Bartholomew's Notes

Jack Wheeler hits a new low for WorldNet Daily:

The Jewish Talmud makes the following observation:

There is no beauty like Jerusalem, no wealth like Rome, no depravity like Arabia.

This was written in the 3rd century A.D. – three hundred years before the Arabs embraced Muhammad’s Islam. But neither the adoption of Islam nor all the intervening centuries since has decreased the addiction Arab men have to pederasty.

And what’s the evidence? Exhibit A: Yasser Arafat:

Arab pederasty was personified in Yasser Arafat, one of the vilest human beings to ever infest the earth. During the Cold War, Arafat was a frequent guest of Romania’s Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, who would put him up in his palace in Bucharest. Always included in Arafat’s retinue was a selection of young boys. What Arafat didn’t know was that Ceaucescu’s secret police, the Securitatae, would covertly film his bedroom escapades. The Israeli intel agency Mossad has copies.

This follows on from a previous WND article by Aaron Klein, “Does Arafat Have AIDS?” There it was revealed that

Ion Pacepa, who was deputy chief of Romanian foreign intelligence under the Ceaucescu regime and who defected to the West in 1978, says in his memoirs the Romania government bugged Arafat and had recordings of the Arab leader in orgies with his security detail.

Various Israeli security sources have in the past suggested publicly Arafat might be homosexual. They’ve claimed Arafat’s former personal driver – a Mossad double agent – used to find teenage boys to bring back to the PLO leader. His wife, Suha, mostly lived abroad and rarely saw her husband.

Wheeler adds, with great subtlety:

Yasser Arafat was the Hitler of Palestinian Arabs.

I think I prefer Edward Said’s “Papa Doc of Palestine” description.

Wheeler likes to be known as “Indiana Jones of the Right”, having led a double life of philosophy teaching and of adventure, helping insurgents in “Soviet colonies” in the 1980s. World O’Crap recently noted:

you can get some of his mind-stretching insights at NewsMax (like the famous one where he scratches out the eyes of Peggy Noonan for saying mean things about her fellow Reagan speech writers); at the Moonie Times (for instance,  one in which he brags of having first outted Hillary Clinton as a bisexual in 1993); and CounterPunch (in which he argues that Janet Reno is America’s Saddam Hussein).

CounterPunch? Peculiar, but there it is. According to Rightweb, Wheeler founded the Freedom Research Foundation (FRF) in 1984, with help from Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus, and he has been involved with various Central American countries, Afghanistan, and Angola. An article by Franklin Foer in The New Republic (only available to subscribers, but a bootleg can be read here) gives more detail, and explains how Wheeler got funding from the Reason Foundation and Lew Lehrman to explore links with anti-Communist fighters, support for whom became “the Reagan Doctrine”:

Wheeler invited anti-communist rebel leaders from Nicaragua, Laos, and Afghanistan to Jamba, Angola, the headquarters of Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita). There, Lehrman gathered his guests and had them sign a communiqué declaring “our solidarity with all freedom movements in the world and … our commitment to cooperate to liberate our nations from the Soviet imperialists.”… Savimbi had become the poster child for this new breed of freedom fighter.

Wheeler, of course, was getting into bed with characters just as unsavoury as the Arafat he excoriates today:

To the credit of National Review, it published [Polish journalist Radek] Sikorski’s damning indictment of unita, including allegations that it had burned 13 people alive… A string of Human Rights Watch reports documented that unita violated just about every section of the Geneva Conventions.

Plus:

well before the horrors of successive Afghan regimes made clear that these “freedom fighters” merely wanted to replace the totalitarianism of godless communism with the totalitarianism of Sharia, the mujahedin’s thuggish tendencies were clear to those willing to look. Take the warlord Gulbulddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedin leader to receive the most American aid. As an Islamic student leader at Kabul University, he encouraged his followers to splash acid on the faces of unveiled women and fire guns at their uncovered legs. During the anti-Soviet jihad, he betrayed a similar tendency toward indiscriminate cruelty, assassinating Afghan intellectuals and Western journalists. And, as recently as last month, he ordered his followers to “cut off the hands of the foreign meddlers.”

Foer concludes:

…When I visited Jack Wheeler, he showed me the books on his desk. They included Sleeping With the Devil, Robert Baer’s polemic against Saudi Arabia, and David Pryce-Jones’s The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. He picked up one and told me, “It’s amazing how similar Islam is to Marxism. I mean, it’s the same thing all over again.” This has become a standard interpretation on the right and has logically led to talk of reapplying the Reagan Doctrine. But the map looks a lot different now than when Wheeler first considered the possibilities of global antiSoviet revolution. Not so many counter-Islamist insurgencies burn across the globe. So reviving the Reagan Doctrine could require digging deeper into the bag of opposition groups for rebels that have even less popular support or even worse track records than their ’80s analogs.

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A couple of footnotes:

1. Thank you to a commentator for finding the actual passage of The Talmud quoted by Wheeler: this is from the Avot of Rabbi Nathan, also known in English as The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan. It’s actually from the sixth century, and is extra-canonical. I have no idea whether Wheeler has used the passage in context.

R. Nathan said: “There is no love such as the love of the Torah; there is no wisdom such as the wisdom of manners; there is no beauty such as the beauty of Jerusalem; there are no riches such as the riches of Modea; there is no strength such as the strength of Persia; there is no adultery such as the adultery of the Arabians; there is no haughtiness such as the haughtiness of Elam; there is no hypocrisy such as the hypocrisy of Babylon, as it is written [Zech. v. 11]: ‘And he said unto me, To build for it a house in the land of Shinar’; and there is no witchcraft such as the witchcraft of Egypt.”

2. A lengthy cached interview with Wheeler can be read here.

3. Ion Pacepa, the source of the Arafat-homosexuality accusation is a particularly shady character. He has been the toast of the neo-conservatives for some years, since he “revealed” that basically anything bad that was ever said against the USA or Israel was the result of Communist propaganda. Back in March Joe Conason noted that the National Review was carrying

a weird article by Romania’s former Communist spy chief, in which he insinuates that Kerry, and anyone else who talked about atrocities in Vietnam, was really an instrument of KGB propaganda. (It is remarkable to see a “conservative” magazine publish a smear written by a man who once facilitated the atrocities of the Ceausescu regime.) The essay by Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the West in 1978, is titled “Kerry’s Soviet Rhetoric,” and claims that his testimony about the war in 1971 “sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era.”

Pacepa also claims that Russia has hidden Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, since the Soviet Union provided them in the first place. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave at UPI, Pacepa is still wanted in Romania and remains undercover.

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