Raw Deal # 6: The Voldemorte Syndrome

Michael Lumish

Heya Guys, this is Michael Lumish talking with ya on the morning of Monday, September 26, and it is hot, hot, hot here in Oakland, California.

I mean, good Christ, it’s almost October for crying out loud and we have temperatures, depending upon just where you live, close to 100 degrees!

In any case, given the rise of political Islam and what seems to be a spike in Jihadi attacks in the United States, but most particularly in Europe, it is both dangerous and disconcerting that the very topic has become verboten.

This is because so many people automatically think that if you have some hard criticisms of Islamic terrorism it must mean that you are vile, irrational, hate-filled racist who despises Muslims merely because they are Muslims.

What is it that Pamela Geller says?

That they call anti-Jihadis something like, racist, Islamophobic, anti-Muslim, bigots.

It just rolls off the tongue.

Racist, Islamophobic, anti-Muslim, bigots.

I have to tell you, that is just messed up and wrong and unjust and inaccurate and does nothing but shut down the conversation, which is precisely what it is intended to do.

Anti-Jihadis have a name for this.

They call it the Voldemort Syndrome.

In the Harry Potter series the arch-villain whom everyone fears is Voldemort.

They are so terrified of Voldemort that the magical community won’t even say his name… despite the fact that they insist that he is dead.

They would say something like, “He who must not be named is dead.”

This is the way that huge numbers of westerners – and, yes, particularly on the left – refuse to think about terrorism

Refuse to think about the rise of political Islam.

And refuse to think about its significance to mass Muslim immigration into the West.

To even so much as think about such questions makes one – wait for it - a racist, Islamophobic, anti-Muslim, bigot.

This issue is not to be discussed and terrorism, all evidence to the contrary, isn’t really that big a deal… or so they would have you believe.

I mean, more people die every year in road accidents, by far, than are killed by terrorists. Right?

The thing of it is, the people who refuse to discuss the Jihad are not afraid of Jihadis. Not at all.

They’re not afraid that some maniac is gonna blow them up while waiting on line at Starbucks for a half café double tall non fat foamy mocha.

What they are afraid of, actually, is one another.

They’re afraid that their friends will think of them as a heinous racist and they, as a consequence, will lose social standing or even, quite possibly, suffer the loss of employment.

Who needs the grief?

So, people won’t discuss it, even as Obama and Hillary are preparing to go all Angela Merkel on us and open the friggin’ flood-gates.

It’s just plain dumb.

In the US we’re pretty much all of us the progeny of immigrants and students are taught to look upon 19^th and early 20^th century disdain for immigrants as, itself, disdainful.

And for good reason.

And for a Jew, of all people, to frown upon people fleeing from a war zone is not just unconscionable. It’s deplorable!

But the fact is, the current wave of Middle Eastern and North African Muslim immigration is not the same as the eastern and southern European wave of a century ago and more.

The Jews and the Italians and the Polish and the Ukrainians and god knows who all, not to mention the Irish and Germans before them, did not generally despise the United States and their kids and grandkids assimilated.  

Of course, there is no getting away from the fact that more than a few eastern European Jewish socialists and anarchists sometimes caused a bit of a ruckus.

My family lived in the Ukraine for who knows how many generations and I sometimes like to tell people that when they arrived in New York Harbor in the early 1920s they carried little round bombs in one hand and a copies of Das Kapital in the other.

But, thankfully, that bit of nonsense was short-lived, unlike the Jihad which has been ongoing since that Muhammad fellow started dreaming of the Archangel Gabriel like some hallucinating character in Tony Kurshner’s Angels in America.

But the point is, not only has the Jihad been ongoing since Muhammad, it continues to this very day.

Does this mean that all Muslims are Jihadis?

No. But I honestly do not care.

One thing is certain, a percentage of these migrants are from the Islamic State, if not other Jihadi groups, and Americans will die because of Obama and Clinton’s naivete or indifference.

Also, of course, let’s not forget that we are talking about people from a part of the world where rates of anti-Semitism range from the mid-70^th percentile, among the most open-hearted, to the mid-90^th percentile among Palestinian-Arabs.

I am not calling for a ban on Muslim immigration, but we need to make damn sure that we know who is coming into the United States.

This is no more racism than opposing Nazism was bigotry toward Germans or opposing Soviet Communism was irrational, bigoted hatred toward Russians.

Given 9/11 and Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon and the 2014 beheading in Oklahoma – most people are not even aware of this, but there was an actual Jihadi beheading in Oklahoma of all friggin’ places.

Not to mention San Bernadino, last years Draw Muhammad contest that got shot up in Texas and then, of course, God rest their souls, 49 dead people in an Orlando nightclub.

Yet, none of this seems to get through to virtually anybody in the Democratic party.

Look. I don’t care who moves into the United States so long as they are not Jihadis, are not in opposition to the Constitution of the United States, and harbor no irrational, Qur’anically-based, cosmic hatred toward Jews.

Aside from that, give us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The Dhimmi That Got Away

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon, Jews Down Under and The Jewish Press.}

Israel is The Dhimmi That Got Away.

The fundamental basis of the never-ending Arab-Muslim aggression against the Jews of the Middle East is the Muslim religion as outlined in the Qur'an and the Hadiths.

Period. Full stop.

It is not an aggression based upon notions of social justice, as the Palestinian-Arabs, and their friends, would have you believe. In truth, Israel is a social justice Shangri-La compared to the rest of the Middle East.

The Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East is a religious war.

And it is within the primary sources of the Islamic faith that we find the basis of this aggression toward the loathsome Infidel, particularly toward those trouble-making Jews.

The Jewish people, however, along with a few Christians, managed to escape dhimmitude - in violation of Islamic theocratic imperatives - with the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the creation of the Jewish State of Israel after World War II.

From those days to these, the Jews of the Middle East are free and the Arabs do not like it.

When Muhammad created Islam as an imperial-supremacist religion intent on global expansion, he constituted it as the enemy of the Jewish people, the Christian people, and all other "unbelievers."

Furthermore, it is an astonishing testament to the man's will and intelligence that he damn near pulled it off. Within a mere century of The Prophet's death Muslims were already banging on Europe's door in search of conquest, slaves, and booty.

Please understand, however, that the following criticisms are not pointed at Muslims as individuals, but toward the consequences of Islamic doctrine. It is Islam as a theocratic-political ideology, with far-reaching consequences for all of us, that is under scrutiny.

The Qur'an and Muhammad's Will to Power

The Qur'an is an opaque and contradictory book, but there is no question that the spreading of Sharia, and the defeat of the Infidels and "unbelievers," is at its core. What this means, needless to say, is death or conversion for pagans and death, conversion, or dhimmitude for "People of the Book." Jews and Christians hold a higher place within the Qur'anic religious hierarchy and therefore have the honor to choose to live out their lives under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule. This entails the payment of protection money (jizyah) under a system of enforced humiliation and submission to the will of Allah... which is to say, to the will of the Arab theological-political leadership.

It is not, therefore, a coincidence that Islam is famous for its bloody borders and is presently conducting a casual, ad hoc genocide of the Christians of the Middle East and much of Africa. The genocide is casual in the sense that no one, including the Pope, himself, really seems to give a damn and the Arabs conduct it in a here-and-there, sort-of piece-meal fashion.

The reason for the never-ending Arab-Muslim war against the Jewish people, therefore, has virtually nothing to do with Jewish misbehavior toward Arabs and virtually everything to do with the Qur'anic religious imperative to keep "unbelievers" under submission. Many Arabs in the Middle East want Jewish blood for the very same reason that they want Christian blood... because both are Infidel religions that absolutely refuse to bow their heads to The Sword of the Prophet.

The punishment for refusal of submission to Qur'anic law (al-Sharia) is death, sometimes via crucifixion, sometimes via head-chopping, and sometimes, as we read in Sura 5:33, by the chopping off of a hand and a foot from opposite sides of the body.

Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment,

The Christians of the Middle East, including of course the Egyptian Copts, are not guilty of anything other than being Christians and it is for that crime that Muslim extremists - with the approval of their friends - burn down churches in the thousands, kidnap young Christian girls for purposes of rape and / or conversion, and riot against Christians wherever they may be found.

None of his is due to Christian behavior.

The cause is the Qur'an, its insistence on Muslim supremacy, and Muhammad's will to power.

The Dhimmi That Got Away

A primary difference between Jews and Christians in that part of the world, vis-à-vis the perpetual aggression and contempt of Arab-Muslims, is the IDF. The IDF is the lone, sole reason why the Arabs have not driven the Jews "into the sea" as they once promised during a more honest period of their history.

For thirteen long centuries Arab-Muslims had their way with all non-Muslims in the Middle East. In some times and places dhimmitude was better and in some times and places dhimmitude was worse, but it was never better than the very worst of Jim Crow in the early twentieth-century American south.

In Martin Gilbert's In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, we read:

There could be no building of new synagogues or churches.  Dhimmis could not ride horses, but only donkeys; they could not use saddles, but only ride sidesaddle.  Further, they could not employ a Muslim. Jews and Christians alike had to wear special hats, cloaks and shoes to mark them out from Muslims.  They were even obliged to carry signs on their clothing or to wear types and colors of clothing that would indicate they were not Muslims, while at the same time avoid clothing that had any association with Mohammed and Islam. Most notably, green clothing was forbidden...

Other aspects of dhimmi existence were that Jews - and also Christians - were not to be given Muslim names, were not to prevent anyone from converting to Islam, and were not to be allowed tombs that were higher than those of Muslims.  Men could enter public bathhouses only when they wore a special sign around their neck distinguishing them from Muslims, while women could not bathe with Muslim women and had to use separate bathhouses instead.  Sexual relations with a Muslim woman were forbidden, as was cursing the Prophet in public - an offense punishable by death.

Under dhimmi rules as they evolved, neither Jews nor Christians could carry guns, build new places of worship or repair old ones without permission,or build any place of worship that was higher than a mosque.  A non-Muslim could not inherit anything from a Muslim.  A non-Muslim man could not marry a Muslim woman, although a Muslim man could marry a Christian or a Jewish woman.

Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010) 32 - 33.

The Palestinian-Arab leadership, and many of their people, are aggressors who portray themselves as victims in order to advance the Islamic religious imperative of Jihad.

The Palestinian-Arabs are also the cudgel that the rest of the Arab world uses against free Israel.

Arabs outnumber Jews in the Middle East by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1. There are about six million Jews surrounded by 300 to 400 million Arabs in the Middle East. Those Arabs are not the least bit happy about Jewish sovereignty on the ancestral Jewish homeland and it is not because of Israel's record on human rights, which is far-and-away superior to their own.

Arab hatred toward Israel is for the simple reason that Islam claims the Jewish homeland as part of Dar al Islam and therefore, according to Islamic religious law, it must always and forever remain part of Dar al Islam.

However, until the Arabs manage to wrest back control of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people it will remain, like all non-Muslim lands, part of Dar al Harb, "the House of War."

And it is for this reason that Palestinian-Arab mothers are sometimes happy to see their children commit suicide by intifada - by Jihad - in the streets of Jerusalem or Hebron. If they are fundamentalist in their Islamic faith, then they honestly believe that the violent Jihad is a religious obligation and that their dead sons will go to an eternal life of indulgence in Paradise.

Nonetheless, despite chronic and unremitting Arab-Muslim theocratic animosity toward Jews, we are the only indigenous people in the history of the planet to successfully reconstitute a national home upon ancestral land after twenty centuries of diaspora and thirteen centuries of dhimmitude.

Israel is, indeed, The Dhimmi That Got Away.

Astrology's Dark Night of the Soul

NASA reveals 13th Zodiac sign and now your horoscope may have changed

Do you wait to make an important decision before reading your horoscope?

Have you ever turned down a date because your zodiac signs weren’t compatible? Do you have a little tattoo of your zodiac sign on your ankle?

If so, we have very bad news for you.

NASA recently revealed that there are actually 13 zodiac signs, and now everything you ever knew about your horoscope has changed.

Jeebus.

First Neil deGrasse Tyson robs us of Pluto and now this!

{The universe shifts beneath my feet.}

Note to a Progressive-Left Facebook Friend

Michael Lumish

{Also published at The Jewish Press.}

I think that what's bugging me - and believe me, this is not meant as a criticism to you, personally - is how quickly politics descends into a team sport the closer we get toward major elections.

It's Us versus Them.

Good Guys versus Bad Guys.

It's less about issues than it is about demonizing the political "other."

It's not enough to merely criticize Obama or Hillary on the issues.

One must spit loathing and contempt at their very essence, as well as at their followers, or anyone who is not absolutely in opposition to their status as human beings.

About a month, or so, ago I was amazed to see both Trump and Clinton calling each other "racist."

Then the very next week they each flung the defamatory term "psychopath" at one another.

Furthermore, among supporters of either candidate, group-think rules the day and if you so much as question a political stance of one side it means that you must be on the other side... the side of that revolting enemy of all humanity... whoever it might be this cycle.

Or, for example, were I to criticize Black Lives Matter for their violent tendencies in the streets or their support for anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, it must mean that I am a revolting racist who hates black people.

In truth, the Democratic Party and the Progressive-Left, the very party and political movement that I come out of, has taken something worthy and noble, the Civil Rights Movement, and turned it into a bludgeon with which to silence alternative viewpoints or bully people into political submission.

This is politics as rat poison and it is not worthy of any of us with two brain cells to rub together or a political heart that honestly cares.

Hanan Al-Hroub and the Evaporation of an Ethical Dilemma

Michael Lumish

{Also published at Jews Down Under.}

Writing for the conservative Breitbart website, Joel B. Pollack tells us:

Hanan an-Hroub is scheduled to speak at a Clinton Global Initiative event in New York after winning a $1 million teaching award from another charity that donates to the Clinton Foundation. Her husband, Omar al-Hroub, spent 10 years in an Israeli prison for his role in a 1980 bombing that killed six Israelis.

For those willing to take a few moments to think about it, the Hanan Al-Hroub story is ethically complex and, therefore, very interesting.

As with any stories that emphasize Palestinian-Arab terrorism, the mainstream left is reluctant to touch it. The Wall Street Journal has an article behind a wall requiring registration, but Breitbart has a a critical piece and the Times of Israel has a laudatory one.

Trump, needless to say, knows an opportunity to smack around Hillary when he sees one.

Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor for the Trump campaign claims that:

Today’s report that the Clinton Foundation is feting the wife of a Palestinian man convicted of helping bomb innocent Israeli citizens is deeply disturbing, especially in the wake of this weekend’s attacks. The decision to honor the wife of a terrorist by Hillary Clinton’s foundation shows a complete lack of judgment and a callousness that should disqualify her from holding the presidency.

Raj Shah, ​deputy ​communications director of the Republican National Committee, says:

In the wake of this weekend’s attacks, granting a platform to the spouse of a terrorist bomb-maker just miles away from where explosives were detonated days ago is an insult to the victims and makes a mockery of the Clinton Foundation.

My initial gut-reaction to this story was nausea at Clinton's apparent disdain for the victims of terrorism.

My second reaction was to wonder how dumb must the Clinton people be to publicly honor a figure so closely connected to terrorism directly after still more Jihadi attacks in the United States?

But then, of course, the question becomes, "Just who the hell is this woman?"

According to the Clinton Foundation website:

Winner of the 2016 Global Teacher Prize, an initiative of the Varkey Foundation, Hanan Al Hroub grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp, Bethlehem, where she was regularly exposed to acts of violence. She went into primary education after her children were left deeply traumatized by a shooting incident they witnessed on their way home from school. Her experiences in meetings and consultations to discuss her children’s behavior, development and academic performance in the years that followed led Al Hroub to try to help others who, having grown up in similar circumstances, require special handling at school. With so many troubled children in the region, Palestinian classrooms can be tense environments. Al Hroub embraces the slogan “No to Violence” and uses a specialized teaching approach she developed herself. Al Hroub has shared her perspective at conferences, meetings and teacher training seminars.

Omitted is any reference to her bomb-making husband and the six people he killed in 1980.

The Wall Street Journal notes:

Omar al-Hroub was convicted on charges that he was an accomplice in a deadly bombing attack in Hebron that killed Israelis walking home from Friday night Sabbath prayers. According to an Associated Press account at the time, Omar al-Hroub was a chemist who provided chemicals needed for making the bombs.

This is damning material and, even if Hanan Al-Hroub were some Palestinian-Arab "Mother Theresa," it very much calls into question Hillary Clinton's capacity for sound judgment.

Nonetheless, we cannot discount the possibility that Al-Hroub is entirely innocent of any involvement in her husband's former Jew Killing Hobby or that her work as a teacher since then is not worth every penny of that one million dollars.

According to "JTA" in the Times of Israel:

Al-Hroub developed techniques to calm children after they witness violence after her own children witnessed Israeli troops shoot and wound their father during the first Palestinian intifada.

The techniques reportedly reduce tendencies to violence among Palestinians. In March, she won the Britain-based Varkey Foundation’s $1 million Global Teacher Prize. Among those congratulating her were Pope Francis, Vice President Joe Biden, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Britain’s Prince William.

The Varkey Foundation tells us that:

Hanan embraces the slogan ‘No to Violence’ and uses a specialist approach she developed herself, detailed in her book, ‘We Play and Learn’. She focuses on developing trusting, respectful, honest and affectionate relationships with her students and emphasises the importance of literacy. She encourages her students to work together, pays close attention to individual needs and rewards positive behaviour. Her approach has led to a decline in violent behaviour in schools where this is usually a frequent occurrence; she has inspired her colleagues to review the way they teach, their classroom management strategies and the sanctions they use. 

I don't know that encouraging cooperation among students or rewarding positive behavior - while wearing a clown's wig and red nose - represents some sort-of pedagogical revolution worth a million bucks, but it definitely beats a kick in the head.

What is troubling, however, is the manner in which the media, and Al-Hroub, herself, imply Jewish-Israeli guilt for the violence created by ongoing Palestinian-Arab theocratically-inspired aggression against Jews living on ancestral Jewish land.

For example, The Guardian, in a piece from last March concerning the original announcement of the award, claims in a context-free manner:

In 2000, when her youngest was established at school, Hroub resumed her education part-time at Al-Quds University. Within months, her husband, Omar, and two of her daughters were shot at by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near Bethlehem. Omar was injured in the shoulder and the girls were traumatised.

I do not doubt it for one moment.

The year 2000 was the first year of Intifada Number Two, the Al-Aqsa Intifada, when Palestinian-Arabs went berserk because Ariel Sharon had the audacity to take a stroll on the Temple Mount.

The Guardian story, of course, also leaves out Omar's history of terrorism.

In conclusion, although I was willing to give Clinton and Al-Hroub the benefit of the doubt, when I see the way that certain media outlets, such as the Guardian, use this story to contrast alleged Palestinian-Arab sweetness and goodness versus Jewish-Israeli barbarism, the ethical dilemma melts away into the aether and all that I am left with is disgust.

For all I know, Hanan Al-Hroub is a terrific woman and a wonderful teacher worth every penny of that million dollars, but when these stories are used in a propagandistic manner to contrast bunny-like Arabs in conflict with Doberman-like Jews, it tells me that there is something more going on here than merely honoring a teacher.

Berkeley reinstates class demonizing Israel

Michael Lumish

The University of California, Berkeley, has made a quick u-turn in its decision to block a student-led class devoted to demonizing Israel and Morton Klein doesn't like it.

Neither do I.

The ZOA tells us the following:

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has condemned the University of California (UC), Berkeley for reinstating an explicitly anti-Israel course dedicating to discussing and seeking ways in which to dismantle Israel, thereby robbing the Jewish people of national self-determination. 

It's important that we still have staunch pro-Israel organizations like the ZOA and this is particularly true given that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has under its new director, Jonathan Greenblatt, moved into the surrealistic J Street realm of pro-Israel / anti-Israel organizations.

Isi Leibler will tell you.

But there is also the important question of where the Jewish and pro-Israel donating Berkeley alums will come down on the issue. My guess is that UCAL, Berkeley has little to fear from the possibility of Jewish financial defections.

The Obama administration, after all, has done a terrific job demonstrating the endurance of American Jewish loyalty to both the Democratic party and progressive-left institutions, such as UCAL Berkeley.

The course, entitled, ‘Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis,’ examines the history of the region from the 1880s  “through the lens of settler colonialism.” The course, in short, simply presumes that Zionism is colonial movement, rather than a national liberation movement.

That's the key insight.

From what I gather, the course is grounded in the false premise of perpetual Palestinian-Arab victim-hood at the hands of those terrible colonialist Ashkenazi Zionists... i.e., the Jews. As violent intruders, needless to say, the Jews are considered to have no rights to national sovereignty on what is falsely claimed as the land of the "indigenous Arab" population.

It is for this reason that the "instructor student," Hatem Bazian, will also examine “the possibilities of a decolonized Palestine.” Or, to say in more honest terms, the possibility of eliminating Israel as the national and ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.

The course readings consist heavily of anti-Zionist readings from biased, ‘new historians’ like Ilan Pappé and Palestinian activists like Edward Said and so on.

Ilan Pappé has a certain notoriety within the academic community for saying in a 1999 interview:

“Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what the facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth-seekers.”

And we even have a photo of Edward Said throwing rocks at the IDF.

According to Morton Klein:

“This course at UC brings into the open what is often merely latent –– that courses at universities today that deal with Zionism, Arab nationalism and the history of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs are inherently biased against Zionism and Jewish national rights, regarding Palestinian Arabs as the only group entitled to such things."

Yes, and this has been going on for many years, now.

One lesson that we can take away from the proliferation of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism on American campuses is that Jewish alumni donors to schools like UCAL, Berkeley, do not much mind the defamation of Israel on those campuses.

Nor do they, apparently, much mind the challenges - physical, emotional, and otherwise - suffered by Jewish supporters of Israel on those campuses.

Either that or the schools are willing to alienate a few Jewish donors and subject pro-Israel Jewish students to harassent in order to support the anti-Zionist project.

It is a shame, really, because if the pro-Israel Jewish alumnus at schools like UCAL, Berkeley would stand up with strength they could make a difference.

Sadly, they don't.