At The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg briely awakens from his intellectual slumber to notice the tendency among Islamists toward national suicide.
Goldberg notes this chiefly in regards to those, like him, “who have a hard time believing that even the most irrational Iranian leader would actually sacrifice Persian civilization on the altar of anti-Zionism.” He would do well to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reported past as an instructor for teeenage suicide squads during the Iran-Iraq war, and his celebration of that mindset as Iran’s president, as the mullocracy’s approval of those tactics goes beyond Ahmadinejad’s own end times belief in the so-called “Twelfth Imam.â€Â
Yet Goldberg still writes of “the existential threat that Israel will face if a Palestinian state isn’t created” as though Israel has not always faced an existential threat from its neighbors. A Palestinian state was offered in 1937, 1947, 1967 and 2000 and rejected each time.  The demand for the creation of a Palestinian state is merely a weapon in a campaign to wipe out Israel.  The misery of those living in Gaza and the West Bank is a product of the intransigence of its inhabitants and Arab regimes eager for a scapegoat to distract from the way they threat their own citizens. And it works; most people who surround Israel believe that the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists.
Historians like Michael Burleigh and Karl Dietrich Bracher warn us against the underestimation of the role of ideological fanaticism in politics. People like Goldberg seem content to remain oblivious to the lessons history offers. Indeed, as the blogger Diplomad notes, this combination of arrogance and ignorance is typical of the supposedly highly-educated youth turned out by elitist liberal colleges and universities. Barack Obama, who majored in political science with an emphasis in International Relations at hyper-liberal Columbia (which, lest we forget, also likes to talk to Ahmadinejad) fits that profile.  The typical Obama supporter, who would not know about the Vienna Summit if a book about it leapt off the shelf and hit her in the head, cares even less. After all, history is about old people like John McCain. What could anyone possibly learn from history?
(h/t Instapundit (x2).)
See Warming, Global
“Dogmatic” slumbers whould have been a better historical reference – IMHO.
The boss turned me loose early. I’m at home with a bucket of vino, Oprah on TV, PW in my face, and thunder outside. I love summer in Atlanta.
What can you learn from history?
“When to duck” comes to mind.
“What could anyone possibly learn from history?”
What about HERstory you sexist pig?
See Warming, Global
But AGW is true, so you can’t be irrationally fanatic about it. Geez.
Dennis Prager is fond of saying that the Left’s biggest weakness is its inability to see evil for what it is. Why is that?
It could be any of the following:
• They are afflicted with cognitive egocentrism, which means they assume that everyone else sees the world essentially as they do.
• “Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either”  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
• They believe that “evil” is a fairy-tale concept that oppressors use to manipulate others, such as parents who threaten children with hell or presidents who rally the nation against a common boogey man.
• They believe in evil, but the only real evil is one’s ideological opponents (i.e., Rethuglicans)
• (related to the above) They think that if the Bible-thumping God-botherers say it’s evil, then it by definition isn’t.
• They see themselves as so sophisticated that they can see good where others see only evil: if the rednecks see the devil, they can see the angel of light because they’re not blinkered by superstition.
There’s an old Russian joke about a peasant who finds a genie lamp. When offered three wishes, hs hae only one: “Kill my neighbor’s cow.”
That’s the Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular. To hell with becoming rich, fat, dumb, and happy. As long as there are Jews, there can be only the urge to genocide. They can’t see success in terms of things improving for them, only in terms of things getting worse for others.
There’s something perversly stupid about all that.
And I say that as a recovering Irishman.
Does anyone doubt that Ahmannajihad muses regularly on the glory of seeing his nation immolated in a nuclear reprisal for the annihilation of the Zionist Entity? Millions of shahidin for Allah to reward, after all.
Patrick – That was a great analogy.
Thanks JD. Though, I see my lysdexia kicking in. “hs hae” What was I seeing?
Oh, and nobody remarks on my Oprah addiction? Jeez!
I didn’t want to be the one to pull your man card, Patrick. But if you insist…
Okay. Patrick, what is it with you and Oprah? Are you teh ghey or something? NTTAWWT.
It’s not just Ahmadinejad.
From the supposed “moderate” Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani:
On Colonialism and Zionism
Rafsanjani said that “global arrogance, led by the U.S. and U.K.,” is responsible for the crimes that the “artificial” state of Israel has been committing worldwide over the past half-century. The UN and other segments of the arrogant world have been supporting Israeli crimes, he said, and, cautioning against what he called “global arrogance arms buildup [by the U.S.]” in an attempt to revive the colonialist era, he asked nations and governments to prevent colonialism from attaining its goals.
(…)
Rafsanjani stated that the establishment of Israel has inflicted hundreds of billions of dollars in damage on states in the region. However, since the essence of the phenomenon of Israel is colonialist – colonialism benefits from this fabricated government. Rafsanjani added that following the end of the official colonialist [era], the perpetrators of colonialism set out to replace it, examined various means, and [found that] the most important means was to create states that were connected by the umbilicus to colonialism in sensitive areas.
The formation of the Zionist state in the land of Palestine was a multi-faceted base for colonialism. By this means, the West rid itself of Zionism, while establishing it in Palestine. Meanwhile, the colonialists affiliated themselves with Zionism and the state of Israel so as to keep them like a tool in their service, even though, for its own survival, colonialism is itself dependent on Zionism.
Rafsanjani added that with the formation of Israel, colonialists created insecurity in the region, exposing states to threats so as to bring them under the dominion of colonialism. The survival of Israel depends on the interests of global arrogance and colonialism, and as long as this base is beneficial to them, they will preserve it.
Nuclear Weapons Can Solve the Israel Problem
Rafsanjani said that Muslims must surround colonialism and force them [the colonialists] to see whether Israel is beneficial to them or not. If one day, he said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons] – on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.
_ _ _
The Mad Mullahs don’t entertain the notion that they would “sacrifice Persian civilization on the altar of anti-Zionism” because there is no “Persian culture” they value beyond Islam.
The variation on the genie story is where the genie says that whatever the guy wishes for, the neighbor gets double, so he says, “put out my eye.”
It’s a zero-sum game for them over there: I can’t win until my enemy loses. We Americans instinctively look for win-win situations, considering them the best solutions because nobody has to lose. For the mid-east, win-win really means lose-lose, so the battle continues until they have a clear winner.
The way I heard it, it was the ex-wife, and the wish was to be choked half to death.
I don’t know what it is. It’s something about her weight fluctuations – you never know what you’re going to get on a given day – coupled with that doe-eyed stre as she goes from sob story to sob story.
I feel like I’m training for sensei in the next “Remo Williams” movie. I mean, if the next sensei is going to be a hard-drinkin’, bald, lazy, Irish geek.
Oh, gotta duck out to the licker store. I have to go to a high-school graduation ceremony tonight, and I’ll be damned if I’m sober for *that*.
Good call, Patrick. I wasn’t even sober for my own high school graduation ceremony.
“Chiun: The trained mind does not need a watch. Watches are a confidence trick invented by the Swiss.”
It’s a zero-sum game for them over there: I can’t win until my enemy loses. We Americans instinctively look for win-win situations, considering them the best solutions because nobody has to lose.
It is the same with economics domestically. The left would rather everybody be poor if they can’t be rich. They don’t see evil in the middle-east because they are just as petty and evil themselves. Envy is one of mankind’s greatest evil, and it thrives on ignorance.
Envy is one of mankind’s greatest evil, and it thrives on ignorance.
I don’t know if envy is a product of ignorance. I’d call it more a lack of perspective, a lack of gratitude, and a lack of humility.
When you’re grateful for what you have (given that you could just as easily have none of it), you tend to resent inequalities much less, because you realize that you’re doing just fine with what you have. Maybe that’s why conservatives are less troubled by inequality: we don’t resent those who are richer than we are, and because gratitude is the mother of generosity, we give more, too.
It’s all a metter of living in a shame-based culture, with no way to escape.
God forbid you try something and fail. SHAME!
These people are trapped in a mindset that invites suicide. If you try somehing, best be surethat the alternative to failure is death. Because then you don’t have to live with the shame.
I remember the freedom I experienced when I left the West of IReland and arrived in the anonymity of London. I could screw up *royally*, again and again, safe in thw knowledge it’d never make it home.
Then I made it to America, where the attempt is prized, as well as the ability to learn from failure, and the failure itself is simply written off.
America: I sank into Eden with you.
Sorry. “alternative to *success* is death”.
21- I had never really thought of it in those terms. We have indeed eliminated much of the negative aspects of shame. Now maybe we need to start working on guilt.
Historians like Michael Burleigh and Karl Dietrich Bracher warn us against the underestimation of the role of ideological fanaticism in politics.
I’ve always thought that this failure to understand fanaticism was a key flaw in the Left’s assessment of the terrorist threat after 9/11. The Left insisted on defining the terrorists’ “root causes” in purely political terms (often falsely asserting that the 9/11 hijacking was “blowback” from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), amenable to a political solution, even though the Islamists themselves were telling anyone who would listen that their motives were religious. Religious fanatics do not trade away “God’s will” for beads and trinkets the way the Indians traded away Manhattan.
“… People like Goldberg seem content to remain oblivious to the lessons history offers.”
Ha Ha! Don’t make me laugh. They are not oblivious to the lessons of history, but appear to be oblivious to history itself. It ain’t so hard to research the history of “Palestine” (which was never a state to start with). Anyone who has done so could never be so ignorant of the truth of how the state of affairs in Israel (Palestine = yeah. right.) got to where it is today. And why it remains that way.
So many idiots think thje Jews entered Palestine with guns blazing, and that idea works so well for the left that they have cannonized it. It is absolute hogwash, though.
Back in May of 2003 I was discussing the Bali bombings on another internet forum, and the progs were explaining the attacks as “blowback†for Iraq.
I happened to read this news story in the Los Angeles Times (5/14/03), and I was struck by the contrast by the progs’ explanation and the explanation offered by the bombers themselves:
B Moe,
As they say (or think) – “Fuck equal opportunity, it’s equal misery for all”
“There’s something perversely stupid about all that.”
– Which says what about the people who spend their days acting as apologists, and stage door Johnnies, for the religion of peace?
“Australians, Americans, whatever  they are all white people,†Ali Imron told the newspaper.”
– It is so helpful that the dissonant based community has defined all non-Leftists as racist, least we all go through life confused on that point.
The Atlantic = Harpers and The Nation with a dash of John “I have the Hat” Kerry.
I’m not against shame, applied appropriately.
If you cheat on your wife, abuse your kids, lie, cheat, steal, you deserve shame.
On the other hand, if you start a new enterprise that goes bankrupt, shame should only be attached to failure to learn from your mistakes. In much of the world, the shame is attached to the simple failure. Hence, don’t try. Hence, no progress.
[…] Protein Wisdom – Jeffrey Goldberg notices that Islamists can be irrationally suicidal [Karl] […]
Hi. Sorry to be so OT here, but:
If you DARE to question ANYTHING I say or do, you are not only a racist, but just too stupid to see how incredibly smart I am!
YOU FUCKING MORONS! Equal misery for ALL!
Thank you.
Now that we’ve got that straight, carry on…
Osama “STFU” Obamessiah
I think everyone should choose a significant other who believes their buttocks are remarkable.
“Nice ass” is just suck a great thing to hear from behind you.
While I’m not in favor of encouraging people to read the Koran, it does in fact state that the Joos will be destroyed… So the simple fact of Israel’s existence puts the lie to the book in the minds of those who see no future beyond their own lifespan, who are confounded by a religion that professes on the one hand “there is no compunction in religion” and on the other “death to the infidel (and especially anyone who converts from Muslim to anything else)”.
No wonder they’re “irrational” and “suicidal”! Their religion is essentially a death cult. Dying while killing unbelievers and lying to unbelievers (in order to gain some advantage over them) are the two fastest ways to “heaven”… according to the Koran…
One hopes and prays that God will grant us all the wisdom to make the right choices. The Scriptures in which I believe teach that our enemies are not flesh and blood (for example Romans 8), that all authority over us was given by God (for example Romans 13), and we are to show His love through our actions. I fall woefully short of the standard. And yet, there is hope (for example, Philippians 4, Hebrews 11)…
But that just means that I need to get up off my comfy chair and **act** on my beliefs instead of looking all serious, holier-than-thou, and mouthing hypocritical pious stuff. See y’all later!! ;-)
BTW, Happy Memorial Day!