John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

This is foolish.

First, being related to Anne Frank qualifies someone with absolutely no expertise or even knowledge of this or any other political matter.

She’s entitled to her view, of course, but it means not a jot more than the views of 7 billion other humans who will not receive publicity in The Guardian.

Second, for any informed person her assertion is close to ridiculous.

I reject most of Trump’s views, but I would never compare them to Hitler’s.

I don’t even understand how anyone who knows anything can say this. Just read one of the better biographies of Hitler – Allan Bullock or Joachim Fest, for example – and you will quickly understand why I say this.

Confusing unpleasantness and unacceptable views with monomania and nihilism shows pretty poor judgement.

In fact, in a few areas, Trump is exactly Hitler’s opposite. He tends to be anti-imperial wars, and he voices a sensible view about Russia and China.

These are the areas where Trump does bring something new to American national politics. Our political systems, unfortunately, are such that any national candidate comes with a bundle of views and issues. If you buy into one part of the bundle, you must take, willy-nilly, the rest. No one comes with a platform completely satisfying to most voters.

Trump comes with some very heavy baggage, yet he does have the potential to bring some welcome change to international affairs, an end to decades of pointless war in which the U.S. has been engaged.

I utterly reject ideas like his wall with Mexico, and further I don’t believe it would prove doable. But it does seem to me that criticism of him is highly selective. How is his wall proposal any different than Israel’s walls? It isn’t, and indeed Israel is building still more walls, but they don’t receive the publicity that Trump’s proposal does.

Again, I utterly oppose selecting a kind of immigrant who is unacceptable, especially Muslims who are in my personal experience excellent people.

Yet Trump has not proposed a ban or an end, he has proposed a pause, and that is a very different thing. There can be no question that massive Muslim – or any other specific, culturally different – migration over a short time can cause huge social adjustment problems, as it very much is doing today in Europe.

However, please think about the absolute root cause of this sudden massive migration: it is America’s violent tear through the Middle East, upsetting old societies, killing tens of thousands, destroying countless homes and institutions. Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and others. That American savagery is source of all our headlines today, and this consideration takes us back to the importance of changing American foreign policy.

I think it worth noting, too, that Israel has a permanent ban on many, many kinds of immigrants. For some recent poor black refugees it did not want to accept, given embarrassing public outrages over black migrants, it actually bribed some African states to take them, where I’m sure their future, given the circumstances of their arrival, will be bleak.

Israel truly grants full citizenship to only one kind of people, its million or so Arab citizens being both an accident of 1948 history and a people who live under constant shadows and threats of expulsion as well as a set of laws which do not treat them equally in almost any matter.

Of course, then there are the five million or so Palestinians – some of whom are Christian and some Muslim – who live under illegal occupation with daily abuse, no rights, no votes, no hopes, and not even secure ownership of homes or farms. I haven’t heard Trump advocating anything resembling that ghastly reality which has endured in Israel for half a century.

So, if you are of a mind to criticize Trump’s more extreme ideas, then you should be in the forefront of doing the same for, not just a dismal prospect, but a dismal reality in Israel.

“We haven’t really learnt anything—I’m depressed by the current situation.” I can at least say amen to Eva Schloss on that, but I’m sure we are not talking about the same situation.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

And a well-earned attack it is.

Abuse and contempt for a people only can go so far before the people respond.

Unless, that is, you are a country like Israel with a demonstrated capacity to slaughter those you abuse.
______________________________

“JOHN CHUCKMAN and many other fools, are mistaking the handful of backsliding, non practicing, moderate ‘muslims’ that they think they know, for the real thing.

“What makes them think that such pseudo ‘muslims’ speak for Islam?”

It doesn’t get more fanatical and ignorant than that comment.

You cannot summarily characterize more than a billion people.

It is precisely the mindset you display that allowed certain people in the late 1930s and the 1940s to do what they did to whole groups in Europe.

Precisely.

Just as it is precisely Mr. Netanyahu’s demands and violence and irrationality that closely parallel those of the German leader in the Munich Crisis.

Just examine your own beliefs by doing a thought experiment.

If the Muslim people are as awful and hopeless as you believe, why did the Zionist leaders want to found Israel in the middle of them?

Surely that renders the leaders stark-raving mad?

And why have several million Europeans and Americans and others gone there to claim Israeli citizenship?

Seems a wholly irrational, almost suicidal act if Muslims are as you and several other mad barkers here claim.
______________________________________

“His real name is John Phuckedupman”

As soon as people start writing nasty adolescent things like this man, you know their quality of intellect and ethics, in an instant.

By the way, he does such things using a pseudonym.

A genuine coward.

Like Netanyahu.

Like the creator of the film.

Pathetic.
_______________________________________________

“I have a proposition for all you lefties who hate jews and love islam. After you marry your boyfriend in the spring, why not spend your honeymoon in the Middle East? I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to have visitors who despise jews as much as they do.”

“Lefties” do not hate Jews.

“Lefties” do not love Islam.

“Lefties” just happen to care about truth and reason and ethics.

Qualities you clearly are missing.

And qualities you in fact hate them for.
___________________________________

Again, if you hate Muslims as much as some people commenting here, it clearly is the most irrational act in the contemporary world to found a state and live surrounded by a couple of hundred million of the people you hate.

Kind of like a believing member of the Klu Klux Klan buying a house in the center of Detroit or on the South Side of Chicago.

Not brave, just irrational.

As far as ancestral homeland, well the world of 2,000 years ago has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the world today.

Nor should it have.

Otherwise, Rome would still rule Palestine. Greece would rule Turkey owing to the Trojan War.

So many states ruled Palestine if you go back several thousand years that you could say Egypt should rule it today or Lebanon (the Phoenicians) or Iran (Persia), and on and on.

By the way, an idea of long speculation – the actual origin of Ashkanazi European Jews – has now been demonstrated scientifically through extensive DNA sampling by researchers at Johns-Hopkins University.

Their origin is not the Hebrew people of Biblical lore but the Kazahr people who live in the Caucasus one thousand years ago.

The idea has long been a source of speculation – there are many subtle but not definitive non-DNA bits of evidence – and some of the Zionist founders were well aware of it.

Now it is demonstrated.

Ancestral claim to Palestine?

Pretty clearly not.

And there is also the idea, with a growing body of evidence, that it is the Palestinians themselves who are the descendants of the ancient Hebrews.

The Romans never followed the practice of scattering a whole people out of a homeland they conquered. They would kill leaders and stubborn opponents, but those willing to accept the relatively mild yoke of Rome were always left to be.

Rome even tolerated all religious practices in their conquered lands, so long as the people were not opposed to Rome.

Of course centuries and centuries of history changed the religious identity of these descendants of the Hebrews, as it did so many others in many parts of the ancient world.
____________________________________________________

“you think these countries are the only ones with negative influences in that cess pool you should add a few of those european countries to your list, espeacially france and england.’

No, of course not.

Abuse has occurred throughout human history.

Organized Christianity’s history of abuse and horrors is largely behind us, but it was an immense and complex history of horrors.

But these are the people today before our eyes as it were – a world of television, cell phones, and the Internet.

And I sympathize with the little guy, the victim, always.

And I really tire of the flood of prejudiced and ignorant statements about a whole people.

For those who want a tale of Christianity’s history of bloodshed, see:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/of-war-islam-and-israel/

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“They should ship him to Islamabad and stone him.”

What can one say but that the comment is colossally ignorant?

Breivik was actually quoted previously on his dislike of Arab people, something apparently he shares with the writer of the comment.

His act, if it has any meaning at all, is in line with sympathy for Israel.

By the way, the person commenting clearly does not understand the origins of stoning. I suggest that he read the book of Leviticus.
________________________________________

“Meanwhile, any Muslim who dares to convert to Christianity gets a death sentence put on their head. Houston, we have a problem here back on earth.”

Death sentence?

Just look back at Christian history.

Centuries of mass killings, burning people alive, and torture over matters so small as a detail of the mass.

We’ve only been free from such horrors for a century or so.

And actually we are not free of them yet if you count places like Latin America and rural India and Africa.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s more than a billion Muslims do not behave this way any more than we do now.

The ones who do are mired in poverty and ignorance and superstition, and if you will just bother to look at the world around you, you will find uncountable horrors in places of poverty and ignorance and superstition – as in rural India or Mexico or Latin America or Africa.
__________________________________________

“The ugly side of socialism”

And your comment qualifies as the genuinely stupid side of free enterprise.

The man is ill.

He is not a whit different to cases like Charles Manson or Robert Picton.

Indeed, he is not a whit different to the American Marines who killed a crowd of innocents recently.

Or Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli who slaughtered a large number of people in a mosque while they were praying.
_______________________________________________

“The man is a terrorist and should be tried as one.”

Terrorist?

Is that anything like a witch?

Or one of Stalin’s “wreckers,” of whom he spoke before starting on a new purge?

Is it a special class of human being?

A sick man is a sick man, although he may well have political views too, and in this case his views are much like those of an Israeli settler.

A certain percentage of such people exist in every human population.

The United States has displayed scores of them in Iraq and Vietnam, not to mention all the mass killers right in the dear old homeland.

Israel was founded on the bloody work of the Irgun and Lehi and the Stern Gang.

Israeli soldiers murdered 400 children during the invasion of Gaza, and there are reliable reports of children used as shields by Israeli soldiers.
__________________________________________

“This coward deserves the worst kind of punishment. Typical of the usual suspects to support his views and actions through some convoluted logic. A mass murderer of children is no hero, unfortunately the chickenshit cowards who jack off to war movies and Fox News feel it’s okay to murder children.”

What are you blubbering about?

The only thing remarkable in your comment is a near complete lack of rationality.

Who on this planet called Breivik a hero?

Who on earth supports his views?

Although I must say that some of the violent voices about “terrorism” here in the comments do come pretty close to supporting his views, only the targets of their hatreds are different ones than his.

Bottom line is that Nature regularly produces all kinds of freaks and failed evolutionary experiments, as it were. He is clearly one of them.

It is quite possible that such heartless killers served a purpose once in early human society. Many of the legendary heroes and soldiers were likely the same kind of psychopaths, figures from Achilles to Prince Vlad the Impaler

Vlad was the origin of the vampire legend, a real historical figure, a ruthless killer who fought against Ottoman Empire expansion.

Closer to our own day, it is widely thought that Stonewall Jackson, the Confederacy’s most ruthless general, was a psychopath.

General Curtis LeMay, who ran the savage bombing of Japanese cities and who later advocated in the Pentagon for a nuclear first strike on Russia, almost certainly also was one.

Quite possibly, “old blood and guts” General Patton of WWII also was a psychopath.

The list is a long one, and we are only lucky early detection caught still another, Canadian Colonel Russell Williams.

Some of these psychopaths like to kill in great masses – hence the name mass murder – while others like to enjoy a long series of killings, as did Mr. Picton.
_________________________________________________

“Islam slaughtered, enslaved and raped its way out of Saudi Arabia to the doorsteps of Europe and India but I hardly hear a chirp from you.”

History is full of horrors.

But I do tend, quite naturally I think, to be most upset with that happening before my eyes.

Especially when the horrors before my eyes are committed by peoples claiming allegiance to democratic and human values, such as Israel and the United States.

One expects tyrants and ignorant armies to kill and maim and torture, but there is supposed to be something different about countries claiming Enlightenment principles.

By the way, it is estimated that the United States left 3 million people dead in Vietnam.

It left also countless cripples from the bombing.

And it left still more a sea of Agent Orange to cripple babies for centuries.

It was a true Holocaust, in every sense of the word.

And all done for nothing, no point whatever, just mad impulses and paranoid fears.

Lastly, quoting weird sources from the Internet like the one you do is just that, weird.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE FROM A COLUMN BY NAZEEN SHEIKH IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is simply blather from Nazneen Sheikh, rather dangerous blather, demonstrating not understanding but attitude.

It is well known that neither the niqab nor the burqa are requirements for the world’s billion or so Muslims.

But they are nevertheless deeply traditional parts of some primitive cultures, and indeed primitive cultures everywhere have backward and superstitious customs. That is precisely what it means to be backward.

Societies leave their backward customs behind when they enjoy healthy economic growth. They don’t bind women’s feet anymore in China or Japan.

What still goes on in the backward corners of India, South America, Thailand, Africa, and other places is appalling. Countless savageries are committed daily against women from accepted rape and selling children into prostitution to bride-burning and “honor killing.”

Considering the vast scope of horrors against women in this world, I think it slightly ridiculous to be riveted on the situation of several hundred immigrant women in France who wear the niqab, and that is the order of magnitude we are concerned with here because the overwhelming majority of Muslim women in France have never worn the niqab.

As anyone who studies the ways of people without a political agenda knows perfectly well, you cannot change backward customs quickly.

Indeed, if you try, you do so with tyrant behavior as bad or worse than the custom itself, and often run the risk of bad reactions from those charged with special and unfair laws.

It sometimes takes a couple of generations in a new land for strongly-entrenched customs to fade, as we can easily observe in other groups who live in Canada.

Indeed, some seem never to change, and one may ask justly, why should they if that is their choice? They live quiet lives, just as the Muslims with their niqabs.

Hasidic Jewish men still wear full face beards and large dark hats.

Traditional Mennonite women wear ugly long formless dresses with ugly caps on their heads and they drive in silly box carriages pulled by horses.

Both those groups are stuck somewhere in the 19th century. They both also do not truly integrate into the greater society, keeping in their own close-knit communities.

And so long as they do no one any harm and obey our laws, who cares?

Telling people what they must or must not wear is in the same spirit of human rights as telling people what they should say.

Sarkozy is only responding to the increased popularity of the National Front, effectively setting himself a race with the society’s least decent political party.

Hardly admirable, but we should know from many of Sarkozy’s other deeds and words that he is an unpleasant man altogether, from his treatment of gypsies to his calling people scum.

Yet, the thoughtless writer of this piece sets him up as someone to be emulated.

I suspect Ms Sheikh to be one of those people who are ashamed of their more backward cousins, but that is no excuse to advocate corrupting the laws of civil society.

I suspect, too, this is one of her ways of responding to the irrational pressure created by the “war on terror” with its daily freely-communicated ignorant prejudices against Muslims in our society. It is a way of responding – jumping on the simpler and more backward members of her community – that is aimed at gaining approval from the ugly noisy mob, when it is the mob that is the problem.

How quickly our perceptions vary under such conditions. Not that long ago, the niqab was viewed as alluring and mysteriously beautiful, highlighting the eyes as it does. We saw that in countless movies and television shows and read it in many books. Suddenly, it is evil and must be expunged.

Ridiculous, unthinking, and unenlightened.