A big, sloppy helping of Steaming Zinnshit.
From former Obama Administration official, Rosa Brooks at Foreign Policy:
Britain built an empire on the slave trade. Germany perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history. Who says the Islamic State won’t be a U.S. ally someday?
The self-styled Islamic State has killed thousands in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, and states and media outlets around the world continue to decry its brutal tactics, which include a penchant for public decapitations, the mass slaughter of unarmed prisoners, and the sexual enslavement of women and girls.
Still, if Western history is any guide, the Islamic State could well be on its way to global legitimacy. History assures us that the commission of mass atrocities is no bar to future success. During the “reign of terror” that followed the French Revolution, France’s revolutionary government publicly beheaded an estimated 30,000-40,000 people — all in the name of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.
In the early 1790s, at least 150,000 other unfortunate French citoyens were shot, burned to death, hacked to pieces, or deliberately drowned in France’s Vendée region. “I crushed the children under the feet of the horses,” French Gen. François Joseph Westermann is said to have written after one particularly brutal campaign. “[I] massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands…. I have exterminated all. The roads are sown with corpses.” Well, tant pis! “Mercy,” Westermann concluded, “is not a revolutionary sentiment.”
It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but it was all so long ago. Today, France is a significant European power and major U.S. ally. Too many years ago to count? Alright, consider Turkey. Between 1915 and 1918, Ottoman authorities killed more than a million Armenians in what pretty much everyone except the Turkish state now calls a genocide. But a hundred years have gone by, and today, Turkey’s a vital NATO ally.
Ancient history? Fast forward to the 1940s. The death toll from the Holocaust was some 11 million civilians, most of them Jews. But today, Germany is our bester Freund in the European Union. No worries, Angela Merkel, all is forgiven!We need to hang every single one of these Moral-Equivalence Peddlers.
The tact she uses in this article - that history is full of things we would prefer not to look at, but they are just human, after all - is one I am very familiar with.
When I was in college, I was told by more than one Professor that the Greeks used to buttfuck little boys, so it's just human, after all.
Somehow I was supposed to find it in me to nod in approval.
Well, I don't nod in approval of pedophilia, nor do I nod in approval of the notion that ISIS can take it's place among other noble nations on the stage of history.
Anyone who proposes such a disgusting line of argument is morally and spiritually bankrupt.
But this woman was a member of the Obama Administration.
I am not surprised in the least.
There is a great reckoning coming, my friends.
MEANWHILE:
Report: ISIS Stones Five Women To Death For Not Wearing Veil
This asshat confuses a government with a nation. Governments commit atrocities and then are made to pay for it (most times). You kill Nazis but the are not the nation. Once a travesty is removed in a nation, one can deal again with it.
ReplyDeletetotal bs. actually britain ended the slave trade and made their empire based on a colonial policy which developed the colony and exploited its natural resource.
ReplyDeleteThis country knew better...yet how far we've fallen.
ReplyDeleteAs coincidence would have it, I just came across an article printed in a NY paper in 1863...
On the Influence of the Semitic Races in the History of Civilization
By Ernest Renan
Posted in The Herald of Progress No. 198,Pages 5 & 6
Dated: December 05, 1863
Select quotes:
"The Arab, at least, and in a more general sense the Mussulman, are today further removed from us than they have ever been. The Mussulman (the Semitic spirit is especially represented in our day by Islam), and the European are, in the presence of one another, two beings of a different species, having nothing in common in their manner of thinking and of feeling. But the march of humanity is owing to the struggle of these contrary tendencies, by a sort of polarization, in virtue of which each idea here below has its exclusive representative. It is in this collectiveness that all contradictions are harmonized, and that a supreme peace results from the clash of elements in appearance enemies. This assumed, if we seek to know what the Semitic race has given to this grand and living organic whole that we call civilization, we shall find that, first, in government, we owe them nothing. Political life is, perhaps, that which the Indo-European have the most indigenous and correct. It is they alone who have understood liberty, who have comprehended at the same time the State with the independence of the individual. "
[snip]
"But never among them do we find those centralized despotisms, crushing out all individuality, reducing man to the state of an abstract function without a name, as we see in Egypt, at Babylon, in China and among the Mussulmanic and Tartaric despotisms."
[snip]
"The East, especially the Semitic Orientals, have never known a midway between the completest anarchy of the nomadic Arabs and a despotism at once the most sanguinary and uncompensated. The idea of public policy and public welfare fails to be conceived by these nations."
[snip]
"The ancient Hebrews and the Arabs have been, or are, by moments, the freest of men, but on condition of having a chief the next day to decapitate them at his single pleasure. And whenever this arrives, there is no cry of a violated right"
[snip] to be continued
"In science and philosophy we are essentially Greek. The search for causation, knowledge for its own sake, are what we have no trace of before Greece, are what we have learned of her alone. Babylon had a science, but no scientific principle par excellence - the absolute fixity of the laws of Nature. Egypt was acquainted with geometry, but did not create the elements of Euclid. The old Semitic intellect is, by its very nature, anti-philosophic and anti-scientific. In Job the search for causation is represented almost as an impiety. Ecclesiates, science is declared to be vanity. Aristotle, his contemporary nearly, and who might with more reason have said that he had exhausted the universe of knowledge, never for once speaks of his weariness. The wisdom of the Semitic never came from parables and proverbs.
ReplyDeleteWe often hear of an Arabian science and philosophy, and during a century or two in the middle ages the Arabs were really our teachers, but it was only till we had comprehended the Greek originals. This science and this philosophy were but a shabby translation of the science and the philosophy of Greece. At the revival of letters, and on the appearance of authentic Greece, these worthless translations became valueless, and not without reason did all the philologists of the period undertake against them a veritable crusade. Besides, on careful examination, this Arabian science had nothing Arabian about it.
The groundwork is purely Greek, and among those who created it, there is not a pure Semitic; they were Spaniards and Persians, writing in Arabic. The philosophical part that the Jews play in the middle ages is also that of interpreters. Their philosophy is the Arabian, without modification. One page of Roger Bacon contains more veritable scientific insight than the whole of this second-hand science, respectable, surely, as a traditionary link, but utterly void of grand originality."
Oooops...link to original Herald of Progress paper
ReplyDeletePerhaps we would do well to remember that during era of great historic evil the same era provided individuals who withdrew their hands from evil to do great good.
ReplyDeleteWhile evil exists it must never find justification via the twisted sophistry employed by the morally bankrupt.
Enslaving, selling and raping women and little girls is called human trafficking. Beheading priests and Christians in the Middle East are acts of religious hatred. Whacking off the clitoris of little girls to deny them future sexual pleasure are acts committed by humans who have lost the capability to think in a logical manner.
Leaders who pray before raping hostages suffer from a distinct form of madness. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a rapist who rapes women based on doctrinal creed regarding the treatment of women during time of war.
We make ourselves small in the eyes of the world if we even contemplate capitulation in the face of such destructive geopolitical forces. The shining city on a hill is not reflected in the statements offered up by a senseless individual who lacks a basic and average ethical framework for human interaction.
Such individuals do not speak for the vast majority of Americans. They can throw their voices, but we all work hard to deflect and mute their influence.
Great comment. Thanks.
ReplyDelete".... The wisdom of the Semitic never came from parables and proverbs."
ReplyDeleteThis sentence is a big fallacy. Jesus, a Jew, a Semite, spoke in parables. Dumping all Semites in the same bag is a travesty. Jews and Arabs may have one root, but boy, have they taken different roads!
I will never understand why in 14 centuries Jews and Christians never saw the need to clarify the many falsehoods at the core of Islam.
Yes, you are absolutely correct.
ReplyDeleteObviously this article is full of old prejudices.