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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Harmony and the Right to Choose



The twentieth century saw more change than any other time in history.  Until the second half of the 20th Century we lived and died with little chance of fate intervening to save or prolong what was for many of us, a largely wretched life. With the exception of the privileged middle and upper classes life was a struggle. It was miserable, short and unpredictable, made bearable by superstition and punctuated by exhilarating distractions such as violence and war, which was perhaps, a welcome change from living a life racked by disease and starvation.  So in the 20th century we experienced the best and the worst of human behaviour.  Mobile death squads and fixed factories of mass extermination juxtaposed unprecedented opportunities to eliminate human misery by curing disease and eradicating poverty (and hence hunger).  The dystopian nightmare future was our recent past.

So what is wrong with our present time?

It starts with the assumption that we know what we want and of even greater importance that we know what others want.  And before we endow others with our munificence we make the assumption that their fear can be conquered even when it is based on an illiberal and reactionary abhorrence of everything to which we adhere, but more about this later.

I did not think these thoughts as I travelled on the London Underground last week. But it did occur to me that the person who pushed in front of me was a symptom of the disharmony that has failed global man (I use the term loosely to encompass both sexes).  She needed to go to work. I waited patiently for the commuters to alight from the carriage. I was dressed casually, not like an office worker. So her superior purpose took precedence over mine.  With this she justified her need to push in front of us and onto the train before anyone else had managed to detrain!

In a multicultural society we celebrate each others cultural eccentricities so our personal peculiarities are often inextricably linked to, and the reason for, cultural misunderstandings.  Too often though, it is the extremists that impose their world view on the rest of us. Unfortunately, our perception is time and again, formed by happenstance, rumour and of course, deliberate disinformation.  If a picture tells a thousand words then even if challenged, the lie is a more effective weapon than the truth. A poignant photo of a Jewish refugee child (see link) was stolen by the Palestinian propaganda industry and rebranded. What an inspired, cynical misuse of history.  The victim’s past becomes the means by which her memory and then she, is obliterated.


Propaganda can both offend and also be an effective means of recruitment. One such example occurs in the UK every year on Armistice Day (also known as Remembrance Day). It is commemorated as a time to remember the dead of war.  Poppies, as such, are an international symbol of that remembrance.  Muslim extremists burn poppies to protest the West’s oppression of Muslims.  For many people, the act of burning poppies, along with anti-Infidel (Crusader) signage taints all Muslims even though it should not.  But while all Muslims and all those on the political Left are not rabid cultural bullies their overwhelming silence (or any excuses that they make) for an act so egregious that it offends almost everyone, can only be interpreted as tacit agreement by the mainstream for the fringe.

And the bully will defend an act of extremism and demand that we support them in demonstration of our fealty to the ideals they profess even when they contradict everything we believe in.  It is the new intellectual terrorism so adroitly practiced by the McCarthyist practitioners of the Red-green-brown alliance.

It was never the intent of multiculturalism as a national policy that it be predicated on equal but separate development.  Distinct identities, interwoven but based on shared responsibilities would tolerate dissent but maintain national unity based on founding principles.   It is the rejection of both founding principles and a common attachment to history that has brought multiculturalism into disrepute.

We arrived at this failure of association because we permitted the bully to control the dialogue, to manipulate the storyline and in a world of unprecedented opportunity we lost the path to the future by assuming that if we allowed poisoned flowers to blossom they would eventually lose their potency.  They haven’t, instead their toxic malevolence has spread across the globe.

The reason I bring this up is that we have permitted too many loopholes in the law, too many opportunities for the hustler to profit (and not just from the weak and the stupid), and too many unscrupulous and benighted policies to be enacted in the subjective name of fairness, progress and better government.  In spite of an insupportable burden of ever-increasing regulation the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been witness, for far too long, to an era of laissez faire doctrine governing society.

Non-interference, especially in individual conduct, has elevated the individual above the group, to the status of a potentate.  It isn’t simply the well-dressed office worker pushing to get onto the uncrowded train.  It is the way we are constantly being told what to do and what not to do; what to think and what to believe in.  Our aggression is encouraged and channelled, for the sole satisfaction of the id, for the benefit of the ‘I’.  The person who refuses to wait, or who permits their children to sit while adults stand are all concerned with the ‘me’ to the exclusion of ‘us’.  First and foremost, their lives revolve around what society owes them.  At a time in history when we should all be able to celebrate our freedom from fear, hunger, violence and poverty we are instead contemptuous of our fellow man as if we remain in competition with them for our very survival.  In our relentless drive to compete – whether for money or for souls, society has lost sight of our humanity, and part of that humanity is our purpose.

In Iraq, in the decade since the invasion, the US alone has spent almost one trillion dollars in propping up this homicidal and racist entity; and on civilian projects alone, since 2001, one hundred and twenty billion dollars has been spent in Afghanistan.  If other countries desire to replicate our way of life then they will eventually accede to doing so, without our interference. The best example I can cite is the story of China. By area, China is the third largest country in the world with the largest population. It has a recorded history that is as old as any nation. It has absorbed many influences – always choosing only that which it considered complementary to its own civilisation.   Nations that are not conquered, even some that are, eventually pick and choose what suites them best.

There are many people in the world who fear our permissive, Western society of free association and perceived lack of restraint.  The Osama bin-Laden’s of this world grew up immersed in immense material wealth. Because of this they were able to reject and use the power their wealth gave them to attack what they feared. And what they fear is what they see every day, on their TV screens, as they walk along the street and in their newspapers.  There is nothing that we can say (or do) that will convince them of our intrinsic value as human beings. We can only defeat them if we marginalise them and if we respond to their incoherent morality by highlighting their ethical contradictions, at every opportunity, publicly. 

When we attempt to govern the ungovernable by throwing money at them we earn not respect for our ways but contempt. To protect our societies from the fall-out of failed nations such as Somalia and Afghanistan and nearly failed nations such as Pakistan, we should boycott them, ban all international interaction with them and those that support them should also be excluded. It is not a form of colonial enterprise to let a nation go its own way if it wants our resources but not our material or spiritual ‘contamination.’  It is not isolationist to want to protect ones’ society from corrupt influences because the very word ‘corrupt’ is subjective and all of human history has been formed by the subjective decisions of individuals within groups that make up societies.   It is our choices that define not just us but our respective civilisations.

It is the rejection of the right to choose that will destroy us.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Racism and Holocaust Blood-Libels



How do we explain Portuguese Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago’s comment that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “we can compare it with what happened at Auschwitz?”

What went on in the extermination camps?  A simple answer is to quote Wikipedia. “Extermination camps (or death camps) were camps built to systematically kill millions of people by gassing and extreme work under starvation conditions…..The formal mass-killing method at an extermination camp was poison gas; besides gas chambers, the camp guards killed prisoners via mass shooting, starvation, torture, etc.”

By his odious equalization Saramago implied that experimental ‘medical procedures’, forced prostitution, guards with Rottweilers waiting to tear residents apart, and gas chambers, were scattered throughout the Palestinian territories.  What else can a comparison to Auschwitz imply? It has always bewildered me that we do not fight this human filth where-ever possible and whenever the libel spews forth from the corrupt vessel making this disgusting association.

Less than a generation after liberation from apartheid, South Africa hosted the world conference against racism, held under UN auspices in Durban and became sponsor to the largest (anti-Jewish) hate fest since the Nazi Nuremberg rallies in the 1930’s.

In Israel there are Jews, Muslims, and Christians riding the same buses, people of black, white and all the skin colors in-between eating in the same restaurants, street signs in three languages, and different ethnicity's all working and playing together.  Arab politicians drink from the same water fountains as their Jewish brothers and sisters, Israeli Arab (Justice) George Kara headed the court that judged, found guilty and pronounced sentence on an Israeli president. Arabs who set themselves apart as being superior to non-Arabs still attend the same universities and sit in the same classrooms as the Jewish students.  These things do not add up to the Oxford definition of Apartheid!

Yes, Israel is far from perfect. Israel has its bigots and racists like anywhere else, which shows just how much Israel is like any other democracy in the world because only in an autocracy can you not have these traits, only in a theological nightmare will you find yourself raped prior to being hanged from a building crane in the main square, stoned to death or decapitated!

People who choose to be ignorant of the facts are the real perpetrators of a criminal libel; they are the racists and super egotists to whom the truth is no more than an inconvenient distraction! And it’s these people who are heard the most, it is these bigots who succeed in spreading their hatred via their distorted truths!

Chairman Arafat stated in 1996 (at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm) “You understand that we plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state…I have no use for Jews; they are and remain Jews.”  So the West’s favourite Muslim Arab proposed that Israel be “Judenrein” (a Nazi term that designated an area "cleansed" of Jews).  Nor have any of his Palestinian successors, including Mahmud Abbas, accepted the essential humanity let alone the equality of their enemy, the Jew.

There is no conflict between Israel and Palestine.  There is a conflict that pits Islam against Judaism and the West, and present day Arab colonialism against Western history.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Racism. Part 1



Racism in all its guises represents a universal need to explain human weakness.  We look at what others have and see in ourselves the inadequacy of our own existence. Instead of being satisfied with striving to better ourselves, too often we are driven by malice and greed.  Or we are provided with an expectation of superior virtue which justifies all of our subsequent actions. For example, central to Islamic theology is the belief that the Muslim has already reached ultimate perfection in all that is human.  What an ethical catastrophe that makes for its adherents.  We are disappointed with what we possess and jealous of the success of others.  We expected that as the twentieth century progressed we would eradicate prejudice but instead, fly-on-the-wall programs and growing global insecurity remind us of our deficiency.  In its organized way racism is no more than a grubby political tool that serves to unite ‘us’ against ‘them’ by explaining our individual as well as our collective failures.

We may look at individual occurrences and see similarities in Uganda (Black against Indian), Rwanda (between Tutsi and Hutu), Europe (against Romany and Jews); Swedes against Finns, Protestant against Russian Orthodox, in fact in Europe the list is endless, Turkey (Kurds and Armenians), Iraq (anyone not ethnically Arab and Muslim; Shiite verses Sunni), Sudan (Arab against Black), Palestine (Arab against Jew), Gaza (Muslim against Jew) and Egypt (Arab - Muslim against Coptic Christian).

Violent acts of racist expression, as well as the petty construction of a narrative of discrimination are encouraged by society because the perpetrators know they will not be punished.  How similar is that to the low level bigotry here in Western society where we too often sacrifice sensitivity to free speech?  Selective discrimination and legalized violence encourage the bigot.  It all has to start somewhere.

That is not to say that society totters on the brink of anarchic self-destruction.  If the urge to destroy were instinctive then our species would be extinct.  If violent action were the natural character of humankind there would be no need for anthropologists to study anything other than ‘civilized’ society because a self-destructive spiral of violence would have obliterated pre-modern societies.  Laws regulate and control, they are essential to the orderly cooperation between large units of people living in close proximity to each other.

We are psychologically conditioned to respond to change with stress reactions because instinctively we know that it represents a threat and not the natural inclination of the human condition. The outcome of war tends towards order otherwise it would weaken the society that wages it and eventually lead to its downfall.  This is the reason that a responsible administration values stability and not chaos.  The human condition is predicated upon predictability and not flux.

Violence is unnatural and harmful, and bigotry is learned. So we try to create justification for both by fashioning a narrative that first rationalizes fear then justifies discrimination. It is by these means that legitimacy is given to a perceived or concocted threat.

Comfort and intelligence does not inoculate us against hate.  Intelligence does not immunize us against the cultural baggage we carry with us; it far too often afflicts us and drives us to speak with our passion rather than with our brains.

The articulation of bigotry on an organized scale is usually orchestrated by people of wealth and education.   Too often I have debated with people whose knowledge was based on blind acceptance of lies, and propaganda that has been manipulated to create a new reality based on falsehood or less than half the story.  The bigot only wants to be reassured by their comfortable prejudices. They will seek out whatever reinforces their perceptions and will deny the obvious deception or outright mistruths because their certainty makes precision of fact irrelevant.

Recently I became embroiled in a ‘debate’ on twitter, we reached an impasse and my adversary demanded that I look at four maps – they allegedly showed the spread of Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine prior to 1948. I ignored the first three as I did not understand them. But the final map was of 1948 mandate Palestine and was colored completely black except at the top, along the northern coast starting with Nahariyah and hugging the Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian borders down to Tiberius.

The color black represented Arab Palestine; the white dots that speckled the northern border represented the Jewish communities of Palestine.

The map was a lie.

According to this map there were no major Jewish concentrations of population in any of the cities prior to 1948.  Jerusalem therefore did not have a Jewish majority from as early as the year 1828; Tel Aviv and Haifa were both Judenfrei.

The Palestinian-Arab-Muslim narrative is based on the total repudiation of Jewish history.

My twitter accuser (for according to her I was a ‘racist’ and ‘evil’) is a seventeen year old White Dutch female.  She is not just Israel’s problem, not only an antisemite but she also represents the bigger issue of racism.  Grab the child and fill their head with lies and deceit and two more generations (if she reproduces) have been corrupted, their minds and hearts poisoned by mindless hate.  This acolyte of bigotry is the foot soldier of the present struggle and the future war. She is immune to the truth, closeted in absolute faith.

The fascist-racist, my Dutch interlocutor, was only interested in a dialogue if she could control the narrative.  The self-worth of the fascist-racist is increased by our debasement. That is why they readily ignore the truth.  They have not abandoned the totalitarian personality’s need for human sacrifice as a means of validating their delusional superior virtue.  How far has their poison infused society? The acceptance of their lies as truth is the observable measure of society’s contamination as this toxic venom travels towards the centre.  In the new era of Western McCarthyism the Liberal / Left agenda is racist by its indifference to Islamism and Arab colonialism.   We ignore their complicity in this war against humanity to our peril.

The ubiquity of the media and now also the social media helps to prepare us to act in accordance with our fears, they also prime us on how to respond.    It is far easier to spread a lie on the web or though twitter than it is to undo the damage it causes.

We are fortunate to be living in a time when we can be part of history and in our own lifetime we know that we are participants in an ongoing drama.  The terrible downside to this intimacy with history is that many people view history as nothing more than their personal statement of particular prejudice and this is highlighted by journalists for whom the story is more important than the truth.  In homage to Political Fascism many modern day journalists are content to repeat the lie as if it is truth; the more often they repeat it, the greater the prominence afforded to the lie, the more likely it is that the lie becomes the truth. 

As an example: Racists often use the argument that Jews who suffered during the Shoah should not behave unfairly towards others (specifically Palestinians – who are defined by their racism to exclude people of Jewish Faith).  In fact, this line of reasoning is almost universal in its acceptance amongst the educated Western classes.  This ethereal halo effect is an illusion, the purity of those that suffer, is a perverse and wholly invalid argument.  I have only ever heard it applied to Jews.  We would never dream of telling an African American that because they were once slaves they should be innately more peaceful, more tolerant and more accepting of pain than their White or Latino brothers and sisters.  We do not ever demand they turn the other cheek.  It is counterfactual to claim that suffering ennobles and thereby creates conditions of tolerance towards those people that persecute or threaten you. That is completely daft!

And intelligence? Being smart far too often carries co-morbid conditions such as arrogance and haughtiness; an intelligent person will rationalize a tendency to disregard the truth because it conflicts with a chosen path and this can easily be justified by reference to a higher purpose that ignores the facts.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Israel and the Clash of Civilizations



The State of Israel may have created a focus for Islamism but Islamic colonial aspirations have been murderously successful since the foundation of the Muslim faith in the 7th Century CE. The Muslim Brotherhood no more than imitates the Hashishim (it is where the word ‘hashish’ originates) or Order of Assassins, founded in the late 11th Century CE and which enjoyed a dubious reputation for bloodthirsty and thuggish brutality in the pursuit of Islamic purity.  Perhaps because of Christianity’s similarly intolerant history we now display an inexplicable tolerance for this resurgent primitivist Islamic Crusader ideology.

How else can we explain uncritical acceptance by the global political Left and their liberal allies of this destructive imperialist pan-Islamic ideology?  Why is it that Israeli nationalism is anathema to all but the politically incorrect? Why is Zionism almost universally reviled while the malevolent force of Islamism (Muslim fundamentalism) erupts in a thousand localities around the world to threaten peace in every corner of the planet but without a single UN resolution or word of anger from the political order?

In his seminal book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” Samuel Huntington referred to “cleft” and “torn” countries.  In a cleft country major groups from 2 or more civilizations can cohabit the same space but want separation and to self-identify to the exclusion of the other. In a torn country there is one predominant civilisation but its leaders want to shift towards another civilisation.  Examples of torn countries include Turkey (since Kemal Attaturk) and Russia (since Peter the Great), both are Eurasian and Orthodox rather than Western-Modern; interestingly, Australia since the 1990’s is looking to Asia as a bridge between the West and the East; and Mexico (in fact much of South America) since the 1980’s (Latin America verses the USA).  Divided loyalties define the torn country.

Local nationalism barely existed at the time of WW1.  In Israel, populations were split between Arab Bedouin and a section of the urban and effendi classes; the fellaheen (rural mass of the population), Jews, Christians and other smaller immigrant groups.  Only the Bedouin usually considered themselves to be Arabs. Arab names could almost always be identified as rooted in biblical, Israelite Hebrew names.  Many village customs were localized and Judaic.  Displacement of the indigenous Jewish population was never sufficient to suppress or destroy the local traditions of Israel.

There are villages in Israel which within the last couple of hundred years were still predominantly Christian or Jewish.  Many ‘Arabs’ were either Jewish or Christian and only in the last few centuries has nationalist Muslim exclusivity succeeded in driving them out or forcing them to assimilate into the Islamic mass.

If we fail to address the hypocrisy that singles out Israel for criticism at every turn while ignoring the intolerance and the terror that is central to the expansionist global Islamic nation we are creating a dystopian future for ourselves and our children.

Richard Holbrooke argued that an ‘arc of crisis’ stretches from Turkey through Iraq, Iran through Pakistan (which includes Afghanistan).  A regional approach views Israel and Palestine as part of a wider Syria – Lebanon - Iran axis.

How far do we have to fall before we recognise that it is also our problem? Islamism is the old-new geopolitical game of dominoes. We lost sight during a different game of dominoes, the Communist era, but it is essential that our newly re-acquired focus is not lost.   We are fighting this war the wrong way.  Tens of billions of dollars have gone to Islamist nations that support terror, Pakistan and Egypt being but two of the most obvious examples of this failed policy.

Anti-Israel activists ceaselessly complain that Israel has received far too much money from the USA for its national defence, and yet in comparison, it is clear that the US strategy of propping up the corrupt Karzai administration in Kabul has done nothing to help win the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Since 2002 Washington has appropriated almost $120 billion of non-military funds (most of it spent) for Afghanistan reconstruction.  The US will have wasted all those precious lives (and the money) in a futile effort if it does not begin to address the issues that nourish the Taliban and their like.    Afghanistan will fall back into the savage swamp its Islamists desire if the US fails to forcefully confront ongoing Pakistani complicity in this colonial war.

India is a target. It could likewise be swallowed up by this threatened Islamic front.  Islamists refer to all of India as being stolen Muslim land. Contempt for Indian sovereignty by Muslim Pakistan is amply demonstrated by the November 26, 2008 and subsequent Mumbai atrocities.  It was alleged to have been orchestrated and carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba (see below) while under the control of Pakistan’s Intelligence Service.  To quote Yossi Melman, (a journalist for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, writing on 30th November 2008):

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was outlawed in Pakistan in 2003, was created by Pakistan's spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, which over the years continued to support it and other Islamic groups. The ISI and the Pakistani Army used the Islamic groups as a whip to weaken India as part of its strategy to return (my italics) Kashmir to Pakistani sovereignty. The fact that the ISI essentially created the Taliban in Afghanistan indicates that the use of radical Islamist groups and violence as a means to an end is not foreign to Islamabad.”

The ISI was later revealed to be “deeply involved in planning the 2008 terror attack on Mumbai, going so far as to fund reconnaissance missions to the Indian city…. The spy agency provided handlers for all the top members of the group” (Haaretz 19th October 2010).  Why? The attack “killed 166 people, paralyzed India's business capital and froze peace efforts between Pakistan and India”.  For the ISI the financial and human cost was simply the icing on the cake.

And while we may assume that this is someone else’s problem, it is in fact a reminder that Islamism is everyone’s problem, everywhere. Islamists view the conquest of Europe as ‘unfinished business.’

Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu publicly reminded his Austrian compatriots that they must not integrate into their host Austrian society; that their loyalty and identity remains Muslim and Turkish.  Professor Ahmet Davutoglu is no political hack. He is a former political scientist and academic; a Muslim fundamentalist who truly believes in the concept of Turkish neo-Ottomanism, the latest incarnation of Islamic colonialism.

Major Islamic terrorist incidents in New York, London, Madrid and Bali are not indicative of an aberrant attitude to Western society; they are symptomatic of the disease that eased the germination of an idea, which in turn grew, one that mainstreamed the suggestion that ‘we got what we deserved’

Twenty million Muslims live in Europe and their population is expected to double or treble over the next few decades. This is an issue that we, the infidel majority, fail to deal with, first at the cost of our identity and then at the cost of our future.

Monday, February 4, 2013

President Morsi and the Silence of the Press



An Israeli Arab journalists Facebook page removed because the message it delivers is one of a vibrant multi-ethnic and sometimes too-tolerant nation; the President of the worlds most numerous Arab nation pours out his personal hatred and religious bigotry on national television and the Western Press by and large ignores it; the world screams in outrage whenever Israel builds in disputed territory but says nothing when Arabs build in that same disputed territory. How can we reconcile these events to what is happening in our everyday life?

We could suggest that prejudice is hard wired by society into our consciousness and that without it, those with power would be exposed and answerable for their incompetent management of society – a conspiracy shared by those in power with those seeking to retain a status quo of bigotry. We might even suggest that our awareness of corruption does not force us to confront it until we are faced with the realisation that we have been permanently excluded from sharing its fruit (as fuelled the Arab Uprising in Egypt for instance). Or we could just say that it is all about oil. 

It has never failed to surprise me just how desperate we are to find the spark of humanity in evil.

 It is difficult to empathise or to try to imagine how a person of intelligence can be persuaded to endorse a dehumanising narrative.  I understand that in the 21st Century an illusion of civilisation at its zenith creates an opportunity for the weak minded to opt out from personal choice.  It has never been easy to think independently of what society dictates.

Universities are portrayed as agents of change, innovation and free thought but the evidence for this is almost completely absent.  Galileo dismissed the idea that the earth was at the centre of the universe and spent the rest of his life under house-arrest.  A much less imminent scholar, Edward Said substituted polemics as alternative to scholarship and was elevated to that Pantheon of Illuminati worshipped by the extreme left for their clarity of doctrinal eloquence (which, in turn is meant to silence all opposition and to damn to hell all those with whom they disagree).  How different is the situation today to that of Nazi Germany? Hitler also used the universities to provide intellectual justification for genocide and he was backed up by the judiciary.  

The issue is not about nuance and for most it is not about ideology. If someone pays you a wage then you have a winning formula, why change it? If your employer demands your soul as payment for putting food in your belly an argument can always be made for the earth being flat (as some Islamic scholars insist it is).

This brings me to Mohamed Morsi, the President of Egypt, Muslim fundamentalist racist and religious bigot.

If the Jewish State of Israel, with all its citizens of many faiths and nationalities is ever to enjoy a peaceful relationship with its neighbours it will only be realised when its neighbours are able to recognise its essential humanity and equality.  Without the former the latter is unachievable.  The issue of Palestine will never be resolved while the Arab / Muslim world believes that Israel is eternally the patrimony of an idealised Islamic caliphate born out of 7th Century conquest and ethnic cleansing and that therefore, non-Muslim rights are conditional and inferior to Muslim rights.

The unreconstructed fundamentalist and Foreign Minister of Turkey (Ahmet Davutoglu) on the 2nd of February 2013 egged on his neighbour, Syria, to go to war against Israel.  President Morsi of Egypt has not done this. Nor has he (as far as we know it) encouraged the jihadis to attack Israel or Jewish targets overseas.  But like his predecessors he has never forsaken the opportunity to belittle Israel, to reward purveyors of hate and to encourage Islamic and Left wing supporters of genocidal bigotry against Jews and Israel.

You begin the way you wish to continue.  There is little, if any reason to believe that a person holding repugnant beliefs is going to magically transform themselves on attaining a position of exceptional power except perhaps in terms of their outward form. Dissimulation is the favoured weapon of fascism. The mendacity displayed by Morsi in justifying his recent comments was balanced, one assumes for his public, by the comments of his spokesman (who denied the veracity of the Shoah).

It is possible to transfigure a theologically hateful individual into a smiling bureaucrat but he does so for a Western audience that would prefer to salve their conscience for as long as is necessary for them to do so and not because he has ceased, mysteriously, to believe in what is an essential component of his religious make-up.

So he accused us of being apes and pigs, bloodsuckers and war-mongers. We might of course consider his hateful epithets in psychiatric terms as no more than mirroring and guilt projection. But what is said by a foul mouthed rabble-rousing bigot in the context of rallying the faithful into a frenzy when travelling a revolutionary path to power has a different significance once that power has been attained. Intoxication with words of hate, these are difficult for the demagogue to dispense with in their entirety.

So what are President Morsi’s excuses?  Morsi says his words were “taken out of context.”  “I am not against Jews who practice their religion” he proposed as a somewhat bizarre explanation for his 2010 diatribe against Jews and Zionists.

His hate filled remark (calling Jews "the descendants of apes and pigs”) was in fact made when as a senior official of the Muslim Brotherhood he could be expected to express his bigotry of anyone who was “not one of his kind” openly and often.  Also from 2010 - the supreme leader urged his followers to “not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews and all those who support them.” Of course the Brotherhood is now Egypt's ruling party and Morsi is Egypt's president so should we believe that his racist rants were no more than electoral sound bites?

It has also been pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood has many targets for its hate. Apparently the CIA invented the Holocaust "myth"; Egypt's declining fortunes are entirely the fault of her Christian minority and recently the Brothers legal committee announced that it was drafting legislation to unilaterally amend the 1979 peace treaty signed with Israel.  The new constitution makes Sunni Islam the supreme guide to everything and denies religious rights to Baha'is and Shiites.

A couple more quotes before I conclude my analysis of the West’s newest best friend, President Mohamed Morsi:

“Resistance is the correct and only way to free the land from the filth of the Jews” (July 2007)

“I do not differentiate between one Zionist and another….they all have the same nature of slyness, deception and hatred” May 11, 2009.

In the twentieth century Muslim world, the word “Zionist” is always code for “Jew” (and far too often this ‘code’ is replicated by the far-Left). So should we believe Morsi and his fundamentalist cohorts when they make excuses?

Given the extreme nature of some of those ancient but revered Islamic quotes, the last quote (above) is perhaps the most appropriate to end on.  As an example of the delusional, hate obsessed ramblings of a religious fanatic they form a not insignificant part of the core belief system of the man who is now President of the world’s most populace economically mismanaged Arab state.

Radical ideological movements say things in order to ease their path to victory. Infidelity to the truth is part of the arsenal they utilise to fool the gullible and the weak spirited. I cannot recall a single Islamic state whose foundation stone is bigotry, prejudice and violence that was minded to renounce any part of it. Fourteen hundred years of historical precedent should have taught us that it should not be ignored.