In Jeremiah 28, we see a disturbing glimpse into the evolution of the Hebrew scriptures. Jeremiah has been predicting the destruction of Judah. It’s not clear if the horrors he is envisioning are visions given by HaShem (the ineffable Name, for non-Jews), or horrors generated deep within his own disturbed psyche. In chapter 20, he presents a perfect picture of paranoia: “For I have heard the whispering of many, terror on every side: ‘Denounce, and we will denounce him’; even of all my familiar friends, them that watch for my halting: ‘Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him.’ (v. 10)”

However, he cannot help himself, he must speak, the word of HaShem drives him like a “burning fire shut up in my bones, and I weary myself to hold it in, but cannot (v. 9).” He wrenches between adoration and execration: “Sing unto HaShem, praise ye HaShem; for He hath delivered the soul of the needy from the hand of evil-doers” and in the very next verse, “Cursed be the day wherein I was born; the day wherein my mother bore me, let it not be blessed (vv. 13, 14).”

No wonder other prophets think Jeremiah’s bonkers. (He probably was.) In Jeremiah 28, another prophet thinks he has had enough of this negative thinking. Hananiah, caught up in the worship at the Jerusalem sanctuary promises that the power of Babylon has been broken, and that the king Jeconiah, along with all the other captives, and the loot taken from the temple, will be restored within two years.

“Amen,” Jeremiah eagerly responds; (as if to say) “may it be as you have proclaimed.” But recognize one thing: the prophets have always proclaimed war, destruction and death. So if your promises of restoration come to pass, then we will know that you are truly a prophet, and not someone who’s just saying things that would have happened anyway. Destruction is the rule; restoration is the exception.

So Jeremiah leaves. But HaShem isn’t done. He sends him back to Hananiah. Because “thou makest this people to trust in a lie,” “I will send thee away from off the face of the earth; this year thou shalt die,…. (vv. 15, 16). Any paranoiac can imagine generic disasters. It takes a prophet to know the year of another’s death. “So Hananiah the prophet died the same year in the seventh month (v. 17).”

One wonders: if Hananiah had not died, would we be reading the prophecies of Hananiah, instead of the prophecies of Jeremiah? Would we be reading the Nevi’im at all? Was the destruction of ancient Israel the price that had to be paid for the emergence of ancient Judaism, the womb of the knowledge of the one true G-d?

And which paranoiacs should we be listening to?

Give the familiar Spenglerian theme of demographic death and the end of languages, I thought his readers ought to know about a recent essay by linguist John McWhorter, “The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English”.

He poses the question:

What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it.

But using the example of the two major pronunciations of “disgusting” (“diss-kussting” and “dizz-gusting”), he argues that different languages do not express different cultural frameworks, but are simply happenstance. What if, he hypothesizes, if all humanity had a single culture with many different languages.

In this we would be like whales, whose species behave similarly everywhere, but have distinct “songs” as the result of happenstance. Who argues that we must preserve each pod of whales because of the particular songs they happen to have developed? The diversity of human languages is subject to the same evaluation: each one is the result of a roll of the dice.

The main loss in the loss of languages is, he argues, aesthetic:

The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.

But let’s remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. Most people, in the West or anywhere else, find the fact that there are so many languages in the world no more interesting than I would find a list of all the makes of Toyota.

At the end, he suggests, the loss of languages is the price we pay for globalization.

It’s been said before, but it’s worth rubbing in the fact that every economic recovery since Reagan started with small business. The numbers suggest that small business is getting killed. Commercial and industrial loans are still shrinking at the fastest rate on record. I just posted the charts over at the Inner Workings blog. Today’s unexpected drop in new home sales underscores the continuing weakness in the consumer sector.

This should be obvious, but it needs to be restated. Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations did so yesterday:

Dore Gold: Nuclear Iran Would Create Terrorist Umbrella

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold warns that a nuclear-armed Iran would shift “the entire balance in the war on terror” by providing terrorists with a nuclear umbrella.

Speaking at a briefing at the British House of Commons on Oct. 12, Dore — also a former adviser to Israeli prime ministers — said Iran’s nuclear program endangers “the security not just of Israel but of the entire Middle East, and I would say the world.”

Gold said that as of this past August, Iran had enough nuclear fuel to produce two atomic bombs, and a missile with the capability of striking Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“So if you take the fact that Iran is one of the largest supporters of international terrorism today, and you team that up with the nuclear capabilities that I’ve been describing, you have a security situation which the West has not yet seen,” Gold said.

“The whole point of George W. Bush’s decision to remove the Taliban after 9/11 was to send a very clear message: ‘You attack the American homeland and we will take down your regime.’

“But fast forward to 2012. Iran has operational nuclear weapons that can strike deep into Europe, and eventually towards the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Will the U.S., U.K., and NATO as a whole have the same freedom of maneuver to say to states that support terrorism, ‘We will take you down if you attack us?’

“Will the U.S. Congress authorize sending forces abroad against a state armed with nuclear weapons? In other words, the entire balance in the war on terror shifts, because the state that is the largest global sponsor of terrorism today now has nuclear capabilities . . .

“This nuclear umbrella of Iran will unfurl and will be able to provide protection, not just to Shiite Hezbollah, but to Sunni organizations such as al-Qaida and Hamas.”

Gold, now president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, raised the possibility that Israel could strike Iran’s nuclear facilities if the international community does not take action.

“I will say that Israel has been thinking about this problem for a very long time,” he said in remarks published on the Web site of The Henry Jackson Society, a London-based organization that promotes the foreign policies of former U.S. Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

“The Israeli air force has been training for action and all options are on the table. But I would say the official position is that there is hope, even at this late date, that the key players in the international community will take action.”

He added: “You might think that Iran’s behavior at present is brazen and risky. It looks much less brazen and risky if you recall how often Iran has already defied the West and got away with it.”

Over at my “Inner Workings” blog I review how the crisis began, republishing material I had gathered and printed in a somewhat different form during 2006 for Cantor Fitzgerald. I showed in some detail during January-February 2006 that foreign flows were massively distorting credit and mortgage returns. Once returns to prime assets collapsed due to a gigantic overseas bid, investors were forced to go to subprime assets. It was all obvious in 2006. Follow the link for the data.

Jewish studies have become a mass-production industry, and the sad story of German Jewry is  the subject of innumerable recent tomes. Most of these efforts, strangely, consider Jews without discussing their relationship to God, the Election of Israel, or the religious practices of Jewish communities. That, to paraphrase Heinrich Heine, is like talking about peanut butter and jelly without the peanut butter, pastrami on rye without the pastrami, or bagels-and-lox without the bagels. Sociological pronouncements and literary studies replace religion.

I have long believed that most of the academics writing about German Jews don’t know their behinds from their elbows, but here is a case in which this literally is true. A new book by Prof. Noah Isenberg of the New School for Social Research (Between Redemption and Doom) quotes Kafka and translates as follows:

Most young Jews who began to write German wanted to leave Jewishness behind hem, and their fathers approved of this, but vaguely…But with their posterior legs [Vorderbeinchen] they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their waving anterior legs [Hinterbeinchen] they found no new ground. The ensuing despair became their inspiration.

Even without knowing German (and Isenberg claims to have a PhD. in German studies from Berkeley) most people know that “hinter” refers to the back, and could deduce that “vorder” refers to the front. In Isenberg’s translation “Vorderbeinchen” becomes posterior — which is to say that he literally does not know his posterior from his elbow.

Franz Rosenzweig, the most interesting Jewish intellectual by far, is quoted only in passing, regarding his sympathy for Eastern European Jews – but without mentioning why. Rosenzweig, about to convert to Christianity, attended a Yom Kippur service with Eastern European Jews and instead became a religious Jew. He found in the Eastern Europeans a devotion and passion for God he had never experienced in his assimilated German-Jewish family (too bad Edith Stein didn’t do the same thing — but of the two we got the better bargain in Rosenzweig).

Isenberg says absolutely nothing about religion; as far as he is concerned the interest of German-Jewish intellectuals in Eastern European Jewry was simply an idealization of “community” (Gemeinschaft), that is, a German category rather than a Jewish one.

The book is idiotic from cover to cover, and crawling with errors of German translation and usage. Given that the dog’s elbows are located on the Vorderbeinchen and the anus is located between the Hinterbeinchen, it is a fair comment that Isenberg has gotten them reversed. How he manages to lecture without drawing attention, I can’t imagine. 

Isenberg’s not the only one. The latest translation of Rosenzweig’s great book The Star of Redemption by Barbara Galli clearly was executed by someone whose knowledge of German is less than elementary. I reviewed this disaster in my Asia Times “Spengler” column when it appeared.

But my favorite example of idiotic illiteracy from the German-Jewish studies industry was a translation into English of Rosenzweig’s jewel-like translations from Hebrew to German of the great medieval Jewish poet Yehuda HaLevi, executed (murdered is a better word) by Thomas A. Kovach, Eva Jospe, and Richard A. Cohen. It was published a dozen years ago by the SUNY press. In the introduction, Rosenzweig mentions the Germanization of Greek hexameters by Voss — referring to the great classicist and Johann Heinrich Voss, a friend of Schiller. Voss is a household name; it was my privilege to study German literature with his descendant Ernst Theodor Voss of the University of Marburg, who was at Columbia on a visiting professorship when I was an undergraduate. Voss is a household name, one of the giants of the German Classic.

The SUNY volume spells his name Vofs — because the old German type (like the old English type) uses a letter that looks a bit like an “f” to represent “s.” That’s like talking about Shakefpeare.

It isn’t just that the academic mass-production industry doesn’t understand any of the issues or any of the important thinkers. They can’t tell a Fraktur “f” from an “s,” and they can’t tell their posterior from their elbows.

CNBC has asked me to join a panel on the dollar’s decline tonight at 7 pm on Larry Kudlow’s show. These things are always tentative, but that’s the present plan.

Today’s “Spengler” essay at Asia Times Online evaluates the crackup of Western and South Asia as the United States builds down its influence in the region. An excerpt:

Iran has blamed the United States for Sunday’s suicide bombing in Sistan-Balochistan province in which six Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commanders were killed, as well as 37 other people. In an indirect way, the charge is true. No one in Washington these days would dream of blowing up Iranian officials, to be sure. America’s abdication of its position as the world’s sole superpower, though, will make incidents of this sort routine.

No one in the region doubts that America eventually will leave Afghanistan the way it left Iraq – not the way it left Vietnam, because America had won the war on the ground in Vietnam, unlike Afghanistan, where it has won nothing. That will represent a triumph for the elements of Pakistan’s military who supported the Taliban from the beginning.

The hostage-taking at Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi on October 10 and the bombing of police headquartersin Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, comprise part of the pattern that includes Sunday’s bombings in the Iranian border town of Pisheen: the unifying element is a demonstration of Sunni power against an external enemy, namely Iran, as well as internal enemies.

The region is full of geopolitical mines. To be name some of them:

India can’t let the fundamentalist side of the Pakistani military take power without responding.

Iran can’t let Pakistan’s Sunnis crush the 20% Shi’ite minority.

Israel can’t allow for the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia can’t let Iran dominate Iraq.

Turkey can’t let Iraq’s Kurds form an independent state.

China can’t let Turkey agitate among the 100 million Muslim ethnic Turks within its borders.

I speculate that there may be a relationship between Obama’s weird mode of governance–running everything out of his vest pocket–and the crackup of American power. Obama’s own agenda may be far more aggressive than the institutional inertia of America’s military and national security establishment can tolerate. Perhaps he can trust no-one and for that reason must run everything himself. He may take quite literally the astonishing statement he made at the U.N.: “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”

I conclude,

The president, in this view, consciously sees himself as an outsider who has become the leader of an alien tribe, rather like Eugene O’Neill’s Brutus Jones or Kipling’s Peachy Carnahan – except that Obama leads the world’s only superpower rather than a primitive tribe. He demands personal control over the reins of power, for as an outsider he can trust no one – surely not David Axelrod or Rahm Emanuel. That may be why he has no real cabinet, but rather a set of “policy czars” who reported to him directly, including the special ambassadors George Mitchell, Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke.

Perhaps the cat isn’t away, but locked up in the cellar. As a result the mice will slaughter each other. Those who wish to reduce American power may get what they wish for, but they might not like it.

I had written this story last week as a humor column, by reference to DSM-IV. No-one got the joke, so I decided to write it as a straight piece instead.

The cover story in this month’s American Conservative–Pat Buchanan’s paleocon platform–is an interview with whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a former Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI who has been under Federal gag order for several years. I had a peripheral relationship to the intelligence community many years ago–I consulted for the head of plans at the Reagan NSC, Dr. Norman A. Bailey–and I learned not to get involved with spook stories. There simply is no way that an outsider can pick a path through the wilderness of mirrors without getting hopelessly lost. Edmonds is a geyser of allegations about illegal leaks of US classified documents to foreign governments, including Israel’s. Her American Conservative interviewer Philip Girardi summarizes what she has to say as follows:

So we have a pattern of corruption starting with government officials providing information to foreigners and helping them make contact with other Americans who had valuable information. Some of these officials, like Marc Grossman, were receiving money directly. Others were receiving business favors: Pentagon associates like Doug Feith and Richard Perle had interests in Israel and Turkey.

As noted, I am not going to speculate as to the veracity of Edmonds’ story. We never find out the truth until the archives are opened to future generations–if ever. But whether classified documents were leaked to Israel with the connivance of Bush administration officials who happen to be Jewish is a very small part of Edmonds’ story.

Only in passing, and with no elaboration, is the name of Fetallah Gulen mentioned in the American Conservative account. Gulen is the 68-year-old spiritual leader of an Islamist movement that claims to have branches in 80 countries, and–with the help of Turkey’s Islamist government–controls large parts of the Turkish media. Edmonds’ most astonishing allegation, widely publicized over the past several years, is that the CIA sponsored Gulen in cooperation with Saudi and Pakistani partners as an instrument against Russia and China in Central Asia.

In 2008 Gulen, who live in exile in the United States, was denied a Green Card after a Philadelphia hearing. The secular Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported at the time:

Gülen’s financial resources were detailed in the public prosecutor’s arguments, which claimed that Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Turkish government, and the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, were behind the Gülen movement. It stated that some businessmen in Ankara donated 10 to 70 percent of their annual income to the movement and that it corresponded to $20,000 to $300,000 per year per person. It added that one businessman in Istanbul donated $4-5 million each year and that young people graduating from Gülen’s schools donated between $2,000 and $5,000 each year.

The Russians have always thought that Gulen was sponsored by CIA, and kicked his organization out of their territory in 2002.

A year ago Edmonds told a Turkish blogger:

You’ve got to look at the big picture. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the super powers began to fight over control of Central Asia, particularly the oil and gas wealth, as well as the strategic value of the region.

Given the history, and the distrust of the West, the US realized that it couldn’t get direct control, and therefore would need to use a proxy to gain control quickly and effectively. Turkey was the perfect proxy; a NATO ally and a puppet regime. Turkey shares the same heritage/race as the entire population of Central Asia, the same language (Turkic), the same religion (Sunni Islam), and of course, the strategic location and proximity.

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

This is why I have been saying repeatedly that these illegal covert operations by the Turks and certain US persons dates back to 1996, and involves terrorist activities, narcotics, weapons smuggling and money laundering, converging around the same operations and involving the same actors.

And I want to emphasize that this is “illegal” because most, if not all, of the funding for these operations is not congressionally approved funding, but it comes from illegal activities.

And one last thing, take a look at the people in the State Secrets Privilege Gallery on my website and you will see how these individuals can be traced to the following; Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – and the activities involving these countries.

All this would be an oddity except for the allegation that elements of the US government were in cahoots with the Gulen organization in fomenting rebellion by the ethnic Turks of Xinjiang, the Uyghurs. Last summer’s Uyghur riots were viewed with extreme concern by Beijing. Turkey’s Islamist prime minister Erdogan denounced the Chinese government for “genocide” against the Uyghurs, an remarkably overwrought response.

The group of officials whom Edmonds fingered has less to do with Israel than with promoting an Islamist strategy for the US in central Asia. As the cited Turkish blog reports:

Marc Grossman, former State Department #3 and former Turkish ambassador, and one of the key named individuals in Sibel’s case, is currently receiving $1.2 million per annum from Ihlas Holding, a Gulen-linked Turkish conglomerate. Sibel has previously referred to Ihlas as ‘semi-legitimate‘ and ‘alleged shady‘ – and emphasized that Grossman’s current payoff is a result of services performed while he was in office.

Grossman’s predecessor as ambassador in Turkey was Morton Abramowitz – in fact, Grossman actually worked under Abramowitz in Ankara for a number of years. During that period, the US opened an espionage investigation into activities at the embassy involving Major Douglas Dickerson, a weapons procurement specialist for Central Asia. Dickerson and his wife, an FBI translator, later became famous when they tried to recruit Sibel to spy for this criminal network.

Abramowitz, who is not listed in Sibel’s State Secrets Privilege Gallery, wrote a letter in support of Gulen for his immigration case. He has long advocated the use of Islamic fighters in furtherance of US interests, including the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets and the Kosovo Liberation Army during the war in the Balkans, acting as an advisor to the Kosovar Albanians.

Another player from Sibel’s Gallery is Enver Yusuf Turani – Prime Minister of East Turkistan, a ‘country’ recognized by only one country, the United States. East Turkistan, aka Xinjiang, is officially a part of China, and home to the Uyghur people and the “Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement,” a UN-nominated terrorist organization “funded mainly by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and received training, support and personnel from both the al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime of Afghanistan.” In fact, the Uyghurs constitute a significant percentage of detainees – at least 22 – at Guantanamo Bay since 2001. Five of those have been set free, and were eventually sent to Albania, amid much controversy.

There is deep suspicion in Beijing that some elements of the US government are supporting the efforts of the Gulen movement to destabilize Xinjiang. That is playing with matches near rocket fuel. The one thing Beijing will not tolerate is an effort to sponsor provincial rebellions. That represents an existential threat to China.

The Turkish shift to Islamism and the ascendancy of the Gulen organization in Turkish politics is the last thing that Israel wants. Israel’s longstanding alliance with secular Turkey is in shambles, in a major setback for Israeli foreign policy. The brunt of Edmonds’ allegations involves alleged skullduggery that is profoundly hostile to Israeli interests. Yet Philip Girardi has managed to twist the story into a trivial story about document-peddling to the Israeli embassy.

Again, I do not know the veracity of these allegations, or what the Obama administration presently thinks of such matters. The bulk of Edmonds story refers to former American officials (some of whom happen to have Jewish names, e.g., Morton Abramovitz, and others who do not, e.g., Graham Fuller) who allegedly committed American resources to supporting dangerous Islamists in an attempt to destabilize America’s largest trading partner.

But one thing is certain: the obsessive, paranoid Judeophobia at The American Conservative prompts the magazine to feature allegations of tertiary importance, and ignore what would be (if true) a political scandal of monstrous proportions.

At the morethodoxy.com blog, Rabbi Hyim Shafner cites classic Jewish commentators on the Book of Genesis regarding how we are to understand the creation story:

The first is Rash”I (Rabbi Shlomo Isaac of Worms, France 1040CE-1105CE) who claims that the bible’s creation story is incorrect since it describes God as having separated the waters before their creation and contains various other inconsistencies.  ….Nachmonides, perhaps the second most well known of the Jewish biblical commentators argues that we do need the story of the creation so that we can know it is God who made the universe, but says Nachamonides, from the story as it is described in Genesis we can discern nothing about the creation.   The actual story of creation, says Nachmonides, was told only to Moses.  Those few who know it do not say, and those say do not know it.

Creationism simply is not very interesting to the authoritative Jewish sources.