Grand Street Pavers

Hayat Boumeddiene


Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
And here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
Oh, Mama, is this really the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

(c) Bob Dylan

Back when I was attending UNC in the early '60s I read a book by Eric Hoffer called True Believer. It compared the politics of radical communists to the beliefs and actions of religious fanatics, suggesting that there was something close to a hidden identity in the thinking of both groups of seemingly disparate people. By the mid-'60 Jean Luc Godard had made Le Chinoise, a film about a group of young Maoists sitting in the apartment of one of their adult relatives and indoctrinating themselves in the politics of terrorism. At the end of the movie some of them rush out to commit an absurd crime, and the apartment owners return to find their expensive digs vandalized with various Maoist dicta scrawled across their living room walls. A bit later, Antonioni made a similar film called Zabriski Point, which leads to a similar end: absurd violence. It is set in America. Later, in the '70s, Fassbinder returned to the topic in Third Generation, which follows the self-hypnosis of a kind of Bader-Meinhof gang in Germany. It too ends in absurdity--an absurdity which Fassbinger highlights more obviously than did either Godard or Antonioni.

About the same time that Fassbinder was working on his film, a group of idealistic, radicalized students, mostly medical students attending Duke University, decided to hold a rally in Greensboro. They called the rally "Death to the Klan." The North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, some of whole resided in the tiny farm town of China Grove, and one of whom was actually a police informant, decided to attend. They carried weapons, and opened fire on the group assembling to march, killing a number of the students and wounding a number more. Later the Klan group was acquitted because their defense raised the possibility that actually a marcher had fired one shot first. The informant was said to have encouraged the Klan group to go to the rally.

In 2001, a small group of men, mostly from Saudi Arabia, hijacked several American passenger airliners and flew them into two very large office buildings in Manhattan, and into the Pentagon, in Washington. Some three thousand more or less random inhabitants of the office buildings were killed, along with the hijackers and passengers. The only thing distinguishing the Manhattan buildings was their height and their globalist name: World Trade Centers. Of course the Pentagon symbolized and in fact was the center of the United States military, but the attack there also killed mostly office workers.

In 1995 a presumably Christian zealot blew up a US government building in Oklahoma City, killing many office workers and a number of small children who were in the day care center that the government had provided to aid workers who were also parents. In 1993 some Islamist fanatics drove a car filled with explosives into the World Trade Center underground garage and damaged one of the towers. Among the injured was the mother of a UNC basketball player, who was at work in the building.

It is reasonable to understand the 9/11 events as an attempt to leverage a great world power, the United States, into a war with the Islamic world. The attempt succeeded. The wars did not. Indeed, our war with Iraq seems to have perfectly prepared the field for ISIS, which did not exist in 2001.

According to news reports, the sole surviving French terrorist, Hayat Boumeddiene, has now fled to Syria, where ISIS battles to overthrow the dictator Assad, who is a secular tyrant of a middle-east country which is neighbors to Iraq, which was led by a secular tyrant until the US overthrew him in 2003 as part of our response to the events of 9/11.

Mr. Rupert Murdoch has said this about the Charlie Habdo assassinations:

Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.

As far as recognizing growing cancers, pot, meet kettle.

I continue to be thankful that Mr. Murdoch continues his jihad against the Dish Satellite Network, so that we remain directly ignorant of the shit-stirring Murdoch's minions toil at with the aim of further inflaming the public against muslims. Murdoch's task and aims are apparently identical to those of the now deceased murderers in Paris. Much of the press, meanwhile, breathlessly reports every possible glimpse of the pretty girl in the story. Ms Boumeddiene should cut a single in Damascus and post it on Youtube.

http://forward.com/articles/212404/beauty-is-a-beast-hayat-boumeddiene-went-from-b/

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-speech-codes-of-david-brooks.html

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/2015/01/like-9-11-paris-massacre-is-not-about-us.html

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Eric_Hoffer/

We can hardly wait for the official Congressional reaction. 2015 begins.