RUTHFULLY YOURS

This column is about the epistemological epilepsy of our political elite. And the elite’s unreal metaphysics.

Or do they also suffer from schizophrenia? A collective neurosis? Group paranoia? Multiple personalities? Anxiety disorders? Bipolar mania? A potpourri of psychoses? Asperger’s syndrome?

A reader, whom I shall call Bridget, offered this comment on my Pax Germania vs. Pax Islamia column:

I don’t understand why the elites just don’t pay attention or understand that Muslim values are different from ours, as is their Shariah law. Crazy, because it’s so simple….People are so ignorant.

It isn’t so simple to the elites. The elites regard simplicity as a mark of insanity, of brutishness, of arrested epistemological development, or of retardation. They don’t think they need to pay attention or understand Islam except to claim that it’s a “beautiful religion” and that Westerners should not be judgmental of it. The elitists need nuances, and complexities, and shades of gray. Without them, they’d be just like everyone else, and no one would be willing to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars or Euros to sit at fancy desks and lord it over everyone else, as though they were the guardians of Plato’s cave of the ignorant.

What follows is an elaboration of my original answer to the reader.

You see, Bridget, reality for you, me, and for other thinking people, is a pretty straightforward affair, not ever to be questioned or subjected to a mental tennis match. European and American political elites, however, and for the most part, refuse to grant reality any reality, because they’ve been taught that mind creates reality. They reject the primacy of existence. They reject an Aristotelian approach to reality. Reality must conform to their imaginings of what it should be, but isn’t, and can’t be, ever. They have never questioned their received wisdom, received, by the way, from a long line of philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer and Hume, among others, a wisdom which claims that metaphysics is malleable, that it can be whatever one wants it to be, if one wants it badly enough, or if it displeases one.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=14165

Last week, a baby born in the Gaza Strip was named “Knife of Jerusalem” by his doting parents. Paying homage to terrorists is nothing new among Palestinians, but the parents in question wanted their tribute to be original.
Rather than imitating the common practice of immortalizing specific “martyrs” killed while committing atrocities, this family from Rafah decided to highlight the weapon of choice employed in the current jihad against the Jews.
In spite of its ongoing conflict with Hamas, which reigns in Gaza, the Fatah-dominated leadership of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah was tickled by the couple’s innovative gesture. After all, murdering Israelis is a shared goal, regardless of other points of contention. For this reason, a photo of the newborn and his birth certificate adorned Fatah’s official Facebook page on Friday.
This is but one tiny example of the way in which Palestinian children are raised and groomed to glorify violence. First they imbibe it with the milk of their mothers, most of whom were born after the signing of the Oslo Accords, or were young children during that period. Then their teachers take over, feeding them false material from hate-filled schoolbooks supplied by the very PA that came into existence through a phony peace process only the Left imagined was genuine.
It is this incitement that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been denouncing, in an effort to explain to the world that the current wave of terrorism, characterized mainly by stabbing attacks, has nothing to do with Al-Aqsa mosque. It has everything to do, he is arguing, with the lies pounded into Palestinian kids’ heads from the time they emerge from the womb.
Nothing illustrates this better than a baby called Knife of Jerusalem.

The last few weeks have given credence to the notion that Palestinian society has sunk to a level of depravity from which it can no longer emerge. The degeneracy starts with Palestinian President for Life, Mahmoud Abbas.

Echoing the sentiments expressed by his mentor and Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, Abbas in a televised speech in mid-September rambled on about how the Jews “defile the Al-Aqsa with their filthy feet.” He then issued a veiled call for holy war by proclaiming that “Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every martyr will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded, by Allah’s will.”

As it frequently does, the Obama administration largely ignored Abbas’ repugnant, anti-Semitic comments and his veiled calls for violence but the Palestinian street paid heed. In the weeks that followed, Palestinian terrorists – or as Abbas refers to them, “martyrs” – engaged in an orgy of violence targeting women, children and the elderly. Just today, a 76 year old educator and US citizen– the grandfather of eight children – succumbed to wounds sustained two weeks ago in a cowardly Palestinian gun and knife attack in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood. There were also a number of attempted knife attacks though thankfully, the only fatalities were Palestinian Authority Arab terrorists.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2015/10/michel-houellebecqs-critique-of-western-anomie/

NOTE: Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission—recently translated into English—depicts a dystopian near future in which France undergoes Islamization. The protagonist, François, is a cynical and unhappy professor at the Sorbonne, which has recently become a Muslim institution. Although the book raised predictable cries of Islamophobia, not to mention death threats against the author, Benjamin Haddad argues that it is an attack not so much on Islam as on modern, secular, and liberal European society:

Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, flawed as it is, gets at the heart of some of the issues contorting the West—and liberalism writ large—at the turn of the 21st century.

Le monde, monotone et petit, aujourd’hui,
Hier, demain, toujours, nous fait voir son image:
Une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui!
—Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”, Les Fleurs du Mal
The existence of irrational economic agents had always been the dark ride, the secret fault in any economic theory
—Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the TerritoryFrance, 2022. After a disastrous second term for President Francois Hollande, France’s mainstream political parties suffer crippling losses in the first round of presidential elections. In the run-off, the Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a new party running on an Islamic platform led by Mohammed Ben Abbes, a savvy and charismatic politician, face off. The country is being convulsed by a wave of urban violence—violence that is largely being downplayed by a cowardly media afraid to play into the FN’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Paranoia and conspiracy theories dominate conversations. Is France headed towards a military coup? The center-right UMP and the Socialist Party decide to support Ben Abbes in a bid to block the FN from acceding to power. They negotiate a deal: the Muslim Brotherhood gets to keep only the Education Ministry while compromising on other portfolios.Islamists, it turns out, unlike the French political elite, understand the importance of education in deciding a country’s fate. French higher education progressively turns Islamic: the Sorbonne is bought out by Saudi Arabia, professors are required to convert, women are compelled to wear the hijab, and programs are rewritten to integrate Islamic teachings. Rimbaud’s rumored late conversion to Islam becomes official dogma.At the same time, security across the country is, almost magically, reinstated; unemployment drops dramatically, largely thanks to strong fiscal incentives for women to stay home. Like a Muslim De Gaulle, Ben Abbes reorients the European Union towards the Mediterranean Sea, integrating North African countries in its ambit. His policies are popular among the French. The country seems to have finally found a new driving force after decades of decline and doubt.All this provides the backdrop to the life of Francois, a disillusioned Sorbonne literature professor, the narrator of Michel Houellebecq’s futuristic novel, Submission—a novel that quickly became the number one bestseller in France, Germany and Italy upon its publication.

Democratic Senator Chris Coons from Delaware betrayed his backers and his voters when at the end of the summer, as the Senate returned from recess, he announced that he was supporting President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Coons announced his decision in an address at the University of Delaware. There Coons acknowledged that the deal was terrible for America. He detailed all the ways the deal harms US national security and places US allies, including Israel at grave risk.

“Frankly, this is not the agreement I hoped for,” Coons began.

“I am troubled,” he explained, “that the parties to this agreement – particularly Iran – have differing interpretations of key terms, and I remain deeply concerned about our ability to hold Iran to the terms of this agreement as we understand them.

Coons continued, “Under this agreement, Iran retains a civilian nuclear enrichment program that grows steadily in scope and the hardened underground nuclear facility at Fordow continues to exist filled with centrifuges which, while sidelined from enrichment for fifteen years, are not permanently shelved.