racist garbage” (probably by a Jewish commenter) and it was placed in the Hidden category as a violation of the terms of the site.

The fact that a single article can be portrayed as either anti-racist or racist, depending on one’s POV, illuminates how hard it is to for humans to objectively define anything, which is exactly what semiotics, poststructuralism, Derrida and the rest were getting at.

The article focused on a group of British former liberals and Leftists who have formed a movement that I called the “Pro-War Left”. Basically, the PWL is a British corollary to the US neoconservatives, albeit with some differences in etiology, political orientation (more leftwing), trajectory and history.

To this day, interestingly, there has not been one other article anywhere in the worldwide media that has explored the “British Pro-War Left” as a corollary grouping to the neocons.

I continue to receive mail about this piece. I don’t usually publish mail, but a recent mail I received about the piece had so many nice points that I have decided to publish it, albeit with my own comments interspersed. I will call the author “Anonymous”, since I don’t know if she wants her name published. The author is a young female US college student.

Here goes:

In regards to race, I personally don’t believe in the concept. There is no defined line along the spectrum of people to warrant such a dangerous theory, really. We could even go so far as to say each one of us is our own race making the whole point moot, and it is.

[RL: I don't agree. Clearly, one can make a case for 12 different races: Asian, East Indian, Caucasian, American Indian, Black, Pygmy, Hottentot, Negrito, Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian and Aborigine. Really, we could probably make even more if we want to start splitting.]

The concept seems to have been invented by some Europeans to make it easier to gain support in order to colonize, subjugate and enslave people.

[RL: Whether or not the modern concept of race was invented by Europeans in the 19th Century or not is not all that relevant, as humans seem to have been making distinctions like this for thousands of years.]

However, whether it’s a fact or not, we must acknowledge it because it’s with us, and I refuse to play the game that we should remove say, Affirmative Action, in an effort to erase the concept of race. That’s ridiculous. White men have had Affirmative Action since day one in this country by default, so it’s only fair that people of color and women have that protection as well.

[RL: This blog takes a nuanced stance on Affirmative Action. While I think it is necessary, it is not acceptable for less qualified members of certain races to be promoted over more qualified members of other races. And yes, this has been done a lot by the AA system.]

But back when race was being defined, with it came racism.

[RL: I will disagree and say that humans have always been racists; in fact, that the natural, normal state of man is a racist state.]

As race is a concept invented by “whites”, naturally the victims have always been people of color.

[RL: The victims of human racism have always been simply the "Other", which often was something as simple as the "tribe over that hill over there".]

The people of color also happened to live in lands the “white” people found attractive, and the darker folks seemed easier to enslave or conquer because of their lack of guns, germs and steel (yes, Jared Diamond).

And that byproduct called racism created movements like White Supremacy, Zionism, etc. All of these theories appeared noble and even Biblical, and all were based on the belief that the favored people were supreme in some way. The supremacism was portrayed in various ways, biologically, or even as victims (the “worst victims in history” theory used by the Jews, even though Zionism began long before WWII).

Americans, Israelis, Australians, white Africans, etc., are all just upholding the ideals of what is actually ongoing colonization. I do believe people are basically good, and the imperialists know this, so they must invent something that good people would support.

If you can tell a compelling enough story, and you know the components that are needed to make the story work, people will believe it. Religions are a testament to that.

Most people can’t or won’t believe their leaders are so capable of evildoing that they’d actually lie and kill for imperial reasons rather than “innocent” self defense. I mean, who wants to wake up one day to discover mommy and daddy are criminals?

I personally hated the day I woke up and realized that my leaders were doing this, although it didn’t actually happen in one day, but the realization built up to the point where there was one day when it all hit me. It dragged on for days, and now years – this realization that our government is an evil empire has made life very difficult for me to live here.

A pure capitalist society – a byproduct of ongoing imperialism and colonization – is absolute Hell. I feel that pain everyday, and most Americans feel it too yet they don’t realize that pure capitalism is the culprit. They think it’s just life. Capitalism is sold to us as one of the freedoms of democracy!

Funny thing is, you cannot have individual freedoms and democracy at the same time. If the majority doesn’t like your idea of freedom, you can’t have it! But any extreme system like pure capitalism is bound to be problematic.

People complain about dealing with bad customer service, or lack of choice of cable telephone services, or DSL/Cable connection, or bad customer service from conglomerates, or the loss of funding for social programs, the arts, education, or not having health care if they’re not employed by a corporation, or the ridiculous cost of college.

All of this is a product of pure capitalism, where maximizing profits goes above all else, even if it means people have to live in poverty or die. Oh well. They are just casualties of life, I guess, but as long as the corporation is making a profit, it’s all worth it, right? It gives people jobs, right? Except how do these corporations explain themselves when suddenly they send most jobs overseas?

Bizarrely, people still support that in some way or another, defending the company’s right to maximize its profits because, that is the American “dream” right? If only people would just stop and listen to themselves. They’ve been convinced that they don’t even deserve to be employed because it might get in the way of a company’s bottom line! That’s one amazing campaign!

I do want to preface the rest of this by saying that I don’t believe Jews would be naturally imperialistic or controlling if it weren’t for Israel.

[RL: Unfortunately, I am not so sure about that!]

The diamond industry is another story.

But support for Israel is one of those “things” that push most Jews to believe they are superior in some way, or at least more deserving. The campaign to support Israel is very well-done and extremely powerful.

In my efforts to learn more and more about Palestine/Israel, I discovered the fundamentals of colonization. They’re always the same, for the most part, so much so that it makes you wonder if there isn’t a book out there called Colonization Cookbook, Land Grab in Ten Easy Steps, and they’ve all used it.

They all do and say the same things – the European Christians said there were no people here in the Americas because they didn’t consider the natives human, the European Christians said what became Australia was terra nullius for the same reason, and the European Jews said that Palestine was a land without people for a people without a land, and on and on.

The colonists raised themselves to a higher status as a “race” and went from there. Agreements/treaties with the native people were continuously promised, then made, and finally broken.

The natives were eventually corralled into camps, reservations, Bantustans or ghettos, and the colonial violence against the natives continued until protests or a native insurgency eventually put a stop to it. But even after the colonization was halted, there was a tendency to start it back up again somewhere else, especially if our military-industrial complex is having a bad year or two.

Then the colonists either discover a new enemy or invent one. I do not believe Arabs/Muslims are behind the majority of our present day “terrorism.”

[RL: I respectfully disagree, but it depends on how you define terrorism.]

Regarding South Africa (SA), I have definitely studied that case. I was fortunate enough to meet a South African man who fought in the struggle and he told me lots of interesting stories. I also believe that the system of Apartheid and the State of Israel’s founding, both in 1948, is only slightly coincidental.

Cecil Rhodes and Herzl communicated and swapped colonization tips. And the largest stockholder of Rhodes’’ company, the DeBeers precious metals company, was Sir Ernest Oppenheimer. DeBeers is still owned by the Oppenheimers.

South Africa’s main industry at its founding was diamonds, and the diamond industry is now controlled almost entirely by Jews in diamond districts in New York, Amsterdam, Israel (20%), and other parts of the world. So the similarities between Israel and SA are no coincidence, it just remained hidden. Sadha, my South African friend, told me that it was the Zionist Jews who made dismantling Apartheid the most difficult.

I mean, why else did the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith work with and help the SA Apartheid government by spying and sabotaging anti-Apartheid movements in the US for many years? How did that help Jews fight “anti-Semitism”?

Of course, Israel and SA were partners for many years – note the arms deals, nuclear weapons, diamonds, etc. My theory is that Zionists finally agreed to let Apartheid fall because they needed the bodies to populate Israel, in order to fill the place because of the impending “demographics” issue.

[RL: Dubious. I realize that Jews have a lot of power in this world, but I don't think they have THAT much power, thank God, and it is not helpful to ascribe more power to the Jews than they already have. Anyway, I am not aware that a huge number of South African Jews headed off to Israel after the fall of Apartheid.]

A special city project was developed in Israel for the SA Jews, and many moved there. The SA Jews acted like desperate white folks, left to live amongst the now-freed savages.

[RL: It's a fact that many SA Jews, despite the fact that factions in their community played a significant role in dismantling apartheid, headed right out of SA as soon as Black rule took over.]

And despite the fall of Apartheid, the diamond industry is still exploiting Africans all over Africa.

Another issue is that Jews still control many industries that have immense power in this country and elsewhere.

For instance, they control the Entertainment Industry, the Mass Media, the Marketing of the Holocaust Industry, and US Middle East foreign policy (though not an industry per se). Such control is mostly to keep people’’s attention away from Israel until Israel carries out its goal of ethnically cleansing all non-Jews from Palestine, to make way for greater Israel.

[RL: I doubt it. The takeover of US mass media and entertainment by the Jewish elite (mostly accomplished from 1900-1930) was done for other reasons, not to keep people's minds off of Israel. In fact, at the time of the takeover, there was no Israel!

As far as why the Jewish elite decided to take over these industries and engaged in actual conspiracies to do just that in the US, that is a complex issue that is the subject of an entire post itself.

Jews took over the Holocaust Industry for a variety of reasons. Number one, clearly this is an issue of prime concern to almost all Jews. Another reason is more cynical - to facilitate Gentile support of Jewish causes and to perpetuate the notion of Jewish victimhood. Control over US Middle East foreign policy is simply being done out of sheer Jewish self-interest.

That's because Israel, the Jewish state, is central to US ME foreign policy. And let's not forget that the simple goal of making money for the Tribe runs like a river through each of these projects.]

Of all these industries, the Entertainment Industry shapes American opinion above and beyond any other. Just look at the way Arabs are portrayed in American films, or read the book Reel Bad Arabs by Jack Shaheen to see it spelled out for yourself.

Arabs are almost never portrayed in a positive light; the Arab is always a dirty, thieving, polygamist subhuman. Nowadays, he often plays the role of token terrorist. I am now taking a class called History of Film. In the reading for the class I came across this text:

Interestingly, the men who founded these companies (which are obviously still the major powerhouses in Hollywood) had a lot in common. They were all originally independent producers and distributors who climbed the ladder from nickelodeon operator and eventually outlasted the powerful MPPC.

Interestingly, they were all first generation Jewish immigrants with little education, yet in charge of the most significant form of mass entertainment in history enjoyed by a vastly Christian population.

Hollywood is still controlled primarily by Jews who are almost all Zionists, both liberal and right wing.

[RL: Actually, the Hollywood Jews are overwhelmingly male, secular, hedonistic, irreverent, and liberal to Leftist. Rightwing Jews are almost nonexistent in Hollywood.]

Take a look what happened to Vanessa Redgrave because of her part in the 1977 film, The Palestinians.

[RL: She was effectively blacklisted in Jewish-controlled Hollywood].

Due to Jewish control over Hollywood, that film was never shown here. Just try to get a Palestinian art exhibit or film shown in a major US city and see how far you get.

Paul Findley’s book They Dare to Speak Out deals with the Jewish Hollywood angle and many taboo topics along similar lines. The Jewish – Israeli Lobby is extremely powerful in the US. Recently, AIPAC has targeted college campuses. They are working closely with Hillel, the US Jewish college student organization. Both groups are promising to really ramp up the pro-Israel position on campuses this fall.

No group is perfect, and any group can be supremacist because we are all human; and I know that Palestinians are no angels, and neither are Muslims.

As an atheist, I could go on and on about the problems of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But let’s take a look at another imbalance: note that people have no problem discussing Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism, but why the taboo about Jewish Fundamentalism?

Jewish fundamentalism – that’s exactly what Zionism is!

[RL: I don't really agree. There are many types of Zionism - secular Zionism, religious Zionism, ultra-Orthodox Zionism. It doesn't make sense to wrap the entire Zionist enterprise in the Jewish religion.]

You can’t even mention the phrase “Jewish fundamentalism” without getting horrific looks; nevertheless, Jewish fundamentalism surely exists. The dirty looks are testament to the power of the Holocaust Industry. This Jewish special privilege is allowing Zionists to get away with murder.

Right now, the Palestinians are absolutely the victims of Judaism as an imperialist, supremacist movement AKA Zionism, just as the native peoples of the Americas, Australia, Africa and parts of Asia were victims of European Christianity as an imperialist, supremacist movement.

The native peoples of those lands did not leave their lands to colonize, subjugate and ethnically cleanse people on another land.

They didn’t steal others’ land and then deny it, claiming the land was vacant or, if caught in that lie, try to justify it by calling it bringing democracy to the natives or civilizing the savages, or, best of all, claim that God had given them the land, as both the European Jews and European Christians claimed!

[RL: I have to disagree here. The notion that only European Christians and Jews have been colonizing other people is an especially pernicious myth that is drastically in need of busting.

Fact is, colonization has been going on all over the globe for, as best we can tell, 1000's of years. The examples of non-Judeo-Christian colonization and ethnic cleansing are voluminous and cannot be summarized in this comment bracket. Perhaps a subject for another post?]

So at least since history has been documented, the Europeans have had the upper hand in conquest and destruction, whereas others were simply either fighting back or left in the wake and rubble of former colonization efforts. Examples of this can be seen in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, parts of Asia, various oceanic islands, and of course the US.

[[RL: Well, I would agree that Europeans have been doing some of the more prominent colonizing in the past 500 years, but the rest of the planet has been colonizing away on their own during this same period; it's just that their efforts were usually on a smaller scale.]

The American people have an obligation to focus on Israel right now, to bring it to the top of the list as the worst atrocity being committed on this planet side by side with the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, even above Darfur.

[RL: I am going to strongly disagree. If the Israelis had treated the Palestinians in the past two years as the Arabs are treating the Africans in Darfur, the following a catastrophe would have occurred.

A catastrophe that looked like this: 1.3 million out of the 3.9 million Palestinians in the Territories would have been ethnically cleansed to Egypt or Jordan or wherever. The Israelis would have killed 120,000 Palestinians, often with extreme cruelty.

The Palestinians would have been herded into horrible refugee camps, where scores would have died every day of hunger and disease while the world dithered and Israel deliberately obstructed relief supplies.

Israeli soldiers and armed civilians would have gone a mass raping spree. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Palestinian women would have been raped in this mass Rape-a-Thon. Many Palestinian women would have been murdered by the Jews after being raped.]

Zionists love to put the spotlight on Darfur because it helps their cause by pointing out that Muslims are always the bad guys, as though Christians and Jews have never done anything bad in the name of their religion.

The Israeli-Palestinian issue is of prime importance to Americans – the Iraq war is Israel’s war, and we’re fighting it for them and with them.

[RL: True in part, see my comments here on whether the Iraq War is "all about Israel" or not.]

US support is the only thing that keeps Israel afloat. By natural selection, Israel would have been gone by now if it weren’t for the extremely expensive American life support system and the very powerful Jewish Lobby.

So, although I hear people say Jews do not control the world, they do control as much of the world as they want.

[RL:I don't agree with that. My God, if the Jews were that powerful, God help us all!]

They don’t want the whole world, they just want Israel and they will work through the power of the US to hold back the world whenever it gets in the way. But what they do control is all it takes to control the world – America, America’s opinion, and America’’s veto.

As columnist Tony Judt wrote recently in the New York Times Review of Books, Israel is an anachronism, since colonization itself is archaic, yet there the Israelis are, milking an archaic system that should have been defunct by now.

And Americans are falling for it, because most have no idea what’s really going on over there. Why? Because of Zionist control of Americans’ opinions on Israel and the Holocaust by way of the Entertainment Industry, the media, and our Middle East foreign policy.

Because the Israel’s colonial system is an anachronism, we are starting to see some desperate measures by the Israelis. Like a passengers on a sinking ship, Israelis won’t give up the Israel ship until there is nothing left to hold on to, and they’’ll lie, kick, scream, and kill as it goes down, taking a lot of innocent people down with them.

And this scenario I cannot accept. Just as I would not have stayed silent during the Holocaust, or during the French colonization of Algeria, or during the US slavery or Jim Crow eras, or during Apartheid, neither will stay silent now in the face of Zionism, nor will I accept that Zionism is simply an aspect of human nature.

At some point, we humans to learn from past mistakes and rise above such greed and hate and become a better species, shouldn’t we? We have the capacity to do so; we just all need to take an active interest.

It’s unfortunate that politics has been lumped in with religion as a subject not fit for polite discussion. This is nuts. One of them, politics, represents direct reality.

[RL: Well, potentially, anyway. The Bush Administration has shown us that the marriage of surrealism and politics is feasible.]

The other, religion, actually represents mythology, not direct reality. But politics’ place as a taboo subject is certainly by design, and undoing that edifice may be the hardest task of all.

To start, I suppose we could have a reality TV show that is actually about reality.

The Catastrophe of the Iraqi Resistance

Repost from the old site. This is a good article, the first article I wrote on the Internet in December 2004. It was widely posted all over the Net and got a lot of comments on the Net. I believe it is still relevant today.

By any progressive standards, the Iraqi resistance seems to have morphed in recent days into one of the most unprincipled, unethical, fanatical, unreasonable, and reactionary resistance factions on Earth.

From a progressive standpoint, it would seem the Iraqi rebels have some principled grounds to fight for – we see them as resisting a US imperialist, neocolonialist and Zionist invasion of Iraq, one intended to subdue all of those forces in the Middle East resisting US and Israeli desires for total economic, military and political domination of the region.

The US invasion was completely contrary to international law, there has been massive colonization and outright theft of Iraq’s resources and economic base, and the US appears to be demanding the right to establish several colonial garrisons in the conquered land in furtherance of its imperial plans for the region.

We could go on and on about the larger political and economic schemes at play here, but that’s all been dealt with extensively by others. The point I am trying to make here is that merely from anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist point of view, the Iraqi resistance would seem to have a valid cause for armed struggle to throw the invaders and occupiers off their homeland.

Given the seedbed for a patriotic, nationalist, principled resistance the US has sown in Iraq, what have the Iraqi guerrillas done? In 2003, one could still hold out hope for some sort of a progressive, secular, nationalist armed resistance in Iraq. Through 2003, a plethora of resistance groups appeared, with new ones popping up every week or so.

A number of them were standard nationalist groupings, others stridently opposed sectarian politics, and a number were decidedly secular. Some of these groupings were associated with the former regime, but many were not.

They were generally made up of Sunni Arabs, though there were also a number of Shia Arabs, along with a few Kurds, Turkmen and even Iraqi Christians filling out the ranks. Further, there were a number of openly Leftist armed groups, though their numbers were small.

From the point of view of the Iraqi resistance, the best thing to do would be to cast aside all sectarian nonsense and try to unite as many groups as possible against the occupiers. This is what a sensible, intelligent, nationalist resistance does. Even in a region where tribal politics holds sway, the fighters close ranks in the name of “national unity”, as the guerrillas in Palestine have done.

The resistance should avoid imposing noxious, draconian law on the peoples under its control, proceed cautiously in the case of spies, and avoid trying to form local government. The case of Palestine is instructive for how a “national unity” resistance should be run.

Prior to the founding of Hamas in 1987, Islamists in Palestine were hardly involved in the armed struggle – they spent most of their time, believe it or not, arguing about how long to grow one’s beard. If one took up arms, one was regarded as a “Communist”, since armed struggle against Israel was for “Communists”.

There was a great deal of sectarian conflict in those days and the precursors to Hamas killed and wounded many Leftists, who the Islamists despised.

Around this time, Israel helped found Hamas as both a divide and conquer strategy against the Palestinians and to Islamicize the face of Palestinian struggle in order to make it less appealing on the international front. In many ways, this strategy was a complete failure. Before the founding of Hamas, the Islamists were attacking Leftists in Palestine all the time.

This internecine conflict came to an end soon after the founding of Hamas. After things settled down a bit, the Palestinian resistance moved to a point of equilibrium called “national unity”. Presently, open Leftists and Communists in the PFLP and DFLP fight side by side, with no problems whatsoever, with the hardline Islamists in Hamas.

Professors on Palestinian campuses write openly atheist and blasphemous tracts against Islam and are not harmed. One of the top figures in the PLO is an acknowledged atheist and no one bothers him. There are large marches against suicide bombings. Hamas eschews all local law enforcement and refuses to implement an Islamic dress code.

In Ramallah, one can walk into a bar and order a drink during Ramadan – the only place in the Arab World one may do this – and Hamas refuses to even issue an official denunciation. Hamas has never tried to shut down the numerous bars in Palestine.

Although Hamas is officially the Palestinian branch of Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas keeps this a big secret because the MB is so disliked in Palestine (it is regarded as an Islamic extremist organization). Most Palestinians are not even aware of the relationship. Last Christmas, Hamas members actually presented gifts and toys to churches in Bethlehem – an unthinkable act for a hardline Islamist group.

Hardline Islamist imams in Gaza have called for Palestinian Christians and Muslims to fight side by side against Israel. Palestinian Christians, and some Muslims, wear whatever they please, and miniskirts and not unheard of, even in Gaza. The Islamists don’t like Western dress, and comments are made, but Hamas has never tried to enforce any kind of Islamic dress code in Palestine.

Palestinian papers are filled with articles that many hardline Palestinians would consider to be openly treasonous – calls for calling off the armed struggle, for settling for the most debasing peace agreements with Israel, for peaceful struggle a la Gandhi, for disarming the armed groups, etc.

Through it all, Hamas and the hardliners generally keep their mouths shut and tolerate openly “sellout” positions, all in the name of national unity. Although the differences between the Left, the PLO and the Islamists are often very wide, there is not much discussion of these differences – they are all temporarily glossed over in the name of national unity.

PFLP and DFLP fighters, open Leftists, came out for the funerals of Hamas leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantissi and were seen fighting in the battles with the IDF that erupted afterward. Human rights organizations operate openly in Palestine, criticizing both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides, and the armed factions leave them alone.

Most importantly of all, all Palestinian factions have deep roots in their communities and do not brutalize the people they live amongst. In many places, almost everyone in the community is part of the resistance in one way or another, from young kids to women to old folks – everyone serves some function. You can’t get closer to the people than that.

Journalists, politicians, government workers, UN employees, aid workers, Christians, Druze, students, innocent civilians, even ISF volunteers, have nothing to fear from Hamas, the most radical of the Palestinian factions. Hamas has never been known kidnap foreigners for ransom, or to behead prisoners, much less to do so on videotape.

Hamas has never attacked a Palestinian school, store, campus, neighborhood, mosque, church, bar, press office, polling place, government office or hospital. Only informers for Israel have something to fear, and usually only after a serious investigation.

Even on the rare occasions when Hamas has taken an Israeli soldier hostage, the captives were treated fairly well, at least until Israel made the mistake of trying to “free” them. Hamas held them as ransom to try to get its own prisoners out of Israeli prisons.

When Israel refused to negotiate and stormed the hideout, the guerrillas executed the prisoner, which is a crime, but that is still not the same thing as wanton execution of all enemy prisoners or beheading prisoners on tape and peddling the gorefest around the Internet.

Even during the 90’s, while the PA spent much of its time arresting Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists as favors for the US and Israel, Islamic guerrillas generally refrained from attacks on the PA, a breathtaking show of self-restraint.

While controversy has swirled over the Palestinian terror tactic of suicide bombings against civilians, the world fails to recognize that almost all Palestinian attacks have been against military or settler targets in the Territories, and only a relative few attacks have occurred inside the Green Line.

Palestinian guerrillas have repeatedly offered to cease all attacks on civilians inside Israel, only to be endlessly rebuffed. One gets the feeling that Israel wants a suicide attack inside the Green Line now and again to malign the enemy and feed its propaganda machine. Even here, though, Palestinian terrorists have taken a nuanced stance.

Note the International Solidarity Movement’s (ISM) volunteers that swarm the Territories, standing by the besieged Palestinian people and helping protect civilians. Most people don’t realize that 1/3 of ISM volunteers are Jewish.

Generally, these Jews who have chosen to stand by the Palestinian people do not complain of racism from the supposedly Jew-hating Palestinians. How long would a Jewish civilian volunteer last in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, no matter how pro-resistance he was?

The point here is that all of these people – atheists, blasphemers, bartenders and bar patrons, women in miniskirts, “sell-outs” and compromise at any cost types, human rights activists, journalists, humanitarian workers, Leftists, Communists, feminists, Christians – are basically left alone!

There may be some words exchanged here and there, but in general, no one threatens them, puts a gun to their head, beats them up, attacks them, tortures them, much less kills them or chops their head off on tape. This is the intelligent way to run a principled, intelligent, nationalist resistance to a colonizer, occupier or invader.

Why? Because by fracturing and fighting amongst themselves, the resistance serves the needs of the occupier. Divide and conquer is the age-old colonial game and the smartest resistance movements try not to fall for it.

So what has the Iraqi resistance done? Exactly the opposite of the Palestinian resistance! Instance of uniting for national unity, they are presently pursuing one of the most reactionary, backwards, barbaric, sectarian, fascistic, oppressive, domineering, racist, tribalistic, and downright stupid agendas imaginable.

Allow me to elaborate: In late 2003, after the capture of Saddam, the resistance started moving towards Sunni Islamism and the pro-Saddam factions started drying up. Although there have been a couple of serious, and commendable, flare-ups of Shia nationalistic Islamism with the 2 Sadr rebellions in 2004, at the moment, the resistance is probably 90% Sunni Arab.

Furthermore, as 2004 wore on, the Sunni Islamists became more and more extreme, with a movement towards Salafism or Wahhabism, the most extreme Sunni Islam with roots in the Arabian Gulf.

Through 2004 the Leftist, nationalist, and unified front type groupings gradually seemed to give way to this extreme fanatical Sunni Salafist Islam, which now dominates the Iraqi resistance with its bleak, cruel, Medieval, puritanical, theocratic agenda.

With each passing month, more and more Shia are alienated from the resistance as the Sunni extremists attack the Shia with increasing regularity. In the areas they control, the Sunni fanatics have imposed the most backwards, insane, brutal and stupid version of Islamic law since the fall of the Taliban.

Even Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Sudan are not this harsh. Women are threatened and then shot dead for the crime of wearing blue jeans. Drivers listening to music are pulled out of their cars, beaten, and ordered to listen to religious music. Stores selling musical instruments and music and video CD’s are ordered to close and attacked when they don’t close. Hairdressers and makeup shops are ordered to close.

Women refusing to wear the hijab are threatened with guns and sometimes killed for not covering up. Alcohol stores are ordered to close and bombed when they don’t comply. Alcohol sellers are flogged in public. Men with long hair are given mock public trials where they are beaten and their “Western” haircuts shorn.

In recent days, the Sunni guerrillas around Latifiyah in the so-called Death Triangle have committed the ultimate outrage of shutting down the schools in the region, either in “solidarity with Fallujah” or because “schools are cooperating with the Occupation”.

One has to think hard to think of a resistance group in recent years that has shut down the schools of very same people they are claiming to “protect”. The damage that could be done to the Sunni youngsters in these areas from long-term school shutdowns is hard to calculate.

Journalists are kidnapped, beaten, tortured, shot dead, and even beheaded on tape in a frenzy of delirious rage that is hard for the sane mind to comprehend. News agencies are attacked for not sufficiently toeing the guerrilla line.

And in the ultimate crime and the nadir of stupidity, an aid worker who dedicated her life to the Iraqi people and hated the Occupation was kidnapped and brutally murdered for reasons only an asylum inmate could comprehend.

God forbid, even hospitals are attacked; in the most egregious case, after the idiotic bombing of a Christian church, in order to doubly punish the “infidel Christian” victims of the blast ferried to the hospital.

Execution of “spies”, “informers” and the like is utterly random and at the whim of the guerrillas, often without much evidence or the slightest hint of a proceeding.

The upshot of all of this is that in the areas where they Sunni fanatics hold sway, they are often feared and hated by a certain number of residents, Sunni Arabs themselves. Some residents are so fed up with guerrilla high-handedness and cruelty that they have welcomed the re-Occupation of their cities by US troops.

When a guerrilla faction is reduced to ruling and surviving through terror and not through the deep, passionate support of the people, that resistance faction is utterly failing in one of the primary rules of guerrilla war.

This rule, cited from Mao to Che to the finest war colleges on Earth, that the guerrillas need to gain support from civilian populations through good deeds and by the passionate commitment to the guerrilla cause of the people the guerrillas live amongst. The people’s support for the guerrilla works best when freely given and not coerced – terrorizing the people you claim to represent only gets one so far.

And how are the Sunni Islamists treating other religious groups, whom any half-sane Sunni resistance ought to be trying to enlist in a national resistance? Christians are threatened, ordered to close their alcohol, hairdressing and makeup shops and wear the hijab. If they refuse, they are killed.

Some Christians are being ordered to convert to Islam on penalty of death and there have been a few deaths in these cases. Iraqi churches, some of the oldest and most beautiful in the Christian World, have been repeatedly and shamelessly bombed.

It is true that many Christians have supported the Occupation in the past, but many others have not, and some large Christian parties have recently strongly opposed the Occupation.

The Shia are threatened, bullied, humiliated and ultimately ethnically cleansed. An entire region, from Abu Ghurayb down to Yusufiya and Latifiyah, is being systematically cleansed of Shia in an attempt to expand the Sunni Zone west of Baghdad.

Clearly, this is no better than what Israel does in their Territories. In Latifiyah, Shia mosques have been ordered to close and Shia are being thrown off the land so that Sunnis can take their farmland. Landowners renting to Shia are threatened with death unless they throw the Shia off the land.

The Sunni Islamists have begun setting up checkpoints in Latifiyah, on the popular Shia pilgrimage route between Baghdad and Najaf/Karbala. When Shia pilgrims arrive at these checkpoints, they are pulled out of their cars and ordered to denounce Ali, their patron saint. If they refuse, they are shot dead on the spot.

Other Shia are pulled out of their cars, beaten, and ordered not to come that way again. A Shia armed brigade, the Fury Brigades, was formed recently in Basra to deal with the blatant Sunni racism and oppression of the Shia in Latifiyah.

This Shia armed group recently fought a battle with Sunni Salafists in Latifiyah. Of course, US forces sat back and watched for a couple of hours while they bloodied each other. Obviously, it serves the occupier, the US Coalition, Israel, and imperialism in general to have various Iraqi factions fighting against each. This is exactly what the US and Israel want – the better to control Iraq.

The long-term strategy of the Israeli Right has long been that in order for Israel to survive its hostile neighborhood, Israel needs to become the dominant imperialist state in the Middle East and take control of the neighborhood by attacking its various hostile Arab neighbors (or getting the US to do it for them) and breaking up hostile Arab states into endlessly warring ethnic statelets.

This strategy was laid out in an internal Israeli document published in 1980 and uncovered and revealed to the world by the brave Israeli dissident Israel Shahak. Other more recent documents echo the same line, especially Securing the Realm in 1996 (The Securing the Realm document appears to lay the groundwork for the Iraq invasion).

The 1980 Israeli paper said that the optimal situation for Iraq, from Israel’s point of view, would be endless civil war between the various sects and ethnic groups, especially the Kurds and the Shia and Sunni Arabs. An eventual breakup of Iraq into unstable ethnic mini-states would be ideal.

A number of prominent American thinkers have also recently published on the benefits of breaking up Iraq into unstable, weak, easily controlled ethnic statelets. So, in their bottomless tribal stupidity, the Iraqi resistance is playing into the precisely laid plans and wildest dreams of their worst enemies – the Israelis and the Americans!

At the moment, the Sunni resistance has various goals. The first and only noble goal, from the point of view of an ideal resistance faction, is to throw the US Coalition out of Iraq. Beyond that, the Sunnis increasingly fear a Shia takeover in the coming elections in January. The Sunni Arabs have brutally ruled Mesopotamia, and later Iraq, for many centuries, lording it over the Shia Arabs in the process.

This 20% oligarchic elite, the Sunni Arabs, feel somehow entitled to lord it over Shia Arabs and Kurds like the worst feudal overlords.

A Shia victory in the coming elections would be the end of the reign of this racist ruling class Sunni elite, the end of their supremacism and domination of the other groups in the nation, and the end to their ill-deserved privileges obtained by brutally exploiting the other groups. The Sunni Arabs need to get used to the fact that they are a minority in Iraq.

If the Sunnis had any sense, they would be negotiating deals with the Shia at this very moment. Instead, like a typical ruling class thrown out of power, they are not giving up the tiniest bit of their illegitimate power and privileges without a vicious fight.

These deals would take the form of some sort of apology rituals by the Sunnis, such as statements of apology by the Sunni clergy for the crimes the Sunnis have committed against the Shia over the centuries, or perhaps pilgrimages to Shia mosques where prominent Sunnis essentially repent to the Shia for their crimes and ask for their forgiveness. The fact that these rituals would be largely symbolic is not the point.

In this sort of socio-political ritual, the symbolism itself can have potent sociological and political ramifications. The Sunnis could also cut deals for some sort of affirmative action or power sharing in government, a la Lebanon.

The Sunnis could point out that the Shia can hardly run the country without Sunni expertise and wealth. In return, the Shia would offer the Sunni Arabs, say, 20% of the seats in Parliament, 20% of the positions in the Cabinet, and perhaps one top-ranking post.

The basis for this deal would be that sharing power is preferable to civil war and that Iraqi Muslims ought to unite against the US and Israel instead of serving the enemy by infighting. Now that’s if the Sunni Arabs had any sense. But it appears that deep-rooted tribalism and bigotry and the towering arrogance and sense of entitlement of an ancient ruling class is trumping pragmatism in Iraq.

The Sunnis feel that they have enough power, guns and money to both throw out the US Coalition and then put the Kurds and Shia back under their boot, just like in the good old days. And they are willing to gamble a lot to get it all back. The game here is the zero-sum game.

Each group – Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Shia Arabs feels that either their tribe gets it all, or their tribe gets nothing. There is one winner who gets everything, and two losers who get zero. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Certainly sharing the wealth and power is preferable to endless civil war that only serves the enemy.

There are plenty of logical, historical reasons for Shia Arabs, secular Iraqis, progressive Iraqis, nationalist Iraqis and even Iraqi Christians to oppose the Coalition’s Occupation of Iraq. In 1920, all these groups rose up against the British.

At the moment, many amongst these groups are either supporting the US Coalition or sitting on the sidelines because the Taliban-like Sunni resistance either offers them nothing or seems even worse than the US. In this case, the US presence at least offers Christians, the Shia, the secular, progressives and even nationalists some modicum of protection against the nightmare of a brutal Sunni theocracy.

The leading figurehead for this insane, fanatical, brutal Sunni nonsense is none other than Mr. Zarqawi. This man is a certified sadist, a sociopathic freak with the mind of a serial killer who delights in personally sawing off the heads of live human beings for the whole world to see.

A few of his more famous victims have been utterly innocent in any sense of the word. Zarqawi harbors a crazed, pathological hatred of Shia Muslims and Christians in general, not to mention Sunni Muslims who are insufficiently fanatical. One could hardly think of a more backwards, terrifying, medieval, monstrous, criminal, racist pig of a man to head the Iraqi Resistance.

The US and Israel must be delighted. Zarqawi is a grade-A villain right out of the movies, with virtually no redeeming qualities and a mortifying, bloodthirsty, genocidal vision. The elevation of Zarqawi to the symbolic leadership of the Iraqi resistance symbolizes the depths of the depravity and lunacy to which the Iraqi Sunni Salafist rebels have sunk.

On the one hand, we have the ultra-reactionary, backwards, racist, corrupt, sexist, cruel-hearted, supremacist, chauvinist, criminal, fundamentalist, crusading Bush Administration and its imperial armies smashing around the globe picking fights and bullying the planet.

Lined up against them, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are some of the most backwards, ultra- reactionary, supremacist, chauvinist, medieval, fundamentalist, racist, corrupt, sexist, cruel-hearted criminals on Earth, offering a vision at least as vicious, animalistic, cold, primitive and fascist-like as Bush’s crusaders, if not much worse.

Rational people realize that religious wars are some of the stupidest of all possible wars. This war – the “War on Terror” – is a becoming a war between insane reactionary religious fanatics, one side waving the banner of Christianity (and more surreptitiously, Judaism), the other the banner of Islam.

The failure of the rest of the Earth, inhabiting the relatively sane terrain between these terrifying extremes, to offer a substantive vision between these two utterly bleak alternatives, is profoundly dispiriting.