Another changer
Here’s another story of political change, this time from Rima Greene, a Jewish leftist feminist lesbian (yep, all four) in San Francisco who woke up to a few realizations [emphasis mine]:
When I was part of the Left, I thought “evil” and “enemy” were outdated concepts brought on by indoctrinated mental patterns. When I was at a peace camp in Portugal—a German peace community—I met the people who’d paraded through Israel with the banner: WE REFUSE TO BE ENEMIES. This is new age thinking, that you can refuse reality and just keep going on your merry way. We as Jews are targeted. We as infidel Americans are targeted. We are the ultimate prize as the Big Satan ”” although Jewish blood is the best for the West’s contemporary adversaries.
We do not grasp the mental universe of our enemies…We in the West have not a clue…That is what I was trying to sort out with the Daniel Pearl incident, but my friend tried to put a stop to my thinking by calling me a racist.
I opened up my mind to understand the mindset of those who want to vanquish us. I read Nonie Darwish and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and books by Paul Sperry and Robert Spencer. I was willing to connect the dots. My friends are not…
I was a lost soul, up for grabs by the default program of the Left. But I was not a Believer, I was not deeply imprinted, because I am an experimenter, an adventurer, and finally, my mind opened to going to Israel.
Many of the long term friendships I have had were with people, mostly women, who are not really people who loved me, but only ideological fellow travelers who cannot follow me now.
Greene’s change story is unique and personal, as is everyone’s. But it has universal aspects, in particular the pre-change mindset that is open to taking in new information despite an already-existing belief system. As Greene indicates, she may have been a believer, but she wasn’t a Believer.
It’s nice to see someone wake up ideologically. But I have to wonder, who is this “we” she refers to when she says “We do not grasp the mental universe of our enemies…We in the West have not a clue…” Seems that some in the West have been quite concerned about the West’s enemies for over a decade (hint: it’s the people she used to think were racist simpletons).
Greene brings up something too few seem to pay attention to, the Jihadis have a point system:
1) killing an American-one point
2) killing a Jew-two points (they are harder to find)
3) killing an Israeli-three points (better defended and limited supply)
4) killing an American Jew-two points
5) killing an American-Jew-Israeli-three or four points depending on whether or not the victim is child, more points awarded for killing babies and children
Extra points awarded for torturing the victim first.
Additional points awarded for claiming victim-hood afterward.
“I am offering you the truth…nothing more.” -Morpheus
It won’t be easy and it is largely a scarier world when you see it for what it is, but that only means you can begin confronting actual problems.
There must be some psychological connection here- i.e. why the Left is preoccupied with fantasies like AGW- vs. confronting real problems. They must be aware of the problems in the world, and as those problems they ignore become more severe or more ugly (like, terrorism), the greater the false outlet problems (AGW) become.
holmes.
neo’s business is understanding mental processes, so I’ll be tentative here.
The problems the left/progs claim to fear they really do fear. They have to. If they didn’t, the other problems, the real ones, would have to be attended to. And those are really scary. Scary both in what they portend and what may have to be done to address them.
Better to do some seld-deluding and get upset about issues that, in their subconscious heart of hearts aren’t really that bad.
If she’s a Jewish feminist lesbian, saying “leftist” is probably redundant. (Can you imagine a Jewish feminist lesbian Republican?)
In addition to the Obama sticker, the essential car decoration for any liberal is the repulsive “Coexist” bumper sticker. Being haters of religion, most liberals hang the sticker as if to say, “All you ignorant religious freaks out there, get along, OK?” Of course, they place more of the blame on those insane Christians rather than on Islam, which they know nothing factual about.
But what if a liberal somehow learns some truths about Islam, and decides to believe those truths? Why, they’d suddenly face an internal crisis when trying to apologize for widepread institutionalized bigotry. And not the simple “bigotry” they screech about when someone says something negative about Obama, but the actual genocidal bigotry that is Islam.
“”a Jewish leftist feminist lesbian (yep, all four) in San Francisco who woke up to a few realizations””
So there’s like two women on the planet that could be her possible life partner now?
I’ve been reading The Game of Thrones by George R R Martin. I’m in the middle of Volume 2. What’s enjoyable about these FANTASY novels is that they portray a colorful yet cruel world, based on the real world, but prettied up in novel form.
I’ve rarely enjoy realistic novels. Most are too sad for my tender self. Science fiction has always appealed to me more because it’s fantasy.
I’m writing all this because The Game of Thrones is quite vivid and seemingly accurate in its cruelties. (Hacking children to death, etc., like the Muslims like to do.) Maybe more liberals could be approached if they were sucked into reading this series. Maybe they would get more insights into the cruelties of other cultures, and life in a world without law and justice.
I don’t know–just ruminating here. I’ve given up trying to get liberals/progressives to use their non-functioning brains to analyze today’s world. Maybe some colorful fantasy could get them thinking.
I mention this because Ace of Spades just had a post describing Obama’s punishing Texas with the EPA. This is straight out of the Game of Thrones.
The next step, of course, will be the division of the kingdom into warring feudal states. Just looking ahead . . .
@Daniel in Brookline
Uh, how about Tammy Bruce?
Jewish leftist feminist lesbian (yep, all four) in San Francisco
Multiple redundancies in there.
Change like this is heroic and very, very lonely. Old bonds are severed and new ones are hard to form. As I grow older I wonder if embracing a false ideology that makes you happy is superior to the truth that appalls you constantly. Is liberal alzheimer’s preferable to Republican cognizance?
Promethea, I love the scifi/fantasy too. I even read the Stephen Donaldson series then went back and thought what the heck did I find in them? Maybe it was the fact that I spent the summer on fire watch and did literally nothing all day. Worst job I ever had. Really. But I did read Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” which is on my top five list. But then, if you are as sensitive as you say, you better stay away from that book. It’s a real tear jerker even though it ends well.
Interesting point on the fantasy appealing to liberals. Here’s what Daily Beast Jace Lacob said about the last Martin book:
A Dance With Dragons, the longest of the installments of A Song of Ice and Fire to date, might also be Martin’s finest work yet, a taut and relentless masterpiece that reaffirms the reader’s obsession with the panoply of unforgettable characters that Martin has created, and the brutal, glittering, terrible world in which these novels are set. There are moments of profound loss and of heart-palpitating joy, as dragons dance and the game of thrones plays on, its players and pawns once more beset by woes from home and abroad. Just when it all seems to fall into place, there’s yet another glinting knife, another unexpected disloyalty. Machiavelli, you have met your match in Martin.
Well, to a closet geek like myself, this sounds good, as good as the movie Van Helsing.
What catches me about this is the centrality of Israel to her awakening. It was the same for me. I’m not Jewish, but when I first began to take politics seriously, the first fact I could really grab onto as a “either/or” between the right and the left was that the left was anti-Israel and pro-Muslim.
I could never get around that. The tenacity of their anti-Israel feelings blends with their anti-Americanism, and to me that was enough to indicate something terminally off about the left’s moral assumptions. Hence, even if I disagreed with the right on this or that issue, I felt confident the right was “oriented” properly, attacking problems from the right perspective with the right principles (think Sowell’s “constrained” vision).
What happens when you bump up against this apparently odd hatred of Israel by the left is a serious discrepancy between words and deeds. The left claims to be for peace and justice and human rights and women and minorities and so forth – but when it comes to defend all of that on the most basic level – are you pro- or anti-Israel – they flunk with flying colors and push for the opposite of everything they profess.
This hammers home the realization that big, vague notions that sound nice and progressive do not necessarily translate into good deeds. The flip-side of that realization is that people who talk in a more balanced and realistic way need not be promoting bad policies. Good intentions have to be rooted in a sense of incentives and constraints – of reality – and when they lose the tether to reality they become utopian and radically pernicious.
That entire chain of thought can easily flow from the first recognition of the bonkers relation of the left to Israel. It did for me. It seems it did for Ms. Greene as well.
Kolnai . . .
My “change” actually occurred with the Ariel Sharon incident in Sept 2000, when Sharon went to the Temple Mount and a Palestinian riot ensured.
The press blamed Sharon and Israel. I was so outraged with the unbelievably evil and distorted accounts of this subject in the Chicago Tribune (my local paper) and the NY Times, that I stopped reading the MSM and began to read the Weekly Standard, National Review, Commentary, and other conservative magazines. (This was before the “internet.”)
Then, 9/11 sealed the deal, and I’m now the woman you see today. A social misfit–a Red Stater in the blueist of all blue areas. A “Jacksonian” amongst the sheeple. A coffee-drinking Tea Partier. 😉
Curtis . . .
Thanks for the info on the latest Game of Thrones installment. I’m reading as fast as I can. I know that this long story cannot possibly end well.
One needs a healthy republic to deal with the problems described in the books. Right now America is devolving rapidly. I pray that we can get back on our feet and be the Light unto the Nations that we were meant to be.
To all . . . I should proofread more. Sorry for the typos.
I wonder if a study of America’s war against the Barbary Pirates under jefferson would wake some of these people up. Especially when they study the apparent mass enslavement of coastal Europeans by the Pirates in earlier years.
Tonight I was talking to some teachers who seemed to have not been previously aware of either this or the word history of the English Word “slave”….how at one point so many slavs-white people – were being used as slaves , not necessarily by the pirates- that is one part I have not researched-the name became synonymous
The reason I bring up the slavery issue, is I sense that some people may be under the mistaken impression the slavery was almost uniquely American in semi- modern times-which leads one to think of America as uniquely evil. But if you understand the perspective that in fact, slavery has, was the world wide norm, then you come closer to understanding how the American experiment was another building block from the days of the greek democracies, Roman Republic,the influences of certain branches of Christian thought , Magna Carta, etc—-we didn’t get here overnight.
When Ann Coulter would say that liberalism [sic] was a mental illness, I thought she was a raving nut. Bonkers.
But when I hear soi-disant feminists like Emily Mann (McCarter Theater director, etc.) say that, yes, women under the Taliban “have problems they face,” but after all, we in America do, too! because no woman director has ever won a Tony Award — well, the mind boggles. Even more so when you’re the only one sitting shocked in the Players’ Club in New York City, and all the self-styled feminists in the room are applauding Emily on keeping things in proper perspective!
It’s a mental illness, all right. The examples of this kind of “thinking” are legion.
One thing I noticed about the Mann incident: those women in the Players’ Club, members of New York’s entertainment industry, actually held their breath when she brought up the Taliban (this was in 2002). Waiting to see what She would say.
If she’d had any real ovaries at all, she could have sounded a clarion call to fight for our sisters in the Middle East. And I bet she would have been able to stir many women to join her.
But, no.
She has zero moral authority in my book, and is one of the legions of Quislings who have sold their alleged principles down the river.
Promethea and Curtis,
I’m a geek too. I love both the books and the new HBO series for A Game of Thrones.
But when election time comes around, avoid Martin’s blog. It will turn your stomachs. Almost made me stop reading him altogether. Almost.
And Curtis…Van Helsing? Jeez, to think I used to respect your opinions.
“”I sense that some people may be under the mistaken impression the slavery was almost uniquely American in semi- modern times-which leads one to think of America as uniquely evil.””
Jon Baker
Seems to me there is a profound lack of reason in people who want to judge previous times by current standards. Who doesn’t consider the same technique can judge them one day as evil incarnate for eating chickens? No generation ever as been or will be ok with the next if you insist on going down such a shallow road.
Steve H.
I figure that if it’s unacceptable to judge other cultures today by our standards–which I will call lateral judgment–it’s unacceptable to judge earlier cultures by today’s standards, which I will call vertical judgment.
Take both or neither. Can’t, logically, pick one and not the other. And we know that multicultis won’t accept this reasoning.
kolnai,
“The left claims to be for peace and justice and human rights and women and minorities and so forth…”
There has always been a naive element among the Left that believes in those values. There has always been a malicious element among the Left that uses those values as a charade, with which they ensnare and mobilize the naive to rally to their cause, a cause diametrically opposed to all of those values.
My fellow Zionist and countryman Steven Plaut put it best in one of his pieces:
The Stupid Left vs. the Satanic Left
jon baker,
“The reason I bring up the slavery issue, is I sense that some people may be under the mistaken impression the slavery was almost uniquely American in semi- modern times…”
This has to rank together with the view of Civil Rights as a Democrat initiative as one of the Big Lies of our age. In truth, an anti-slavery movement arose within the West, both in Europe and in America, in the latter case leading to a bloody civil war. To contrast with this, the Arab world has never acknowledged its debt in the black slave trade, Saudi Arabia officially outlawed slavery only in 1961, and de facto slavery is still the norm in that country and its neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula. Yet blacks keep flocking to the religion of their unrepentant traffickers. Go figure.
It’s no wonder Hergé’s Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks (or Coke En Stock in the original French), which has the Arab slave trade of Africans as a major plot device, is from 1954–today it would have been banned for “racism,” the modern kind where Muslims are on the top of the grievance hierarchy (even though the Africans traded as slaves in that story are themselves Muslims).
“It’s no wonder Hergé’s Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks (or Coke En Stock in the original French), which has the Arab slave trade of Africans as a major plot device, is from 1954–today it would have been banned for “racism”…”
Actually there is a modern novel which deals with the slave trade – Fiorella de Maria’s Poor Banished Children. She decided to write a historical novel based on her native country Malta. Muslims would kidnap women and children from Malta, take them back to North Africa, and sell them as slaves. I have a pile of books to read, but I’m putting it on my list, as it’s gotten good reviews.
MissJean,
Thanks, this is interesting, should be worth a read.
But as far as the white slave trade is concerned, there’s little chance a Leftist would give it even a second’s notice, what with their racial theory about whites being by nature always the oppressors and never oppressed. Therefore, there is only some hope in enticing them to take a fresh look by considering the Arab trade in black slaves, which is a cause they profess to champion. In reality, however, few and far between are Leftists who let inconveniences like that get in the way of their alliance with the Muslims; they are willing to waive even gay rights when it comes to a choice between that issue and their unholy alliance.