From Normblog today:

"There you go, just 'fighting for an ideal', irrespective of its content - and 'admired, romanticized'. I wonder if Melody Kemp has ever given any consideration to the foreign volunteers of the Waffen-SS."

From Wiki:

"Himmler, wishing to expand the Waffen-SS, advocated the idea of SS controlled foreign legions. The Reichsführer, with his penchant for medieval lore, envisioned a united European 'crusade', fighting to save old Europe from the 'Godless bolshevik hordes'"

It's scary how the very same terms are utilized today, arranged along re-configured blocks of beliefs, to describe the mayhem in Europe and the West. For "foreign legions" read Al-Qaeda, "medieval lore" - the Caliphate, "old Europe" Al-Andalus, "Godless" - infidels and apostates, "crusade" - jihad.

Kemp's nostalgia makes her substitute passion for clarity and reason. All nostalgia is reactionary, according to Heidegger. He must have known, having been himself complicit in the nostalgic mission of Nazism. Kemp is incapable of recognizing her own complicity:

"My family were Spanish socialists. I should not brag about that, as they lost. But in those days, going overseas or to another country, to fight for an ideal, was to be a partisan and to be admired, romanticized, courted by artists, and writers. Now it's orange jumpsuits and terrorist charges. French partisans were stubbly warriors, smoking Gauloises Disc Bleu, not ‘madmen’, ‘cowards’ or ‘terrorists’. Yet again this word ‘terrorist’ like ‘insurgent’ is used with a sneer, a curled lip and sanctimony, and cleverly not linked with Israeli tanks pushing over houses or US troops destroying an ancient city and raping and then killing young girls, or staging unauthorised raids into a neighbouring country such as what happened in the nation in which I now live. Neither do we hear the words ‘anti colonial’ forces to describe those who attack US soldiers and their ‘imperialist lapdogs’ Just thought I’d throw in some of that to remind us."

One can get a snapshot of Kemp's mind's furniture from her knee-jerk inclusion of Israel in her Anti-whatever rant. A reference, if I may be so bold as to identify one of those pieces of furniture, to Rachel Corrie, herself a much-sung hero of the Pretend Left-Islamist coalition.

The kindest way I can assess Rachel Corrie’s mission is in comparing her to Pasha Antipov, the idealistic revolutionary from Dr. Zhivago, whose rage of exclusive pity overwhelms his moral values. The immense suffering he saw turned him from a naive idealist to a brutal, mass-killing revolutionary. He was a lost soul.

Corrie, likewise, aligned herself seamlessly with suffering Palestinians, reserving for them her absolute pity to the extent that suffering Israelis merited nothing but a sneering hatred from her. Corrie’s idealism did not proceed from love but from ideologically induced hatred. She was an open apologist for Palestinian terrorism, and she died trying to prevent the work of an Israeli bulldozer, which was searching for munitions buried in the ground. Contrary to Palestinian reports, the bulldozer was not there to demolish a house. (Israel did have a habit of demolishing houses which were used as cover for a weapon-smuggling tunnels, but on that day the bulldozer had a different assignment). Any which way you look at it, those munitions were there to be utilized in pre-meditated attacks against innocent civilians. Corrie died protecting terrorist weapons. She was completely indifferent to the deaths these weapons spelled at a time when suicide bombings were a matter of daily occurrence in Israel.

Corrie fits Kemp's idea of a hero, of a true partisan: She went "overseas... to another country, to fight for an ideal, was .. a partisan" and is "to be admired, romanticized, courted by artists, and writers."

Like Corrie, Kemp is in love with the passion of hatred.

A strong antidote is needed to neutralize the taste of bitter poison such polemics leaves. Maybe a shot of Orianna Fallacci's own polemic against Islamo- fascism. At least Fallacci knew first hand what a partisan was and what that word stands for.

Later:

And more on the kind of thinking that Kemp advocates, from Michael Waltzer, (again, via Normblog):

But our most dangerous enemies right now are people who defend inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism idealistically, with ideological fervor and organizational discipline. We may not remember the idealism of the Nazis; we think of them as thugs, which many of them were, but without young idealists they would never have seized power in Germany. We remember Communist idealism all too well, because so many people on the left were seduced by it and became apologists for a murderous and tyrannical regime. Today we need to be clear about our hostility to religious fundamentalism - in all its versions, but most important, right now, in the form of Islamic radicalism, because this is by far its most threatening form. Here we have idealistic hatred of everything the Western left stands for (or should stand for); here we have fanatical zeal, cruel intolerance, a cult of death, a passionate commitment to the subordination of women, vicious anti-Semitism, and a pervasive hostility to liberalism and democracy. And yet there are people on the left who insist that the dangers posed by this hatred are exaggerated (or even invented by rightwing politicians) or who make excuses for it, invoking cultural difference or imperialist oppression - as if our enemies were (secretly: it would have to be secret) advocates of multiculturalism and national liberation.

____________

And tangentially pertinent: The curse of the Jew

(Via The Big Pharoah):

"Whenever a Muslim blows up himself to kill hundreds of other Muslims I always tend to call that "the curse of the Jew". We allowed and justified suicide bombings against innocent Israelis in cafes and malls. We religiously sanctioned the actions of every Palestinian suicide bomber who killed and maimed Israelis. Now it seems the suicide bombers are killing far more Muslims than Jews.

The deafening silence of the Arab/Muslim world towards the mass slaughters in Iraq indicate one thing: this region will stay in the abyss of darkness, ignorance, and backwardness for a very long time until someone really rises up, takes it by the neck, and forces it to look in a mirror and see the ugly reflection.