A Tale of Two Tyrants

Storm Shelter
1

Here’s an interesting Substack article written by Yama Barkaee, an Israeli woman presently living in Boston. Barkaee has written quite a number of excellent works including The Palestinian Myth: How History is Being Rewritten to Erase Israel. All of Ms. Barkaee’s works are self-published.

Ms. Barkaee in the said Substack piece compares the tyranny of the ascendance of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran with than of Mandami in New York. She does a marvelous job describing the careers of the two individuals and of course predicts, accurately I think, a future of gloom for the hapless citizens of our nation’s largest city.

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Before anyone takes this piece seriously, you need to know what it actually is.

The entire argument hinges on a single foundational claim: that on the set of Mississippi Masala, someone asked about the white characters and Mamdani’s mother replied “don’t worry, they’ll be the waiters”, and that Zohran absorbed this as a lesson in racial hierarchy. This is the seed the Khomeini comparison grows from. The bibliography cites “Mamdani’s own public statements, interviews.” No date, no publication, no link.

Because the quote is real, it’s just been deliberately misattributed.

Mira Nair has told this story herself for thirty years, in the NYT, Slate, The Wrap, and elsewhere. A studio executive told her to put a white protagonist in the film. She replied: “I can promise you, sir, that all the waiters will be white.” It’s a filmmaker pushing back against Hollywood whitewashing. The author took that documented story, stripped the context, handed it to a different woman, and rebuilt it as evidence of anti-white indoctrination passed down to Zohran. That’s not a mistake. That’s fabrication.

The rest follows the same method. Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship gets rendered as “suicide bombers are legitimate resistance fighters”, when what Good Muslim, Bad Muslim actually argues is that the CIA spent the Cold War funding and arming jihadist networks, and the blowback killed Americans on 9/11. That’s a mainstream foreign policy argument shared by virtually all analysts across the spectrum. Understanding why political violence happens is not endorsing it.

The entire article is structured on the premise that a Shia revolutionary theocratic who seized power through mass mobilization with mass executions, forced hijab and the imprisonment of his own allies and a DSA assemblyman who won a democratic Governor’s race are the same, when Mamdani has operated within democratic institutions his entire political career and whose most radical policy proposals are rent freezes and public transit.

This is what motivated bad faith advocacy looks like when it’s working: real citations surrounding invented claims, elegant prose substituting for argument, and a conclusion decided before the first sentence was written. Once you see the waiters quote for what it is, you can’t unsee the dishonest method applied everywhere else in the article.

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Oh don’t worry… We already know…It’s only leftist indoctrination that should be taken seriously.

Yes sir!

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The loudest, loneliest guy in the room chimes in again, a spectator to his own life…foaming at the mouth to be the most feeble, toxic guy in the room but never actually addressing a point. “A gambling app and a Hurricanes message board is literally all he has in life.”

5

I’m incapable of feeling lonely… Just like you are incapable of not craving attention…You are an overly-dramatic, loudmouth cunt.

Imagine thinking I could make a living off one gambling app. I’ve been barred or limited to pennies at more gambling apps then you know exist.

Ya fucking idiot

6

The old adage of being able to fool all people some of the time but not all the time applies to Skeeter whom I’ve known now for two decades. Skeeter is a really smart guy over whose eyes you cannot pull the proverbial wool. As a football analyst I have him rated historically with the legendary Laus. I have found these many years that when Skeeter calls you an asshole, you most likely deserve it. Skeeter does his homework. Skeeter uniquely thinks for himself. Warden shares the same qualities as Skeeter, but unfortunately he fails to grasp what I call Grand Existential Theory. Warden rejects Western chauvinism by failing to recognise that Western civilisation is the acme of historical human ethical comportment. Not being able to recognise a great president is in my view the height of short sightedness. All sentient humans know where in the world individual rights and liberty flourish and where they do not. Warden is also very smart and though I reluctantly admit he has bested me in a few arguments has missed his calling in life. Warden I think would make a superb trial lawyer. There are lawyers galore, but few have trial lawyer talent. A trial lawyer is sublimely prepared and follows the first rule in the art of cross examination, that being never ask a question which you do not know the expected response.

1 Like
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You consistently try to have it both ways, while each position you take devours the other.

Contentions

  1. Western Civilization - the pinnacle of human ethical achievement
  2. You support Vladimir Putin, who runs an authoritarian petro-state that has systematically dismantled every institution West civilization supposedly represented: free press, rule of law, independent judiciary, democratic succession, and individual rights.
  3. You support a domestic political movement, in MAGA, that has actively attacked the institutional infrastructure of liberal democracy from the inside.

These three positions cannot be held coherently together.

What is actually going on is you and modern conservatism has increasingly traded philosophical substance for cultural symbolism. Western Civilization to you is only an ethnic signifier rather than an institutional one. To you, Western Civilization doesn’t mean Enlightenment liberal institution, rule of law, separation of powers, individual rights, scientific enlightenment…it means White European, Christian cultural heritage, a particular ethnic and religious demographic order and a civilization defined by “who” rather than by “what.” We’ve seen this in the discussion regarding Israel as well. To you, it doesn’t matter what Israel does, it matters only who Israel is. Every pillar of Western Civilization has been directly attacked by those you favor and champion. You appreciate Western Civ’s hierarchy, strength and order but not its liberty. However, to look a little deeper, you use “Western Civilization” as a bludgeon against perceived cultural enemies (immigrants, Muslims, progressives, secular liberals) rather than a genuine philosophical commitment. You, and the entirety of MAGA, don’t believe in the content of Western Civilization, you believe in the team, and Western Civilization is just a trophy your team holds. It’s Tribal Epistemology. It’s always been this way, all the way down to valuing the flag, but ignoring what it represents. It is even in how you view business and the relationships therein. It’s prioritizing the brand over the product, hollowing out the ideals your claim to protect. The flag, “Western Civilization”…it’s all a tribal totem and very little more. That’s the difference, at the core, between the right and the left. The right values only the totem. The left values only the ideals that the totem is supposed to represent.

8

The Democrat Party is presently the party of violence causing the majority of acute political turmoil that pervades our nation. It is not by happenstance that Islamic maniacs align with Democrats. The same is true of violent illegal aliens and misanthropic native Americans some of whom even have attempted to assassinate our excellent president. The Democrat Party wants Americans to tolerate what is inimical to the best and ethical interests of our nation. It tolerates the barbarism inherent in the Muslim religion. It encourages open borders and voting rights of illegal aliens. It pervasively uses false allegations of racism to intimidate those who oppose even their most screwball ideas such as gender being a fluid process. Democrats show disdain for the superiority of Western Civilisation and favor racial discrimination in particular against those of European ascendancy, and also against Asians. Yes, I support Putin in Russia, because Putin, despite his prodigious number of warts has been Russia’s best leader. It must be born in mind that Putin is the best among a history of poor statesman. Putin refuses to have a heavily armed Nazi state along its southern border. Further Putin is freeing ethnic Russians both in the Donbas and Crimea. Now, let me jump to Europe which faces an even greater immigration problem than our own. In the UK, we’re witnessing a rebellion against the liberal tyranny of globalism. To this end, I point to this rather radical article by a young scholar from Hillsdale College calling for very bellicose action against the culture responsible for the estimated one million rapes of young British white women. While I regard the article as extreme, the crimes are abominable

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Yeah…not once sentence is accurate and you’ve avoided any response to the aforementioned points. That’s called a retreat and attempted redirect to another subject.

Failed. Try again

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The lead article in this thread is a Substack piece by Yama Barkaee, a captivating story teller. No doubt Ms. Barkaee has deserved disdain for Islam, something all of you know I share with her, but she also treats the reluctance of civilized humanity to acknowledge what is ineluctably true about Islam, that it is the cause of abominable atrocities. No doubt humans have a hard time admitting when they are wrong, especially liberals who exhibit a delusional tolerance for what is morally intolerable. Too many lack a spine, haven’t the courage to stand up for truth, fearful of being called racists or Islamophobes by the loony left. Here’s another Substack authored by Yama Bar, as she signs her name, which I find very passionately written and a worthwhile read.

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Again, you’ve failed to address any of the points and retreated again. However, I’d like to discuss your overall premise…Islam.

First, let’s see how we got here with Islam. Islam has been historically progressive compared to their global contemporaries (particularly in medieval Europe). It wasn’t until the 20th century shift towards strict, literalist conservatism changed that measure as historically Islamic history tells a completely different story of intellectual openness, scientific advancement and legal rights. Many of the foundations claimed by Western Civilization were already established in Islam. Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba were the global capitals of science, philosophy, and pluralism. They were known for unprecedented women’s rights beginning in the 7th century. While the Spanish Inquisition began expelling or executing Jews and Muslims in 1492, the Islamic Ottoman Empire explicitly invited displaced Jewish populations to resettle in Ottoman lands and provided safety. Pogroms didn’t occur in the Middle East, they occurred in your beloved Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Britain and Romania.

So what caused the change? We did.

After WW1, Western powers (Britain and France) drew artificial borders, supported secular, Westernized dictators who pushed European laws and lifestyles while sidelining local institutions and starving out those who couldn’t afford the new way. That created a cultural vacuum that the Muslim Brotherhood filled by offering grassroots social services and a return to native identity. Now, when the Muslim Brotherhood was started, it was just the second iteration of the Ittahad Party which began in Egypt. Once again, the West is at the heart of this being that British agents supported and provided economic benefits to those originators as they were thought to be more manageable than those who were secular and starting to favor communism in the region. Once that party died, they regrouped into the Muslim Brotherhood, which again was supported by the West as it was religious authoritarianism vs the perceived draw of communism.

Couple that with Saudi Arabia, again, a Western invention created from Britain signed an official pact with one of the warring tribes, Ibn Saud, to fight the Ottomans in 1915. The Sauds backed an ultra-conservative, authoritarian, religious state who swept up all the holy cities and officially declared the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. While the British helped it get on the map, it was bankrupt until oil was discovered in 1938 by American engineers. The Quincy Pact of 1945 is still the bedrock of Middle Eastern geopolitics today. The US gets uninterrupted access to Saudi oil and in exchange, the US military provides absolute security and protection for the House of Saud.

Before the 1960s, Israel’s greatest threats were secular Arab nationalist states-primarily under Egypt alongside Syria and Iraq. They were modern, left-leaning, socialist-leaning and strictly secular. They routinely jailed Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood, viewing them as backwards radicals. When Israel defeated these combined armies in the 6 Day War, it didn’t just capture the territory; it completed shattered the ideological credibility of secular Arab nationalism. Islamic movements stepped directly into this vacuum, of which Israel actively encouraged at the time as a tool to divide and conquer their primary secular enemy, the PLO. Of course, the lead player was Saudi Arabia with the support of the United States in that sweeping shift throughout the region on the Sunni side. The Shia side was known for being a quietist, politically passive theology which was thrust into authoritarian, military rule by the US and Israel. The 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel was originally welcomed by the local Shia as a way to get the secular PLO off of their land. However, it setup a prolonged, 18 year occupation of southern Lebanon and the local population revolted. A new radical Islamist group emerged to fight the occupation: Hezbollah. Over the next 2 decades, they used its battlefield credentials against Israel to become the most powerful military and political force in Lebanon, effectively holding the secular state hostage to its armed, religious agenda. Then, we have the United States deposing, using the CIA, a democratically elected President of Iran because he wanted to nationalize oil profits in favor of a pawn. We all the know the story of how that led to the Iranian Revolution and the Shah, which showed the region an Islamist group can overthrow the West.

The1973 oil boom was caused by the US supplying Israel during the Yom Kippur War, where Saudi Arabia - still propped up by the US - weaponized their oil leading to a 300% price spike. This direct reaction to Western intervention flooded the Saudis with petrodollars and emboldened OPEC. After that the Saudis exported Wahabiism with their new oil wealth, funding mosques, schools and universities worldwide. They used their money to project a highly conservative, anti-Western brand of Islam across the region to counter secularism and Soviet communism…and of course, we funded it and supported it with direct military interventions like in Afghanistan.

Long story short, Western intervention and Israel literally destroyed Middle East secularism. The unintended consequence was the destruction of the region’s secular political movements, leaving Islamism as the most organized, well funded and emotional resonant force left standing.

Now that we’ve established how we got here, care to discuss who’s carrying out the real barbarism in the region? Israel likes to put things on video. It was the Bush, Trump and Kuschner longtime pals, the Saudis, that attacked us on 9/11 and the Israeli Mossad cheering in OUR streets about it while it happened.