Category: Arab Racism

Alt Left: Yochanan Gordon, "When Genocide is Permissible"

Note this is an old article that I am republishing as I had to reformat it. A lot of the stuff that got transferred from WordPress lost a lot of its formatting, especially spaces between paragraphs.

This article caused quite a stir when it was published one of the Times of Israel‘s blogs. But is was so controversial that the Times of Israel took down the blog post and appears to have suspended the author. The author’s father is the publisher of the Five Towns Jewish Times in Nassau, New York, serving the large Orthodox Jewish community in that part of New York. The article first appeared in that publication. Yochanan’s grandfather was a somewhat famous Jewish author who wrote in Yiddish.

People are screaming and yelling about it a lot, but if you go to Israel National News, similar views, not quite as broadly stated, are so normal they are nearly the norm for commenters on that site. Yet even there some have gone overboard calling for germ warfare and chemical warfare to be unleashed on Gaza. One man called for the IDF to release the Ebola Virus on Gaza. However, many of the commenters have protested these posts as going too far.

Nevertheless, let us be fair, Muslims the world over are calling for the genocide of the Jews in one way or another just about every week. “Kill the Jews! Kill all of the Jews, every one of them!” and other comments along those lines are pretty regular fare with preachers in Saudi Arabia, Germany, the UK, Gaza, and Egypt. These preachers are generally from the Salafi-jihadist or Global Jihad/Al Qaeda school of radical Islam.

Nevertheless, statements by Palestinians have not been very heartening either. Yasser Arafat said that once the Arabs get Palestine back, they would slowly terrorize the Jews into leaving. Although I think he said psychological terrorism, we know what he meant. George Habash of the PFLP said a long time ago that there were no limits when it came to killing Jews in order to win back Palestine. Note that Jews in general were targeted although the fight was against Jewish nationalists in Israel.

Sheik Yassin, a wicked little beady-eyed troll of a man, was interviewed by Atlantic Magazine‘s Jeffrey Goldberg. Yassin allowed that all Jews who could prove that they were in Palestine before 1916 (the Balfour Declaration) would be considered residents and not settlers and could stay on the land.

The rest would be considered invaders. How to deal with them? “We will slowly kill them until they leave,” he allowed. Dr. Rantissi, pediatrician and leader of Hamas at the same time that Yassin was spiritual leader, was a famous Holocaust Denier and fulminated quite a bit about the Jews. He was also apparently a believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The idiotic Hamas Charter also references that stupid book along with a lot of other traditional anti-Semitic tropes. In addition, it references the famous Koranic phrase that talks about how in the last days, the Muslims will kill off all the Jews. Some of the Jews will hide behind trees, and Allah will tell the Muslims, “There, behind that tree, there’s a Jew!” Then the Muslims will follow directions and go find and kill the Jew. Nice book, that Quran.

In closing, while I believe this article is lamentable, the Muslims say stuff like this about the Jews all the time, as in every week.

When Genocide is Permissible

by Yochanan Gordon

Judging by the numbers of casualties on both sides in this almost one-month old war, one would be led to the conclusion that Israel has resorted to disproportionate means in fighting a far less-capable enemy. That is as far as what meets the eye. But it’s now obvious that the US and the UN are completely out of touch with the nature of this foe and are therefore not qualified to dictate or enforce the rules of this war because when it comes to terror, there is much more than meets the eye.

I wasn’t aware of this but it seems that the nature of warfare has undergone a major shift over the years. Where wars were usually waged to defeat the opposing side, today it seems – and judging by the number of foul calls, it would indicate – that today’s wars are fought to a draw. I mean, whoever heard of a timeout in war?

An NBA basketball game allows six timeouts for each team during the course of a game, but last I checked this is a war! We are at war with an enemy whose charter calls for the annihilation of our people. Nothing, then, can be considered disproportionate when we are fighting for our very right to live.

The sad reality is that Israel gets it, but its hands are being tied by world leaders who over the past six years have insisted they are such good friends with the Jewish state that they know more regarding its interests than even Israel does. But there’s going to have to come a time where Israel feels threatened enough to where it has no other choice but to defy international warnings – because this is life or death.

Most of the reports coming from Gazan officials and leaders since the start of this operation have been either largely exaggerated or patently false. The truth is, it’s not their fault, falsehood and deceit is part of the very fabric of who they are and that will never change. Still however, despite their propensity to lie, when your enemy tells you that they are bent on your destruction, you believe them. Similarly, when Khaled Meshal declares that no physical damage to Gaza will dampen their morale or weaken their resolve – they have to be believed.

Our sage Gedalia the son of Achikam was given intelligence that Yishmael Ben Nesanyah was plotting to kill him. However, in his piety or rather naiveté, Gedalia dismissed the report as a random act of gossip and paid no attention to it.

To this day, the day following Rosh Hashana is commemorated as a fast day in the memory of Gedalia who was killed in cold blood on the second day of Rosh Hashana during the meal. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over. History is there to teach us lessons, and the lesson here is that when your enemy swears to destroy you – you take him seriously.

Hamas has stated forthrightly that it idealizes death as much as Israel celebrates life. What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely?

News anchors such as those from CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera have not missed an opportunity to point out the majority of innocent civilians who have lost their lives as a result of this war. But anyone who lives with rocket launchers installed or terror tunnels burrowed in or around the vicinity of their home cannot be considered an innocent civilian.

If you’ll counter that Hamas has been seen abusing civilians who have attempted to leave their homes in response to Israeli warnings to leave – well then, you’re beginning to come to terms with the nature of this enemy which should automatically cause the rules of standard warfare to be suspended.

Everyone agrees that Israel has the right to defend itself as well as the right to exercise that right. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has declared it, and Obama and Kerry have clearly stated that no one could be expected to sit idle as thousands of rockets rain down on the heads of its citizens placing them in clear and present danger. It seems then that the only point of contention is regarding the measure of punishment meted out in this situation.

I will conclude with a question for all the humanitarians out there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide, is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

Alt Left: Did the Arabs Ever Threaten to Drive the Jews into the Sea?

All of their enemies are trying to exterminate every last Israeli Jew. The PLO was accused of this for decades.

Admittedly there was some overheated rhetoric. The Arabs said, “We will drive the Jews into the sea.” I think it mostly just meant pull guns on them and force them to go back to Europe where they all came from. The Arabs have definitely said this many times. I’ve heard them said it right in front of me, so it’s something they still do.

The man who said it was a member of the civilian apparatus of the PFLP. I was associated with some of these people for a while and got to know them pretty well. They eventually banned me as a “Zionist spy,” which figures. They’re very radical and paranoid. I was shocked at how extreme they were. They were overtly anti-Semitic too. Their beef didn’t just extend to Israelis. They also hated the Jewish religion.

In recent years, they have been milder.

Arafat, at an inopportune moment, said that the Arabs would simply move into Israel and live with the Jews, but they would commit guerrilla terrorism against them to slowly terrorize them and drive them out.

Sheik Yassin of Hamas said much the same thing, but he had an evil little smile as he said, “We will slowly kill them.”

Iran supports Arabs moving into Israel and Jews and Arabs living together.

I’m not sure what Hezbollah wants. They don’t want a 2-state solution but they said they would live with it and not say anything. The 2-solution is of course dead forever now due to Israel and getting more and more doomed all the time. The US has been secretly greenlighting all of this and Biden will continue to greenlight all the settlement building Israel wants. They will probably just let Israel take over the West Bank too.

Moderate elements of Hamas said similar things a while back.

I’m not sure what Islamic Jihad wants. I

The guys I knew at the base of the PFLP said they were going to throw the Jews out of Israel and “they can go back to Europe or Hymietown or whatever. We don’t care where they go.” However, the leadership of the PFLP such as Leila Faled has said that the PFLP officially says that all the Jews can stay. Faled is the famous counterculture airplane hijacker/hero of many US radicals in the 1960’s (many hippie women had photos of Leila Faled with an automatic weapon on their walls). She was the original badass chick.

ISIS says they are going to conquer Israel and kill all the Jews, but mostly they’ve just been working alongside of them. ISIS fighters have crossed the borders of Israel many times at the Golan Heights where they are treated for their injuries and returned.

Interviews with Palestinians on the street found few who wanted to throw the Jews out of Israel. Mostly they said that they wanted to move into Israel and live together with Jews. However, many Palestinians  prefaced that by saying, “The Jews will be our guests.” As you can see, the Palestinians want the upper hand in Israel and it will no longer be a Jewish state in any way, shape, or form.

Alt Left: Is Anti-Semitism Leftwing or Rightwing?

Antisemitism has always been a rightwing, conservative, and even reactionary philosophy. Paranoid Jews who scream anti-Semite every ten minutes like to go on and on about leftwing anti-Semitism, but there’s never been much of it.

They usually lead off with Marx’s On the Jewish Question, supposedly an anti-Semitic work. Except that it isn’t. Marx as Jewish himself. His father was a rabbi for Chrissake.

And he was no self-hating Jew. He didn’t care about them one way or the other. The article is an attack on the Jewish religion in which he says Judaism essentially boils down to the worship of money. There’s a lot of truth to that statement.

The paranoid Jews then go on about anti-Semitism in the USSR, of which there was little. In fact, the penalty for anti-Semitism in the USSR was the death penalty. Yitzhak Rabin, former Israeli Prime Minister, said the USSR was the most Jew-friendly state ever. It was “anti-anti-Semitic” as he put it.

The Jewish accusations go into the lamentable Rootless Cosmopolitan campaigns of the early 1950’s, but these were set off by Zionists and not Jews. Nevertheless, they were anti-Semitic in effect.

Then they mention the Doctors’ Plot in which several of Stalin’s Jewish doctors were executed for planning to poison him to death. Jews have always maintained that this was an anti-Semitic frame-up. But there is good evidence that such a conspiracy not only existed but may have killed Stalin.

There have been a few other cases of Left anti-Semitism, but they’re mostly outliers.

The nonsense about Left anti-Semitism all comes from the pro-Israel crowd, heavily Jewish but also including many conservative Gentiles like Trumpian Republicanism.

You can certainly hate that shitty little country without hating the Jewish guy next door. I mean he has no involvement in Israel’s crimes. So he supports Israel? So what? So do 57% of Americans, overwhelmingly Gentiles. You can’t go around hating everyone who supports something unpleasant. You’ll die a hermit.

Conservatives from the 1920’s on traditionally opposed liberals, hated Communists, and were deeply worried about the modern movement which waged war on much of traditional family values in the West. An anti-Semite who does not go on and on about “Jewish Communists” or Jewish Bolsheviks is a rare bird.

These tropes are the leading edge of anti-Semitism to this very day, although anti-modernism and anti-liberalism are also very strong and are often tied together as a war against cultural liberalism, said to be a Jewish creation.

Anti-Semitism has always been conservative if not reactionary. There’s never been much in the way of Left anti-Semitism. Marx said a few things, but he was not an anti-Semite. The early anarchists had a few sharp words, but the Jews in the Pale had behaved badly for centuries, ruthlessly exploiting the Gentile peasants who lived there.

Anti-Semitism has a very long pedigree in Russia, and Russian Jews return the favor by being some of the worst Jews of them all. Many are simply criminals. The Russian Mafia was 1/3 Jewish when Jews were 3% of the population. Russian Jews delight in drinking Bloody Marys, toasting each other while proclaiming that they are drinking the blood of their Christian enemies. Nice people.

There was a temporary anti-Semitic phase in the USSR and Eastern Europe after Stalin died in the anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigns. This had started even when Stalin was alive.

Stalin was not an anti-Semite – indeed, he had a Jewish wife – but he did crack down of Soviet Jews. People asked him why and he said, “But you do not understand. It is not that they are Jews. It is that they are all Zionists!”

The USSR supported Israel at the start, but Israel quickly turned to the West, and the USSR logically reacted badly to this. Many East European Jews, while forming significant parts of the postwar Communist regimes, also spied for the West against the Soviet bloc. The Israeli media crowed about this when it was revealed after 1989.

So Stalin had some reasons to be suspicious. And he may indeed have been poisoned, and if he was, it may indeed have been by his doctors, who were mostly Jews. You see Stalin’s anti-Zionist campaign had infuriated Soviet Jews.

The argument of the Doctors’ Plot in which Jewish doctors were accused of a plot to poison Stalin was that these doctors were doing this as revenge for Stalin’s anti-Zionist policies. Some of these doctors were executed.

It turns out they may have not gotten them all though because a good argument can be made that Stalin was later poisoned to death by his own physicians. The poisoners were said to be Jewish doctors.

There is some anti-Semitism on the Russian Left, especially in the Communist Party, but it just a symptom of a larger societal infection.

There are some anti-Semites on the Arab Left, which they try to disguise as anti-Zionism.

However, as one who was active in PFLP (an armed Palestinian Marxist group that fights Israel) circles in the US for a while, I can tell you that a lot of these people were simply anti-Semites. Granted Jews had not been very nice to their people, but their anti-Semitism was way out of line. For instance, most of the PFLP people I knew were Holocaust deniers.

There is a lot of anti-Israelism on the Left, especially the Western Left, but it’s more anti-Israelism than anti-Semitism.

I’m an Israel-hater myself. US Jews aren’t squatting in Palestine, so I don’t understand why they’re relevant to the Israel issue, except that they tend to support Israel, but most folks support their people anyway, so they can hardly be blamed.

There is little true anti-Semitism in the Western pro-Palestine movement. The people who run it are hard Leftists and people like that are very sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism.

The movement is heavily policed for anti-Semites, the most notorious of which are rooted out and tossed out of the movement. The Solidarity Campaign gets called anti-Semites 50,000 times a day anyway by hysterical Jews merely for being anti-Israel. No point adding to that and worse, giving their enemies ammo by moving into real deal anti-Semitism.

Jews Vow to Destroy Future Careers of Campus Anti-Israel Activists

Looks like Jews have set up a new organization called the Canary Mission to uncover campus anti-Israel activists in order, as the video implies, to destroy their chances of having a career after graduation.

Many of the profiled are Arab Muslims. I assume that many are Palestinians. Here are the lists, and yes, many of them are Arabs. Good Lord Arab women are beautiful!

This is creepy as Hell, but the Jews are very good at menacing their critics in this way.

I remember when I was debating on the Usenet Israel and Jewish groups, the Super Jews on there were always menacing their critics, threatening us, including lots of death threats, and making threats to uncover our real identities, track us down and post all of our personal information including real name, address, phone number, arrest record and any dirt they could dig up on us.

They especially wanted to find out who our employers were so they could try to get us fired from our jobs. They also threatened to get us in trouble with police and government services agencies. In addition, they kept extensive documentation of all of our posts.

One Jewish woman really creeped me out because apparently she had some sort of a database of everything I had said on the group, and she was always digging through it to post some incriminating thing I had said some time earlier. It creeped the Hell out of me, and I started to develop an extreme hatred of her.

I don’t think this campaign was very successful at silencing critics because more often people would come into the group with a pretty fair-minded opinion of Jews but after experiencing this abuse for a while, they would turn into wild antisemites.

They would come in saying, “Well, I’ve had a lot of Jewish friends, and I admire the Jews very much,” and after six months, they would almost be raving, drooling Nazis.

The Jews seemed to be making people hate or dislike them even more, but God knows, maybe that was the plan after all? Maybe Jews love to make enemies (as long as they are not too lethal of course) so they can play the victim role better and in order to scare Jews away from assimilation and breeding out.

After all, the Jews only retained a pure bloodline for 2,000 years by preaching that the non-Jews were evil and ordering the Jews to have no contact with them. In Medieval Spain, the penalty for a Jewish woman caught having sex with a Gentile man was to have her nose cut off. A proper European Jewish man in 1800 would never eat with a Gentile. In fact, he would refuse to even have tea with any Gentile. If you want to keep your people from outbreeding, continuously preach that the out-group is evil and wants to kill all of your people. Then people will stick to their own group and not breed out.

The Jews have been menacing their critics in the US for a long time now. In the 1930’s, they tried to kill Henry Ford. Marlon Brando was told by Jewish Hollywood moguls, “You will never work in this town again.” This implies that Jews have significant control over the movie industry. But if you say Jews run Hollywood, that’s an “antisemitic canard,” and the Jews will try to ruin you over it. It’s that sort of behavior that angers me about these people.

I must say that the Jews seem like one of the most totalitarian ethnic groups in America.

That said, some of the behavior of the anti-Israel Arabs in that video is disgusting. Voicing Nazi-tinted slogans like, “Start up the ovens!” and support for genocidal anti-Semitism is despicable and unacceptable, but after all, we are dealing with Arabs here, and Arabs are pretty uncontrolled, fanatical and somewhat less civilized people.

The Jihadis Brought Slavery with Them

Here.
All of these people are Black. The Tuaregs and the Arabs are lighter skinned Blacks then the rest, and they have more Caucasoid features, but these are all Black people we are talking about here. In fact, Tuaregs are ~86% Black by genes and only 14% Caucasoid, about the same as US Blacks. Arabs may be the lighter, but the distinction between an Arab and a Black in this part of the world is not strong. An Arab is more someone who is a pastoralist and speaks Arabic. A Tuareg speaks the Tuareg Berber language and is a pastoralist. The Blacks probably speak an African language, are darker and look more African and may be agriculturalists.
But what matters more is if you were born into slavery or not. Slavery has been going on forever in the Sahel. There are still 200,000 slaves in Mali. There are also many in Mauritania and Niger. Food is so scarce at times that some slaves enter into bondage voluntarily just to get something to eat. The slave masters are very cruel to their slaves, treating them worse than animals. Although slavery is illegal in Mali, the law is hardly enforced.
What is interesting is that with the coming of radical Islam in the form of the Islamist jihadis, the slavery issue got worse. Ta Tuaregs and Arabs largely supported the Islamists and they took advantage of the coming of the jihadis by enslaving their Black neighbors, reclaiming old slaves, or enslaving their Black workers. Now that the French ran the Al Qaedists out of Timbuktu, the slaves have been freed, but there are now deep wounds that will take ages to heal. The Blacks here are very angry at what the Arabs and Tuaregs did to them, and they will not forget soon. This is a very brutal part of the world.
In some ways, this mirrors the genocide going on in Darfur, with the pastoralist Arabs committing genocide against the agriculturalist Africans. In the same way, both are Blacks, but the Arabs speak Arabic, are lighter, taller, thinner and have more Caucasoid features. The Blacks are darker, speak African languages and have been African features. The Arabs have always treated the Blacks with contempt in Sudan even before the Darfur genocide.
The war against South Sudan was similar except that it was a religious war. The South Sudanese were more African, spoke African languages, and tended to be Christians and animists. The northern Arabs committed mass murder on the infidels of the South. A favorite way of killing the infidels was crucifying them on a makeshift cross. Similarly, radical Islam was used by the northern Arabs to radically Islamicize their cause and once again, it seemed the extra dose of Islam made the Arabs that much more racist against the Blacks.
It is important to note that this war was seen as a jihad against the infidels by the radical Islamist regime in the North. Their idea was the that Southern infidels should be given the choice of converting to Islam or dying. There were in fact many forced conversions and similar to the situation in Mali, many South Sudanese, especially women, were kidnapped and taken as slaves to the North, where they served in their Arab master’s homes. The slavery often had sexual overtones as the women were made to serve as sex slaves.
As you can see, we are dealing with a Sahelian regional phenomenon here. But note also the deep connections between Arabs and the enslavement of Blacks in this part of the world. Arabs have been enslaving Blacks forever. Saudi Arabia only outlawed slavery in 1963. There was a report recently of a castrated Black slave being offered for sale by a wealthy Gulf Arab. The ad selling the slave appeared on Facebook.

Alt Left: Countering Lies About Hezbollah

Repost from the old site.
Ever since the Lebanon War last summer between Hezbollah and Israel, much nonsense has been written about this organization, much of it from Zionists and US imperialists in the press. It is time for a rational overview.
Lie: Hezbollah is the puppet of Iran and Syria.
Not true! Is Israel the puppet of the US? Well, the US supports Israel, right? Despite the US support, Israel is not the puppet of the US. Israel does what it damned well wants. Well, yes, Hezbollah gets support from Syria and Iran, but they don’t take orders from them anymore than Israel takes orders from America.
In truth, Hezbollah does what it wants. Iran was probably informed before Hezbollah started this war, but that’s about it. And Hezbollah’s autonomy from Syria is well-documented. Syria uses Hezbollah to keep up the pressure on Israel, not because they want to kill all the Jews, like insane Zionists insist, but because they want the Golan Heights back.
Iran supports Hezbollah in order to support Shia power in the region, and because Hezbollah’s leadership supports the Iranian revolution and because Iran hates Israel.
Lie: The Lebanon War was started by Iran to take the heat off its nuclear program.
Not true! It looks like Hezbollah started the war on its own in order to try to win back some Lebanese that Israel has been holding captive for a long time.
But they had no idea that the war would go this way. They thought it would just be a few days of shelling back and forth and then they would get down to some hard bargaining. They were totally taken by surprise by Israel’s response.
Lie: Hezbollah “started the war”.
Well, yes, Hezbollah conducted a cross-border raid, killed and wounded some Israelis, then grabbed some captives and took them back to Lebanon.
But to place all of the responsibility for the resulting war in which Israel destroyed Lebanon is insane. Israel’s wild response was part of a war that they had been planning for over a year, in concert with the US, and the war was conducted by both the US and Israel.
In fact, Ehud Olmert has recently given testimony in Israel that he had been planning this war for months along with the neocons in the Bush Administration. The Israeli military already had advanced plans for this war that they had developed with Ariel Sharon.
The neocons were trying to use the war against Hezbollah as an excuse to attack Syria, but Israel would not take the bait. They wanted to go after Hezbollah’s main backer, Iran. Since Iran could not be hit itself, the second best option was to go after Syria. The apparent purpose was to weaken Iran’s allies Syria and Hezbollah prior to an attack on Iran itself.
This explains why both the US and Israel have been refusing to deal with Syria’s increasingly desperate efforts to negotiate a settlement on the Golan Heights (Syria is even willing to turn the Golan into a “peace park” and give Israelis free access to visit it.
Since this war, logically, Syria has been edgy, and has been building up its forces along the border with Israel. But in the crazy paranoid Israeli mindset, this is seen as Syria preparing for a (in my opinion, an obviously suicidal) war with Israel. Even the distinguished Martin Van Creveld, Israel’s top military historian, has bought into this nonsense.
What will stop the upcoming Syrian war? Let’s ask Van Creveld. Only a US attack on Iran. What will hasten it? A US withdrawal from Iraq and a US refusal to attack Iran. We can see the twisted Israeli thinking. If the US does what Israel wants, the nonexistent war can be prevented. If the US acts against Israel’s wishes in the region, the fake war can be prevented.
Lie: Hezbollah is an insane terrorist group that is dedicated to killing all the Jews.
Jews just love this one, since so many of them are afflicted with a paranoid-masochistic character that just eats this stuff up. It’s not true.
Hezbollah is not opposed to a Jewish state, they just don’t like that Jews stole Palestine, which they did. Lebanon is a Lebanese nationalist organization. They mobilized to fight Israel when Israel annexed South Lebanon. Ten years of guerrilla war won it back for Hezbollah and Lebanon and Hezbollah were the heroes of Lebanese nationalists.
Hezbollah is now fighting to get back the Shebaa Farms, Lebanese land that Israel occupies and refuses to give back to Lebanon on some very phony grounds. They have also made some noises about three or four Lebanese Shia villages that Israel conquered, ethnically cleansed and annexed in the 1948 War.
Many of the people in the South, where many Palestinians live in refugee camps, and people have lived through numerous conflicts with Israel, really hate Israel, and understandably so. So here for an overview of the people’s views of Israel.
Hezbollah has said that if the Palestinians accept Israel for a Palestinian state, Hezbollah will stand by that. Unfortunately, Hezbollah’s leaders have made some lamentable anti-Semitic remarks and it is disgusting that they call one of their missiles “Khaibar” in reference to the Khaibar tribe of Jews who had their men killed and their women enslaved by Mohammad.
Lie: Hezbollah are radical fundamentalist Muslims, like Al Qaeda.
Not so! At the beginning, Hezbollah laid down Islamic Law in south Lebanon but over time they found that it was not going over well, so since 1990 or so, they have lifted most of their restrictions.
At the time, Hezbollah banned alcohol and forced women to wear headcovers. Both of those bans have now been lifted by Nasrallah. However, Hezbollah still arrests homosexuals and turns them over the Lebanese police, since I believe that homosexuality is illegal in Lebanon. They may beat some of them too.
The Shia in particular seem to take a hard line against homosexuality, as the Iranian regime and the Iraq Shia have really persecuted gay men. The Iranians mostly beat them up, harass them and send them to jail for short stays. The Iraqi Shia have also been beating them, but apparently they have also killed quite a few gay men.
The Shia doing this include the Dawa and SCIRI parties that the US supports in Iraq. Hezbollah’s supporters include many liberated females, I saw a video on Youtube of Lebanese women without hijabs driving a car and smoking cigarettes, then doing a belly dance, all the while saying how they supported Hezbollah.
Hezbollah rallies have included quite a few beautiful young women without hijabs, and many have been dressed racily. Josh Landis tells of how during the Lebanese Civil War, when Hezbollah took over a district, they imposed Islamic Law, but it went over so poorly that they soon rescinded most of it.
Lie: Well, at least Iran is a radical fundamentalist state like Al Qaeda.
Nor is Iran. Women have many more rights in Iran than they do in the Gulf. The dress code is loosely adhered to and the religious police no longer bother mixed couples. Fredericks of Hollywood stores dot Tehran.
Middle class and upper middle class young people are engaging in lots of promiscuous sex and not much is being done to stop them. One of Iran’s top race car drivers is a woman. There are many women in Parliament and most or all professions are open to women. Compare to Saudi Arabia where only 5% or so of women are even employed.
Alcohol, marijuana and especially opium are widely consumed at parties and not much is done about that. Prostitution is widespread, especially in the religious city of Qom, where they serve the religious students. There, throngs of young women meet men and go before mullahs to get a temporary marriage in order to have sex.
The temporary marriage is merely a cover for prostitution. There is so much prostitution in Tehran that the religious leadership has suggested having official houses for them, all under the banner of temporary marriage. The religious leadership has also recognized transsexualism and one of the top mullahs is a transsexual.
Temporary marriage is widespread, and a famous Iranian female parliamentarian has had sexual relationships with many men, including top mullahs, under this rubric and has written about it. Also, Iran is much more democratic than most of the Sunni regimes, and this is one of the things that the Sunni regimes fear most about Iran.
Supporters of this theory can always come up with this or that atrocity to demonstrate how Iran is an Al Qaeda-like state, but the truth is more complicated than that.
Lie: Hezbollah has savagely persecuted the Israeli-backed South Lebanese Army.
After Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, most people expected that there would be widespread paybacks for the South Lebanese Army (most of whom were Shia, not Maronites as it is commonly thought.
In fact, after Israel withdrew, Hezbollah issued a directive forbidding any attacks on the South Lebanon Army members, many of whom just went home. Quite a few others defected over to Israel.
That’s pretty amazing, considering that the French Resistance executed 10,000 “traitors” during World War 2. It’s also highly untypical behavior for a “terrorist” group.
Lie: Hezbollah is a terrorist group.
Well, for the most part it is a Lebanese resistance organization, and the vast majority of its attacks are against Israeli military targets.
It’s true that during the war, they fired rockets at Israeli cities and killed some civilians, but many of those attacks were actually aimed at strategic targets like arms factories and military bases that Israel cynically put right in the middle of Arab towns, so that if they enemy attacked, they would kill a lot of Arabs by accident.
On the other hand, Israel killed far more civilians in this war, and somehow avoided the “terrorist” label. Isn’t that kind of unfair?
Lie: Hezbollah and Iran are out to kill or convert all the Sunnis and then attack and kill or convert all the infidels in a world war, after which everyone will be a Shia Muslim.
I could not believe that people actually believed that one, but I heard a number of (mostly) Zionists and US imperialists repeating this bit of Sunni paranoia.
On the Sunni conversion, see here. On the rest of it, forget it. Shia is the nigger of the (Muslim) World. The relationship between Sunni and Shia is similar to that between Whites and Blacks during the Jim Crow South, with the Sunnis being the Whites and Shia being the Blacks.
The notion of Shia takeover is similar to fantasies of poor downtrodden Blacks taking over the South, or America. In Lebanon, the Shia say that the Sunnis used to only let them work as garbage collectors. Shia youngsters were routinely taunted and attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut in the 1970’s.
Lie: Hezbollah gets Iranian money for schools and hospitals to brainwash Lebanese into supporting the terrorists.
No! The reason they do this is because to this day, the bigoted Lebanese government that the US supports provides almost zero money whatsoever for any kind of development whatsoever in South Lebanon.
This is the reality of Lebanon, and its always been this way. Someone has to do it, the government won’t, so Hezbollah steps in. Good for them!
Lie: Hezbollah is trying to take over Lebanon to make a fundamentalist Islamic state there.
Well, that is their stated intention. In the early days, they may have believed it.
In recent statements, Nasrallah has said that an Islamic state is only possible in Lebanon if the “vast majority”, meaning over 80% or so, or people support it. That is not likely any time in the near future, so the project is all but written off. Hezbollah is reckoning itself to Lebanese reality.
Lie: Lebanese Christians are poor, downtrodden and horribly persecuted by Muslims.
Nonsense. In fact, they have always run the country! This lie is spread by some of the Maronite fascists. In the late 1950’s, Marines landed in Lebanon to help preserve an election that the Christians stole.
The real cause of the Civil War was the Muslims wanting a fairer share of the pie that the Christians had unfairly dominated for far too long. The Christians are being forced to concede some of their excess power in Lebanon (though they still have most of the money and much of the political power) and this is why some of the Maronites are wailing so much about “persecution”.
Lie: The Lebanon War last year was between Israel and a group of terrorists called Hezbollah. Most other Lebanese were not involved or opposed Hezbollah.
As you can see here, Israel was fighting much more than Hezbollah in South Lebanon.
In the Battle of Aita Al Shaab, most of the village fought against Israel, under the leadership of Hezbollah, true, but most fighters were just “local militia” who were not actually Hezbollah fighters. Further, there was quite a bit of fighting from members of the Lebanese Communist Party. The Amal militia fought against Israel too.
Truth is, Israel was essentially fighting a war against the people of South Lebanon. It’s true that a certain amount of that resistance was Hezbollah, but much of it was just local militia fighting for their homes and towns.
In the town of Marjayoun, during the Civil War the headquarters of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army, Israel came under attack soon after they entered the town by members of Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). Most of the members of this party are Greek Orthodox.
In fact, it may be the most popular political party among Lebanese Greek Orthodox. In the Sunni villages, the local Muslim Brotherhood and another fundamentalist group organized an armed resistance.
Furthermore, 80-90% of Lebanese supported Hezbollah during the war, including 80% of Christians. The sickening US media deliberately lied about this, making much of the tiny minority of Lebanese who opposed Hezbollah, acting like they were the majority, and trying to portray the country as “divided”.
Lie: Hezbollah forces salute using “Nazi salutes”, so that means that Hezbollah idolizes and Nazis and wants to kill all the Jews just like Nazis did.
Much is made of this on Zionist and rightwing blogs and even in the mainstream press. See here and here for two examples. For more examples, see here, here and here.
In the last example, written by a militant Jewish Zionist named Lewis Loflin, although the photo on the right is of Hezbollah forces giving a “Nazi salute”, the photo on the right, which he states is of a Hamas fighter giving the Nazi salute, is actually of a PFLP fighter.
You can tell it is a PFLP fighter by the characteristic red headband and the poster and Ahmed Sa’adat, the present leader of the PFLP. Many people say that the PFLP is dead, but it is interesting how a dead organization could afford full uniforms, headbands, posters and automatic weapons.
This blog strongly supports the PFLP, and as leftists, I assure you that the mainstream PFLP does not like Nazis one bit.
The fact is that the “Nazi salutes used by Hezbollah fighters” is propaganda.
This is a type of salute which was originally known as the “Roman salute”. It has a fascinating history, and was widely used by many countries before World War II. Under the name “Bellamy salute” or “flag salute”, it used to be usual salute used when saying the US Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States. A photo of the Bellamy salute is here.
From Wikipedia:

Because of the similarity between the Bellamy salute and the Nazi salute, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted the hand-over-the-heart gesture as the salute to be rendered by civilians during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem in the United States, instead of the Bellamy salute.

The association with Nazism has been so strong that the salute has rarely been used by non-Nazi organizations since the end of World War II. There are several exceptions; one is the Republic of China (Taiwan), where the salute is still used during the swearing of oaths in inaugurations.
The salute is also still used by some Palestinian militant groups. It is also known to be used by the Tamil separatist organization, the LTTE, while saluting their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Lie: Hezbollah does not support Israel’s right to exist and therefore they want to wipe it off and map and kill all 5.1 million Jews there in the process.
Embedded in this clever argument is the notion that any nation or regime has any kind of inherent right to exist.
Did colonies and empires and occupied territories have a right to exist too? The very notion that any nation-state on Earth has some kind of a rock-solid “right” to exist is strange and counter-intuitive.
Sure, humans have a right to get together and make nations out of mapped out geographical parcels, but why does that mean that that nation has some kind of a laid in tone specific right to exist?
The fact is that throughout history, nations, empires and colonies have come and gone. The ones that no longer exist had no greater or lesser right to exist than any existing state does.
*****
Meanwhile, the US has initiated a very controversial plan to counter Shia influence in the region. The plan is being coordinated with Saudi Arabia, specifically Prince Bandar, who has a longstanding relationship with US Administrations, and possibly the Jordanian government, especially Jordanian intelligence.
They are working to arm and build up the pro-US Siniora government and stoke sectarianism in Lebanon.
Part of this plan, outrageously, has involved money given by the US, via the Siniora regime, to three Sunni Salafist groups who are pro-Al Qaeda. These groups are being armed in order to fight Hezbollah (since they loathe Shiites). If push comes to shove between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, these groups will be used to battle it out with Hezbollah.
Outrageously, the US is once again funding Al Qaeda, which shows that imperialism truly has no morals at all. See The Seymour Hersch’s The Redirection in the latest New Yorker magazine (video here).
The Saudis are racists who hate the Shia and want to keep them down. In fact, most of the Sunni Arab regimes are like this. They all look to the Ottoman Empire when the Sunnis ruled the roost and the Shia were kept down by force. This is the Sunni Jim Crow era that they long for.
It is outrageous that the US is supporting Sunni Jim Crow racism against the downtrodden Shia and it is particularly despicable that the Israeli Jews, considering the history of the Jews, are supporting the oppressor against the oppressed. Or maybe that is what Israel is all about?

Mass Rapes of Black Women by Libyan Rebels

Here.

The Libyan rebels are mostly Caucasian as far as their race goes (~87% Caucasian on average). These men do almost no raping during peacetime. But war changes everything.

So much for those figures about how 37,000 White women were raped by Black men in one recent years, and 0-10 Black women were raped by White men. Black women are “unrapeable” the racists say? Don’t think so.

During war, men will rape any woman. And White men will mass-rape Black women, no problem.

Does Multilingualism Equal Separatism?

Repost from the old site.

Sorry for the long post, readers, but I have been working on this piece off and on for months now. It’s not something I just banged out. For one thing, this is the only list that I know of on the Net that lists all of the countries of the world and shows how many languages are spoken there in an easy to access format. Not even Wikipedia has that (yet).

Whether or not states have the right to secede is an interesting question. The libertarian Volokh Conspiracy takes that on in this nice set of posts. We will not deal with that here; instead, we will take on the idea that linguistic diversity automatically leads to secession.

There is a notion floating around among fetishists of the state that there can be no linguistic diversity within the nation, as it will lead to inevitable separatism. In this post, I shall disprove that with empirical data. First, we will list the states in the world, along with how many languages are spoken in that state.

States with a significant separatist movement are noted with an asterisk. As you can see if you look down the list, there does not seem to be much of a link between multilingualism and separatism. There does seem to be a trend in that direction in Europe, though.

Afterward, I will discuss the nature of the separatist conflicts in many of these states to try to see if there is any language connection. In most cases, there is little or nothing there.

I fully expect the myth of multilingualism = separatism to persist after the publication of this post, unfortunately.

St Helena                        1
British Indian Ocean Territories 1
Pitcairn Island                  1
Estonia                          1
Maldives                         1
North Korea                      1
South Korea                      1
Cayman Islands                   1
Bermuda                          1
Belarus                          1
Martinique                       2
St Lucia                         2
St Vincent & the Grenadines      2
Barbados                         2
Virgin Islands                   2
British Virgin Islands           2
Gibraltar                        2
Antigua and Barbuda              2
Saint Kitts and Nevis            2
Montserrat                       2
Anguilla                         2
Marshall Islands                 2
Cuba                             2
Turks and Caicos                 2
Guam                             2
Tokelau                          2
Samoa                            2
American Samoa                   2
Niue                             2
Jamaica                          2
Cape Verde Islands               2
Icelandic                        2
Maltese                          2
Maltese                          2
Vatican State                    2
Haiti                            2
Kiribati                         2
Tuvalu                           2
Bahamas                          2
Puerto Rico                      2
Kyrgyzstan                       3
Rwanda                           3
Nauru                            3
Turkmenistan                     3
Luxembourg                       3
Monaco                           3
Burundi                          3
Seychelles                       3
Grenada                          3
Bahrain                          3
Tonga                            3
Qatar                            3
Kuwait                           3
Dominica                         3
Liechtenstein                    3
Andorra                          3
Reunion                          3
Dominican Republic               3
Netherlands Antilles             4
Northern Mariana Islands         4
Palestinian West Bank & Gaza     4
Palau                            4
Mayotte                          4
Cyprus*                          4
Bosnia and Herzegovina*          4
Slovenia and Herzegovina*        4
Swaziland                        4
Sao Tome and Principe            4
Guadalupe                        4
Saudi Arabia                     5
Cook Islands                     5
Latvia                           5
Lesotho                          5
Djibouti                         5
Ireland                          5
Moldova                          5
Armenia                          6
Mauritius                        6
Lebanon                          6
Mauritania                       6
Croatia                          6
Kazakhstan                       7
Kazakhstan                       7
Albania                          7
Portugal                         7
Uzbekistan                       7
Sri Lanka*                       7
United Arab Emirates             7
Comoros                          7
Belize                           8
Tunisia                          8
Denmark                          8
Yemen                            8
Morocco*                         9
Austria                          9
Jordan                           9
Macedonia                        9
Tajikistan                       9
French Polynesia                 9
Gambia                           9
Belgium                          9
Libya                            9
Fiji                             10
Slovakia                         10
Ukraine                          10
Egypt                            11
Bulgaria                         11
Norway                           11
Poland                           11
Serbia and Montenegro            11
Eritrea                          12
Georgia*                         12
Finland*                         12
Switzerland*                     12
Hungary*                         12
United Kingdom*                  12
Mongolia                         13
Spain                            13
Somalia*                         13
Oman                             13
Madagascar                       13
Malawi                           14
Equatorial Guinea                14
Mali                             14
Azerbaijan                       14
Japan                            15
Syria*                           15
Romania*                         15
Sweden*                          15
Netherlands*                     15
Greece                           16
Brunei                           17
Algeria                          18
Micronesia                       18
East Timor                       19
Zimbabwe                         19
Niger                            21
Singapore                        21
Cambodia                         21
Iraq*                            21
Guinea-Bissau                    21
Taiwan                           22
Bhutan                           24
Sierra Leone                     24
South Africa                     24
Germany                          28
Namibia                          28
Botswana                         28
France                           29
Liberia                          30
Israel                           33
Italy                            33
Guinea                           34
Turkey*                          34
Senegal                          36
Bangladesh                       39
New Caledonia                    39
Togo                             39
Angola*                          41
Gabon                            41
Zambia                           41
Mozambique                       43
Uganda                           43
Afghanistan                      47
Guatemala                        54
Benin                            54
Kenya                            61
Congo                            62
Burkina Faso                     68
Central African Republic         69
Solomon Islands                  70
Thailand*                        74
Iran*                            77
Cote D'Ivoire                    78
Ghana                            79
Laos                             82
Ethiopia*                        84
Canada*                          85
Russia*                          101
Vietnam                          102
Myanmar*                         108
Vanuatu                          109
Nepal                            126
Tanzania                         128
Chad                             132
Sudan*                           134
Malaysia                         140
United States*                   162
Philippines*                     171
Pakistan*                        171
Democratic Republic of Congo     214
Australia                        227
China*                           235
Cameroon*                        279
Mexico                           291
India*                           415
Nigeria                          510
Indonesia*                       737
Papua New Guinea*                820

*Starred states have a separatist problem, but most are not about language. Most date back to the very formation of an often-illegitimate state.

Canada definitely has a conflict that is rooted in language, but it is also rooted in differential histories as English and French colonies. The Quebec nightmare is always brought up by state fetishists, ethnic nationalists and other racists and nationalists who hate minorities as the inevitable result of any situation whereby a state has more than one language within its borders.

This post is designed to give the lie to this view.

Cyprus’ problem has to do with two nations, Greeks and Turks, who hate each other. The history for this lies in centuries of conflict between Christianity and Islam, culminating in the genocide of 350,000 Greeks in Turkey from 1916-1923.

Morocco’s conflict has nothing to do with language. Spanish Sahara was a Spanish colony in Africa. After the Spanish left in the early 1950’s, Morocco invaded the country and colonized it, claiming in some irredentist way that the land had always been a part of Morocco. The residents beg to differ and say that they are a separate state.

An idiotic conflict ensued in which Morocco the colonizer has been elevated to one of the most sanctioned nations of all by the UN. Yes, Israel is not the only one; there are other international scofflaws out there. In this conflict, as might be expected, US imperialism has supported Moroccan colonialism.

This Moroccan colonialism has now become settler-colonialism, as colonialism often does. You average Moroccan goes livid if you mention their colony. He hates Israel, but Morocco is nothing but an Arab Muslim Israel. If men had a dollar for every drop of hypocrisy, we would be a world of millionaires.

There are numerous separatist conflicts in Somalia. As Somalians have refused to perform their adult responsibilities and form a state, numerous parts of this exercise in anarchism in praxis (Why are the anarchists not cheering this on?) are walking away from the burning house. Who could blame them?

These splits seem to have little to do with language. One, Somaliland, was a former British colony and has a different culture than the rest of Somalia. Somaliland is now de facto independent, as Somalia, being a glorious exercise in anarchism, of course lacks an army to enforce its borders, or to do anything.

Jubaland has also split, but this has nothing to do with language. Instead, this may be rooted in a 36-year period in which it was a British colony. Soon after this period, they had their own postage stamps as an Italian colony.

There is at least one serious separatist conflict in Ethiopia in the Ogaden region, which is mostly populated by ethnic Somalis. Apparently this region used to be part of Somaliland, and Ethiopia probably has little claim to the region. This conflict has little do with language and more to do with conflicts rooted in colonialism and the illegitimate borders of states.

There is also a conflict in the Oromo region of Ethiopia that is not going very far lately. These people have been fighting colonialism since Ethiopia was a colony and since then have been fighting against independent Ethiopia, something they never went along with. Language has a role here, but the colonization of a people by various imperial states plays a larger one.

There was a war in Southern Sudan that has now ended with the possibility that the area may secede.

There is a genocidal conflict in Darfur that the world is ignoring because it involves Arabs killing Blacks as they have always done in this part of the world, and the world only gets upset when Jews kill Muslims, not when Muslims kill Muslims.

This conflict has to do with the Sudanese Arabs treating the Darfurians with utter contempt – they regard them as slaves, as they have always been to these racist Arabs.

The conflict in Southern Sudan involved a region in rebellion in which many languages were spoken. The South Sudanese are also niggers to the racist Arabs, plus they are Christian and animist infidels to be converted by the sword by Sudanese Arab Muslims. Every time a non-Muslim area has tried to split off from or acted uppity with a Muslim state they were part of, the Muslims have responded with a jihad against and genocide of the infidels.

This conflict has nothing to do with language; instead it is a war of Arab Muslim religious fanatics against Christian and animist infidels.

There is a separatist movement in the South Cameroons in the nation of Cameroon in Africa. This conflict is rooted in colonialism. During the colonial era, South Cameroons was a de facto separate state. Many different languages are spoken here, as is the case in Cameroon itself. They may have a separate culture too, but this is just another case of separatism rooted in colonialism. The movement seems to be unarmed.

There is a separatist conflict in Angola in a region called Cabinda, which was always a separate Portuguese colony from Angola.

As this area holds 60% of Angola’s oil, it’s doubtful that Angola will let it go, although almost all of Angola’s oil wealth is being stolen anyway by US transnationals and a tiny elite while 90% of the country starves, has no medicine and lives unemployed amid shacks along former roads now barely passable.

The Cabindans do claim to have a separate culture, but language does not seem to be playing much role here – instead, oil and colonialism are.

Syria does have a Kurdish separatist movement, as does Iran, Iraq, and Turkey – every state that has a significant number of Kurds. This conflict goes back to the post-World War 1 breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The Kurds, with thousands of years of history as a people, nominally independent for much of that time, were denied a state and sold out.

The new fake state called Turkey carved up part of Kurdistan, another part was donated to the British colony in Iraq and another to the French colony in Syria, as the Allies carved up the remains of the Empire like hungry guests at a feast.

This conflict is more about colonialism and extreme discrimination than language, though the Kurds do speak their own tongue. There is also a Kurdish separatist conflict in Iran, but I don’t know much about the history of the Iranian Kurds.

There is also an Assyrian separatist movement in Iraq and possibly in Syria. The movement is unarmed. The Assyrians have been horribly persecuted by Arab nationalist racists in the region, in part because they are Christians. They have been targeted by Islamo-Nazis in Iraq during this Iraq War with a ferocity that can only be described as genocidal.

The Kurds have long persecuted the Assyrians in Iraqi Kurdistan. There have been regular homicides of Assyrians in the north, up around the Mosul region. This is just related to the general way that Muslims treat Christian minorities in many Muslim states – they persecute them and even kill them. There is also a lot of land theft going on.

While the Kurdish struggle is worthwhile, it is becoming infected with the usual nationalist evil that afflicts all ethnic nationalism. This results in everyone who is not a Kurdish Sunni Muslim being subjected to varying degrees of persecution, disenfranchisement and discrimination. It’s a nasty part of the world.

In Syria, the Assyrians live up near the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Arab nationalist racists have been stealing their land for decades now and relocating the Assyrians to model villages, where they languish in poverty. Assad’s regime is not so secular and progressive as one might suspect.

There is a separatist conflict in Bougainville in New Guinea. I am sure that many different tongues are spoken on that island, as there are 800 different tongues spoken in Papua New Guinea. The conflict is rooted in the fact that Bougainville is rich in copper, but almost all of this wealth is stolen by Papua New Guinea and US multinationals, so the Bougainville people see little of it. Language has little or nothing to do with it.

There are separatist movements in the Ahwaz and Balochistan regions of Iran, along with the aforementioned Kurdish movement. It is true that different languages are spoken in these regions, but that has little to do with the conflict.

Arabic is spoken in Khuzestan, the land of the Iranian Arabs. This land has been part of Persia for around 2,000 years as the former land of Elam. The Arabs complain that they are treated poorly by the Persians, and that they get little revenue to their region even though they are sitting on a vast puddle of oil and natural gas.

Iran should not be expected to part with this land, as it is the source of much of their oil and gas wealth. Many or most Iranians speak Arabic anyway, so there is not much of a language issue. Further, Arab culture is promoted by the Islamist regime even at the expense of Iranian culture, much to the chagrin of Iranian nationalists.

The Ahwaz have been and are being exploited by viciously racist Arab nationalists in Iraq, and also by US imperialism, and most particularly lately, British imperialism, as the British never seem to have given up the colonial habit. This conflict is not about language at all. Most Ahwaz don’t even want to separate anyway; they just want to be treated like humans by the Iranians.

Many of Iran’s 8% Sunni population lives in Balochistan. The region has maybe 2% of Iran’s population and is utterly neglected by Iran. Sunnis are treated with extreme racist contempt by the Shia Supremacists who run Iran. This conflict has to do with the fight between the Shia and Sunni wings of Islam and little or nothing to do with language.

There is a separatist movement in Iran to split off Iranian Azerbaijan and merge it with Azerbaijan proper. This movement probably has little to do with language and more to do with just irredentism. The movement is not going to go very far because most Iranian Azeris do not support it.

Iranian Azeris actually form a ruling class in Iran and occupy most of the positions of power in the government. They also control a lot of the business sector and seem to have a higher income than other Iranians. This movement has been co-opted by pan-Turkish fascists for opportunistic reasons, but it’s not really going anywhere. The CIA is now cynically trying to stir it up with little success. The movement is peaceful.

There is a Baloch insurgency in Pakistan, but language has little to do with it. These fiercely independent people sit on top of a very rich land which is ruthlessly exploited by Punjabis from the north. They get little or no return from this natural gas wealth. Further, this region never really consented to being included in the Pakistani state that was carved willy-nilly out of India in 1947.

It is true that there are regions in the Caucasus that are rebelling against Russia. Given the brutal and bloody history of Russian imperial colonization of this region and the near-continuous rebellious state of the Muslims resident there, one wants to say they are rebelling against Imperial Russia.

Chechnya is the worst case, but Ingushetia is not much better, and things are bad in Dagestan too. There is also fighting in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia. These non-Chechen regions are getting increasingly radicalized as consequence of the Chechen War. There has also been a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chechens to expand the conflict over to the other parts of the Caucasus.

Past rebellions were often pan-Caucasian also. Although very different languages are spoken in these areas, different languages are still spoken all across Russia. Language has little to do with these conflicts, as they have more to do with Russian imperialism and colonization of these lands and the near 200-year violent resistance of these fierce Muslim mountain tribes to being colonized by Slavic infidels.

There is not much separatism in the rest of Russia.

Tuva reserves the right to split away, but this is rooted in their prior history as an independent state within the USSR (Tell me how that works?) for two decades until 1944, when Stalin reconquered it as a result of the conflict with the Nazis. The Tuvans accepted peacefully.

Yes, the Tuvans speak a different tongue, but so do all of the Siberian nations, and most of those are still with Russia. Language has little to do with the Tuvan matter.

There is also separatism in the Bashkir Republic and Adygea in Russia. These have not really gone anywhere. Only 21% of the residents of
Adygea speak Circassian, and they see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. This conflict may have something to do with language. The Adygean conflict is also peripherally related the pan-Caucasian struggle above.

In the Bashkir Republic, the problem is more one of a different religion – Islam, as most Bashkirs are Muslim. It is not known to what degree language has played in the struggle, but it may be a factor. The Bashkirs also see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. It is dubious that the Bashkirs will be able to split off, as the result will be a separate nation surrounded on all sides by Russia.

The Adygean, Tuvan and Bashkir struggles are all peaceful.

The conflict in Georgia is complex. A province called Abkhazia has split off and formed their own de facto state, which has been supported with extreme cynicism by up and coming imperialist Russia, the same clown state that just threatened to go to war to defend the territorial integrity of their genocidal Serbian buddies. South Ossetia has also split off and wants to join Russia.

Both of these reasonable acts prompted horrible and insane wars as Georgia sought to preserve its territorial integrity, though it has scarcely been a state since 1990, and neither territory ever consented to being part of Georgia.

The Ossetians and Abkhazians do speak separate languages, and I am not certain why they want to break away, but I do not think that language has much to do with it. All parties to these conflicts are majority Orthodox Christians.

Myanmar is a hotbed of nations in rebellion against the state. Burma was carved out of British East India in 1947. Part of Burma had actually been part of British India itself, while the rest was a separate colony called Burma. No sooner was the ink dry on the declaration of independence than most of these nations in rebellion announced that they were not part of the deal.

Bloody rebellions have gone on ever since, and language has little or nothing to do with any of them. They are situated instead on the illegitimacy of not only the borders of the Burmese state, but of the state itself.

Thailand does have a separatist movement, but it is Islamic. They had a separate state down there until the early 1800’s when they were apparently conquered by Thais. I believe they do speak a different language down there, but it is not much different from Thai, and I don’t think language has anything to do with this conflict.

There is a conflict in the Philippines that is much like the one in Thailand. Muslims in Mindanao have never accepted Christian rule from Manila and are in open arms against the state. Yes, they speak different languages down in Mindanao, but they also speak Tagalog, the language of the land.

This just a war of Muslims seceding because they refuse to be ruled by infidels. Besides, this region has a long history of independence, de facto and otherwise, from the state. The Moro insurgency has little to nothing to do with language.

There are separatist conflicts in Indonesia. The one in Aceh seems to have petered out. Aceh never agreed to join the fake state of Indonesia that was carved out of the Dutch East Indies when the Dutch left in 1949.

West Papua is a colony of Indonesia. It was invaded by Indonesia with the full support of US imperialism in 1965. The Indonesians then commenced to murder 100,000 Papuans over the next 40 years. There are many languages spoken in West Papua, but that has nothing to do with the conflict. West Papuans are a racially distinct people divided into vast numbers of tribes, each with a separate culture.

They have no connection racially or culturally with the rest of Indonesia and do not wish to be part of the state. They were not a part of the state when it was declared in 1949 and were only incorporated after an Indonesian invasion of their land in 1965. Subsequently, Indonesia has planted lots of settler-colonists in West Papua.

There is also a conflict in the South Moluccas , but it has more to do with religion than anything else, since there is a large number of Christians in this area. The South Moluccans were always reluctant to become a part of the new fake Indonesian state that emerged after independence anyway, and I believe there was some fighting for a while there. The South Moluccan struggle has generally been peaceful ever since.

Indonesia is the Israel of Southeast Asia, a settler-colonial state. The only difference is that the Indonesians are vastly more murderous and cruel than the Israelis.

There are conflicts in Tibet and East Turkestan in China. In the case of Tibet, this is a colony of China that China has no jurisdiction over. The East Turkestan fight is another case of Muslims rebelling against infidel rule. Yes, different languages are spoken here, but this is the case all over China.

Language is involved in the East Turkestan conflict in that Chinese have seriously repressed the Uighur language, but I don’t think it plays much role in Tibet.

There is also a separatist movement in Inner Mongolia in China. I do not think that language has much to do with this, and I believe that China’s claim to Inner Mongolia may be somewhat dubious. This movement is unarmed and not very organized.

There are conflicts all over India, but they don’t have much to do with language.

The Kashmir conflict is not about language but instead is rooted in the nature of the partition of India after the British left in 1947. 90% of Kashmiris wanted to go to Pakistan, but the ruler of Kashmir was a Hindu, and he demanded to stay in India.

The UN quickly ruled that Kashmir had to be granted a vote in its future, but this vote was never allowed by India. As such, India is another world-leading rogue and scofflaw state on a par with Israel and Indonesia. Now the Kashmir mess has been complicated by the larger conflict between India and Pakistan, and until that is all sorted out, there will be no resolution to this mess.

Obviously India has no right whatsoever to rule this area, and the Kashmir cause ought to be taken up by all progressives the same way that the Palestinian one is.

There are many conflicts in the northeast, where most of the people are Asians who are racially, often religiously and certainly culturally distinct from the rest of Indians.

None of these regions agreed to join India when India, the biggest fake state that has ever existed, was carved out of 5,000 separate princely states in 1947. Each of these states had the right to decide its own future to be a part of India or not. As it turned out, India just annexed the vast majority of them and quickly invaded the few that said no.

“Bharat India”, as Indian nationalist fools call it, as a state, is one of the silliest concepts around. India has no jurisdiction over any of those parts of India in separatist rebellion, if you ask me. Language has little to do with these conflicts.

Over 800 languages are spoken in India anyway, each state has its own language, and most regions are not in rebellion over this. Multilingualism with English and Hindi to cement it together has worked just fine in most of India.

Sri Lanka’s conflict does involve language, but more importantly it involves centuries of extreme discrimination by ruling Buddhist Sinhalese against minority Hindu Tamils. Don’t treat your minorities like crap, and maybe they will not take up arms against you.

The rebellion in the Basque country of Spain and France is about language, as is Catalonian nationalism.

IRA Irish nationalism and the Scottish and Welsh independence movements have nothing to do with language, as most of these languages are not in good shape anyway.

The Corsicans are in rebellion against France, and language may play a role. There is an independence movement in Brittany in France also, and language seems to play a role here, or at least the desire to revive the language, which seems to be dying.

There is a possibility that Belgium may split into Flanders and Wallonia, and language does play a huge role in this conflict. One group speaks French and the other Dutch.

There is a movement in Scania, a part of Sweden, to split away from Sweden. Language seems to have nothing to do with it.

There is a Hungarian separatist movement, or actually, a national reunification or pan-Hungarian movement, in Romania. It isn’t going anywhere, and it unlikely to succeed. Hungarians in Romania have not been treated well and are a large segment of the population. This fact probably drives the separatism more than language.

There are many other small conflicts in Europe that I chose not to go into due to limitations on time and the fact that I am getting tired of writing this post! Perhaps I can deal with them at a later time. Language definitely plays a role in almost all of these conflicts. None of them are violent though.

To say that there are separatists in French Polynesia is not correct. This is an anti-colonial movement that deserves the support of anti-colonial activists the world over. The entire world, evidenced by the UN itself, has rejected colonialism. Only France, the UK and the US retain colonies. That right there is notable, as all three are clearly imperialist countries. In this modern age, the value of retaining colonies is dubious.

These days, colonizers pour more money into colonies than they get out of them. France probably keeps Polynesia due to colonial pride and also as a place to test nuclear weapons and maintain military bases. As the era of French imperialism on a grand scale has clearly passed, France needs to renounce its fantasies of being a glorious imperial power along with its anachronistic colonies.

Yes, there is a Mapuche separatist movement in Chile, but it is not going anywhere soon, or ever.

It has little to do with language. The Mapudungan language is not even in very good shape, and the leaders of this movement are a bunch of morons. Microsoft recently unveiled a Mapudungan language version of Microsoft Windows. You would think that the Mapuche would be ecstatic. Not so! They were furious. Why? Oh, I forget. Some Identity Politics madness.

This movement has everything to do with the history of Chile. Like Argentina and Uruguay, Chile was one of the Spanish colonies that was settled en masse late. For centuries, a small colonial bastion battled the brave Mapuche warriors, but were held at bay by this skilled and militaristic tribe.

Finally, in the late 1800’s, a fanatical and genocidal war was waged on the Mapuche in one of those wonderful “national reunification” missions so popular in the 1800’s (recall Italy’s wars of national reunification around this same time). By the 1870’s, the Mapuche were defeated and suffered a devastating loss of life.

Yet all those centuries of only a few Spanish colonists and lots of Indians had made their mark, and at least 70% of Chileans are mestizos, though they are mostly White (about 80% White on average). The Mapuche subsequently made a comeback and today number about 9% of the population.

Because they held out so long and so many of them survived, they are one of the most militant Amerindian groups in the Americas. They are an interesting people, light-skinned and attractive, though a left-wing Chilean I knew used to chortle about how hideously ugly they were.

Hawaiian separatism is another movement that has a lot to do with colonialism and imperialism and little to do with language. The Hawaiian language, despite some notable recent successes, is not in very good shape. The Hawaiian independence movement offers nothing to non-Hawaiians (I guess only native Hawaiians get to be citizens!) and is doomed to fail.

Hawaiians are about 22% of the population, and they are the only ones that support the independence movement. No one else supports it. It’s not going anywhere. The movers and shakers on the island (Non-Hawaiians for the most part!) all think it’s ridiculous.

There are separatists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, but I doubt that language has much to do with it. Like the myriad other separatist struggles in the NE of India, these people are ethnically Asians and as such are not the same ethnicity as the Caucasians who make up the vast majority of the population of this wreck of a state.

This is another conflict that is rooted in a newly independent fake state. The Chittagong Hill Tracts were incorporated into Bangladesh after its independence from Pakistan in 1971. As a fake new state, the peoples of Bangladesh had a right to be consulted on whether or not they wished to be a part of it. The CHT peoples immediately said that they wanted no part of this new state.

At partition, the population was 98.5% Asian. They were Buddhists, Hindus and animists. Since then, the fascist Bangladesh state has sent Bengali Muslim settler-colonists to the region. The conflict is shot through with racism and religious bigotry, as Muslim Bengalis have rampaged through the region, killing people randomly and destroying stuff as they see fit. Language does not seem to have much to do with this conflict.

I don’t know much about the separatist struggle of the Moi in Vietnam, but I think it is more a movement for autonomy than anything else. The Moi are Montagnards and have probably suffered discrimination at the hands of the state along with the rest of the Montagnards.

Zanzibar separatism in Tanzania seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with language, but has a lot more to do with geography. Zanzibar is a nice island off the coast of Tanzania which probably wants nothing to do with the mess of a Tanzanian state.

The conflict also has a lot to do with race. Most residents of Zanzibar are either Arabs or descendants of unions between Arabs and Africans. In particular, they deny that they are Black Africans. I bet that is the root of the conflict right there.

There were some Talysh separatists in Azerbaijan a while back, but the movement seems to be over. I am not sure what was driving them, but language doesn’t seem to have been a big part of it. Just another case of new members of a fake new state refusing to go along for the ride.

There were some Gagauz separatists in Moldova a while back, but the movement appears to have died down. Language does seem to have played a role here, as the Gagauz speak a Turkic tongue totally unrelated to the Romance-speaking Moldovans.

Realistically, it’s just another case of a fake new state emerging and some members of the new state saying they don’t want to be a part of it, and the leaders of the fake new state suddenly invoking inviolability of borders in a state with no history!

In summary, as we saw above, once we get into Europe, language does play a greater role in separatist conflict, but most of these European conflicts are not violent. In the rest of the world, language plays little to no role in the vast majority of separatist conflicts.

The paranoid and frankly fascist notion voiced by rightwing nationalists the world over that any linguistic diversity in the world within states must be crushed as it will inevitably lead to separatism at best or armed separatism at worst is not supported by the facts.

What’s Going On In Iran? (With Emphasis on Iranian Nationalism and Iranian Secessionist Movements)

Repost from the old site.

Updated February 6, 2008:

Most people do not realize that the famed Shah of Iran was actually a blood and soil, Persian supremacist, ethnic nationalist, primordialist, volkisch, fascist along the same lines as Hitler’s Nazis and Milosevic’s Serbs. Yet it is true – in fact, the Shah even formed an alliance with Nazi Germany.

The Nazis attempted to form all sorts of alliances with people they mistakenly regarded as genetic inferiors – including Bosnian Muslims, Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs, Ukrainian, White Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian rightwing nationalists, Iranians and some of the upper-caste peoples of East India.

The East Indians, of course, are part of the original Aryans – the light-skinned invaders who descended from the steppes into India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan at various times in the past 3,500 years. In India, they displaced the native Indians – the Dravidians or South Indians – and pushed them to South.

They also twisted the Hindu religion by adding on their casteism, which was apparently not present in the original pre-Aryan system. Originally, in the caste system, those at the top were the lightest-skinned and the lowest castes tended to be the darkest. It is interesting that over thousands of years the Brahmins have become progressively darker.

The Nazis were fascinated that these Brahmins regarded themselves as fellow Aryans and even sent researchers over to India to measure skulls and analyze the facial characteristics of statues and engage in other peculiarities of Nazi racial research. The Brahmin class of India has always returned the favor and many have long been supporters of Hitler, Nazism and fascism in general.

The fascinating article linked above deals with something that is little known to most Americans – a neat summary of many of the views expressed by what are best termed Iranian nationalists. Americans have no understanding at all of this ancient, proud culture.

The piece notes the Western deceit that modern nationalism began with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1600’s Europe, when the principle of inviolable national borders was first codified. In fact, this is a Western narcissistic view. Other nations, in particular Persians and Iranians, have a long history of what could be called nationalism, depending on how one defines the term, dating back maybe 2500 years to Cyrus the Great.

US idiots like George Bush and the council of clueless super-Zionist advisors whispering in his ear provoke this ancient culture at their peril.

The piece goes on to discuss the Minorities Question in modern Iran. Most people do not recognize that Persian and Iranian are not synonymous. Persian is an ethnic group, but Persians only constitute 51% of all Iranians. Azerbaijanis are a huge group in the northwest, constituting 23%.

US imperialism and Kurdish nationalism make much of Azerbaijanis supposed desire to break away from Iran, but there is not much truth to that. Those who say such things do not understand history. It is true that there is an Azerbaijani minority that invokes irredentism and wishes to break away from Iran and reunite with “northern Azerbaijan”, the independent state of Azerbaijan.

But the majority of Azerbaijanis have no desire to do such a thing. People do not understand that despite the racist Persian ethnic nationalism of the Shah, Azerbaijanis have typically ruled Iran for many centuries now. In fact the Supreme Jurisprudent Ayatollah Khameini is an Azerbaijani.

The Sassanid Empire was one of the most prominent empires in the world from 200-600, a rival to the Roman Empire. This culture, to many, represents the pinnacle of Iran’s power in the world. Its religion was Zoroastrianism and it was characterized by great tolerance towards religious minorities, especially Christians and Jews.

The Sassanids were defeated in the mid-650’s by invading Arab Muslim armies, many Iranians were put to the sword, and many Iranian nationalists have resented the resulting forced imposition of Islam ever since. According to these nationalists, there is a difference between those societies where Islam was “native” – supposedly Arab societies, and those where it was imposed by force – supposedly all non-Arab countries.

This greatly simplifies matters, and in many ways is false. For instance, Islam has deep roots in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Muslim India, Eastern China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Albania, Kosova, Bosnia, the Caucasus and in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So the case of Iran is not generalizable. In most cases, where Islam conquered non-Arab lands, many of the natives converted and become passionate Muslims. In fact, some of the world’s most ferocious and fundamentalist Muslims have traditionally come from non-Arab lands like Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in Iran, something different happened: Islam ran up against Persian nationalism.

To understand the conflict between Iranian nationalism and Islam is essential to understanding modern Iranian culture. The Khomeinists have enraged Iranian nationalists by declaring wholesale war on Iranian nationalism. According to the mullahs, there is no need for Iranian nationalism since Islam supplants it. Iranian nationalists are often theologically diverse, secular, atheists, agnostics, or even Zoroastrians.

Even worse, the mullahs seem to have imposed a pro-Arabism on Iran. This is sure to infuriate Iranian nationalists. Iranian nationalists have always had a resentful and bigoted attitudes towards Arabs (and some towards Muslims – who they regard as having a barbaric Arab religion).

When you hear an Iranian nationalist hurl an insult like “lizard-eating Mohammadens”, this is the rage they are mining. It is the rage at a primitive culture of desert barbarian wanderers – so barbaric, in fact, that they “ate lizards” – that invaded the glorious, superior, Sassanid Zoroastrian Empire and destroyed it, supplanting it with inferior Arab Islamic culture and religion.

The mullahs have not only waged war on symbols of Iranian nationalism, but they have also tried to import Arab culture and language, much to the fury of Iranian nationalists. Since, to Islamic fundamentalists, Arabic is the language of Islam (a bigoted and irrational construct on its face), they tend to promote Arab culture and language over native culture and language.

This tends to produce friction between Islamic fundamentalists and non-Arab nationalists in the non-Arab parts of the Muslim World. For instance, it is often difficult to find a copy of the Koran in any language other than Arabic. And many non-Arab Muslims claim that Arabs, especially Gulf Arabs, look down on them and despise them when they go Mecca on hajj.

The Arab chauvinism in Islam has been a long-term hindrance to spread of the religion. Furthermore, for centuries after the conquest of Islam, the greatest Iranian poets, authors and scientists – beloved by all Iranian nationalists – were ordered to be killed by the fundamentalist Islamic morons ruling Islam at the time. Few of these heroes of Iranian culture were killed, but the fact that their deaths were even condoned stings.

It is important to note that Shia Islam was also imposed at the point of the sword sometime later and many Sunni Iranians were put to death.

The remains of this violent religious imposition can be seen today, when one notes that Sunni Islam (Iran is only about 75% Shia Muslim) continues to hold sway in the outliers of the Iranian state – in the desolate Balochi barrens of the southeast, in the northeast near Afghanistan, and in wild, mountainous Iranian Kurdistan in the northwest.

All of these parts of the Iranian state remain largely outside of the regime’s control, and Sunnis continue to complain, legitimately, of discrimination by Iranian Shia Muslims.

The rage between Iranians and Arabs is difficult for outsiders to fathom, but is essential to understanding the region. Sunni Islam is synonymous with Arab identity and nationalism, as Juan Cole astutely notes, in the same way that White Christianity is synonymous with American nationalism. Hence, the secularism of Arab nationalists has always been a bit of a lie.

The Arab masses and regimes are Sunni. Shia minorities have traditionally been suppressed in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and even in Lebanon. This is the root of the Sunni-Shia conflict that rages ferociously in Iraq today.

See here for a particularly bigoted and insane example of Sunni Iraqi bigotry from the interesting blog of a secular Iraqi woman. Note that she ridiculously claims that Shia Islam was invented by the Iranians to destroy the Sunni Islamic civilization of the Arabs.

I realize that sounds like the ravings of a mentally ill person, but this is how many Sunni Muslims, especially Sunni Arabs from Mesopotamia, the Gulf and the Levant, regard Iran and Shiism.

When we understand this sick, crazy, racist hatred, we can understand why Saddam attacked Iran, and why he was supported in that war by all of the states in the Arab peninsula. We can understand why the secular King of Jordan intones darkly about a “Shia Belt” snaking ominously from Iran, across Iraq, to Syria and Southern Lebanon under Hezbollah control.

We can understand the insane, Nazi-like massacres of crowds of Shia civilians – men, women and children of all ages – in Iraq by both the Sunni Islamist guerrilla animals and Saddam’s secular, Shia-hating fascist Arab nationalists. We can understand why the government of Yemen launched a murderous war on the Zaidi Shia of northern Yemen, who constitute 40% of Yemen but are locked out of the state.

We can understand why the Sunni Muslim states of the Gulf are supporting the preliminary plans for a US attack on Iran, and why these states and the Iraqi Sunni-Nazi rebels will stand up and cheer till they can’t talk if the US invades Iran. We can understand why the viciously racist Sunni Arab bigots of Iraq intone darkly, “We will never be ruled by the blackhats (the Shia)”.

While the Arab attitude towards Iran and the Shia has always been one of sheer, Nazi-like racist hatred, the Iranian attitude towards Arabs has tended to be one of the disdain of a supposedly superior people for a supposedly inferior one.

I have droned on enough on this subject, and we need to move on to the rest of the post. If you wish to dive into this fascinating matter further, click the link above and take a crash course in Iranian history, the minorities of Iran and modern-day Iranian nationalism. I hope you enjoyed this excursion.

April 7, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: Sunni Islamist guerrillas shot and seriously wounded Hojatoleslam Yusef Mohammadi Soleimani, a top cleric who represents Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the Centre for Higher Education here.

April 8, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: 6 armed Sunni Islamist guerrillas abducted Eshaq Nezamdoust, a local Iranian official who was in charge of distributing oil products here.

April 9, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: Sunni Islamist guerrillas shot dead 2 Iranian army officers here, Mostafa Ahmadi and Behzad Qolipour.

May 4, 2006

*****
Many of you are probably aware of the furor over Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the figurehead President of Iran, and his comments regarding Israel and the Holocaust. This much-distorted comments are grist for the propaganda for a campaign to get the US to wage a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, primarily for the benefit of the Zionist state in Israel.

If the US won’t do it, “mad dog” Israel says, then Mad Dog Israel herself may be forced to take matters into her own hand. Ahmadinejad shoots off his mouth quite a bit and says some dumb things, but it’s important to note that he is just a figurehead with little power. Remember when reformist Khatami had the same office as Ahmadinejad, and all the Iran-haters said that Khatami had no power anyway?

Well, shoot, Ahmadinejad has the same power as Khatami. If Khatami had no power than Ahmadinejad also has no power, logically speaking. In Iran, the office of the President seems to be mainly utilized these days to vent off steam from the unhappy population, to give them somewhere to channel their dissatisfied energies.

Ahmadinejad’s comments in question concern his purported remarks to “wipe Israel off the map” and his Holocaust denial. First of all, let us note that Holocaust denial in various forms is not unusual at all amongst Arabs and Muslims, especially Islamists.

Furthermore, many misguided non-genocidal persons on both the Right and Left, are caught up in the nonsense of Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Revisionism. Lamentable as it is, it does not necessarily make one a new Hitler.

As far as Ahmadinejad’s comments to wipe Israel off the map, Juan Cole makes clear that he was apparently paraphrasing Khomeini’s remarks from 25 years ago, when the Ayatollah compared Israel to the Shah’s regime, and said in poetic Persian that “the Occupation regime over Jerusalem shall vanish with the page of time”. Cole is adamant that there is no killing of anyone, much less military action, implied in that remark.

Nevertheless, led by the Jewish Lobby and their Gentile fellow travelers on the Fox TV circuit, the US neoconservatives have been hammering out a devious propaganda campaign designed to paint Ahmadinejad, and Iranian Muslims in general, as insane suicidal maniacs out to finish the work that Hitler started.

The supposed evidence is the Holocaust revisionist remarks and the “wipe Israel off the Earth” remark, which Cole has convincingly demonstrated that it is being misquoted. Supposedly, Ahmadinejad is a member of a Shia mystical sect that believes that the 12th Mahdi, or hidden Mahdi, who supposedly vanished on the site of holy Shia mosque in Samarra that was recently detonated by Al Qaeda, is going to return soon.

This religious belief is roughly analogous to the Christian crazies who think that the “end times” are here and Jesus is coming back soon. The common thread in both loony beliefs is that the world is coming to an end. Because Ahmadinejad believes in this nonsense and supports suicide bombers fighting the Zionist regime in Israel, the Israeli Lobby paints him, and an entire nation of Shia Muslims, as suicidal nutcases.

They want to get a nuclear bomb in order to suicidally fire it at Israel, which in the process will destroy Iran with the inevitable US and Israel nuclear retaliation. Clearly, this is a serious question: Is Iran actually capable of such an insane act? We can’t afford to be wrong about our answer here. I have thought about this for months now, and I do not believe that Iran or its leaders are suicidally insane.

I realize there are ominous consequences if I am wrong, including the deaths of maybe 100,000 Israeli Jews. But I am willing to stick my neck out here, just for the sake of argument. I would also like to take this time to argue passionately against any kind of lunatic US or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program, a disastrous idea with truly dangerous consequences.
******

May 13, 2006

****
Kerman Province, Between Kerman and Bam: Armed terrorists with the radical Sunni Islamist group Jundallah (Army of Allah) disguised themselves as cops and set up a roadblock on this highway deep inside Iran and stopped motorists and pulled them out of their vehicles. 11 males were lined up next to a ditch and executed. A 12th man was killed when another vehicle was sprayed with gunfire as it drove past.

A 12-year-old boy was wounded by gunfire, but instead of finishing him off, the terrorists strung him up on a power pylon. He survived, but was badly traumatized. Afterward, the terrorists fled into the Kofout Mountains southeast of Kerman.

The scene of the terrorist attack by Jundallah on the Kerman-Bam highway 130 miles from where Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran come together. Terrorists set up a fake roadblock and murdered 12 civilians in cold blood here.

The murders stunned the nation, which despite its “terrorist” reputation, is actually a very safe country for travelers. Jundallah has its origins in the Sunni population of the Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan.

The Sunnis here complain of discrimination and ethnic cleansing by Iranian Shia officials, charges which have a basis in fact. There are suggestions that Jundallah may be based over the border in Afghanistan, possibly in the wild deserts of Nawruz Province. Clearly, Jundallah has a safe haven in the area where Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan all come together. This is one of the more dangerous places on Earth.

Travelers heading there are advised to take a bodyguard, or preferably several bodyguards. None of the three governments in the region have much control over this area. It is overrun with drug traffickers (usually smuggling heroin or opium), who travel in large, very heavily-armed convoys.

They periodically fight it out with Iranian troops. Iranian troops have lost an incredible figure of hundreds of troops in just a few years fighting running battles in this border region with drug traffickers. Jundallah has links to Al Qaeda. In March, they killed 22 people in Zahedan, a very wild and dangerous city located where Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran all come together. Last year, the group beheaded an Iranian security officer.

Iranian officials say that Jundallah is the arm of Al Qaeda inside Iran, and they say that Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi is bin Laden’s right hand man in Iran. That is probably correct.
*****

May 15, 2006

Kerman Province: Iranian Basij and Revolutionary Guard paramilitaries tracked down and killed 10 terrorists who murdered 12 drivers in cold blood on the Kerman-Bam highway 130 miles from where Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran come together (see May 13 entry for details).

May 19, 2006
****
Syria: Syrian officials arrested dozens of leaders of the various Shia Arab Ahwaz fronts who are waging guerrilla war in Iran’s oil-rich Ahwaz Province. I cannot support this struggle, which is simply designed to steal much of Iran’s oil wealth. However, the Arabs in this region fought bravely in the Iran-Iraq War and suffered heavy casualties.

They complain that they do not see much of the oil wealth in this region. The area was heavily damaged in the war, and the Iranian government hasn’t even rebuilt it very much. The Arabs also complain of discrimination. There is some truth to all of this, but one of Iran’s top military leaders is an Ahwaz Arab.

If Iran had any sense, they would institute affirmative action to hire Ahwaz Arabs, rebuild the Ahwaz region and let the area see much more of their present share of the wealth. This conflict has always been fed by Arab nationalist fascists like the Baath fascists in Iraq, whose hatred of Iran borders on the insane and pathological.

Furthermore, in recent days, US and British Special Forces and intelligence are in the region assisting the insurgency. By arresting most of the top leaders of the insurgency, Syria is spitting in the eyes of Arab nationalist bigots all over the Arab World, and is throwing its lot in with Shia solidarity (Syria is ruled by a Shia sect) and Syria’s alliance with Iran.
*****

Alt Left: Where Helen Thomas is Coming From

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQcQdWBqt14]

This is the famous video where some rabbi set up Helen Thomas and got her on camera saying that the Jews should get out of Palestine and go back to Europe where they came from.

This comment has been attacked as everything from stupid to anti-Semitic. It’s neither, really.

The comment is best analyzed in seeing where Thomas herself is coming from. Helen Thomas is the child of Lebanese Christian immigrants to the US, specifically Greek Orthodox Arabs. These comments of hers are quite in line with the typical Arab attitude about the Zionist Jews forming their state on the ashes of Palestine. The attitude is that the Jews are occupying Arab land in Palestine and that they ought to go back to Europe where they came from. So, she’s just talking like a typical Arab, nothing more, nothing less.

Although many Arabs who say such things are anti-Semites, not all are. Surely they are anti-Zionists. Rather than a battle of racists, this is really a war between two tribes, the Arabs and the Jews, and increasingly between the Muslims and the Jews. Tribal wars are not very pretty affairs, but it’s often incorrect to accuse the parties involved in the war of racism. Were those who hated Germans and Japanese during WW2 a bunch of racists? Get real.

The Jews do not like Arabs very much. Understandably so, as the Arabs won’t stop trying to kill them. Likewise for the Arabs in turn. If members of some enemy tribe kept trying to kill my people and more particularly me, I would surely opt to paint myself with the flimsy stain of temporary racist sin as opposed to daubing my body with the sturdy blotch of universalist death.

But it’s not much of a choice.

Further, Thomas’ comments must be seen in terms of her Greek Orthodox Arab religion. There were many Greek Orthodox living in Palestine before the Nakba, and many were ethnically cleansed. George Habash, leader of the PFLP, was ethnically cleansed with his family from Lydda, and his own sister was killed by the Jews. He was permanently radicalized. The Greek Orthodox refugees spread out to the surrounding Arab states, and many were attracted to secular Arab nationalism. Waddi Haddad, another PFLP radical, was also Greek Orthodox.

In Lebanon, the Greek Orthodox live heavily in the South with the Shia, but they often have their own villages. During the latest Lebanese war, when Israel invaded a Greek Orthodox village, the Lebanese Army surrendered, but the Israelis were soon attacked by a Greek Orthodox militia from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a pro-Syrian and pro-Hezbollah political party.

In the early days of the Lebanon War of 1982, the first suicide bombers were often Leftists, often Lebanese Christians, typically Greek Orthodox, from parties like the SSNP. Only later did Hezbollah take up the tactic.

In Lebanon, the Greek Orthodox support Syria and Hezbollah and despise Israel. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem is a ferocious anti-Zionist and even anti-Semite who has supported suicide bombings and Hamas. The Greek Orthodox had a large population in Jerusalem. Recall that one of the four quarters of the Old City, the Christian Quarter, is mostly Greek Orthodox.

Unfortunately, the Greek Orthodox, and the Orthodox Church in general, has a long history of anti-Semitism. Note the anti-Semitism of the Russian Orthodox Church. Some say that Orthodox anti-Semitism is even worse than Catholic anti-Semitism. Note that the Orthodox Church sees itself as the true pure church, and has never gone through Vatican I, forget Vatican II. My understanding is that they don’t even like Catholics, and consider Catholics to be some sort of liberal deviationists.

The anti-Semitism of the Orthodox involves accusations that the Jews are Christ-killers and the ancient enemies of the Christians. In this way it is similar to Catholic anti-Semitism, which is all about a homicidal or even genocidal response to their descendants of those who committed the Deicide.

The Nazis killed 80% of the Jews of Greece, who were mostly living in the formerly majority-Jewish city of Salonika (now Thessaloniki).  Israelis who vacation in Greece report that Greeks are quite hostile, and describe them as anti-Semites.

One of the worst Christian anti-Semites was the 4th century Archbishop of Constantinople, Church Father Saint John Chrysostom. He delivered a series of homilies about Judaizing Christians, suggesting that they needed to choose one religion or the other.

The Jewish people were driven by their drunkenness and plumpness to the ultimate evil; they kicked about, they failed to accept the yoke of Christ, nor did they pull the plow of his teaching. Another prophet hinted at this when he said: “Israel is as obstinate as a stubborn heifer.”…

Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter. This is why Christ said: “But as for these my enemies, who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slay them.”

Here’s an excerpt from Homily 6…

You [Jews] did slay Christ, you did lift violent hands against the Master, you did spill his precious blood. This is why you have no chance for atonement, excuse, or defense.

Pretty ugly stuff.

In spite of these sentiments, or, even more frighteningly, possibly due to them, this man was made an Orthodox saint! His hatred for the Jews was palpable. He wanted them hunted down and killed, and he wanted their synagogues burnt to the ground.

In that sense Orthodox anti-Semitism is worse even than Catholic anti-Semitism founded in part on Saint Augustine. At least Augustine felt that the Jews should be preserved in humiliation as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity. Neither accorded the Jews full humanity, but at least Augustine was willing to let them survive, albeit as some sort of Catholic version of the dhimmi.

So, while I have no knowledge of whether or not Thomas is an anti-Semite, this is the cultural milieu that she comes from. She may have heard dinner-table conversations like this while growing up in her Greek Orthodox home.

The Yezidis – A Mysterious Kurdish Religious Sect

About two years after the publication of this post, I wrote an update to this article, Do the Yezidis Worship the Devil? which goes into much more detail about the religion.
Since hardly anyone has any idea about who or what the Yezidis of Northern Iraq are, an introduction is in order. The Yezidis are a minority religious group that lives in Northern Iraq, Eastern Turkey, Eastern Syria, Armenia, Northwestern Iran, Georgia, Russia and Germany.
Some estimates put the number of Yezidis at 100,000. However, Yezidi spokesmen say there are 600,000 Yezidis, mostly in Iraq. Other estimates put the number of Yezidis as high as 2 million. There are 10,000 Yezidi refugees in Germany. German Yezidis have created a home page to help introduce others to their religion, but unfortunately it is all in German.
The Yezidis are more of a religious than an ethnic grouping. All Yezidis are Kurds and they all speak Kurdish. In Iraq, most of them live north of Mosul and in the Sinjar Mountains near the Syrian border. There are also Yezidis in Tel Afar, Mosul and the city of Sinjar. Iraq’s Yezidis are seizing Iraq’s democratic moment to press for their rights for the first time.
Yezidis have long been persecuted by Muslims as heathens and devil-worshipers. Although it’s true that the Yezidis worship a peacock angel they call Lucifer, they are basically good, upstanding, moral people. They are not in any way analogous to the actual devil-worshipers who exist in the West, like Anton Levay’s Church of Satan (COS), etc.
Yezidis do not believe in Heaven or Hell and they do not regard Satan, who they regard as the Chief of the Angels, as evil. Instead, he is sacred. The Yezidis feel the Devil created the world and is de facto in charge right now. From the perspective of my life at the moment, those scenarios seem distinctly possible.
Yezidis are allowed to eat pork, unlike Muslims. But bizarrely, they cannot eat lettuce (because the Kurdish word for lettuce rhymes with their word for devil) or wear yellow. This dietary code is not often followed these days. The restriction on eating lettuce may have been due to outbreaks of E. Coli.
Like the Zoroastrians, Yezidis do not accept converts – a tendency which may result in the end of Yezidism with time. Yezidism shares many things with Zoroastrianism, and some commenters regard it as either a Zoroastrian sect or a religion with roots in Zoroastrianism.
My opinion is that a synthesis between Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism and pre-religious paganism is more accurate. It is likely the Yezidism predates all of these – Zoroastrianism, Islam and Judaism – in fact, it may be one of the oldest extant human religions.
Somewhat similar to the caste system of Hinduism, another ancient religion, Yezidis have seven levels of initiation, or classes. The classes are princes, sheiks, senators, seers, ascetics and the community of the faithful. The large faith community class makes up 70% of the community.
This split, with a small elite sect who retain most of the (oral) knowledge of the religion and a large majority of mere followers who are kept in the dark about most of the religion, is also similar to other “secret” religions in the area, including the Sabeans, the Druze and Alawi.
The Alawi of Syrian and Lebanon are a highly divergent Shia sect, a split-off from the extremist Nusairi split early in the history of Shiism. Although the Druze call themselves Muslims, it is probable that they are not Muslims at all, since their religion is so divergent. Instead, like Bahaism, the Druze religion is more properly considered to be related to Islam, rather than part of Islam proper.
The Druze date back to the 1100’s and also seem to be the result of a Shia split, similar to the split that birthed Alawism. Both sects persisted via extreme tribalism, refusing intermarriage, accepting no converts, keeping their religion secret, pretending to be Muslims to avoid persecution while still practicing the religion in secret, and especially, seeking shelter in the difficult, mountainous terrain of the Levant.
The Sabeans or Mandeans of Iraq are probably the last remains of the ancient Gnostic religion; they may also be former Diasporic Sephardic Jews who split off from Judaism in Iraq around the year 600. The Mandeans also worship the North Star, revere John the Baptist and consider Jesus Christ as the font of all evil on Earth!
In Yezidism, marriage across classes is strictly forbidden, again reminiscent of Hinduism. However, people do marry across caste nonetheless. Although the new Iraqi regime is basically a puppet regime of US colonialism, at least the Yezidis do have three members of the new Iraqi Parliament, all elected on the Kurdish list.
Saddam’s regime persecuted the Yezidis first for being Kurds and second for their religion as they were viewed as heathens. Yes, Saddam’s regime was not completely secular. Under Saddam’s extremely racist, fascist-like, Sunni Arab Nationalist regime, Yezidis, Kurds, Assyrians, Shia and Turkomen were all persecuted by the Ba’ath Party.
For instance, Assyrian Christians were denied an identity by the Baath and referred to as “Kurdish Christians”. The Baath forbade the use of the Assyrian or Turkoman languages in the schools. Yezidi religious studies have been banned in Iraq since 1963, the year of the Baathist coup.
In its censuses, Baathist Arab nationalist racists called the Yezidis “an Arabic people”, clearly a falsehood. Saddam’s racist Arab regime engaged in ethnic cleansing of the Yezidis on several occasions. Usually, the Yezidis were driven off their land onto other lands, and their land was given to nearby Arabs.
In 1978, 126 Yezidi villages in Sinjar were “collectivized” into 10 villages while 10 villages near Dahuk were destroyed and the villagers were forced into another village. The new villages created for the Yezidis lacked even basic health care, and it was hard to earn a living. Arab invaders who colonized Yezidi lands forbade the Yezidi from herding animals, and the new villages the Yezidis were pushed into lacked decent pasture.
In 1997, two Yezidi teachers from Elqush were arrested by Saddam’s intelligence services and tortured until they agreed to stop teaching the Yezidi religion.
In the same year, in Ayn Sufna, Baathists stole 1,500 Yezidi properties and gave them to Arab and Kurdish tribes in the region. Saddam’s army surrounded a Yezidi village in 2000, but left after the Yezidis staged a defiant demonstration.
In the no-fly zones formed by the allies in the Kurdish Regional Government area of Iraq instituted after the Gulf War, the Yezidis have fared much better than they did under Saddam.
They liberated many villages that were seized by Arab colonists and today in school, classes in the Yezidi religion are even taught in areas where there are good numbers of Yezidi pupils. However, since the US invasion, the Yezidi situation in some ways has worsened.
The entire north of Iraq has come under the control of Kurdish racist fascist parties, the KDP and PUK. These parties are lately promoting a sort of Kurdish Sunni racism which attacks Sunni and Shia Arabs, Shia, Christian and Yezidi Kurds and Assyrian Christians – in short, everyone who is not a Sunni Kurd.
The racist Sunni Kurds succeeded in preventing large numbers of all of these groups from voting in the election in February 2005.
In the case of the Yezidis, Kurdish racists never even allowed polling stations to open in a number of Yezidi zones. Racist Sunni Kurds have been attacking and ethnically cleansing Assyrian Christian villages in the north for decades now, a process which accelerated when the Allies granted the Kurds their Kurdish Zone in 1991.
This is a continuation of long-standing Kurdish Sunni Muslim racism against Assyrian Christians extending back to the 1920’s. In that decade, Kurdish Muslims gleefully slaughtered huge numbers of Assyrians in a naked display of Islamist bigotry that reached genocidal proportions.
Formally, the Yezidi religion was founded in the 1100’s by Sheikh Uday bin Masafel al-Amawi. Uday was born in Damascus but died in Shaikan in northern Iraq. His tomb in Shaikan is now Yezidism’s holiest site. As noted above, many scholars trace Yezidism to one of the world’s oldest extant religions, Zoroastrianism, founded in ancient Persia.
Traditionally, Yezidism is variously regarded as either an offshoot of Zoroastrianism or Shia Islam. Those who say the Yezidis are Shia hold that they are an extreme Shia “Sevener” Ismaili sect similar to the Druze and the Alawi (see discussion of the Alawi and Druze above).
A better analysis is to regard Yezidism as a syncretic mix between Zoroastrianism and Shia Islam.
Others note Judaic traits in the Yezidis; some suggest that the Yezidis are former Jews who broke away from Judaism and formed a new religion. Indeed, some theorists that the Kurds in general are former Jews. See Rabbi Joe Katz’s Eretzyisroel site for more on that interesting theory, which may have some validity.
The best analysis would leaven the Zoroastrian-Shia syncretism of Yezidism with dollops of Judaism and tablespoons of ancient paganism, while noting the Yezidism is probably older than any of its parts, except for the pagan.
Oddly enough, the Yezidis have a monk and nun class, men and women who dress in white and have taken a vow of celibacy. Yezidis are also said to be sun worshipers, in another similarity with Zoroastrianism.
A famous Yezidi, Sharfadin, has a tomb in Sinjar. Sharfadin also serves as a personified sun god. Note that sun-worship is one of the most ancient of human religious tenets, dating back to the Egyptians and probably beyond.
The leader of the Yezidis is a prince called mir, or mireh shekha. The Yezidi religion is passed down orally through families and officially, there are no Yezidi religious texts. However, closer analysis seems to reveal that there are a couple of Yezidi holy books, but they are hidden by followers, and their existence is denied to outsiders.
Outsiders have somehow managed to get a hold of a couple of copies of these holy texts, or at least parts of them, and they have been published, both in print and on the Internet. Some say that these supposed Yezidi holy texts are actually fakes, and that no extant holy texts exist, as all knowledge is oral.
I glanced through the material in these texts along with an analysis of them. Shall we say that Yezidism is an immensely complex religion and that this article does not begin to tickle out an understanding of it?
Kakaism is another Kurdish sect that is very similar to Yezidism. It arose 1000 years ago in northern Iraq due to conflicts between the Umayyad rulers of Islam and the Zoroastrian priesthood. Kakais, like Yezidis, are forbidden from cursing Satan on religious grounds. Hence, many Muslims see them, like the Yezidis, as devil-worshipers. There are 300,000 Kakais in Kurdistan.
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