Terminology Matters - muslim

Speaking of “radical Islam” is wrong as that term implies there is some other Islam somewhere which is just fine.  There is not.  As Turkish president Erdogan always says, there is just Islam.

Similarly with “Islamist terrorist”.  No, the correct term is “muslim”.  Those two Australian girls killed at London Bridge were killed by muslims.  Being muslim is what mattered.  It is what made them terrorists. Being terrorists is an outcome of being muslim.

Using the word “muslim” brings it home what the problem is, whom the problem people are. Words like “radical”, “Islamic”, “Islamist” and “radicalised” suggest people on the periphery.  “Muslim” places them at the centre.

A Little White Lie and Lacey Schwartz

I recently watched a PBS documentary entitled, A Little White Lie, about an African-American woman, Lacey Schwartz, who grew up thinking she was white even though any mirror could have told her otherwise. (Ironically, Schwartz is German for black.)

When Lacey was born to her white Jewish parents - she was dark. Brown. Instead of drawing the rather obvious conclusion, the fact that her father’s grandfather had been a swarthy Sicilian was seized upon as an explanation.

So Lacey grew up white. This was not a matter of passing for white nor pretending. It was a denial of the obvious physical facts. Her parents, Robert and Peggy Schwartz, and their kin, told Lacey she was white and behaved as though she was. The whole family was in denial - though surely some may have been more realistic and just played along.

Woodstock, where Lacey grew up was a white, liberal community. When she went to high school in a more mixed community perception and reality started to get out of sync. Lacey still saw herself as white, though the black students there could see she was black. When Lacey went to Georgetown University, the facade collapsed and Lacey finally realised she was black.

Her parents’ marriage fell apart before that. At long last, Lacey’s “father” had faced up to the fact of his wife’s adultery and his wife had to admit to that adultery. (Even the mother had grasped at the straw of Sicilian ancestry.)  How could the father have been so slow, so naive?

The Peggy Schwartz had been having an affair with a black man, one Rodney Parker. That started in 1968 prior to her marriage and lasted at the very least until Lacey’s birth, very probably later. Lacey was born in 1977. Did the affair ever end?

Did Peggy and Robert decide that she should go off the pill so they could have a child? If so, she could have put Parker on hold for awhile but did not. The documentary did not cover this so I can only guess as to the circumstances, but she would hardly have been the first woman to not care just which man got her pregnant.

Amazing though the denial was, the really interesting part is the two things the story says about the wife, Peggy - and about some other wives.

Firstly, Peggy’s attitude: what she had done was No Big Deal. Nothing. She did not seem to have any comprehension - none whatsoever - that a wife fucking another man, year in year out, was wrong. It was as though the piece of brain that might have told her so was missing. Peggy Schwartz just liked what she was doing. After all those years, the sex must have been routine so maybe she just enjoyed the deceit.

Peggy merely commented that if her daughter was not black, no one would have been the wiser. No problem. Her daughter asked her why, if she was so keen on Rodney Parker, she did not leave her husband for him. Peggy said that Robert was a much more fun and interesting person to live with - and he was paid much more money than Rodney. Robert was a meal ticket.

Secondly, the type of person Peggy presented as:  innocent, trustworthy. When the child was born, and growing up, it should have been obvious to her husband what had happened. Apparently his mind just could not conceive that his wife would be unfaithful. No, she was not that type of woman. Well, she was.

What a delusion - but a common one amongst men.

I have, over the years, noticed this in other cases. When some wife is revealed as an adulteress, everyone is shocked. No, not her, so sweet and innocent and good. Butter would not melt in her mouth.  Such deceit with such an innocent face.

It is expected that if the wife is an adulteress there must be some reason - a loveless, unhappy marriage or an unfaithful husband. Sometimes that is so, but not necessarily. Some just like fucking someone else. This Peggy Schwartz was one such and she made no claim otherwise.

The husband, Robert, was a weakling, a wuss. Why else did he go into such denial? And why else, after decades of betrayal, did he not put a bullet in the wife?

Marhaba

An Arabic-speaking German named Constantin Schreiber has set up an Arabic TV show entitled Marhaba (Hello). Its purpose is to teach refugees about Germany, German life and the German way of doing things. All very worthy.

However, he himself tells of going to a refugee camp in Germany and not being welcomed by all there. Muslims see his show as a conspiracy mechanism of forced assimilation. Clearly, they do not want to be assimilated. Surprise! Surprise!

Schreiber quoted a muslim preacher as saying, “First they talk to you in Arabic then they take away your veils.” And these are the people Schreiber wants to live in Germany.

source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 28-9 January 2017

Moderate muslims. Really?

My mother used to know a Jordanian muslim woman and her family. Some fucking do-gooder organisation had asked mum to help this immigrant family to settle in.

The family included a young daughter, ten years old or so. My mother asked the muslim mother what they would do if their daughter wanted to marry someone they did not want her to marry. The muslim mother was horrified and said that they would kill the daughter. When mum pointed out that you could not do that in Australia, the mother said they would take the daughter back to Jordan. To kill her there?

The significance of this is that these muslims were not radicalised nor extremist muslims. They were “moderate” muslims, civilised, supposedly. The husband had trained as an engineer in the United States.

Just because a muslim is not a terrorist nor  a Jihadi does not mean he is just fine, just like us. All muslims are alien. None belong in civilised countries.

Female Genital Mutilation - Australia

I used to be a civilian employee of the Queensland Police. I recollect that, in about 1999, an email came around noting various changes to the Queensland Criminal Code. Amongst the amendments were several criminalising female genital mutilation. The law was commendably tough. However, I though to myself, "not so very long ago we did not need such legislation".

The best solution to this and similar problems is to not allow backward races, cultures and religions to exist in Australia.

Multiculturalism and Zubrzycki’s Pillars

Jerzy Zubrzycki is not a name that springs to mind. He is not, and was not, well known, but he was important. Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki was considered to be the architect of multiculturalism in Australia and, as such, he came up with four pillars:

1. social cohesion
2. equality of opportunity
3. obligations and rights that we all have
4. cultural identity.

Perfectly reasonable. Pretty obvious. We whites have no difficulty in accepting them. (I would say though that as a definition of a nation they are necessary but not sufficient, but that does not matter here.)

I saw Zubrzycki on television during the 1998 Federal election campaign. I recollect him admitting that that multiculturalism had failed. The reason being that too many of the groups entering Australia did not accept these pillars. 

Whites believe in tolerance and not being racist or discriminatory. The problem is that only whites think that way. White liberals are too stupid to understand that.

Ritchie Valens – left behind (written Feb 2012)

I love YouTube. I love the music videos, especially the black and whites from the Fifties and early Sixties. YouTube is like a time machine, allowing us to peer back into a long gone world. Still alive in that world is Ritchie Valens, the young singer who died, with Buddy Holly and Jiles ”the Big Bopper” Richardson, in a plane crash in 1959. The ghostly trio remains trapped in the Fifties forever, for all time.

Ritchie Valens’s career was short, but it had taken off: records released, television appearances, even a small part in a movie. Ritchie was on the fast track. Everything was going right for this youngster. But Ritchie’s career lasted at most a year, with only five months between the release of his first record and his death. Death cut him short, stole his future.

Looking at the images on the Internet, there are a few in which Ritchie Valens looks mature, much older than he was.  But he was only seventeen at the time, just a boy. In many photos he looks so young, even childlike. A seventeen year-old is still more of a child than a grown-up. That youngness was what grabbed my attention, locked onto my mind. One photo in particular made me so sad that I had to get up and walk away from the computer. Ritchie Valens was just too young to die.

But it is not just his youth that holds me. Listening to his young voice, his songs, looking at his happy images, he is just so alive, so full of life, with so much ahead of him. How can that suddenly cease to be? Be utterly gone?

And it was all so long ago, in another world. 1959 is so remote. It is not yesterday. So many years have passed since then. Ritchie Valens should have had all those years, and be 71 today. 

Time rolls on, leaving the dead behind, forever, as we move on without them. Trapped in the past for all eternity, the dead recede from us as though on a boat cut adrift from our ship. The Fifties are another world, a long gone world sealed off from the present, sealing off those who lived and died then. The Fifties are a million years ago.

Still being able to hear his ghostly voice, still singing La Bamba, Ritchie Valens still seems so alive. But it is an illusion, an Internet illusion. Ritchie Valens is long dead, long gone. Finished. He does not exist. But not so to his family. They have lovingly kept Ritchie’s memory alive, holding onto him. Being able to hear his voice still must make it so much harder to say goodbye, to let go of their young one, as he slips further and further away, separated from them forever on that little boat. He is so very distant now.

Ritchie Valens was not the only seventeen year-old who ever died, or even died that day. The young die every day. And Holly and Richardson were young too, only in their twenties. So was the pilot, the overlooked and forgotten twenty-one year-old Roger Peterson. I could just as well have written of them. Some young deaths, such as this one, catch my attention, but all are sad. How can something so wonderful as a young life be over, gone, forever? So much is lost, stolen. So much should have been, but never will be.

There is nothing more sad, more unfair, than the death of the young. Nothing. And nothing more wrong. It should not be.

So, goodbye Ritchie Valens – once so alive, so young, and now so long gone.

(3 February, 2012, was the 53^rd anniversary of that plane crash.)