Saddam Redefines Terrorism

Like Oliver Burkeman (see my last post), Saddam Hussein also has trouble correctly identifying terrorism. According to the Associated Press, in court today, Saddam "complained that he had no fresh clothes and that he had been deprived of shower and exercise facilities. 'This is terrorism,' he said."

Semantics

Writing in The Guardian today, Oliver Burkeman addresses Donald Rumsfeld's recent comment that the word "insurgency" is not appropriate for describing the armed opposition forces in Iraq. Burkeman considers, then dismisses, a number of other possible words, including "terrorists," "resistance," and "paramilitary," before concluding that "insurgency" is the best word after all, that in any case it has already been established through precedent, and that Rumsfeld is just going to have to put up with it.

Burkeman's reasons for rejecting the word "terrorists" are curious. In his words:

"'Terrorists' is out, not least because it seems to imply attacks primarily on civilians, and to assume the legitimacy of a government whose legitimacy is, in fact, widely disputed."

But disputed by whom? The Iraqi government was elected democratically through an election that a majority of Iraqis voted in. How much more legitimate could a government be? Certainly the current government is far more legitimate than the previous government led by Saddam, which attained power through force. Those in Iraq who dispute the legitimacy of the government are primarily the insurgents and their supporters.

Furthermore, the insurgents have carried out numerous attacks on civilian targets. While it might not be true that they have primarily targeted civilians, it is the case that they carry out more attacks on civilians than on coalition troops, and that the attacks are far more lethal. Human Rights Watch, never a friend of the US, recently published a damning report detailing how the insurgents' targeting of civilians violates international law:

"Since the U.S.-led invasion of the country in March 2003, armed opposition groups have purposely killed thousands of civilians—men, women and children. Across the country, insurgents have used car bombs and suicide bombers … to maximize the number of civilian injuries and deaths. They have assassinated government officials, politicians, judges, journalists, humanitarian aid workers and those deemed to be collaborating with the foreign forces in Iraq. They have tortured and summarily executed, sometimes by beheading, persons in their custody."

Many other groups that I imagine Burkeman would consider "terrorists" also attack military targets as well as civilian targets, but this does not mean that they cannot be called terrorists.

But perhaps the problem lies with Burkemans's definition of "insurgency." The title of his article is: "What do we call people fighting the US in Iraq?" Similarly, he says that a consensus has been reached on the term "insurgency" as a way of describing "fighters attacking US forces in Iraq." But in fact the media use the word "insurgency" to describe not only those fighting the US, but also those fighting the (legitimate) Iraqi government, Iraqi security forces, foreign civilians, Shiite civilians including women and children, even Jordanian civilians. If Burkeman could actually acknowledge this, then he might realize that "terrorists" – that is, groups who target civilians with a view to overthrowing a legitimate government – is indeed a highly appropriate word for describing the Iraqi insurgents.

Pushing the Envelope

Lamb and Lynx are back on myspace.com, though this time they have a joint profile under the name Prussian Blue.

We learn from their profile that:

"In a day and age when most bands are working hard to remain within self-imposed limits of Politically Correct Thought, Prussian Blue pushes the envelope."

In other words, most bands want to be Jew-haters, neo-Nazis, all-round racists, but they feel obliged to be politically correct, and therefore suppress these desires.

War of Words

In a post nine days ago that attempted to fisk a Guardian column by Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana, I mentioned that dozens of members of the al-Khalayleh clan of Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, had disowned him following the hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan. Yesterday, al-Qaeda responded by saying:

"Either the enemy of God [i.e. King Abdullah II of Jordan] forced you to take this step ... or you agreed and did it voluntarily. If the first case, then you have an excuse. In the latter case, then you can only make your excuses before God Almighty."

But if the intention behind this rebuke was to force al-Zarqawi’s clansmen to cower under the fear of God, or maybe under the fear of the master terrorist himself, the result has been quite the opposite: Today, in a full-page letter published in several Jordanian newspapers, 370 more members of al-Zarqawi’s clan have renounced all ties to him, pledging their loyalty to King Abdullah:

"We, the sons of the Bani Hassan tribe in all its branches in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan support and express solidarity with our cousins, the al-Khalayleh clan, and their decision to sever relations with the terrorist Ahmad Fadheel Nazzal al-Khalayleh, who calls himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. We condemn all terrorist actions carried out or claimed by this individual – actions which are alien to members of this tribe."

Meanwhile, US military officials have received confirmation that raids carried out in October killed Abu Ubaydah, a close confidant of al-Zarqawi who acted as his "executive secretary." I doubt Abu Ubaydah will be mourned very much by the Iraqi people, since according to al-Qaeda detainees, he "used intimidation and death threats" to force Iraqi civilians to support their terrorist activity. This adds credence to the argument I made in the earlier post mentioned above that it’s not the case that US tactics in Iraq are causing more Iraqis to join the insurgency, as Zangana claims, but rather that the far more brutal tactics of the insurgents are leading to a loss of support for the insurgency among the Iraqi people.

The Path Our Mother Chose for Us

Prussian Blue are now taking orders for their second CD, misleadingly entitled The Path We Chose. The lyrics for several of the original songs (which can be read on their website) would seem to signal a change in the girls' sources of inspiration. Gone are references to Nazis ("Rudolf Hess, a man of peace"), home-grown terrorists ("Robert Matthews knew the truth"), and race wars ("Our people's dedication is now complete, our enemies have finally been beat"). Now Lamb and Lynx have reinvented themselves as a pair of insecure schoolgirls singing about their adolescent crushes. Each of the excerpts below is taken from a different song:

"In between class, I see you walking out of math. Will you sit beside me, at lunch time? Should I ask? Will my face turn red? And will I forget what to say? Will I stutter, or will I just look down, as you walk by? "

"As I sit here staring, my heart is yearning for just one glance from you."

"You make me feel like I'm in the air. You make me feel like I'm very fair."

There was one semi-love song on their previous album, but that was an ode to a rather obnoxious character called "Skinhead Boy" who apparently was "not afraid to kick some ass." But in these latest songs, there's no mention of the skin colour, hairstyle, or violent pastimes of their would-be boyfriends. Also, those songs that do refer to their unorthodox political beliefs are more defensive than proud. In "Sacrifice," Lamb had spoken of "the future for our race's eternity." Now the girls reassuringly insist that "there's not a problem with the way I was raised. There's not a problem. You shouldn't be afraid."

Unfortunately, the damage has been done, and the Gaede girls are going to have a hard job convincing America that they're not neo-Nazis with a disdain for mud races and a fondness for Aryan skinhead boys, but just a pair of ordinary, if misunderstood, teenagers.

Narratives of Israel

Interesting article by Charles Moore in today’s Telegraph describes how the earlier inspiring narrative of Israel, much beloved in the West, that cast her as a brave young nation, forged from a desert and surrounded by belligerent foes, has given way to the quite different, all-too-familiar narrative of today:

"Israel, which was attacked, has come to be seen as the aggressor. Israel, which has elections that throw governments out and independent commissions that investigate people like Sharon and condemn him, became regarded as the oppressive monster. In a rhetoric that tried to play back upon Jews their own experience of suffering, supporters of the Palestinian cause began to call Israelis Nazis. Holocaust Memorial Day is disapproved of by many Muslims because it ignores the supposedly comparable 'genocide' of the Palestinians."

Jailbirds

Ernst Zundel, currently awaiting trial for inciting racial hatred in his native Germany, has become the cause célèbre of the neo-Nazi movement. In early February, at which time he was being held in Canada, several coordinated demonstrations were organized both in the US and abroad to demand his release (the biggest demonstration, outside the Canadian consulate in Los Angeles, attracted only 30 people – see photo). During a recent performance by Prussian Blue, the Gaede girls dedicated a song to him, arousing applause and whoops of approval from the assembled crowd.

Zundel suffers from many illusions – he thinks only 300,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust, he thinks that less than 20,000 Jews died at Auschwitz, he believes that UFOs are in fact Nazi airships that fly out from a secret base near the South Pole (I'm not kidding) – but he doesn't seem to have too many illusions about himself:

"I know my ideas are half-baked – I'm not exactly Einstein, and I know that. I'm not Goethe. I'm not Schiller. As a writer I'm not Hemingway."

Damn straight. It's curious that for someone who hates Jews so much – in this interview clip from 1997, he says of the Jews "I dislike intensely their parasitic nature and actions in the world" – he compares himself unfavourably with Einstein. In the same interview, he cites a claim made by David Irving that "fewer Jews died during the entire war than the British killed during one single bombing raid on one German city on one night." However, Irving himself had repudiated this claim over a year before the interview when he stated that he believed as many as four million Jews were killed by the Nazis during the war, a figure at the extreme low end of the range of estimates made by professional historians.

In fact, Irving has apparently retreated altogether from his former position as Holocaust denier, since he now says he believes in the existence of the gas chambers. Unfortunately, this recant has not helped him with his current troubles, as an Austrian court has just denied him bail, ensuring that he, like Zundel, remains in jail.

The Tyranny of Critique

Ann Althouse recently drew attention to an article by Stephen Metcalf in Slate magazine that examines the death of literary theory. Althouse asks: "How many hours of your precious life did you throw away trying to get your mind around literary theory?" Given that I studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, my answer to that would be "far too many," exhaled with a deep sigh of regret that I didn't major in something else. But unlike Althouse, Metcalf laments the passing of literary theory: "Was it so wrong," he asks, "for a university to indulge one department whose time was spent agonizing over the entire mission of knowledge production itself?" Well, yes, it was wrong insofar as the theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism sabotaged the foundations upon which much of our ability to know was based. Poststructuralism argued that the meaning of a literary text was created through the act of reading. There was no "true," transcendent meaning, but numerous meanings that proliferated each time a new person read the text. The idolatry of the author was replaced by the idolatry of the reader. My interpretation of a text is as valid as yours, and both are as valid as the author's own.

This was perhaps fine when analyzing a gothic novel or a love poem, and it led to many intriguing, imaginative, and downright idiotic interpretations of works of literature. But the problem was that literary theorists stepped out of their own innocuous field and began to subject everything to the tyranny of critique: the entire phenomenal world became a collection of "texts" demanding to be read, whether a TV commercial, a used car, or even an historical period (one of my professors taught a course called "Reading the Nineteenth Century"). Eventually, literary theory took on science, which even Metcalf concedes may have been one step too far. The postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard agued that science is only one language game among many, with no more right to claim itself as the truth than the narrative games of myths, stories, and proverbs. Paul Feyerabend went one step further, arguing that science often failed to use reason and logic in the first place; that there never was any real method to science. Under this radical onslaught, science came to be seen as a vast mythic site, no more capable of describing truth than the lore of witchcraft or the myths of ancient cultures.

But this assault on the very methods by which we come to know anything meant that it became very difficult to be able to distinguish truth from falsehood. Postmodern relativism may be harmless when it comes to determining the psychological motives of a character in a play, but it becomes hugely problematic when trying to understand the reality of the social and political worlds that we inhabit, in which things really happen, where injustices occur. The critique of the methodology by which truth was reached allowed those who did not like the truth to come up with alternative methodologies in order to arrive at a "truth" they preferred. Thus, Holocaust denial in a sense found its legitimation in the anti-theory of postmodernism. The flawed methodology and faulty reasoning of Holocaust deniers are as valid in the postmodern paradigm as the methods and practices of academic historians. There is no truth, only interpretation. History becomes pseudohistory.

So while it was good to some extent that literary theory forced knowledge producers to cultivate what Metcalf calls "the habits of withering self-reflection," to question their ingrained assumptions and inviolate truths, it is also the case that academia took a serious knock from the postmodern assault on knowledge production from which it has never fully recovered. The dangers of Holocaust denial underline how important it is to establish a sound, scientific methodology for any discipline that seeks the truth, and to acknowledge its superiority over other methodologies. Otherwise the truth may become buried by those who seek to deny it.

Why I Love History

"I take delight in history, even its most prosaic details, because they become poetical as they recede into the past. The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are to-day, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghost at cock-crow. This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical, and the knowledge of it has never ceased to entrance me, and to throw a halo of poetry around the dustiest record."

George Macaulay Trevelyan

Downfall

Following his arrest in Vienna last week, David Irving has now been charged with denying the Holocaust, a crime that in Austria can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. It has been enormously enjoyable watching Irving’s downfall in recent years: his disastrous libel case against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin, his financial ruin, and now, fingers crossed, some jail time. This is a man whose career has been built on adulating Hitler and denying the extent and nature of the Nazi crimes against the Jews. He once referred to an Association of Auschwitz Survivors and Other Liars, or "ASSHOLS." He has all the hallmarks of a true Holocaust denier: an antisemite, a white supremacist, a deliberate falsifier and distorter of historical evidence, and an unqualified, amateur historian. He doesn't even have a BA in history, let alone a PhD.

Jew-Baiting

Little green footballs points to an article in Canada's National Post describing how more and more Jews are leaving France to escape a rising tide of antisemitism from extremist Muslims:

"There have been dozens of synagogues and community centres firebombed, Jewish schools covered with anti-Semitic graffiti and set on fire, kosher shops peppered with bullets, and tombstones toppled and desecrated, a domino effect of nauseating proportions. In Paris, on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus, the words 'sal juif' -- 'dirty Jew' -- were painted in 2002, an epithet that has made a comeback in parts of France, although perhaps not spray-painted on brick or stone as often as 'Jews Get Out.'"

Devoid of Gratitude

In an article in Saturday's Guardian, Haifa Zangana provides a highly critical analysis of America's current performance in Iraq. He implies that the US is carrying out torture to the same extent that Saddam's regime did. He says that the biggest struggle Iraqis currently face is surviving under the "increasingly harsh occupation," of which "collective punishment, random arrest and killing are the defining features." He also claims that Iraqi doctors and hospital staff "are unable to cope with the deepening humanitarian crisis" brought about by the occupation, and that more and more Iraqis are turning to support "the resistance."

While it might be presumed that Zangana, an Iraqi novelist and former prisoner of Saddam's regime, would have an especially insightful perspective, his observations are enormously one-sided and in several important cases quite simply false. To imply that the US carries out torture to the same extent that Saddam did seems on the face of it absurd and certainly is totally unsubstantiated. The Abu Ghraib torturers have already been tried and convicted, and are currently languishing in jail. This was not a fate that awaited any torturer under Saddam's regime. To claim that Iraqis' biggest struggle is surviving the occupation is completely false. All polls indicate that Iraqis fear crime far more than US killings and punishments. It is also a fact that the insurgents are killing far more civilians than the Americans are. Most ludicrous is his claim that the harshness of the occupation, evident in the tremendous strain being placed on Iraq's health infrastructure, is pushing more people to support the insurgency. The insurgents' main tactic currently is to target groups of Shi'ite civilians, whether young, unemployed men queuing up to join their nation's security forces, children accepting sweets from US soldiers, or families worshipping in mosques or grieving at funerals. It is these despicable acts that are putting so much pressure on Iraq's health infrastructure, not the US, who have spent billions of dollars on reconstruction – a fact that Zangana completely ignores. Does he really believe that support for the Iraqi insurgency is widespread and becoming wider? A poll taken earlier this year found the 96% of Iraqis thought it was wrong to target the security forces. The percentage opposed to attacks on civilians must be even higher.

The recent targeting of Jordanian civilians by the noble Iraqi resistance is very clearly having the effect of greatly eroding Jordanian support for the resistance's leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. On Friday, 200,000 civilians demonstrated against the hotel bombings in Amman. Today, dozens of al-Zarqawi's own kinsmen, including one of his brothers, have disowned him, issuing a damning statement of repudiation. Contrary to Zangana's claim, as the Iraqi insurgents turn to increasingly brutal attacks against Muslim civilians, more and more Muslims are turning against them, not towards them. Given the frequency and brutality of attacks against Iraqi civilians over the last several months, it seems very likely that this is also happening in Iraq.

The title of Zangana's article is "A right to rule ourselves," the implication being that the Iraqis currently don't. Yet, the current government, which wants the US to stay, was democratically elected by the Iraqi people. The examples of US oppression that Zangana gives – accidental killings of civilians, the rounding up of suspected insurgents, the abuse of prisoners – are part of US efforts to defeat the insurgency, not attempts to tyrannize the Iraqi people. While there is a case to be made that the coalition forces should get out and leave the job of putting down the insurgency to the Iraqis, it is also valid to argue that if the coalition forces were to pull out now, the Iraqi people would completely lose the right to rule themselves as the insurgents would take over and install another fascist Sunni regime. Indeed, the very possibility of Iraqis being able to rule themselves was created by the overthrow of Saddam. Had the US and its allies not invaded, Zangana himself might still be in a Ba'athist prison cell. Clearly, he's not very grateful for the freedom the Americans have brought him and his countrymen.

To the Man

Absorbing debate currently raging on the Prussian Blue forums between "admin," who I assume is the site administrator, and a 16-year-old Jewish boy called Daniel. Admin makes the argument that since no traces of cyanide, in the form of Prussian blue, were found in the Auschwitz gas chambers, they were not used as gas chambers. Daniel responds by pointing out that the study on which these arguments are based was conducted by a fraudulent researcher, Fred Leuchter, who lied about his credentials and his experience, and in any case has been debunked by qualified scientists. Daniel also critiques admin’s claim that World War I was started by Jews. Admin's response is to completely ignore the comments on Leuchter, fudge the issue of who started World War I, and instead fall back on that method of argumentation so beloved by Holocaust deniers: antisemitic smear:

"It's just like a Jew to try and focus attention away from what we said or meant, and away from what he knows full well is true. Regardless of how WWI started, why don't you concentrate on how WWI ended. Once you get to the heart of that see if you can keep your precious Jewish arse out of the fire."

And then later: "You can have your ass back now Jewboy."

Lovely. Ad hominem attacks are of course a standard debating technique of Holocaust deniers, though I didn't realize they were as happy to use it against children as adults.

Mismatch between Rhetoric and Reality

On the same day that Iraqi terrorists deliberately kill dozens more Muslims, their leader announces that Iraqi terrorists don’t deliberately kill Muslims.

Following their triple suicide attack in Amman, Jordan last week, al-Qaida in Iraq have released a tape recording of their leader, al-Zarqawi, spewing bluster, lies, and even a slight note of conciliation: “People of Islam in Jordan, we want to assure you that we are extremely careful over your lives ... you are more beloved to us than ourselves…. For those Muslims who were killed, we ask God to show them mercy, for they were not targets.”

Yet the Iraqi insurgents killed 90 Muslims today, including many children, in two suicide attacks against mosques, bringing the total number of Iraqis killed in acts of suicide murder to 1,617 since the Shiite-led government took power seven months ago. Most of them were killed by al-Qaida.

In Denial

Holocaust denial is aptly named. The vehemence with which deniers make their arguments – flawed, repeatedly debunked arguments originally made by unqualified, discredited researchers – suggests that they truly believe them, and that no amount of debate, no contrary evidence will make them change their minds. It's not so much a conscious refusal to acknowledge sound evidence and differentiate it from evidence that is seriously flawed, but an unconscious inability to do so. As I argued in my last post, at the root of Holocaust denial is a passionate, paranoid, and irrational antisemitism, and reason, objective enquiry, and the yearning for truth are all distorted to fit within this paradigm. Holocaust deniers are truly in denial.

I was reminded of this today while reading some recent posts by April Gaede et al. about her girls. One person referred to a recent TV program aired in New Zealand that said Prussian Blue's lyrics "preach race hatred." In a post she made today, April Gaede responded by saying, in apparent outrage and bemusement: "Where do they 'preach hate'???" A short time later, someone else made the same point: "Having recently received my copy of 'Fragment of the Future' I am happy to report there is no 'hate' … in any of the fine songs."

Yet the lyrics to one of the songs on Fragment of the Future run as follows:

When … black masked men with guns come bashing down the doors.
Where freedom exists for only those with darker skin.
…
Aryan man awake!
How much more will you take?
Turn that fear to hate!

There could barely be a more direct incitement to racial hatred. Yet not only are these the most quoted lines from Prussian Blue's repertoire, and therefore not easy to ignore or forget, but April actually wrote the words herself. But in complete denial, the Aryan lady screams: "Where do they 'preach hate'???"

Obvious Distortions

Clearly, it's not only their mother who teaches Lynx and Lamb the untruths of Holocaust denial. Their stepfather, Mark Neufeldt, stated the following last week in response to being asked what really happened during the Holocaust:

"The story of 'gas chambers' and 'gysers [sic] of blood' etc. are obvious distortions."

He was also asked the following question: "If someone actually did kill six million people because they were Jewish, what would your opinion be on that? Would you be against it?"

And his response:

"That would certainly be tragic. Though the Jews have been a particularly destructive group of people throughout history, I wouldn't wish them dead, unless of course, they threatened the existence of my people."

I can't say I believe he's being honest here. He uses as his avatar a photo of William Pierce. In Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries, the white nationalists who take over the country do commit genocide against the Jews.

This is the dilemma that motivates Holocaust deniers to spin their lies. They admire the Nazis precisely because they were able to carry out such a successful attempt at Judeocide, and yet in order to legitimize the Nazis in the eyes of the world, they must deny that this ever took place.

Irving Arrested

Holocaust-denier, antisemite, discredited historian David Irving has been arrested in Vienna.

"What Must Be Done"

Disturbing poem that Lynx Gaede wrote when she was 10 (published in Resistance Magazine):

What Must Be Done

Fire and rage burn inside
But I will hold on to my pride.
My race and my family make me brave -
They are all I want; I do not crave.

We will fight for what we believe;
Our land we will retrieve.
Our race is Nature's Finest,
So I can't understand people's blindness.

All the mud races must be banished,
For look at the world they have damaged.
Look around and what do I see?
Ugly brown faces staring at me.

Our people must look like my mom and dad.
They don't now and that makes me mad.
We don't want to be mongrelized,
We want to be Nature's Finest down deep inside.

Now sit down and think of what I just said;
Remember our Cause until you are dead.
Hope what I wish comes true,
And that people come to look like me and you.

I am proud of what I just wrote,
And now I will go and read it to my Folk.

By Lynx Gaede
age 10
California

Home

"'A' Is for 'Aryan' and 'B' is for 'Broodmare'"

Excellent article on April Gaede and her girls, written before the ABC interview:

"Society scoffs at the beliefs that Gaede has instilled in these children and does not act very kindly towards those who hold to such tenets. Lynx, Lamb, & [their baby sister] Dresden will enter the world with strikes already against them. What we are witnessing, as we watch these children grow, is the disdainful act of indoctrinating children into the arena of hate and bigotry. We stand helplessly by as we see children raised not only to hate, but to idolize murderers, criminals, and felons. We watch as they come forth and desperately attempt to defend the indefensible. We watch as their mother shoves them onto a stage in front of an audience that most of us hope our children never see and tells them to perform. We watch as others publicly criticize, threaten and malign them because of a woman who chooses to live her life vicariously through them. We watch as April Gaede continues to exploit the innocence of these children in what appears to be an effort to validate herself."

Irrational Terrorism

There is often a perplexing irrationality to acts of Islamic terrorism. I’m thinking, for example, of the London bomber whose desire for martyrdom was apparently ignited by US abuse of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, especially the incident of an American flushing a copy of the Koran down the toilet. The irrationality lies in the moral nonequivalence of killing innocent British civilians, including Muslims, as a way of avenging mistreatment, not murder, of Muslims by Americans; in the fact that well before the London bombers struck, it became apparent that the toilet-flushing incident had never occurred; and in the fact that at the time of the bombing, the only people deliberately killing Muslim civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan were other Muslims.

Another example of irrational terrorism is reported today. Friends of the would-be female suicide murderer whose bomb failed to detonate in Amman, Jordan last week claim that three of her brothers were killed by US forces in Iraq's Anbar province. According to CNN, this "is being considered as a possible motivation" behind her bid for martyrdom. That would make perfect sense. The Americans killed three of her brothers in Iraq, so no wonder she journeyed to Jordan in order to murder some Muslims celebrating a wedding.

(A footnote: FoxNews.com prefer the term homicide bomber to suicide bomber because it focuses on the death of the victims rather than the perpetrator. But while this approach is laudable, the new term does not clearly indicate that the bomber kills himself (or herself) in the process, which is obviously an important distinction. Anyone who sets a bomb that kills people could also be referred to as a homicide bomber, even if the bomb is not strapped to his (or her) body. But recently, Victor Davis Hanson used the term suicide murdering, which I also intend to use from now on. This term and related terms like suicide murder and suicide murderer also foreground the death of the victims, but still indicate that the bomber was on a suicide mission.)

The Ten Million Dollar Question

The National Vanguard Tampa Unit held the Tampa Bay Solstice Festival in Florida back in June and Prussian Blue were the star attraction. A rather paltry total of 90 people showed up (including a Swedish tourist).

The event, including Lamb and Lynx’s performance, was filmed and between sets, the girls, in the words of the narrator, “showed their resolve when responding to a challenging hypothetical question”:

Interviewer: Okay, here’s the question: You’re offered $10 million to cut a record and make a music video. The only problem is your boyfriends in the video are not white boys. How do you respond?

Lamb: Ten million dollars is a lot of money, but I think our gene [I think the word is gene, though it doesn’t really make sense in the context] and our beliefs are a lot more important than that.

Lynx: Yeah, it is a lot of money. But if they’re just promoting another thing that we’d have to fix … you know, we’re trying to fix that. We don’t want to promote it. So I wouldn’t do it even if we did get money.

Lamb: Plus there would be a lot of little girls looking and watching the movie, and then they’d be like: “Oh, that’s okay then to do that.” So… [nods decisively].

I wonder what Lynx had in mind when she referred to fixing the problem of interracial dating?

Conspiracy Theory 9.11

If further proof is needed that April Gaede is seriously deranged, here is another of her recent (25th September) posts on the stormfront forums, this time discussing the September 11th terrorist attacks:

"Not only is the Bin Laden connection a fake BUT the entire claim made by the US government is false.

There are way to many things that dont make sense about that whole day. From the claims that each of the 4 hyjacked planes only had 1/4 of the usual amount of passangers, to the eyewitness reports of the planes that flew into the trade center having no windows and 'looking like transport planes' to the 16 foot hole in the Pentagon that was were the 175foot passenger jet supposedly fit.............there are alot more too."

April seems to have forgotten that bin Laden has already admitted he carried out the attacks.

Hamas Leader Killed

News that Israel have taken out another leader of Hamas or Islamic Jihad always comes as a mixed blessing. One less terrorist in the world, especially a leader, is obviously a thing to be welcomed. But then it becomes likely that in a few months' time, a group of innocent Israeli civilians will be murdered in retaliation. In this case, the Israeli security forces were about to arrest the leader of Hamas in Nablus when he opened fire on them. He was killed when the Israelis fired back.

April Defends Her Girls

Here are some posts by April Gaede taken from the stormfront forums. First, one she posted on November 4th in which she gave an example of the hate mail her daughters have been receiving of late:

"Here is a particulary pathetic example of hate mail the girls have received:

'i hope you whities die. i am white, but i hate myself because of people
like you. i hope you die of a terrible white flesh eating disease from
afrika. all living organisms on this planet came from the same single-celled
organism billions of years ago. apparently you and your friends failed
to keep evolving.' "

The following two posts were both made by April today after someone criticized her daughters' musical abilities:

"no I dont think I am overreacting. My kids are under alot of pressure and attack right now and they dont need to come to this forum and see you MEN post on here and make negative comment after negative comment about their well intentioned efforts."

"You obviously know little about how much guts it takes for 13 year old kids to get up on stage and perform in front of total strangers. If you think that knocking them will make them stronger then you need to consdier they have the whole G88D8888 world attacking them right now as well as misquoting and lying about them. The media seems to think that they can make up boldface lies about the girls and get away with it because of who they are. We dont need our own people trying to break us down.

april"

Many more posts about Prussian Blue can be found by browsing the home page.

"Why Corrupt Children?"

Over the last two weeks, I've read many comments written by people who oppose Prussian Blue and their message, ranging from civil expressions of sadness to obscene insults and death threats. But I think the best one I've read – the best argued, the most humane – was one I came across today on the (new) official Prussian Blue forums from a 16-year-old Jewish boy living in Australia:


from: Daniel Levy at: 09.11.2005 03:55
Subject: Why corrupt children?

This is directed to April Gaede. You sicken me. You gave not the chance to Lamb or Lynx to formulate their own opinions. From the crib, you nurtured within them your sick hatred. And what is this hatred of? A few different alleles in ones' genetic makeup.

"Rudolf Hess was a man of peace who wouldn't give up." What the hell kind of lie is that you're feeding to your children? Rudolf Hess helped conduct the killings of millions of Jews around Europe. Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg for a reason.

I ask you. How would you feel if you were black? Would you like being racially discriminated against? Black people, barring skin colour are the same as you, and in my opinion far better than scum like you, April Gaede. I'd love to hate your children, but that's impossible. They're simply a product of your intense and wasteful hatred.

You don't deserve to have children. I wonder, if your children had been brought up in an objective environment, if they would have developed a hatred of other races. It is simply inhumane to want to wipe out other human beings, simply because of their skin colour. If you cannot empathise with the people you are discriminating against, and put yourself in their shoes and realise that what you are doing is wrong, then you are forever lost to a life of hatred. You are also condemning your children to that same life.

I had a listen to a few of your daughters' songs. If you ask me, they're pretty good. A little work needs to be done on the vocals, but that will come with age. However, they're never going to make it into the limelight. They'll be sitting on the side getting raped by the media at every turn, and meeting severe backlash at every concert they play.

I am 16 from Australia, I am Jewish and half of my family got wiped out in the Holocaust. As a direct result of people who think like you. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels. They can all be likened to you. All sharing the same hatred, due to just the simple topical looks of people. Do you know what's funny though? Hitler envisioned a race that embodied everything that Aryan stood for. Blonde haired, blue eyed, tall, strong and fit.

Hitler was brown haired, brown eyed, short and stubby.

Hitler - the world's greatest hypocrite.

Goebbels too had a club foot.

The point I am trying to make here, is that that was the way we as humans are made. That is the miracle of the human being. To be so diverse that not a single person is alike. If you superbreed a race of blonde haired, blue eyed etc. people, what would be the point? There would be very little diversity.

I'm fairly sure that none of this will get through that thick skull of yours. You'd be too stubborn to change over the post of some 16 year old kid, but damned if it wasn't good getting all that off my chest.

To Lamb and Lynx, you're still young and it's not too late to change. If you read this post, take heed of it. For god's sakes. Hatred incites hatred which achieves nothing but pain, suffering and in extreme cases, war. By spreading hate, you're only fuelling conflict and conflict achieves nothing.

Sincerely,
Daniel Levy

P.S. Feel free to rebut any of this. I'm more than happy to argue this, and hopefully convince you to think otherwise.

The Netanya Massacre

I'm in the middle of writing something on what I sense is a change for the better in the tone of Guardian op-ed columns in recent months, which I suspect is partly a reaction to the London bombings in July. More on that later. But it reminded me of the response of the British press, including The Guardian, to the so-called Jenin massacre in the West Bank in April 2002.


In March 2002, 103 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians:

2 March .......... 11 killed, including two sisters aged 7 and 3 (pictured below), by suicide bomber



3 March .......... 3 killed in a shooting attack

5 March .......... 3 killed by gunmen in a restaurant; 1 woman killed; 81-year-old man killed on a bus by suicide bomber

7 March .......... 5 eighteen-year-old lads killed

9 March .......... 2 killed, including nine-month-old baby, in a hotel lobby; 11 killed by suicide bomber in café

12 March .......... 1 killed; 5 more killed when gunmen opened fire on vehicles

17 March .......... 18-year-old girl killed

20 March .......... 3 killed on bus by suicide bomber; 3 more killed including pregnant woman

24 March .......... 1 woman killed; 1 man killed

27 March .......... 28 killed by suicide bomber in the hall of the Park Hotel in Netanya. Eighteen of them were aged 70 or over. Two more died later of their wounds.

28 March .......... 4 members of one family killed

29 March .......... 2 worshipers aged 70 and 79 killed on their way to synagogue; 2 killed including 17-year-old girl when a 16-year-old girl blew herself up inside a supermarket

31 March .......... 15 killed by suicide bomber


In direct response to the March 27 attack in the hotel in Netanya, which was launched by Hamas from Jenin, the Israelis launched Operation Defensive Shield on March 28. On April 3, they entered Jenin, igniting a battle that raged for nine days. During the battle, the Palestinian authorities claimed that 800 Palestinians had been killed. Others said thousands. The Guardian wrote that Israel's conduct during the battle was "every bit as repellent" as the September 11 terrorist attack in New York. The Evening Standard referred to it as "genocide." Writing in The Times, Janine di Giovanni commented that "rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life."

But the final casualty figures were as follows:

Total number of Palestinian civilians killed: 22
Total number of Palestinian militants killed: 34
Total number of Israeli soldiers killed: 23

So, more Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians on just one day (March 27) than Palestinian civilians were killed by Israelis during the nine days of the battle of Jenin. Clearly, it is Netanya that should be remembered as a massacre, not Jenin.

Major Iranian Newspaper Cosies up to Holocaust Denier

The Tehran Times, one of Iran's main newspapers, printed an interview today with Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson entitled "Zionist power stems from West's belief in 'Holocaust' myth." In the interview, Faurisson speaks of "the sham of an alleged German project to exterminate the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers and the alleged six million Jewish victims." Holocaust deniers are fortunately very much marginalized in the West, but they are regularly interviewed and referenced by the mainstream media in the Middle East. Muslim countries seem to have put on hold their 60-year, so far abysmally unsuccessful attempt to destroy Israel militarily. But Faurisson recommends another means of attack:

"Islamic countries need to destroy the Jews' and Zionists' veritable 'atomic weapon', that is, the appalling and gigantic imposture of the 'Holocaust' that up to now has been poisoning the Western world and is henceforth imposed on us by the UN in the entire world. In your public demonstrations and talks, repeat after the revisionists: 'The "Holocaust" is a lie'. Have the courage to proclaim this salutary truth."

Professor Faurisson clearly is not someone who hopes for better relations between Israel and the Arab world.

April Slams the "Jewish Media"

In a recent post, I referred to a report in Newsweek that the Gaede girls had been in tears as a result of the backlash following the ABC Primetime interview, aired three weeks ago, and had gone into hiding. It's not hard to understand why. The official Prussian Blue forum, now closed, the comments on the Prussian Blue blog, now disabled, and the girls' myspace.com member profiles, now cancelled, were all attacked by scores, maybe hundreds of people with critical comments, insults, death threats, and hardcore interracial porn pics. One person posted the following:

"I hope you all die and those two girls die in some freak shovel accident where the shovels get lodged into their cunts and then stuck to the rims of a hummer as it falls off a cliff."

Not a nice thing to say about a pair of 13-year-old girls, especially when they might very well read the comment themselves. Even the poster admitted he had gone too far.

Another person, who posted a message saying that the girls should be shot, ended up in an e-mail fight with their mother, the dreaded – and dreadful – April. When the poster referred to the fact that there had been no takers of Lamb and Lynx's supplies among the white hurricane victims, as shown in the Primetime segment, April responded with a predictable antisemitic rant:

"I guess people of your sort are too stupid to notice when the Jewish media heavily edits a piece. The Jewish media didn't let you know about all of the people on that trip who took our literature and our supplies did they. And the Jewish media never lies do they?"

Another Hadera Victim

Genya Polis, a 66-year-old Israeli injured in the October 26th terrorist attack in Hadera, died from her wounds on Sunday, taking the death toll to six. Four of the victims were over 60. Islamic Jihad must be proud.

Straight from the Heart

Fortunately, my obsession with Prussian Blue seems to be waning some what. But I can't resist posting some more pearls of neo-fascist wisdom from the Aryan twins. Apparently, a couple of months ago, Lynx and Lamb joined the online community at myspace.com. Shortly after the ABC interview aired, someone posted their user IDs online so that anyone could contact them. Needless to say, they soon cancelled their memberships. But before this happened, some of their messages were copied and pasted onto the tuckermax.com message board, allowing anyone to read the unadulterated ramblings of the girls before TV rendered them infamous.

The messages seem to confirm what was evident from the ABC interview: that Lamb is much less comfortable spewing forth the Nazi filth than her sister, and in fact is much less committed to the cause. (Lynx, on the other hand, seems to be much less comfortable using foul language.)

First up is Lamb, eulogizing their sisterly bond:

"I have a fraternal twin sister named Lynx who is my best friend. We know EVERYTHING about eachother. We always tell eachother everything. Well, most of everything...Lynx is bigger than me though I am taller...She has big shoulders so I always get the cloths that she grows out of....Pretty cool."

Lynx also starts off with a display of familial affection:

"Hey!!My name is Lynx , I am thirteen and I am a twin. I have a younger baby sister named Dresden and she is the cutest baby sister in the whole frickin' world."

But after some more drivel about her likes and dislikes, she gets to the heart of things:

"I am racist and don't really care what you think of me because I am who I am and I don't need you if you don't except me for that." (I think she means "accept.")

She also indicates that she's aware her perception of things doesn't make her that popular:

"I hate how you have to be a certain something these days to fit in. I will just let you know that I like believing what I do and if you can't understand that, you can buzz off."

But the most revealing quote definitely comes from Lamb:

"Just got back from Ixtapa, Mexico. I met this fucking hot french kid named Sammy who was born in France but moved to Mexico when he was one. So he can speak French and Spanish fluently. He is really cute and isn't very good at speaking English but can still speak it fairly well. My dad screamed at me tons of times but oh well. Sammy was there to sooth me!"

It's just as well that she was on vacation with her father because I'm quite sure her mother would not have approved of Sammy. First of all, she would probably have found his "chattering" in a foreign language annoying. But more importantly, being French, he's not even a true whitey since pure Aryan blood only runs through the veins of Celts, Germans, and Scandinavians.

So the good news is that Lamb clearly has the potential to one day become a race traitor.

The Hidden Face of War

Though it might be difficult to believe, these photographs were taken a few days ago in Baghdad. They show a side of Iraq that the mainstream media (MSM) completely ignores. They are among several photos taken during the recent festival of Eid - a three-day holiday following the holy month of Ramadan - that were recently posted on a blog run by the photographer's brother. The blogger, Sooni, is a 35-year-old IT manager from Baghdad. In his "About me" profile, he gives just two words: "Free man!"

Last month, Sooni posted an answer to the following question that was sent to him by an American blogger: "What do I tell the liberals that say we should leave? Do the majority of Iraqis hate the Americans and want them out? Are they even aware or grateful of the sacrifices that the soldiers and their families have to endure?"

The last paragraph of Sooni's response reads as follows:

"Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed in terrorist acts but they burst in millions to the polling stations to defend their freedom and because most of them believe it’s the only way to gain the peace back, the freedom that was granted to the Iraqis by the Americans soldiers, and yes the Iraqis are fully aware of what the Americans have done to Iraq and they are really grateful and I wont be surprised if we built a statue for the brave American soldiers who fall in Iraq defending their country and people and Iraq and its people and the whole free world."

Of course, this is the opinion of just one Iraqi, but it is an opinion that is rarely heard in the MSM and one that might be more common than we in the West realize. About a year after the invasion, a poll of 3,444 Iraqis, representative of 93% of the population, revealed that 19% of Iraqis saw the coalition forces as liberators; that is, about 1 in 5. A further 8% said they regarded coalition forces as both liberators and occupiers. This means that although some had mixed feelings, more than 1 out of every 4 Iraqis saw the coalition forces as liberators a year after the invasion (admittedly this poll was conducted before the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal erupted). The respondents were also asked how they had felt about the coalition forces at the time of the invasion. Forty-three percent said they had seen them as liberators back then, and another 9% said they had considered them as both liberators and occupiers. In other words, 1 out of every 2 Iraqis considered the Americans and their allies as liberators when they first invaded Iraq.

Since the monstrous birth of the insurgency, the anti-war crowd have delighted in ridiculing Dick Cheney's pre-invasion prediction that "we will be greeted as liberators." They have enjoyed pointing out that the Iraqi people did not receive the invading forces with outstretched arms, or shower them with gifts of flowers and chocolate. But if, as this poll shows, half of the population did see them as liberators, why weren't they greeted as such? Well, the fact is that to some extent they were. All the following photographs of grateful, happy, sometimes ecstatic Iraqi children and their families were snapped by American troops during the first two months following the invasion. I have never seen one photograph like this in the MSM.

Gifts of Life

Astonishing and heart-warming story from the Middle East. The father of a Palestinian boy who was accidentally shot on Thursday in Jenin by Israeli soldiers when they mistook his water pistol for the real thing, has donated his son's organs to Israelis, including two Jews. "I feel that my son has entered the heart of every Israeli."

Sisters

"Lord help the mister, who comes between me and my sister!" (as sung by Prussian Blue)




Two victims of that "great man" Hitler ........... and two admirers.


Not even Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson, who has argued very unsuccessfully that The Diary of Anne Frank is fake, disputes that Anne Frank and her sister Margot died as a result of Nazi persecution during the Holocaust. Though perhaps Holocaust-denier Lynx Gaede would.

Prussian Blue Speak Out

Click here for poem Lynx Gaede wrote when she was 10.

Below is a transcript of the televised parts of the ABC interview with Lynx and Lamb. I have cruelly left in all their hesitations and verbal tics. But this is not just to expose them as a pair of inarticulate teens, which I don’t think they are. Rather, it’s to highlight the obvious discomfort they felt in discussing these subjects. At times, they seem to habitually lunge for a racial slur, then check themselves, hesitate, and come out with a politically correct term. I guess that’s a good sign – at least they are aware that their views are controversial (which, given their upbringing, they might not be). They also pull rather odd faces at times and are both notably fidgety.


Interviewer: You have been compared to the Olsen twins.
Lamb: We like the Olsen twins.

Interviewer: What does 88 mean?
Lamb (struggling): 88 is the … it’s… Of course, “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so it’s … you know…
Lynx (becoming impatient): It stands for “Heil Hitler.”
Lamb: …“Heil Hitler.” It’s just like a comradic thing. It’s just like a … you know: “I believe what you believe.”
Interviewer: What does 14 words mean?
Lamb: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Interviewer: So, the term “mud” – what does that refer to?
Lamb: A non-white
Interviewer: A non-white?
Lamb: Yes.
Lynx (shaking her head for some reason): Yeah.
Interviewer: What does it imply?
Lamb: Instead of saying, you know, saying a racial slur, it’s just like: “Oh, mud.” They call us “cracker” we call them “mud.”

Interviewer: Tell me what happens in Ethnic Cleansing [a video game]?
Lynx: You kill … uhm … you kill … err … Blacks, and then you try to get to this one area…

Interviewer (summarizing): Skinheads are going through a ghetto shooting Blacks and Mexicans who make gorilla-sounding noises.
Lamb: Yeah. [Pulls her lips so far into her mouth that they completely disappear. I have no idea what this expression means.]
Lynx: It’s kind of fun.

Interviewer: Well, it does bring up the Hitler question.
Lamb: Yeah it does, but…[I wonder what Lamb was going to say here before being cut off?]
Interviewer: And what is your opinion on Hitler?
Lamb: I think that he had, he ha … he wanted to preserve his race.
Interviewer: He had six million Jews executed.
Lynx (scoffing): I think that’s an exaggeration.
Interviewer: You do?
Lynx (falling back on her years of scholarly research): I, I honestly believe there weren’t even that many Jews alive back then.
Interviewer: Is Hitler someone you admire or someone you don’t admire?
Lynx (talking over Lamb): I think he was a great man.
Lamb (talking over Lynx): I think that he had, he had a good belief…
Interviewer: Hold on. Let me hear one at a time. [To Lynx] You think he was a great man?
Lynx: Yeah, I think he did a lot … he had a lot of good ideas.

Lynx: We’re proud of being white. We want to keep being white. We want our people to stay white. We don’t want to, you know, just be a big muddle. We don’t want to…. We just want to preserve our race.


But the star of the news segment was not Lamb or Lynx, and certainly not their mother. The twins sent a box of supplies to the victims of Katrina, but they were only to be handed out to white people. Some of their mother’s fascist friends (I assume) ventured down south to distribute the supplies, along with leaflets pushing their white pride agenda. One white Mississippian woman in particular was outraged by the racist message:

“I can’t believe y’all down here strictly to serve white people. We don’t friggin’ want y’all here. Y’all need to leave this area. Everybody eats and breathes and everybody [inaudible because of the racist pigs talking over her]. If y'all just here to serve white people, then … screw y’all! Get out of here!”

Well put, hun.

In the end, not one of their white brethren would accept the girls’ supplies.

















Lamb, beaming with Scottish pride.

The Ideology of Hate

A standard defence of white supremacists, or white separatists/nationalists as they like to call themselves, is that they are not preaching hate, merely separatism. That is, they do not hate other races but just want nothing to do with them. This is one of the defences that the 11-year-old Lamb Gaede had evidently been trained to make when she phoned up KERN radio in her hometown of Bakersfield two years ago. “We don’t hate ‘em,” she says, referring to Blacks, “we just want our own living space.” I must admit that I believe that Lamb doesn’t hate, but I’m not so sure about her mother:

“I find other races annoying. I don’t like their chattering in other languages, I don’t like the way they look. I mean, 99 per cent of them, they’re just not pretty. I don’t want to be around them. I don’t like the fact they seem to make everything just dirty and messy wherever they are. I don’t like to be around them. I want to be around all white people.”

This invective was delivered to Louis Theroux, who spent several days in the company of the Gaede family in 2003 while making a documentary about white supremacists. In his words: “Though April claims not to hate other races but simply to love her own race, the truth is she clearly does hate other races – she has a contempt for them that borders on loathing.”

An even worse example of rabid hatred comes from the pen of William Pierce. Pierce, who died three years ago, was a physicist, a high-ranking member of the American Nazi party, and the founder of the white supremacist group the National Alliance. He was also a friend of the Gaede family – Lamb refers to him in a song she wrote: “Dr. Pierce, a man so wise, helped so many of us open our eyes, and see the future for what it could be: a future for our Race’s eternity.” The wise doctor’s infamous novel, The Turner Diaries – considered by the FBI to be the primary influence on Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and described by Pierce himself as a “blueprint” for a coming race war – recounts the story of how a group called the “Organization” take over the US and then proceed to murder every Jew, every Black, and every “race traitor” in the country before attacking Israel with nuclear weapons. Of the Jews, the novel’s protagonist, Earl Turner, writes: “We’ll go to the uttermost ends of the earth to hunt down the last of Satan’s spawn.”

This is racist, genocidal hate in its purest form. It is not something you are born with, nor is it something you are taught. It is a feeling that is born out of the pain, hardship, and failure that in rich countries are normally only experienced in adulthood. An emotionally healthy individual does not stumble across the ideology of white supremacism and suddenly realize that it makes sense. Rather, an emotionally brutalized individual will develop hate first; the ideology is then found to be appealing because it legitimizes that hate. But for the Gaede twins, who have led quite an easy life so far, such hatred could not ever have developed. It’s not surprising that Theroux found the girls “charming and well-adjusted.” That they have been indoctrinated by a fallacious ideology they don’t really understand, but also lack the hate that sustains it, is quite apparent in this extract from the conversation between Lamb and radio talk-show host Inga Barks mentioned above:

Inga: If you could pick your neighbours, you would not pick a black person to live next to you?
Lamb: Correct.
Inga: Why?
Lamb: Just because.
Inga: I need a better reason than that, honey.
Lamb goes silent.

Just because is the logic of a child. The idea has not been thought through, just accepted. Ultimately, the only answer to the question Barks asks is: “Because I hate Blacks.” On the radio show, Lamb comes across as sweet, polite, unaggressive, and mostly unsure of herself. Pretty much what you would expect from a girl that age. If anything, she seems younger than her 11 years – no doubt the effect of being home-schooled. The only thing unusual about her is the ideas she is spouting. She cannot answer the above question, not because she’s afraid of admitting to hate, but because she doesn’t hate. Her answer is an admission that she doesn’t know why she wouldn’t want to live next to a black person; it is just something that she’s been taught by the racist, hate-filled adults, like her mother and Pierce, that have surrounded her for her entire life.

Prussian Blues

According to an article in the current issue of Newsweek, poor Lamb and Lynx have been forced to go into hiding. Their lawyer, Edgar Steele, reported that "the girls were in tears". The problem was the public outcry after the ABC TV segment (mentioned in my last post) aired last month. I guess this is what happens when you claim on television, as Lynx did, that Hitler was a great man.

Lamb and Lynx

Click here for poem Lynx Gaede wrote when she was 10.


Lamb and Lynx Gaede were born on 30 June 1992 in Fresno, California. They are fraternal twins. Until recently, they were home-schooled by their mother, April, who taught them to be proud of their heritage and their race. They have a baby sister called Dresden.

The twins started performing together when they were nine. Lamb, who’s slightly taller than her sister, plays the guitar and also writes some of their songs. Lynx plays the violin and is currently learning the bass guitar. They both sing. Lamb loves Andalusian horses, malamutes, Boston terriers, and cats, while Lynx’s favourite animals are pug dogs. They also love Barney the purple dinosaur!

They chose the name Prussian Blue because part of their heritage is Prussian German. Also, they have blue eyes, and they just think that Prussian blue is a pretty colour. Their first CD, Fragment of the Future, was released last year and they’re currently working on their second album. One of their most recent songs, “The Stranger,” is based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling (at a recent concert, one of the sisters said she couldn’t remember Kipling’s first name, then the other joked that the truth was she just didn’t know how to pronounce it!).

But the girls are not just talented musicians; they're also very smart. Last year at their junior high school, they both earned the Principal’s List award for their excellent grades. Also, Lynx was nominated "7th grade Princess" and Lamb won the school History award. They've even found time to act, appearing in the horror film Dark Walker in 2003.

They’re already in the process of becoming big stars. In 2003, they were featured in a BBC documentary. More recently, they were the subject of a segment of ABC’s Primetime, and the Sun newspaper in the UK wrote an article about them. As Rich Lindstrom said, “These gals will be breaking new ground, and will also capture the imagination of young boys and girls all across the world.”

Prussian Blue

While randomly browsing blogs today, I came across a post about two delightful 13-year-old twin musicians, Lynx and Lamb Gaede, who perform together as Prussian Blue. In an interview they gave when they were 12, they explained where the name of their outfit came from:

"Part of our heritage is Prussian German. Also our eyes are blue, and Prussian Blue is just a really pretty color."

Charming. But there's more:

"There is also the discussion of the lack of 'Prussian Blue' coloring in the so-called gas chambers in the concentration camps. We think it might make people question some of the inaccuracies of the 'Holocaust' myth."

Young, cute, talented, and neo-fascist. These lovely girls, who have been playing together since they were nine, are Holocaust-denying white supremacists. They perform folk-influenced renditions of racist hymns by bands like Skrewdriver and Brutal Attack, idolize such great men as Rudolph Hess, and lament the decline of the white race:

"It seems like smart white girls who have good eugenics are more interested in making money in a career or partying than getting married and having a family."

It comes as no surprise to learn that their mother manages the duo and also writes many of their lyrics. Here's an example of Mrs. Gaede's scintillating verse taken from Prussian Blue's own website:

When a mother's only children belong to her no more.
And black masked men with guns come bashing down the doors
...
Aryan man awake!
How much more will you take?
Turn that fear to hate!

At 13, these girls are on the verge of those wondrous years of adolescent rebellion. So I guess there is still some hope that they'll come to reject the sickening ideology they've had thrust upon them as children.

Moral Nonequivalence

Islamic Jihad say that the suicide attack that killed five Israelis in Hadera yesterday was launched in retaliation for the assassination of their West Bank leader by Israeli forces earlier this week. They have a twisted sense of moral justice. The Israelis kill the leader of a militant group. The militant group murder five civilians in revenge. This AP story that reports the attack shows a picture of a grieving relative: a distraught young girl holding up a photograph of her dead brother. The ripple of sympathy I began to feel for her immediately died when I realized her brother was the suicide bomber. Don't worry, honey, he's in Paradise now.

UPDATE 28/10, 1:45 AM

Charles Johnson at little green footballs regularly points out what he sees as the liberal (read anti-war, anti-Israel) biases of major press agencies such as Associated Press and Reuters. I'm beginning to see what he means. The AP article and accompanying photograph linked above keep changing as events in the Middle East unfold following the Hadera suicide attack. But I still haven't seen any pictures there of the Israeli victims or their grief-stricken relatives. When I checked in several hours ago, there was a picture of more of the bomber's relatives. The current photo, accompanying an article reporting the killing of seven Palestinians by the Israelis, shows a group of Palestinians swarming around the wreckage of a car destroyed by an Israeli missile.

On the other hand, though barely a day has elapsed since the attack in Hadera, this Israeli site provides names, ages, and photos of the real victims, along with photos of some of the funerals that took place yesterday, including photos of grieving relatives. Somehow I find it much easier to sympathize with these young mourners.

Note that the Israeli response to the murder of five civilians is a targeted strike against Islamic Jihad militants, not Palestinian civilians. The Israelis display here a slightly better notion of justice.

The Politics of Body Counting

It's hard fighting a war in the age of a mass media, especially one that sees impartiality as one of its primary virtues. Yet to ignore some facts and focus on others, as the media does, is in fact a form of partiality, but a more subtle one than simply presenting your own opinion. I'm thinking particularly of the media's obsession with the number of American soldiers who have died in Iraq. Several times over the last year, I have spent an hour or so searching the Web in vain for an estimate of the number of insurgents killed. It really struck me as odd that such a figure was so difficult to find. Of course, there's no doubt that it's more difficult to estimate, but the US military has provided enough estimates of insurgents killed at various engagements that it would at least be possible to come up with a rough figure. The Brookings Institute provides an estimate of the number of "neutralised" insurgents in its fascinating, regularly updated Iraq Index , but no distinction is made between those killed and those captured. Is it really necessary to be reminded of the number of Americans killed in the war every time there is a new casualty? Is it really impartial when there is no similar attempt to tally the number of insurgent dead?

As awful as the death of even one American soldier is, the death rate in the Iraq War is actually extremely low. The combat death rate -- that is, the number of combat deaths per month or per year -- in the current war is lower than that in any other war America has fought except the War of Independence (and that is only because Washington et al. spent so much of the seven years of that war hiding from the British). It's become standard rhetoric recently to compare the war in Iraq to the Vietnam War, but during the worst year in Vietnam, 1968, the Americans lost around 15,000 troops in combat, whereas over the last 12 months in Iraq only about 700 Americans have been killed by the insurgents -- over 20 times fewer. During World War II, almost 300,000 Americans died in combat. For the number of combat deaths to reach that amount in Iraq, at the current death rate, the war would have to continue for another 500 years. (See table below for a comparison of the annual death rates of all the major wars America has fought.)

I believe that most Americans consider that the sacrifice made during World War II was worth it to defeat fascism in Europe and Japan. Is it not worth making a far, far smaller sacrifice to defeat fascism in the Middle East?

US military hostile deaths* during major wars
War	Total Deaths			Duration (yrs.)		Ann. Av.		Relative to Ann. Av. For Iraq War
Revolutionary War	4,435			7.6		584		X1.0
War of 1812	2,260			2.5		904		X1.5
Mexican War	1,733			1.4		1,223		X2.0
US Civil War	191,963			4.0		48,000		X80
Span. Am. War	385			0.3		1,155		X1.9
World War I	53,402			1.6		33,727		X56
World War II	291,557			3.7		77,750		X130
Korean War	33,741			3.0		11,250		X19
Vietnam War	47,369			7.5		6,315		X11
Gulf War	148			0.1		1,283		X2.1
Iraq War	1,430**			2.4		597		NA
*i.e. does not include deaths from accidents or disease.
**as at early August 2005

Chaos of Ideas

The name of this blog is taken from Nietzsche's Will to Power. "Originally a chaos of ideas. The ideas that were consistent with one another remained, the greater number perished -- and are perishing." Nietzsche was describing the origin of logic, the jostling among ideas for supremacy. In his view the idea of logic survived, not because it was the closest to the truth, but because it was the most amenable to the drive for power. In fact, because it is bound to the idea that things are equal, it rests on a "fundamental falsification." This struggle for survival among ideas currently characterises this blog. I imagine that what will be written here initially will have the appearance of chaos, a chaos of ideas, but over time some consistency will emerge and then the specific nature of this blog will become known -- to me the writer as well as the reader.