The Peer Gynt Syndrome 

By David Ramati

The Scandinavian fascination with the Middle East probably goes back to pre-history when Norwegian Myth placed Aasegard, the home of the gods, somewhere in the Mediterranean Basin.  In order to understand this phenomenon it is probably best to start with an understanding of how the Norwegian adventurer sees himself.
Henrik Ibsen best defines this self image in his play "Peer Gynt", when Peer replies after being asked if he is  a Norwegian: 

By birth but a
Citizen of the world by creed.
For the good fortune I've enjoyed,
I have to thank America.
I've drawn my library of books
From the latest German scholars' works.
From France, I took a taste in dress,
My manners and my turn of wit—
From England, my enterprising spirit
And an eye for my own advantages.
The Jews have taught me how to wait.
From Italy, I gained a bit
Of a flair for dolce far niente—
And once, when events were violently
Disposed, I stretched my years no small amount with the aid of Swedish steel. (1)

Our modern day Peer Gynts see themselves as latter day Vikings, plundering and absorbing the best that other, lesser cultures have to offer.  They operated military missions in Lebanon, the Sinai, and Hebron.  The Oslo Peace Process is probably the most dynamic attempt to Scandinavianize another people since the failed Trans-Scandinavian Movement of Ibsen’s' day when Denmark attempted to annex Schleswig-Holstein in the Jutland peninsula. [DR1] 

There followed a long period of isolationism in which the Scandinavians were absorbed in their own problems; a process which climaxed in an independent Norway on the 17th of May 1905. 

Two world wars and a cruel occupation re-kindled the Viking spirit and the Scandinavians became the corner stone of the U.N. throughout the world, sending observers and soldiers to almost every continent.  The modern Peer Gynts found themselves attracted to the middle east. 

The Arab world became more than a cause; the Scandinavians saw it as their burden.  In a passage which is almost like something written by Kipling, Peer Gynt speaks with his Arab lover, Anitra:

I'm taking over your education.
No soul Yes, you are rather dumb;
It's struck me, with a certain depression.
But, for a soul, there's always room.
Come here!  Let me measure your braincase—
There's room, room enough; I knew there was.
It's true—you aren't ever going to go
Very deep; a large soul isn't for you—
But, after all, what's the difference—
You'll have enough for all your wants—(2)

The Arab world is to receive a Soul; an education which will take them from savage ignorance to something approaching culture.  Unfortunately the gift is dependent on the capacity of the receiver, and in the case of Anitra, the ability to understand the superior culture is shallow.[DR2]
Anitra represents the allure of the dark Mediterranean Peoples;
emotional, childlike, and definitely the intellectual and cultural
inferiors of the Norwegians.  In order to become a Man, Peer must raise this Pygmalion to a status deserving of his love.  Not the love of equals, but rather, the paternalistic incestuous love of enlightened master and grateful slave.  This approach was used by the Norwegians during the Oslo agreements.  The Arabs were to benefit from Norwegian and European largess in financial terms on the condition that they recognize their basic inferiority and lack of self determination.  The PLO Anitra would be rewarded if only she discarded her primitive HAMAS past and clung lovingly to the new Western Culture of which Scandinavia is the example.  Peer asks Anitra:

Tell me, do you know what it is to live?
Now do you see, my little one,
Why I've graciously paid you court—
Why I singled out your heart
To be, as it were, the foundation stone
Of all my being's caliphate?
Over your longings, I'll be lord.
In passion, I'm an autocrat.
You have to live for me alone.  (3)

The price paid by Anitra for the Oslo Accords is high indeed.  In return for some babbles and the Western definition of a "soul" she is required to abandon her image of self and embrace an alien culture; the western culture which requires her to "live for me alone" is foreign to a desert tradition based on the harsh laws necessary to the self sufficient nomadic peoples.
This obedience to an outside influence cannot last for long.  Anitra takes everything that Peer offers her, but, in the end, when he requests that she change clothes with him:

Your robe wouldn't fit;
Your girdle's too big; your stockings, to tight—
Your paradise—is it much farther yet? [DR3]
Oh, a thousand miles—
Too far!
The soul I promised you, you'll get---
Thanks—I'll make it without a soul.
But you asked for sorrow.
(She cuts him sharply across the knuckles and
gallops away full tilt across the desert.) (4)

With a practicality born of the desert, she takes all that is offered, but, when the Norwegian tries to steal her birthright by changing clothes with her, she finally refuses.  And when she realizes that the Scandinavian promise of paradise is not a real thing, but merely a mirage a "thousand miles" distant, she loses interest.  The Palestinians may find that they can survive without a Norwegian Soul.  They need not betray their origins.  The parting gift is the sorrow that the Scandinavian was courting all along.  That sorrow is the final realization that the Scandinavian will never be accepted as an Arab by the Palestinians.

 Every country in the Middle East has it's Scandinavian Tourist/Soldier; white limbs jutting from his Bermuda shorts, long blond hair flowing from under a mini-kafia many times too small for his head.  The Scandinavian feels he is blending in with the locals...he has become an Arab.  The Arab cause has become his cause.  He maintains a patronizing interest in Arab affairs until, tired of promised paradises a thousand miles away,
the Arabs burn his car or take his valuables.  At that point the
Scandinavians return home for a year or two until the hurt is dulled by distance and time.

The withdrawal period lasts until fatal masochistic intoxication of thee Peer Gynt Syndrome manifests itself, and he finds himself compelled to take up the "Arab Burden" and, once again, the Vikings return to the Middle East.

_________________________________ 

(1) Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, P.130 IV. i. , Translated by Rolf Fjelde
(2) Henrkik Ibsen, "Peer Gynt", P.158 IV. vii.  Translated by Rolf Fjelde
(3) (4)  Ibid. P. 160 IV. Ix

[DR1]  In 1863 the policy that advocated closer ties between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark was called Scandinavianism".  This policy resulted in the 1863 annexation of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein on ethnic grounds by the Danish King Frederick III.  When the Prussian army invaded
Schleswig in February 1864, these internationalists, Ibsen included, called for Norway and Sweden to come to Denmark's aid and defeat the invaders.  The Danish forts at Dybbol fell, and the Swedes and Norwegians stayed home.  The  unification of ermany was inevitable, and instead of Scandinavian expansion into Europe the world saw the results of a united Germany in two world wars.  There was to be no revival of the Viking Past.

[DR2]  This generalization of the Arab world as shallow and soul-less had become stereotyped by 1915, less than fifty years after "Peer Gynt" was first published on November 14, 1867.

T.E.  Lawrence describes the Arabs in his classic work, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" as '...a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation.  There imaginations were vivid, but not creative.'--"Seven
Pillars of Wisdom", P.38, Foundations of Revolt, T.E. Lawrence

[DR3] T. E. Lawrence writes, "In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes:  they destroyed it all for me.  At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin:  it was an affection only."--Seven Pillars of Wisdom, chapter 1, P. 31.  The English learned quite early on that "never the twine shall meet", a wisdom that has never been grasped by the Scandinavian Tourist/Soldiers.
       

The War against Islam

By David Ramati

The truth of 9/11 is something that the American people have yet to understand.

The attack on 9/11 was not an attack of terrorists as such, but rather an expression of radical Islam's traditional attempts at destroying what it considers to be a satanic world order.  They truly see themselves as

involved in a holy war against the West and all it stands for.  In order to understand this better we should look at history without, as is usual for mankind, making any futile attempts to learn from it.

After the conquest of North Africa and the conversion of the Berbers to Islam, the Arabs were frustrated that they faced the Sea (Atlantic Ocean) with no more lands to conquer.  According to Arab chronicles, when the Arab army reached the seashore for the first time, the Arab commander Uqba-ibn-Nafe waded into the sea and swashed his sword at the water to express his frustration that there were no more lands to conquer in which to spread the glory of Islam by terrorizing the conquered people to accept Islam or death.

The Arabs now started eyeing Spain the country that lay across the Mediterranean.  They faced the legendary Pillars of Hercules (later renamed by the Arabs as Jebel-ut-Tarik or Gibraltar as we know it today).  Spain was then under the rule of the Visigoths, who had embraced Christianity.  The Visigothic king who was ruling the Visigothic Spain was Roderic, or Rodrigo (in Spanish).  King Rodrigo of Spain married the daughter of one of his noblemen, Count  Julian against the wishes of her father.  To avenge what Julian perceived as his violated honor, he opened secret parleys with the enemy and invited with the Emir (Governor) Musa ibn Nusayr, the Muslim ruler of North Africa, who was based in Tunisia to invade Spain.  The Caliph al-Walid authorized the invasion of Spain (710-711 AD), on condition that Count Julian recited the Shahada and embraced Islam.  

The two armies met on the banks of the Guadalete river on July 19, 711 in the extreme south of the Iberian peninsula.  The Muslim army was victorious and stuck the Spanish Emperor's head on a pole and paraded it before those contingents of the Spanish army that were still engaged in opposing the Muslims in crossing of the Guadalete River.

After conquering Spain, the Muslims immediately began the campaign against Europe.  Soon the Jews along with the Christians were made to pay the Jiziya poll tax was imposed on all non-Muslims (Kafirs) by the Muslims.  They were also drafted for slave labor to demolish churches and build mosques from the columns of the destroyed churches.

The Jews and Christians also could not carry weapons, ride horses, wear shoes, ring church bells, wear anything green, or resist a Muslim assault.  From these earliest times proclaiming Jesus' divinity and attempting conversion from Islam were made capital offences.  In the 9th century, Spanish Jews in Muslim areas had to wear on their shoulders a patch of white cloth that bore the image of an ape; Christians, since they ate pork, wore the image of a pig.  On the Caliph al-Mutawakkil's orders a yellow badge for

Jews was made compulsory, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany.

Thus began the Muslim invasion of France under the leadership of Abd-ur Rahman, who was then been appointed the chieftain of the Muslim occupiers of Spain.

The Franks were a Gothic (Germanic) tribe who eventually became the French as we know it today.  It was another related Gothic clan - the Ostrogoths, who were ruling Spain when the Muslims attacked.  The tales of mindless Muslim cruelty, savage torture, subterfuge deception, and blood chilling ruthlessness that the Ostrogoths who fled Muslim occupied Spain told their Frankish clansmen, had contributed to further stiffen the Frankish resolve to defeat the Muslim invaders.

The ferocity with which Charles (Karl) Martel fought against the invading Arabs, and the personal weapon of a hammer like axe that he used, earned him the title of Karl the Hammer.  October 10, 732 AD marks the conclusion of the Battle of Tours, arguably one of the most decisive battles in all of  history.  Martel gathered his forces directly in the path of the oncoming Moslem army and prepared to defend themselves by using a phalanx style of combat.  It was one of the rare times in the Middle Ages when infantry held its ground against a mounted attack.  The exact length of the battle is undetermined; Arab sources claim that it was a two day battle whereas Christian sources hold that the fighting clamored on for seven days.  In either case, the battle ended when the French captured and killed Abd-ur Rahman.  And Europe was safe for the next 700 years until the Muslims breached the Eastern Gateway when they overran Constantinople in 1453.

Constantinople proved far more difficult to conquer than the Muslims had expected, and did not fall until 1453.  The great expansion of Islam had obviously lost steam, and the final battle would be fought by a ragtag group of defenders: Jews, Lithuanians, Hapsburgs, Saxons, Bavarians, and Poles against Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha and the might of the Ottoman army.  Vienna would be the decisive battle.

The Battle of Vienna ended in defeat for the Muslims, and began the long slide by Islam into near irrelevance, as far as the Europeans cared.  The battle opened after a 2-month siege of the Holy Roman Empire's capital city on September 12, 1683 in the pre-dawn hours.  It ended that era of Islamic expansion with a defeat at the hands of Jan Ill Sobieski and Charles V of Lorraine.

When the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001, nobody in the news media seemed to understand the choice of September 11 by al Qaeda as their attack date.  It has often been suggested that this was merely a random date chosen for convenience.  I beg to differ.  It seems clear to me that bin Laden was sending America and the West a message.  Al Qaeda had an old score to settle, and was putting us on notice that the era of expansion is resuming after the interruption of Vienna.  Night fell on September 12 for the soldiers of Allah, and so our towers fell on the preceding morning three hundred and eighteen years later.

It is important to understand this history in order to understand what we are up against; our enemy has a long memory and seeks to avenge this defeat of its ancestors.  The radical Islamists are not upset about our presence in their lands, nor are they upset about Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor about our "exploitation" of their oil fields, nor our invasion of Iraq.  They are taking a much longer view, a view with vengeance in mind!

Vengeance for Tours, vengeance for Granada, vengeance for Vienna.  They want to reinvigorate Islam, return to the days of pride and victory and submission by their foes.  They want to establish the Caliphate and place the entire world under Sharia law.

9/11 was the first step in this process of re-establishing Jihad as a divine force of conversion and conquest but it will not be the last.  Soon they will have atomic weapons and rest assured they will not hesitate to use them.

 If America, Europe and Israel fail  to understand this,  then they have made a classical fatal mistake in warfare; they have failed to understand their enemy.