Crusader War College

While I believe the loss of freedom in the health care "reform" bill makes it intolerable, I continue to work on my project that has dictated this web site's hiatus, which promises to radically change the game.

Mere dissent is not in itself virtuous.

Dissent is disagreement with someone else.

If the other is mistaken, then dissent may be right, or it may be wrong.

HOWEVER, if the other is right, then dissent is wrong.

Here is the kicker: A society that tolerates, nay welcomes, dissent, does so to do the right thing. It does so to discover the truth. However, such a society is also open to manipulation by liars posing as dissenters. To blindly accept any dissent as the truth is as bad as blindly denying any dissent as evil. We must "examine all things, hold fast to that which is true."

One of the core sins of Neo-marxist liberalism is sloth: they establish superficial rules and methods to designate "truth tellers" because they are too lazy to follow the more reliable, but much harder to apply, rules to determine truth. They would much rather declare the tree good than face the task of determining if the fruit is good and letting that determine the goodness or badness of the tree. Since their internal goal is to please themselves rather than discover and obey the truth, they resort to hypocrisy in the application of their own rules when the inevitable consequences work out to their displeasure.

A lot of people cling to the belief that God is inherently unfair and not good given the following threat from Exodus 20:

4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: 5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; 6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

It is, of course, ignored that the punishment of the fathers falls on the children to the third and fourth generation, while mercy is shown to thousands of generations that love him.

This threat is repeated in Exodus 34:7, with some clarification that is often ignored deliberately:

5 And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. 6 And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, 7 Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. (Ex. 34:5-7)

What is the purpose of these threats? The first thing to recognize is that these indeed are threats, but they are plainly directed to the descendants of the guilty. Secondly, it should be recognized that, in those days, it was customary for marriages to be very early and with the goal of having children as soon as possible. Thus, it was very much possible for the guilty one who worshipped idols to see their great grand children (the fourth generation).

I believe the way to look at these verses is to realize that when religious men and women knowingly commit evil, they will justify the sin or the attempt to manage the consequences of their sin by a seeming "selfless" appeal. "It's for the children!" is the cry being given today for government mandated health care, one world government, pacifism, abortion, environmentalism, the war on terrorism, and destruction of the economy in the name of controlling "man originated global warming". "Certainly what we are doing is not good right now," they say, "but it is okay because I am not doing it for myself, but for those who will come after me." It is said that the wealthy tend to look 100 years down the line while the poor don't look past the next paycheck. Thus, this threat is directed to those who claim to have a "long term vision" that mandates their "evil" actions today in the name of averting some future threat or gaining some future benefit.

Whether this is what they honestly believe or is merely a pretext is irrelevant: the intent is to disarm opponents that would keep them from performing those actions or who would punish them as part of a process to derail what they set into motion. In a sense, these people are employing virtual human shields. Like cowardly terrorists who flee to civilian areas knowing that Western forces will not chase them down if there is a good chance of civilian casualties resulting from it, these appeal to the threat to current children or children not yet born that would result from executing justice on them and undoing their acts.

What must be kept in mind when dealing with such people is that such behavior is calculated. That is, they have not only meticulously planned out what they were going to do, but engaged in a cost/benefit calculation that was used to come up with contingency plans to mitigate the costs: "IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN" is the implementation of a contingency plan born of a mitigation strategy. The argument against government intrusion into economic affairs is based on the fact that government aid and restrictions affect the cost/benefit analysis, and thus affects the actions of those making those calculations.

What is God doing in these passages? He is acting to counter-mitigate this argument! "If you truly CARED for future generations, know that what I am requiring will truly benefit thousands of future generations if you obey my commandments today. Thus, because those future generations are what you purport to value, I will not only threaten them for what you do, but I will make sure that that punishment falls on the generations that you do see."

That God takes into account the perverse calculations of the human heart is seen when this commandment is seemingly reversed in Ezekiel 18. In that chapter, the parents believe that these verses imply that the children totally bear the parents sins, while beliving that they are suffering the consequences of the sins of their parents. Rather than repent and count on the Lord's word that he would have mercy on thousands of generations that love and obey him, they decide that the best way to mitigate the pain they are suffering is to indulge the sins of pleasure, reasoning that the pain from THOSE sins will be shifted off of them to their children. It is even more perverse behavior if their fathers were righteous so the suffering they are enduring is due to the natural consequences of the sins of their neighbors splashing over onto them because they didn't want to "rock the boat" or "cause trouble" by holding their sinning neighbors to account: Rather than execute true justice on the ones causing corporate suffering, they start this inter-generational pissing contest by their sins. God "messes" things up by negating the inter-generational threat and declares he would judge people by what they do, rather than what their fathers did.

Those who complain about God's justice should note Ezekiel 18:25-29:

25 Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not equal. Hear now, O house of Israel; Is not my way equal? are not your ways unequal? 26 When a righteous man turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and dieth in them; for his iniquity that he hath done shall he die. 27 Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive. 28 Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die. 29 Yet saith the house of Israel, The way of the Lord is not equal. O house of Israel, are not my ways equal? are not your ways unequal?

We may laugh today at what we see as the obvious perversity of that generation who complained of God's ways "not being equal" when it was obvious that "their ways were unequal"! In the same way, future generations will look back at the fools of our day and laugh at them for their belief that God would be blamed for their use of human shields! Men's moralities may not change as often as the spring clothing styles, but change they do. God's morality never changes and is always beneficial, regardless of the time or the foolish beliefs of men.

Wow.

Like WOW.

THAT is who I REALLY am.

THAT is what I REALLY BELIEVE.

And THERE ARE OTHERS who believe as I do!

I once joked that I was a Pentecostal Free-will Baptist, but I had no idea that what I thought was "off-the-wall" was actually held by others.

Like WOW.

Thanks be to God!!!!

[The Jansenists were seen as calvinists because they held to total depravity. So does Reformed Arminianism.]

An extremely good article by J. R. Nyquist on the unintended consequences of men deciding they can create Utopia on earth, and who thus feel themselves free from any restrictions because the utter blessedness of the ends must surely justify the means.

However, this set of quotes Mr. Nyquist cites from David Ignatius' "Agents of Innocence", says exactly what I have been trying to articulate:

There is a passage from a novel by David Ignatius about Middle East espionage, titled Agents of Innocence. It expresses the damning verdict of an Arab who had been working for the Americans. At first he thought the Americans had the toughness to persevere. He thought they were “cynical enough” to liberate the Arab world (and t hereby do something good).

The disillusioned Arab wrote to his handlers: “I was wrong. Americans are not hard men. Even the CIA has a soft heart. You want so much to achieve good and make the world better, but you do not have the stomach for it. And you do not know your limitations. You are innocence itself. You are the agents of innocence. That is why you make so much mischief.”

The great teaching of David Ignatius may be condensed, as follows: Men who are not sufficiently cynical, who are soft-hearted, who do not have the stomach for what they propose, cannot do anything good. If you want to level nations and kill millions of men, adopt a Utopian foreign policy. Ignatius’s Arab tells his American handlers, “You convince people to put aside their old customs and allegiances and to break the bonds that hold the country together. With your money and your schools and your cigarettes and music, you convince us that we can be like you. But we can’t. And when the real trouble begins, you are gone. And you leave your friends, the ones who trusted you, to die.”

There is, indeed, a millenarian spirit at work. This spirit now contaminates American domestic policy as well as military policy. “You urge us to open up the windows of heaven,” wrote Ignatius’s Arab. “But you do not realize that the downpour will come rushing through and drown us all.”

Exactly. In an imperfect and evil world, doing real good takes real effort. Sometimes, to do real good means doing what a fake good would call evil.

Mary O'Grady summarizes the facts of the Honduran "coup":

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

She concludes her article:

The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators. This crisis clearly delineates the problem. In failing to come to the aid of checks and balances, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Insulza expose their true colors.(P: emphasis added)

Ms. O'Grady pulls her punches, for President Obama also vigorously condemned the Honduran army's action to enforce the Honduran Constitution in obedience to the Honduran Congress and the Honduran Attorney General. This is the same President Obama who dithered for days before limply objecting to the violence perpetrated against Iranians protesting against what they perceived to be a rigged vote. He too shows his true colors. Both he and Hillary Clinton are rushing to support a wanna-be thug and condemn the enforcement of a nation's constitution because they don't want anyone to have an example of how to respond when they do the same.

I thank the Lord for this incredible confluence of events: in every abusive relationship, either existing or heading in that direction, the abuser makes a fatal and noticeable misstep that alerts his victims to his intentions and true nature. However, it is up to the victims to ignore the spin, hype, agendas, preconceptions, and preassumptions that they themselves believe that prevent them from recognizing the implications of the intentions revealed by the misstep, take the information presented to them at face value, and act upon it.

Much of what passes for "commentary" in the MSM are rhetorical and sophilistic attempts to get people to doubt the actionability of their own experience. Canadians claim that they are happy with their health care system, but shout down the complaints of those who actually HAVE to get health care. Those so treated are not being convinced that what actually happened to them did not really happen (although there may be attempts to deny that it happened to others) as much as they are being told that they have no right to act in a logical manner in response to that experience. In a sense, people's ability to respond to abuses are conditioned by their belief that they have the right to respond. Where that "right" comes from varies from culture to culture, but a unique characteristic of tyrants is that the abuser is also the source of the "right" to respond to that abuse.

What does this have to do with Obama's reaction to the situation in the Honduras? The supposed 'right' of Zelaya to be restored to the Presidency, regardless of his offenses against the Honduran Constitution, ignores the fact that Zelaya's claim to be President is based on his meeting the requirements laid out by the selfsame Honduran Constitution that he subsequently flouted. In this sort of worldview, constitutions are supported when they grant power but are not when they revoke that grant.

Of course, constitutions do nothing whatsoever of themselves and by themselves, for they are only collections of words on paper that have neither limbs to act nor mouths to speak. Rather, the power of a constitution lies in the people who believe that "their" constitution grants them the right and permission to respond when the actions of individuals flouts the rights, duties, and requirements of that constitution.

Given this, there are two core threats to any Constitution. The first threat is for its requirements or prohibitions to be ignored. This is especially true of the Constitution of the United States whose design principle was to facilitate the prohibition of the illegal exercise of government power. It was the prohibitions of the Honduran Constitution that Zelaya flouted, and whose punishment is being protested by his like-minded presidential compatriots who find the restrictions imposed by their Constitions on their own actions equally distasteful, and who desire, like Zelaya, to eventually throw those restrictions off. Obama, by his support of Zelaya, shows his true colors in his attitude toward prohibitive constitutions.

Another method for ignoring and flouting a constitution is to hide behind a deliberately mis-designed implementation of due process: the United States Constitution provides for the impeachment and removal of leaders, but the imposition of superfluous bureaucratic restrictions in the name of due process allows representatives and senators to cover for each other so that a vote is never taken. It may even be window-dressing if the majority, motivated by politics, ignores the facts in an actual trial and votes to acquit the truly guilty. The appeals to "due process" and the reminder of the downsides of "vigilanteism" and "mob rule" are used to rob the true victims of the belief that they have a right to respond. In the most egrerious cases, the post-modern view of "there is no truth" is used to erase the distinction of perpetrator and victim, again robbing the true victims of the ability to exercise the right to respond.

The other threat to a Constitution involves revising it to the extent that it permits behaviors that the constitution was originally designed to prohibit. This can be done using an otherwise legal amendment process, such as what Chavez has done with the Venezuelan Constitution (and what Zelaya was caught laying the foundations for). It can also be done by the Judicial interpretative process that permits what was originally prohibited. For instance, the use of Eminent Domain to transfer private property from one person to another is explicitly prohibited, but this prohibition was flouted with the judicial interpretation (Kelo vs. City of New London) that the transfer is legal if there is an incidental public benefit. In the face of such abuses, the victims and potential victims are, again, told to "obey the rule of law" and "due process" to eviscerate their willingness to exercise their right to respond.

The question before us is not how we restore the full rule of Constitutional law, but how we recover our willingness to respond to threats to constitutional rule or violations of the Constitution. We are, to an extent, bound and limited as private citizens because the Constitution explicitly reserves the right to correct abuses and abusers to the authorities it itself authorizes. Ironically, to stop an abusive situation it may be required that some abuse must be dished out: it may be as necessary to violate the constitution in order to save it as an abused wife needs to abuse her abuser. This is already recognized when the normal rule of law breaks down during natural disasters and martial law is declared. It is recognized that Martial law is an undesirable state of affairs if it is permanent, but it is allowed if it is a temporary measure that is removed when the more preferred legal environment is restored, and is imposed with the goal of restoring the preferred legal environment. Cancer damages the body and will kill the afflicted, but surgery itself can also kill the patient. It does not do so because it is skillfully applied and the damage is calculated to restore the patient to health: any surgeon who says "the operation was a success but the patient died" has a criterion of success calculated to save his ego, not his patients.

This is a very delicate subject: nobody except the mob believes in or wants mob rule. A deep respect for living "legally" and respecting the rule of law is necessary in all citizens for a constitutional republic to work, which is why I have problems with amnesty of "illegal" aliens whose behavior and presence testifies that they lack this essential respect.

What is happening is that our respect for law that translates into our belief that our behavior must be "legal" is being gamed. That is, people who benefit from exploiting us through the violation of laws, constitutions, and conventions (and their supporters, beneficiaries, and politicians), head off the exercise of just retribution from the victims by declaring any such actions as "illegal". This happens all the time, and not just in the War on Terror. We see it in sophists and opportunists everywhere.

How do we regain our belief that we have permission to act to restore a truly just society organized as a constitutional republic? Ironically, a hint of a solution can be found in the behavior of Islamists, who have no compunctions about attacking states and nations of all kinds, including those founded on Muslim principles. They act because they believe they have received authorization and permission from a higher authority.

Please note that I am not saying that we ourselves should only trust God to fix the situation, for rarely are worthwhile ends attained easily and without effort. Virtually every Revolutionary leader, from the time the American Revolution ended to the time of their deaths, privately and publicly credited and thanked Divine Providence for intervening at critical times to provide that little extra help or insight or change of circumstance that, when be added to their own necessary efforts, resulted in success.

Rather, what is required is the permission of Him whom the Declaration of Independence called "nature's God" Who "created all men equal" and Who "endowed them with certain unalienable rights". We need to see that there is a vast difference between telling a wanna-be tyrant "we don't need no steeking permission!" and "we don't need your steeking permission!" The first is the response of the mob, while the second is the response of principled free men.

Louis Palme's article at "The Critic", called "After God, What?", neatly lays out, from the authoritative texts of Christianity and Islam, the real differences between the two religions.

=> Read more!

Very illuminating. Complete with references to the Koran which can be confirmed via the link in the right sidebar menu.

Hattip ed via Rantburg.

An interesting proof of the Existence of "God" using Multiverse theory.

A long while back, I announced that this blog was going on minimal posting status. I was pursuing a line of biblical research, and needed more time to work on it, and the time had to come out of this blog. Occasionally, I've posted stuff, but mostly for a record and note to myself.

So, what have I been doing?

Well, I hit the jackpot. Hit it BIG.

I was researching several lines of inquiry on and off. One had to do with the church, one had to do with the Holy spirit, and one had to do with personal growth and improvement.

All three lines converged about 3 months ago, thanks mostly to the work of Owen Barfield, a fellow Inkling of C.S. Lewis, Lewis' lawyer (solicitor as they are called in Great Britain), and a rather prolific philosopher in his own right. I was cued in to Owen Barfield's work when I came across a PBS documentary titled "The Question of God", in which the work and world views of Sigmund Freud were compared with those of C.S. Lewis. In the documentary, Barfield played a key role in shifting the way that Lewis looked at the question of God: Lewis' secretary comments, in the documentary, that Barfield "Asked all the right questions." Lewis called the debate between Barfield and himself "The Great War", and all the Inklings (save Barfield himself) considered Barfield the most brilliant of their group.

You don't hear much of Barfield, since he eventually threw his intellectual lot in with Anthrosophy, an attempt to come up with a scientifically sympathetic view of Religion and the Spiritual world, created by Rudolph Steiner, a german philosopher that Barfield apparently idolized. Anthrosophy suffers from a bad case of Political Correctness, and shoehorned reincarnation into their view of the Spiritual side of man. Barfield adopted this view of man's existence, and generally abandoned classicial Christianity since he felt he could not get the results he wanted if he stuck with it.

It is probably not coincidence that about the time the PBS documentary came out in DVD, which is how I viewed it, Barfield's works began to be re-published. One that always was in print was his "Poetic diction", as close as a textbook on how to write poetry that one can find, and which I highly recommend if you need some help. I suspect that the documentary inadvertently stoked demand for his works. (The documentary itself is heavily stacked against God, putting in light-weights and distractors arguing God's side against the atheist publisher of Reason magazine. A fairer balancing would have put Chuck Colson on the panel, but that would have been too fair.)

While I have issues with Anthrosophy, having worked out an alternative method for getting the effects that Barfield needed without invoking reincarnation, I was able to sift the wheat from the chaff.

Reading Barfield's works, listening to the Holy Spirit, and pursuing an engineering approach to the three issues resulted in a mental and spiritual revolution. I came up with an alternative model of the Human mind that is more biblical and consistent with what I know of the workings of the human mind that science has proven (in contrast to its conjectures). From there, I was able to apply the model in a practical way to solving problems of a spiritual, mental, emotional, and psychological nature.

The results have been INCREDIBLE. I've lost temptations, sins, hang-ups, and phobias I've had for YEARS, since I was a child, and with hardly any strenuous work or mental effort. For the first time in 45 years since my parents divorced, I've been happy from the inside, not from externals coming to me from the outside. I've found depths of strength I never knew before. I don't think I've praised God so sincerely in my entire life. The only downside is that my bible study time is less efficient: I go only a few sentences before I get a revelation or a surge of joy, and then break off to give thanks.

You may have come here from Rantburg due to my strange attitude being demonstrated at the linked article. Simply put, I'M NOT SCARED ANYMORE. At the near top of my list of reasons for doing the research I've been doing is to figure out how to tap into deep spiritual resources to effectively fight the War against Terrorism. I've found those resources. Or, I should more properly say, The Resource. I've barely scratched the surface of what is possible. Trust me on this: the cavalry IS on its way.

Much work remains to be done, including the working out of a lesson plan to consistently replicate these results at a near-universal rate. Unfortunately, this will continue to take much of my time, so the status of this blog will remain at minimal posting. In fact, I've been dumping other non-essentials to pursue it.

In the meantime, don't bother Googling "Symbiotic Christianity": none of the hits are anywhere near the truth.

An excellent posting at John Ray's dissecting Leftism. Here's a sample:

When Leftists say, "There's no such thing as right and wrong", they are normally referring to moral judgments. They use that formula when confronted with something as uncomfortable as their unwavering support for murderous Communists and Muslims. And, as such, it is a transparent fraud. They themselves reveal that such talk is at best a tantrum by going on themselves to use the language of right and wrong to condemn "intolerance", "Zionists" or the Iraq war etc. Talk of right and wrong is meaningless when conservatives use it but highly meaningful when Leftists use it, apparently. To call such reasoning "sophomoric" is to praise it too highly.

And here's a real jewel, in the parenthesis:

So how come Pastor Wright can say the opposite of what is normally regarded as correct about race to thunderous applause at a NAACP convention? Simple: To a Leftist, the truth of a statement depends entirely on the use to which it is put. If a statement about an inborn difference seems to be derogatory to a favoured group (Leftists are so mentally limited that they think almost entirely in terms of groups) then that statement is WRONG. But if it defends the deviant actions of the same group it is RIGHT.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club provides a link to Stanly Kurtz's book review of "Culture and Conflict in the Middle East" by Dr. Philip Carl Salzman. The book review is facinating reading.

A professor of anthropology at Montreal's McGill University, Salzman specializes in the study of Middle Eastern nomads. He, too, is something of a last survivor of a once proud band. What Salzman has managed is to have preserved, nurtured, deepened, and applied to our current challenge a once-dominant anthropological perspective on tribal societies: the study of tribes organized into "segmentary lineages." It was one of the great achievements of modern anthropology. Yet, over the past 40 years, scholars have largely rejected and forgotten the study of segmentary lineage systems.

And why is that?

The anthropological understanding of tribal social structures--especially in Africa and the Middle East--has been shunned for 40 years as exaggerating the violence and "primitivism" of non-Western cultures, discouraging efforts at modernization and democratization, and covertly justifying Western intervention abroad. Decades of postmodern and postcolonial studies have conspired against the appearance of books like Salzman's. That an academic, "on the inside," could have worked in relative concealment long enough to produce this book is testament to the possibility of cultural survival. Indeed, fully appreciating what Salzman has to teach us will first require us to dust off our records of his all-but-forgotten language, and trace the trajectory of its destruction.

Heh. He's not the only one going covert...

... decades before 9/11, the rise of terrorism as a tactic in the Palestinian struggle against Israel suggested embarrassing continuities between the endemic violence of traditional tribal life and the present. Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism was the key work in the rise of postcolonial theory, and Said, a savvy Palestinian academic and advocate, was particularly keen to keep the focus on American and Israeli policies that he claimed explained terrorism, rather than on any causes internal to Palestinian society. By attacking efforts to link terrorist violence to Middle Eastern culture as bigoted "Orientalism," Said and his followers gave a hard edge to already widespread Third World complaints about Western scholarship. That move, coupled with the growing number of faculty members entering American universities from outside the West, put paid to all but a remnant of the anthropological study of Middle Eastern tribes. The triumph of Said's perspective meant that by the post-9/11 era, when we'd need it most, the systematic understanding of Muslim tribal violence was largely lost.

That understanding, that wisdom, is power. Note this:

Disproportionately powerful though they may be, outlying tribal populations are small in comparison with peasants or city dwellers in the modern states of the Middle East. Even conceding the renewed significance of militant but marginal tribes, can we really follow Salzman in treating the tribal template as the dominant pattern of Arab culture itself? Salzman confronts this challenge persuasively and, if anything, actually understates his case.

Salzman says that it is not the details of tribal kinship structure that pervade Arab culture but the underlying principles of "balanced opposition," in which collective responsibility, honor, and feuding shape every action and thought, often calling for quick shifts in loyalty. Unite with your erstwhile enemy in opposition to a more distant foe; treat all members of an enemy group as potential targets; demand honorable behavior from members of your own group; and maintain your own and your group's honor by a clear willingness to sacrifice for the collective good. Warring Sunni and Shiite sects from Beirut to Baghdad follow principles of balanced opposition. They may be at each other's throats, yet they'll unite in opposition to an outside threat, as when Shiite Iran harbors members of Sunni al Qaeda on the run from America. In a sense, Islam's founding triumph was to raise the stakes of balanced opposition by uniting all the Arab tribes in an ultimate feud against infidel outsiders.

Since Muslims treat the tribal era of Muhammad and his early successors as the golden age of Islam, the cultural influence of the tribal template remains pervasive. To prove it, Salzman takes us on a country by country tour of Middle Eastern tribalism, from Jordan, where Bedouin form the backbone of the army, to Iraq, where even towns are heavily tribal, to Kuwait, where the strongest parliamentary opposition to women's rights emerges from tribal MPs.

Writing in 2006, Salzman cites a news report of clashes between Hamas and a powerful clan in Gaza to show tribal themes enduring in towns and cities. By early 2007, when Salzman's book was in press, the Palestinian unity government had fallen apart and Gaza was in quasi-anarchy, with Fatah and Hamas too busy fighting each other to govern. Such order as existed was enforced by brutal, battling clans.

This is no isolated occurrence. We ought to understand the emergence of Gaza's feuding clans as the revelation of a bedrock of Middle Eastern social organization ever-present and ever-influential, beneath superficial layers of Islam and state. Salzman noted the phenomenon in Gaza well before it became obvious. And long before he could have known of the tribal-based Anbar Awakening of 2007, Salzman identified it in nucleus thanks to some throwaway news reports in 2005.

Thus, Edward Said's fear that knowledge about tribalism would strip the mask off of Palestinian motivations proves true. More tellingly, the fact that he, a Palestinian, acted in a way to suppress the truth in order to tilt the playing field in favor of Palestinians shows that the traditional understanding of tribalism, updated with new finding, reveals that he himself is acting tribally. This exaltation of one's "tribe" over the truth is shared by communists and liberals, making this a marker for sub-groups/tribes that are hostile to truly individual rights. The truth is often the only defense for a poor weak individual, and justice is served if the judge/court/jury dig the truth out into the light and makes sure its implications are implemented in actual life.

Further, a knowledge of how tribes work again illustrates and proves the superiority of Judaism. While we see tribal dynamics operating from the Exodus through the times of the Judges, King David works to unify the tribes, and Solomon works to promote and exalt the position of truth and wisdom over all. Judaism thus, in a sense, incorporates elements of tribalism with elements of behaviors that promote the stability of societies in the modern western nation state. Of course I do not believe, along with pious Jews, that this is an outcome from Jews working alone and on their own: All the elements and construction plans were there in the beginning, in the Torah and other writings.

Much food for thought. I may pick the book up.

Zenster, formerly of Rantburg, has moved to Belmont Club as a regular commenter. I kinda miss being able to hit the comment link and say "right on!", so here's one of his comments from a post by Wretchard worth thinking about.

Meremortal: Mock incessantly, unceasingly, until they collapse. As they will, for there is no answer to mockery in their world. They can't kill everyone. They can't stop the mockery. They will implode.

ONE MORE TIME.
Fifty or sixty years ago? Sure, mockery would do just fine. WE ARE NOW IN THE AGE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS. We no longer have the luxury of such genteel methods as ridicule and lampooning. Islam must be crushed and damned soon. Pakistan's tenuous control of its own nuclear arsenal should be enough to give any competent military planner conniption fits. We do not have a few decades to wait. We have less than TEN YEARS to turn this situation around before total Hell breaks loose.

All Muslim majority countries must be denied access to nuclear weapons until Islam has been neutralized. Nothing less will do. Anything short of such a policy will permit Islam to inflict sufficient damage upon the Western world that even the most brutal retaliation will not change how civilization will have been mutilated, possibly beyond all recognition.

I would sooner see every Muslim on earth perish than endure even a single major Western metropolis being immolated by an Islamic terrorist nuclear attack. WE HAVE TOO MUCH TO LOSE. The sandswept MME (Muslim Middle East) cesspits are already so close to the stone age that they have little more to sacrifice save their populations. Something they are all too ready to do. Need I remind you of Khomeini's 1980 speech in Qom?

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

You DO NOT ridicule such insanity. You DO NOT mock such psychosis. You KILL IT in sufficient quantities whereby such concentrated evil no longer constitutes a threat. We can do this by targeting Islam's aristocracy or resign ourselve to genocide on an unheard of scale. Those are the options.

Again, Islam has nothing to lose. We have the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Louvre, the Uffizi and myriad other irreplacable troves of genius that must be retained to inspire further generations of artisans yet to come.

Permitting Islam to vandalize even one such treasure is an unpardonable sin. We have worked far too hard merely so some Neanderthal cretins can bull their way through the China shop of Western heritage.

Put another way: How many of these incalculable jewels of civilization are you willing to see immolated as the price of kick-starting dormant Western intervention?

My own answer? Not a one.

Right on!`

The link is to a topic at Rantburg that cites the Turks re-looking at the validity of the hadiths, or sayings of Mohammed. G(r)omgoru, a regular at rantburg, had commented thusly to my comments at 8 and 9:

Reformation Ptah, the key word is reformation = return to Old Testament.

I had failed to come back and look for responses. On the off chance that a rantburg regular comes by, here's what would have been my response to G(r)omgoru's comment.

Ah, I see. I failed to emphasize the "Reformation" aspect of Christianity.

However, in a way, I did address it: the Protestant Reformation was not a return to the Old Testament by overlooking the New Testament, but a return to the New Testament that demanded that the Church abandon centuries of accumulated opinion that forced a specific interpretation of the New Testament. One of those abuses of interpretation was that the Church replaced Israel and that its role was to rule in the governmental realm as if it was Davidic Israel. (One thing I didn't know until recently was that Martin Luther the Reformer opposed the Crusades, but not from the point of view of being pacifistic: he objected to the Church using its power to make decisions about war and using religious extortion to force secular rulers to fight the battles. His position was that the Church should make its case for getting pilgrims free access to the Holy Land from the point of view of the pilgrims being the subjects of the rulers being petitioned. They, in turn, would decide whether to obtain that free access, and how to accomplish that free access if they decided that it was worth working toward, either by paying tolls on behalf of the pilgrims, negotiation of treaties, or making war to force the making of a treaty or to take over the Holy Land. He was not as much pacifistic as insisting that those sorts of decisions were exclusively Caesar's, not the Church's.)

That's not theology. That's HISTORY.

This extract from Peter's comment at Wretchard's blog is worth pondering:

50 countries on this little planet are governed exclusively or primarily by Islamic law. The best of them retain their veneer of civility only by oppressive monarchies or secular armies. Billions upon billions of petrodollars are spent annually to reinforce the supremacist teaching and yearning of Muhammed, the perfect human. Will endless accommodation convince a supremacist that something less than everything is enough? Who will stand up to Allah and say that the cost of one billion Muslim lives is too much to pay for Allah's supremacy of the world? Is any human cost too much for Allah?

Zenster's reply added context that I had initially missed. After citing the above extract, Zenster wrote::

Incredibly well put. Just another version of the "tipping point". Installation of a global caliphate will see the death of half this world's human population. The equation is rather simple. Some 3 BILLION Infidels versus 1 BILLION Muslims. Only Islam differs over which way the scale should tip. Most surreal of all is how insistent Islam remains over making this world choose right away. I think that Muslims are going to be very unhappy when that choice gets made.