FAQ: Where do you get your ideas?

I've touched on this briefly during the series on how I created A Pius Man, but, apparently, the question many authors are besieged with is “How do you come up with your ideas?”



Short answer: formal viewpoint. Or a functional mentality.



For example, last year, I saw Forbes Magazine with cover article about how al-Qaeda was losing money, and it suggested that Osama "needed a new business model."



I can not make this stuff up.



The point is, people look at things from a “formal viewpoint.” I would look at a large pile of money and think of where a character would hide it. An accountant would probably count it all. A pyromaniac would look at it as stuff to burn.

[More below the break]



In my case... to use an example, in 1998, my family went to London and stopped off to see the Crown Jewels. Everyone else stared at the jewels. I went and looked at the security. I didn't take notes, since I didn't want to be thrown out of the Tower of London by the fastest possible route [the jewels were a few floors up]. The British Museum got the same treatment from me -- The Elgin Marbles from the Greek Parthenon had their own wing.... so, if the Greeks really wanted them back, they could steal them with a few construction helicopters and just airlift the whole wing—the Israelis did that with an Egyptian radar tower once to great effect.



Basically, it's a matter of looking at things from a certain viewpoint. I suspect that if I go see the Mona Lisa, the majority of my time will be pondering how someone could disable the security guards, the electronic surveillance, and walk away with a few paintings from the Louvre. Though the answer would probably be to steal something from the basement storage area—less security, without the individual alarms on every piece.... hmm, now that's an idea....can someone scan for Semtex at the entrypoint to the Louvre? Hrm...



The sad thing is that the above was really thought up as I wrote it.



I created one character because a teacher in high school, on the first day of class, said “I'm a wanted terrorist. I've been hunted for 19 years.... I can kill you with two fingers.” He was the creative writing teacher, so we went with it....



And I wondered... “What if he was telling the truth?”



He's in a back pocket somewhere, for when I get around to writing that novel. The annoying thing is, I have it outlined....



Some, like Harlan Ellison, have described writing as a compulsion, and that's because that's how we seem to be wired. Be it the Tower of London or the British Museum, writers wonder how we can do something with where we are, what we're doing, some little factoid we picked up, or a stray comment.



I don't think I've ever gone to someplace and not wondered how to blow it up, shoot it up, or what would be required to do something like that.



Rebekah Hendershot, author of Masks, described a similar experience when creating her book: “Why doesn't LA have any superheroes?” Answer: “Because something killed them all. And it's still here.”



With A Pius Man, Scott “Mossad” Murphy came out of the mass of Evangelicals flocking to Israel after 9-11. What does Israel do with all of these meshuge goyim? And what do you do with them if they want to join the military, or even the intelligence services? Answer: the goyim brigade—Mossad agents who not only "don't look Jewish," but aren't.  Murphy was just a throwaway character I had come up with to use “someday.” He had literally been shoved into a notebook and left there for three years. I had used him once as a supporting character in one book, and all but forgot him. Later, he came in handy.



And that's why writers have notebooks—to keep track of all the random neurons firing off with ideas. You never know when there's going to be something that comes in handy. Stephen King supposedly has a trunk filled with notebooks of ideas past.



So, if you ever think that a writer is odd, well, they are. They look at things from different points of view—if only because they have to be able to see things from the points of view of different people as they write them. Stephen King writes about things that scare him... and that seems to be everything... the author of Rebekah saw how much LA had been shortchanged of superheroes and decided to explain why. I think up various and sundry ways to kill someone with a ballpoint pen (I'm on nine).



That's how we find ideas. We're wired to.



But then again, who'd go into this profession if we weren't?

Evil Religions 1: Allahu Akbar.

An evil religion blog post.



When I first proposed the "Evil Religions" series of blogs, I figured I would make it ironic. You may all remember the "first" Evil Religion post back on April 1st. This is the real one.



Before you get your panties in a twist, I warned readers of this blog quite some time ago that there would be a series of “Evil Religion” blog posts, and that it wouldn't be what you think it is. Guess what, it's still not going to be what you think it is. Read the rest of this preface here.



Now, let's start with our first “Evil Religion.”  The following can be footnoted in the works of Bernard Lewis, David Dalin, Ralph McInerny, or Roy Schoeman’s “Salvation is from the Jews”



The Middle East has a problem, and it's not Islam. It's their culture... which is also not Islam.



Yes, sorry, hate to break it to all of you, the culture of the Middle East was not substantially altered by The Prophet. Mainly because there were no real fundamental building blocks for the culture to be altered …



The trouble with the Middle East, in part, can be traced to the Nazis.



No, I am not being allegorical, but literal.



If you're a newcomer to this blog, you may not have heard of the term “Hitler’s Pope”: that Eugenio Pacelli, aka Pope Pius XII, worked with, for, or around Hitler in support of the final solution of the Holocaust.



What I'm almost certain you never hear about is what has been labeled Hitler’s Mufti.



To be more precise, he is properly called the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Now, a bit of background: in the 1920s, as a prize of World War I, Palestine was a mandate of Britain—they ran it and everything in it. Al-Husseini was installed by the English; he had, in fact, been put into power by a Jewish Minister of the Palestinian Mandate, Robert Samuel. Samuel even rigged the votes a little, in part on behalf of an anti-Semitic “advisor” Ernest Richmond (who may or may not have been al-Husseini's boyfriend; there were rumors, and Richmond was British, after all....).



Through the 1920s, al-Husseini incited two “intifadas” that killed mostly Jews (which I can only assume means that intifada now translates as “pogrom”), and Robert Samuel caved in each time, eventually cutting off any and all Jewish immigration into Palestine.



And you thought British appeasement started with Neville Chamberlain, didn't you?



Hajj al-Husseini was, in essence, local aristocracy. His brother had been the previous Grand Mufti, and his family had been in government positions for the previous seventy years. Unfortunately, his mind had been a little warped by a propaganda piece out of Tsarist Russia called the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”



For those of you who don't know about the Protocols, it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that makes anything Dan Brown has written look like a well-researched historical treatise. According to the Protocols, the entire world is run by three hundred Jews out of Europe. Al-Husseini got it into his head that the British forces in Palestine were, in fact, there on the behest of their Jewish overlords, therefore, the British were mere puppets of the vast Zionist conspiracy ...



At this point, it feels like the moment I should grab the Thorazine and cue The Illuminati Polka.



Even after al-Husseini became grand Mufti, he called for an anti-Jewish jihad in Palestine during the 1930s, saying “Murder the Jews! Murder them all!”  This was how he started riots in 1929 and 1936-1939. He would later move his rhetorical style to Berlin radio, stating in one “Kill the Jews—Kill them with your hands, kill them with your teeth! This is well pleasing to Allah!” Al-Husseini’s connection with Hitler begins in 1933, when he sent emissaries to Berlin, first lending support, then suggesting collaboration. When the German anti-Jewish laws went into effect in 1934, the Islamic world sent them congratulations. Husseini would become friends with Adolf Eichmann (the banal evil that logistically engineered the Holocaust), and pushed for the extermination of Jews as soon as possible.



In 1937, al-Husseini met with Hitler, and they apparently got along quite well. Afterwards, Al-Husseini tried for a Nazi tour of the middle east; he briefly led an overthrow of the government in Iraq, only to be run out by the British. He hid in the Japanese embassy in Iran for a little bit, until the British and the Soviets invaded. He ran through Turkey and made it to Mussolini's Italy. He finally ended up in Germany.



SS chief Heinrich Himmler took Husseini on tours of the death camps, and the mufti pushed for greater diligence in running the gas chambers. Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny mentioned that the mufti “played a role in the decision to exterminate the European Jews.” At the Nuremburg trials, he stated that “the mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler… one of Eichmann’s best friends” And don't think Dieter got anything out of saying all of this—he was executed after the trial.



Al-Husseini also had a Muslim clerical school in Dresden, where Muslims could be trained in Nazism, and introduce it to the Middle East. In exchange for this service, Husseini went into Bosnia to recruit Muslims for the SS, Hanjar (or Handschar) units, who wore specially marked fezzes with the swastika on them. You can also see photos of Husseini in Bosnia inspecting the SS troops (see: Shoeman, 258. If you want to see more research on Muslim/Arab Nazis, hit the Yad vashem archives , or the Simon Wiesenthal Center). The Muslim SS Hanjar (“sword”) unit massacred about 90% of Bosnia’s Jews.



Husseini made it to France after the war, after the Swiss kicked him out. The pro-Nazi French government (which was still in charge for a while) refused to extradite him, and by the time the Allies could lay their hands on him, it was inconvenient to prosecute him (Tito didn't want the “Handschar units” as an issue in his ethnically-divided Yugoslavia; the new English government didn't want to antagonize the Arabs in their Middle East mandates, and the Soviets had their eye on the middle east as future clients). He managed to stay free and clear until 1974, when death caught him.



So why does Mufti al-Husseini matter today? Well, let’s start with the fact that the grand mufti imported Nazi experts to train young Palestinians in guerrilla tactics—the start of a group we know as the Palestinian Liberation Organization.



During the Six Day War in 1967, Israelis found Egyptian prisoners carrying issues of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Ironically, it had been translated into Arabic by a man known as el-Hadj…aka former Nazi propagandist Lius Heiden. Mein Kampf would be republished by Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in 2001 and was an instant bestseller throughout the Middle East—in 1999, it was sixth on the bestseller list in Palestine (and this is before the reprint). By the way, did I mention that “Schindler’s List” is banned?



The legacy of al-Husseini lives on into the 21st century. To start with, it was in the form of his nephew—Abd al-Rahman abd al-Bauf Arafat al-Qud al-Husseini. If you blink you miss the key word—Arafat. Yes, that Arafat. Second Lieutenant Wilhelm Boerner, a guard at Mauthausen concentration camp, and Erich Altern (Gestapo, head of their “Jewish Affairs” section), trained members of the Palestine Liberation Front. Former Nazi Johann Schuller, supplied arms to Fatah. Jean Tireault, neo-Nazi, also paid by Fatah. In the 1970s, neo-Nazi Otto Albrecht was hired by the PLO to act as a middle man for weapons.



Then there’s the Grand Mufti’s grandson, Skeikh Ekrima Sabri, the current Mufti of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He said recently “The figure of 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust is exaggerated…It was a lot less. It’s not my fault if Hitler hated the Jews. Anyway, they hate them just about everywhere.” Nice guy.



And let’s not forget that the Socialist nationalist party of Syria had a “Furher” and their banner donned the swastika as well. It's also known as the “Ba'athist party.” The one that's currently running Syria, and used to be Saddam Hussein's party.



Remember that pro-Nazi coup that got Husseini tossed out of Iraq? One rally member was a man named Khayrallah Tulfah. After the war, he lived with his nephew, and in the main room of his house he had an idolized portrait of Hitler on the wall. He raised the nephew personally, and had al-Husseini over to his home repeatedly until Husseini died. This nephew would grow up to be one mean fellow—one of his mistresses noted that he would look himself in the mirror and state “I am Saddam Hussein. Heil Hilter!”



The Grand Mufti, this (literal) Islamofascist, helped form the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And let us not forget Egyptian leader Gamal Nasser, who helped the Nazis in Egypt during the war, and who later led the Six Day War against Israel. He even adopted the slogan “One folk, One party, One leader.” His successor, Anwar Sadat, also had ties to the Reich—he spied for Germany during the war. Johannes von Leers, Goebbel’s executive officer, was put in charge of Egypt’s Ministry of Information in 1955. Gestapo man Hans Becher went on to become a police instructor in Egypt.



Let's look at the bad stuff that have come out of the middle east in the last hundred years, shall we? The psycho dictators have decided to enforce laws written down when Islam was still an emerging power, using the literal xenophobic rules of the day to enforce their own will. In fact, most of the stuff they're using isn't really the Koran, but bastardized versions of it, at best. They tend to work with scholars who have very.....old views about how Islam works, or should work.



Many of these were laws that were not in place during the Ottoman empire. It falls, and within a few decades, tada, archaic rules that no one noticed suddenly become applicable, and some which were completely made up two hundred years ago, or two decades ago – basically, whatever they “found” that could be useful. There is no Islamic Vatican. They devolved into a bunch of different opposing viewpoints that tended to disassociate Islam from itself more than anything.



Such transparent bull …



And let's target Israel, because, yes, a nation the size of Vermont is a threat to an Islamic geographical area equal to or greater than the entire United States of America … Israel just reminds Arabs that they're no longer on top of the world, and that there's no changing it.



One of the problems these psychos have taken advantage of is : you can't translate the Koran in the Middle East. Seriously, it's illegal. Which becomes a problem because most people can't read the Koran. I'm serious. Imagine how hard it is to read Shakespeare. It takes entire college courses, because it's poetry, and requires historical context. Now take the Bible, which also requires whole college classes (my bible course took a whole semester, and we only got through the Old Testament), because it's partly written in poetry, and also requires historical context. You get the worst of both possible worlds in the King James Bible.



Now, imagine that the King James Bible was written in Olde English—and I mean Beowulf English, not Chaucer.



And now you have the Koran, a document that's heavy on poetry, that is illegal to translate, study, dissect, or give any historical context to, written in a language no one has used in fifteen centuries.



And it has been translated. I've read it … it's still bloody unreadable.



Congratulations, your local leaders can now make it say whatever they like. Say what you like about the Bible, but it has been poked, prodded, dissected, vivisected, and footnoted to within an inch of its life, and it gets a new translation every few years.



And in Europe, you have a whole bunch of immigrant youth, being brought up in Mosques so insane that they're run by rejects from the Middle East, because they were so nuts even the Wahhabi's wouldn't take them. They're all in an environment that is either so antithetical that they're hostile (Chirac's France) or so accommodating that they're letting the nutjobs take over (Holland).



Oh, and you didn't have suicide bombers in the 1920s. Or the 1940s—and the technology was there, the Japanese Imperial Army had suicide bombers near the end of the war in the pacific. Suicide bombers were not invented in the Middle East ... they were invented by the Ayatollah Khomeini, in the 1980s, when he was fighting a war against Iraq, and losing, badly. Suicide bombers were his way of balancing the scales. And as one book notes, Khomeini was inspired by … post-modern, French deconstructionists.



At the end of the day, does being Muslim make you evil? Hell no. Otherwise we would already have the Caliphates of Dearborn Michigan, Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, and possibly Detroit. The problem with the modern Middle East actually start in the “Post-Christian” Europe, with Fascism, and Tsarist Russia creating the Protocols … if you never thought anything good ever came out of Tsarist Russia, well, you were right.  However, all of this grew up in a soil rich for planting – the middle east has a culture that hasn't changed in over two thousand years.



And it has nothing to do with the religion. It has everything to do with a warped cultural and political sense that occasionally intersects with bad religion and bad people. And the culture that is so very very static …



Still don't believe me?



There is An example that recently came to my attention: an old text that discusses the locals making their women cover their faces.



Was this written in the Wahabist 19th century? No.



In the High Imperial, Ottoman time period, in, say, the 1500s? No.



Was it even back in Mohammed’s time? No.



It was the Bible.



One of Joseph's brothers sleeps with a “Canaanite woman” who had her face covered, in the custom of “her people.” It was a scam, but it made me think. Canaan was a long, long time ago… does anything ever change there?



Because in the beginning, there was the Persian Empire. You know them, you saw 300—and the Persian Empire was actually worse than the film portrayed. No, they weren't Lord of the Ring-like mutant orcs, that was dramatic license when the story is told in bardic format. But the Persian Empire had no concept of freedom or liberty. No concept. No frame of reference. Not even the basic idea. How do I know? Simple.



There was no word for “freedom.”



Eight hundred years later, after Darius III, Alexander the Great, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Byzantines … all of whom weren't big on freedom, unless you were a citizen of said empire (and that only came in with the Romans). And up comes the rise of Islam, The Prophet, blah blah blah … When exactly was the word “freedom” supposed to come into play?



Add Western fascist ideology. Stir well.



I believe I will leave the last word to my friend, Jason Bieber (this is paraphrased, so bear with me).  "Islam changed the culture at the top. It didn't change the culture at the bottom."



And, when you consider that large parts of the culture hasn't changed much since Xerxes, that says something.

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Comments are welcome.  Disagreements are encouraged, but only if you are coherant, and can at least offer evidence for your arguments (references wouldn't hurt).  Also, this is a PG blog.  Any R-rated language will result in your comments being deleted, no matter how good your points are.  I dislike pointing that out, but prior events have made it a necessity.

Secret Origins: Scott "Mossad" Murphy.

I said I would post this the moment the Facebook page hit 100 likes.



It did.



This is the origin of how Scott Murphy, Irish Catholic American, became a founding member of Israeli's Goyim brigade.



If you are on Facebook, remember, this is only the first part of the contest.  When the page hits 150 likes, I will post a podcast of the opening of the book.  When we get to 200 likes, I will post a chapter from the novel.  Somewhere in the middle, really.



And, at 200 likes, we start the real fun: the one who brings the most readers to the fan page will be inserted into A Pius Man by name.  Or we can put in someone else's name, if you like.



Enough of me.  Here's the story. Enjoy.





Tinker, Tailor, Goyim, Spy.

Colorful terrorists.

July 4th, 1976. Sayaret Metkal, Israeli special forces, parachute into Entebbe airport. The objective: rescue over a hundred hostages on a hijacked Air France plane. For over a week, the terrorists had demanded the release of dozens of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.



Israel's response was to send in a team. All the terrorists were killed, and the Israelis lost one man: the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu.



The terrorists were from two groups: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Baader-Meinhoff, a German Red Army Faction.

Those of you who have read the description of A Pius Man have seen that it involves a Red Army terrorist. There were dozens of “Red Armies”-some of them were spin offs of each other, some went by slightly different names, but they were usually Communist in ideology, and Soviet in monetary backing. One popularly known member of these Red Armies was Illich, Ramirez Sanchez, popularly known as Carlos the Jackal.



In Italy, which is the focus of A Pius Man, the Brigate Rosso—the Red Brigade—had a habit of killing policemen, kidnapping, bombing, and generally making an all around nuisance of itself. They rose in prominence on the world Terror scene during the 1970s. By the end of the decade, they had murdered two politicians—a Christian Democrat and a Union leader.



This was more or less the beginning of the end of the Red Brigade. In the 1980s, there was a major crackdown, bordering on all out war, between the Italian police and the Red Brigade. By the end of the decade, they were dispersed. Many of the arrested...



So, it does sort of makes you wonder why, in A Pius Man, one of their former gunman has been hanging out with a Vatican priest. Or, why he was busy shooting a respected academic researching the Vatican archives. Or what he was doing being blasted out of a hotel window to land on the hood of a passing car.

A Public Service Announcement: How to Spot a Suicide Bomber

I live in New York City, so a certain amount of paranoia is reasonable. How much is too much? Great question. However, given that the New York City skyline has a relatively recent hole in it, I don't think it's too much to consider that someone, sooner or later, might want to consider rendering more damage to the city.



Over the past few years, I have come to the conclusion that most people—even those with limited knowledge of weapons, tactics, explosives, or anything harmful—can plan a better terrorist attack than some of the “masterminds” currently operating out in the world.



For example, one of the most likely scenarios in any major urban environment is suicide bombing. Load some people with bombs onto the A and the 6 trains in rush hour, or in the midst of time square—then you can start seeing examples of terror.



Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all sorts of signs for the simple reason that they are, by definition, all first timers. Israeli counterintelligence wrote the defensive playbook, using pragmatic observation and psychological insight, and came up with a 12-point checklist, 11 for women—you'll see why. If you want to see the list being applied, I recommend Lee Child's novel “Gone Tomorrow.”



Now, the twelve signs that you might be looking at a suicide bomber.....



1. Inappropriate clothing: bulking clothing helps hide the explosive vest. If someone is wearing a heavy coat in spring or summer, that could be a hint. If you're living in the sections of the planet where you have never seen real snow, that's less of a hint, and more like a neon sign.



2. A robotic walk: Bombers walk like a robot for a very simple reason: they're carrying approximately 40 pounds of additional weight. Also, many suicide bombers tend to be high before they go towards their target—raw opium is standard, usually tucked between the gum and the cheek. So, either take the added weight or being high, or both, a suicide bomber walks funny



3-6. Variations on a theme: irritability, sweating, tics, nervous behavior. These people are in the last moments of their lives: scared of the pain, drugged out of their mind. Motivation doesn't matter, nor does sincerity of one's beliefs—they are about to die, they see it coming, and they haven't exactly had to do this before. The stress becomes visible.



7. Breathing. Breaths come low, and controlled. It's more or less a matter of the bomber trying to control their breath so they don't hyperventilate.



8. Staring. No one is 100% sure why, but suicide bombers stare straight ahead, fixed on a target. Perhaps it's tunnel vision, perhaps it's blocking out everything but the thought of being about to meet ones maker. Every image of bombers before they blow up shows them with the exact same stare.



9. Mumbled prayers. To date, everyone who blows themselves up in a suicide bombing has done so for religious reasons. Surviving eyewitnesses have all seen continuous, formulaic incantations on visibly moving lips, usually before all hell breaks loose.



10. A large bag. Fresh dynamite is a stable explosive that needs to be set off by specially prepared blasting caps. These caps are wired with cord to an electricity supply and a switch. A nine-volt battery will do, or a large square battery—these are too heavy for a pocket, usually, therefore, a bag.



11. The most recent point: You can't see the person's hands. If the person's hands are in the bag consistently, it could be resting on a button. In the earlier days of suicide bombings, a good bearhug would pin the bomber's arms to their sides, preventing them from reaching the button. The bombers learned, leading to....hands in the bag.



12. Male bombers only: Recently shaved beards. Usually, this is done so the bomber can blend in better. However, it has an obvious flaw: when they shave off their beards, they're leaving an obvious tan line where the beard used to be, the lower half of the face is paler, since it had not been exposed to a great deal of sunlight in a while.







What do you do when you see someone who might be a suicide bomber? That's for another blog post. However: I wouldn't recommend taking the nearest large object and smacking them over the head with it—for one thing, if they have their finger on the trigger, that might set it off early. The best thing I can suggest (without writing a new article) is to move away, slowly—put distance, and preferably a building, between you and the suspect, call emergency services and report a suspicious-looking person.