April 22, 2013

The Atlantic: American stereotyping of Muslims and Chechens prolongs terrorism

A central theme here at iSteve is that the contemporary liberal worldview is pro-ignorance. 

From The Atlantic:
The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So? 
Why we turn to labels in times of crisis -- and why we should stop 
MEGAN GARBER APR 19 2013, 5:49 PM ET 
Here is what we know -- or what we think we know -- about Tamerlan Tsarnaev: He was a boxer and a "gifted athlete." He did not smoke or drink -- "God said no alcohol" -- and didn't take his shirt off in public "so girls don't get bad ideas."  He was "very religious." He had a girlfriend who was half-Portuguese and half-Italian. In 2009, he was arrested after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend. He was "a nice guy." He was also a "cocky guy." He was also a "a normal guy." He loved the movie Borat. He wanted to become an engineer, but his first love was music: He studied it in school, playing the piano and the violin. He didn't have American friends, he said -- "I don't understand them" -- but he also professed to appreciate the U.S. ("America has a lot of jobs .... You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work"). He was training, as a boxer, to represent the U.S. in the Olympics. 
We know, or we think we do, that Tamerlan's brother, Dzhokar, is "very quiet." Having graduated from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School -- a public school known for its diverse student body -- he received a scholarship from the City of Cambridge. He went to his prom, with a date and in a tux. He had friends. He posed with them, smiling, at graduation. He tweeted pictures of cats. He skateboarded around his Cambridge neighborhood. His personal priorities, he has said, are "career and money." He is a second-year medical student at UMass Dartmouth. He is seemingly Chechan by birth and Muslim by religion, and has lived in the U.S. since 2002. He is "a true angel." He has uncles in Maryland. He called one of them yesterday and said, "Forgive me." 
In times like this, we tend to emphasize adjectives rather than verbs. 
These are provisional facts. They are the products of the chaos of breaking news, and may well also be the products of people who stretch the truth -- or break it -- in order to play a role in the mayhem. They are very much subject to change. But they are also reminders of something it's so easy to forget right now, especially for the many, many members of the media -- professional and otherwise -- who currently find themselves under pressure of live air or deadline: Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are not simply "the Marathon bombers," or "murderers," or "Chechens," or "immigrants," or "Muslims." They might turn out to be all of those things. They might not. The one thing we know for sure is that they are not only those things. They had friends and families and lives. They had YouTube accounts and Twitter feeds. They went to class. They went to work. They came home, and they left it again. 
And then they did something unimaginable.

Not all that unimaginable if you are familiar with Chechens, who have, after all, been the subject of some of the greatest writers in the history of Russian literature.
That the brothers Tsarnaev are more than the labels we would hastily apply to them is obvious, I know. Then again, labels are especially tempting amidst the twin confusions of breaking news and municipal lockdown. Stories like the one that has now been shorthanded as the "Boston Bombing," or the "Marathon Bombing" -- among them "Aurora," "Newtown," "Columbine" -- have their cycles. And we have entered the time in the cycle when, alleged culprits identified, our need for answers tends to merge with our need for justice. We seek patterns, so that we may find in them explanations. We confuse categories -- "male," "Muslim" -- with cause. We focus on contradictions: He had a girlfriend, and killed people. She was a mother, and a murderer. And we finally take refuge in comforting binaries -- "dark-skinned" or "light-skinned," "popular" or "loner," "international" or "homegrown," "good" or "evil" -- because their neat lines and tidy boxes would seem to offer us a way to do the thing we most crave right now: to put things in their place. 
The problem is that there is no real place for the Boston bombings and their aftermath, just as there was no real place for Aurora or Columbine or Newtown. Their events were, in a very literal sense, outliers: They are (in the U.S., at least) out of the ordinary.

But not in Chechnya, Dagestan, and other places within easy driving distance of Grozny.
They were the products of highly unusual sets of circumstances -- of complexity, rather than contradictions. 
But we don't often treat them that way. ... 
But it's that kind of conversion process -- people into People -- that led, this week, to the public fears that the bombers would turn out to be Muslim. It's the process that led, two days ago, to headlines like "In Boston Bombing, Muslims Hold Their Breath" and "For Muslim Americans, Boston Bombings Bring Added Anxiety" -- and that led, this morning, to stories about Muslim leaders now "fearing a backlash." The sad assumption carried in these reports is that Americans lack the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to tell the difference between an individual and a group. It's an assumption that has, in the past, occasionally proven valid. 
Yet it's also symptomatic of a tendency, in the media and beyond it, to privilege caricatures over characters. Particularly when we have so much access to people's interior lives through social media -- this Twitter feed seems to be Dzhokar's, and it is revealing -- we have new license to think beyond categories (and metaphors, and stereotypes). We have new ways to bolster our categories -- "Muslim," "Chechen," "Causasian" -- with the many caveats they deserve. The Tsarnaev brothers may have been Muslim, and that circumstance may have, in part, motivated them in their actions on Monday. They may have been Chechen. They may have been male. But that was not all they were. Their lives were like all of ours: full of small incongruities that build and blend to drive us in different directions. ... 
One day, the brothers left it for Boston. And to understand why they did that -- to have even a prayer of progressing towards a world where two more young men don't do that -- we have to embrace complexity.

Now this is the kind of intelligent-sounding boilerplate that gets churned out whenever anybody from a vibrant demographic does anything stereotypical. To extrude this kind of text, you don't have to actually know anything. In fact, the implicit message is fundamentally anti-knowledge: do not notice patterns, do not see what is in front of one's nose because one should be stabbing oneself in the eyeballs with Occam's Butterknife.

The liberal urge to know nothing appears to be increasing as learning becomes easier. Lately, I've been typing in search engines the names of world famous Russian writers along with words like "Chechen." I haven't yet found anything by Nabokov or Chekhov on Chechens, but, like Tolstoy and Lermontov, Solzhenitsyn wrote about them.

The Jamestown Foundation is in the misbegotten business of trying to bring Chechens to the United States as refugees, but here are some excerpts they've collected from Solzhenitsyn's works:
As the cycle of revenge and counter-revenge between Chechens and Russians continues to spiral downward, it is worthwhile to pause for a longer view. The greatest Russian nationalist of the 20th century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, provided some occasional glimpses of the Chechens in his classic of three decades ago, "The Gulag Archipelago." In Part V he described a 1949 escape by two Slav prisoners from a labor camp in Kazakhstan. Desperate for food, they stole a cow from a village but were caught.

In Solzhenitsyn's words, "They were taken to the village and locked up. The people shouted that they should be shot out of hand and no mercy shown to them. But an investigating officer arrived from the district center with the picture sent around to assist the nationwide search, and addressed the villagers. 'Well done!' he said. 'These aren't thieves you've caught, but dangerous political criminals.' Suddenly there was a complete change of attitude. The owner of the cow, a Chechen as it turned out, brought the prisoners bread, mutton, and even some money, collected by the Chechens. 'What a pity,' he said. 'You should have come and told me who you were and I'd have given you everything you wanted!' (There is no reason to doubt it; that's how the Chechens are.) Kudla burst into tears. After so many years of savagery, he couldn't stand sympathy."

In his detailed account of the 1954 revolt at the Kengir labor camp in Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn observed that "there is more than one side to the Chechens. People among whom they live--I speak from my experience in Kazakhstan--find them hard to get along with; they are rough and arrogant, and they do not conceal their dislike of Russians. But the men of Kengir only had to display independence and courage--and they immediately won the good will of the Chechens! When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should."

Comparing the various ethnic groups exiled to the most remote corners of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn concluded that "there was one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission--and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens....They had been treacherously snatched from their home, and from that day they believed in nothing....The years went by--and they owned just as little as they had to begin with. The Chechens never sought to please, to ingratiate themselves with the bosses; their attitude was always haughty and indeed openly hostile. They treated the laws on universal education and the state curriculum with contempt, and to save them from corruption would not send their little girls to school, nor indeed all of their boys....They were capable of rustling cattle, robbing a house, or sometimes simply taking what they wanted by force. As far as they were concerned, the local inhabitants, and those exiles who submitted so readily, belonged more or less to the same breed as the bosses. They respected only rebels."

Solzhenitsyn ended his account of a Chechen vendetta:
"In our books and schools we Europeans read and pronounce only words of scorn for this savage law, this cruel and senseless slaughter. But it seems that this slaughter is not so senseless: it does not stop but strengthens the mountain nations."

On a Saturday, I posted a Youtube clip of Chechens' driving. It turns out Solzhenitsyn was struck by something similar:
"... in the constant motion of the automobile they found the satisfaction of their passion for trick riding, in the opportunities open to drivers the satisfaction of their passion for thieving."

In carjacking a Mercedes, then stopping at a gas station to pick up some snacks, which led to them getting into a car chase in which they threw pipe bombs out the windows injuring several cops, followed by a spectacular firefight, the Bomb Brothers were living the Chechen Dream.

41 comments:

  1. "to have even a prayer of progressing towards a world where two more young men don't do that -- we have to embrace complexity."

    Like so much of liberal cant, this is the precise opposite of the truth. What we have to embrace is simplicity. Don't let people who make their countries of origin a byword for hellholes in to this country even if they don't take off their shirt in public. See, Simple.

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  2. "The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?"

    Americans don't own the American media. Globalist Zionists do, and it was pro-Zionist policy that made things bad between America and Muslims. So, this author should attack the Jewish media and control of government.

    True, many Americans hate Muslims but it's because they've been bombarded by zionist media on both right and left.

    If Buchananite 'Arabist' pragmatists had been in charge of foreign policy, things would have better US and the Muslim world.

    And it was liberal Hollywood that made stuff like TAKEN.
    Hollywood makes us see all Muslims as terrorists and all Russians as gangsters.

    The author is right that Americans are strung up about Muslims, but she doesn't really look into the why. Americans get their info from the media and entertainment, and those are controlled by Jews, gays, liberals, and neocons.

    And while the 'left' is allowed to hate whites and Christians with utter vehemence, the right is only allowed to hate Muslims, so all the pent-up spleen on the right is directed at Muslims when, in fact, Jews do far more damage to the right.

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  3. While they don't belong here, I must admit that Solzhenitsyn's words have temporarily elevated my opinion of the Chechens. Considerably. I suspect that authors of favorable Russian accounts might suffer from some Slavic version of dances with wolves syndrome, so I'll try to still my natural reaction to stirring reports of bravery, defiance and generosity.

    -The Judean People's Front

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  4. Even more so than you think: look up Chechen Smertniks."Death warriors." These two had no intention of living.

    What is particularly nauseating about this terror attack is that for years the US soft-peddled Chechen terrorism (both under Clinton and Bush) as a simple, understandable desire for independence with maybe a smidge of opportunistic Islamism. This despite the videos Chechens made detailing their atrocities, edited to Middle Eastern music with black flags flying.

    Then Beslan happened. Suddenly, US soft-peddling looked very, very foolish. And now it looks even more foolish.

    When the Russians complained of "Wahhablism" imported from Saudi Arabia, the US acted like this was scaremongering.

    Isn't the point of national borders to protect you from murderous foreigners?

    Whoops, silly me. The point of borders is to increase diversity.

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  5. Liberal stereotyping of conservatives prolongs conservatism.

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  6. Thurston Howell IV4/22/13, 2:40 PM

    Damn, I have to say I like the cut of their jib! (Or should that be the crease of their pants?)

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  7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTqsV3q7rRU

    David Blaine looks Chechenish and drives these two gays nuts.

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  8. "Embrace complexity" "Embrace diversity" "You MUST"

    We have heard this song and dance from the Red Guard for 30+ years. It doesn't work. It is about as natural as telling someone "You MUST eat shit" and their doing so. "You MUST jump off this cliff." "You MUST re-wire your brain from top to bottom." "You MUST believe that 2 + 2 = 5."

    (Do Israelis hear the same song and dance about embracing complexity? One wonders.)

    You MUST, you hayseed, you MUST.

    No, I think I'll simply drop out and let you have your complexity. Bye now. I'm leaving to stock up on ammo.

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  9. Chapter 18 has more of Solzhenitsyn's thoughts on nationalities in the camps, including Chechens:

    http://200yearstogether.wordpress.com/category/solzhenitsyn/

    Dostoevsky was also favorably impressed by the ethnocentrism of the Chechens. He mentions them in his semi-autobiographical prison novel "House of the Dead"

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  10. btw, the tsarnaev brother's mother is apparently an avar from dagestan, not a chechen.

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  11. Steve,
    Keep doing what you're doing.

    O/T, but Drudge is the master of juxtaposition and this one is a beaut:

    Anthony Weiner Creates New TWITTER Account...
    ----------------------
    Goldberg: Welcome To 'The Era Of The Suspicious Package'...

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  12. "Do Israelis hear the same song and dance about embracing complexity? One wonders."

    Actually, they do. Take a look at the online English edition of any Israeli newspaper - they're no more "Zionist" than Sailer. All problems with the Arabs are the fault of Likud, the settlers, etc., why doesn't the government just do what Obama tells us to do, blah, blah, blah. Fortunately, the majority of Israelis don't fall for this crap anymore.

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  13. Picture one of our insightful commentators writing "The Boston Bombers Were Right-wing: So?"

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  14. Someone in a blanket: "KKK!! We must root out white evil!!!"

    Hispanic defends himself with gun against black thug: "White supremacist murdered a black baby!!!"

    Chechen-Muslim terrorist blows up a marathon: "So?"

    --------

    Look, I personally like stories like this.

    1. At least it means anti-Islamism is no longer so effective to distract us from the real issue. That means it's harder for neocons to rouse us up to fight more wars for Israel.

    2. If white liberals wanna go easy on the attack that killed and wounded blue city liberals, I say BE MY GUEST.

    Look, if libs don't much care about white libs killed by Muslims or Chechens, why should we?

    I say just settle more Chechens in blue cities.

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  15. Contrast with The Conscience of Liberaloidism's take on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

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  16. Chechens the new cossacks.

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  17. Documented desperados

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  18. i said: "the tsarnaev brother's mother..."

    i meant the tsarnaev brothers' mother.

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  19. "When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should."
    ^ I think this point from The Solzh may be just about 100% lost on multicult po-mo intolerant transfer-state America.

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  20. "They had been treacherously snatched from their home"

    They were exiled for fighting the Soviet Union while it was defending itself from the German invasion. Any other state that wanted to survive would have done the same or worse. And the person who made the decision to exile them was a fellow Caucasian.

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  21. It's a good point by Anon 4:23, Stalin thought the Chechens were f'ing nuts. This is a sort of testimony unique in the ages.

    The lamest line in the Oprah Winfrey article above has to be: "And then they did something unimaginable"--she is betraying her emo suburban girl sympathies for the boy band model and the older bro from the wrong side of the tracks. It's totally imaginable what these two did. Imagine violent religiose foreigners who aren't fond of Gay Marriage Elena Kagan HBO USA--it's easy if you try

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  22. Dzhon Lenintov4/22/13, 4:38 PM

    You may say I'm a DREAMer
    But I'm not the only one
    I hope some day you'll join Sharia
    And the burqa marathons will be fun

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  23. Hmm, actually I bet the Chechnio Bros. woulda really dug "Game of Thrones"

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  24. Anonymous said:"When we feel that we are not sufficiently respected, we should ask ourselves whether we are living as we should."
    ^ I think this point from The Solzh may be just about 100% lost on multicult po-mo intolerant transfer-state America.

    +1. As a culture, we've somehow lost the ability to utilize others' behavior towards us as corrective feedback. It's bizarre. Contemporary America is eager to accept the blame for enemy behavior yet remains incapable of learning from it.


    -The Judean People's Front

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  25. Also feeling the "urge to know nothing": Sailer's hero Stephen "The Israel Lobby" Walt.

    " knowing the suspects' origins doesn't tell you what their motives were. . . . The fact that they were of Chechen origin raises various possibilities, but at this point in time we have no idea if their actions were inspired by Chechen nationalism, by anger at America, by some weird personal animosity or desire for glory, by religion or by something entirely different ".
    http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/04/19/the_lockdown_in_boston

    Sailer must be so proud that he spent the last decade praising Walt as a brave foreign-policy truth-teller.

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  26. "They had been treacherously snatched from their home"

    Japanese too during WWII.

    And Ost-Germans got pushed west.

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  27. "I must admit that Solzhenitsyn's words have temporarily elevated my opinion of the Chechens. Considerably. I suspect that authors of favorable Russian accounts might suffer from some Slavic version of dances with wolves syndrome, so I'll try to still my natural reaction to stirring reports of bravery, defiance and generosity."

    I think the thing about environments of clan warfare and vendetta is as well as selecting for traits like impulsively violent sh*theadedness and sadism they also select for admirable traits like bravery, toughness and indomitability.

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  28. Most of what appears at The Atlantic just begs to be mocked.

    The ignorance there -- among all those over-educated, privileged "elite" -- is frightening.

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  29. >Contemporary America is eager to accept the blame for enemy behavior yet remains incapable of learning from it.<

    A pregnant point.

    Are we really learning anything? The indefeasible core of every multiculty apologist is the assumption that he/she/we know it all. We will judge right and wrong, who is "racist" and who isn't, what's "appropriate" and what isn't. We will prescribe behavior for the world. In the past, the wogs had to grok Christianity or they were savages. Today, all of us have to grok tolerance of The Other or we're savages.

    The fair-minded judges sit on their thrones, wagging their fingers at the world, just as they did in the past. And those fair-minded judges are not other than the mouthpieces of the dominant empire (Britain, then America).

    Their assumption is that they set the standards for the world. Like Old Testament preachers, they define the Right and the Good, the Wrong and the Bad.

    It's not other peoples who define these things for themselves. It's us. Always. The veneer of all-embracing multiculturalism hides the fact that it's the same old arrogance - an arrogance so extreme that it denies facts outright. Our official muppetmedia and elites surfeit us with examples of flat-earthism about race, of studied ignorance, of self-righteous stupidity, of magical thinking, of deliberate ideological obliviousness. The more off-the-wall it is, the more insistently it's asserted. "Muslim terrorists - so?" "These angelic boys were ruined by xenopobic America." "Just because they came from the Czech Republic doesn't mean that we should judge. Only bad people judge people."

    The obvious fact is that "we" don't learn anything, because we don't want to learn anything - because we already know everything. We know that racism is bad and love is good. That's the whole Law.

    Contrast this with Steve's septimana mirabilis. He has brought together more info about Chechnya/Chechens - from current events to classic literature to dissident writings to the testimony of experts and veterans, etc. etc. - than the NYT could publish in a month of Sundays. He and we (iSteve readers) want to dig into the nuts and bolts, the real-world facts.

    Paradoxically, we "racists" have a healthy respect for other peoples. We don't think all of them can be turned into Republicans. We don't assume that all of them even want to be turned into Republicans, even if they come to America.

    We recognize that peoples are intrinsically different (for all practical purposes) and we respect that.

    It's our opponents who want to press all human material into Davos Man, and send virtually to a re-education center any victims created by this victory for "virtue."

    No one is more religious (epistemologically), narrow-minded, arrogant, parochial, preening, ignorant, narcissistic, and moralistic than cultural liberals.

    They are, at best, the worst kind of Sunday school church ladies but in modern dress, backed up by the full pomp and circumstance of (dying) Empire.

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  30. are chechens the hmong of the caucasus region?
    i know some californians who are not too impressed with their armenian immigrant stock.
    perhaps the caucasus area as a whole is slightly higher in mean aggression & slightly lower in mean IQ?
    too bad this can't be bandied about openly, like it could've been 70 or 80 years ago. a lot less shrieking, pointing & sputtering back then.

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  31. They were the products of highly unusual sets of circumstances -- of complexity, rather than contradictions.
    But we don't often treat them that way. ...



    Who has time for that?

    Good grief. I've got my own kids and work and problems to deal with. I don't have time to endlessly agonize over every tear ever shed in the world. People need to grow up.

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  32. No one is more religious (epistemologically), narrow-minded, arrogant, parochial, preening, ignorant, narcissistic, and moralistic than cultural liberals.



    And 'complexity' is their explanation for everything. Of course they never even provide an outline of said complexity. Rather complexity is the emperor's new clothes. They couldn't possibly explain their intricate complex ideas to morons like the readers they are writing for. Oh, no no no, such morons couldn't understand it. That would be like blinding them with the glory of God.

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  33. Oh please Anon. Russia got Beslan, and they are the most pro-Muslim nation around. Tiny Denmark has been the site of repeated "Muslims acting Muslim" acts, as has Sweden and Norway, both "Jew Free" and hard-left anti-Israel and pro-Muslim. That's how Muslims are.

    There is no accommodation, bargain, or "deal" to be made because Islam and Muslims are a failing society, that can ONLY contain and moderate their failure by constant conquering (and providing their young men with a harem of sex slaves taken from conquered societies and slain husbands and fathers and brothers). That's it.

    The most anti-Christian people are not "the Jews" more lazy intellectual bogeyman but deeply secularist post-Christians who HATE HATE HATE the idea of Christianity. Who am I thinking of? Why "Letters from Earth" Mark Twain. Or "Penguin Island" Anatole France. Or DH Lawrence. Or Maureen Dowd. Heck all of Scandinavia is unbelievably hostile to Israel and Jews and has no Christian religion whatsoever left. Guys like say, Stieg Larsson who detested Israel and overt Jewishness and wrote "Girl With Dragon Tattoo" penciled in Christians as the main bogeyman in most of his novels.

    As far as "fighting Israel's wars," Israeli leaders begged Bush to leave Saddam alone, as he was a counterweight to Iran, and wanted Iran's nuke program killed. They could have cared less about Afghanistan. They've weighed in on keeping Assad around (the same side as the Russians) as better than the AQ guys.

    The reason for this Atlantic dreck is that most of modern liberalism is a bad mixture of "WE are more moral and high-status than you because diversity does not touch us in Malibu and the Upper East Side" and the typical female emo stuff out of Oprah of disdain for White middle/working class guys and fascination with hard/angry/emo guys from other cultures.

    That the older brother got some College hottie to convert and bear his kid and marry him at age 21, dropping out of college, because he was aggressive and stupid and foreign does not surprise me. That's chick crack, basically. Had he lived he would have had women begging him to consider them for Wife #2, #3, and #4.

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  34. What the hell happened to the Atlantic? Not that long ago, it was a treasure trove of interesting articles. Now it is an endless collection of liberal lameness.

    Whenever I read stuff like this, and its coming fast and furious now, I am reminded of an eerily prescient short story by Bruce Sterling,about the conflict between fanatical Islam and the liberal West, "We See Things Differently."
    Reading this in 1988, I got the first hint that trouble lay ahead.

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  35. Life on earth prolongs terrorism.


    The chick is stupid.

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  36. I think its a win/win.

    Either liberals have to grudgingly accept that Islam may play some part in this or they have to acknowledge that ethnicity (Chechen in this case) may actually play a part in human behavior.

    Its a bit like Zimbabwe - whats wrong there liberals? Is it socialism or black rule?

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  37. That rough people descended from rough people tend to get into scrapes is something our grandfathers knew, but I wouldn't quite put Walt in the category of flat-earther. His sounds like the kind of statement any honest academic (there are a few) would make. Nothing wrong with it as far as it goes (read it once more). Of course one must expect that the pounding of Walt will continue until the end of the chapter.

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  38. As far as "fighting Israel's wars," Israeli leaders begged Bush to leave Saddam alone, as he was a counterweight to Iran, and wanted Iran's nuke program killed.

    Whiskey, you are not going to be allowed to lie. You are incorrect about Israel not wanting the US to attack Iraq.

    From August 2002:

    "Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose," Raanan Gissin, a senior Sharon adviser, said yesterday.

    "It will only give Saddam Hussein more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction."

    Israeli intelligence officials had new evidence that Iraq was speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, he said.


    From October 2002:

    Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last night called on the United States to strike Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein and install what he said would be the first democratic government in the Arab world.

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  39. "Why we turn to labels in times of crisis -- and why we should stop "


    I wonder when they're going to stop labeling white American males as the devil. I'll just hold my breath til that happens.

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