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PSALM 137

by Zack Lieberberg

Long time ago, as a young man, fresh out of Moscow University, I lived for a few years in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, which was, at the time, one of the 15 Soviet republics. Those were not the most enjoyable years of my life, but they gave me my first-hand experience of living among Muslims and the basis for understanding them, their grievances, and their dreams. More often than not, those bits of understanding were gained from isolated, seemingly meaningless episodes.

One such episode occurred on a summer morning, before dawn, when, for a reason I no longer remember, I had to go somewhere with a friend of mine. I was waiting for him near the Aeroflot ticket office where he was supposed to pick me up. He was late. I felt sleepy and bored. The streets were empty, with the exception of a small group of people standing in a tight circle near the corner at the end of the block. Judging by their clothes and by the heavy bags they were holding, they were Azeri peasants on their way to the marketplace. They were all looking at something located at their feet inside the circle. They resembled people watching the victim of a fatal accident while waiting for the authorities to pick up the body.

But there had been no accident. I decided to come closer to take a look. The group paid no attention to me. They were completely absorbed in the spectacle unfolding on the sidewalk in front of them. They were watching it in reverent silence. Their rough, peasant faces were solemn and seemed illuminated by an inner light of the kind that can sometimes be seen on the face of a man when he is reading a favorite book which he hadn't touched for years. He knows what's going to happen, but that knowledge does not diminish his pleasure. Not having ever witnessed an execution, I imagine that those who have might have a somewhat similar expression on their faces: the complex combination of the sadness of the event, the physical revulsion at the inevitable details, and, overall, the profound feeling of rightfulness of what's happening.

Inside their circle, nervously glancing at the silent, immobile spectators, two stray dogs were hurriedly mating.

For a few moments after they disengaged and went their separate ways, the peasants continued standing there, looking at the now empty stage, keeping their dramatic silence while the light gradually faded from their unshaven faces. Finally, one of them moved, and the entire group slowly came back to life. Without a single word, they looked at each other's faces, and the degree of mutual understanding I saw in their eyes could only be a result of shared intimacy. At last, they too began moving apart, and, for a fraction of a second, the disintegrating group looked almost as dramatic as Rodin's The Citizens of Calais.

I was reminded of that completely inconsequential episode when I saw a photograph showing a group of Muslims burning a Danish flag. They looked just as immobile and as solemnly satisfied as those Azeri peasants. The resemblance was not accidental. In both cases, the Muslims, cruelly deprived of the real thing, found comfort in whatever substitution was available.

The Azeri peasants, in accordance woth Muslim laws and traditions were deprived of a normal sex life to such a degree that I don't think they knew such a thing existed. Everything about sex that we consider normal constitutes the most depraved debauchery to the Muslims; we, on the other hand, gently disapprove of their zoo- and pedophilia.

The flag-burners, on the other hand, were deprived by cruel circumstances of an immediate opportunity to wash their hands in the blood of the infidel, which, under the same Muslim laws and customs, is both their sacred right and sacred duty. In both cases, the substitution was precious and, at the same time, lacking.

The major difference between the two groups is that the Azeri peasants will never have their dreams -- whatever they might be -- fully realized. Unlike them, the flag burners have a pretty fair chance to realize theirs.

The media report the latest fit of Muslim rage with even more sympathy than they displayed while reporting the recent Muslim riots in France. According to the New York Times, those riots were caused by France's failure to assimilate the immigrants.

Being an immigrant myself, I can comment on that with confidence. I came to the country of my choice, the United States of America, uninvited. I am forever grateful to America for letting me come and stay and for treating me equally under its laws. I have assimilated myself to the degree which made me feel comfortable, no more and no less. I never expected America to be assimilating me. What's more, I would never choose to live in a country that would make an effort at assimilating me. The Soviet Union kept trying to assimilate me for the first 34 years of my life, and failed.

Some of my friends are immigrants themselves. Their degrees of assimilation vary, and some of them are much less assimilated than I am. I know a lady from China who has lived in this country for 20 years. Once I invited her for lunch to an Italian restaurant. She was unfamiliar with even the most common dishes. She thought that the word Pizza was the name of a store chain, like Te Amo. She was surprised to discover that some of that foreign food was actually palatable. She was terribly unassimilated, and it caused her some very serious problems. Nevertheless, I guarantee that under no circumstances would she ever consider addressing her problems by burning a car. She was not a Muslim.

The excuse the Muslims have used this time seems almost reasonable in comparison. How many times have you read that they consider any image of Mohammad an insult to their religion? Guess what? That's just another Muslim lie.

There is a book sitting on my desk, The Legacy of Jihad by Dr. Andrew Bostom. Its cover is adorned with a depiction of the massacre of the Jews of Medina. Presiding over the massacre is the non-prophet himself, along with his (if I am not mistaken) cousin, Ali, and their faceless wives. You don't need to be an art expert to realize that it is a Muslim painting. Produced in the 19th century, it betrays its author's complete ignorance of the laws of perspective and other basic techniques used by European artists for many centuries. Flames in that painting look like a plywood model of a cactus, and it takes an effort to figure out which of the victims are already down and which are still standing.

In short, this Islamic masterpiece does not quite reach the level of sophistication achieved by Cro-Magnon artists some 30,000 years earlier. Nevertheless, it provides an accurate, even if artless, depiction of one of the many genocidal episodes comprising the entire history of Islam and the genocidal blood thirst that constitutes its essence. I have never heard that Muslims objected to that picture, even though their beloved fuehrer, if you look closely, appears to be severely constipated.

Generally, I believe that people -- individually or collectively -- never deserve more respect than they show towards others. When was the last time observant Muslims demonstrated any respect for anything or anyone outside their death cult? The answer is, never. But then, the question itself is tricky, since, in the Muslim world, respect is synonymous with fear and submission. It gets even trickier if you recall that the so-called Muslim world -- every square inch of it -- was taken by them from its rightful owners by ways of jihad, the Islamic war of conquest and genocide continuing non-stop for 14 centuries.

Do you remember how, in 2002, a group of Arab terrorists escaping capture by the IDF barricaded themselves inside the Church of the Nativity and took hostage the priests who happened to be inside? The Arabs did not hesitate to urinate and defecate inside the church. Imagine the reaction of the Muslim world if infidels had done something similar to the most insignificant mosque on earth.

Although the Church of the Nativity constitutes one of the most important Christian holy places, not a single Muslim objected to its desecration. Christians did not demand any apology from that particular group of Muslims, or their leaders, or Islamic authorities in general. There was no anti-Muslim backlash in any Christian country. Instead, Christians, following their 2000-year-old tradition, blamed the Jews for the incident. Jews, faithful as ever to their own customs, did not respond to the new libel with a backlash against the Christians either.

This demonstrates the importance of anti-Semitism in the world affairs. To the villains, it offers a convenient scapegoat. To the majority of their intended victims, it offers a comforting delusion that the villains are after someone else. This simple tactic allows our common enemy to pluck us out one by one, and every time we lose one of ours, we delude ourselves into thinking that they will never come to our door.

They most certainly will, just as they have come to the door of Denmark. The Christian response is as cowardly as the Israeli response to the Arab atrocities on its territory. Take the boycott of Danish goods, for example. What would be the appropriate response of the civilized world? Any response as long as it is meaningful. But not a single Western country, not a single Western manufacturer has taken its goods off the shelves in the Muslim world out of solidarity with Denmark's stand for the freedom of expression.

Was there ever any danger of such a response? Of course, not. We are doing everything in our power to fulfill Lenin's prophecy about selling to our enemies the rope on which they will hang us.

What would be the appropriate American response to the accusation of mistreatment of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay? The immediate confiscation of every single copy of the Koran from the prisoners. Is there any danger of that? Of course not. It is far more important for us to remain politically correct than to win the war unleashed on us by the Muslims.

Every lame anti-terror measure of the Bush administration is being malevolently scrutinized for possible violations of our constitutional rights and erosion of our freedoms. I'll tell you what constitutes the vilest, the most dangerous violation of my constitutional rights, what threatens my freedoms more than anything else. It is the ever growing influence of Islam in this country. How hard is it to understand that the most important component of freedom is not listed in the Bill of Rights because it is taken for granted like the oxygen in the air we breathe? How hard is it to understand that the most vital component of freedom is physical safety?

You cannot be free if you are not safe. You cannot be safe in your own country when its Muslim population is growing. You cannot be safe in this world when Islam is spreading like metastasized cancer, and Western governments, including our own, instead of doing anything at all to oppose it, compete with each other in their expressions of abject dhimmitude.

But there has not been any terrorist attack inside the country in more than 4 years, you might object. Very well, let us ask why. Is it due to the heroic efforts and unbelievable efficiency of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA? To a degree, yes, although juries composed of decent American citizens routinely undermine their successes. But these organizations, by their very essence, can only provide passive, defensive measures, and you know as well as I do that no war can be won by passive, defensive measures alone.

The truth is that our enemies do not need to commit another atrocity right now. The mass migration of Muslims to the United States continues. In a couple of generations, there will be enough of them to vote the Constitution out and Sharia in. When our policies begin threatening the success of their venture, there will be another terrorist act in the US, and our leaders, along with their colleagues from Western Europe, will obediently make the necessary adjustments.

Our misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq do nothing to prevent that from happening. The administration must have realized long ago that our military presence there does nothing to diminish the threat of terrorism; that's why they substituted the original, unreacheable, goal of our invasion with the chimera of establishing democracy in the Middle East. That's why Osama bin Laden keeps dictating his letters to the American people.

The only tangible result of our absurdly benevolent conquest is the ongoing deterioration and impending destruction of the only democracy that is possible in that poisonous region.

Once the imams and ayatollahs established that Western voting rituals, although meaningless, do not contradict Sharia, the Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Arab-occupied territories of Israel went to the voting booths. In Afghanistan, the election was as meaningless as it used to be in the Soviet Union, where people were forced to cast their vote for the only candidate on the list. In Iraq, it brought to power people openly hostile to us and our goals, but that was inevitable since everyone in Iraq is hostile to us and our goals. In Israel, the Arabs cheerfully used the occasion to shamelessly demonstrate that they are not a "people", but a terrorist organization.

Nevertheless, we continue treating the nobody called Hamid Karzai as an ally. We continue pretending that the death of our soldiers in Iraq does something good to this country. And we are holding our breath waiting to see if Hamas will accepts Israel's right to exist. Why isn't Hamas worried whether Israel will accept its right to exist?

Twenty-six years ago, Iran attacked the United States and took 66 of our citizens hostage. The general consensus was that the United States was powerless to respond to the Iranian aggression since that might lead to the execution of the hostages. Unfortunately, the United States accepted this cowardly point of view.

It was cowardly because, at that time, Iran could not, even in theory, harm more than the 66 hostages they were holding. The United States, however, could easily hold hostage their entire country, with a clear, credible promise to unleash the wrath of God on it for any harm they might have caused to their captives.

A minimally decent person in place of Jimmy Carter, would have given the ayatollahs 24 hours to deliver the hostages and the 500 revolutionary students who had invaded the embassy, and, if they failed to meet the deadline, proceed with the systematic and thorough destruction of Iran's "holy" places, elite residential areas, oil installations and whatever else it was necessary to incinerate in order to ensure that the new Iranian regime would forever remain the most convincing proof of Islam's unshakeable peacefulness. Even if the "revolutionary students" were stupid enough to harm their captives, no Muslim would ever again contemplate taking Americans hostage or flying our planes into our skyscrapers.

But Jimmy C. was not the kind of a guy who would take their little ones and dash them against the rock. He has always preferred to see our little ones dashed against the rock, which is exactly what earned him his Nobel Peace Prize. Today, 26 years later, one of the organizers of that attack on the United States is leading the Iranian front of global jihad in the official capacity of the president of the Islamic Republic and is about to acquire nuclear weapons. What are we going to do? What can we do?

We can do a lot. We are perfectly capable of stopping jihad forever by next Wednesday. Instead, we will do nothing, because taking Babylon's little ones and dashing them against the rock takes the courage we no longer possess.

We, my dear friends, are not really that different from those Azeri peasants. Only, instead of stray dogs, we are silently, passively watching the unfolding of a new holocaust.

Zack Lieberberg is a mathematician who works in the computer field. He was born in Russia and now lives in the United States.

This article was translated from the Russian by Yashiko Sagamori. It originally appeared on
http://www.middleeastfacts.com/yashiko/