Rationalists vs. the Leftists

May 1, 2006, 10:05 pm
  


 

 

By Obadiah Shoher, Guest Columnist

Firstly, my thanks to Andrew Jaffee for offering the guest column. It is not easy for reasonable people to find a tribune in these days of leftist dominance when even the word “liberal” is usurped and twisted. The old liberals were aware of their limitations, and therefore tolerant. The new “liberals,” more properly – leftists, drove the tolerance over the edge and turned it into its opposite, accommodation of evil. In order to accommodate everything, the leftists have to shut those old-fashioned people who still call an evil – evil. Liberal tolerance, applied to enemies, necessitates repressing friends. Liberalism is great when applied to one’s neighbors. Applied to the people with strikingly different, even hostile values, liberalism undermines safety.

Leftists, of course, sense that their policies of accommodation are counterproductive. It is a normal human urge to destroy enemies, not to caress them. Leftist weakness not only diminishes our resolve to oppose those who hate us. It also provokes the enemies who face the dream target, a weak giant, fighting whom is both honorable and not especially dangerous.

Unwilling to counter the enemies, leftists counter the friends, and turn liberalism into totalitarianism. Yahoo and Google banned our website www.samsonblinded.org from their advertising programs because of unacceptable content, and Amazon deleted all reviews of my recent book, Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict. There were many more incidents: Zanox refused advertising, GoDaddy cancelled hosting, and numerous sites and blogs rejected our ads.

In the cyberspace which tolerates Neo-Nazis and Islamic terrorists, North Korean and Iranian propaganda, calls for jihad and destruction of Israel, what caused such a reaction? Quite simply – truth. The lies are acceptable, even if ideologically charged, but the truth is not. Leftists thrive on ideological lies, but cannot stand the reality – and suppress it.

I am yet to hear a serious rebuttal of the Samson Blinded. Most reviewers resort to labels: of hatred though I pursue rationalism and respect terrorists as courageous fighters, of war-mongering when I show that a war cannot be won with police means, and of Nazism when I say that Islamic civilization is inherently different from the Judaic or Western.

The Samson Blinded is entirely about objective options, even objectivism. I often argue both sides, like advantages of holding the Palestinian territories for Israel, and of establishing the Palestinian state. The choice should be based on rational calculations, not on ideological illusions.

Some rational possibilities seem bizarre, but must be nonetheless considered. Israel is militarily capable of annexing Saudi oilfields. Saudis use oil proceeds to finance anti-Western Wahhabism and terrorism. Why not expropriate the oil?

Egypt is extremely unstable. Government is merely a tiny shell on boiling society. Egypt changed many rulers and policies in only decades. There is no doubt that Muslim Brotherhood will come to power – if not now, then sometime in this century. Should we wait for the nuclear arsenal to fall into the hands of Islamic radicals, or should we preempt? The answer must not be related to ideological preconceptions of sovereignty and international treaties.

Jordanian monarchy will not survive. No monarchy does. Democratic elections will bring Palestinian majority to power. Do we want two Palestinian states? If not, should we help Jordanian Palestinians to rid themselves of the oppressive monarchy?

Israel, is it a Jewish state or ethnic-blind democracy? Jews, a nation created to follow the Torah – should they live in a secular state? Israelis will never reach an agreement on these fundamental issues. Religious Jews are most unhappy with what they perceive as anti-Judaic policies of Israeli government, and secular Jews hate fighting for what they perceive as religious issues. Should we create a Jewish mini-state, Judea, to accommodate the religious Jews?

There is a single example in the modern history of fighting an insurrection efficiently, and that notoriously by Nazis. All other states succumbed to large-scale insurrections: Algeria, Vietnam, and Iraq, to name a few. Israel cannot oppose the suicide bombers by mild means. To do so is waste of lives and resources. Should we give in to the demands or employ draconian measures?

The answers to these and other questions are pretty obvious – but fairly uncomfortable and thoroughly illiberal. As the law of cybernetics has it, systems suppress perturbation sources, and leftists-dominated media prefer comfortable delusions – at the irrelevant to them cost of Israeli and American lives and money.

The Samson Blinded is self-published to keep it free on the Internet, and more than 170,000 people from 78 countries read it. Comments in our blog are always welcome.

I use a pen name for security reasons – many people threaten me more or less credibly, and because Israeli laws ban the people with the views I express in the book from the Knesset. Using a pen name does not improve credibility, but perhaps I have no choice and ask the reader to judge the book on its own merits.




Related: Israel, Arab/Muslim World, Palestinians, Political Correctness, Peace Process, Media/Blogsphere


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