Nidal Malik Hasan And Baruch Goldstein...Plus Definitive Post-Script

Klein's piece was here http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/11/07/bigoted-religious-extremists/. In it, he said he didn't remember Peretz giving serious thought to the meaning of the Goldstein murders in connection with Judaism.

"And, remembering the restraint of Elizabeth I, I'm not about to inquire into their souls." To hell with that, Elizabeth sought to force people to mouth words that they were not in religious agreement with. It was her lunacy of continuing a Church of England, which prevented religious liberty. I understand your intent, but it sure as hell wasn't her intent.

I certainly agree there is a large streak of lunacy in Islam nowadays. I have no idea what to do about it. And neither does Steyn, so I have no idea why you call his analysis sharp. With sharp analysis comes solutions. His solution, the military should have caught on earlier, is a D'uh, no shit kind of answer. "I will tell you one thing that is NOT the answer America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas." Neither does he. The simple fact is that the only solutions to this lunatic fringe in Islam has to come from within.

The only way to hasten that day is to truly move, in a World War way, away from fossil fuels. When their economies collapse then they might, just might, get their heads out of their asses. As is what happened in Asia and India. And if they don't, then they will simply rot in the desert, ignored by an every increasingly prosperous East and West.

by the way, to be clear, moving away from fossil fuels is in our best interests, if it brings about Muslims modernizing, then that is a bonus, but it is they who have to do it. They have to find a way. Our fossil fuel economy simply enables the oil sheiks in their delusions.

Varadarajan's piece generally advocates the profiling of Muslims, and implies that the difference between an "integrated" and a non-integrated American Muslim is that the latter is prone to vindicating his religion by engaging in violence against fellow Americans. Steyn's piece denies, or is at least skeptical of, any distinction between jihadism and Islam at large, concluding that Hasan's "Islamic impulses" trumped his expensive Western education. These are views that Marty embraces?

What about the nutter who killed the abortion doctor? Should the Christian Community come together for a collective soul-searching? I don't recall any of their machers stepping up to the plate.

Is there anything at all you won't exploit in order demonstrate that Jews and Zionists are repentent civilized souls while Muslims and their ilk are unrepentent savages? One of your folks commits a terrorist act and immediately the collective souls of the Jewish race rush to disavow it, to embrace their....collective guilt?

But why? If Goldstein's act was truly, "lunacy in action, derangement", an act of an "unhinged mind" how can there be a moral element at all? His madness is only another manifestation of God, isn't it?

No, the whole point of this exercise in flagrant rationalization is, of course, to clearly distinguish Hasan from Goldstein, Us from Them.

Ah, but if one should dare to suggest a immoral collaboration between the terrorist act committed against soldiers in Ft. Hood and the terrorist act committmed against children in Gaza where do collective souls and collective guilt fit in there?

Imagine Muslims in America [or Amercians of Arab descent] reacting to your gift of "solidarity" now after reading The Spine over the past couple of years. I think we could excuse them if they told you to stick your gift up your....

Well, pick an orifice.

george

Goldstein's act was more akin to a event like Hasan going into a synagogue and murdering Jews at prayer, which he didn't do. One difficulty with this analogy is that Hasan was a soldier and went onto a military base, killing his own -- except that he didn't see them as his own any more. If Goldstein had gone into an IDF facility and killed non-Jewish servicemen and -women, that would also be akin.

Otherwise the analogy is somewhat flawed.

"Otherwise the analogy is somewhat flawed."

gw:

Suggesting this to a True Believer of the species known as Man is like suggesting to a pride of lions that killing baby antelopes is flawed.

Their moral agenda is on automatic pilot. It's instinctive.

Besides, being flawed might be construed as being....wrong?

george

"...the analogy is somewhat flawed."

Marty cited this example not because it is an analogy on all its points. The similarity between these two examples stems from the fact that they were both atrocities committed by fanatic madmen upon unsuspecting, unprepared groups of people that did not spare a moment to think that their safety might be at risk at that moment and at that locale.

Baruch Goldstein, as was Ygal Amir, was a wake up call, to all Israelis whatever their political affiliations might be that inciting speech must be subjected to some restraint, some circumscribing horizon. That people who incite and inflame others must be confronted and exposed.

MOLLYSIMON "What about the nutter who killed the abortion doctor? Should the Christian Community come together for a collective soul-searching? "

I remember reading a number of articles and editorials by Christians saying just that. Likewise the Jewish religious community here and in Israel was on the whole aghast at Baruch Goldstein’s murders. (I agree btw with Ironies point about the analogy being flawed.)

The problem isn't the isolated killer, it's the presence of people who will explain (excuse) from my point of view such behavior. This goes back to Sartre who wrote in his introduction to Franz Fanons' book that natives have a perfect right to kill their European oppressors.

Thank god for the new format where I can only see part of George True Believer Walton's post. He is the only true believer (in Eric Hoffer's sense) here.

Noga makes a fair point, in response to my argument with Marty's analogy. What is particularly disturbing in this case is that Hasan went on his ramage in a medical facility, exactly the place were people expect to be treated with care. Indeed, a medical facility is where enemy soldiers or even (e.g. in Iraq) irregular insurgents taken prisoner could expect to be treated with care, but Hasan picked that place for his murder spree. I'd argue against the point that it's a military target just because it's on Ft Hood, as most societies exempt the medical units from attack, even on the battlefield.

Hasan didn't, for example, pick some location that had a lot of officers around, as a protest against the chain of command. He didn't, as far as we know, pick any office that had a role in denying his petition to be allowed to resign his commission (if indeed he submitted one). He didn't pick any target that had a specific political meaning beyond the fact that it was on Ft Hood and thousands of service people are there on their way to and from Iraq and Afghanistan.

To be honest, the more I think about it, the more this seems akin to the Virginia Tech massacre and other similar events than, say, the attack on the U.S. Holocaust Museum. It seems to go against the grain here to say that, but . . . well, that's where I am at the moment. That the motive was infused with religious obsession and private paranoia, yes. That it deserves the name "terrorist attack," I don't know. On the other hand, maybe there is some directed lunacy here -- a new kind of religious terrorism that prides itself on randomness?

The rational lunatic driven randonly to commit premeditated crimes against one part of humanity but not others.

I guess we'll have to wait for Nancy Grace or Judge Judy to sum it all up pop culturally.

Perhaps Marty [and the rest of us] should start forwarding his [our] affidavits to them now.

gw

Here is the latest:

"Hasan Communicated With Radical Imam, Official Says" By Justin Blum and Jeff Bliss

"Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Counterterrorism officials detected communications between a radical Muslim religious leader in Yemen and Major Nidal Malik Hasan before the Nov. 5 shootings at a Texas Army base that left 13 dead, a U.S. official said.

Hasan is the suspect in the attack, in which 30 people were wounded.

The U.S. official said today Hasan’s communications were with Anwar al Awlaki, who news reports said was the imam at a Falls Church, Virginia, mosque when Hasan and his relatives worshipped there. U.S. authorities, who intercepted the communications before the attack at Fort Hood, determined the messages didn’t pose a threat and no formal investigation was opened, said the official, who requested anonymity."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aIND7aVv1xm4&pos=9#

The new format has forced the true believer and hater George Walton d/a/j to scribble short weird messages. That's something to be thankful for, anyway.

IR,

Interesting point. Actually, I think it's very much like the shooting at the USHM. Both appear (as of now) to involve individual attackers with no apparent operational links to larger organized conspiracies who killed based on deeply held ideological antipathies. Whether it's an act of terrorism depends solely on Hassan's motivation. If it was intended to influence or drive political behavior, then it can legitimately be labeled terrorist even if it was an individual act. But, I think it more likely it was an a purely individual act of religiously and politically induced rage that was intended to "do good work for God" as Hassan was quoted as saying the morning before the shooting.

The VT killings, this week's killings in Orlando, Colombine, San Ysidro, various other school shootings, postal workers, tech workers, etc, etc, etc are standard alienated-American killings. It's amazing how much alienation our deracinated, flexible-labor, tradition-stripped society generates. That dynamic might conceivably play a secondary role in Hassan's crime, but strictly secondary.

But what I find more interesting is the historical backdrop to this attack and the emergence of Islamist violence over the the last several decades. I mean, if this sort of crime is truly an inherent aspect of Islam that Muslims--the Umma, I suppose--need to overcome, then why weren't we targeted earlier in the last century? Why weren't terrorists sniping at us in Algeria in 1943 or Iran in 1944? One can dismiss the search for larger causes as rationalizing an Islamist crime, but modern Islamist terrorism emerged during a distinct period of time--the last 50 or so years--and it was preceded/accompanied by secular terrorism clearly learned from the West. That suggests specific causes external to Islamic doctrine and dogma.

"The new format has forced the true believer and hater George Walton d/a/j to scribble short weird messages."

Yeah, maybe. I like to think that it was my technique of playing back to him his own position that words mean nothing except one's unmoored subjective delusory fantasy.

Except maybe that's my unmoored fantasy.

"Yeah, maybe. I like to think that it was my technique of playing back to him his own position that words mean nothing except one's unmoored subjective delusory fantasy."

Or maybe it was my posts showing what an ignorant ass George. Or all the posters who didn't answer any of his pretentious posts:

Success has a hundred progenitors, failure is an orphan.

"That suggests specific causes external to Islamic doctrine and dogma."

That's a very interesting remark, Xenophon, and I've also been curious about why the late 1960s was the time when a kind of new attitude emerges.

I think Israelis and people close to Israel might argue that it's only our limited perception that it began with the PLO in the seventies -- they had to deal with it earlier. But, to counter that, France was a major and open supporter of Israel from the early 50s to 1968, and France wasn't subject to terror attacks from Arabs or Muslims in that era (other than in the direct context of France's own colonial war in Algeria, which wasn't easily cast as a "war against Islam," mainly because the FLN was a secular marxist force).

The humiliating failure of Pan-Arab nationalism seems to me to be at least part of the reason. Tribal/clan thinking and morbid social hierarchies of privilege seem to have been given a new lease of life by the fact that Egypt and other countries were just simply unable to construct fair and upwardly mobile educational and career systems that give people a stake in their nation's succeeding. At a deeper level, I sense a great fear of the West -- in order to do well in our terms they would have to change not only their political systems but their personality. The bitterness of, say, Egyptians against us seems to be a kind of projection of their bitterness against their own national oppressors (but we've supported exactly those oppressors). Asian Islam hasn't had the same problem, partly because their societies were and are more diverse and less ideologically fixated on clan-state hierarchies. What Arab countries needed was Chinese immigrant communities.

ire:

"one's unmoored subjective delusory fantasy."

gw:

As with James Randi [minus the million dollars, alas] the challenge remains:

Choose a moral/political value judgment and we'll discuss it so as to explore the manner in which the language we use reflects a denotative [objective] assessment or a connotative [subjunctive] assessment instead. How are the two distinguished epistemologically? And how is that distinction relevant in discussions of "the news"?

In other words, please: no more cluck, cluck, cluck and wiggle, wiggle wiggle of the intellectual coward.

Indeed, and that goes for any of you hell bent on, uh, humiliating me? ; o )

Or as J once inquired: "is there a mechanical device somewhere in Mr. Peretz's office where minds like this are stamped out for The Spine?"

Yes, much too harsh. Cluck, cluck, cluck and wiggle, wiggle, wiggle works just fine for me. He spends most of his time in blogs devoted to philosophy, astronomy and the science of engineering. He's not used to the lack of intellectual rigor in, well, places like this?

george walton

d/a/j ; o )

Via ironyroad
"That suggests specific causes external to Islamic doctrine and dogma."

I wasn’t going to answer Xenophon’s limited and self serving history. The history of Islam ids over a thousand years old and for most of that time it’s been at war with non Muslims.

It was only in the modern period that Europe was able to start feeling secure in relation to Islam.
This happened because overwhelming force was used to attain ascendancy over it. If the fact that since decolonization Islam has again started to act aggressively against non Muslims that in itself would justify those who believe that only force can contain that religion’s desire to convert the world.

I am not sure this was what Xenophon was aiming to say.

Loony George is baaaaaaack!

This is an interesting thread, and brings up an issue that has fascinated me for some time. Marty's urging of American Muslims to "not avert my eyes from the deeds done in their names" is part of a broad-based criticism of the American Muslim community for their refusal or reluctance to condemn violence by Muslims, here or abroad, that is driven by Anti-American or Anti-Western animus. The widespread reluctance to condemn is deeply, deeply troubling. One intriguing explanation is that the American Muslim community is a fairly new one (dating to the mid-1960s in any appreciable numbers), and they do not have the level of comfort and cohesion in American society to swiftly and comprehensively decry anti-American violence perpetrated in their name. If one wishes to compare them to American Jews in this regard, it is not fair to use a modern yardstick (e.g., whether American Muslims are as quick to condemn Nidal Hasan as American Jews were quick to condemn Baruch Goldstein or Yigal Amir), since we are talking about communities with very different levels of acceptance in American society. In this view, a better (though hardly an exact) comparison would be to the American Jewish community in the early decades of the 20th century and its response to revolutionary violence or civil disturbances perpetrated in the US by immigrant Eastern European Jews. For example, how quick were American Jewish leaders to condemn Alexander Berkman for his attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick? How quick were they to censure Jewish socialists who protested America's entry into World War I and urged resistance to the draft? How quick were they to condemn American Jewish radicals who embraced Soviet Russia in the wake of the October Revolution? I would be interested to see some quotes or articles, since historical information on this is hard to come by with Google searches alone.

"The history of Islam ids over a thousand years old and for most of that time it’s been at war with non Muslims."

Jackson, that's like saying that, because it tends to be raining somewhere in the world at any given moment, most of the world is rainy. "Islam" has not been a cohesive polity beyond the first few decades of Muhammad and the earliest Rashidun Caliphs -- the fracture into Shia and Sunni sects, as well as other sects, came very early on, and any definitive domination by one unified sect or faction over another ended with the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate by the middle of the 8th century. Since that time, some of these sects or factions happened to be at war with their non-Islamic neighbors (or with rival Islamic sects or factions), but many other sects or factions had peaceful, if not friendly, relations with their non-Islamic neighbors. Modern Islamist violence has many sources, many of which are peculiar to a particular region or relations with particular non-Muslim peoples, but the idea of 1,400 years of unified Islamic violence against non-Muslims is a myth.

To pick up on Wildboy, the Ottoman empire was Islamic in nature, but that did not prevent them from joining Germany and the Austro-Hungarians in WW1. It was only a short interval from the dissolution of the empire that the European powers had much influence over the Middle East. It was an empire that lasted from 1299 to November 1, 1922. Suffice it to say, I think it acted like a traditional empire, its expansionism not unlike that of the British. There were competing alliances throughout the period. For example in the 1500's via wiki "France and the Ottoman Empire, united by mutual opposition to Habsburg rule in both Southern Europe and Central Europe, became strong allies during this period. The alliance was economic and military, as the sultans granted France the right of trade within the Empire without levy of taxation. In fact, the Ottoman Empire was by this time a significant and accepted part of the European political sphere, and entered into a military alliance with France, the Kingdom of England and the Dutch Republic against Habsburg Spain, Italy and Habsburg Austria."

Long story short, the Turks are the one Muslim nation that has made a transition to modernity, but that is because for centuries they were modern. It was the Arab subject nations that possess this lunacy that now exists. Turkish Muslims do not possess this feeling of humiliating inferiority. This is why Turkey has been such a stable NATO member. They feel they are in every way equal to the West, so America having bases on their soil is not an affront.

Nobody anywhere has hit on the fact that Hasan acquired semi-automatics in the vicinity of Ft. Hood, surely he had to indicate who his employer was. Hasan did not get these weapons in Maryland or Virginia. How could anybody in military be allowed to purchase firearms then bring them into barracks? Don't Generals want to know the firearm inventory on campus? There have been obviously well documented cases of Iraq/Afghanistan/Vietnam/Gulf1 veterans becoming violent in civilian life (DC sniper, Tim McVey). Traditionally civilized societies decommission soldiers of their firearms. America's biggest terrorrist suppoerting organization? The NRA, no doubt.

wildboy: "How quick were they to condemn American Jewish radicals who embraced Soviet Russia in the wake of the October Revolution?"

Pretty quick. In any case, this the kind of view one will find on the stormfront website, i.e. that Jews were complicit in the Bolshevik revolution, never mind that Jews in Russia suffered porgroms from both the whites and the reds and that Trotsky didn't lift as finger to help.

"I would be interested to see some quotes or articles, since historical information on this is hard to come by with Google searches alone."

Poor wild boy, he may actually have to read a book.

"this the kind of view one will find on the stormfront website"

No only on stormfront:

http://cifwatch.com/2009/11/09/test-your-knowledge-of-cif-threads-commen...

Jackson and Noga, you seem to spend more time on Stormfront than I do, as you are so assiduous about ferreting out Jewish self-hatred on the Web that you feel the need to go directly to the sources. As for my questions about American Jewish condemnation of the Bolsheviks, I know as well as you that most American Jews had little sympathy for the Soviet regime, certainly after news got out of the massacres perpetrated in Ukraine and Galicia by Whites, Reds and others (pogroms in which many of my ancestors died or were dispossessed of all their property, in case you were curious). However, the sad fact (which you would also know if you have much knowledge of the early 20th century, as you seem to boast) is that a number of senior Bolsheviks (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Kun) were of Jewish or part-Jewish origin and that much "respectable" opinion in the West at the time perceived the Bolshevik revolution as a Jewish plot or at least as an endeavor backed by Jews in their own countries. This sort of climate resulted in the widespread distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion through networks of White Russian emigres to Western political, military and economic elites, including people like Henry Ford, Erich Ludendorff and others. So there was plenty of guilt by association being directed at Jews in the West, just like today's American Muslims endure guilt by association with the Bin Ladens and Malik Hasans of the world, regardless of where their actual sympathies may lie. So here's my question -- if American Jewish leaders were strongly and publicly condemning the Bolsheviks and any Bolshevik-sympathizing American Jews in 1920 (and rebutting the lie about guilt by association in the process), it would be more than fair to bring this up as an example for the American Muslim community to publicly condemn Malik Hassan and his ilk. After all, they did so forcefully in the 1950s with the Rosenberg case and Hollywood Blacklists, among other things. If, on the other hand, the leaders of American Jewry in the 1910s and 1920s were reticent to distance themselves from those Jews who seemed to rejoice at the imminent downfall of Western capitalism (for whatever reason), there may be some room to understand why American Muslims are silent now -- and how to assist the majority of American Muslims who DON'T hate America to join in the condemnation.

As for reading books, perhaps you should read something about the history of Islam (besides books that are advertised on World Net Daily).

"How quick were they to condemn American Jewish radicals who embraced Soviet Russia in the wake of the October Revolution?"

I think this is a non-question, wildboy. Millions of people, Jewish and otherwise, across the world were inspired by the Russian Revolution, which seemed to promise a new dawn for humanity. One can certainly argue that embracing Stalin later on was a very different thing and required condemnation, but most people were relatively uninformed about the SU, and singling out Jews because some Bolsheviks were Jewish seems to me to be unacceptable. If Jews had committed armed attacks in the United States, fired up by their religious beliefs, that would be something else.

I'd also like to underline the fact that most Jews also became political revolutionaries because of their belief that a new socialist Russia (and world) would have no place for antisemitism, which they saw as the sickness of a radically unjust and morbidly undeveloped society.

Antisemitism is the socialism of fools, as August Bebel said.

Irony, that's a fair point about the Russian Revolution and one that bears refinement. The real parallel to Hasan's massacre would be anarchist acts such as Berkman's attempt on Frick's life. It should also be fair to point out that many other, non-Jewish immigrants were responsible for anarchist violence in the early part of the 20th century, like President McKinley's killer Leon Czolgosz or Sacco and Vanzetti (innocent or not). I don't recall to what extent their ethnic compatriots in America were pressured or prompted to condemn these men for their violence in order to prove their groups' American bona fides, but it would be instructive to read something to that effect.

Jacksondyer,

“I wasn’t going to answer Xenophon’s limited and self serving history.”

Well, how good of you to take time out of your schedule to do so.

First of all, my remarks were indeed limited in scope as the sentence “MODERN Islamist TERRORISM emerged during a distinct period of time--the last 50 or so years,” might have indicated to you. Certainly, Islam was a dynamic, aggressive force for its first millennium--622 to 1683 (the lifting of the second siege of Vienna) and I agree that Europe (I’m not getting into Muslim-Hindu issues here--just too much to discuss) was under siege--broadly speaking--for much of that time, as you suggest. But as Europe emerged from its period of weakness and the Islamic world declined into one, the tables were turned. After a transitional period from 1500 to 1700, it was now Europe--the West--that was the dynamic aggressor and the Islamic world an increasingly inwardly-turned, passive and decrepit ruin. It is incorrect to imply that the subsequent conquest of much of the Islamic world by Europe was necessary for the latter to “start feeling secure in relation to Islam.” The application of “overwhelming force” in the form of imperial conquest happened AFTER the region’s INTERNAL decline had rendered the Middle East prostrate and poverty-stricken under a shaky Ottoman Empire in its last century plus. (See the observations by Bonaparte’s army of Egypt in 1798.) It’s simply in the nature of human organizations, nations and other political groupings that when they become strong, they quickly become aggressive and acquisitive whether Muslim or Western.

It is also misleading to say that “since decolonization, Islam has started to act aggressively towards non-Muslims.” That implies that only colonization could somehow “keep them under control” which is absurd. In fact, anti-Western violence was the ONLY reason there ever WAS a decolonization. After all, why else would the French have left Algeria or BP have given up its delicious profits in Iran? Of course, this violence was initially primarily secular--nationalist and/or leftist--ideologies learned from the West with an increasing flavoring of Islamism that has now become the dominant strain. The interesting subject is the transition from leftist/nationalist opposition to Islamist. Is it because of ME political/cultural failure? Maybe, but clearly, in the post-colonial era, the West has adopted more subtle means of asserting its dominance--from Iran 1953 to the backfired democratization campaign of this decade. It is a paradox that while political Islam has largely failed to win significant popular support as a mechanism of governance over the last two decades (Algeria, Egypt) there is still significant support at the popular level in the ME for what is seen as its resistance to the West.

Finally, I would say that “that religion’s [Islam’s] desire to convert the world”, as you put it, is actively pursued by very few Muslims unlike the project to spread (impose) “democracy” on the world which really does seem enjoy consensus in the West.

"It is also misleading to say that “since decolonization, Islam has started to act aggressively towards non-Muslims.” That implies that only colonization could somehow “keep them under control” which is absurd. In fact, anti-Western violence was the ONLY reason there ever WAS a decolonization."

This is debatable at best.

It wasn't the anti-Western violence that led to decolonization it was Western exhaustion from two world wars and a prolonged "cold war."

Had there been no WW1 and WW2 I doubt that Algeria would be an independent country today. The same goes for many other former colonial countries including Ireland and Israel, not to mention India and especially Pakistan.

"....and singling out Jews because some Bolsheviks were Jewish seems to me to be unacceptable. "

This is wildboy's stock in trade.

He did it with Russian Jews and other Jewish groups.

Ireland is a bit of an oddity in this equation. It's absolutely true, I think, that WW1 speeded up the clock and opened an opportunity for armed rebellion, but an Austro-Hungarian type dual monarchy solution (the Irish Home Rule Act) was already on the books and would have become law in late 1914 if it hadn't been suspended because of the outbreak of war.

This was not actually so different from the quasi-dominion status that the Irish Free State got in 1922 that they were able to parlay into an independent republic in the following decade. The main point is that, like many countries, Ireland had both constitutional and armed branches of the nationalist movement.

Wildboy again: "So here's my question -- if American Jewish leaders were strongly and publicly condemning the Bolsheviks and any Bolshevik-sympathizing American Jews in 1920 (and rebutting the lie about guilt by association in the process), it would be more than fair to bring this up as an example for the American Muslim community to publicly condemn Malik Hassan and his ilk. After all, they did so forcefully in the 1950s with the Rosenberg case and Hollywood Blacklists, among other things."

This is an insane comparison, worthy of George Walton. You seem to sit around thinking up ways of condemning Jews for one reason or another.

“If, on the other hand, the leaders of American Jewry in the 1910s and 1920s were reticent to distance themselves from those Jews who seemed to rejoice at the imminent downfall of Western capitalism (for whatever reason),”

This isn’t even true. Many leaders condemned Communism and all who engaged in it. Moreover, there was no need for Jews t distance themselves from “Jewish Communist” like Rosa Luxemburg because these same communists didn’t regard themselves as Jews. Only antisemites thought of them as Jews.

“there may be some room to understand why American Muslims are silent now -- and how to assist the majority of American Muslims who DON'T hate America to join in the condemnation.”

Finally this is an insult to Muslims. They don’t need you to help them react to the Muslims (and we are talking about practicing Muslims) who kill innocent people.

Wildboy can’t post on any topic without insulting some group of Jews.

ironyroad
"Ireland is a bit of an oddity in this equation..."

I agree, I was hesitant in naming Ireland. The same may be true of one or another country or people. In the main though it was European exhaustion that led to decolonization.

Jackass,

There's nothing insane about the comparison. Marty's point in this article was that, since American Jews can publicly condemn violence by a fellow Jew like Baruch Goldstein, then American Muslims should similarly publicly condemn violence by a fellow Mulsim like Hasan. Since many of them are reluctant to do so, we are left with several assumptions -- that the majority of them sympathize with what Hasan did, or that most of them disapprove but are uncomfortable engaging in public condemnation. I think that Marty holds the second assumption (he's not in the Michelle Malkin camp), but it appears that he can't think of a legitimate reason for why Muslims are silent. My point was that it may be fairer to assess their silence against a historically analogous situation -- the actual or apparent leftist sympathies of certain Jewish and other European immigrants from 1890-1920 (some of which resulted in violence) and to what extent those immigrants' broader communities publicly rebuked them -- rather than to today's well-established, secure and politically engaged American Jewish community. The point about whether Jewish leftists in the 1910's considered themselves Jewish or not is not really relevant -- the call to condemn the acts of co-religionists or fellow ethnics is often a protective mechanism that signifies to the broader society that the group does in fact share their values and that fellow ethinc or religious criminals or radicals have no place in it. The American Jewish community in the 1950s was quick to condemn fellow travelers and Communist sympathizers acting on just such a protective impulse -- they would not allow anti-Semites to tar them by association. Many are making the same demands of American Muslims today. If you are certain that "many [Jewish] leaders condemned Communism and all who engaged in it" in the early part of this century, just give me some names. The example of those people would serve as a guide to American Muslims today.

As for insulting groups of Jews -- you should know, you do it all the time by calling anyone who disagrees with you a self-hating Jew or an anti-Semite. How pathetic.

wildboy
"Jackass There's nothing insane about the comparison. Marty's point in this article was that, since American Jews can publicly condemn violence by a fellow Jew like Baruch Goldstein, then American Muslims should similarly publicly condemn violence by a fellow Mulsim like Hasan."

marty's comparison, true or not, was valid. He compared the actions of one man to those of another man in a single period of time. Your comparison was invalid. You compared the actions of one man to the actions of many individuals over a long period of time.

"As for insulting groups of Jews -- you should know, you do it all the time by calling anyone who disagrees with you a self-hating Jew or an anti-Semite. How pathetic."

In your case, they both happen to be true. Too bad for you.

Jackson, since you relish the anonymity of posting and enjoy extrapolating personal details from other people's posts, I will do you the courtesy of assuming that you are a somewhat precocious 19-year old philosophy major with fearsome views on Jews, Muslims and Israel, the inability to debate anyone without insulting them and a discounted subscription to TNR. I'm not going to make any assumptions on whether you are Jewish or not, but if not you are may certainly consider yourself in the exalted company of Orde Wingate, John Hagee and other Hasidei Umot Haom. You can assume whatever the heck you want about me.

wildboy, your analogy needs to be jettisoned. It's unworkable on several levels. I'll try to go through them:

a) the Russian Revolution was a complex affair involving hundreds of thousands of people, not a murderous rampage by one man;
b) the Russian Revolution was a complex affair of which the Bolsheviks' taking power was one final component;
c) the removal of the absolutist Russian monarchy was legitimately a cause for celebration;
d) many American Jews disliked communism; many American Jews, however, were of left-wing sympathies then and later;
e) supporting or condemning (or being neutral on) the Russian Revolution was a political act, as opposed to a moral condemnation of an act, which is what is being asked of Muslims (rightly or wrongly);
f) the 1950s comparison is a little more grounded because by then the Soviet Union had become a global opponent of the U.S., but this was not true in 1917/1918 as the only "hostile" thing that the Bolsheviks did was withdraw Russia from the war (and there was a big antiwar camp here too, which approved of that).

"You can assume whatever the heck you want about me."

My only assumption is that you are an ignorant bigot (anyone who would place Wingate and John Hagee on the same list has gto to be an ignoramus) and in the exalted company of George Walton since like him you make awfully dumb jokes.

What irony said:

11/10/2009 - 5:08pm EDT | ironyroad

Irony, points well taken (especially point (e), about collective political acts versus acts of individual violence). As I conceded earlier, I think the Russian Revolution analogy is flawed, and the analogy for anarchist violence is more apt in my mind. It would still be interesting to hear about condemnation of the Bolsheviks and their American sympathizers by their ethnic fellows in the US in the period before World War II to better understand how immigrant groups assessed the impact of such things on their status as Americans, but that's more of a discussion for students of history rather than political partisans.

Just one thing to point out, which you already know -- there were two revolutions in Russia in 1917, the first of which overthrew the Czars but kept Russia in the war on the Allied side. This one was almost universally embraced by American Jews (except for a minority of German or Austrian Jews who sympathized with the Central Powers), and was also generally popular with pro-war Americans. The problems arose with the second, Bolshevik revolution, which took Russia out of the war and, in short order, helped plunge the country into civil war. That one was obviously more problematic for the US and its political leadership, which by that point was fully engaged on the side of the Allies. The Wilson Administration did view the Bolshevik government as hostile by 1918, after it signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and spent the next two years assisting White forces in the Russian Civil War, along with some limited direct intervention in North Russia and the Russian Far East. On the home front, the widespread fear that Bolshevik sympathizers would impede conscription and mobilization of factories for the war effort and, after 1918, that such sympathizers would seek to overthrow the US government prompted the Red Scare, the Palmer Raids and all the rest. Many US socialists and communists, Jewish and otherwise, were caught up in the Red Scare and detained or sent to jail; it was during this period that Samuel Gompers and other "mainstream" labor leaders made their most strenuous public efforts to distance themselves from socialism and communism. Therefore, the need to publicly repudiate pro-Communist radicals was an active factor in American politics at that time and only went dormant after the Harding Administration stopped the intervention in Soviet Russia and effectively withdrew the US from further dealings with the Russians.

Did you know that Orde Wingate was TE Lawrence's cousin? He is mentioned in a

And I suspect wild's inclusion of him and Hagee in the same bracket owes its rationale to the principle that anyone supporting the Jews for their own (religious, imperialistic) interests are contemptible. Perhaps wildboy can provide us with the answer to an important question: what constitutes a purely good reason to support the Jews?

I sense the faint impression of a Kafka fragment or maybe something I.B. Singer-ish here: "The Man Who Sought a Good Reason to Support the Jews"

It could be a tale of a man who walked for six days and each day he was given the opportunity to help Jews, but always wanted a purely good reason to do so. Therefore he never did support them. Then on the seventh day . . .

Wildass will never admit that he was wrong. He goes on nattering about the red scare as if it were relevant to this discussion it isn't.

Most Jews who were communists didn't think of themselves as Jews. They didn't give a shit about their people and there is no reason the Jewish community should have felt obligated to distance itself from these louts. These Jewish antisemites had already distanced themselves from the Jewish community. This is the inverse of the Muslim reality today where those that kill are acting in the name of Islam.

Wildass will never admit that this is the case.

"Perhaps wildboy can provide us with the answer to an important question: what constitutes a purely good reason to support the Jews?"

He won't not unless the person is an anti-Zionist like mackenzie who pretends that he is really a supporter of Jews.