We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
The way I see it, the Palestinian Götterdämmerung is at hand. Maybe this week, maybe this month, or maybe in a year from now, but it is coming. Israel will take the view that unless it either turns the West Bank into a vast concentration camp (literally not figuratively) on a pretty much permanent basis, or completely ‘ethnically cleanse’ it of its Muslim and Christian Arab population, because otherwise civil life within Israel will become completely intolerable.
Unlike many in the media and blogosphere who are gleefully baying for the streets of the occupied territories to run with Palestinian blood, I cannot add my voice to that ghastly chorus. Yet in fact I think that an apocalyptic end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just inevitable now but perhaps the sooner Israel gets it over with the better. I can see no prospect for a political solution. Thirty years of criminally stupid Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, aided and abetted by the Palestinian’s own psychopathic, inept and suicidal leaders, have worked to ensure that the forcibly collectivised Palestinian people are ‘ruled’ by a dependably duplicitous pathological liar with not even the prospect of a rational alternative leader, and so there is now no solution other than the effective destruction of the Palestinian people as a coherent society.
Yet the fact I regard the Israeli state as being a huge contributor to the horrors being visited upon themselves, that actually changes nothing. The time for blame has passed. It will come again but not for a while. Regardless of who is responsible, Israeli society finds itself where it finds itself and no amount of finger pointing will change one iota of the reality of that. People are now dying on a pretty much daily basis and in increasing numbers. Israel will either do what it must to survive or it will gradually bleed to death as a seemingly endless supply of Palestinians demonstrate that they have been given nothing to live for except hatred and revenge, and thus blow themselves up in Israel’s supermarkets, pizza parlours and hotels. That is the terrible reality. The other terrible reality is that when the IDF finally gets the order to kill Arafat, it will make not the slightest bit of difference. The killings will go on, the bombings will go on, the murderous hatreds will continue unabated until Israel shrugs off the last political restraints and finally by sheer force of arms imposes the quiet of the graveyard over the occupied territories.
Israel must do terrible things to survive and be damned for doing them. Do them they must… and be damned they must. Israel will survive but there will be no winners in this ghastly inter Semitic madness. Now today Tel-Aviv has been subjected to the insane horrors and thus individual Palestinians move a day closer to the end of their identity as a member of a distinct identifiable society, regardless of their personal responsibility.
I would just love to be completely wrong about this.
“Two important phenomena, of the same nature but opposed, are emerging at this moment in Asiatic Turkey. They are the awakening of the Arab nation and the latent effort of the Jews to reconstitute on a very large scale the ancient kingdom of Israel. These movements are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins”
From ‘Le Reveil de la Nation Arabe’ by Najib Azouri, written in 1905 
Not everywhere in the Islamic world forces women to hide under burqas.
 
As Jordanian society gradually evolves towards a more sophisticated extended order, I cannot think of an image more subersive and corrosive to the joyless Pan-Islamist world view than Queen Rania of Jordan: intelligent, elegant, articulate and Palestinian.
The murderers of Daniel Pearl live in another world. It is a world in which acts of deception that result in the murder of an unarmed noncombatant is seen as somehow heroic. It is an inverted world in which showing your weakness by murdering the would-be journalistic bearer of your own message is seen as showing your enemies that you are strong. It is a world with a chain of unfathomable logic that suggests that a course of action that murders a single fine but helpless American in Pakistan will change America foreign policy more to the murderers’ liking even when killing 3,000 helpless Americans in New York did not.
Well in the last one they are at least partially correct. By killing 3,000 Americans they filled the skies of Afghanistan with thunder and caused the destruction of their patron government, which was indeed a change in American foreign policy. And by killing this good man they move America closer to another change. Pakistan must now realise that they have no choice any longer but to crush the serpent in its midst with whatever force it takes or the United States will rightly do it for them in Daniel Pearl’s name. Just as these monsters filmed their foul acts of cowardice, so too we may soon see the deaths of his murderers, if not from the forces of the Pakistani state then through the green light of night vision scopes and guided bomb cameras of a vengeful America.
It is rather surprising, in the year 2002, to find someone expressing the thoughts noted in this article to which the Opinion Journal’s handy e-mail newsletter directed me.
The Associated Press reports on the proliferation of anti-Semitic propaganda in the Egyptian press, whose editors are appointed by the government. Al-Akhbar, one of the three leading dailies, published a piece last spring paying tribute to the 20th century’s leading evildoer: “Thanks to the late Hitler, who took revenge in advance for the Palestinians on the most vile criminals on earth, though we blame Hitler because his revenge was not quite enough,” Ahmed Ragab wrote.
I think someone should warn Mr Ragab of what we did to the Nazi’s the last time around.
Note: If anyone has a link to photo’s of the hangings of the Nazi war criminals, I would appreciate it.
Whilst I often agree with Glenn Reynolds over on Instapundit, there is one pet theory of his that he has mentioned several times before that I find baffling:
I still say that what’s going on right now is that the Israelis are dismembering the Palestinian Authority and all the various terror groups there so that there won’t be any significant resistance when the Jordanians move in and take over.
To which I say, and have said before, what on earth is in it for the Jordanians? Why would the Hashemites want to risk another Black September uprising against their Bedouin dynasty five to ten years down the road by adding 2 million pissed off, radicalised, impoverished Palestinians to an already complex Jordanian 5 million strong ethnic Palestinian/Bedouin mixture? Quite apart from the horrendous political and security nightmare the occupied territories would present to Jordan if they were handed back to them, they are an economic booby prize. The Jordanians have a GDP of about $3,500 per capita, hardly rich…compared to the West Bank Palestinians GDP per capita of about $1,500, which is truly dire.
So whilst it might well take the pressure off Israel, so what? I must ask Glenn to say what on earth is in this for Jordan? They would have to be bonkers to want the West Bank back!
[Update: Glenn responds on Instapundit. However I do not doubt that Jordan and Israel will continue to cooperate in security matters, just that Jordan will accept the poison pill of reacquiring the West Bank. The article to which Glenn links seems to strengthen my case regarding the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Jordanian monarchy for having the West Bank Palestinians within Jordanian borders]
Today’s Opinion Journal newsletter has an interesting quote from the Axis of Evil:
Iranian Ex-Prez: We’ll Nuke the Jews
Anyone who thinks Bush was wrong on the merits in calling the Iranian government “evil” should consider a speech ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani gave on the occasion of “Jerusalem Day” last month. He said that the Islamic world will soon have nuclear weapons: “On that day, the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.”
While his statement is true as far as it goes, he neglects to include the response from elsewhere. I humbly suggest the US could spare a volley from a Trident or two without even raising a particular sweat.
It would be such a lovely memorial fireworks display. Mister Rafsanjani could watch it and ponder his errors… during his last .00000001 seconds.
To say that things are getting nasty in the Middle East would be facile. They’ve been nasty for quite some time
But if this report is anything to go by then the ratchet has moved yet another notch and Israel and the Palestinians are heading into a full scale, balls out, pants down shooting war for real
Is anybody surprised?
This test, being prepared all sorts of people, will be to see if the Bush administration is actually as sophisticated as I think they might be.
Somalia is being suggested as the next course on the menu after Afghanistan by all manner of odd bed fellows, from the Ethiopian government who would like to see their neighbour destabilized for their own ends, to oil companies looking to redeem worthless Siad Barré era concessions, to certain conservative US revanchists looking to avenge the bloody 1993 repulse of US Rangers by Somali militiamen.
My guess is that if there is any US military action at all, it will be highly targeted, rather than just blundering in and picking a fight with a Somali clan over an absurd UN derived desire to reorder Somali polity more to Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s liking, as happened last time.
Israel and the Middle East
Take a look at Victor Hanson in his article about why Arabs have misunderstood Israel. In a nutshell, his thesis is that if Israel did not exist, then as far as many Arabs are concerned, they would have to invent it.
If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent somehting like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for milliums of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn’t about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Isreal is a constant reminder that it is a nation’s culture-not its geography or size or magnitude or its oil reserves-that determine its wealth or freedom.
Scholar of arcane Anglospheric Cultism, the eminent James C. Bennett of Miskatonic University, has turned up a disturbing fact after translating an ancient text. In a closed session address to Foreign Policy Research Institute, Bennett reported his findings:
H. P. Lovecraft got it garbled: It’s “In his house in Riyadh great Cthulhu lies sleeping.” That’s why the Saudi Whahabis hate all other varieties of Islam. Their form is really Cthulhu-worship.
Naturally the Saudi ambassador dismissed this as:
Obviously just another Zionist smear campaign and quite clearly racism against Middle Eastern people. So what if a few of us smell strongly of fish, commune with extraplanular creatures and have tentacles under our burqas?
Alarming stuff.
[Editor’s note: you need to have read H. P . Lovecraft’s horror stories to have the slightest idea what this means]
Another recommended article for fellow Blogistas: Ralph Peters, a retired U.S. Army officer and author of “Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?”, has a piece in Opinion Journal called Riyadh is at the root of much evil, arguing that the most important source of instability and terrorism is Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. will have to confront it at some point. My knowledge of Saudi Arabia is thin so it would be good to get some discussion going on whether folk think the guy has a point or is wildly overstating the case.
Tom Burroughes
tom.burroughes@reuters.com
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
