Samizdata

There is an excellent article on Rantburg about Al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy. It quotes some of his remarks as printed in a London based Arabic newspaper

Terrorist attacks on Western civilians are justified because they live in democracies and are directly responsible for government policies that anger Arabs, Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant implies in the latest excerpt of his memoirs. In the passages that appeared Tuesday in the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Ayman al-Zawahri says the West understands only “the language of self-interest coupled with oppressive power. If we want to make them understand our rights we have to speak to them in the language they understand,” he said.

Well he is correct in one respect: the West, particularly the Anglosphere, does indeed understand that language. The problem is, we are considerably better at expressing it than they are. If they want this ‘dialogue of civilisations’ to be conducted at 3000 feet per second, ok, we can do that. That is not a dialogue we are going to be on the loosing end of.

The Islamists like poor deluded Mr. Al-Zawahri are actually in a no-win situation. If they elect to fight us, which they obviously have, we are richer by several orders of magnitude and much, much better at the whole ‘directed violence’ thing than they are… but if they do not fight us, they are still doomed. In the long run the sheer joyous banalities of globalised capitalist consumer culture will snow them under with a blizzard of addidas shoes, MP3 players, porno DVDs, air conditioning, satellite videophones and silicon enhanced actresses in very short skirts. Worst of all, we can quite happily tolerate and actually absorb the Islamic world’s best and brightests in ourcivilisation. In the final analysis either way they’re screwed.

Christian Michel sees Israel’s problems as rooted not in geography but in what it is.

It has been said that Israel is ‘a state in the wrong place’.

But Israel’s problem is not that it is a state in the wrong place (where else should it be?), it is that it is a State. Because it was artificially established from the outside, its sovereignty is questioned inside (as is the case by minorities of so many states set up by their colonial powers, notably in Africa and the ex-Soviet Union).

But Israel’s problems only anticipate those to be faced sooner or later by Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, to name a few in Europe. A modern State, all the more so if it claims to be democratic, is viable only when it rules a totally homogenous, uniform, undifferentiated population. Yet, whether we like it or not, populations will get more and more differentiated, by fortune, by education, by new ethnic awareness, by culture. States will either have to level down differences through brutal ethnic cleansing and economic intervention, with the risk of stifling innovation and prosperity, let alone human rights; or withdraw.

In my childhood liberal Christian environment, Jews were regarded as the “chosen people”, our “elders in the faith”. When anarchist issues became of interest, Jews appeared to me as the obvious model of a God-given historically proven example that human beings’ social identity is not attached to a land, it is not dependent on some bureaucracy conferring citizenships. We can live collectively without these artificial constructs. Jews managed to do it despite persecutions for 2000 years.

This constant and admirable refusal to be assimilated and reduced to the single dimension of a subject attached to a land and a state is a root of anti-semitism. It is not the ‘deicidal people’ that Hitler hated, but the ‘wandering’ one. Hitler’s fight, his ‘Kampf’, was not so much against Jews as such, as against cosmopolitanism. The Communist was an enemy (the name USSR with no reference to a land was a statement of the internationalist nature of communism at the time), the Capitalist was another one, so were the landless Gypsies and Jews. It is no coincidence, of course, that Jews were so heavily represented in both capitalist and communist elites.

An extraordinary paradox of our time, then, is that Israel is established just when the world is discovering the absurdity of social organizations based on the junction of a territory, a people and a government (ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer). Inherited from the French Revolution, the dogma that all three had to go together led to the Versailles Treaty and its disastrous consequences. It is still causing today ethnic cleansing through forced assimilation, deportation or elimination.

The creation of a State of Israel after the Holocaust might have seemed a good idea to some. Jews wanted a country of their own where they would be safe and not dependent on the goodwill of alien governments. It turns out that Jews are safe everywhere except in Israel, and Israel survives only thanks to the goodwill of a few alien governments.

Sacred texts, whether the Bible or the Koran, are metaphors. The universe was not created in 6 days and the Promised Land is not 20,000 sq. km between Eilat and the Golan. Land belongs legitimately to individuals only, not States, and the only Promise to look for is that it will remain your property to enjoy until you give it away, sell it or die. It matters little then that neighbours are Palestinian and Jews, provided they respect property rights. And provided they don’t need to get control of a government, either because no government exists, or it is powerless anyway to redistribute their wealth, subsidize their business, educate their children, run their police, ban what they will eat or drink, dictate how they should dress and when they should fast and close their shops… compare Palestine before the State of Israel and today.

That is the lesson Jews had been teaching us throughout History, how to remain yourself among others. They have discharged themselves of this mission with terrible consequences. Maybe that torch has passed on to Libertarians.

Christian Michel also writes on liberalia.com, one of Europe’s leading libertarian websites. All texts available in English and French.

Following the horrors in Israel, it is entirely reasonable and justified for the Israeli security services to do what the Palestinian Authority of Yassir Arafat has singularly failed to do, namely go after the psychopathic Hamas and Islamic Jihad organisations.

Israel is also quite right to demand that Arafat make a serious effort to suppress Hamas himself. This very point was made by an Israeli minister on the BBC this morning. In response however, the BBC reporter asked the minister

“If you want Arafat’s security services to do their job as you demand, then why are Israel’s attacks primarily directed at Arafat’s security services themselves?”

The reply can be best described as no reply, other than to insist that Arafat was responsible for arresting members of Hamas and he was not living up to his part of the bargain. The BBC reporter rephrased the question, asking:

“Why is Israel destroying the very force that you are demanding Arafat order to crush Hamas?”

The minister replied

“Israel is sending Chairman Arafat a message and if he does not understand that message, we will send it again.”

Well I sure as hell hear Israel’s message and it has very little to do with what that minister was saying. It is entirely reasonable for Israel to go after Hamas, given the Palestinian Authority’s abject failure to do so. But how does destroying Arafat’s assets achieve this? It would be rather like the USA striking the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan because they were not attacking the Taliban with enough gusto. Clearly that is absurd. If you want to understand what is going on, you have to ignore what the Israeli government is saying and just look at what they are doing.

The reality is that Palestinian Authority is a deeply corrupt, tyrannical, factionally riven organisation which could not control Hamas or Islamic Jihad even if it was inclined to. My analysis is that as well as going after the elusive Hamas, Israel is attacking the Palestinian Authority partially because internal Israeli outrage demands ‘action’ and requires someone been seen to pay big time (and the Palestinian Authority is a nice easy visible target) but mostly because Sharon sees this as his best chance to destroy the Palestinian Authority and reshuffle the deck whilst the world’s attention (meaning the USA) is focused on Afghanistan. Israeli colonisation of the occupied territories will continue (25 new settlements under the Sharon government) and the Palestinian west bank bantustans will not be allowed to expand into a proto-nation. Governments by their very nature are vast engines of deception: watch what they do and subject every utterance to skeptical but rational analysis. The target is Arafat’s ‘government’ with Hamas only being struck en passant. For reasons that are a mixture of Jewish colonial expansion and reasonable self-defense of Israel, Sharon wants to destroy the existing order in Palestine and replace it with something more to his liking. That is the reality.

This Teheran Times story says that two of their nuclear scientists have been rearrested on suspicion of something or other to do with Afghanistan. Can the two stories be linked?

Events in Afghanistan bring to mind a large container truck suddenly tipping over and spilling its load across a busy highway in front of traffic moving in both directions. As we see the situation shift not by the day but by the hour, it is important that people look not just at Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Kabul and Khandahar, but also at nuclear Pakistan: what happens in Islamabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Quetta will certainly end up being far more important in the long run.

For weeks since the US bombing started, the Islamic political parties in Pakistan have been whipping up sentiment with a world view that pits Islam against the godless foreigner. Large numbers of young Pakistanis heard the call for jihad against the United States and were urged to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the defence of Islam. Thousands streamed across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan seething with religious zeal to take up arms against the hated infidel.

The secular General Musharraf looked on uneasy as the streets swelled with crowds incited by his political enemies and has also been forced to keep looking over his shoulder at his own intelligence service, the ISI, who have always been the Taliban’s primary patron.

And then, the container truck unexpectedly tips over, scattering its cargo of… jack-in-the-boxes.

Weakened by the USAF/USN airstrikes far more than the ignorant and willfully pessimistic western pundits would have had us believe, the Taliban suddenly starts to collapse. Like dominos, town after town falls to the various anti-Taliban forces.

In Mazar-i-Sharif, we have learned that the Afghan Taliban forces took all the available motor vehicles and retreated as Abdul Rashid Dostam’s forces enveloped the city, leaving about 600 newly arrived pro-Taliban Pakistanis to face Dostam’s soldiers alone. The school in which they made their last stand is now a twisted ruin and at least 400 Pakistanis were wiped out in the bitter fighting.

In Kunduz, accounts suggest most of the Afghan Taliban forces have either defected or bailed out of the town prior to it being completely surrounded. What is left are largely Chechens, Chinese Muslims and Pakistani fighters. They are clearly doomed.

And so, it is interesting to note that the streets of Pakistan are surprisingly subdued. Far from ‘Islam’ rising up against the United States and its anti-Taliban friends in Afghanistan, city after city is filled with cheering throngs and America is saluted by the very people who lived through the bombing for contributing to the Taliban’s misfortunes. Hundreds and possibly thousands of young Pakistanis are already dead, killed not as Islamic holy warriors but as hated foreigners by Afghans who have had it up to ‘here’ with the interference of its neighbours.

So as the Islamic politicians of Pakistan survey how in the matter of eight days the entire situation in Afghanistan has turned upside down, the families and friends of the dead Pakistani boys who listened and then marched to their deaths across the Khyber pass are going to start asking ‘why?’ When people start to figure out the answer, I don’t think the forces of Islamo-fascism are going to like what happens next. It must be slowly dawning on the more secular forces in Pakistan that their Islamist political enemies are starting to look very exposed indeed.

For the west, nuclear armed Pakistan is far more important in the long run than that ‘Mad Max’ nation called Afghanistan.

Yes, the leitmotif for Afghanistan and Pakistan really is a jack-in-the-box. You heard it here first.