In the post on Helen Thomas below, I mentioned that I thought Helen Thomas’ comments were not “animated by anti-Semitism” but rather a broader hatred of Western Civilization of which Israel and the Jews are merely a conspicuous subset by virtue of being an island in a sea of Islamic/Arabic culture . In response commenter (and friend) Bonnie points out, quite correctly, that there is a spiritual root to the animus toward the Jews in general and to Israel in particular.

This is the pitfall of hurriedly dashing off thoughts for a blog post. What I should have written is that anti-Semitism isn’t the sole force animating Thomas’ ugly remarks. Clearly, a visceral hatred for Jews and for the Jewish state is a dominant part of the mix. And this animus is indeed spiritual in root and branch; as is the hatred of Christians and the global resentment of Christian, missionary-sending America.

For example, the levels of vitriol and blind rage focused on George W. Bush each day of his eight-years in office defy explanation in terms of ideology or culture. Sarah Palin triggers the same fury in those who dwell under the principalities and powers of Media, Pop Culture, Politics, Academia  and Art. Indeed any real-deal Christian who aspires to high office in America is going to find him or herself the object of this fury from the Helen Thomases of this world.

Flawed Logic

Spiritual roots aside, at an intellectual level, there is also a false assumption under-girding much of the anti-Israel bias infusing the sentiments of Helen Thomas, et. al.. That assumption is that most of our problems in the Middle East would be solved if Israel didn’t exist. This is nonsense.

If Israel as a nation-state ceased to exist tomorrow and every Jewish person on the planet were whisked off to another planet, the leaders of the Arab-Islamic world would simply find other grievances and resentments with which to whip up hatred for the West.

Chief among these would be European Colonialism, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and, hilariously, the Crusades.

It is telling that Osama Bin Laden’s original manifestos before and after the 9/11 attacks rarely if ever mentioned “Palestine” or the “Zionist Entity.” His rational for the war against America was the presencce of U.S. “Christian Crusader” troops on the holy soil of places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The fact is, nothing short of complete “submission” (the literal meaning of Islam) by the West to Islamic culture and sharia will appease the virulent strain of spiritual dementia that has spread through the Islamic world like mad cow disease.

That surrender is already well underway in Europe. In fact, the future King of England told a group of students at Oxford this week that we should all look to Koran to inform our views and policies on the environment. I’m not making that up. It is madness.

Semantics

At another level, I am finding the term “anti-Semitism” increasingly un-useful for communicating an ugly reality. Like the words racist and sexist, the word has lost the punch it ought to have by virtue of overuse and abuse.

Thirty years of Al Sharpton and the rest of the Civil Rights Grievance Industrial Complex shouting “racist” at anyone who disagreed with them has diluted the word into meaninglessness. Feminists have done much the same thing to the word sexism. This is tragic in that real racism and real sexism still exist and we need words to communicate the concepts.

In a similar way, but to a lesser degree, the U.S. Anti-Defamation League has weakened the word anti-Semitism by hurling it promiscuously at things like Christian evangelism, Easter pageants, and simply quoting statements from the New Testament.

In my view, the word anti-Semitism is becoming too subjectively laden with varying meanings to various people to effectively convey the dark thing that is rising in hearts and minds around the world. Thus I am increasingly likely to use the terms Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred as an end-run around the semantic fog.

Oddly enough, all of the above reminds me of a great piece Charles Krauthammer wrote back in 2006 when the “Borat” movie was doing big business. Check it out if you have time.

Little by little, the truth about the so-called humanitarian flotilla that attempted to run the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza is coming out.

It is now widely known–at least to those not so deeply invested in Israel hatred that they are immune to the obvious–that the flotilla was a provocation financed and orchestrated by the Turkish government and carried out by an extremist Turkish islamic group called the IHH.

As a just-released report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center tells us:

“The IHH operatives’ preparations included handing out walkie-talkies as they boarded the ship, taking over the upper deck, setting up a situation room for communications, and a briefing given to theoperatives two hours before the confrontation by IHH head Bülent Yildirim, who was on board the ship and commanded his men.“

The revelations also bring into question Turkey’s status as a member of NATO and therefore an “ally” of the United States. You may recall that the U.S. invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein was rendered much more difficult and dangerous by Turkey’s refusal to allow staging from their territory.

Some enterprising students in Israel have come up with a brilliant device for highlighting Turkey’s hypocrisy and duplicity in the whole flotilla affair.

Although most of the recent talk regarding flotillas has revolved around ships sailing toward Gaza, at least two plans have emerged for “reverse flotillas” – from Israel toward Turkey – to highlight what organizers have labeled the Turks’ “shameless hypocrisy” in their criticisms of the Jewish state:

The most ambitious of the two plans has been devised by members of Israel’s National Student Union, who this week announced their intention to set sail toward Turkey, in an effort to bring humanitarian aid to the “oppressed people of Turkish Kurdistan” and to members of the “Turkish Armenian minority.”

This is delicious. The Turks have been oppressing their Kurdish minority for decades. The Eastern end of Turkey was formerly Kurdistan and therefore, by the standards of Helen Thomas and other Israel-bashers, it is occupied territory. Of course the Turks have been much more brutal to minorities under their rule than than the democratic and civilized Israelis would ever contemplate.

The Turks have worked hard to erase the historical memory of their genocidal actions against ethnic Armenians in the early years of the 20th Century. If you’re not acquainted with that horror, you can get an overview here.

Finished another book yesterday. And by “finished” I mean writing, not reading.

This one was a ghost-writing gig. Between this project and the Palin book I’ve written about 100,000 words since getting back from Alaska in mid-March. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I’m thrilled to have had the opportunities. But meeting the deadlines has meant pretty much lashing myself to my office chair for 14 hours per day for the last 12 weeks. Every once in a while I would get up and walk 10 feet from the chair just to prove to the universe and myself that we are indeed two separate entities.

Meanwhile the world kept spinning. Though the wheels seem to have come off and we’re pretty much just rolling down the freeway on rims now as the sparks fly upward.

*****

President Obama is trying to figure out “whose ass to kick.”  The Holder Justice Department just lost another honest lawyer because he was, you know, honest. Secretary of State Clinton delivered heartfelt birthday greetings to Queen Elizabeth a week before her birthday. And it appears a huge volume of U.S. foreign policy secrets have been leaked and are about to posted on the web.

Do you want to know what Obama and friends have me missing the most about the Bush Administration? Competence.

Yes, the Bush years offered plenty to disappoint and frustrate. Government and spending grew far too much. Immigration and border security policy were foolish. And some of the ticking economic time bombs that were activated in the Clinton years were allowed to keep on ticking.

However, it is should be noted that the Bush Administration and Republicans in Congress made a valiant effort in 2003 to reform the Community Reinvestment Act. Congressional Democrats, led by Barney Frank, were successful in defeating the reform measures and the housing bubble kept right on inflating until it burst in 2008.

All that aside, think back to the team Bush assembled and the resume’s they brought to Washington, both in business and government. Here is line up A:

• Cheney–White House Chief of Staff (Ford); Congressman; Secretary of Defense (Bush 41); Chairman/CEO Halliburton
• Rumsfeld–Congressman; Director, U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity (Nixon); White House Chief of Staff (Ford); Secretary of Defense (Ford); Ambassador to NATO (Nixon); CEO/President/Chairman, Searle Corporation; Chairman/CEO General Instrument Corp.; Chairman, Gilead Sciences Corp.
• Powell–4-Star General, U.S. Army; National Security Advisor (Reagan); Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, (Bush 41)
• Ashcroft–Governor, Missouri (two terms); U.S. Senator

(As it turned out, Bush’s two biggest cabinet blunders involved leaving Clinton appointees in place–Tenet at CIA and Mineta at Transportation.)

Now compare the backgrounds and real-world experience of those key Bush cabinet appointees to their counterparts in the Obama government. That would be Joe Biden, Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder. The only one in this group who knows what he or she is doing is Gates, the hold-over from the Bush administration.

Thus, the most inexperienced, least qualified President to occupy the White House since Warren G. Harding has surrounded himself with an inexperienced, under-qualified team. This, just as our nation is facing a confluence of crises not seen since the 1930s–when the Great Depression combined with the Dust Bowl and the global rise if militant fascism.

*****

Some thoughts about the Flotilla a little later.

Helen Thomas. She’s the hyper-liberal White House reporter who used to harangue and hector Ronald Reagan before she did the same to George H.W. Bush which was before she spent eight years pecking at Bill Clinton from his left flank which was before the eight years of harpy-like shrieking at George W. Bush.

Of course, all of this occurred many decades before she, as a young reporter fresh out of college, grilled newly elected President William Henry Harrison about the Whig Party’s position on the Indian Problem and the tarriff.

For some time now, Thomas has been sort of the village idiot of the White House press room. She would have long ago become an embarrassment to the liberal journalistic establishment if such were capable of embarrassment. But lacking the capacity for shame, it has continued to give Thomas a coveted seat at presidential press briefings simply because she’s playing for their team.

If Thomas were a conservative she would have become a byword and in in-joke among journalists decades ago.

But yesterday Thomas may have gone too far. She did what lefty journalists are never supposed to do, that is, say plainly and clearly what she thinks about Israel.

After this video virally propagated around the interwebs, she snapped back into a journalistic pose of detached objectivity and wrote this on her blog:

I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.

So her comments, which the interviewer asked her to confirm twice, don’t reflect her “heart-felt belief?” Then what do they reflect?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think anti-Semitism animates and informs Helen Thomas’ views. I think she is expressing “anti-Zionism” which in turn springs from a general hatred of Western Civilization.

The American Left has turned against Israel for the same reasons it views the United States as the guilty party and bad guy in every interaction with the wider world.

Israel is an island of Western culture in a sea of medieval islamist decay. As I have said in this space before, Helen Thomas, her fellow travelers rooting for the phony flotilla, and the seething masses of islamists around the world, do not hate the West because of it’s support of Israel. They hate Israel because it is part of the West.

This is clearly our current President’s posture, too and explains his flagrant hostility to Israel.

That’s what they call it in Britain. It’s Memorial Day here but the spirit is the same.

On both sides of the Atlantic we have come to associate the red poppie with remembrance of our war dead because of some words by Canadian Colonel John McCrae.

McCrae had  served as a gunner in the Boer War in South Africa and later been a Professor of Medicine at McGill University of Canada. After the outbreak of World War I, Colonel McCrae went to France as a medical Officer with the First Canadian Contingent.

There Colonel McCrae, in charge of a small first-aid post near the second battle of Ypres in 1915, took a pencil and wrote a poem on a page torn from his notebook. Ninety-five years later, most of us can recite at least a portion of the words he wrote:

In Flanders’ fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead, short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders’ fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe,
To you from failing hands we throw
The Torch: be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders’ fields.

Someone, perhaps McCrae himself, anonymously sent his verses to the English magazine, Punch, which published them under the title, “In Flanders’ Fields.” The poem was taken to heart by countless American families who eventually had loved ones buried in one of those rows of crosses at Flanders.

A young American woman named Moira Michael was deeply moved by McCrae’s poem and wrote an American reply. She called it “We Shall Keep the Faith”:

Oh! You who sleep in Flanders’ fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew,
We caught the torch you threw,
And holding high we kept
The faith with those who died.
We cherish too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valour led.

It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders’ fields.

And now the torch and poppy red
Wear in honour of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught
We’ve learned the lesson that ye taught
In Flanders’ fields.

Colonel McCrae died while on active duty in 1918. The night before he passed away he is said to have told his doctor: “Tell them this. If ye break the faith with us who die, we shall not sleep.

I can’t presume to speak for other places. But I know here in Texas we will not break the faith with those who died.

God bless, keep and comfort you Gold Star families.

There’s a fascinating essay by Walter Russell Mead at the online version of “The American Interest titled: “Pentecost Power.” An excerpt:

Christianity is not only the world’s largest and fastest-growing faith.  Christianity is also the world’s most pro-American faith.  Not all Christians like American values and American ideas; from Pope Pius IX to Dietrich Bonhoeffer modern European religious history is filled with Christian thinkers and writers who have been almost as horrified and appalled by American-style capitalism and society as Sayyid Qutb.  Yet during the Cold War and again today in the struggle against the Force That Must Not Be Named overwhelming numbers of Christians worldwide, and especially in the developing countries, instinctively sided with the United States and saw us as the good guys.

(h/t Instapundit)

The truth is, if every American could instantly be made utterly intellectually honest and fully informed of the relevant facts, everyone would be rooting for the advance of evangelical Christianity around the world.

There is ovewhelming evidence it is the world’s best hope for progress, peace, and prosperity. Actually, it is its only such hope.

Here’s an older piece I’ve pointed to in the past from an intellectually honest atheist who agrees with me.

. . . seem close to slipping their threadlike leashes on the Korean Peninsula. At least this article in the Financial Times seems to indicate so.

A shooting war there of any type at any time would be a very bad thing for the world. But especially now. Especially with this Commander-in-Chief.

The folks over at CollegeHumor.com (warning, that site is filled with, well . . . college humor) have put together a nice little compilation of some of the questions left unanswered by the writers of LOST. Note that I said “some” of the unanswered questions. There are scores of others.

I find it amusing that defenders of the show’s writers typically say, “Sure, the writers left a few loose ends untied, but . . .  blah blah. blah.” Right. Watch this:

I had actually been looking forward to buying the complete series on DVD and then re-watching each episode. I had expected to have the gratifying experience you get in re-watching an M. Night Shyamalan film and noticing all the clues and pointers that were sewn into the well crafted story.

But I now realize that in the case of LOST, re-watching the series would just be a maddening exercise in frustration as each episode waved numerous red herrings in my face that I now know are just that–meaningless details that shouted with significance and mysteries that would remain unreconciled precisely because they were irreconcilable.

As I said below, LOST is the perfect postmodern story because it contains characters that got to make up their own rules and create their own “truth” written by people who were making up their own rules.

I

I had planned a long, pedantic post about what annoyed me about the series finale of LOST. But it’s late and I’m tired and I’ve been writing all day and it’s just a stupid television show.

Let me just say for the record that I’m not confused about the ending of LOST. (Many commenters on the message boards seem to assume that if you had problems with the finale it’s because you don’t “get it.”) Trust me, I’m crystal clear about what we are supposed to understand about what happened to the Lostaways. And that’s the problem.

My beef is with the ethics of the story telling done by the writers–who are clearly brilliant and talented, by the way. But there is a difference between talent and integrity. (paging Tiger Woods)

In pre-Postmodern times, there was an unwritten pact between storytellers and the readers/hearers of their stories. The pact was simple and threefold.

(1) The teller would be clear about what kind of story they were telling. (2) He would be faithful to genre in the telling. (3) Any prominent details or themes presented in the story would ultimately prove to be meaningful.

The writers of LOST eventually violated that pact on all three counts.

What kind of story were we being told? Science fiction? Fantasy? Supernatural thriller? Apocalyptic religious drama? Yes to all. Was the underlying theme thread good vs. evil? Game theory? Philosophy? Particle Physics? Alice in Wonderland? The Wizard of Oz? The Chronicles of Narnia? Star Wars? Jacob and Esau? Yin and Yang? Yes to all and much more. Take from the smorgasbord of iconography whatever appeals to you.

Re: the 3rd part of that pact . . . The previous five seasons of LOST were filled with details and themes which proved in the end to be little more than red herrings designed to keep ratings bolstered by teasing, tantalizing and bewildering us.

The deal a story teller makes with a hearer is that if, for example, in Act 1, I present a character who seems to be using four different names.  (e.g., Edgar Halliwax, Marvin Candle, Mark Wickmund, Pierre Chang) then at a some point in my story I will reveal why that is so and what it has to do with the story I’m telling. It must matter, otherwise I, the storyteller, wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of coming up with four different names for this character.

Unless, of course, I’m just screwing with you. There are hundreds of examples of this in LOST.

The other thing I find irksome about the finale in particular–besides the fact that the writers finally revealed their religious worldview assumptions as Buddhist/Taoist–is that it chose sentiment over logic.

The 2.5 hour episode did a brilliant job of yanking the heart strings of all of us who were emotionally invested in the characters. And the series did a masterful job of getting us to make that investment. But the “Purgatory” of the flash sideways really just served as a contrivance for allowing all our separated couples to have their tender “awakening” moments.

Most fans loved this finale precisely because it provided one “feel good” moment after another, even if the overall premise made no sense to the integrity of the story.

Thus the finale was a celebration of sentiment. A triumph of love over logic. Feeling over facts.

Which I guess in a postmodern culture makes the LOST finale, pretty much perfect.

Well what do you know, I had a long, pedantic post in me after all. Good night. The Christian Shephard is leading me into the light now. And I must close my eye.