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March 31, 2006
Comments?
You are not alone in experiencing problems in posting comments about Porn in our institutions of higher learning.
Try posting here.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 05:15 PM | Comments (50)
Tuition Refund, Please!
When I was in college learning about film, I studied Kurosawa, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, you know, great writers, great directors, sublime films.
But times have changed.
The genuises in our universities are at it again.
The people who have brought you multi-cultural studies, women's studies, white man studies, gender studies, queer studies, middle-eastern studies, i.e. how to hate Israel, the list of nonsensical studies is endless, well, now they've hit the film departments, and you'll never guess what they think is important in cinema?
If you have a child in film school, I strongly suggest that you check out what courses are being offered.
He/she might be taking, yup, Porn 101.
Those who work in the porn industry know they are trash. But to try and intellectualize this filth is, in the end, to defend it, and thus beyond any ethical boundaries that I recognize.
Only in our elite institutions could one find such utter lack of wisdom, such complete intellectual and moral degradation.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 01:04 PM | Comments (2)
Geoffrey Typede Thes Wordes
And on a lighter note, much thanks to Yehudit of the fine blog Kesher, for alerting me to the fact that one of my favorite authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, whom I thought was no longer alive, is still with us.
Is it alchemy?
And imagine my surprise to discover that Geoffrey has his own blog.
Here's what he has to say:
SCIANT PRESENTES ET FUTURI and alle those who maye linke to thys page, I Geoffrey Chaucer in the presence of the internette knowlechede thes wordes and typede them wyth myn owene fingres.
This looks very promising.
Karen and I wish you all a lovely and meaningful Shabbos.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:41 AM | Comments (4)
The Usual Suspects
And this just in from Seraphic Friend Jeremiah Duboff, who deconstructs a letter by Arab Militants that tries to dupe naive Americans into, oh gee-willikers, just read on. My first impulse was to laugh, but then I felt like weeping, realizing that this sort of propaganda plays well--especially on our Ivy League campuses.
Dear Friends:
The San Francisco Chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is planning a protest next month to oppose American tax dollars that support oppression in other countries. They're asking concerned citizens -- like you and me -- for their support in the ongoing struggle against oppression and for peace and justice. Won't you please join me as I read between the lines of their tiresome efforts?
In solid hilarity,
Jeremiah
Tax Day Protest - Monday, April 17 th 12 PM
Come out on Tax Day and Palestinian Political Prisoners Day to demonstrate against the use of our taxes to fund occupation, imprisonment, and repression in Palestine, Iraq, and right here at home.
YES, we call for an end to all American funding to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority -- NOW!
We will also be delivering letters in support of the campaign to free Manal Ghannem and her two year old son Noor who are among the approximately 8000 Palestinian's currently being held in Israeli Prisons.
YES, write them and congratulate them on being incarcerated in an Israeli prison -- it's a step up from what their plight would be in a Palestinian one!
Protest US taxes for war, occupation and Incarceration
YES, we call for regime change in Iran, Syria, and North Korea -- for starters!
Monday, April 17th, 2006
12:00pm, Montgomery & Market in San Francisco
Someone TIP the IRS to this -- that'll be the place to start tracking down 2006 tax evaders!
-Press Conference: 11:30 Post & Market
-12:00 Rally in front of Dianne Feinstein's Office
-12:30 March to Israeli Consulate
HEY, Zombie -- You got that?
One Post St., San Francisco, CA (Near Montgomerey BART Station)
Sponsored by: SUSTAIN (Stop US Tax Aid to Israel Now) and ADC-SF
The usual suspects.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:06 AM | Comments (27)
Kartoonnacht
Credit: Seraphic Friend, Jeremiah Duboff for the brilliant title of this post.
This letter just in from another splendid Seraphic Friend, Antoine Clark:
The Western Standard, among other things, the only regular media
outlet for free-market views in Canada, is being sued by the Alberta
Human Rights Commission following what looks like a bogus complaint
about publishing the Danish cartoons.
Some of you can afford to donate money to the WS's defence fund. Some
of you have blogs that could expose the machinations of the AHRC. All
of you can email.
The best way to kill intimidation is for a lot of people to contact
the Alberta authorities and raise hell about press censorship,
intimidation by pursuing frivolous complaints etc. The
local police refused to take up the complaint on the grounds that
gagging the press is not its job.
I shall be posting something about this as soon as I get home this
evening. In the meantime, all of us could send an email to:
humanrights@gov.ab.ca and call the Canadian embassy (this tends to get
more attention than emails).
in the UK telephone Canadian High Commission: 020 7258 6600
in the USA telephone Candian Embassy: 202-682-1740
in France: 01.44.43.29.00
I suggest something along these lines:
You've heard that a complaint has been made. The police refused to
consider it on the grounds that it was frivolous. You understand that
the Western Standard will have to spend 75.000 Canadian dollars
defending themselves from what is obviously a bogus complaint. Why is
this agency advancing the cause of media intimidation and censorship?
This will reflect very badly on the reputation of the Alberta Human
Rights Commission, if it is seen to be an agency for crushing free
speech.
Best wishes,
P.S. Here's the email I got from the Western Standard.
Dear Western Standard reader,
Our magazine has been sued for publishing the Danish cartoons, and I
need your help to fight back!
As you know, the Western Standard was the only mainstream media
organ in Canada to publish the Danish cartoons depicting the Muslim
prophet Mohammed.
We did so for a simple reason: the cartoons were the central fact in
one of the largest news stories of the year, and we're a news
magazine. We publish the facts and we let our readers make up their
minds.
Advertisers stood with us. Readers loved the fact that we treated
them like grown-ups. And we earned the respect of many other
journalists in Canada who envied our independence. In fact, according
to a COMPAS poll last month, fully 70% of Canada's working journalists
supported our decision to publish the cartoons.
But not Syed Soharwardy, a radical Calgary Muslim imam.
He asked the police to arrest me for publishing the cartoons. They
calmly explained to him that's not what police in Canada do.
So then he went to a far less liberal institution than the police:
the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Unlike the Calgary Police
Service, they didn't have the common sense to show him the door.
Earlier this month, I received a copy of Soharwardy's rambling,
hand-scrawled complaint. It is truly an embarrassing document. He
briefly complains that we published the Danish cartoons. But the bulk
of his complaint is that we dared to try to justify it - that we dared
to disagree with him.
Think about that: In Soharwardy's view, not only should the Canadian
media be banned from publishing the cartoons, but we should be banned
from defending our right to publish them. Perhaps the Charter of
Rights that guarantees our freedom of the press should be banned, too.
Soharwardy's complaint goes further than just the cartoons. It
refers to news articles we published about Hamas, a group labelled a
terrorist organization by the Canadian government. By including those
other articles, he shows his real agenda: censoring any criticism of
Muslim extremists.
Perhaps the most embarrassing thing about Soharwardy's complaint is
that he claims our cartoons caused him to receive hate mail. Indeed,
his complaint includes copies of a few e-mails from strangers to him.
Some of those e-mails even go so far as to call him "humourless" and
tell him to "lighten up". Perhaps that's hateful. But all of those
e-mails were sent to him before our magazine even published the
cartoons. Soharwardy isn't even pretending that this is a legitimate
complaint. He's not even trying to hide that this is a nuisance suit.
Soharwardy's complaint should have been thrown out immediately by
the Alberta Human Rights Commission, just like the police did. But it
wasn't. Which is why I'm writing to you today.
According to our lawyers, we will win this case. It's an infantile
complaint, without basis in facts or law. Frankly, it's an
embarrassment to the government of Alberta that their tribunal is open
to abuse like this.
Our lawyers tell us we're going to win. But not before we have to
spend hundreds of hours and up to $75,000 fighting this thing, at our
own expense. Soharwardy doesn't have to spend a dime - now that his
complaint has been filed, Alberta tax dollars will pay for the
prosecution of his complaint. We have to pay for this on our own.
Look, $75,000 isn't going to bankrupt us. But it will sting. We're a
small, independent magazine, not a huge company with deep pockets. All
of our money is needed to produce the best possible editorial product,
not to fight legal battles. This is clearly an abuse of process
designed to punish us and deter other media from daring to cross that
angry imam in the future.
One of the leaders in Canadian human rights law, Alan Borovoy, was
so disturbed by Soharwardy's abuse of the human rights commission that
he wrote a public letter about it in the Calgary Herald on March 16th.
"During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create
such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used
against freedom of speech," wrote Borovoy, who is general counsel for
the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Censorship was "hardly the
role we had envisioned for human rights commissions. There should be
no question of the right to publish the impugned cartoons," he wrote.
Borovoy went even further - he said that the human rights laws
should be changed to avoid this sort of abuse in the future. "It would
be best, therefore, to change the provisions of the Human Rights Act
to remove any such ambiguities of interpretation," he wrote. That's an
amazing statement, coming from one of the fathers of the Canadian
human rights movement.
I agree with Borovoy: the law should be changed to stop future
abuses. But those changes will come too late for us - we're already
under attack. The human rights laws, designed as a shield, are being
used against us as a sword.
We will file our legal response to Soharwardy's shakedown this week.
And we will fight this battle to the end - not just for our own sake,
but to defend freedom of the press for all Canadians.
Do you believe that's important? If so, I'd ask you to help us
defray our costs. We're accepting donations through our website. It's
fast, easy and secure. Just click on
http://www.westernstandard.ca/freedom
You can donate any amount from $10 to $10,000. Please help the
Western Standard today - and protect freedom for all Canadians for
years to come.
Yours gratefully,
Ezra Levant
Publisher
P.S. Remember, Soharwardy's complaint will be prosecuted using tax
dollars and government lawyers. We have to rely on our own funds - and
the generous support of readers like you.
P.P.S. Please help us now, at Western Standard Legal Defence Fund.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 06:44 AM | Comments (15)
March 30, 2006
Terrorized
Seraphic Secret is blessed with many close friends who write to us regularly in the comments section, and privately. We have been corresponding with Vincent, not his real name, privately, for quite some time.
Vincent has been telling us his life story in bits and pieces, and we have been urging him to tell it in full, for we believe that it is profound and important.
It is the story of how blinkered and romantic leftist support of terorism can destroy families and almost destroy lives. Here, at last, is Vincent's story. We thank him for having the courage to write these words. We know that it was extremely difficult.
My mother is the archetype of the sort of insane leftist that we've all come to know so well in recent years. I remember, when I was about eight, asking her what the letters "USA" meant on a map on the evening news. I knew what America was, but didn't associate it with that abbreviation. It's the sort of simple little question that kids ask. Her explanation, instead of telling me what the letters actually meant, was simply to say, "They're the bad guys." That pretty much sums her up. That's the crap I grew up with, and it took me years to dig my way out of that sort of mentality. It probably didn't help that I was living in inner London, where that sort of thinking is the norm.
One of the many left-wing articles of faith in my household was that the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, were fighting the good fight. My mum celebrated when the Brighton Bomb went off, though she was disappointed that it didn't kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. And, again, I grew up thinking the same way, because that's what kids do.
At the time of the Victoria Bomb, in 1991, I was living with my dad. At the precise moment the bomb went off, I was in bed asleep, but my dad rang me and woke me up to tell me he was OK. The bomb was detonated at the entrance to platform # 3 a couple of minutes after the train arrived, which means that my dad should have been walking past it when it exploded.
But he'd overslept and missed his train.
Inevitably, it got me thinking. If my dad had been killed, he'd have been killed by the men my mother regarded as heroes. And, knowing her pretty well, I thought I knew what her reaction would be: she'd be upset that he'd been killed, but not to the extent of ceasing to support the IRA. She'd still regard them as fundamentally right.
And I, being a Londoner, was regarded by the IRA as a legitimate target. They were killing people in London all the time. They let off a bomb in Camden High Street, somewhere I hung out pretty much every weekend -- and gave the police a false warning, so that they were evacuating people towards the bomb when it exploded.
I suddenly realised that my mother supported the men who were trying to kill me. Had I been caught in a blast at any point, she'd have been upset, of course, but she'd have blamed the British Government and those bloody Northern Irish Protestants and anyone but the men who'd actually done it, whom she would have continued to support.
That sort of realisation can really put you off a person.
But, nevertheless, I stayed on good terms with her until I went to university. I went to St. Andrews, which is popular with the Northern Irish, so, all of a sudden, I was making friends with lots of Northern Irish people, many of them Protestants, and realising just how wrong the popular picture of them is.
And then I fell in love with one of them.
And I didn't tell my mum.
I was pretty sure that her reaction would be political and dreadful, and I absolutely dreaded her finding out.
I have huge arguments with my sister about this, who thinks that this is really no big deal. But what if I'd started going out with a black girl and dreaded my mum finding out because I knew she hated blacks? No-one seems to have any difficulty understanding the problem with that. The irony is that it is, in part, the staunch anti-racist values drummed into me from an early age by my mother that ended up helping to turn me against her.
Anyway, as long as I didn't tell her about my girlfriend, I could give her the benefit of the doubt. But then I did tell her, and her reaction was worse than even my worst cynicism had suspected. The moment I told her that my girlfriend was Northern Irish, she said, with absolutely no hesitation, "Well, I hope she's a good left-footer and not some bastard proddy."
Then I visited Northern Ireland itself and stayed with my girlfriend's family. Her father was a civil servant whom the police suspected was on an IRA hitlist, so the family would start a car by reaching in, turning the key in the ignition, and then getting into the car. That's the difference between immediate guaranteed death and mere life-threatening injury.
That was 1993, and my relationship with my mother has never really recovered. I can't imagine that it ever will. The Northern Irish are some of the nicest people in the world, and my mother thinks it's OK to kill them or torture them to death because of something that happened eight-hundred years ago.
My girlfriend and I split up at the end of that year, but, wonderfully enough, we got back together again a few years and failed relationships later, and are now happily married.
My mother was not invited to the wedding. I haven't spoken to her since sometime in 2001, and am much happier for it. Towards the end, conversations with her only depressed me anyway, and they'd become rather one-sided, because I had nothing to say to her.
That's a short version. There's lots more to it, of course -- mainly about the fact that she was a bloody awful mother anyway, who let me know on a daily basis that she'd wanted a daughter -- her feminism extended to holding it against her own offspring for being born male -- but those are the salient points.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 06:52 PM | Comments (32)
March 29, 2006
The Unhappy King
Kadima won, and naturally you might think that Bibi Netanyahu, leader of Israel's Likud Party, is the most unhappy man in the world about the election.
But you would be wrong.
It's King Abdullah of Jordan who's really the unhappy puppy here. Believe me, if he could have voted, he would not have voted for Kadima. That wall they're building, it's the last thing he wants. Israeli troops and communities in Judea and Samaria are just fine by him. Pay no attention to his rhetoric about occupation. In the Arab world, rhetoric is golden--and utterly meaningless.
The Jewish pull back from Judea and Samaria, for him, for his always shaky Kingdom, baaaad news.
Wow, talk about a man with problems, Poor King Abdullah.
Let's rewind a few years and explore the whacky history of what used to be called Transjordan.
After taking over Transjordan after World War I, Great Britain created a local militia called The Mobile Force. It was made up of 150 men. Thus was born the nation of Jordan.
Amir Abdullah ibn Hussein, a descendant of the Prophet and the son of the Hashemite Sheik of Mecca, arrived with British approval in 1921, with the idea of making himself king -- as Mel Brooks said: "It's good to be king" -- and he was not exactly welcomed by the other marauding Arabs tribes.
His main foe was, get this, religious fanatics under Abd al-Aziz Ibn-Saud, eager to spread his Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.
Yup, The house of Saud before they discovered oil. Just a bunch of fanatical, double-dealing, ruthless desert murderers.
Nothing's really changed except now they wear bespoke suits.
The RAF made short work of Ibn Saud and stopped the tide of Saudi expansion.
Let us thank the British colonials.
The Transjordan Army, under the command of "Glubb Pasha," Colonel John Bagot Glubb, was the most professional indigenous military in the middle east. Okay, they were led entirely by British officers, or Jordanian officers trained in the British manner. And over 50% of their army were illiterate Bedouin. But they were disciplined and not the usual rabble.
In 1948, when the current King's grandfather ordered the invasion of the new state of Israel, it is clear that he did not hope to eradicate the state, unlike his Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian and Iraqi allies. Abdullah actually hoped to annex the West Bank and Jerusalem.
After all, the king had opened secret negotiations with the Israelis. Abdullah rightly never trusted his duplicitous Arab allies and suspected that his new Jewish neighbors would not be defeated so easily. The point of his secret negotiations was to get the Jews to cede him territory without bloodshed.
This did not happen. The fighting was fierce and his Arab Legion took extremely heavy casualties for every inch of land they siezed.
Let us now move forward to 1970-71 for these are the watershed years and the reason that the current King is probably in meltdown mode.
After the Six Day War, the PLO tried to set up a state within a state in Jordan. This situation was intolerable to King Hussein.
Moreover the humiliating defeat of the Arab Legion by the Israelis in 1967 emboldened the Palestinians, and they moved to overthrow King Hussein.
On 17 September 1970, The Jordanian General Staff commenced operations against the PLO. The Jordanians had nothing but contempt for the Palestinians and planned a "48 hour blitzkrieg."
The King was also worried about Syrian intervention for the Syrians were strong supporters of the PLO and sworn enemies of the Hashemites.
From the begining, the operation was a mess. For some inexplicable reason the Jordanian High Command assigned the 4th Mechanized and 60th Armored into Amman's Old City. The Old City is a typical Middle Eastern madinah of narrow streets, abutting houses, dead end alleyways, the worst place imaginable to operate tanks and APC's. To make matters even worse, the Jordanians sent their tanks forward with little or no infantry support.
Which is a big no-no.
To add to Jordan's problems, the operation against the PLO caused frictions in the army to explode. About 5,000 Palestinian soldiers and officers deserted and joined the PLO, bringing with them badly needed heavy weapons.
And then, total oy-vey for the Jordanians, the Syrians invaded, sending in the 5th Infantry Division reinforced with two armored brigades to bring its tank strength to nearly 300 T-55's.
The Jordanians sent the 25th Infantry Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division and the two armored battalions, 100 improved Centurions, of the 40th Armored Brigade to stop the Syrian advance.
The battle that took place can only be described as something out of a Marx Brothers movie. Both sides blundered into each other. They employed no strategy or sophisticated tactics, but simply hunkered down and fired, or just bludgeoned their way forward in dumb frontal assaults.
By the end of the day, the Jordanians retreated. The King, in a panic that his kingdom was about to fall, called out his air force. This saved the monarchy.
The question rises, why did the Syrians not send in their Air Force to save their ground forces from destruction? The answer is simple. Israel made it quite clear that it would not stand idly by and allow the Hashemite Kingdom to fall. The Israeli Air Force was scrambled and if one Syrian plane took off, the entire Syrian Air Force would have been destroyed.
It took ten months for The Jordanians to destroy the PLO.
In the process they besieged several PLO strongholds, and indiscriminately shelled villages, in the process killing thousands upon thousands of civilians.
Thus was born Black September.
But of course, Jews were held responsible, at least publicly. Never mind that Jordanians killed more Palestinians than the Jews ever dreamed of.
Memories die hard in the middle east.
The current King of Jordan looks at the wall Israel is building, looks at the Jewish retreat from Judea and Samaria, and all he sees in his future is bloody payback.
The Palestinians will never forget what his father did to them.
The Syrians will never forget.
The Saudis will never forget.
You have to feel for the guy.
Hamas will almost certainly try and destabalize the Hashemite kingdom. The Syrians will help with assasinations. The Saudis will finance it. The Iranians are already meddling, anxious to bring about their vision of a world without Israel.
King Abdullah speaks lovely Cambridge English, and his wife wears nice Chanel suits, but make no mistake about it, he runs a vicious police state.
No, the Jordanians are not hampered by Western style ethics. Their security services are efficient and utterly ruthless
The usual suspects are rounded up, tortured, given speedy trials -- and then promptly hung.
Keep your eyes on Jordan. If the Hashemite Kingdom falls, it will not be good.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:10 AM | Comments (38)
March 28, 2006
Another World
It's funny, I love novels, I love movies, and yet, perhaps my favorite book of all time is a non-fiction work that I've read maybe six or seven times. Perhaps I like it so much because the world it presents is so utterly foreign that it reads and feels like fiction.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman sits on a corner of my desk. It is a well thumbed paperback, spine cracked, pages spilling out. I think this is the third copy I've owned. Every once in a while I pick it up, open it at random, just read, and I am absolutely transported to a different world. The medieval world of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, but truly a time of chaos, where war and passions and assassinations ruled state craft. This is the only book I've ever read where I've actually felt as if the medieval mind I'm meeting is an alien thing.
The men who ruled their states seemed to have little impulse control, and committed terrible murders with little thought for long term consequences. Suffering was great and the serfs were expected to do most of it; whereas the nobles took it as their birthright to, well, enjoy themselves at everyone else's expense. The clergy were almost entirely corrupt and debauched, and naturally everyone hated the Jews.
Decency, or what we think of as goodness, was in short supply.
Heaven, hell and demons, were as real, as physically present as the most ordinary objects of every day life.
Women were, of course, treated like objects of commerce. It was no fun being a woman in the 14th century. If you were a noblewoman you were sold into marriage or you were thrust into some cold convent. If you were a female serf, you were lucky if your husband did not beat you to a pulp.
This is a great book and though we in the west have changed, human nature has not. The 14th century lives on in many parts of the mideast and Africa.
I recognize it in the sectarian slaughter in Iraq, in the killing fields of Rwanda, in the so-called honor killings all over the Arab world, in the homicide bombings in Israel, in the Janjaweed terrorists of Darfur.
Gosh, my fingers are actually getting numb just thinking of all the 14th century type states that still pockmark our globe.
Read this fine work. It is at once foreign and tragically, totally recognizable.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:29 AM | Comments (43)
March 27, 2006
The Best Plot Device... Ever
Last week, in the comments section, in an almost throw-a-way line, I said that it seemed to me that the most common literary device in the European novel revolved around the question of: "What do we do with our unmarried women?"
I received several private e-mails asking me if I was serious about this observation and if so, could I supply some more examples.
Well, I am serious.
The more novels I read, the more obvious it becomes that the standard plot device, and I have used it myself, see my movie, A Stranger Among Us is, The Umarried Woman Question.
Let us proceed.
Roxana by Daniel Defoe, 1724. This is an amazing novel about a beautiful woman who manipulates the social system and the accidents of her life to survive. This novel is dark. There is great psychological, sociological and economic insight. Roxana and Defoe have not progressed where the main character can lead an independent life, but all the right questions are posed.
Pamela by Samuel Richardson , 1740. A fifteen-year-old waiting maid's employer dies. She is pursued and preyed upon by the son. Pamela preserves her virtue even after he abducts and imprisons her and attemps to bribe her! Not one to give up, he even attacks her in her bed while a housekeeper holds Pamela's hands. Pamela goes nuts. The son falls into remorse and the rest of the novel is about his reformation. This novel is about education, about models of good behaviour, but the main theme of abduction and attempted rape of the virginal girl just keeps us turning the pages. We just have to find out what will happen to the unmarried young woman. It's in our DNA.
Persuasion by Jane Austen, 1818. I've written about Pride & Prejudice many times. Persuasion is also a very great book. Anne Elliot is 27-years-old. She's on the verge of becoming a spinster. Her family have lost their money and now live in reduced circumstances. Anne remeets her old suitor, a career naval officer whom she hasn't seen in eight years since his marriage proposal was turned down as not prestigious enough. Captain Wentworth, however, is now rich and respected, and is looking for a wife.
Jane Austen was the most important writer in the English language of her time. Her importance is hidden by her clever style and rapier like wit. She focuses on the emotional lives of women at a time when women, especially virginal women, were not allowed to have emotional lives. Austen pays close attention to what her women want. Most novelists, even into the Victorian era, required that women be ignorant of love and choice until they were properly solicited with an offer of money and marriage. Austen's women are also ferociously intelligent and ambitious without impugning their virtue.
Persuasion is not as lighhearted as Pride and Prejudice nor as forgiving as Emma. But it is her most passionate and her most haunting book.
In brief, a few more great novels that address the question of What to do with our girls/women? And now, you will notice that some of the novels move off into a new territory which I call: Once we've married them off, oy-vey.
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, 1847. Actually, this novel wants to know, "What do women want?"
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, 1847. A wild story about intransient passion, male and female. Truly, one of the most surrealistic novels ever penned.
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848. Becky Sharpe. No one has ever known what the heck to do with this little minx.
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1857. This is The Elvis, The King, of the I'm Married, oy-vey, What do I do now? novels.
Therese Raquin, by Emile Zola, 1867. This one ends with a Japanese like double suicide. One of the most depressing novels ever written.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:55 AM | Comments (38)
March 24, 2006
One True Voice & Ten War Novels
Truth is hard to find when the fog of mainstream journalism mixes with the fog of war.
Loyal readers of Seraphic Secret know of our enormous respect and enthusiasm for the work of journalist Robert D. Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan is one of the few journalists who actually goes into the field and spends time with our brave troops.
Mr. Kaplan believes that our soldiers are thinking, feeling human beings whose opinions are legitimate and should be mined.
Mr. Kaplan does this without treating our soldiers like hillbillies. He does this without condescending to our troops for Mr. Kaplan, unlike the sneering N.Y. Times, L.A. Times, Chicago Sun Times--take-your-pick; for unlike the elite Mainstream Media, Mr. Kaplan well understands that a vast and (naturally) underreported revolution has taken place in our armed forces.
And so, whereas the civilian "best" ahem "and brightest" Vietnam generation has budged not one inch ideologically, politically, nor tactically; a whole new generation of soldiers and officers has arisen and they are -- and there is no other word for them: magnificent.
The American armed forces are the most professional, the most motivated, certainly the most lethal, as they should be, and the most highly educated army the world has ever beheld. And I have not even touched upon our elite small forces such as Green Berets.
And yet, viewed through the lens of the mainstream media, one would think that this proud army is still mired in the paddies of Viet Nam--when in fact it is the journalists and ivory-towered academics who have never dug themselves out.
And with their unwise reporting, which the Jihadists eagerly read and make no mistake about it, celebrate, I believe the mainstream media are gullible partners in the killing of innocent Iraqi civilians and yes, in the killing of our soldiers, our children.
And so, please read this fine dispatch by Robert D. Kaplan. He along with Michael Yon, is one of the few journalists in Iraq who is actually doing his job. This is one of the few dispatches you will read that tells you what is right and what is wrong with our effort.
Karen and I wish all our readers a lovely and meaningful Shabbos.
With G-d's help, we will continue our discussion of our favorite and maybe our not-so-favorite novels next week.
In fact, I'd like to suggest that we start by listing our favorite war novels, defining war quite broadly.
Here's my 10 of the moment:
1. "The Sharpe Series" by Bernard Cornwell, over a dozen novels that tell the story of a ruffian British soldier in the Peninsular War. This is not an anti-war series. In fact, these books love war and love soldiers. I have read each book several times.
2. "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield
3. "The Killer Angels" - Michael Shaara
4. "A Soldier of the Great War" - Mark Helprin
5. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" Hemingway
6. "To the Last Man" by Jeff Shaara
7. "The Long Patrol: A Novel of Light Horsemen from Gallipoli to the Palestine Campaign of the First World War" by George Berrie.
8. "The Beardless Warriors" by Richard Matheson
9. "Lonesome Dove" by Larry McMurtry
10. "Bloody Season" by Loren D. Estleman -- The aftermath of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. In fact that's when the blood really started to flow. Low Intensity Conflict in the Wild West. An amazing and practically unknown masterpiece.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 11:44 AM | Comments (60)
March 23, 2006
Detour
Novels were invented to be read by the common man and woman; they were written to be accessible; no specialized knowledge is needed to enjoy the pleasures of a good story.
As a child I would curl up in a corner of my bed, open a book and dive into the words. I particularly enjoyed the Tom Swift series, or The Hardy Boys. I loved the drawings at the beginning of each chapter and I would often read a chapter then go back and compare the drawing to the words.
When Karen and I founded Seraphic Press and published The Hebrew Kid and The Apache Maiden, we took great care to supply beautiful drawings for each chapter. I wanted to give readers that same special feeling I had as a child, a feeling I have seen eroded over the years, of a fine book, carefully made and lovingly published.
As I grew older and my tastes in stories matured. Among others, I discovered Jane Austen. Pride & Prejudice has always been a fine guide to personal integrity. Anthony Trollope knows exactly how marriage works--and does not work. I understand more about the French Revolution by reading Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, than by plowing through a dozen dry histories. And when I read that there has been a typhoon in Japan I remember The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki.
It's odd, college literature courses took the pleasure of reading right out of me. The heavy theories. The turf battles fought by various mean-spirited professors. I didn't do well in these courses. I didn't get the narrow theories. The love of the words and stories was lost under an avalanche of "discourse."
It took years for me to get back to the love of reading after graduating from college. But once there, I was more certain of my love of words and stories than ever.
Sometimes, you have to take a short detour to get where you belong.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:03 AM | Comments (83)
March 22, 2006
Scenes From a Wedding, Part II — Low Intensity Conflict
"Daddy, I think you'd like to meet our friend, David."
I almost fall out of my chair.
Here's the thing: I'm not a normal parent. I know this. Offsprings #2 & 3 never know what I'm going to say to their friends.
Is daddy going to start waxing eloquent about The Seven Samurai to their friends who could care less?
"Daaaady, nobody watches black and white movies anymore. Especially when they're in Chinese."
"Japanese."
"What-ever."
Will daddy rant about the evils of the Belgium Congo?
The necessity of rounding up San Francisco Democrats and isolating them, like a dangerous virus, from the rest of humanity?
The need to bomb the PA territories back to the stone age as we did to the Japanese during WWII.
The absolute perfection of Jane Austen's prose.
In short, I can be a terrible embarrassment, and the girlses usually do their darndest to keep their friends waaaay out of their father's conversational range.
But now it is Saturday night. Tomorrow, Offspring #2 is to be married. Casa Avrech is just crawling with relatives and friends and I am hiding in my office in the back for I have absolutely no idea who most of the people are.
Here's the things about Offspring #2: when she has something up her sleeve her baby blue eyes twinkle. Brilliantly.
And, oh boy, are they glittering, like diamonds.
"Um, sure, I'd love to meet your friend," I say. Cautious.
"David will be you're new best friend, daddy."
"Why's that?"
And I learn that David works for The American Enterprise, the Conservative think tank, and in a month he's leaving for England to study at King's College...
"Study what?"
"Low. Intensity. Conflict."
I have a very serious asthma attack.
And I do not have asthma.
Meet him, I want to adopt him.
Offspring # 2 makes a phone call, and a few minutes later, David R. is in my office and Offspring #2 has, like a Jane Austen heroine, quietly withdrawn.
David and I, before I know it, are deep in conversation about The Malayan Emergency: 1948-1960. David explains how the British brilliantly and ruthlessly defeated a communist insurgency. And he prints out a four page syllabus for me. David is quite sure that America should be studying this small war for lessons in Iraq.
David R. is smart as a whip and before he knows what's hit him (I have not worked in Hollywood for 25 years and not learned a few tricks) I have managed to rope him into a promise to write some dispatches/articles/think-pieces for Seraphic Secret while he is in London.
Hey, it's a great way to get published nice and fast. And don't forget, This is also Seraphic University so you can put it on your resume: Distinguished Lecturer at Seraphic University. Imagine how impressed the four stars at the Pentagon will be.
So: David R. You listening?! Welcome to Seraphic Secret. We're counting on you for some really smart and accessible thoughts from Europe. No footnotes necessary. No academic jargon. Just simple straightforward, prose.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:06 AM | Comments (51)
March 21, 2006
Twelve Paces
"You are empty. You have nothing to fill you up."
In my twenty-five years in Hollywood, the most baffling people I work with are actors. They can alternately be a blessing, making my words come alive in ways I never imagined. Or they can be a curse, taking my scripts in directions I never intended and making a mess of things.
I have screened dozens of films about the lives of actors, looking for that one film that touches on the truths that I recognize from the actor's life and craft.
Most are just a pack of lies.
But I have finally discovered one film that is truly about acting.
I want to thank my friend Michael Makiri, from the Young Israel of Century City, for bringing this film to my attention. Michael collects obscure films. Every few weeks Michael schleps over to my house with shopping bag in hand, filled with goodies, and lets me paw through it. From this pile of DVD's I pick and choose various treasures and some truly wretched films, like Blood Island. Don't ask.
Anywhoo.
It's a small, obscure British film that takes place in the 19th century. Oddly enough, the heroine comes from an orthodox Jewish family. Enamored of Yiddish theatre, she yearns to break away from the family sewing business and become an actress.
Let me be clear, Esther Kahn is not big on plot, it is slow and uses voice-over narration not quite successfully. There is a great deal of Yiddish at the beginning. The opening scenes in the Jewish ghetto evoke atmosphere in a self-consciously European style. And this film is loooong. Over two hours. Longer than The Godfather. Oy-vey.
But this film is about the psyche of an actress, and in that it succeeds brilliantly.
Summer Phoenix (yup, the family that keeps on giving) plays the lead role of the young Jewish girl who, in the words of Ian Holm, who plays Nathan, her acting teacher, "Feels nothing, for you have nothing at your core."
There is one scene in this film that just knocked me out and brings home what great acting is all about.
Ian Holm is giving Esther her first acting lesson. He tells her to walk a dozen paces across the stage and greet him. She does it.
Then the acting begins.
He makes a chalk mark on the stage floor.
"Here is where you take your first step, Esther, you will register surprise."
He makes a second chalk mark.
"Here at the second mark, you will register, hesitancy."
Third chalk mark.
"Now anger, Esther."
Fourth mark.
"Disgust."
Fifth mark.
"Self loathing, Esther."
And so on for twelve paces.
"Twelve simple paces, Esther, twelve completely different ranges of emotion."
Esther Kahn looks at him in complete bewilderment.
And then she does it.
The point of the movie is that Esther becomes a great actress because she has no center. There is no there... there. And she has to fill up that emptiness with various characters. With stories and drama.
Every great actor and actress I have worked with in Hollywood is an empty vessel. Oh, they try and fill that emptiness with celebrity, with vacuous relationships, with absurd leftist politics they can't even begin to comprehend, they go through drug phases, they try Zen, Kabbalah, Dianetics, whatever, but in the end, there is nothing there; and that is why they can take those twelve paces brilliantly, and normal people can only gaze in wonder.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:28 AM | Comments (67)
March 20, 2006
Palestinians Bilked U.S. Taxpayers
This really deserves careful scrutiny.
The Palis have been stealing from the US taxpayer for years. And the money stolen has not been used for "humanitarian relief."
Previously, the money has disappeared into the private bank accounts of Yasir Arafat, his greedy wife Suha, and of course into the Swiss accounts of Arafat's "Tunisian" associates. The Tunisian's is the designation used for the PA old guard. The loyalists who followed Arafat into Tunisia after being expelled form Beirut. For this, they were paid off in endless graft. You can see their sea-side mansions in Gaza. Trump style villas that make Trump look like a man of refined taste.
Now, in Hollywood, there are several progeny of the Tunisians who strut around informing everyone who will listen that they are Muslim and Palestinians. Never mind that they were raised in France and Switzerland, attended expensive boarding schools, speak Arabic with European accents, never go to prayers, and live off stolen money. They wear their "victimization" like neon badges, and you better believe that they work the political angles to the nth degree. And secular Jewish executives move these people up the corporate ladder with lightning speed.
As one exec remarked to me privately: "Did you know the father rides around in a bullet-proof Mercedes?"
I did know. The father is a terrorist thug.
***
Study finds over $3 billion in aid based on 'fraudulent data'
By Aaron Klein
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
The United States government must conduct an inquiry into the almost $3 billion in taxpayer funds that may have been distributed as aid to the Palestinians in part based on fraudulent data provided by the Palestinian Authority, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., chairwoman of the House International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East, told WorldNetDaily.
The subcommittee last week heard testimony from the leaders of a new study that documents the Palestinians have inflated their population numbers by over 50 percent, in some cases counting residents of certain cities twice.
"U.S. assistance to the Palestinians was based on the population numbers provided by the PA. Recent study shows that the PA numbers were grossly inaccurate. There should be an inquiry as to what happened to the extra funds," said Ros-Lehtinen.
"U.S. and United Nations future funding to the Palestinian territories should reflect the actual population numbers in the Palestinian territories and not the inflated data provided by the PA."
Since 1994, the United States has reportedly given nearly $1.8 billion in direct aid to the PA and nongovernmental organizations operating in the Palestinian territories, usually delineated through the U.S. Agency for International Development. America has also provided more than $1.1 billion to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which oversees Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, according to State Department records.
U.S. assistance to the Palestinians last year alone reportedly totaled $282 million.
American aid to the PA and Palestinian-related agencies, especially to refugee organizations, is devised largely based on Palestinian population figures, a State Department spokesperson said.
PA officials reported the Palestinian population for 2004 in West Bank and Gaza totaled 3.8 million. But an in-depth study led by American researchers Bennet Zimmerman, Roberta Seid and Michael Wise puts the current Palestinian-Arab population of the West Bank at 1.4 million and Gaza 1.1 million, for a total of 2.4 million.
"American tax dollars and other international humanitarian aid have been based on inflated population numbers which have been accepted without question by governments and aid agencies. Our researchers pointed out that money has been spent to help Palestinians who were double-counted, never born or not present in the West Bank and Gaza," Zimmerman told WND.
The study, titled "Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza," compared the accepted PA data to Palestinian voting records, birth and death records published annually by the PA's Health Ministry, immigration and emigration data from Israel's Border Control, internal migration of Palestinians from the territories into Israel recorded by the Israeli Interior Ministry and others, Israeli Civil Administration population studies, U.N. population surveys, and surveys conducted by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and the World Bank.
Zimmerman's team found extreme faults in the methods used by the PA to determine its population, including counting the 230,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem twice and retroactively raising growth and birth rates, which the study contends have been declining.
The PA claims a population growth rate of 4 to 5 percent per year, among the highest in the world, but Palestinian Ministry of Health records published annually since 1996 contradict the PA's own claims by stating growth rates averaging around 3 percent.
Zimmerman's study documents the PA tampered with its own data, retroactively raising its growth numbers in 2002. The new study shows a steady pattern of growth decline leading to a natural growth rate in 2003 of just 2.6 percent.
The PA projected a net population increase of 1.5 percent per year as a result of immigration from surrounding countries. But Zimmerman's researchers found that except for 1994, when the bulk of the Palestinian leadership and their families entered the territories from Tunis, Palestinian emigration from the area has outweighed immigration by a net negative of about 10,000 to 20,000 per year.
"The U.S. and Europeans have for years accepted entirely exaggerated data," Zimmerman said. "Now Congress has some very tough questions to ask, including how its own State Department and the CIA could have been duped and what do to regarding future aid."
Ros-Lehtinen recently drafted legislation along with Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., calling for a halt to U.S. assistance to the PA following Hamas' victory in January's Palestinian elections.
The United States and Israel have been leading an international push to politically and financially isolate the new Hamas government.
The PA has for years depended on U.S. and European aid to pay salaries for its nearly 150,000 employees, totaling about $90 million per month.
While most European countries have expressed support for isolating Hamas, Israeli officials fear substantial cracks in a united international front, particularly following the terror group's visit to Russia last week.
In response to international attempts to isolate his government, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar claimed last month his terror group doesn't need "satanic" American money.
"Those who built their structure on the basis of the Quran ... cannot budge because of promises from America or a dollar from Europe. I wish America would cut off its aid. We do not need this satanic money," al-Zahar said at a news conference in Cairo.
But al-Zahar took quite a different tone in a WND interview just prior to the Palestinian elections in which he outright lobbied for U.S. money.
"Without any condition we are accepting any money and we are ready to put these figures in the proper way and in a purified manner. Anybody can follow this money, can observe and account, do anything to be sure that we are running our system without corruption," al-Zahar said in response to a question about whether he would accept American aid.
Al-Zahar, whose group has openly funded and carried out over 60 suicide bombings and hundreds of rocket and shooting attacks against Israelis, said he would use American money to build "factories, agriculture and [other] real investments in the Palestinian people."
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:35 AM | Comments (35)
March 17, 2006
Scenes From a Wedding Part I - Hollywood
"Hollywood. They kill you with hope Mr. Avrech, do you know that?"
The elderly lady has cornered me just as I'm about to enter the banquet hall. I recognize the look in her eye, the plaintive tone in her voice. She has asked for a moment of my time, and how can I say no? It is, afterall, Offspring # 2's wedding day, and I am host to close to three-hundred guests. I am obliged to be gracious to each and every one of them.
"Hollywood, Mr. Avrech. My daughter, she came out here close to ten years ago to be an actress and you know what she is?"
"A waitress."
"You know my Esther?!"
"It was a lucky guess."
"So talented, so beautiful. Here."
A head-shot is thrust into my hands. I give it a quick glance. A pleasant face. The kind of actressy face I have looked at in my twenty-five year career about ten-thousand times.
There is nothing nice about the life of an actress in Los Angeles, USA. I do my best to discourage nice women from following this professional path.
"Look at my Esther's credits."
My heart sinks as I see the inevitable college credit of "Fiddler on the Roof." Not much else of substance.
"I'm a screenwriter. There's very little I can do for Esther until I go into production on a film and even then, I defer to my directors."
"Please, you've so many awards, surely you can do something. Here's my Esther's phone number. Will you at least talk to her, give her some advice?"
I sigh. The advice I want to give this actress is to quit being an actress. It's the most punishing, humiliating, bottom-feeding part of the film business.
"I'll talk to Esther."
The elderly lady takes my hand. I actually fear that she's going to kiss it. But she just squeezes very hard.
"I knew you'd help me. It is your lovely daughter's wedding day, how can you deny any request?"
Oh my gosh.
I'm The Godfather.
I rise.
"Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to go to attend my daughter's wedding."
Oh no, I'm even delivering the exact dialogue from the film, a film I might add, I have seen about fifty times. And if I'm not mistaken, my voice has just gotten all sandpaper raspy like you-know-who.
"You'll call my Esther?"
"I'll call."
A few days later I call Esther. I listen to her ramble about her non-career, her "awesome" talent, how no one understands her unique creativity, her dwindling bank account, her abusive boyfriend, her miserable agent.
And I politely bring the conversation to an end when Esther viciously rants about how much she hates her mother who has never supported her artistic dreams.
Hollywood. It kills you with its brutal truths.
***
It is with great pleasure and thanks to HaShem that Seraphic Secret can report that Pearl's father, Yaakov Arieh, has made what can only be described as a miraculous recovery. He is returning home today. I know that Pearl is deeply grateful for all your lovely notes and most of all for your heartfelt prayers. Pearl has been a good friend of this blog since we started writing and we are greatly relieved. Pearl's joy is our joy.
May all our readers have a lovely and meaningful Shabbos.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:36 AM | Comments (90)
March 16, 2006
Seraphic Wedding II
At the risk of absolutely boring you all to tears, here are more pictures from Offspring #2's wedding this past Sunday night.
I have been asked repeatedly: how come you keep calling your daughter Offspring #2 now that her name has been revealed on onlysimchas.com?
BTW, for those of you who don't speak Hebrew, Only Simchas means, "only happy celebrations," hence: engagements, weddings, births, bar mitzvas, etc.
Smart, huh? That website makes people smile, and it actually generates a profit. Free market capitalism at its very best.
Anywhoo:
Back to Offspring #2; you know, I got so used to calling her "Offspring#2" that I actually walk around saying, "Hey, Offspring #2, have you read Seraphic Secret today? Notice that I continue to keep my promise and not reveal your secret/real identity. Aren't you proud of me?"
In return, I get a great big roll of her baby blues.
Sigh.
I try. Oh, how I try.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 11:04 PM | Comments (71)
March 15, 2006
Seraphic Thanks & No Thanks to Belgium
Karen and I want to thank all our readers and commenters for your kind and generous comments. You have managed to make our simcha, our joyous event, even more complete and for this we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
I will blog about wedding plans and the wedding, but I need some distance from the event to gain a better and more thorough understanding of what exactly happened.
I'm like a punch-drunk boxer at this point. I won the bout, I think, but my brain is a bit scrambled.
In the meantime, our good friend and commenter Ari M. is in Brussels right now and he celebrated the Jewish holiday of Purim in that city. He wrote to me that the synagogue he attended was guarded by six, that's right six soldiers armed with machine guns. The synagogue did not have a single sign identifying it as a Jewish house of worship.
Way too dangerous.
In addition, Jewish men remove their black hats after services, before stepping out into the streets. Needless to say, it is not safe for men to wear their yarmulkes in the streets either.
In closing, Ari, one of my son Ariel's ZT'L, May His Memory Be Blessed, very best friends, concluded by saying that we Jews should never forget how good we have it in America.
Thank you Ari.
I would like to add this:
Belgium is home to the absurd International Court of Human Rights, where for years they tried to put Ariel Sharon on trial for "crimes against humanity."
Disgusting.
It seems to me that in a country where Jews cannot worship safely, or even walk the streets safely as Jews, Belgium's priorities are completely askew.
But what can you expect from Belgium? This is a country that has never faced its colonial past in the Congo. They were bestial abusers of the native population beyond all imagination. Yes, Belgium was the worst colonial power in all of modern colonial history. Read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for a taste of their brutality. They exploited ruthlessley, murdered and mutilated the native population mercilessley.
For more on Belgium in the Congo read The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Packenham. You will need a strong stomach.
Now, their self-righteous noises ring totally hollow. And their selective historical amnesia is a continuation of this wretched colonial legacy.
Little Belgium is a giant blot on human memory and decency.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:21 AM | Comments (25)
March 14, 2006
Seraphic Wedding
Behind the scenes here at Casa Avrech, we've been in a bit of a tizzy the past few months. Offspring #2, well, here's the link at onlysimchas.com.
I will blog about being a Jewish Father of the Bride at a later date. When I recover my fragile mental health.
This, by the way, is most definitely not a Purim joke.
Karen and I are very happy.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 07:26 AM | Comments (83)
March 10, 2006
Karen: Out of Context
The continuing story of how I met my wife Karen in fourth grade, and fell helplessly, hopelessly in love with her. Naturally, Karen did not know that I existed. And so, though technically we met when we were nine-years old, we were not to know each other until we were both in our mid-twenties. It was a painful, one-way love affair for yours truly.
"Let's go to Rabbi Singer's shul."
"You mean Karen Singer's father?" David asks.
I nod. I'm trying for an oh-so-casual attitude. But my heart is beating in my chest like a Gene Krupa solo and I'm pretty certain that everybody can hear it.
David and Mitchell trade glances.
"It's too far to walk, " says Mitchell.
"Actually, " says David, "it's only about 2.2 miles and we've already done that several times."
My best friends debate this "spontaneous idea" of mine. But in truth, I've been planning this proposal for close to a year. Ever since my grade school buddies and I have developed this whacky notion that we will daven, pray, in a new shul, synagogue, in Brooklyn, every single Shabbos no matter the weather.
For us yeshiva kids, this constitutes a grand adventure.
Go figure.
I hold my breath as the arguments fly back and forth. It is maddening. I want to scream: "Guys I really don't care about visiting all these shuls I just want to see Karen Singer on her home ground."
We three are in eighth grade in the Yeshiva of Flatbush. I have had a secret crush on Karen Singer, The Rabbi's Beautiful Daughter, since the fourth grade.
I'm pretty sure that I'm completely abnormal. None of my friends ever mention girls, nor do they seem particularly interested in the opposite sex.
Me, I'm totally obsessed with Karen.
Finally, David and Mitchell make a momentous decision.
"Okay," says David, "This Shabbos, we walk to the Avenue O Jewish Center in Bensonhurst."
"Hey," says Mitchell,"what happens if we see Karen there?"
I remain mute. I'm like this secret agent, even under torture I will not reveal my deep dark secret.
"You say, Good Shabbos, Karen," David offers.
David is ferociously logical. The smartest kid in school, I'm amazed that he's my friend, after all I'm absolutely one of the dumbest kids in our yeshiva.
Mitchell chuckles and says: "Karen probably won't even be in shul. She'll hear that we're coming and stay home."
Mitchell and David crack up.
"How would she find out?" I demand, my voice unnaturally shrill.
"Robert, I was just making a joke." Mitchell frowns.
My friends gaze at me for a long moment. I think my cover as a normal Jewish kid is about to be blown. I force myself to laugh. I assure them that I knew it was a joke and I was actually, in my own clever way, building on the joke.
My friends are typically immature 13-year-old kids, but they are far from stupid. I sense that they sense... something.
David has mapped out our route from our home turf, Midwood, to Karen's neighborhood, Bensonhurst. David, a combination human calculator/GPS system is our designated navigator. So bright is David that he doesn't even have to sit down and consult a map. David just walks. It's all in his head automatically. Mitchell and I follow, sure in the knowledge that the route David has chosen is not only the quickest but the most scenic path, ahem, possible—for Brooklyn.
The 2.2 miles seems like 26.2 miles. Normally, on our walks, we talk about, what else, school, and our truly insane teachers.
There's Mr. Zilber, who regularly hurls blackboard erasers at our heads. He's got an arm like Willie Mays. It's a miracle that no one's eye has been knocked out.
Mrs. Katz is probably a sociopath. When a student misbehaves—and G-d knows how loosely she defines that term—she makes the kid stick out his hand, and WHAP, WHAP, WHAP, she smacks the tender flesh with a long wooden ruler. The pain, for I have been on the receiving end many times, is excruciating.
And then there's Mr. Weinstein, who has the endearing habit of grabbing the back of our necks, shaking us like rag dolls and screaming at the top of his lungs. His face turns red and a huge blue vein visibly throbs on his temple. I often stare at the throbbing vein, willing it to implode.
Our teachers hate us with a Dickensian ardor. And our parents pay top dollar for this education.
The Avenue O Jewish Center is a fairly large shul. And they've got a pretty good minyan going. We slip into some vacant seats, grab siddurim, prayer books, and start to daven, pray.
Well, not exactly. Mitchell and David are davening. Me, I'm craning my neck, looking beyond the mechitza, a low wall that separates the men and women's seating. Naturally, I am looking for Karen Singer. And guess what?
She's not here.
This is, I'm pretty sure, a conspiracy. David and Mitchell have figured out my secret, and they've leaked the intel to Karen, and naturally she's stayed home. Rather than allow me to gaze upon her lovely face on her home ground, Karen's chosen not to come to shul on Shabbos.
I feel like Quasimoto—except not as hideously adorable.
Rabbi Singer, up on the podium, is a charismatic figure. He's got that stern but totally dignified I'm-The Rabbi-Don't-Mess-With-Me look about him. He's not one of those smiley, huggable, politically savvy congregation Rabbis. Nope, Rabbi Singer has a reputation as being one of the most learned Talmudic scholars, well, anywhere.
I'm so disappointed that Karen is not in shul that I actually feel like telling Mitchell and David that I'm going to go home early. But I just can't bring myself to do that to them. It's called flat-leaving. And it's the worst thing you can do to a friend.
Besides, I'd never be able to find my way back home. I'd probably end up in some really bad neighborhood, get knifed by some hoods and with my blood spilling to the concrete, I'd write Karen's name. Word would get back to her and she'd spend the rest of her life mourning the one man—okay boy—who truly loved her.
Hey, that actually sounds pretty good. I'm about to bail when Rabbi Singer gets up to make his speech.
You do not walk out when the Rabbi speaks. That's just plain wrong.
Wow. This guy can really lay it on. Most Orthodox Rabbis speak in really squeaky voices and sweat bullets. Crowds are not their thing—Torah is.
But Karen's father has this deep bass, operatic voice, and even I can tell that he uses his voice like a musical instrument.
Normally, I switch off my little brain when a Rabbi speaks. Yes, I am that shallow. The speeches are usually dead boring. But Karen's father is just mesmerizing. And intimidating. I have this strange feeling that he's looking right at me, right through me, and telepathically sending me messages:
Stay away from my daughter, you little putz.
There's more, lots more, but that's the basic thrust of the secret message he's zapping into my head.
As Rabbi Singer finishes, I sense movement in the women's section.
Oh
My
Gosh
Karen Singer is in shul. She's sitting next to her mother. And Mom, I kid you not, looks like the movie star, Lee Remick. Karen is a combination Elizabeth Taylor and Vivien Leigh. Together, mother and daughter are just breathtaking.
Karen's mother, Mrs. Celia Singer, in her hometown of
Lowell, Mass., 1941
I barely turn the pages in my siddur. I'm gazing at Karen outside of school, and I am just overwhelmed. She's even more beautiful out of our regular context.
And oh boy, does she daven. Karen sits there, head down, eyes glued to the siddur, praying with true emotion. Nothing showy about Karen's piety; she does not shuckle, sway back and forth; she does not clench her fists; she does not squeeze shut her eyes and grimace. No, Karen davens like she does everything else in life: quietly, deeply, sincerely, modestly.
I am so in love with this girl I feel like Raskolnikov in Crime & Punishment. I desperately want to confess my feelings for her. I need to make this confession for the weight of this emotion is simply unbearable.
And then, and then I'll bravely accept exile to Siberia.
I turn to David and Mitchell.
"Guys, I have to tell you something."
"What?" they whisper in unison.
"I just love... the stained glass windows in this shul. Aren't they just great?"
Mitchell rolls his eyeballs.
David frowns.
"I'm just saying..."
"Avrech," says Mitchell, "you are sooooo weird."
"Oh yeah, well at least I don't carry a handkerchief!"
For some reason I have decided to decide that carrying a handkerchief is the height of perversity.
"I told you — it's my allergies." Mitchell wheezes. Saying the word 'allergies' as if he's pronouncing, Bubonic Plague.
We three are immediately shushed by the shul regulars. Not because we're interfering, G-d forbid, with the intensity of their prayers, nooooo, but because we're interrupting a serious conversation about the, oy-vey, New York Mets.
After davening, we walk up to Rabbi Singer and say, "Good Shabbos." It's what we always do. A way of putting closure to our whole Shabbos adventure.
"What's your name?" Rabbi Singer asks me as I shake his hand.
I tell him.
"Ah, so you must be Rabbi Avrech's son."
"Yes."
"Please send my warmest regards. Your father and I are old friends."
"Really?"
I'm thinking: I've got an in with Rabbi Singer. I can use my father as leverage. There is nothing like the bond that exists among Orthodox Rabbis. Somehow, in my feverish 13-year old mind I'm plotting a way to manipulate this Rabbinic friendship to my advantage.
And I have the perfect plan.
"Daddy?"
"Yes, Robert?"
"Can I ask you a favor?'
"Sure son, anything."
"Can you ask Rabbi Singer to order his daughter to love me with all her heart and marry me when we're older. Say, in high school."
That's about as sophisticated as my thinking gets.
We turn to leave, and oh gee-willikers, I'm pretty sure I'm going to melt into a puddle. There's Karen, at the back of the room, waiting for her father.
I start to walk towards her. I'm going to say something incredibly clever. She'll be so impressed that she'll fall instantly in love with me.
Mitchell grabs my arm.
"Let's go."
"I am going, the door's that way."
"There's an exit right here."
I turn, David already has the rear exit door open. He beckons to me. Mitchell tugs my arm. I look over my shoulder just as Rabbi Singer joins Karen and her mother.
Please, just look over your shoulder, notice me!
And they are gone.
We make our way back to Midwood. We talk about where we'll go next Shabbos. I tell my buddies that I don't think I'm going to go with them next time. They want to know why, and I can only shrug.
The next Shabbos, I attend my own shul, seated right next to my father. I daven, but when I close my eyes all I see is Karen in her father's shul. I see her head slightly inclined, her lips moving in prayer.
I wonder how long this feeling will grip me, for it is painful, and yet I recognize that it is simultaneously oddly exhilarating.
After Shabbos, David calls.
"Mitch is in the hospital."
"What happened?"
"We were fooling around on the second floor of the shul, and somehow Mitchell put his hand right through a glass window, Robert, there was so much blood. They had to call an ambulance to take him to the hospital. He's got about forty stitches in his hand. You're so lucky you weren't there."
"Oh, my G-d."
This terrible accident signals the end of our Shabbos wanderings.
I imagine that I'll never set foot in Karen's father's shul ever again. But close to thirty years later, I am in that shul again. It's my Aufruf, the Shabbos before our wedding. And during the entire service, I gaze into the women's section, gaze at Karen, who will soon be my wife.
I'm also looking back to a time when we were just children and I sat in the same shul, in the same seat, loving that same child/girl/woman. I watch Karen across time and space and for one brief moment past and present merge into a single magical point, and I am delirious with joy.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 04:11 AM | Comments (64)
March 08, 2006
Learning Patience IV
For our final look at Alistair Horne's Savage War of Peace, an encyclopediac study of The Battle of Algiers, we turn our gaze upon the Jews of Algeria for they were truly stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
The Jews in Algeria comprised about one fifth of the non Muslim population. Tragically, they were trapped between the European colonists and the native Muslim people.
Many Jews could trace their ancestry back to the expulsions from 16th century Spain; some even claimed to pre-date the invaders who surged out of the Arabian peninsula in the 11th Century. No matter the exact dates, the Jews of Algeria were an old and established community with deep roots and an abiding love of the land.
By the 1830's the Jews of Algeria had become an underprivileged community, fallen into poverty, and it was with the advent of the French colonists that their opportunity arose to improve their status. By the 1870's more prosperous Jews from outside Algeria began to arrive and the quality of the lives of the native Algerian Jews improved considerably.
In the Second World War, Petain's antisemitic regime repealed decrees of Jewish Rights, The Cremieux Decrees, and Jewish teachers and school children were expelled from all European schools in Algeria.
The whole community was threatened with mass deporation to Nazi death camps--which thank G-d, never took place.
By the 1950's the Algerian Jews were tugged in several directions. The poorest tended to identify with the Muslims rather than the French colonials, and many were members of the Communist Party. The wealthiest Jews identified strongly with the Parisian life style and scorned the local Muslims.
By 1954 a majority of the Jewish intellectuals and professionals sided with the Algerian insurgents. In August 1956 a group of Constantine Jews wrote a public letter declaring that:
"One of the most pernicious manoeuvers of colonialism in Algeria was, and remains, the division between Jews and Muslims... the Jew has been in Algeria foe over 2,000 years; they are thus an integral part of the Algerian people."
Frantz Fanon wrote: "The Jews were to provide invaluable services as the eyes and ears of the revolution, often acting as double agents against the French."
This was not enough for the FLN. By 1960, they tightened the screws on the Jewish population, demanding that the Jews en masse, declare itself publicly for the FLN.
By now, the Jews were "uncommitted." There was never such a thing as a united front among the Jews of Algeria. Besides, there had been too much indiscriminate terror, too much throat slitting, too much rape; the Jews were not fools, they knew that such revolutions eat their young.
The Jews of Algeria found themselves subjected to the cruel logic of terrorism. Typical was this letter to a Jewish shopkeeper:
"Sir, if on Wednesday you do not hand us a sum of two million francs, your daughter will be abducted and will serve as a mattress for the army of liberation... If you do not follow our instructions, your shop will be blown up and we shall have your skins, yours and your wife's."
In the spring of 1960, a terrorist grenade was tossed in the Jewish ghetto. In March the following year Jacob Chekroun, the Rabbi of Medea was murdered on the steps of his synagogue. The following month an FLN boycott was imposed on Jewish shops.
Whole families were riven by conflicting loyalties. The Levy family of Algiers is a particularly poignant and tragic tale. The father would be assasinated by the French as an FLN sympathiser while his son was murdered by the FLN on suspicion of being a French agent.
The end of the Algerian Jewish community finally came with France's withdrawal from Algeria and her independence in 1962. And as always, when the day of reckoning came, all the Jews were lumped together into the same boat--a boat that would sail away from Algeria, never to return.
Over 100,000 Algerian Jews, most of them poor, backward, and disease ridden, fled their homes, and poured into metropolitan France.
But in a sense they were more fortunate than the other loyal Muslims who fought for France and who were now abandoned to their fate to be massacred in the thousands by the vengeful FLN.
The Jews of Algeria were the historic canary in the mine. To judge the decency of any society, look at how the Jews are treated. The French treated the Jews wretchedly and so did the Muslims.
Now, the children and grandchildren of these Algerian Jews are once again witness to their homeland being devoured by Muslim terrorists. The French will do nothing; they know not what to defend for they believe in nothing.
In ten years, I guarantee, the last of the Algerian Jewish community will be forced to leave the shores of France -- for Israel, America and Canada.
Thus will end The Battle of Algiers--for the Jews.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 12:40 PM | Comments (30)
March 07, 2006
How Many Jews...
"The light's out."
My stomach does somersaults when Karen says these three words. Understand, I know that the light is out. I'm not blind. I've known it for days. But I kind of make believe that it's actually still functioning, that all is right in Casa Avrech.
But on Shabbos, when we just can't see what we're eating because the light is so dim, the illusion tends to crumble.
"The lighting is romantic," I tell Karen.
"There's nothing romantic about eating in pitch blackness," she answers.
Several years ago we did some "minor renovations." Meaning, our lives almost ended. Anyway, these renovations included installing some incredibly high-tech recessed lighting. The lighting is so high-tech that you need a degree from MIT to change the light bulbs when they burn out.
The guy who installed the lighting explained to me that when I change the bulbs I have to make sure to wear "white gloves and be extra careful not to touch the reflecting glass." He had this incredibly serious look on his face as if he knew that I was the absolutely the wrong man for such delicate surgical missions. Presumably, the oil on your fingers gets on the glass, sizzles and fries, and causes the delicate ground glass to explode into flying shrapnel.
Anywhooo.
When these super intense halogen lights burn out, I schlep the ladder from the garage, and Karen stands there frowning.
"Can I do anything?" she says as I climb the ladder.
"No, I'm hunky-dory."
But Karen grabs the sides of the ladder to steady it. She does not trust the engineering of the legs. Actually, she does not trust my, um, dexterity.
"Be careful," she says, "remember what happened to Yossie."
Yossie is an unfortunate neighbor who, while building his Succah, fell from his ladder and is now, well, not quite himself. In fact, we have two Yossie's in our community.
I should write a blog called Jews and Ladders: A Cautionary Tale.
So, I climb the ladder while Karen grips the legs and worries that her husband is going to fall on his head and, I just have to tell you, the more she worries, the more likely it seems that it's going to happen.
The whole time I'm thinking to myself: everything would be okay if I just had a real tool belt.
Now, these halogen bulbs don't just screw in. That's way too simple. I have to reach up and yank on this deeply recessed lighting fixture, and of course, it's completely stuck. I mean totally frozen.
I pull, but it's not easy because I have to reach over my head and I have no leverage. None. And the ladder inevitably wobbles. Dangerously.
"Are you going to fall?" Karen asks helpfully.
I have no idea how to answer that question/statement/exclamation/cry-of-fear.
So, I jam my fingers between fixture and ceiling, pull and twist and grunt -- and just rip my nails to shreds.
"Your fingers are bleeding, Robert."
"It's only a flesh wound."
I grab a screwdriver, jam it under the lip of the fixture and slap it hard and WHAP! The fixture drops free, slams me right in the skull.
"Do you think you have a concussion?"
"No."
"Tell me if you get dizzy or nauseous."
"Absolutely."
And months of accumulated black dust in the fixture have just floated into my hair, my nose, and my mouth. I'm pretty sure I've also swallowed a dead fly or two. Maybe even a dead spider.
Ick!
"Maybe we should call the electrician, Robert?"
"I'm not calling the electrician to change a light bulb. That's just plain humiliating. He'll see my yarmulke and make jokes about how many Jews it takes to screw in a light bulb."
So, now I've got the main fixture out and guess what I find inside? Yup, another fixture that's recessed even deeper in the bowels of the celing. This one is an incredibly complicated metal armature that holds one single itty-bitty light bulb.
Again, with zero leverage, I'm yanking and twisting, the legs of the ladder are tipping this way and that, and Karen is saying things like:
"Don't fall."
And:
"I don't want you to fall."
And:
"Please don't fall, Robert."
I'm like stuck in this old style film montage where the main character just hears one word louder and louder: Fall, Fall, FALL, FALLFALLFALL!
And finally, I get this second fixture to shake free and now all I have to do is somehow get the dead bulb out. Not so easy. The bulb is attached to this final housing that I have work free very carefully or I might crack the thin lens of the glass. The bulb makes this horrible screeching noise, and finally it jumps loose. But it's still held by two thin little prongs. I pull and pull and for the life of me, I think it's been soldered in place. Finally, I give a huge yank and the bulb jumps free and I wave my arms, almost toppling from the ladder.
Good thing Karen's holding on to the legs of the ladder or I'd be Yossied
Now I have to put the new bulb in.
Karen yells: "STOP!"
She runs over, switches off the juice.
I say, "Whoops."
"Are you trying to make me a widow?"
"It just happened."
"That's what the toothless morons on Jerry Springer say."
"Have you been watching Jerry behind my back, you naughty girl you."
Everything in reverse now. The whole operation takes about forty minutes. The time it usually takes me to write a good scene in a screenplay.
On Shabbos, we sit and eat. Ah, the simple joys of a nice middle class Jewish life. Thank you Ha-Shem.
"Notice anything different?" I hint to Offsprings #2 and #3.
They stare at my face, wondering if I've somehow managed to pull off a nose job without telling them. But their expert eyes detect the same old face and they shrug.
"You can see your food," I explain.
They look at me frowning. I'm getting to be a pretty strange parent.
"Daddy changed the light bulb," Karen explains.
The girls look at Karen, look at me, roll their eyeballs, get down to the serious business of eating the Shabbos meal.
Karen looks at me, smiles and says: "I'm proud of you, Robert."
I have to tell you, I can't wait to change the next bulb. Anything to get a compliment from the love of my life.
***
Let us not forget to continue davening, praying for Pearl's father: Yaakov Arieh ben Chaya Malka.
Pearl has been in touch, and she greatly appreciates our thoughts and prayers.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 10:02 AM | Comments (54)
March 06, 2006
Jews & Carburetors
"You simply spread this compound out and then mix this other compound and then give each of them individually time to harden just a bit, and then you carefully bond them together, and that should pretty much do the trick. Anybody should be able to do this."
The salesman, a very friendly and articulate Hispanic young man, looks directly at me and smiles.
Infused with enthusiasm, I look at Karen: "I can do this, let's buy it."
We're in B&B Hardware. It's the, how to describe it? The Metropolitan Museum of Art of hardware stores here in Los Angeles. I know, I know the chattering classes like Koontz Hardware over on the West Side. But look, the parking lot at Koontz is jammed with shining Jag's, BMW's, Mercedes', and Lexus' -- up the kazoo. Not a pick-up in sight.
Hint: If extremely well dressed interior designers are shopping at a hardware store, then it's probably overpriced.
Karen sighs and says: "Robert, what are you thinking?" She smiles at the nice salesman, tells him we're not going to purchase Compound X, and we move on.
Here at B&B, the pick-up trucks are appropriately beat-up, and they have gun-racks. There are contractors and guys in overalls everywhere. Guys who actually work with their hands for a living. This is a good and safe place to shop.
Huge sigh of relief.
The aisles of B&B are narrow and the shelves go up to the high ceiling--which are at least two hundred feet high.
Okay, I exaggerate. But the shelves are really high. And casting my eyes upwards, I actually feel like a character in a Hitchcock movie. I'm getting dizzy. Vertigo.
The array of tools is staggering. With these things I can fix anything and everything that goes wrong in Casa Avrech. Heck, with these tools I can build another, bigger and better Casa Avrech.
And the salesmen, all of them these nice and well spoken young Hispanic men, have absolutely got my number. They look me right in the eye and convince me that with this tool or that migraine-inducing compound I can actually build/repair/solder/dovetail/ anything in the house and our lives with be immeasurably better.
I am lost.
Somehow, I've wandered away from Karen. I feel like I'm six-years old, separated from my parents in Macy's, and about to panic.
Mesmerized, pushing down the fear, I walk up and down the aisles looking for Karen, but also, wondering, what does this tool do? It actually looks like something from another planet, another galaxy. Is it an intergalactic ray-gun?
I can only hope.
Finally, just as I'm about to really embarrass myself and ask the salesman to page Karen:
ATTENTION SHOPPERS FRIGHTENED SCREENWRITER COWERING IN AISLE TEN IS NOT INSANE, WELL NOT ENTIRELY, SIMPLY SEPARATED FROM THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE. KAREN, PLEASE RESCUE YOUR SEMI-DEMENTED HUSBAND BEFORE HE FRIGHTENS OFF THE NICE CHILDREN WHO ARE SHOPPING WITH THEIR PARENTS.
"Robert?"
"Ummmm?"
"Where did you go?"
Shrug of the shoulders.
Firmly, Karen takes me by the hand and steers me to aisle 12. Our mission is to purchase two halogen bulbs. Sounds simple? Not really. These bulbs come in about a dozen different intensities and a dizzying variety of code numbers on the boxes. I'm pretty sure that if I shtup the wrong bulb in the wrong socket I'll start an electrical fire and Casa Avrech will burn to the ground and I'll probably end up being responsible for starting a major urban conflagration.
Karen grabs one of the nice Hispanic salesmen and he picks out the right bulb.
"Are you sure this is the right one?" I ask, deeply worried.
"Oh, yeah."
"Absolutely sure?"
"Yeah, see here, the code number on the box, they da same."
"Yeah, but maybe they switched code numbers when we weren't looking."
The salesman looks at me like maybe I need to take some incredibly strong meds.
At the check-out counter, they have a huge display of tool belts. As Karen pays for our two light bulbs--and I'll post about yours truly screwing in said light bulbs another time for that is a sad story indeed--I gaze longingly at the beautiful tool belts. They come in every possible configuration.
"Karen, I'd like a tool belt. Will you buy me a tool belt?"
Karen looks at me, she's got that oh-so-patient-kindergarten-teacher look on her face.
"I like that leather one with the huge steel loopy thing."
"You're a screenwriter Robert, what possible use would you have for a tool belt?"
The big black lady at the cash register looks at us and stifles her laughter as she punches in the total.
I shrug. I don't know. The tool belt. It just looks so... useful.
Tomorrow: I, yes, sigh, screw in the lightbulbs.
***
Let us not forget to continue davening, praying for Pearl's father: Yaakov Arieh ben Chaya Malka.
Pearl has been in touch, and she greatly appreciates our thoughts and prayers.
I came across this wonderful quote from playwrite Christopher Marlowe on my friend Billy Cochrane's Vintage Knives site the other day and I realized how appropriate it is to our little community:
Above our life we love a steadfast friend.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:45 AM | Comments (75)
March 03, 2006
Learning Patience III
Who were these leaders of the Battle of Algiers, these men who were so willing, no anxious to spill boiling rivers of innocent blood. This is not an academic question, for as we shall see, the cast of characters is sickeningly familiar. We continue exploring Alistair Horne's, Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.
Mohamedi Said: Born in 1912, he had grown up with early memories of a French officer slapping his grandparents. Fanatically religious, he worked during the Second World War with the Pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Husaini, joining the Muslim S.S. legion formed by the Mufti. In 1943 he was parachuted into Tunisia as an Abwehr agent, was captured and sentenced to life in prison, but was paroled in 1952. Whether out of nostalgia for the good ol' days, or a whacky sense of fashion, he invariably appears in photos wearing a Wehrmacht steel helmet.
Ait Hamouda, AKA Amirouche: A skeletally tall montagnard with wide-set eyes and a thick moustache, he was also a deeply religious Muslim. Of remarkably quick and decisive intelligence, he assumed command of a small mobile unit, imposed iron discipline and made his men go on forced marches of seventy kilometers a day. Within six months he had over eight-hundred men under his command. Soon, he established a reign of terror in the Soummam region of Eastern Kabylia.
Ramdane Abane: Involved in a massacre that took place in 1945, he was jailed by the French. He studied Marx, Lenin and, surprise, Hitler's Mein Kampf. Released in 1955, he immediately made his mark as an outstanding political intellect. Something of an Algerian Robespierre, his sinister dictum was: "One corpse in a jacket is always worth more than twenty in uniform." From the spring of 1955 Ramdane Abane's philosophy was central to the Battle of Algiers, both in its external and internal operations.
Abane would tolerate no "deviationist bodies."
Which means, anybody who disagreed with his group, the FLN, died--horribly.
You would think that Abane and his group would turn their attention immediately to their prime enemy, the French.
But no, Abane realized that he had to impose iron discipline on the Algerian population. And after Phillipville, Abane and the other leaders realized, with great satisfaction, that terror worked.
Abane had no interest in bringing the masses to the movement through propaganda. Pressure and blackmail on the average poverty stricken fellah, peasant, worked much more effectively. The terror cadres "with the knife literally under his [the fellahs] throat, make him hand over 50,000 francs."
"They never sought to attach the rural populations to their cause by promising them a better life, a happier and freer future; no, it was through terror that they submitted them to their tyranny."
In 1956, a visitor was shocked at the silence he found in the typical Algerian villages, each one of them of which would be held by a local FLN thug who was responsible simply for collecting "taxes" and "food supplies."
It was also a customary initiation ritual for a new recruit to be made to kill a designated "traitor", French officer, or colonialist in the company of a "shadow" who would dispatch the recruit himself and make sure the murder took place. It was a form of terror apprenticeship.
Yes, even after Philippeville, it was fellow Muslims who bore the brunt of FLN terror. Over the first two and a half years of the Battle of Algiers 6,352 Algerians were murdered by the terrorists as opposed to 1,035 Europeans.
The FLN announced that cigarettes and liquor were unIslamic and would no longer be tolerated. It was also a way of boycotting French products.
The punishment for any Algerian caught with liquor was having their lips severed. It was called, The Algerian Grin.
The punishment for smoking was the severing of the nose.
In the Casbah the Chardor was now mandatory on all women. The repression of women had begun.
Interpolation:
I guarantee that in the Palestinian Territories you will see the exact same pattern play itself out. Hamas is no charitable organization. Do not fool yourself. It is a ruthless terrorist group that sends out homicide bombers. They will not set up sanitation services. They will not organize medical services. They will not fix pot holes. They will not build any power grids. They have no idea how to build an infrastructure, for this is an organization whose roots are solidly embedded in savage clan and tribal rivalries.
Hamas will "collect taxes," they will "eliminate traitors," repress women, and steal every penny that comes their way. Oh and kill Jews. Here, read their covenant, it tells you what their plan is. I don't know about you, but when someone tells me that they're going to slaughter me, I tend to believe them. Especially when they have such a bloody track record already.
End Interpolation:
If we look at Iraq, this all makes perfect sense through the lens of the Battle of Algiers. The daily homicide bombers against civilians is how the terrorists control the population. It's how they tell the Iraqis that they must not cooperate with the Americans.
The terrorists cannot offer a better life, this everyone knows. They cannot offer medical services, dental services, freedom of speech, nor education. They cannot offer a society where banks and stock markets function properly, where contracts are honored, a society where you are are safe to walk the streets, a society where women are not treated like cattle.
No, all the jihadists offer is mutilation and death. And they count on this to frighten the homefront, and ultimately intimidate civilization into complete submission.
Second Interpolation:
It is interesting to note that every single country that has thrown off its colonial shackles is now in far worse condition than it was when the colonials were in charge. Congo, Mozambique, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Angola, Togo, Chad...
Sheesh, I'm getting tired, I just can't type all the countries that are on my list. My fingers are going numb. Okay, this is terribly un PC. But every single country in Africa that is now "free" is an economic basket case. Even South Africa, the last hope of Africa, hanging on by its fingernails, is drowning in AIDS. Algeria has just emerged from a twenty year civil war where over a million people had their throats slit.
The lesson? These violent Thirld World Revolutions invariably bring even worse goverments and even more terrible repression to their people.
End Second Interpolation:
Terror works.
But it doesn't always have to.
Not anymore.
We have learned too much about its corrupt innards. We, in the 21st Century have seen too much evil to tolerate this malignancy any longer. From the death camps of Eastern Europe to the genocidal covenant of Hamas, we can no longer allow these savages to nudge history backwards.
But we must stare terror in the eye and fight back in every way possible. That means we must fight militarily, and we must fight back softly, offering the best of what we have and who we are. And in the end, we will will prevail for we are not the French trying to colonize a foreign shore, but a free people offering other people the choice of freedom, and that is something every man and woman deserves.
***
Pearl, a good and loyal friend to Seraphic Secret since the very beginning, has just informed us that her father is gravely ill. She asks that everyone please daven, pray for "Yaakov Arieh ben Chaya Malka."
In this community of fine and wonderful people. Pearl's goodness and generosity stands out. She made the long trip from Toronto to Los Angeles for the Ariel Avrech Memorial Lecture.
Pearl's pain is our pain. We wish her father a speedy recovery.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:07 AM | Comments (28)
March 02, 2006
Learning Patience Part II
One could easily argue that Al Queda and the worldwide jihad pansurgency has its roots in the Algerian War. Alistair Hornes' magnificent book Savage War of Peace, Algeria 1954-1962 is a must read for a thorough understanding of what's going on in Iraq and in the Muslim world today.
The Algerian insurgents were, at the beginning, a mix of westernized intellectuals and Muslim fundamentalists, but soon enough the Muslim jihadists took over. Simply put, they were more brutal, willing to commit the kind of atrocities that would put them in the vanguard.
It is vital to understand that what's going on in Iraq today is part of an old and reliable guerilla playbook. If you don't understand the military and political stages, then you are fated to be crushed beneath the wheels of the jihadists. There is nothing improvised about the daily homicide bombing. It is a carefully thought out tactic that is part of a grand strategy that stabs at the soft heart of the western middle class.
And the Battle of Algiers is where the Muslim jihadists first perfected it.
The strategy for modern terrorism was well defined by the Brazilian guerrilla leader, Carlos Marighela, before he was hunted down and killed:
"It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things."
Marighela's philosophy is simple: using terrorism will inevitably provoke the forces of law and order to strike back with overwhelming force and repression, thereby alienating the hithero uncommited native population. The idea is to polarise the situation into two extreme camps and make impossible any dialogue of compromise by eradicating the "soft center."
Wrote Marighela: "The government can only intensify its repression thus making the life of its citizens harder than ever... The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in having recourse to the actual physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the country will become a military situation..."
It was along this line of thought that the Algerians started their war against civilains--without mercy, without quarter.
The opening attack came in a small hot place called Philippeville.
Seraphic Warning: The following contains a detailed description of a massacre. It is horrible and nauseating and if you have a weak stomach, read no further.
Philippeville was a small mining center of about 130 Europeans and about 2,000 Muslims, who for years had coexisted amicably. Apparently, labor relations were extremely good with a rare degree of equality between Muslim and European.
It appears that the whole Muslim community was aware of what was about to happen on August 20, 1955. A number of Muslim families even left town.
But no one warned the Europeans.
Shortly before noon, four groups of fifteen to twenty Muslim men attacked the village, taking it completely by surprise. They were led by Muslim mineworkers who knew each house and their neighbors. Intimately.
Telegraph lines were cut, the emergency radio transmitter was found to be "out of order" and the village constable who was equipped with warning rockets had "disappeared."
The Muslim attackers went from house to house, mercilessly slaughtering all the European occupants: men, women, children, infants. All the time egged on by Muslim women with their eerie ululations. From the Mosque exhortations to slit the throats of women and nurses in the cause of jihad.
It was not until two o'clock in the afternoon that a French Para unit managed to reach the town. An appalling sight greeted them. In houses literally washed with blood, European mothers were discovered with their throats slit and their bellies slashed open by bill-hooks. Children had suffered the same fate, and infants in arms had had their brains dashed against the wall. A mother disembowelled, her five-day old baby slashed to death and replaced in her open womb.
Four entire families had been wiped out to the last member; only six who had barricaded themselves in a house in the center of the village and had held out with sporting rifles and revolvers had survived.
Men returning from the mines had been ambushed in their cars and hacked to pieces. Altogether thirty-seven Europeans had died, including ten children under fifteen, and another thirteen had been left for dead.
The reaction of the French army was immediate. Out in the streets they found:
"...bodies literally strewed the town. The Arab children, wild with enthusiasm--to them it was a great holiday--rushed about yelling among the grown-ups. They finished off the dying. In one alley we found two of them kicking in an old woman's head. We had to kill them on the spot: they were crazed..."
The reprisals were severe. The Algerians claim that as many as 12,000 were killed by the French. The French cliam, 1,273. We will never know the truth.
But the Philippville Massacre had its intended impact. The polarizing effect that Marighela spoke of immediately took place. The Battle of Algiers went on for eight long bloody years, and the brutality on both sides was unspeakable -- for there was a burning river of blood between the French and the Algerians after Philippville.
In Iraq right now, the terrorists are working from the exact same playbook. They are murdering innocent civilians indiscriminantely. The hope is that the Americans will clamp down with even greater ferocity and the population will turn against the liberators. For make no mistake about it, the average Iraqi is relieved that Saddam and his gang of torturers, rapists and killers are gone.
So far, the Americans are playing it smart. They are reacting calmly and professionally. The terrorists are getting desperate, thus the attack on the Golden Mosque. An attempt to spark a civil war.
But on the homefront, the mainstrem media have not a clue as to the grand strategy the terrorists are using. They see car bombs, body parts, chaos and assume that all is lost. They do not understand warfare, worse, they do not understand evil.
In fact they enable evil with their foolish dispatches.
But there are some of us who understand jihad, some of us who understand evil, comprehend that this is a hundred years war that will be fought on a hundred far shores. We must be patient and yes, steadfast. It takes time and blood to defeat evil, but it can and must be done or we will be thrown back to the seventh century and its barbarian masters.
*****
Pearl, a good and loyal friend to Seraphic Secret since the very beginning, has just informed us that her father is gravely ill. She asks that everyone please daven, pray for "Yaakov Arieh ben Chaya Malka."
In this community of fine and wonderful people. Pearl's goodness and generosity stands out. She made the long trip from Toronto to Los Angeles for the Ariel Avrech Memorial Lecture.
Pearl's pain is our pain. We wish her father a speedy recovery.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:04 AM | Comments (49)
March 01, 2006
Learning Patience Part I
Looking for historical parallels to the War in Iraq and to the worldwide jihad is an interesting intellectual exercise. The Nazis spring to mind. Like the jihadists they wanted to kill every Jew in the world, however the Nazis were not willing to commit suicide to do it. The Japanese were suicidal, but once we dropped the bomb on them, mass extinctinction no longer looked so attractive.
Frustrated, I grabbed a thick tome on my night table, Savage War of Peace, Algeria, 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne and oh my gosh, what a revelation.
It is the definitive account of probably the dirtiest colonial war of the 20th century. We tend to think of the French as a bunch of pussies, but oh boy were they brutal. Once the Algerians revolted, the French followed a scorched earth policy.
"...the [French] army, incorporating Sengalese units legendary for their ferocity, subjected suspected Muslim villages to systematic ratissage--literally a 'raking over', a time-honored word for pacifying operations. This involved a number of summary executions. Of the less accessible mechtas, or Muslim villages, more than forty were bombed by Douglas dive-bombers..."
And this was just the opening salvo of the battle. It got worse. Much worse. The level of ferocity--on both sides--almost unimaginable.
As I have pointed out many times, the Palestinians are a lucky people in that their enemies are Jews. Any other enemy, especially Arab enemies, would have wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago. And it still might happen. When the security wall is built, and Jordan faces the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, you can be sure the Palestinians will almost certainly try to destabalize the Hashemite Kingdom, and then buckle up for some real old fashioned blood-letting. You can bet that King Hussein will not use targeted assasination--uh-uh--it'll be mountains of Palestinian corpses choking the Jordan River.
But I digress.
The leaders of the Algerian revolt kept telling one another and their cadres to have patience. Democracies, they told their followers, cannot stand long wars; democracies have a built-in weakness. Elections. And wars are bad for elections. Democracies demand immediate results.
"We can hang on forever," Ahmed Ben Bella explained to his men, "we can fight and fight, whereas democracies like France have to go to their citizens and explain why their men are dying. And sooner or later, they will grow sick of it. Democracies are inherently weak for they have no patience."
This theme rises again and again in this amazing book, and though the French fought in Algiers for eight long and bloody years, Ben Bella was right. In fact, the Battle of Algiers almost brought revolution to the streets of France, and a mutiny in the French army.
Now, let's be clear, the War in Iraq is not a colonial war. The French had a million citizens in Algeria living as priviledged subjects. The War in Iraq is a war of liberation against fanatical jihadists who are part of a world-wide pansurgency. The War in Iraq was a war to overthrow one of the worst dictators this planet has ever seen. Personally, I could care less about WMD's.
But the point about democracie's lack of patience really hit home with me. Everywhere I go I hear people saying: "How long is this war going to take?" As if they are standing in line at McDonalds.
Perhaps we are too used to instant solutions in our lives.
And the Jihadists know it.
They count on it.
This is not The Battle of Algiers, and this is not Viet Nam. If we pull out of Iraq, well, no ally will trust us ever again, and the Jihadists will have won an enormous victory.
And that will be a disaster.
Truly, we need to learn patience.
Oh, yes, by all means, watch The Battle of Algiers, a fine and powerful film, perhaps the only film that uses cinema verite with absolute narrative authority. The scenes of torture make will make you jump in your seat.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:43 AM | Comments (68)