Posted on 03/07/2006 11:54:51 PM PST by mal
"In the street, the halls of power, and the battlefields, political Islam flexes its muscles. Its physical aggressiveness is exemplified in its disproportionate, violent reaction to the cartoons. ... In Gaza, demonstrators demanded the hands of cartoonists be cut off, and an imam at the Omari Mosque declared, to 9,000 of the faithful, "We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible." Calls to slaughter Islam's putative enemies, such as "Death to Denmark" in Pakistan, are apparent commonplaces of the protests. More specific death threats against publishers and cartoonists alike, including a bounty of $1 million for the murder of the Danish cartoonists, seek to silence those political Islam has declared as enemies and intimidate others from speaking out. This is not normal politics. This is not even the normal excess of normal politics. Imagine what European and American commentators would say if tens of thousands of Americans, Britons, Germans, or Israelis marched with calls for the murder of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, or Muslims in response to a few anti-American, anti-European, or anti-Semitic cartoons appearing in one, or a few, Arab or Islamic newspapers. Yet Western politicians and commentators have mostly indulged this outpouring of violent hatred. Even when decrying it, they blame the cartoons' publishers and express pious regret that the cartoons insulted the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims, as if there is any normal political cause and effect (let alone a proportionate one) operating here. This Western indulgence is extremely wrongheaded and self-injurious. It cloaks the political Islamic proto-intifada in a measure of legitimacy.
(Excerpt) Read more at tnr.com ...
If Achmed will pray, to a smoking crater.
They are animals, actually worst, even animals don't act like that.
May I draw your attention to this, it might make you smile..or not as the case may be.....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1592180/posts
I generally bypass anything this writer says, given his poor reasoning abilities and lifelong vengeful agenda. There are better sources for similar insights by analysts who are not committed to a lifelong possession of victim status. It does not help that the article appears in New Republic.
Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679772685/qid=1141817132/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-2687844-3003361?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Deeply flawed study with some good points, September 10, 2003
One hopes that at some future date, Goldhagen (or an editor who acutally knows his job) will return to this work and do some serious editing. Clearly Goldhagen simply took his doctoral thesis, and with precious little revision, transformed it into a book that is barely readable, due to its dense and repetitive language. The reader should be warned that the narrative does not flow freely in this book.
For those readers who have the stomachs to wade through the book to its conclusions, they will find some useful material. In particular, Goldhagen has shown that more ordinary Germans were active participants in the Holocaust than has been previously believed, and in this he is to be commended.
If he had left it at that (and had made his book somewhat more readable), most of the criticism this book has received never would have occurred. Unfortunately, Goldhagen attempts to extend his argument by stating that virtually all Germans were culturally hard-wired to participate in a Holocaust, once the right circumstances were in place. He maintains that German culture has essentially programmed Germans to be eleminationist anti-semites, either tacitly or actively, and furthermore, this is a cultural feature unique to the Germans.
The flaws in this argument should be obvious to anyone. For one thing, Goldhagen assumes that the average German, if he or she did not actively oppose the Nazi regime, was therefore tacitly supporting it and by extension was anti-semitic, abetting the more active Holocaust participants. How does one prove that one is not an eliminationist anti-semite under the conditions Goldhagen has provided? It would be virtually impossible for any human on the planet to prove that he or she wasn't ready to participate in the Holocaust, except that Goldhagen has focused his sights on the Germans alone.
This raises the most glaring flaw: obviously, a great deal of the killing was done by non-Germans, and the majority of the victims in the Holocaust were not Jewish! From Eastern Europe to France, Germany certainly had plenty of help in liquidating the millions of victims it did. How does Goldhagen reconcile this with his argument? Simply put, he doesn't. The sections of the book where he tries to rationalize these discrepancies are unravelling before he even finishes them.
In fact, even his argument that Germany had a uniquely historical predisposition towards anti-semitism is difficult to accept. How does one explain that Jews in 19th century Germany were probably the most prosperous in Europe, if they are living in a region filled with people who are programmed to kill them under the right circumstances? How does one explain away the fact that anti-semitism in France was probably even more virulent at the turn of the century? For that matter, how does one explain away the pogroms in Russia which were clearly taking place long before Nazi ideology began to form?
Goldhagen's argument that Jews were killed by Germans because, well, that's what Germans do, in its own perverse way lets the rest of us, the human race, off the hook. The implication is that the rest of us shouldn't worry about a holocaust in our back yard because we aren't Germans hard-wired to participate in a holocaust. This is very troubling, because obviously the human race at large is very much hard-wired to engage in genocidal activities just as the Germans did, given the right circumstances. The events of the past century should demonstrate that genocide is by no means a German specialty, although the Nazis practiced it with unequalled efficiency.
Goldhagen seems to have focused his enmity towards the Germans to the point he is able to ignore the plentiful evidence of genocide all across the globe, and in so doing, he has cheapened the lives of the victims of genocide who happened not to be Jewish. Genocide isn't a Jewish problem, and it isn't a German problem, it is a human problem. I don't think Goldhagen has fully accepted that; otherwise his book would have written much differently.
UNCONVINCING, March 2, 2002
Reviewer: "kaysixone" (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
Whatever the merits of Goldhagen's scholarship, the first thing to make clear about this book is that his ponderous, repetitious writing style does not make its 600-plus pages an easy read. However, his basic argument can be summed up as follows:
Because antisemitism was so integral to the psyche of ordinary Germans, Nazi policy unleashed their latent desire to exterminate the Jews, which they did with willingness and enthusiasm. Although most Germans would never have consciously considered acting in this way before the Nazis ascended to power, all the latter effectively had to do was provide the spark which then produced the fire.
To back this up the author first of all provides us with evidence that antisemitism was deeply ingrained in German society. Next, he tries to demonstrate that the perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust were basically just typical Germans (ie they were a fairly representative sample of the whole German population). Furthermore, they willingly participated in atrocities against the Jews even though they could have avoided doing so.
From these postulations he infers that, if placed in their shoes, the average German would have behaved in exactly the same way as they did.
It's all seems so simple doesn't it?
Too simplistic by far in my view.
Even if we accept Goldhagen's figures for the actual number of German perpetrators, they are still a small minority of the total population. His assertion that the rest would undoubtedly have behaved in a similar manner because they were equally imbued with antisemitism is dubious to say the least.
And does this imply that members of other nationalities would not have acted the same way? Or that Germans never acted with equal cruelty against their non-Jewish victims?
I don't think it could logically be claimed that non-Germans who wore the Nazi uniform were less cruel to the Jews than Germans were. Presumably Goldhagen would contend that this is because they were also highly antisemitic. But there's no shortage of evidence of excessively sadistic behaviour towards their fellow-Jews by Jewish police in the ghettos and Jewish kapos in the camps. Were these people Germans disguised as Jews? And are there really no examples of Germans acting with deliberately excessive brutality towards non-Jews? In my experience they're quite easy to find. Try reading (for example) "Forgotten holocaust: the Poles under German occupation 1939-44" by Richard C Lukas or "Did the children cry?" by the same author....
How does German antisemitism explain Nazi genocides against disabled people, gypsies, homosexuals and of course, millions of Slavs, all of whom were being killed by the same Germans at the same time as the Jews?
Isn't it just possible that antisemitism is only part of the story (just as Nazi policy towards the Jews was also just one part of a bigger picture)?
And although Goldhagen asserts that the Nazi holocaust of the Jews is the most shocking event of the 20th century, are there really no other examples of equal degrees of cruelty (or public culpability) in any of the 20th century's other genocides, whose total victims number in the tens of millions?
These are some of the questions which Goldhagen's ultimately worthless thesis leaves unanswered.
Flying planes into buildings was only the means to aquire victim and privileged-religion status.
These savages will use their privileged position and the USA's empty-headed liberal policies against us to take over, and impose their privileged religion on the entire USA.
Maybe 100% of the USA should convert to Islam, and then appoint the President of the U.S. as Chief Imam over all of Islam, and move Mecca to Salt Lake City, and behead anybody who disagrees with our Islamic way of life.
(in other words, co-opt them)
Sickening, isn't it? Screaming out "Our God is the greatest!" 5 times a day in a foreign language. Monsters.
Isn't it interesting that these animals expect the world to "respect" their... whatever the hell it is... yet they promote death, beheadings, sinister thinking, ungodly behavior... need I go on?
Throughout history different ethnic groups, Irish, Italian, Black and Jewish Americans have struggled for equality and recognition. Yes there was sometimes violence, but it was part of the struggle and the violence was usually abated and withheld because in the end they all wanted peace. They wanted to work and be a part of society, regardless of their differences. They were Americans.
This behavior on the otherside, however, makes me sick. Has there ever been a group of people more savage than this? These people want bloodshed, war and death on anything not of there... whatever the hell it is... I refuse to call it religious anything. It makes me sick.
Islam is an insane murder cult at its core.
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