On May 12, I posted an article entitled, “The Torture Debate Shows Our Vulnerability to Radical Evil.” My conclusion:
Nearly two hundred thousand Americans, military and civilian personnel, were exposed to Iraqi terrorist organizations that routinely employed suicide bombings in order to kill Americans and their supporters. Some of these organizations were supported by Iran, which employed waves of children as human minesweepers in its war with Iraq. These atrocities were motivated by a religion that permits a peaceful interpretation, but cannot refute the cruelest and most violent interpretation. America simply is in no position to expose large numbers of its military and civilian personnel to this sort of horror. Instead we should attempt to quarantine such cultures and expose our own people to them as little as possible. In other words, we should intervene in the Islamic world where urgent American security interests are at stake, but to the minimum extent possible, and with no commitment to determine the civil outcome. We must leave the Muslim world to its own destiny rather than to attempt to engineer a happy ending. And unless Western leaders, religious as well as civic, help their followers to understand the Islamic manifestation of radical evil, the West will continue to be vulnerable.
I wish I had put the matter more strongly:
In countries where torture is habitual, unexceptionable and embedded in everyday life, it is foolish to imagine that our armed forces might conduct successful operations without employing torture as a matter of normal practice. That is why we cannot hope to intervene in civil societies in the Middle East. On April 4, the London Times published a video of Taliban soldiers publicly torturing a teenaged girl in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, reportedly for the crime of stepping out of her house unaccompanied. It is hideous; men hold the girl down while one beats her with a leather strap. The girl screams in pain. Around her a large circle of men watch.
That sort of atrocity is part of everyday life in the Middle East, as Daniel Pipes observes:
Some of the bravest and most distinguished analysts from the Middle East emphasize that region’s culture of cruelty. Kanan Makiya titled his 1994 book about Arabs Cruelty and Silence. Fouad Ajami writes about Beirut being “lost to a new reign of cruelty,” about Iraq’s “plunder and cruelty and sectarian animus,” and about the region’s “cruelty, waste, and confusion.”
This observation came in Pipes’ recent commentary on a remarkable report of the torture of a businessman by a prince of the United Arab Emirates over a commercial dispute. Videotapes of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan torturing a grain dealer over a $5,000 delivery were aired April 22 on ABC News.
The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrain the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly. At another point on the tape, the Sheikh can be seen telling the cameraman to come closer. “Get closer. Get closer. Get closer. Let his suffering show,” the Sheikh says.
Over the course of the tape, Sheikh Issa acts in an increasingly sadistic manner. He uses an electric cattle prod against the man’s testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man’s testicles and sets them aflame. Then the tape shows the Sheikh sorting through some wooden planks. “I remember there was one that had a nail in it,” he says on the tape. The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail.
Sometimes ignorance and prejudice reinforce a hostile view of peoples or countries. In the case of the Middle East, the vast majority of Americans have no clue as to the degree of ambient cruelty. Leave aside that between 50% (lowest estimate) and 90% (highest estimate) of Egyptian girls are subjected to genital mutilation, the horror of everyday life in what President Obama calls “the Muslim world” is more than the American mind can absorb.
June 5th, 2009 |
Well, it does seem that everytime the USA engages in foreign interventionism, for whatever reason, we end up getting in a mess.
Yet, we never learn….amazing!
I’m leaning toward an orchestrated American collapse engineered by either a Marxist/Muslim, or a Muslim/Marxist. I know you don’t agree and I hope you’re right.
On a more sensitive note, there seems to be a demonic component to Islam, an adherence to evil (noted above), that few wish to discuss.
June 5th, 2009 |
[...] or torture: Yes, I will put my thoughts down on paper, soon, but in the meantime, Spengler adds some afterthoughts to his recent musings on the [...]
June 5th, 2009 |
Robert,
I don’t think Obama is orchestrating an American collapse. He wants to maximize his own power, and the parasite can only damage the host so much without killing himself. But I have been warning for more than year that he is a Third World anthropologist profiling us:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html
“America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world’s 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama’s mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.
Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother’s revenge against the America she despised.”
June 5th, 2009 |
Spengler, Brilliant!
But, when I read this to the wife her reply was that “He doesn’t care about America!”
But, between you and me, you have a point about the parasite (nice word!) not wanting to kill the host but the wife is prescient. I have to mull this over!
BTW, this does not look good for Israel, is B.N going to cave in to the Enlighten One’s demand to stop the settlements?
June 6th, 2009 |
Mr. Goldman,
The ambient cruelty, as you describe it, of Moslem nations is not, in my view, inherent to Moslems. Most Moslems, like most people everywhere, want to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit. The proof for this is the number of Moslems who have moved to America and become fully integrated into American culture – such as, for instance, a Pakistani friend of mine who wouldn’t dream of torturing anyone. The truth of the matter is that the evil prevalent in the Moslem world is the result of what always creates evil – lies.
Now, of course, all civilizations have their quota of liars, but in Moslem civilization there isn’t the corrective of a free society able to expose the lies. In point of fact, there are probably far more lies abroad in our Judeo-Christian, Western civilization than in Moslem civilization – but there is also much more freedom and thus anyone who cares to inform himself swiftly determines what is a lie. What Moslems need is not the cold indifference of an American determined to keep them at bay, but an America determined that Moslems shall be free.
There is no cure for what threatens us out of the Moslem nations short of making them free – so that lies can be exposed, justice done and the ambient cruelty exposed to the full light of day, and thus no longer prevalent. We simply must go in and by a judicious combination of force and diplomacy, mid-wife a birth of freedom in the Moslem world – a birth already started in Iraq and Afghanistan (however imperfectly).
June 6th, 2009 |
[...] An Afterthought on Torture by David P. Goldman [...]
June 6th, 2009 |
None of these things will matter as soon as the folThe Lord God says they will come, “Then answered I, and said unto him, WHAT ARE THESE TWO OLIVE TREES UPON THE RIGHT AIDE OF THE CANDLESTICK AND UPON THE LEFT SIDE THEREOF?And I answered again, and said unto him, WHAT BE THESE TWO OLIVE BRANCHES WHICH THROUGH THE TWO GOLDEN PIPES EMPTY THE GOLDEN OIL OUT OF THEMSELVES? And he answered me and said, “KNOWEST THOU NOT WHAT THESE BE? And I said, “NO, MY LORD.
Than said he, THESE RE THE TWO ANOINTED ONES, THAT STAND BY THE LORD OF THE WHOLE EARTH.” (Zechariah 4:11-14) OT Tenach
and
The Lord says also, “AND I WILL GIVE POWER UNTO MY TWO WITNESSES, AND THEY SHALL PROPHESY A THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND THREESCORE DAYS, CLOTHED IN SACKCLOTH.
THESE ARE THE TWO OLIVE TREES, AND THE TWO CANDLESTICKS STANDING BEFORE THE GOD OF THE EARTH.” (Revelation 11:3-4) NT Tenach
Read the rest fround in this chapter, verses 5-14 IF YOU WANT TO KNOW THE TRUE FUTURE OF THE NATION OF ISRAEL.
The Holy Lord God says these things are true, and “I MAGNIFY MY WORD ABOVE MY NAME” He says also!!! Amen,
His Servant of 42 years at age 65
Larry Shayer
lowing takes place:
June 6th, 2009 |
We are not going to do the torture, but we are going to pay Jordon and Egypt to do it for us. They now better than us how to do it. That save a lot of TAX money and good food for those murderers. Egypt and Jordon will feed them moldy bread and onion, pull their finger and toe nails. hung them to the ceiling fans, insert hot pepper and Popsi bottle with caps into their ” “, insert needles into their thighs, bring their families and threaten to rape them in front of their eyes.
June 7th, 2009 |
A very good little article, which I commend you for posting. I have heard before about the cruelty of Arabs, from a former Lebanese immigrant girlfriend, as well as a military member of my family, who had been stationed in Libya for several years in the 1960s,
though I believe one must differentiate between Muslims and Christians (my girlfriend was from a Christian family that had suffered, though mainly financially, in their civil war).
Time prevents me from saying more than a smidgin of what I would wish, so I will leave this thought-bomb: do you believe that all the peoples of this earth are equally civilized, or equally moral – or even possess equal potential for moral behavior? I do not, as a matter of both historical study and longtime personal observation in multiracial California.
We know, past any doubts or counterarguments, that the living races of man differ in many physiological ways, as well as in median IQ (and that the variation in adult IQ is virtually wholly genetic in origin).
A publication like FT, about religion and founded and staffed by believers, albeit of varying faiths and denominations, cannot be comfortable with the idea that morality, compassion, ethical behavior, revulsion against physical cruelty, etc., might also have genetic bases, but at this point in the development of scientific knowledge, the possibility of such cannot be ruled out a priori. Indeed, I think even on the speculative basis that is all the evidence currently warrants there is a likely biological basis for altruism – and that that biological basis for moral behavior is unequally distributed amongst the races and tribes of man. Of course, not everything is “in the genes”, so a person existing in a favorable ethical environment (eg, one’s people/community are Christian), will have a better chance of suppressing cruel instincts, or at least, less opportunity to express them. But it is the propensity of which I speak.
I speak of it in the larger context of mass immigration to the West (specifically Muslim, but not just Muslim). To put the matter bluntly, I concluded a few decades ago that the white race was the ethically superior race, and there is nothing in history or my own experience which contradicts this. Even the Nazis were mostly not wantonly cruel (in a twisted way, many of them believed what they were doing, even wrt the Holocaust, was their “moral duty”) – and anyway, the Nazis were a small thuggish elite whom a certain talent and ruthlessness, along with exceptionally propitious circumstances, very much including appropriate fear of Bolshevism, had placed at the head of an otherwise deeply civilized country, and who in no way represented ordinary Germans (the academically thuggish Daniel Goldhagen notwithstanding).
Wherever one looks, in whatever cause, the most truly self-sacrificing persons and genuinely charitable persons around the world are usually white. This can only partly be ascribed to the relatively greater wealth of the white nations. Japan is wealthy; to what extent are they in the forefront of fighting for unselfish causes, or contributing to planetary relief of various kinds? Much worse are the Arabs. Many of those shiekdoms are stupendously wealthy. Yet how much genuinely altruistic, charitable behavior do they exhibit? Very little. Anything they do that can be called compassionate is usually tied to some political agenda (like paying for textbooks for Palestinian schoolchildren), often in multiple ways.
Have you ever considered the environmental movement? There is a lot there I disagree with, but these are usually sincere people who are acting out of genuine altruistic concern. And, having attended many environmental events, I can attest that, even in ‘diverse’ LA and San Francisco, environmentalists are overwhelmingly white.
Given these simple conclusions based upon easily observable behaviors, not to mention sociology stats (note I have not even broached the issue of horrendous black criminality, to be found wherever there are large concentrations of blacks), is it not insane for the Western nations to be admitting non-white immigrants, especially Muslim ones, Muslims being historically even more practiced in strange cruelty (read the casual depictions of or allusions to it in Ismail Kadare’s excellent novel, THE SIEGE, recently translated into English) than many other peoples?
The West is committing suicide. But we are doing so out of an excess of misapplied and undeserved ethical zeal directed towards the non-whites who are ruining us. How I wish I were old, and could have lived out a good life before the plague of ‘diversity’ descended upon us!
June 7th, 2009 |
Dear David,
Does the Arab terror of a woman’s sexuality go back to Hagar or Sarah or Rebecca?
June 7th, 2009 |
“…anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama’s mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice….”
At the same time the modus operandi of the “Education System” continues as strong as ever to produce generation after generation of hypnotized individuals like Ms. Dunham ready to put another nail on America’s coffin. The worst part is the coffin is nearly shut, and the end is near.
June 7th, 2009 |
America must collapse. Unemployment, welfare, benefits to illegals must go up. National healthcare and mandatory national service must be implememented. Taxes must go up while a VAT must be included. I say must because this is Obama’s plan or shall I say it is the ideology of the liberal Democrat. I speak in reference to the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
As summarized by David Horowitz:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
What to appears to have been Democratic party failures over the past 40 years have actually been successes. Do what is necessary to break capitalism. Obama never hid who he was nor did he hide any of his ideologies or mentors from which they came. Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers to name a few. The majority of people voted for him because: he’s black, has a D after his name, his relative youth, white liberal guilt or bias by blacks for blacks. There are other minor reasons no doubt. But he was backed by the powers that be because those reasons would get him elected. The road towards the success of Cloward-Piven has been a long one. Machiavelli must be proud.
June 7th, 2009 |
David,
There is dramatic dualism in the world of Islam. You cited this in a previous post. Even Oswald Spengler saw the irony of this in his day.
How does this drama play out in the end? Arabian culture and civilization seem to have waned from its glory days of the first millennium and persisted in its stagnant and unrelenting funk.
June 8th, 2009 |
I’m working on a longer piece on that subject, but Ali Allawi is worth reading on the subject:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KE05Ak02.html
June 8th, 2009 |
Obama is giving himself an enormous base of power with taxpayers’ money. I find this terrifying. Here’s a note I posted last night at my “Inner Workings” blog:
http://blog.atimes.net/?p=1036
June 8th, 2009 |
America is going to take the biggest hit in its history. I’m not convinced that it really is the end — but I think it’s going to feel like that.
June 8th, 2009 |
Surely not Rebecca, who was at the well to meet Isaac’s servant — not locked up at home in a burka.
June 8th, 2009 |
Non-whites? Being Jewish, I observe that black Jews (including the Ethiopians) are just as Jewish as I am. I refuse to raise the issue of genetic differences. Two generations ago the consensus was that Asians were ill-suited to the modern world. The Arabs are genetically closer to Jews than either are to northern Europeans, yet Arab culture is disintegrating. The whole genetic issue is a giant distraction in the face of the glaring cultural and religious issues we face. This discussion simply isn’t welcome on my blog.
June 8th, 2009 |
That’s exactly right: they will do it not only because the US asks them to, but because that is what they always have done, and continue to do, without any encouragement from the US.
June 8th, 2009 |
Mr. Noonan,
Far be it from me to assert that all Muslims condone torture. But I don’t know how to make Muslim countries free. I don’t think we’re capable of it. Our presence in Muslim countries undermines traditional society. Is what what Muslims want? Some surely do: they emigrate to the US, for example. Others surely don’t. Nor do I think it’s fair to ask American soldiers to die to fix someone else’s society. We can ask them to die to remove threats to the US. I supported both invasions of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein. But I agreed with my friend Daniel Pipes, who said we should have installed a pro-American strongman and left.
June 8th, 2009 |
It looks terrible for Israel. I don’t know what Netanyahu is going to do. None of this choices are good. A year ago I urged the Israelis to kick over the chessboard by attacking Syria, rather than go rocket-hunting in Gaza.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD15Ak02.html
It’s a bit harder to kick over the chessboard now. I really don’t know what to say.
June 8th, 2009 |
There is a website that showed Saddams’ men torturing others. They were thrown off buildings, had tongues cut off, blown to pieces, beheaded, and beaten to near death. Funniest videos ever!!!! ALL Muslims should be treated in this manner, they deserve it. We need only keep them in their part of the world and slow the spread of this cancer called ISLAM.
June 8th, 2009 |
I am tired of Muslims defending their religion as “peacefull”. Because of the Profit Mohammed’s persecution of “infidels” the Islam ruled much of the world for 1,400 years and they did this by slaughtering or enslaving millions of “infidels”. The Koran is rife with directives from The Profit to kill and enslave infidels everywhere they can be found. The crusades was a response to this agression when the Islam campaign finally took Jerusalem.
Quote from Brigitte Gabriels book “They Must be Stopped” – “During this period (the 1,400 years of Islamic Rule), Muslims had killed 270 Million People Across the globe: 120 Million Africans, 60 Million Christians, 80 Million Hindus, and 10 Million Buddhists.”
What we are experiencing today is Islamic Jihad as spelled out in the Koran. While the Muslims carrying this Jihad out are in the minority, please keep in minds that the majority of Germans were moderates while Hitler pushed the world into WWII.
What I see happening today is the Muslim “moderates” keeping silent while their pals the radicals do all the dirty work for them.
June 8th, 2009 |
I’m surprised and disappointed in you Mr. Goldman. I posted some well-written and apposite comments, and thought you might have addressed the questions they contained. Instead, you pretend the issues simply aren’t there, like generations of leftists before you. Most disappointing. I thought I had discovered a fellow truth seeker. I guess not.
Of course, whether lefties like you “just can’t handle the truth” or not, does not change its content. As one observes the behavior of the peoples of the world, it is AT LEAST prima facie plausible that there are gene-based differences in altruistic propensities between races (and probably ethnic groups – and, of course, individuals). How else could you explain the appallingly bad communal behavior of Negroid peoples everywhere they are to be found on Earth? Really, how else? Being one of the last honest intellectuals, I’d be interested to hear alternative hypotheses, though I suspect none persuasive will be forthcoming.
But why wouldn’t such a discussion be welcome on your blog? That smells of the worst sort of political correctness – or cowardice. Why are so many so afraid of biology?
June 9th, 2009 |
This is nonsense, I’m afraid. There’s strong and apparently independent support of torture among American churchgoers (and Catholics, to my very great shame). Torture, sorry, enhanced interrogation of Muslim prisoners seems to have begun almost immediately after the invasion; if it was caused by the mere exposure to (what you take to be) the widespread torture among Muslims in Muslim countries, there would have been a time lag between the invasion and the American adoption of what you take to be Muslim methods. I can’t help but think that this is a bad attempt at shifting responsibility.
June 9th, 2009 |
Mr. Haller, you are not welcome on this blog. I refuse to have a discussion with racist overtones. As a Jew, I do not believe that skin color matters for intelligence, culture, morals, or humanity. Go away and don’t come back.
June 9th, 2009 |
Mr. Goldstein,
There is considerable support for the use of torture to extract information in counterterrorism operations. But there is very little use of torture in the US. Torture is routine and habitual in many Middle Eastern countries. And I never said the torture was Muslim. That would imply religious sanction for torture, and I know of no such thing in the Koran or Hadith. Nonetheless it is endemic.
June 21st, 2009 |
While I am a “Spengler” addict, I can’t say with certainty that this has not been addressed here, but Mr. Goldman, you are utterly wrong in your belief that “I don’t think Obama is orchestrating an American collapse” as fine as your insight is into the anthropologist-in-chief, you really need to keep in front of your mind the Cloward-Pivin strategy. Go here to read all about it:http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/the_clowardpiven_strategy_of_e.html.
The idea, originating in the 60s, is to break the system by massively overwhelming it with welfare-state demands that it cannot possibly met, so that communism can be imposed upon the resulting catastrophe.
The whole idea of this headlong rush of his is to jam as much in as fast as possible to slam the machine into chaos. Then the Orwellian “FUN” begins.
June 21st, 2009 |
Mr. Murphy,
I don’t see Obama at all in the light of Cloward-Pivin, whom I recall vaguely from the ’60s. Obama is maximizing his power, often at the expense of economic efficiency, and is willing to damage the economy if it enhances his power– that, I think, is the main difference between him and Bill Clinton. And he wants to build down American security capabilities overseas because he authentically sympathizes with some of America’s adversarires. But to say that he has a plan to wreck the US seems to be as inaccurate as it is overwrought.
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