Some Sunday reading. Featuring: Nick vs. the state dicks; and Howard vs. the coward victim worshippers

Because the other side has given up on reason... what titles must we write in future....?

Nick at Ghostofaflea has some great lines:

...It is no business of the government to intervene in religious disagreements of this kind. Incitement to violence... actual violence... is another matter entirely. It is true any number of bigotries are tribalism dressed up in theological language. It is also true many take whatever their creed as justification for mayhem and slaughter from lone maniacs to psychopathic state-actors. But mere disagreement about the truth cannot be the province of the government, let alone rogue bureaucracies or criminal bureaucratic cliques acting with the power of the government. [I think Nick means this kind of thing]

My creed holds I must have the freedom to be wrong; to deny salvation itself. It holds that the nature of salvation is such that it may only be discovered and accepted as a free gift. My virtue cannot be legislated, let alone the fate of my soul.

Scientologists should be free to believe whatever outrageous UFO nonsense they wish. But I must be free to describe their UFO nonsense in those terms and be free to discourage the overly credulous from believing Scientological faith and practice where a high credit card limit may purchase their ersatz salvation. Once the government steps in to say that my disagreement may bring Scientology into hatred and contempt I can only reply, yes, that is the precise idea. There are many ideologies that should be brought into hatred and contempt, must be if liberty - civilization itself - is to survive. That our law is incapable of distinguishing between opposition to an ideology and incitement to violence against the con artists and rubes who advance it is to show not only badly written law but a Canadian Establishment that has lost the capacity for reason.
[...]
Ask yourself: What kind of "church" sues to prevent public discussion of its theology? What other cults use thought crime legislation to enforce opinions that cannot win converts by reason and example? What other ideologies dismiss disagreement as false consciousness and insist on the power to indoctrinate the children of their opponents?

Ghost of a flea: Operation: Cult Fiction

And in related news:

Perhaps in anticipation of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets of Paris and London and San Fransisco, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explains there is no timetable for withdrawal from the independent, United Nations recognized state of Georgia. Call me cynical but I suspect he need not have bothered. An alphabet soup of so called human rights organizations and so called anti-war activists seem utterly indifferent to reports of slave-taking "forced labour" and continuing Russian military operations in violation of an internationally brokered ceasefire.
[..]
Near uniformity in support of Russian imperialism in comments at The Toronto Star. Historical sidebar: Toronto citizens crowd the port to welcome President Jefferson Davis. More recent historical sidebar: Prime Minister Stephen Harper waves a piece of paper. That was a couple years ago and he is even more wrong now. Military force is the only thing that will resolve this dispute.

For those in need of some visual confirmations of the horrors of this war, from the p.o.v. of the Russian soldier and his desire to record images of burning bodies, check out this link (HT Michael Travis)

Finally, don't miss all the latest at Howard Rotberg's blog detailing his forthcoming trial against Canada's book monolith:

I have gone to some pains in recent postings to explain that I think that the young Palestinians who lied and lied some more about me are to be pitied. But the all too human tendency in this world, exacerbated by elements in our current culture, is always to blame somebody else for everything and shy away from taking personal responsibility for your actions.

What I am referring to is the way that the media who reported the incident and the corporate executives at Chapters in fact by their liberal inclinations for moral relativism and sympathy for the perceived underdog, actually encourage the Raneem Al-Halimis of this world to lie and to think they can get away with their lies.

Why? Because look how inadequate was the investigation by Chapters. Look how the PR Director, Ms. Gaulin, automatically assumed that the word of an 18 year old part time employee should be preferred to that of an author, a lawyer, an activist for race relations, and a developer of affordable housing in the very community in which he had been attacked, without proper protection by his hosts, and she did not take up my offer to talk to two reputabe professors in the audience for the whole lecture.

Look how the police were so fast in releasing the troublemakers, before they even completed their investigation by talking to me. Look at how easy it was for Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress to say he had "every confidence" in the Waterloo Police, without even taking the time with me to receive the sworn affidavits that I had.

In other words, the real blame extends through our media, our police, our cultural corporations like Chapters, the NGOs and even the Jewish NGOs! They are so eager, in their misconceived liberal sympathies for the "perceived victim" that they don't care if the perceived victim is victimizing others.

Now let's turn to the Israel-Palestinian problem. The United Nations treated the Palestinians unlike any other refugees, by creating United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. This perpetuated the problem, rather than attempting to solve it and created a whole class of people whose income and jobs depended on the perpetuation of the problem and not its solution.

I have written on this blog about one Western country's inappropriate reaction to Palestinian terrorism (Germany in the 1972 Olympics) and in fact the IOC's inappropriate reaction. In fact, I would argue that the West, particularly Europe has in fact encouraged a maximalist, rejectionist Palestinian leadership, beginning with the way that Yassr Arafat was so frequently feted and the way in which intellectuals continued with him the all too often intellectual love affair with totalitarians and men of violence.

Then, when Israel offered the overly generous settlement at Camp David, was the Western world there to counsel the Palestinians to accept it? No, in fact when the Palestinians chose to make a reaction not a diplomatic one, but one of the worst examples of killing innocent civilians in history - i.e. suicide bombings against civilians as part of a death cult, did the West penalize or even denounce the Palestinians for adopting this death cult, and turning their schools and media into brainwashing factories for suicide bombers?

No, in fact, as I show in my novel, the more violent and disfunctional the Palestinians became the more certain elements in the West, especially in Europe and especially in our universities, became pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Even as the Palestinians rejected democracy by voting in a totalitarian Islamist killing machine, controlled by non Arabs in Iran, the West was still silent.

So do you see the metaphor? Sure the Palestinians were at fault in my case, just as they have been at fault in many cases of their conflict with a country that is trying to set up a state for them in the West Bank and Gaza.

But in both cases, we cannot only fault the poor mixed up people who have done the vile deeds. As my writing shows, again and again, it is we in the west, who are perpetuating and in fact deepening the problem by our morally corrupted responses.

So, Heather Reisman and Sorya Ingrid Gaulin at Chapters, you are a main part of the problem. What you have done to me is an interesting metaphor for what the western, educated world has done to the poor pitiful Palestinians, and their Jewish neighbours.

The Metaphor