Covenant Zone

Netanyahu at the UN

2011-09-25T20:45:00.004-07:00

For "na"

2011-07-07T11:17:00.002-07:00

na, if you are still dropping by the blog, you might enjoy this interview of Ruth Wisse on the nature of antisemitism and the failure of the academy and many Jews to understand it.
Watch: Harvard professor assails 'kill-the-Jews flotilla'

Jew sues Israel haters: are the Canadian courts capable of enforcing just reciprocity?

2011-06-07T13:07:00.003-07:00

The Israel-Palestinian "peace process" is perhaps the world's longest-standing act of cynicism. Countless have professed themselves to the cause, but too often in ways that actually avoid the possibility of any resolution. As Blazing Cat Fur notes in his post on the lawsuit of one Cherna Rosenberg, the Gazans today enjoy the trappings of modern consumer culture: Blazing Cat Fur: Sea Hitler Lawsuit - Canada's Gaza Boat Sued For A Cool Million. However, there is no economic basis in Gaza for this consumption other than the inflows of foreign "aid" in various forms. Essentially, the Gazans are paid to hate and fight the Jews, and as David Goldman has shown their warfare economy has earned them a standard of living considerably higher than that of their neighbors in Egypt. The world pays the Palestinians because the world doesn't really want a resolution to the conflict, because such a resolution would require the world to admit it either wants another Holocaust or wants the Jews to be a sovereign nation like all the rest (and not a pathetic figure in whose apparent failures one can take religious comfort), a self-interested nation with the ability to guarantee its security by controlling, if only militarily, the lands from which the local Arabs have professed, since at least the 1920s, their will to launch endless attacks until the Zionist presence is wiped off the map. The world doesn't want either of those outcomes as much as it wants a ready scapegoat on which all the resentments churned up by the modern global economy, and the failure of large swaths of humanity to adapt to this economy, can be directed. Countless organizations around the world gain their credibility among the resentful by participating in what is, effectively, a death cult that positively requires blood and suffering that people may find identification with a victim of supposedly "aggressive", world-destabilizing, Jews. Money is paid for blood, as the latest parade of self-sacrificing Arab youth to tresspass the Syria-Israel border has once again shown.

So one wonders, now that much of the Canadian and world left has returned to its antisemitic roots - i.e. to the Marxist identification of "the Jew" with the evil invisible hand of bourgeois capitalism - will a Canadian court with, likely, a centre-left judge, allow a Jewish plaintiff to sue successfully the Canadian organizers of the Canadian "Sea Hitler" boat to Gaza? In other words, will the Ontario courts allow for some reciprocity that a Jew, who has suffered under the rocket attacks from Gaza, get a share of the money the world directs towards the Palestinian cause of blaming and hating Israel for all the woes of the Middle East and beyond? Via Scaramouche:

A lawsuit filed in Toronto is seeking to block Canadian participation in the second international "Freedom Flotilla" to Gaza.

Cherna Rosenberg, a 68-year-old citizen of both Canada and Israel, filed her case June 2 in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice inToronto against the Canadian Boat to Gaza and Alternatives International. The complaint charges these groups with raising funds for and providing material support to Hamas, which governs Gaza and which was declared a terrorist group by Canada in 2002.

Under Canadian law, it is illegal to help or support "a designated terror group," said Rosenberg's lawyers, Neil Sher of New York and Ed Morgan of Toronto, in a statement.

Rosenberg, who divides her time between Israel and Canada, is seeking an interim and permanent injunction prohibiting the defendants "from continuing to raise funds, purchasing equipment or supplies, and purchasing or renting a vessel for the purpose of delivering goods or funds to the Gaza Strip."

According to a statement of claim, which outlines a plaintiff's cause for action, the suit also seeks to block the defendants "from sending goods, funds or any other material support, directly or indirectly, to Hamas or any of its representatives, and/or from aiding and abetting Hamas by assisting in bringing imports and exports to and from the Gaza Strip."...

Ezra Levant interviews the always-fascinating Sam Solomon, ex-imam, and now a Christian and advisor on Islam to Western politicians

2011-05-25T16:10:00.003-07:00

The Rapture

2011-05-20T22:21:00.007-07:00

I saw a couple of people on the street today waving signs declaring that the world ends tomorrow (which begins here in about ninety minutes). I didn't stop to enquire further. But apparently this is part of a widespread belief drummed up by some American evangelical who is getting much attention notwithstanding that he is but the latest in a long line of people who have thought they could predict the (start, end of?) the end times. If I recall correcty, the early Christian church made frequent predictions about an imminent return of the Messiah, a habit it gave up at some medieval point, recognizing that serial declarations of the end were costing the Church credibility.

Indeed it seems to me that the truest spirit of Judeo-Christian, or Abrahamic religion is the development of a faith that can allow one to live confidently in the possibility of an ongoing creativity and growth in human civilization, with no guarantees of an imminent end of history, a faith that survives all doubts whether life is still meaningful if it is deeply open-ended, with no final judgment day any time soon.

It was this book which introduced me to a memorable Franz Kafka aphorism, one I think speaks to a true faith in our humanity able to live without belief that either we or the divinity must soon bring things to an end. Faith in humanity is faith in our ability ever to defer the violence that must destroy our world. Keeping in mind that in Judaism (in contrast to Christianity), the promised Messiah is not thought to be God, but a human, we may in any case still ask whether our faith in God should be any different than our faith in humanity. Kafka articulates the question thus:

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last day

Variant translation: The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but at the very last.

If the new Parliament is to get a clean start...

2011-05-03T10:03:00.003-07:00

We must not forget that when the chips were down, Jack Layton did not have the courage to ask for forgiveness but told a bald lie to the Canadian people (and quite possibly to his own wife).
Massaging the truth about Jack Layton - The Globe and Mail

HT: Scaramouche

First thoughts on news of the Lorna Pardy- Guy Earle- Zesty's decision from the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal

2011-04-21T11:45:00.001-07:00

The decision on the Lorna Pardy, Guy Earle, Zesty's restaurant case before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has just come down. For links to early reactions and a copy of the decision see Blazing Cat Fur: Comic Guy Earle Fined 15K For Offending Heckling Dyke By BCHRT

Lorna Pardy has been awarded over 22 thousand dollars from Earle and the owner of Zesty's/Zawa restaurant. I have not yet had time to read the decision, but I will have more to say about this attack on all Canadians' freedom later. For now, just a few preliminary thoughts, based on my attendance at the hearing (as reported here - see reports in our March and April 2010 archives in this blog's sidebar. Yes, it has taken a whole year for the "human rights" tribunal to present its "justice").

My overall impression of the trial was that Lorna Pardy was genuinely hurt by the Earle-Pardy event, but that she and the culture in which she thinks of herself as a victim is much to blame for this injury.

Since I ultimately see this as an instance of human sacrifice, in which a "victim" has willingly (though with much instititutional encouragement) hurt herself for the cause of her society, let's begin with a few quick thoughts on the the human nature of events and sacrifice.

All human reality stems from events. It is how we act in, try to shape, and remember events that allows us to construct our shared cultural reality. When an event happens, at the very moment it begins (though it's always carrying baggage from previous events) its meaning is up for grabs: it is not a given in the nature of things that we must see any event one way or another. This is because what makes an event, what makes it stand out as noticeable in the flow of time, is its inherent unpredictability, its creation of some difference that we can't fully explain in terms of previous experience. Because humans have freedom, we have events.

This uncertainty in all human experience of events is a humbling mystery, at least it should be for us. But most of us do not have the good faith to remain humbled. We generally want some guarantee that event X means what we might like it to mean. (It's cold this year, that means the theory of global warming is.... he insulted me because he is an...) All religion, ritual, and secular institutions try to provide some such guarantee.

In hunter-gatherer societies, people made animal offerings to the gods or spirit world in attempts to guarantee some meaning or outcome (the outcome was important not simply for pragmatic reasons but as a sign that would either sustain or threaten the group's shared understanding of the human and spirit worlds, and this understanding was the bond that kept one's group together). When human societies moved beyond hunter-gatherer subsistence and developed, usually through agriculture, the potential for some bankable surplus of wealth, they became hierarchical as "big men" evolved to develop the capacity to control the ritual or institutional means by which this (potential) surplus could be accumulated, stored, and divided. One aspect of the new ritual order witnessed in many places around the world was the proliferation of cults of human sacrifice. Often it was the big men themselves, the most esteemed figures, who ended up as the sacrificial victims. Not only was the king the most obvious one to blame when things went wrong, when the gods were not smiling on the human community, but over time resentment of his social difference, the big man's break with the primitive and more equalitarian world, and the inability of the big man, sooner or later, to mediate all the of the group's collected resentments, made him the most obvious figure for scapegoating. This tendency to make victims of our most "worthy" has been well-documented at least since James George Frazer's groundbreaking ethnographic work, The Golden Bough.
Perhaps we still do it today.

But once a culture discovers the arts of human sacrifice and discovers that, in the context of a simple agrarian society that knows no other way, human sacrifice really does have some positive benefits in mediating (often irrational) resentments, in reducing group tensions, and sometimes controlling population growth that cannot be sustained by the prevailing economic methods, all kinds of people can become targeted as scapegoats. And sometimes, or so I think we must conclude from the ability of some cultures, like the Aztecs, to organize regular festivals with thousands of victims, these were at least somewhat willing victims who went along with the ideas of their culture.

The West would come to renounce its pagan cults of human sacrifice under the influence of Judeo-Chritian religion and the secular "enlightened" modernity to which it later gave rise.

And, all too quickly, this brings us to the postmodern "human rights" worlview, now insititutionalized in Canada in various "Human Rights" Comissions and Tribunals. To the proponents of the "human rights" worldview, the postmodern culture continues in the tradition of redeeming victims and denouncing human sacrificial violence. The vulgar "comedy" act of a Guy Earle thus becomes the target of a Human Rights Tribunal acting in the name of countering "homophobia" and redeeming one particular victim of Earle's verbal abuse.

However, those of us who have come to think that the postmodern "victimary" world view is not a genuine continuation of our most liberal traditions, do so because we have come to see that our present-day cult of "redeeming" victimhood is actually one that positively needs to create victims and harms lives to do so, so that it will always have a "victim" to wave about as a guarantee of its own righteousness and institutional justification. In the victimary world view, every human relationship must ideally (at least in the thinking of today's academy) be "deconstructed" to find the unequal or oppressive relationship inherent within. This becomes an impossibly Utopian project of never accepting human reality, with all its asymmetries and differences, as anything other than the conpsiracy du jour of the supposedly powerful against the supposedly weak (I say supposedly, because we are already, in having this Utopian thought, beginning to turn the tables and letting the "victim" get something back from the "oppressor").

In the postmodern world, the differences by which any human order or society might be constructed - and social differences are always necessary to any conceivable society - are put under permanent suspicion. Anyone who takes a historical lead in creating a difference is suspect. At its logical extreme, this means the left devolves into antisemitism and anti-Americanism and mindless apologetics for the violence of the supposedly "oppressed" third world, especially when that violence is targeted against the (once) historically exceptional West and its Judeo-Christian exemplars. If you are a psychotic Hamashole intent on killing Jews, the Western left will hear your pain and rail against my unsympathetic language; if you are an Egyptian Copt, facing murder and assault form the local Islamic mob, probably not.

In the case of Guy Earle and Lorna Pardy, we must ask whether our culture and "human rights" institutions have positively encouraged Lorna Pardy to publicly present herself as a "victim" of Earle. We can argue over the event - just what happened at Zesty restaurant's comedy night - all we want. But we are naive if we don't understand that even before the two parties went into the restaurant that evening their minds and conduct were already shaped by, and attempting to shape the next of, a countless series of events battling over the meaning of our postmodern "human rights" worldview. It may be worth noting at this point that the hallways of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal featured (at the time of the hearing last year) a feminist poster championing a series of "great women" in the narrative of a certain redemptive "human rights" worldview. This was not an institution trying to appear neutral but one that positively wanted Pardy to present herself as a victim, which she did in what I took to be a rather pitiable manner.

I think Pardy hurt herself (however many thousands of dollars she may receive in compensation will not be sufficient compensation) by publicly presenting herself, in the way she did, as a great victim of some idiot's bad words, as a victim who could not simply pay back Earle in his own currency. She has been widely belittled on the internet and in the media for seeking out the arms of the nanny state. And so I think that in the end she did, by her own actions, and with the help of our legal system, become a victim. I think she is evidence for the argument that the "human rights" world view positively encourages and creates victims, and truly scars them. I think our "human rights" tribunals are often engaged in a cult of human sacrifice, having forgotten the best means to mediate the human desire for sacrificial violence lies in the codes of personal responsibility, and more decentralized mediation of differences, that once were central to Western culture.

Guy Earle's atrocious "humour" is itself, in my mind, a reaction to "political correctness". In a youth culture today where kids at school are taught to think in terms of identifying themselves or others as real or potential victims of power, and are taught little else in the way of human self-knowledge - everything is now reduced to victim/oppressor revelations - it is not uncommon to see young people taunting each other with incredibly vulgar but puerile language, taunting to see who is willing or able to play "the victim". And you're a "douchebag", etc. etc., if you disagree.

Now, before further comment, it's time to digest the decision that on its face seems outrageous, a chill on the freedom of our comedy scene and our freedom and financial ability to operate small businesses. I will be interested to see if it confirms my first impression is that this is the "human rights" regime just paying off a woman who served herself up as a very public victim to give the "human rights" institutions fodder for their suppression of freedom in the name of some impossibly Utopian project of deconstructing and redeeming each and every unequal human relationship. It's time for the Canadian people to give back to the regime, the truly victimizing power, some of its own medicine.

Real diversity stems from the unity of human truth, faithfully pursued

2011-04-21T00:07:00.002-07:00

Wally Keeler

Praying For Japan

2011-03-13T18:16:00.004-07:00

I've now heard from all my Japanese friends, and thank God they and their families are safe. Five bits of good news, to weigh against the tide of bad news.

Looking at this "before-and-after" slideshow from the NY Times, it seems a miracle that anybody in that part of the country could have survived at all. (Click on the slider bar in the middle of each picture, and then drag the slider back and forth, like a curtain, to compare and contrast each image in the series)

It's as if a giant scythe swept across the face of the country, shaving the soil of its humanity, a ghastly harvest of death.

"War Is War"

2011-03-09T21:14:00.005-08:00

“[W]ar is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.”
__ General William Tecumseh Sherman

Controversial in his day, equally so in our own time, General William Tecumseh Sherman put quill pen to paper in the aftermath of the US Civil War to write an autobiography and chronicle his side of the story, in voluminous detail.

Thanks to the marvels of e-book technology his 1875 one thousand-page multi-volume memoirs can be carried effortlessly in a modern reader’s coat pocket. The technology may allow us to delete the file from an e-reader’s storage, but the stories Sherman relates are not so easily dismissed from the human reader’s memory.

Sherman can teach modern-day readers much about the people and the period in which their story took place, and through them, make us see something about our own time. His was a life of constant upheaval, of drama always lurking over the horizon. His recounting of the early days of the 1849 Gold Rush, which erupted during his California mission, were especially stimulating; hundreds of sailing ships would arrive with cargo and prospectors, but never leave, because all their crews would desert for the gold fields. Bank presidents and other wealthy managers of wealth found themselves starving and ill-clothed, as servant after imported servant would desert their households so routinely that their families had a hard time eating regular meals. The lure of gold proved so seductive that few people kept their word; trustworthyness became such a valuable commodity that those possessing the rare virtue sought each other out, formed business partnerships together (as well as doing each other's laundry..!), and made far more lasting fortunes than those dredged up by the get-rich-quick gold-seekers in their muddy rivers and fields.

Death is always close at hand in this book, even before the advent of the War Between The States. The deadly perils of mid-19th Century transportation, for example, are brought to light early on: while Sherman is west-bound to serve at his early post in California, he is shipwrecked twice in one day! No wonder everyone seemed to always do anything they did with such gusto.

The vengeful Union General, the scourge of the South, offered such generous terms of peace to the forces of General Johnston, the Confederate opponent who finally surrendered to him in April 1865, that many in the North charged that he who had marched so resolutely to the sea was now guilty of treason. Yet that same Union General had written a blunt letter in 1862, following the capture of Memphis, leaving no doubt the price he felt was necessary for peace:

“I will write plainly and slowly, because I know you have no time to listen to trifles. This is no trifle; when one nation is at war with another, all of the people of the one are enemies of the other: then the rules are plain and easy of understanding. Most unfortunately, the war in which we are now engaged has been complicated with the belief on the one hand that all on the other are not enemies. It would have been better if, at the outset, this mistake had not been made; and it is wrong longer to be misled by it. The Government of the United Statesmay now safely proceed on the proper rule that all in the south are enemies of all in the North; and not only are they unfriendly, but all who can procure arms now bear them as organized regiments, or as guerillas.”
__Sherman’s letter to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P Chase

There were many stories that at once set my mind to wandering, and wondering; but none more so than Sherman’s casual meetings with his wartime opponents after the war, in social settings. "It's a small world", then as today. By chance he once found himself sharing a long train ride with former Confederate General Joe Johnston, the erstwhile defender of Atlanta, the forlorn protector of the Carolinas, the thorn in Sherman’s side for month after month of a year’s worth of gruesome fighting. What a meeting that must have been… how much suffering and misery had each conversationalist brought upon the other, just a few short years before; yet there they were, able to put such painful conflicts behind them, to find common ground for civil talk, despite their previous civil war.

It says a lot about the greatness of the United States of America, that such men were capable of such reconciliation, despite all that they had seen, and done. And lost. Today the drumbeat is sounded to never forgive, else victims lose their idealized status as heroes. Once upon a time, the heroes were those who could forgive, who allowed for atonement. Despite even losses as grievous as that of their own son.

Sherman has been accused of many vile deeds (his solution to how to clear a mine-filled road: have Confederate prisoners of war march ahead of his own troops, to set off the waiting mines), and he catalogs many of them in his memoirs, defending or deflecting where he feels necessary. There is one civilian casualty, however, whose death he never denied responsibility: the death of his favorite son, 'Willie' Sherman. A letter to a captain C.C. Smith is included in his memoirs, "as exhibiting our intense feeling" about the tragedy:

"Consistent with a sense of duty to my profession and office, I could not leave my post, and sent for the family to come to me in that fatal climate, and in that sickly period of the year, and behold the result! The child that bore my name, and in whose future I reposed with more confidence than I did in my own plan of life, now floats a mere corpse, seeking a grave in a distant land, with a weeping mother, brother and sisters, clustered about him. For myself, I ask no sympathy. On, on I must go, to meet a soldier's fate, or live to see our country rise superior to all factions, till its flag is adored and respected by ourselves and by all the powers of the earth.
But Willie was, or thought he was, a sergeant in the Thirteenth. I have seen his eye brighten, his heart beat, as he beheld the battalion under arms, and asked me if they were not real soldiers. Child as he was, he had the enthusiasm, the pure love of truth, honor and love of country, which should animate all soldiers.
God only knows why he should die this young. He is dead, but will not be forgotten till those who knew him in life have followed him to that same mysterious end.
Please convey to the battalion my heart-felt thanks, and assure each and
all that if in after-years they call on me or mine, and mention that they were of the Thirteenth Regulars when Willie was a sergeant, they will have a key to the affections of my family that will open all it has; that we will share with them our last blanket, our last crust! Your friend,
W.T. Sherman, Major-General

To see Sherman in today's cultural memory is to see a scowling face plotting some calculated cruelty, a furrowed brow framing a pair of merciless eyes. Reading his memoirs, reading about the loss of his son, I see these wartime portraits, much to my surprise, with new eyes.

William Tecumseh Sherman is no longer the brute I thought him to be; now I see a saddened father looking to shorten, not increase, the suffering of others, a man seeing others as fellow men, a soldier seeking to wage war as the necessary shortcut to winning a lasting peace.

One Thing Jimmy Carter Got Right

2011-02-11T07:06:00.007-08:00

Let's face it, when the old son-of-a-gun is right, he's right. Back in 1980, Carter's speech at the Democratic convention contained this undeniable truth: the former commander of the Atropos and the Hotspur would, indeed, have been a good president.

If I was at that convention I would be cheering too.

Iranium

2011-02-07T16:08:00.001-08:00

Iranium

Dutch White Guilt has another run-around with Geert Wilders

2011-02-07T12:58:00.003-08:00

If you ever thought there was something compulsive about the modern left, as if they were trapped in a cultic thinking that just knows it can't be wrong, the Dutch plaintiffs and politicians who seemingly can't let go of their persecution of Geert Wilders, are back in court today to support your intuition, notwithstanding the utter farce of their earlier courtroom miscarriages of justice.

The International Free Press Society - Canada writes:

From the beginning, the plaintiffs were not pleased that the Dutch prosecutors felt the criminal case against Geert Wilders should not proceed. Remarkably, the Court of Appeal chose to ignore the recommendations of the prosecutors and proceed with the trial.

The trial was suspended in October 2010 as it was determined that the Chief Judge had acted in a manner which could be prejudicial. Subsequently, another instance of interference surfaced. In response to this turn of events, yet another Judge inappropriately made public comments about the suspension of the trial.

The zeal and determination with which the court is pursuing Geert Wilders even in the face of so many opportunities to put a halt to this farce, bespeaks the application of a kind of law that is foreign to western principles of justice. We should all be alarmed that Shariah law appears to have taken hold in our courtrooms and in the social fabric of western nations against the wishes and unbeknownst to the majority of citizens.

It is imperative that the citizens of free nations fully understand the implications of the actions of unelected officials in courtrooms across the Western world and stand with Geert Wilders and other victims of the Thought Police and reject this stealth movement towards removing our fundamental liberties.

Geert Wilders Speech at court in Amsterdam today :: IFPS-Canada

The IFPS then provides us with an English text of Wilders' speech today at the Amsterdam court:

The lights are going out all over Europe. All over the continent where our culture flourished and where man created freedom, prosperity and civilization. Everywhere the foundation of the West is under attack.

All over Europe the elites are acting as the protectors of an ideology that has been bent on destroying us since the fourteenth century. An ideology that has sprung from the desert and that can produce only deserts because it does not give people freedom. The Islamic Mozart, the Islamic Gerard Reve [a Dutch author], the Islamic Bill Gates; they do not exist because without freedom there is no creativity. The ideology of Islam is especially noted for killing and oppression and can only produce societies that are backward and impoverished. Surprisingly, the elites do not want to hear any criticism of this ideology.

My trial is not an isolated incident. Only fools believe it is. All over Europe multicultural elites are waging total war against their populations. Their goal is to continue the strategy of mass-immigration, which will ultimately result in an islamic Europe – a Europe without freedom: Eurabia.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Anyone who thinks or speaks individually is at risk. Freedom loving citizens who criticize islam, or even merely suggest that there is a relationship between islam and crime or honour killing, must suffer and are threatened or criminalized. Those who speak the truth are in danger.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Everywhere the Orwellian thought police are at work, on the lookout for thought crimes everywhere, casting the populace back within the confines where it is allowed to think.

This trial is not about me. It is about something much greater. Freedom of speech is not the property of those who happen to belong to the elites of a country. It is an inalienable right, the birthright of our people. For centuries battles have been fought for it, and now it is being sacrificed to please a totalitarian ideology.

Future generations will look back at this trial and wonder who was right. Who defended freedom and who wanted to get rid of it.

The lights are going out all over Europe. Our freedom is being restricted everywhere, so I repeat what I said here last year:

It is not only the privilege, but also the duty of free people – and hence also my duty as a member of the Dutch Parliament – to speak out against any ideology that threatens freedom. Hence it is a right and a duty to speak the truth about the evil ideology that is called islam. I hope that freedom of speech will emerge triumphant from this trial. I hope not only that I shall be acquitted, but especially that freedom of speech will continue to exist in the Netherlands and in Europe.

But why do the "multicultural elites" need to persecute Wilders and his free speech and contribute generally to the suicide of freedom, the suicide of the ongoing creativity that defines the West in comparison to pretty much any other, relatively unfree, civilizational order? Why has the left become a cult of control freaks?

We will perhaps find our answer in a debate over the nature of White Guilt. In this debate, I agree with Adam Katz that White Guilt is ultimately the fear of what we will become (mass murderers) if we refuse the blackmail of those who threaten us with terrorism or totalitarian law (essentially, the Sharia), e.g. with demands for expansion of the Islamic culture and state. This is why, to counter the underlying fear of our cultic left, the defenders of freedom must become much more active in thinking about how our freedom and any reformed immigration policy need not entail a genocidal threat to the "third-world" that is full of resentment at being, in the present world order, marginalized economic and political losers whose culture is not readily-suited to productivity in a now single global marketplace.

Can that resentment be mediated, can it be turned into productive energy, with anything less than a step-by-step liberalization of the cultures of the present outcasts? And do we have the courage, and humility, to help lead that process? Or will we commit suicide? Or will we try to put up a wall around those who hate us and want to kill us, thinking that we will only have to keep them in check with occasional military strikes, and that a heavy hand will diminish and not increase their fury to destroy us, so that the situation will never escalate into the possibility that drives White Guilt: the possibility that we will wipe them out in some fury of escalating rivalry?

White Guilt seeks the suicide of the West so that we need never face that day when we lose all trust and faith in the civilizing mission of Western Judeo-Greco-Christian culture. White Guilt has already imagined that day and lost faith. And that's why Wilders, according to the guilty, must be ceaselessly pursued. While I detest their faithlessness, I think the white guilty do have one real insight: the likelihood that genocide will emerge from any strategy to lock up and contain the resentful, unfree populations of the third world. I don't see this as an argument not to fight the Islamization (Shariafication) of Europe, or at least parts of it, by changing immigration, among other, policies. But maybe that's a topic for the comments section, if anyone wants to take it up.

The Least Of Egypt's Problems: Virtual Looting

2011-02-02T12:59:00.000-08:00

As we watch and wait for any signs of a hopeful outcome to the news from Egypt, here's a story that was shared with me this morning, with an angle that probably won't make the headlines any time soon...:

A friend of mine plays in one of those "real-time" internet games where each player faces off against other human players from around the world, rather than against a computer. Not everyone may be aware of this newer trend in online games, so permit me the following basic description: The gameplay involves each player managing medieval-styled villages scattered across a virtual landscape, inter-acting with neighboring players' villages, either through peaceful trade or strategic conquest. There are shifting alliances of players/villages that compete or co-exist, with the whole saga playing out in "real-time", rather than in "turn-based" gameplay, like chess; if you stop playing this game for a while, your neighbors can't help but notice, and that influences how they choose to co-exist with you...

When Egypt unplugged itself from the internet a few days ago, one of the minor results was an online assault upon self-identified Egyptian players' villages, as they stood suddenly helpless before online looters. You see, players have the option to include some biographical information about themselves, as part of their player profile, much as we bloggers have the option to "reveal" ourselves through our blog profiles. Players are usually circumspect about their identities, although my friend reports that gamers claiming to be from the Middle East are rarely shy about declaring where they live and who they are, when compared to the rest of the average players of these games.

In recent weeks, current events have been tipping off the players in this online world as to which specific villages/players are not likely to be able to defend themselves if attacked, because of the real-world difficulties happening in their real-life homeland. When Egypt disconnected itself from the internet, it left all their players' online communities unsupervised... and therefore, unprotected.

The online response in the game has been two-fold; on the one hand, a few charitable players have banded together to try and co-manage, and ultimately defend, these properties on behalf of their real owners, knowing as they do the real reason behind the sudden silence of their Egyptian absentee landlords. The game mechanics apparently allow for certain mutual assistance to take place without the actual owner of a village being online to supervise the transaction; consequently, several sympathetic players here and there had taken the initiative to shield their colleagues' virtual possessions during their enforced absence, in the hope that soon enough there can be more of a level playing field once again.

Unfortunately the far more common response has been the systematic looting of Egyptian players' virtual villages by rapacious competitors, who see these real-world events as a golden opportunity for easy pickings.

My friend shared a message she received this morning from an Egyptian player of her acquaintance, back online today after an understandably long absence. He thanked her for her recent help, as well as requesting their team's continued support for keeping his online virtual possessions safe and secure until he can become more involved again himself.

Now, putting aside the obvious point ("Why in the world do you still care about this online fantasyland when your real world, filled with real friends and family, is in such peril??"), isn't it interesting how human behavior in the real world is spontaneously repeating itself in this online, parallel, reality?

In real-world Egypt, some citizens are banding together for mutual protection from looters, while others see the tumultuous times as occasion for pillage and plunder. And here it is occuring again, in imaginary worlds. There are countless games like hers nowadays; is the story repeating itself in all of them, I wonder?

Lars Hedegaard acquitted, without winning the right to speak freely in public about Muslim violence

2011-01-31T16:18:00.001-08:00

Apparently, the Danish court has acquitted Lars Hedegaard on hate speech charges, stemming from Hedegaard pointing out that Muslim girls face sexual violence from their own families. But this acquittal was not because the court found that a Dane has the right to discuss such things in public, but because the court found Hedegaard did not know that his private comments would be publicized.

Yo, Danish judiciary, prosecutors, and politicians! right now, I'm flipping you the bird, in private! More and more, one comes to think, well, maybe the rumours of the Hells Angels taking over Denmark in a coming collapse of the rule of law have something to them!
Scaramouche!: Breaking News: Lars Hedegaard Acquitted!

Statement by Lars Hedegaard on his acquittal :: IFPS-Canada:

Copenhagen, January 31, 2011

As my ancient forefathers, the vikings, would have said: It is always good to fight. It is better to win.

My detractors – the foes of free speech and the enablers of an Islamic ascendancy in the West – will claim that I was acquitted on a technicality, namely that the judge in the Court of Frederiksberg resolved that my supposedly offensive comments on the violations against little Muslim girls were not intended for public dissemination.

That is absolutely true. The judge chose the way out provided by my capable counsel.

However, the public prosecutor has been privy to the circumstances surrounding my case for a year – and yet he chose to prosecute me. Obviously in the hope that he could secure a conviction given the Islamophile sentiment among our ruling classes.

My acquittal is therefore a major victory for free speech.

I have no doubt that the massive support I have received from freedom fighters around the world has been instrumental in securing my acquittal.

This outcome will encourage people all over the West and beyond to speak up.

The battle for freedom is far from lost.

Courage!

Barry Rubin on the Palestine Papers Fraud and Blood Libel

2011-01-26T17:52:00.003-08:00

(Updated below)
Whether or not you think Barry Rubin evidences a previous naivete in announcing that the recent al-Jazeera/Guardian "revelation" of (obviously fraudulent) papers (ostensibly the undoctored notes of Palestinian "peace" negotiators) means the end of hopes for any peace agreement, for at least a generation, his explanation of why these are obviously fraudulent is worth reading. Also, of interest to friends of Covenant Zone will be Rubin's concluding thoughts on the the often asked question - what can we do? - in face of a massively corrupt or deluded mainstream media:

"[A person I know] gets almost all his news from CNN. So today he gave the important news that he received from CNN that the "Palestinians said they were willing to give up most of Jerusalem for peace." I tried to explain to him that the story was completely false. He just gave me a blank stare back. His mind could not comprehend how such an authority as Wolf Blitzer and CNN could report something as fact but that is in fact completely false.

"Do you ever just want to scream? I do. What can we do? What can the average person do? Does it have any effect at all if we write to the media, expressing our outrage. Does the truth matter if the official truth is all that people believe?"

Do I ever want to scream? What do you think! Does it have any effect when we complain to the media? No.

Does the truth matter if the official truth is all that people believe? Well, that's different. Roughly two-thirds of the American people do not accept what the media tells them on this issue. In fact, support for Israel in the United States went up during the Gaza flotilla crisis. Every day, more people are waking up. New sources of information are expanding.

A lot of average people have common sense. A lot of government officials (not enough, for sure), have to deal with reality and sooner or later see through the illusions. Polls on media credibility show it to be quite low. Student sit through indoctrinating classes and don't accept what they are told.

Basically, we have to wait it out. Meanwhile, we need to tell the truth, educate as many people as possible, help build an alternate elite to replace and repair the diseased segments of society.

Rabbi Tarfon said "It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to abstain from it." Pirkei Avot, Chapter 2, Paragraph 16.

Or here is the Enlightenment version of that principle from Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

RubinReports: Coming Soon, From Those Wonderful People Who Brought You The “Palestine Papers

RubinReports: PS On Palestine Papers

UPDATE: See also the analysis of Pinhas Inbari who suggests that the way to propagate lies is to wrap them in truths:

After reading many of the documents, it appears that most of them are genuine and reflected the course of negotiations with Israel's previous Kadima government. The problem is that because al-Jazeera has a point to prove - that the PLO negotiators betrayed Arafat's legacy and hurried to cross red lines, with their gestures unreciprocated - Israel is portrayed as a hard-line interlocutor that did not respond to PLO "moderation." This results in damage to both sides - to the "traitorous" PLO and to "unresponsive" Israel.

Yet there appears to be a clear gap between the substance of these documents and the way they were presented. Besides a readiness to accept the principle of land swaps - from the Clinton parameters - there were no further Palestinian concessions. Nor was there agreement on the size and location of these land swaps. The PLO team was adamant in refusing to agree to Israeli demands to keep the settlement blocs. For example, the Palestinians demanded the dismantling of the city of Ariel (pop. 17,559), and they were ready to consider leaving Israelis living in Ma'ale Adumim (pop. 34,324) only if the Jewish city adjacent to Jerusalem was under Palestinian sovereignty.

While Erekat mentioned "creative ideas" to solve the issue of the al-Aqsa/Temple Mount compound, they have nothing to do with sharing the site with Israel, but rather to establishing an Arab and Muslim consortium to supervise the holy site.

Questions on the Refugee Offer

While the figure of 100,000 refugees to be allowed into Israel is mentioned for the first time in Palestinian sources, it is unclear which side offered this figure. According to previous reports, it was Olmert's offer that was rejected by Abbas. Abbas himself referred to these documents as a "mixture" of Israeli and PLO positions.
[...]
Al-Jazeera is now under the management of Wadah Khanfar, a radical Palestinian from Nablus. For years the Arab satellite channel has sought to advance the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood against the Arab regimes. The problem it faces is that the sources of the current wave of Arab unrest are actually local and have nothing to do with pan-Arab ideals or with the Palestinian problem. Nevertheless, al-Jazeera is trying to link the local grievances in every Arab country to a pan-Arab revolution triggered by the Palestinian problem.

Another motivation is to preserve Hamas' interests. Erekat was right when he said the leaks cut short the PLO's diplomatic campaign to isolate Israel and gain international recognition of a Palestinian state. The PA success in gathering support for statehood recognition was turning Hamas rule in Gaza into a liability. Once Ramallah is recognized as representing a state, the international community might turn against the separate entity in Gaza and seek to end the problem.

Some encouragement for the PA leadership may be found in the popular reactions among the Palestinians in the West Bank. They did not "revolt" as a result of the leaks, which may indicate that the West Bank Palestinians are ready to compromise as a result of fatigue after the generation-long struggle with Israel. If there is popular rage, it is against al-Jazeera, as seen in attacks on its property in Ramallah and in Tripoli, Lebanon.

Now, after al-Jazeera has brainwashed Arab minds with charges of PLO treason, no declaration of statehood can be expected. Neither will there be a resumption of negotiations with Israel since the Palestinian team will stick to the most hard-line positions possible.

To sum up, al-Jazeera is serving Qatari policy to deepen unrest in the Arab world and link the current local upheavals to the Palestinian problem. In its presentation of the Palestine Papers, al-Jazeera distorted the contents in order to delegitimize the PLO and present Israel as a hard-line non-partner. There is also reason to suspect forgery in the documents referring to refugees since the person suspected of the leaks is the same person who wrote them.

[Full article]

The self-mutilation of Europe continues, now even Denmark lives in shame...

2011-01-20T00:24:00.002-08:00

The following message from the Canadian Branch of the International Free Press Society and the linked page must serve to motivate us to carry the fight to the enemies of freedom everywhere:

As it has become known that the Danish public prosecutor is actually going ahead with his trial of Free Press Society President Lars Hedegaard, (set to begin on January 24, 2011), protests against the trial have arrived in great numbers.
A common theme in many of these protests and declarations of support for Lars Hedegaard is an awareness that the trial does not only have significance for free speech in Denmark but will have repercussions throughout the West.
We are asking for assistance in spreading the expressions of support from several noteworthy defenders of freedom of speech from around the world, complete article here: Massive International Support for Lars Hedegaard.

Massive International Support for Lars Hedegaard :: IFPS-Canada

Flying The Silver Lining

2011-01-16T18:37:00.009-08:00

The bad news: grandparents learn that their daughter's live-in boyfriend has allegedly murdered their three-year old grandson. The brain-dead child is soon to be taken off life-support, and the grandfather is booked on a flight to be at his daughter's side, to help her shoulder the tragedy of her son's final moments.

The worse news: The grandfather is racing against the clock to make his flight from Los Angeles to Denver. TSA and airline employees in both the security and bag check lines at Los Angeles airport are indifferent to his pleas for sympathetic (and speedy) treatment through the long lines; they offer him no help whatsover in speeding up the process. Despite arriving at the airport two hours before his flight, he ends up ten minutes late for his plane; the desperate grandfather makes a final scramble without shoes, and fleeting hope, down to the terminal.

The surprising good news waiting for him there, as told by his grateful wife:

When he got [to the terminal], the pilot of his plane and the ticketing agent both said, “Are you Mark? We held the plane for you and we’re so sorry about the loss of your grandson.”
The pilot held the plane that was supposed to take off at 11:50 until 12:02 when my husband got there.
As my husband walked down the Jetway with the pilot, he said, “I can’t thank you enough for this.”
The pilot responded with, “They can’t go anywhere without me and I wasn’t going anywhere without you. Now relax. We’ll get you there. And again, I’m so sorry.”

My husband was able to take his first deep breath of the day.

Consumer advocate and journalist Christopher Elliot, an acquaintance of the grandmother, contacted Southwest Airlines to get a comment on their staff's decision to break the rules for the sake of a grieving passenger:

[A] representative said the airline was “proud” of the way the pilot had held the flight. Again, most airlines would punish an employee who holds up the line for any reason.

ABC News has a video report on the story, with the last word given to the grandfather:

Dickinson says he never got the pilot's name and couldn't find him after the flight to thank him properly, and now just wants to shake his hand.
"I can't tell him how grateful I am that he did that for me," he said.

In this post-compassionate age of rampant cynicism and crass opportunism, it's refreshing to read this story of corporate compassion; if anything can be of solace to grieving families at a time like that in their lives, and to renew their faith in the potential for human goodness, surely it's the sterling example offered by Southwest Airlines, a company that dares to care.

Being Kind Without A License In Houston

2011-01-15T19:47:00.005-08:00

Feed A Friend's mission, in Houston Texas:

Every day around 6:30 p.m., on the corner of San Jacinto and Commerce, volunteers serve a warm meal and a loving smile to the poor and destitute. Currently, all meals are prepared by caring people at their homes and delivered personally by them…

... until now. Bobby and Amanda Herring have been forced to stop their tradition of feeding several dozen of Houston's homeless every night, until they get the proper certification for food preparation:

"We don't really know what they want, we just think that they don't want us down there feeding people," said Bobby Herring...
Anyone serving food for public consumption, whether for the homeless or for sale, must have a permit, said Kathy Barton, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department. To get that permit, the food must be prepared in a certified kitchen with a certified food manager.
[...]
Bobby Herring said those rules would preclude them from continuing to feed the 60 to 120 people they assisted nightly for more than a year. The food had been donated from area businesses and prepared in various kitchens by volunteers or by his wife.
He and his wife became involved in the effort several years ago, when she would take leftover food from work to the homeless downtown. From there, it expanded into a full-time effort for her working through Eyes on Me, the Herrings' nonprofit organization that focuses on Christian-themed youth outreach efforts.
Nearly every day last year, they distributed food prepared or donated by volunteers or local stores at 6 p.m. at the corner of Commerce and San Jacinto, near the Harris County Jail, Bobby Herring said.

Some city councillors have said they are trying to amend the city ordinances that currently prevent people from sharing their food with Houston's less privileged, but meanwhile...:

Herring said he was told his operation would have to pay $17 a day for a permit, similar to event vendors.
"They (the homeless) are hungry. It’s freezing in Houston now, and the city doesn’t have to deal with it," he said.

The Health Department's recipe of red tape notwithstanding, the Good Samaritans at Eyes On Me are carrying on as best they can:

In the meantime, we are going to be delivering over 60 sleeping bags to our less fortunate friends within the next couple of days. We will also pursue a temporary daily permit from the Health Department. From our understanding, the Health Department issues these permits for special events such as city festivals. With the donations we have already received, we have enough money to cover the next two months.

Love Israel, win an iPad

2011-01-11T11:16:00.002-08:00

It seems you have a week to put together a post on why you love Israel, so as to enter Dave IsraellyCool's contest whose winner will have an apple in his eyes.

2011 Pro-Israel Blog-Off : Israellycool

Praying For The Victims Of The Arizona Massacre

2011-01-09T12:00:00.009-08:00

Praying today for many people in the aftermath of yesterday's senseless carnage in Arizona, but especially for the family of that poor 9-year old girl who died at the hospital. Her uncle describes her as "real special and real sweet":

"The next thing you know this happened. How do you prepare for something like this. My little niece got killed-took one on the chest and she is dead," Segalini said outside the girl's house."

Pray for her parents who now have the shadow of two tragedies over their life... for, as we learned yesterday, young Christina-Taylor Green was born on September 11, 2001:

Christina-Taylor had just been elected to the student council at Mesa Verde Elementary School and had been interested in politics from a young age, her father, John Green, said Saturday night.
"She was a good speaker. I could have easily seen her as a politician," her father said.
The brown-eyed athletic girl had one sibling, an 11-year-old brother named Dallas, and the two loved to go swimming together.
[...] "She kept up with everyone, she was a strong girl, a very good athlete and a strong swimmer," said her mother, Roxanna Green. "She was interested in everything. She got a guitar for Christmas so her next thing was learning to play guitar."
[...] Christina-Taylor also enjoyed singing in a church choir at St. Odilia's Catholic Church, where she had received her first Holy Communion in the spring.
Already aware of inequalities in the world around her, Christina-Taylor often repeated the same phrase to her mother:
"We are so blessed. We have the best life."
[...] "She was born back east and Sept. 11 affected everyone there, and Christina-Taylor was always very aware of it. She was very patriotic and wearing red, white and blue was really special to her," her mother said.

Pray for her well-intentioned neighbor, who must be beside himself with guilt; knowing of her interest in politics, the neighbor invited little Christina-Taylor along with him to see Congresswoman Giffords' "Congress On Your Corner" event at the local Safeway. Pray for her neighbor's family, as he was shot four times during the rampage, and is now recovering in hospital.

Prayers of gratitude are in order for the three brave souls who stopped the crazed gunman from murdering even more victims in the attack. On a day when the news is filled with villainy, thank God we may also learn of acts of such heroism:

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik also said three people, included one of the shooting victims, jumped to action, preventing the attack from being worse.
Although he didn’t identify the heroes, he said when the shooter ran out of bullets and attempted to reload a magazine into the gun, a woman grabbed the magazine and “tore it away from him.”
“She was trying to get the gun away from them,” Dupnik said.
Then as the shooter sought to load yet another magazine into the Glock 9 millimeter pistol, the spring in the magazine failed. The magazine holds 31 bullets.
At that point two men were able to tear the gun away.

The family of another hero that day, need prayers of a special kind. 76 year-old retired construction worker Dorwin Stoddard was waiting in line with his wife to meet Congresswoman Giffords when the massacre began. Stoddard instinctively tried to shield his wife, and was shot in the head. He fell onto his wife, who ended up only being shot three times in the legs. His sacrifice spared his wife's life, as CNN reports that the bullets were removed and she is expected to make a full recovery.

Pray for the families of the other murdered victims: 76-year-old Dorothy Morris, 79-year-old Phyllis Scheck, congressional aide Gabe Zimmerman, who was engaged to be married, and Chief Judge John Roll of the U.S. District Court for Arizona, who was stopping off on his way home from church to say hello to his friend, Congresswoman Giffords.

And pray for the family of Gabrielle Giffords; may they, and all those whose lives were changed yesterday, some day come to know peace.

E-Topia

2011-01-05T20:27:00.006-08:00

My New Year's Resolution to do more blogging will take a hit, I can see already, from a competing Resolution inspired by the new toy my wife and I were lucky enough to get for ourselves for Christmas:
an E-Reader!

Do you have one yet? What do you think? Now that we finally have one, I can't imagine not having one, they are simply awesome.

After shopping around, we got the Sony PRS-650 model. The size felt comfortably portable, not too bulky, not too small. I like the page turning speed, it's appreciably faster than, for example, the Kobo E-reader, the device offered by Chapters up here in Canada. I can "turn" a page with my e-reader, by tapping the screen, and the next page appears as fast as if I was turning a page in a real book. I can shut it off, and when I turn it on again it goes right back to the last page I left it open at. I can abandon one book for another, and when I return to the first one it picks up where I last left off.

I'm offered a range of sizes to choose, in the event that the type of a given book is too small.

A very welcome feature is that it comes with a dictionary; you get to look up puzzling words in the books you're reading on the device. How cool is that??

It also comes with a stylus, that emerges James Bond-style from the top corner of the device, which you can use to make quick notes.

The Sony reader doesn't limit you to only reading e-books in proprietary formats that only a Sony reader would recognize. The e-books themselves don't take up much file space, which was a pleasant surprise; I can't see myself needing to ever enhance the basic memory capacity that we got included with the model.

At the risk of my co-bloggers considering me even more eccentric than they already do, I have to admit something: for me, the enduring attraction of these e-readers, what really sets my heart a-pounding, is how I've been granted comfortable access to the scores of free, archived old books online nowadays at sites like Project Gutenberg, Google Books and Archive.org. Bookworms have been busy scouring the world's libraries, to scan each and every out of copyright book to be found, but it's proven rather frustrating, not to mention impractical, to try and read a whole book off of a computer monitor...

Leading to a dream come true, for this history buff: as a lifelong lover of history and biography, I can't count the times I've skimmed through bibliographies, aching to have access to the old books I'd see referenced there. How could I ever hope to someday hold in my hands a book from, say, 1869, or 1847. How likely would it be that I could read a book from the 1700s...

Well, I've now lived long enough that this daydream has become a reality. I can simply download these antique treasures onto my e-reader, in seconds, and enjoy them all to my hearts content, whether in bed, on the bus, at a coffee shop, with the additional bonus that there's little worry it will crumble into dust in my hands. Their contents, the memory of their experiences, can be retained, for yet one more generation.

And just in time, it seems; we are being granted an unprecedented amount of back-door access to old memories from an older age, one step ahead of modern publishers determined to transform classic texts into "texts with a message for moderns, made accessible to moderns."

Republican Dumbth

2011-01-05T07:13:00.003-08:00

The late comedian Steve Allen wrote one book that was more likely to bring tears of sorrow than of laughter: Dumbth, self-described as a catalogue "of a host of hilarious and sometimes alarming personal encounters with shoddy workmanship, bad service, failures to communicate, and the general breakdown in the capacity to reason".

Had he lived long enough to update his 1999 book, Steverino would have loved the following question-and-answer segment from the recent Republican National Committee debate, undertaken to find a new chairman. Current RNC chairman Michael Steele gives a less-than-impressive answer to the simple question: What is your favorite book?

“Probably my kitchen table,” said Ms. Wagner, misunderstanding the question as “favorite bar.” She corrected that to say: “I like George W. Bush’s new book.”
Ms. Cino chimed in with “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
After which Mr. Steele said, “War and Peace.” He then dashed off the opening line from, well, a different book: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Last Time For The First Team

2011-01-03T17:05:00.004-08:00

My Saturday morning started off with a groan, as I stumbled onto the computer after my late night New Year's fun... only to discover that one of my favorite radio shows was coming to a sudden and unexpected end.

Thanks to the internet this Canadian political junkie has spent the last decade tuned in to radio stations from around the world, freed at last from having to settle for only my local provincial fare.

I particularly liked to spend my Saturday morning waking up and working at my desk while listening to 1580 AM The Patriot, out of Minnesota. Every Saturday since 2004 The Patriot had featured a lively line-up of several programs hosted by Minnesota bloggers; the format evolved over the years, but lately had cemented into two sequential two-hour programs: "The Headliners", with Ed Morrissey and Mitch Berg, and "The First Team", consisting of Powerline blogger John Hinderaker and Fraters Libertas' Brian Ward.

This Saturday, as it turned out, was to be The First Team's final appearance. To our horror, faithful listeners were told that the boys would be unceremoniously replaced... by infomercials! Apparently the station can make more money running infomercials in their broadcasting time slot, over the money they were making from the commercial sponsors buying time during that two-hour block. Yet, I wonder: what regular listener will forgive and forget this loss long enough to buy whatever product or service is stepping into that time slot??

When political blogging emerged as a media phenomenon in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, new media maven Hugh Hewitt quickly headlined several of the more effective conservative bloggers in blue-state Minnesota, and jokingly began referring to them as "The Northern Alliance". National exposure from both Hugh's radio show and high-profile blog led to these Minnesota bloggers to adapt the name into the Northern Alliance Radio Network, as they made a successful bridgehead into local Minnesota radio.

Now the NARN, as they have taken to calling themselves, are to be one team short.

It's been my pleasure to have been a listener from the beginning, and Saturday's finale, with its solid wall of callers expressing their gratitude for so many hours of insightful commentary and thought-provoking interviews, brought six years of memories crashing out of my brain like an avalanche.

The First Team introduced me to many worthy authors, and in turn to their books:

Peter Robinson, and the stirring memoir of his days a Reagan speechwriter (probably one of the most helpful books I've ever read)
Peter Schweizer, and his remarkable revelations of liberal hypocrisy,
the feisty Vox Day and his surgical dissection of the logical loopholes of modern atheism...
and especially, particularly, the unforgettable Father Richard John Neuhaus. I'm a different person today, for having listened (and thoughtfully chewed over) this one interview, and the book, Catholic Matters, that it led me to.

Each hour would end with either the Loon Of The Week, spotlighting some crackpot comment from the cracked left, or, my favorite, This Week In Gatekeeping, as the familiar musical theme of "This Week In Baseball" would accompany an increasingly unbelievable degree of shoddy journalism and reporting that the boys had spotted that week in the mainstream press. (Many of their choices were inevitably featured at Regret The Error, an online collector of such stories.)

Radio reaches us in ways that reading can't, and certainly television never will. John, and especially Brian, with his quick wit and sense of humor, feel like friends I've never met, to borrow a phrase I recently heard over another show on the Patriot.

Sorting out my recollections of all the First Team's political coverage, I'm hard-pressed to settle on my favorite guests (probably Father Neuhaus), or funniest wisecracks (maybe Brian's dissing John over his age)... I find myself drifting instead to memories of the annoucement of Brian's wedding, former co-host Chad's becoming a father for the first time, and many other personal stories the First Team hosts shared with their listeners.

Each week it felt like catching up with what some friends had been up to... and that's a feeling that reading their individual blogs can't match.

Thanks, guys, for some wonderful radio memories.

[Now it's a race against the clock to download and stockpile my favorite episodes from the online First Team archive, currently still available here, back to 2006...!]

France's Secret Weapon For Preventing Car Burnings: Secrecy

2010-12-30T20:26:00.010-08:00

The scortchings scorecard:

Dec 31 2006: feral youth burned 397 cars in France on New Year's Eve

Dec 31 2007: 878 cars were burned on New Year's Eve.

Dec 31 2008: 1,147 cars set ablaze on New Year's Eve.

Dec 31 2009: 1,137 cars torched on New Year's Eve.

Dec 31 2010: It's going to be... a secret...

... according to Brice Hortefeux, France's Minister of the Interior.

Yesterday, while visiting with firefighters in the "sensitive zone" of Val-de-Marne, the Minister announced that his office will repeat the strategy he began employing back in July, as a means to reduce the number of cars now traditionally burned on Bastille Day.

"I took the decision to put an end to the contests, to the honor rolls, and to no longer talk about the number of burned vehicles."

In July Minister Hortefeux implied that the "unhealthy tradition" of keeping citizens informed on the progress (or lack thereof) of policing this fiery vandalism, was only promoting more attacks, inspiring the feral youth toward a thuggish game of one-upmanship.

Now, to rain on their parade, January news accounts will contain no specific accountings of how many automobiles are to be flambées on New Year's Eve: only numbers for the year as a whole will be released.

Holy Night

2010-12-24T19:46:00.002-08:00

Here's a fresh look at a piece of wondrous, classic Christmas music:
O Holy Night.

Originally a French composition by Placide Cappeau, it was translated into English in by the thoughtful gentleman pictured above, who shared the frenchman's deep-rooted anti-slavery sentiments: John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893). Unitarian minister, music critic, abolitionist.

As far back as 1837 Dwight had been preaching against slavery, delivering sermons on the great evil in-between more tranquil moments spent translating poetry by Goethe and Schiller. And there was music, always music: Dwight went on to publish, for four decades, the influential Journal Of Music: A Paper On Art And Literature.

In 1855 he is said to have first published his translation of Cappeau's French piece, "Minuit, Chretiens" ["Midnight, Christians"]. Today, we stop short from singing the piece in its original form... even though the Christmas wish expressed in its second half still applies in our time:

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of Our dear Saviour's birth.
Long lay the world In sin and error pining,
'Til He appear'd And the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope The weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks A new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! O, hear the angels' voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born;
O night divine, O night, O night Divine.

Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming,
With glowing hearts By His cradle we stand.
So led by light of A star sweetly gleaming,
Here come the wise men From Orient land.
The King of Kings Lay thus in lowly manger;
In all our trials Born to be our friend.

He knows our need, To our weakness is no stranger,
Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!
Behold your King, Before Him lowly bend!

He taught us To love one another;
His law is love And His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break For the slave is our brother;
And in His name All oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy In grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us Praise His holy name.

Christ is the Lord! O praise His Name forever,
His power and glory Evermore proclaim.
His power and glory Evermore proclaim.

Merry Christmas to my co-bloggers, Dag and Truepeers; thanks for teaching me how to dig deeper for deeper strength.

And a Very Merry Christmas to all: may the special day bring each of you the renewal of strength you need to persevere... And let us keep in our thoughts and our prayers, those who will be denied their Holy Day this year, as a day of Peace.

May your soul feel its worth...

Peace

2010-12-22T18:41:00.002-08:00

Snow!

2010-11-20T08:24:00.004-08:00

Our first real snowfall of the season last night left a beautiful white carpet for us to wake up to this morning.

When I was a kid I used to earn quite a bit of money each Winter going door to door in the morning to offer to shovel neighbor's driveways for them on days like this. The experience left me with the lifelong habit of seeing snow as Opportunity... and to think of Winter as the time for renewed enterprise.

The tapestry of white serving as a blank canvas... ready for an imprint.

And so, to work...

Voting For Life Or Death In Minnesota

2010-11-18T07:17:00.005-08:00

A Minnesota couple have established an online poll at their blog to determine whether or the pregnant wife should give birth to their baby, or not.

"Help Us Decide"

You can vote and choose whether we abort or keep our unborn child. For the first time, your vote on the topic of abortion can make a difference.

A grim countdown calendar ticks downward, day after day, with a fateful cut-off to determine whether or not a child will live or die.

Dec. 9th is the last day we could legally get an abortion in our state. This vote will remain open until 2 days prior to allow for the procedure if decided.

The Daily Mail UK newspaper, whose reporter has more time to read blogs than I do, quotes an older post (without supplying the link) from the mother-to-be:

She wrote: 'I'm not convinced that I want to change the status quo. I feel that as I age I've actually gotten more selfish and set in my ways.
'I'm afraid that I will eventually regret starting a family and "settling down", as they say.
'I fear that the constant pressure to be the perfect wife and mother while maintaining a full-time job will eventually cause my brain to implode and lead to a nervous breakdown.

To value life as the blessed gift that it is, why not grow to see how we can never really "know" whether or not we will succeed at the tasks most worth doing. We can hope, but we can't "know". Studying for a trade, starting a business, getting married, starting a family. These acts require faith, and embracing these challenges is an act of faith.

Sometimes simply living is an act of faith.

Remembering A Happy Warrior

2010-11-16T21:20:00.005-08:00

Reagan grinned. He was breaking the ice. But he was also doing more. As always, his stories had a point or purpose behind them; it had been that way ever since he started using illustrations in his public speeches thirty years earlier. Reagan was telling a funny joke about communism. But just below the surface, there was a sharp edge of truth that revealed the absurdity of the Soviet system.
Every time [Gorbachev and Reagan] would meet, Reagan would have a couple of jokes ready in his arsenal, gently zinging the Soviet leader about the absurdities of his system.

... An American took a trip to the Soviet Union. On the way to Kennedy Airport, he rode in a cab driven by a college student.
"What are you going to do after graduation?"
"I haven't decided yet."
When he arrived in Moscow he jumped into another cab, which was also driven by a university student.
"What do you want to do when you finish college?" he asked.
"I don't know", the student responded, "I haven't been told yet."

Gorbachev sat grim-faced when he heard that one.
__Peter Schweizer, "Reagan's War: The Epic Story Of His Forty-Year Struggle And Final Triumph Over Communism, pgs 250-251

Lest We Forget

2010-11-11T12:18:00.012-08:00

Vancouver's 2010 Remembrance Day ceremony attracted an even larger crowd than usual to this year's event; it seems part of the tradition now, to see an increase in attendance each November 11.

The ceremony at the Cenotaph concludes with the remaining WWII veterans placing their single white roses with singular determination, in memory of those whose hair never got to grow as grey, whose children, and grandchildren, could not accompany them during this traditional gesture of remembrance.

We may sincerely say Thank You, but the words are like the raindrops also seemingly part of the fabric of this ceremony's tradition. They come, and they go. It's the memory of the gesture that tends to remain; the tender hand on the shoulder speaking more eloquently and casting a longer shadow on the mind than mere words could ever do. The gestures, and the contact that comes with them: these are what renew the shared hope that there may still be a better tomorrow.

We watch, and we can't help but wonder: was the sacrifice worth it? What promise, is there, for Peace?
As ever, the answer is everywhere around us, carried in the thoughtful eyes of the young.

Many are not yet old enough to read the names of those represented through the many wreaths laid in their memory. Still, their young minds, like their delicate hands, reach out to understand the deeper meaning to what they witnessed today. And Thank God, there are many who make a point to help them appreciate what these gestures are to mean to them.

"Say Thank You", they are coached by grateful parents, and the bashful smile that animates the child's grateful touch must surely bring a renewal of faith to the older hands that gently receive it. A renewal of faith through gratitude, and with it, a chance for Peace.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget.

Remembrance Day, 2010

2010-11-11T08:40:00.006-08:00

We haven't been writing much of late, and I'm off to the Cenotaph in few minutes. So I thought I'd just remember that there are countless signs, all about us, from your favorite free-wheeling blogs to innocent children, to all the fruits of a free-trading entrepreneurs, that are the legacy of those who fought in the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries against the evils of totalitarianism. Here are a couple of photos I took last spring in Fort Langley, BC.

Blazing Cat Fur needs your help!

2010-10-27T18:27:00.001-07:00

Please follow the link and consider Arnie's appeal for financial help in his lawsuit - do we want to make it easy for the threat of lawsuits to shut up critics of public figures whose views on "human rights" we find wrong-headed?

Blazing Cat Fur: Richard Warman Sues Blazingcatfur For Linking To "Far Right" Mark Steyn

Geert Wilders' speech in Berlin - The kind of talk Europe's totalitarian elites want to ban

2010-10-07T12:08:00.002-07:00

Geert Wilders Berlin Oct 2 English titles from Vlad Tepes on Vimeo.

Transcript:

00:00 On Monday October 4th, 2010, in a court in Amsterdam,
00:03 Geert Wilders was put on trial for his freedom.
00:06 Two days before, on the eve of the anniversary of German reunification,
00:08 an event was held in Berlin, by yet another European political party established to preserve
00:13 the traditions of European liberty and to oppose the Islamification of the continent.
00:16 There Mr Wilders delivered the following speech,
00:18 again giving voice to the opinions that the European establishment,
00:22 would like to see him thrown in jail, for having the courage to express.
00:26 Dear... Dear Friends, I find myself very happy to be here in Berlin today.
00:35 As you know, the invitation which my friend René Stadtkewitz extended to me,
00:41 has cost him his membership of the CDU group in the Berlin Parliament.
00:47 René, however, did not give in to the pressure.
01:01 He did not betray his convictions.
01:05 His dismissal prompted him to establish his own new political party.
01:12 And René, I thank you for your invitation, and I wish you all the best:
01:19 and I also wish you a great great deal of success with your new party.
01:38 My friends as you may have heard, the past weeks have been rather busy for me.
01:46 Earlier this week we succeeded in forging in The Netherlands,
01:49 a minority government of the Liberals and the Christian-Democrats,
01:55 which will be supported by my own party.
01:59 And this is an historic event for the Netherlands.
02:05 I am very proud of having been able to help achieve this.
02:11 And at this...
02:22 At this very moment, while we are here,
02:25 the Christian-Democrat Party conference is deciding
02:29 whether or not to approve this coalition.
02:33 And if they do...
02:35 If they do, we will finally be able to start to rebuild our country.
02:41 To be able to preserve our national identity,
02:44 and offer our children a better future.
02:48 Despite...
02:57 And despite my busy schedule,
03:00 it has always been a wish of mine, to come to Berlin.
03:04 Because Germany too needs a political movement,
03:08 which is both willing to defend German identity,
03:11 and to stand up against the Islamification of Germany.
03:32 Your Chancellor Angela Merkel says that,
03:35 “The Islamization of Germany is inevitable.”
03:39 She has called upon citizens to be prepared
03:42 for more changes as a result of immigration.
03:46 She wants the Germans to adapt to this situation.
03:51 The Christian-Democrat leader has said, and accepts that, quote:
03:57 “More than before mosques will be an integral part of our cities.” Unquote.
04:06 My friends...
04:08 My friends, we should not, and we will not
04:11 accept the unacceptable as inevitable:
04:16 Without trying to turn the tide!
04:31 It is our duty as politicians to preserve our nations for our children.
04:37 And I hope that René’s new movement
04:40 will be as successful as my own Partij voor de Vrijheid,
04:45 as Oskar Freysinger’s Schweizerische Volkspartei [in Switzerland],
04:49 and as Pia Kjaersgaard’s Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark,
04:53 and similar movements elsewhere.
05:06 My good friend Pia Kjaersgaard recently spoke in Sweden,
05:11 at the invitation of the Sverigedemokraterna.
05:15 She said: “I have not come to meddle in Swedish domestic politics.
05:21 Because that is for the Swedish people to be concerned with.
05:24 “No,” she said, “I have come because
05:28 in spite of certain differences today's Swedish debate, in many ways
05:33 reminds me of the debate we've had in Denmark for 10-15 years.
05:40 And I have to come to Sweden because it is also a concern to Denmark.
05:45 We cannot just sit on our hands
05:49 and be silent witnesses to political developments in Sweden.”
05:52 And the same, the very same, applies for me
05:57 as a Dutchman with respect to Germany.
06:00 I am here...
06:12 I am here today because Germany matters to the Netherlands,
06:18 and to the rest of the world;
06:21 and because we cannot, in the absence of a strong German partner,
06:25 establish an International Freedom Alliance.
06:38 Dear friends, tomorrow is the Day of German Unity.
06:43 Tomorrow exactly twenty years ago, your great nation was reunified
06:50 after the collapse of the totalitarian Communist ideology.
06:55 The Day of German Unity is an important day for the whole of Europe.
07:01 Germany...
07:09 Germany is the largest democracy in Europe.
07:15 Germany is Europe’s economic powerhouse.
07:18 The wellbeing and prosperity of Germany is of benefit to all of us.
07:24 Because the wellbeing and prosperity of Germany,
07:27 is a prerequisite for the wellbeing and prosperity of Europe.
07:39 Today I am here, however, to warn you about a looming disunity.
07:45 Germany’s national identity, its democracy and economic prosperity,
07:51 is under threat from the political ideology of Islam.
08:00 In 1848, Karl Marx began his Communist Manifesto with the famous words:
08:08 “A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism.”
08:14 But Today...
08:16 Today, there is a different spectre stretching across Europe:
08:20 It is the spectre of Islam.
08:24 This danger...
08:34 And this danger, is a political one today also.
08:39 Islam is not merely a religion, as many people seem to think:
08:44 Islam is mainly a dangerous political ideology.
09:01 The Flemish Professor Urbain Vermeulen, the former president
09:06 of the European Union of Arabists and Islamicists, points out that,
09:10 “Islam is primarily a legal system: a law,” rather than a religion.
09:19 I quote from the bestseller and BBC television series: The Triumph of the West,
09:26 which the renowned Oxford historian J.M. Roberts wrote in 1985.
09:32 And he wrote that,
09:34 “Although we carelessly speak of Islam as a ‘religion’;
09:38 that word carries many overtones of the special history of western Europe.
09:45 The Muslim is primarily a member of a community,
09:49 the follower of a certain way, an adherent to a system of law.
09:56 Rather than someone holding particular theological views.”
10:02 And the American political scientist Mark Alexander writes that,
10:07 “One of our greatest mistakes is to think of Islam
10:12 as just another one of the world’s great religions.
10:18 We should not do so.”
10:29 “Islam,” he says, “is politics or it is nothing at all.
10:34 But of course, it is politics with a spiritual dimension...
10:39 ...which will stop at nothing, until the West is no more.
10:44 Until the West has... been well and truly Islamized.”
10:49 And, he was right. These...
10:56 These are not all just statements by opponents of Islam.
10:59 Islamic scholars say, and think, the same thing.
11:03 To anyone who has read the Koran, the Sirah and the Hadith:
11:09 there can be no misunderstanding about the nature of Islam.
11:15 Abul Ala Maududi, the influential 20th century Pakistani Islamic thinker, wrote,
11:24 – and I quote, emphasizing that these are not my words but those of a leading Islamic scholar –
11:31 he said: “Islam is not merely a religious creed [but] a revolutionary ideology,
11:39 and jihad refers to that revolutionary struggle...
11:44 to destroy all states and governments anywhere, on the face of the earth,
11:50 which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam.”
11:55 And Ali Sina, an Iranian Islamic apostate who now lives in Canada,
12:02 points out that there is one golden rule,
12:06 and that this golden rule lies at the heart of every religion:
12:12 that is, that we do unto others, as we would have them do unto us.
12:19 But in Islam, this rule only applies to fellow believers, but not to Infidels.
12:39 Ali Sina says, and I quote,
12:42 “The reason I am against Islam is not because it is a religion,
12:47 but because it is a political ideology of imperialism and domination,
12:53 in the guise of religion.
12:55 Because Islam does not follow the Golden Rule, it attracts violent people.”
13:03 A dispassionate study of the beginnings of Islamic history,
13:07 reveals clearly that Muhammad’s objective was
13:11 first to conquer his own people, the Arabs, and to unify them under his rule,
13:19 and then to conquer and rule the world.
13:23 That was the original cause.
13:26 It was obviously political and was backed by military force.
13:32 “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah’, ”
13:41 is what Muhammad said in his final address.
13:44 He did so in accordance with the Koranic command in sura 8:39:
13:50 “Fight them until there is no more dissension and the religion is entirely Allah’s.”
14:00 According to mythology, Muhammad founded Islam in Mecca,
14:05 after the Angel Gabriel visited him for the first time in the year 610.
14:11 However, for its first twelve years, when Islam was religious rather than political,
14:18 Islam was not a success.
14:20 But in 622, Muhammad emigrated with his small band of 150 followers, to Yathrib,
14:29 which was then a predominantly Jewish oasis.
14:32 There he established the first mosque in history, and seized political power,
14:39 he gave Yathrib the name of Medina (which means the “City of the Prophet”);
14:44 and began his career as a military and a political leader,
14:49 who conquered the whole of Arabia.
14:52 Tellingly, the Islamic calendar starts with the hijra,
14:58 the migration to Medina:
15:01 the moment when Islam became a political movement.
15:07 And after Muhammad's death, Islam developed,
15:11 based upon his own words and deeds: Sharia.
15:14 An elaborate legal system which justified,
15:17 the repressive governance of the world by divine right
15:22 – including rules for jihad,
15:25 and for the absolute control of believers and non-believers.
15:30 And Sharia as you all know,
15:32 is the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran, among other Islamic states.
15:38 It is also central to the Organization of the Islamic Conference,
15:44 which in article 24 of its Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,
15:50 proclaims that, “all rights and freedoms are subject to the Islamic Sharia.”
15:58 And the OIC is no religious institution; it is a political body.
16:06 It constitutes the largest voting-block in the United Nations,
16:11 and writes reports on so-called “Islamophobia” in Western Countries,
16:17 which accuse us of human rights violations.
16:22 To speak in biblical terms: They look for the splinter in our eye,
16:29 while ignoring the log in their own.
16:48 Under Sharia law, people in territories conquered by Islam,
16:53 have no guaranteed legal rights,
16:56 not even the right to life or the right to own property,
17:00 unless they convert to Islam.
17:04 Before I continue,
17:07 and in order to avoid any misunderstandings,
17:10 I want to emphasize that I am talking about Islam,
17:15 not about Muslims.
17:17 I always make a clear distinction
17:20 between the people and the ideology,
17:23 between Muslims and Islam.
17:27 There are many moderate Muslims,
17:31 but the political ideology of Islam is not moderate,
17:37 will never be moderate, and has global ambitions.
17:53 It aims to impose Islamic law, or Sharia, upon the whole world.
17:59 The way to achieve this is through jihad.
18:03 The good news is,
18:05 that millions of Muslims around the world,
18:08 – including many in Germany and the Netherlands –
18:11 do not follow the directives of Sharia,
18:14 let alone engage in jihad.
18:17 But the bad news...
18:19 The bad news however, is that those who do follow them,
18:25 are prepared to use all available means
18:28 in order to achieve their ideological, revolutionary goal.
18:34 In 1954 the British-American writer and historian Professor Bernard Lewis,
18:42 in his essay Communism and Islam, spoke of,
18:46 “the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition.”
18:51 Professor Lewis said that,
18:54 “The traditional Islamic division of the world
18:58 into the ‘House of Islam’ and the ‘House of War’...
19:01 ...has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs...
19:06 ...The aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same.”
19:12 says Professor Lewis.
19:14 And the American political scientist Mark Alexander states,
19:19 that the nature of Islam, differs very little
19:22 – and only in detail rather than style –
19:25 from despicable and totalitarian political ideologies,
19:29 such as National-Socialism and Communism.
19:34 He lists the following common characteristics for these three,
19:39 these three, ideologies:
19:42 Communism, National-Socialism and Islam.
19:45 First: They use political purges to “cleanse” society of what they consider undesirable.
19:56 Second: They tolerate only a single political party,
20:01 where Islam allows more parties, it insists that all parties be Islamic ones.
20:09 Third: They coerce the people down a road that they must follow.
20:16 Fourth: They obliterate the liberal distinction between areas of private judgment and of public control.
20:27 Fifth: They turn the educational system into an apparatus for the purpose of universal indoctrination.
20:35 Sixth: They lay down rules for art, for literature, for science and for religion.
20:44 Seventh: They subdue certain people who are given second-class status.
20:53 Eighth: They induce a frame of mind akin to fanaticism,
20:58 adjustment takes place by struggle and dominance.
21:03 Ninth: They are abusive to their opponents, and regard any concession on their own part,
21:10 as a temporary expedient, and on a rival’s part, as a sign of weakness.
21:19 Tenth: They regard politics as an expression of power.
21:24 Lastly: They are anti-Semitic.
21:29 There is one more striking parallel,
21:33 but this is not a characteristic of the three political ideologies,
21:40 but rather it is a characteristic of the West:
21:43 It is the apparent inability of the West to see the danger.
21:50 The prerequisite to understanding political danger:
21:53 is a willingness to see the truth, even if it is unpleasant.
22:14 Unfortunately, modern Western politicians seem to have lost this capacity.
22:22 Our inability leads us to reject, the logical and historical conclusions,
22:28 to be drawn from the facts.
22:32 Though we could, and should know better.
22:36 What is wrong with modern Western man,
22:40 that we end up making the same mistake over and over again?
22:45 There is no better place to ponder this question,
22:52 than here in Berlin.
23:07 Here in Berlin, the former capital of the empire,
23:11 of the evil that was Nazi Germany.
23:14 And a city which was held captive by the
23:17 so-called German “Democratic” Republic for over forty years.
23:22 When the citizens of Eastern Europe rejected Communism in 1989,
23:30 they were inspired by dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
23:35 Václav Havel, Vladimir Bukovsky, and others, who told them:
23:39 that people have a right,
23:41 but also an obligation, to “live within the truth.”
23:46 And freedom, dear friends...
23:49 Freedom requires eternal vigilance;
23:53 so it is with truth also.
24:08 So it is too with truth.
24:10 Solzhenitsyn added however, and I quote, that,
24:14 “The truth is seldom sweet. It is almost invariably bitter.”
24:21 Let us, let us together, look the bitter truth squarely in the eye:
24:27 We have lost our capacity to perceive the danger,
24:32 and to understand the truth,
24:34 because we no longer value freedom.
24:38 Politicians from almost all establishment political parties today,
24:41 are facilitating Islamization.
24:44 They are cheering for every new Islamic school,
24:47 every Islamic bank, and every new Islamic court.
24:52 They regard Islam as being equal to our own culture.
24:57 Islam or Freedom?
24:59 It doesn't really matter to them.
25:03 But to us? To us? It does matter.
25:18 The entire establishment, the elite
25:21 – universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians –
25:27 are all putting our hard-earned liberties at risk.
25:32 They talk...
25:39 They talk about equality,
25:42 but amazingly fail to see how in Islam,
25:47 women have fewer rights than men,
25:49 and infidels have fewer rights than adherents of Islam.
26:01 Are we, then, going to repeat the fatal mistakes of the Weimar Republic?
26:20 Are we succumbing to Islam because our commitment to freedom is already dead?
26:26 No. It will not happen.
26:30 We are not like Frau Merkel.
26:32 We will not accept Islamization.
26:55 We have to keep our freedom alive.
26:59 And, to the extent that we have already lost it,
27:01 we must reclaim it in our democratic elections.
27:16 This is exactly why, precisely why,
27:19 we need new political parties that defend freedom.
27:30 It is to support such parties that we established the International Freedom Alliance.
27:40 As you know, I am standing trial in the Netherlands.
27:46 On Monday, in two days time, I will have to go to court again.
27:50 And I will have to spend most of the coming month there.
27:55 I have been brought to court because of my opinions on Islam,
28:01 and because I have voiced these opinions in speeches,
28:07 articles and in my documentary film Fitna.
28:11 I have personally lived under constant police protection for years.
28:16 Islamic extremists want to assassinate me,
28:19 yet it is I who stand before a court,
28:22 because the Dutch establishment – most of them non-Muslims –
28:28 want to see me silenced as well.
28:32 I have been dragged to court because in my country,
28:36 freedom can no longer be fully enjoyed.
28:42 Unlike America, we do not have a First Amendment which guarantees people
28:49 the human right to express their opinions,
28:54 and foster public debate by doing so.
28:57 And in contrast to America, in Europe, the nation state,
29:02 and increasingly the European Union also,
29:05 prescribes how citizens
29:07 – including democratically elected politicians such as myself –
29:11 how we should think, and what we are allowed to say.
29:26 One of the things we are no longer allowed to say,
29:31 is that our culture, our culture, is superior to certain other cultures.
29:39 This...
29:48 Saying only this, is seen as a discriminatory statement
29:55 – a statement of hatred even.
29:58 We are indoctrinated on a daily basis, in the schools and through the media,
30:02 with the message that all cultures are equal,
30:06 but that, if one culture is worse than all the rest,
30:09 then it is our own.
30:14 We are inundated with feelings of guilt and shame
30:18 about our own identity and what we stand for.
30:25 We are exhorted to extend respect to everyone and everything,
30:29 except ourselves.
30:31 This...
30:46 This is the message of the Left and of the politically-correct ruling establishment.
30:54 They want us to feel so ashamed about our own identity,
31:01 that we simply refuse to stand up for it.
31:05 The detrimental obsession of our cultural and political elites with Western guilt,
31:13 merely reinforces the view which Islam has of us.
31:17 The Koran says that non-Muslims are kuffar [the plural of kafir],
31:21 a word which literally means “rejectors” or “ingrates”.
31:26 Hence non-believers, are “guilty”.
31:30 Islam teaches that in our natural state we have all been born as believers.
31:36 Islam teaches that if we are not believers today, the fault for this thus lies with us,
31:41 or the fault lies with our forefathers.
31:45 Subsequently, we are always kafir – guilty – because either we or our fathers are apostates.
31:53 And hence, according to some, we deserve subjugation.
31:57 And our contemporary leftist and politically-correct intellectuals,
32:02 are entirely blind to the dangers of Islam.
32:07 Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky argues that the West,
32:13 after the fall of Communism,
32:15 failed to expose those who had collaborated with the Communists.
32:21 By for example purposefully advocating policies of détente and improved relations,
32:27 or a relaxation of international tension, and peaceful coexistence.
32:33 He points out that the Cold War was, “a war we never won.”
32:41 “We never even fought it… Most of the time, the West engaged in
32:47 a policy of appeasement toward the Soviet bloc
32:53 – and appeasers don’t win any wars.”
33:06 Dear friends... Islam is the Communism of today.
33:12 But...
33:17 But, because of our failure to come clean with Communism,
33:23 we are unable to deal with Islam,
33:26 trapped as we are in the old Communist habit of deceit and double-speak;
33:33 which in the past plagued the countries in the East, and that now plagues us all.
33:39 So we see the sort of people, who before turned a blind eye to Communism,
33:46 are precisely the same politically-correct, leftists, who today close their eyes to Islam.
34:03 They are using exactly the same arguments
34:07 for “improved relations”, and appeasement as before.
34:13 They argue that our adversary is just as peace-loving, as we are,
34:20 that if only we were to meet him half-way, then he would also do the same.
34:26 That he only asks for respect, and that if we respect him, he will in turn respect us.
34:34 We even hear a repetition of the old moral equivalence mantra.
34:40 They used to say that Western “imperialism” was as bad as Soviet imperialism;
34:49 today they say that Western “imperialism” is just as bad as Islamic terrorism.
34:57 In my speech a few weeks ago in New York, on September 11th,
35:02 I emphasized that we must stop this “Blame the West, Blame America”-game,
35:09 which Islamic spokesmen are playing with us.
35:27 And we must stop playing this game ourselves.
35:32 And I have exactly the same message, dear friends, for you today.
35:39 It is an insult to tell us that we are guilty,
35:44 and deserve what is happening to us.
35:47 How is it exactly, that we deserve becoming strangers in our own lands?
35:53 We should accept such insults no longer.
36:12 First of all, Western civilization is the freest and most prosperous on earth.
36:21 Which is precisely why so many immigrants are so keen on moving here.
36:24 Secondly...
36:29 Secondly, there is no such thing as collective guilt.
36:33 Free individuals...
36:41 Free individuals are free moral agents who are only responsible for their own deeds.
36:51 I am very happy, very fortunate, to be here in Berlin today in order to deliver this message,
37:00 which is extremely important, especially so, here in Germany.
37:05 Whatever...
37:07 No matter what took place in your country in the past,
37:13 the present generation is not responsible for it.
37:34 Whatever happened in the past, is no excuse for punishing the Germans of today.
37:49 But... But, neither is it an excuse, for you to shrink from the fight for your own identity.
38:10 Your only responsibility is to eschew the mistakes of the past.
38:16 It is your duty to stand with those threatened by the ideology of Islam,
38:24 such as the State of Israel and your Jewish compatriots.
38:41 The Weimar Republic refused to fight for freedom,
38:46 and was overrun by a totalitarian ideology,
38:50 with catastrophic consequences for Germany, the rest of Europe and the world.
38:56 Please do not refuse to fight, for your freedom, today.
39:14 I feel lucky to be in your midst today because it seems,
39:18 that twenty years after German reunification, a new,
39:23 a new generation no longer feels guilty, just for the fact of being German.
39:41 The current and very intense debate about Thilo Sarrazin’s recent book,
39:48 is an indication of the fact that Germany is coming to terms with itself.
39:53 I have...
40:01 I have not yet read Dr Sarrazin’s book, but I say this:
40:05 While the minds of the ruling politically-correct establishment
40:09 may be closed to, and almost unanimously critical of his thesis,
40:12 and while he may have lost his job as a Bundesbanker,
40:16 nevertheless, a large majority of Germans acknowledge that Dr Sarrazin
40:21 has addressed an important and pressing issue.
40:35 “Germany is abolishing itself,” warns Sarrazin,
40:40 and he calls upon the Germans to halt this process.
40:44 The enormous impact of his book indicates that many Germans feel the same way.
40:50 The people of Germany, do not want Germany to be abolished.
40:54 Despite all...
41:04 Germany is no longer ashamed to assert its national pride.
41:18 In these difficult times, when our national identities are under threat,
41:23 we must stop feeling guilty about who we are.
41:26 And with that cease feeling shameful,
41:29 and say together who we are:
41:31 We are not kafir, we are not “guilty”.
41:48 Like other peoples, Germans too have the right to remain who they are.
41:53 Germans must not become French, nor Dutch, nor Americans, nor Turks.
42:00 They should remain Germans.
42:10 When the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan visited your country in 2008,
42:17 he told the Turks living here that they had to remain Turks.
42:23 He literally said that, “assimilation is a crime against humanity.”
42:28 And Erdogan would perhaps have been right,
42:32 if he had been addressing the Turks in Turkey.
42:47 However, Germany is still the land of the Germans.
42:52 And hence, the Germans have a right to demand that anyone
42:56 who comes to live in Germany should assimilate.
43:00 They have the right...
43:07 They have the right
43:09 – no, they have the duty to demand, for the sake of their children –
43:17 to demand that newcomers respect German identity,
43:21 and fully respect Germany’s right to preserve its identity.
43:25 And we must realize...
43:29 We must realize that Islam expands in two ways.
43:35 Since it is not a religion, conversion is only a marginal phenomenon.
43:41 Historically, Islam has expanded either by military conquest,
43:48 or, it has expanded by using the weapon of hijra: immigration.
43:55 Muhammad conquered Medina through immigration.
43:59 Hijra is also what we are experiencing today.
44:03 The Islamization of Europe continues all the time.
44:09 But the West, our West, has no strategy for dealing with the Islamic ideology:
44:17 because our elites say to us, that we must adapt to them,
44:22 rather than the exact opposite.
44:35 In this regard, there is a lesson which we can learn from America,
44:41 the freest nation on Earth.
44:43 Americans are proud of their nation, its achievements and its flag.
44:50 We, too, should be proud of our nations.
44:55 The United States has always been a nation of immigrants.
44:59 And President Theodore Roosevelt was very clear about the duty of immigrants.
45:07 Here is what President Roosevelt said, and I quote:
45:12 “We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith,
45:19 becomes an American and assimilates himself to us,
45:22 he shall be treated with a full and exact equality with everyone else...
45:29 But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American,
45:35 and nothing but an American...
45:38 There can be no divided allegiance here...
45:43 We have room for but one sole loyalty
45:47 and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
45:52 Endquote.
46:05 And it is not up to me to define what Germany’s national identity consists of.
46:13 That is entirely up to you.
46:16 However I do know, that German culture,
46:19 like that of neighbouring countries such as my own,
46:24 is rooted in Judeo-Christian and humanist values, and not in Islam.
46:43 Every responsible politician has a political obligation:
46:48 to preserve these values against ideologies which directly threaten them.
46:55 And a Germany...
46:56 A Germany full of mosques and veiled women,
47:00 is no longer, my friends,
47:02 it is no longer the Germany of Goethe,
47:05 of Schiller and Heine,
47:06 of Bach and Mendelssohn.
47:28 It will be a loss to us all.
47:32 It is vital that you cherish and preserve your roots as a nation.
47:38 Otherwise it will be impossible for you to safeguard your identity:
47:43 you will be abolished as a people, and you will lose your freedom.
47:49 And the rest of Europe will lose its freedom with you.
47:55 My friends, when Ronald Reagan came to a divided Berlin 23 years ago,
48:04 he uttered, not far from here at the Brandenburg Gate,
48:09 the following historic words, to the Soviet General Secretary:
48:20 “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
48:25 President Reagan was not an appeaser,
48:29 he was rather, a man who spoke the truth, and who loved freedom.
48:34 Today, we must again tear down a wall.
48:40 It is not a wall of concrete,
48:43 but rather it is a wall of denial and ignorance, about the real nature of Islam.
48:50 The International Freedom Alliance aims to coordinate and stimulate these efforts.
48:59 And because we speak the truth – and it is the truth – voters have given my party,
49:05 and many other parties too, from Denmark all the way to Switzerland,
49:09 the voters have given us the power to influence the political decision-making process.
49:15 Whether that be in opposition, or through supporting a minority government;
49:21 as we too want to do soon in the Netherlands.
49:26 President Reagan... President Reagan showed, that one can, by speaking the truth,
49:33 one can change the course of history.
49:37 He showed...
49:47 He showed also, that there is no need to despair.
49:52 Never!
49:55 My friends... Just do your duty.
50:00 Do not be afraid.
50:03 Speak up. Speak the truth.
50:06 Defend Freedom.
50:08 Together we can preserve freedom,
50:12 together we must preserve freedom,
50:14 and together, my friends, we will be able to preserve freedom.
50:19 Thank you.

VIA Gates of Vienna: Islam or Freedom?

Show Trials 2010 - Geert Wilders quietly watches poor imitation of Maoists

2010-10-06T16:45:00.011-07:00

Here is a highlight from Day 3 of the Geert Wilders "hate speech" trial in the Netherlands, sparked when the court was about to watch Wilders' film Fitna, and one audience member (a formal plaintiff?) puts on a show of asking permission to leave that she not have to see the horror. Have a good look at the vacant bureaucratic faces of the "judges". I haven't seen the like since attending show trials at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. (We previously discussed the judge's obvious bias here.)

Don't miss Dutch Blogger Klein Verzet for a full report on Day 3. Here is one of his interesting observations:

Then they started with the reading of the testimony of Hans Jansen (he can be seen in the court room sitting behind Geert Wilders). In their reading of the first Islam expert the court showed some ignorance. The court apparently had never heard of Qutub the founder of modern jihad ideology. The judge could not pronounce the name: Qutb and had to try several times to pronounce it.
[...]
Noteworthy was Hans Jansen his final statement in which he stated his surprise about the courts interest in so many religious details. It was against all he had learned about the separations of powers, the separation of church and state.

And of course, as often, he is right. He has said it before, with this trial, they have positioned the court as an arbiter of truth, truth about religion, truth about Islam, an impossible and unwanted situation.

Alas, that is a point about the study of religion, any religion, that lots of people don't quite appreciate, especially when it comes to consideration of Islam. With this religion, the resentment of insiders (according to this study, noted in Klein Verzet's most recent post, 64% of the Koranic text discusses - i.e. curses - the Un-believer) and the anti-Islam resentment of non-Muslims often trumps the scholarly desire to get closer to the inherently paradoxical nature of that truth, in any religion, which generates resentment, and love.

Dennis Prager Interviews Ezra Levant

2010-10-05T23:47:00.003-07:00

Ezra Levant was interviewed Monday morning in the second hour of Dennis Prager’s daily talk show, on the subject of Ezra’s new book, Ethical Oil: The Case For Canada’s Oil Sands.

I didn’t see much mention of their 30-minute talk elsewhere online, including any mention of it at Ezra own site, so I thought I would offer a brief recap, “for the record”.

Ezra’s responds to Dennis’ gracious introduction by reminding the American audience of the tremendous First Amendment rights that they may be taking for granted, citing how his own recent 900-day prosecution for publishing the mohammed cartoons in his magazine would not have been the same problem had it happened in the US.

Dennis' first question addresses how much oil is assumed to be available in Alberta’s oil sands reserves. The answer: 175 billion barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia. Ezra points out that Canada is the only liberal democracy to be found in the listed ten nations possessing the largest oil reserves (defining Iraq as only a “wobbly democracy"). He explains how the technical means to extract the oil from the sand and clay that it’s mixed with are being perfected every day, allowing Canada to keep increasing the amount of oil it can provide to the US. While Nancy Pelosi and Greenpeace have criticized Alberta's “dirty” resource, Ezra points out that when various other liberal criteria, such as environmentalism, fair wages and treatment of workers, are factored into the equation, Canada’s liberal values far surpass those of the other OPEC nations that we could be getting our oil from.

Dennis cuts to the quick: what is stopping America from buying even more oil, all its oil, from Canada? Ezra raises the issues of aesthetics, and how “ugly” the process can appear. However, those who criticize the Canadian source have less to say about Iranian or Saudi refining, because they can’t visit these locations and report on them as readily as they can access the comparable sites in Canada.

Dennis is a bit incredulous that mere aesthetics are the main roadblock to purchasing more oil from Canada. Ezra clarifies that Nancy Pelosi has primarily been critical of the “large carbon footprint” associated with the oil sands oil. He concedes her point that to produce one barrel of oil this way takes more energy than a barrel of light oil from the Saudis, due to the different refining needs of each source. But the comparison does not hold up when stacked up against heavy oil from Venezuela or even California, where Canada has the smaller carbon footprint.

Returning to the issue of ethics, Ezra makes a specific comparison with the Sudan, where the UN estimates about 300,000 people have been killed. The grim statistics are tabulated: how much blood (an eyeball’s worth) are to be associated with a barrel of Sudanese oil, and whether it might be better to have more carbon dioxide, but no blood, by using Canadian oil. Ezra was particularly eloquent and effective here, especially when pointing out that the mayor of the oil sands town of Fort MacMurray is a woman, and how unlikely such a situation would be in oil producing nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Ezra brings the segment to a close with a remark on how America, such a strong advocate of consumer rights, offers labels denoting countries of origins for so many goods, yet not for gas. Raising the question, what would people choose to buy if the country of origin for oil was revealed at the gas pump?

Back from the commercial break, Dennis takes a call from an angry listener in Texas. The caller states that he’s from Alberta, has seen the oil sands in Fort MacMurray “hundreds of times”. He tries to shame Ezra by asking how much water is used in the process. By his tone the caller expected to deal a severe wound to Ezra's case with this thrust. Ezra calmly parries the blow by conceding the recipe of three barrels of water that used to be required to produce one barrel of oil, then explains how technological advances see us using 38% less energy today in this process than had been the case 20 years ago. Statistics about the wasteful amount of water tolerated to secure a single cup of coffee or a pair of jeans put the oil sands equation into context, and for good measure we’re invited to wonder whether Iran or Saudi Arabia might be as worried about such environmental concerns as we would be in Canada.

The caller testily proposes that Alberta doesn’t care about the environment either; Ezra reminds him that he is from Alberta and cares about the environment, which prompts the caller to bark that he was from there as well. Having lost his cool, the caller then trips on his next point: Ralph Klein doesn’t care about the environment. Ezra gently suggests that since Klein hasn’t been Premier of Alberta for a few years now [since 2006], that perhaps the caller’s information may be a little out of date.

The third and final segment starts off with Dennis asking Ezra why the United States isn’t developing more of its own domestic oil sources, why is it depending so heavily on Canada’s oil? Ezra suggests that part of the answer could be the consumer doesn’t really have a way to know where the gas they currently buy is coming from. He cites the recent case of CITGO, and how when word got out about its connection with Venezuela, many people chose to drive to another dealer for their gas.

Dennis reframes his question more clearly: does the oil sands deposit not extend into the states neighboring Alberta? Not to the same degree, it seems, but in order to reach what deposits there are to be found in states like Idaho and Montana, the ecological downsides to any source of energy, and the particular ones associated with oil sands oil refining, have to be weighed against the notions of security of supply, as well as whether it’s worth financing our enemies.

Back again to the issue of environmentalism, Ezra asks, rhetorically, whether anyone believes that Nigeria’s oil refining could be more environmentally safer than what would be undertaken domestically in the US. Americans, like Canadians, care much more about the environment than the dictatorships do.

Ezra points out anecdotally to Dennis how the US now spends approximately $50 billion so that the US Navy can keep the Persian Gulf sea lanes open. This results in a $54 a barrel “subsidy” for oil exported from the Saudis, Kuwait and the UAE. “A military tax”, Dennis calls it. The stark comparison is made to the much lower costs associated with procuring oil from Canada, via pipeline.

Dennis concludes the conversation with a mention of Ezra’s previous book, Shakedown. Dennis asks Ezra to provide the “Cliff Notes” version of the story behind it for his listeners. Sadly Ezra's had a lot of practice, I'm sure, recounting the 900-day Human Rights farce of an investigation, and the “counterfeit human right”, the right not to be offended, that was at the heart of the “hate speech” complaint filed against him. He again brings up the point that Americans should not be complacent about their freedom of speech, and not to think that his trial would remain an impossibility in the US. Dennis agrees heartily, referencing the recent Yale University-published book on the mohammed Danish cartoon controversy, where the publisher self-censored themselves, cutting the cartoons from their own book, despite the wishes of author that they be included (naturally enough, since that's what the book was about in the first place!).

All in all a strong appearance by Ezra. I must say that I was a little disappointed with Dennis in this interview; he did a tremendous job summarizing Ezra's case at the start of each segment, for the sake of listeners tuning in late, but a couple of jokes after the first commercial break were extended way too long for my taste. This tragically ate up precious time at the expense of Ezra's advocacy on behalf of this critically important consumer protection movement.

The bad joke that is "justice" in the Netherlands

2010-10-05T13:00:00.004-07:00

Yesterday, Geert Wilders declared to the Dutch court that is trying Wilders for "racism" against Muslims - on the grounds that Wilders has compared the Koran to Hitler's Mein Kampf (in the context of questioning the balanced or reasonable application of a law that bans publication of the Nazi book) - that he will not answer any questions from the court, that he will invoke his right not to say things that may be held against him in what promises to be a politicized game of gotcha (my interpretation). Here, via Diana West, is Wilders' statement translated into English:

Mister Chairman, members of the Court,

Thank you for allowing me a few minutes for a personal observation. For me the past months have been centred around the exhausting process of government coalition formation. For the people at the negotiating table the end of the day meant that they could rest and recharge their batteries. For me it usually meant that I had to devote my time to a second job, namely being the object of this ongoing court case.

It is strange experience for me to have to combine these two cases. However different these cases are they are the results of the same ideal, namely to stand for the freedom of expression and the will to pass on a better Netherlands to the next generation.

In this regard, defending freedom of expression (and for me that is what is at stake in the coming weeks) is of crucial importance. More then ever we must honour this commitment. Democracy requires open and free discussion. It must be possible to express different vision, especially on controversial issues, because the clash opinions leads to better understanding..

I am here today as a suspect. Formally, I am being tried, but it is the freedom of expression of many Dutchmen that is being tried.

Freedom of expression may not be curbed. That is all I have to say.

My lawyer will speak on my behalf regarding all the rest. I invoke my right to remain silent. I do so on the advice of my lawyer, but also because I have already said everything that needs to be said. I do not retract any of it. This does not mean, however, that I have said all the things which have been attributed to me.

And how did the court respond to Wilders' statement? The head judge, Jan Moorse, said:

I still value it to say something about it, Mr. Wilders. The court has read the files, but the court also read newspapers and watches television these days. You have been accused by others of being good at stating a position but unwilling to debate it. It looks as if you’re doing the same thing today.

In other words, the court responded to Wilders' statement that he would exercise his right not to say anything that might be seen as incriminating, by accusing Wilders on the spot that his failure adequately to debate his accusers is a sign of Wilders' guilt. The power of the accuser, the scandal monger, is somehow equated with what is right and just.

This is a sign of a totalitarian "justice" system of course. Reminds one of China's cultural revolution, for example.

Naturally enough, Wilders' lawyer then asked for an independent finding that the presently-constituted court is biased against Wilders. The wrakings kamer, the special court that is held to consider such claims of bias then found that

There is no substantial evidence to show that the judges have given the impression of being biased, therefore the request is being denied

Talk about being blind to the obvious. But then again, maybe not. It turns out that the head of the wrakings kamer is himself politically active with a government-funded organization focussed on "development" aid for Morocco, a judge with a previous record of downplaying terrorism. It seems that it is normal for judges in the Netherlands to be affiliated with a ruling political party.

While it should go without saying that any government that puts on trial a leading oppposition politician for mere words, for advocating policies that run counter to the highest pieties of the governing "liberal" elite, is in no sense liberal and only proving that contemporary "liberalism" reaches its logical conclusion in totalitarianism, it is nonetheless jarring to this writer to see additional evidence of the decadence of Dutch society and justice. Many Canadians, only a generation or two ago, died liberating the Netherlands from the Nazis. And, we may now well ask, for what?

Let us remember how, after liberation, the Dutch treated some of those who had collaborated with the Nazis, marking them visibly.

Madness has again descended on Europe.

Weeding The Human Plant From The Garden Of Eden

2010-10-03T13:01:00.006-07:00

Move over, Leni Riefenstahl, you now have serious competition indeed, courtesy of the smiling eugenicists at 1010 and their catechism of cataclysm, "No Pressure":

The green thumb of the left hand of environmentalism is soaked with crimson this week, as a British taxpayer-supported group's attempt to bring attention to their upcoming advertising campaign got a little more attention than they bargained for. Against all reason, they packaged their appeal to conservation within a despicable gorefest launched with a preview in the UK-based Guardian newspaper, whose readers were given the first look at this "edgy" ecology lesson last Thursday, reminding us all that we can't expect to make omelettes without first breaking a few eggs:

[W]hy take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask [director Franny Armstrong]: "Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that's not worth jumping up and down about, I don't know what is."
"We 'killed' five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change," she adds.
Jamie Glover, the child-actor who plays the part of Philip and gets blown up, has similarly few qualms: "I was very happy to get blown up to save the world."

Two reactions. One, it's yet another example of how the well-intentioned animists who can successfully see the spark of the divine Creator in slugs and bugs, seem to have exhausted that insight by the time they get around to seeing their fellow human beings. No wonder we can be treated as just so much collateral damage, our tilling is merely part of the toil that goes into preparing the soil of any field for planting, a necessary evil familiar to every hopeful gardener.

Two: is this film really aimed at the increasing number of blaspheming skeptics no longer holding their iron-clad faith in the man-made religion of man-made global warming? My sense is that it's real target audience are the fellow travelers who might be straying from the party line. Tithing must be in serious decline for No Pressure to warrant shot after shot of terrified blood-stained survivors of each explosive purge. Death comes quickly, after all, to the characters in the vignettes who disagree; the terror is reserved for those left behind, haunted by the shocking price to be paid for free will. Beyond the purported conservationist message of the film, isn't it also whispering:

"When you join this club, you never leave."

No pressure, because there's no real freedom to choose in the first place.

The artful photography, the studied realism of the special effects, the impressive acting (is there anything harder to pull off than acting natural..?), all this and more reveal how much thought, labor, and talent must have gone into the creation of this monstrosity. There was just one thing missing: moral judgment. An admission agreed to by the sponsors of the film, who upon seeing it were reported to be "absolutely appalled" at the result of their good faith. Thankfully, the backers have come to their senses, so that the film will no longer be distributed to UK theaters, as originally planned. (!)

"Many people found the resulting film extremely funny", the filmmakers contend in their eventual apology. This is absolutely true, as we may read, with mounting horror, as the initial article in the Guardian fills with reader comments rising to the defense of the indefensible, revealing all the more clearly how far Great Britain has fallen in our lifetime. Where once there were giants like William Wilberforce, capable of seeking justice for people and animals both, now there remains caricatures of his shadow, willing to see people as animals, ready for herding... and culling.

The sickest joke seems to have turned out to be in the apology:

At 10:10 we're all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

"Live and learn"... a priviledge not extended to the heretical characters of their macabre video.

More evidence there has never yet been a serious "Palestinian peace partner"

2010-09-30T14:05:00.005-07:00

Today comes news of the latest in the long litany of revelations of how the Arabs have been fighting a century-long war against any Jewish state or political presence in the land of Israel, while getting a deeply naive West to consider Arabs potential "peace partners" or at least an equally-aggrieved party in a conflict that is dubiously styled the "Palestinian (or Arab)-Israeli conflict" - a term which assumes two parties equally desirous of conflict - when in fact what we have witnessed is a century-old Arab/Muslim war against the desire for a Jewish presence in the land of Israel/Palestine:

Hamas Reveals that Arafat Gave Green Light for 2000 War - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

We now know that Arafat - a man who never had any authority to recognize a Jewish state - was never a serious partner for peace, and was in fact someone who had to unleash violence the more Israel wanted to make concessions for peace. He had to do this for two reasons: 1)However "secular", he had no authority in what has always been an Islamically-dominated culture (the secular, after all, is just another, less ritualized, form of the sacred) to acknowledge any right for any kind of Jewish political presence in land that Islam has previously conquered and ruled. Arafat could play at making peace as long as this won his people useful concessions and foreign aid, but when it came to actually being asked to sign a deal that would recognize Israel, wrecking violence had to be unleashed as the only way out of a cultural impossibility. 2)In the Arab world view, those who sue for peace are seen to be weak and so deserve to be forced to submit.

None of this is to suggest that Israel doesn't have a moral responsibility to be always ready to negotiate and assist in various arrangements to facilitate Jewish life alongside Arab life, whenever the Arabs are serious about (in)formally recognizing the Jewish presence in Palestine. But Palestinian culture is today one where endless and widespread antisemitic libels and hatred are expressed as normative, where no one "serious" can acknowledge Israel's right to exist. For now, peace can only come as long as this Jew hatred is treated with the stony contempt and necessary force it deserves. The forceful reality of the Jewish presence in the land of Israel must be asserted until it is accepted, if only silently. One must not dream of final victories or final peace terms - there is only unnecessary violence in Utopian desires - but rather see that in fighting, step by step, for one's values and cultural presence, instead of showing fear and weakness, one engages the Other on a primitive level - the only realistic level in this case - and starts to create a reality, an order of shared existence that better recognizes powerful facts on the ground, and hence creates some degree of stability.

The guilty white Left: Making Excuses for those who would rape and enslave infidel activist women

2010-09-21T13:39:00.004-07:00

Arabs Harass Female 'Peace' Activists; Left Silences Victims - Politics & Gov't - Israel News - Israel National News

UPDATE: Phyllis Chesler takes up this story.

A light unto the nations

2010-09-21T13:16:00.002-07:00

Nano-Particles Shaped Like Star of David Found - Israel National News

Monday Numbers

2010-09-20T22:57:00.001-07:00

Numbers and words calculated to be of interest on a wet Monday evening...

50 millionaires: Roll Call publishes their annual list of the fifty richest members of Congress.

28 Democrats, 22 Republicans. Of the top ten wealthiest, 7 are Democrats, 3 are Republicans.

At over $188,000,000, John Kerry "... is the richest Member of Congress for the 13th time in the 15 years since his 1995 marriage to Teresa Heinz Kerry, widow of the late Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.), the scion of the ketchup fortune."

60,000 words: 58 year-old John Basinger turned a regular workout routine on his treadmill into an opportunity to exercise his mind while exercising his body. After 3,000 hours spread out over nine years of running, he wound up memoring Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost:

JB didn't use the mnemonic techniques favoured by memory champions, but neither, the researchers say, should we see his achievement as a 'demonstration of brute force, rote memorisation'. Rather it was clear that JB was 'deeply cognitively involved' in learning Milton's poem. JB explained:
'During the incessant repetition of Milton's words, I really began to listen to them, and every now and then as the whole poem began to take shape in my mind, an insight would come, an understanding, a delicious possibility. ... I think of the poem in various ways. As a cathedral I carry around in my mind, a place that I can enter and walk around at will. ... Whenever I finish a "Paradise Lost" performance I raise the poem and have it take a bow.'

23,000 religious prostitutes: The devadasi, an ancient Hindu tradition made illegal in India in 1988, serves as the subject of a documentary on one of the many forms of human trafficking still plaguing our long-suffering world:

Out of those she interviewed, nearly all cited economic need rather than religious tradition as the main reason behind their chosen path.
“Many devadasi are sold into the sex trade by their families,” she says. “The parents know that they’re not really giving their children to be religious servants, but they turn a blind eye.”
[...]
When the devadasi become older and can’t attract the same business, they end up trafficking, and taking girls from the small villages to big cities like Bangalore, where they set up brothels. Most of the girls chosen are illiterate agricultural workers, who go because they think they’ll make more money as devadasi than if they work on the land.”
Do any make their fortune? “A few can - a client might pay a few thousand pounds for a night with a virgin devadasi. But a lot of devadasi in their 30s or 40s are selling sex for about thirty or forty pence. The strange thing is that though they see themselves as superior to non-religious prostitutes - and even though they often dress to look different, with distinctive jewellery and clothes - I don’t think the clients see much difference.”

Obama The Sphinx

2010-09-19T19:29:00.008-07:00

What a puzzle this man Obama can be.

While reading a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute last week, the President of the United States quotes the Declaration of Independance, but -- avoids? refuses? forgets? -- to include three seconds-worth of text... the image above captures the pose he wore as a visual ellipsis rather than admit that his fellow Americans hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed BY THEIR CREATOR with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Is there nothing to the timing of this long pause? Did he simply lose his place while reading from the teleprompter? Or is there something about that particular part of the quote that Obama finds... troubling?

[Hat Tip to Guy Benson]

"No one Innocent" - Roberto Luongo

2010-09-13T21:21:00.010-07:00

A friend of ours has a beef with the pathetically-named "immigrant rights" group, "No One is Illegal". NOI is defending the right of entry to Canada of illegal migrants, like the recent boatload of Tamils. But where would NOI draw the line? Their name is mindless Utopianism - for starters, how can we have unlimited "legal" migration in a world of welfare states with their costly benefits that are given to all legal residents as "rights"? And I'm sure that No One is Illegal is also for welfare states and their economic viability.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that Roberto Luongo today wore a shirt with almost the opposite sentiment. Luongo announced today that he is giving up the Captaincy of the Vancouver Canucks hockey club - this after becoming the city's scapegoat (though not entirely without reason given his uneven performance in goal) for the team failing to go far in the Stanley Cup playoffs last year. Being a scapegoat of the group can teach you an important truth about our collective human nature - that there is nothing innocent in the collective, mimetic, process by which any group binds itself in opposition to what it singles out, more or less arbitrarily (but nonetheless meaningfully), to be in error.

Today Luongo went to the press conference with a shirt emblazoned "No one Innocent".
I salute your fashion sense, Roberto.

More evidence of relationship between Canadian state and Jewish covenant

2010-09-04T00:29:00.004-07:00

Watch this video and look for the name on the plane at the 12 second mark, in the lower lefthand corner. If anyone knows why Capt. Mark Remington has this name, please let us know...

Jumping Jehosaphat - Sockeyes as far as the eye can see

2010-08-30T17:30:00.007-07:00

When I last wrote about British Columbia's love and fascination with the mystery of the salmon, this year's returning Sockeyes were but small fry yearlings. How they would this year "know" to return from far out in the North Pacific to the specific creek or stream of their birth, no one knows.

This summer, the great mystery of Creation again reveals itself. After many years with bad news of declining salmon returns, we are blessed with the largest run of Sockeye on the Fraser River in a hundred years. I believe the current estimate is a return of 30 million Sockeye.

I was down by the river on Saturday in the early evening and took the following video, just a little west of Finn Slough. The video may not entirely capture the awe and gratitude I felt as I stood on the bank and watched salmon jumping all over the place. There were moments when I could see three or four salmon jumping almost simultaneously, and stretches of seconds when it seemed one was jumping every second in front of me. But this minute of video was a pretty average minute, and you can have a sense, considering the camera's limited angle of vision (a tiny stretch and moment of a large river), how many fish were hopping.

More evidence for Hitler being part Jewish

2010-08-24T14:33:00.001-07:00

There is no hatred quite like self-hatred.
'DNA shows Hitler of mixed race' (HT: Spengler)

The limits of Darwinian evolution

2010-08-23T13:52:00.002-07:00

"Don Lightband", the gay troubador of the Generative Anthropology list writes (in respect of this article: Orang-utans are not remotely like humans | spiked), "Norwegian babe admits herself to the ranks of the Unfooled, seemingly w/out any anthropological assistance!"

Helene Guldberg seems to have endeared herself to Lightband with lines like:

Time and again, we are told that humans are not that special after all: abilities previously thought to be uniquely human are now purportedly evident amongst the great apes. The most recent claim, published in the current issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, is that orang-utans use mime to make themselves understood.
[...]
Ape communications are incomparable with human language. We debate and discuss ideas, construct arguments – drawing on past experiences and imagining future possibilities – in order to change the opinions of others. We pantomime. We create everything from great literature to nursery rhymes that help us make sense of the human condition, and we can pass this on down the generations: some nursery rhymes have survived centuries. We can communicate an infinite number of meanings and develop an infinite number of arguments. We can debate and discuss everything from international politics and economics to the most mundane issues.

I cannot see even the remotest comparison between the beauty, power and complexity of human language and an ape wiping its forehead with a leaf and passing it to another being.

Now Mr. Lightband alleges a lack of anthropology here, because Ms. Guldberg argues for the distinctively human without any apparent hypothesis of what has made the human distinct. Nonetheless, obviously we all have anthropological insights in degrees; we all depend on developing our human self-understanding better to survive the risks and threats we pose each other. And so it would be interesting to speculate just why, at this point in history, there seem to be a number of scientists, as Guldberg reports, breaking with the deeply human tendency to anthropomorphize our animal cousins (a tendency which has wrecked countless "scientific" studies that appeal to specifically human common-sense to explain animal behaviours); and also, by implication, though Guldberg does not spell it out, we seem to be witnessing a time when some scientists are grappling with the over-use of Darwininan-evolutionary explanations, for if human language is something quite distinct from anything our ape cousins practise among themselves (they may well learn human language, in some degree, when interacting with us), then the emergence of human language was quite likely an event that cannot be explained simply by assuming some kind of quiet, "natural" evolution of ape to human. Rather, the creation of the human must have been a distinctive break in biological-evolutionary "time", the creation of a specifically-human kind of time and cultural evolution. This is the hypothesis of Generative Anthropology.

I would begin my speculation on why we now witness this scientific trend away from assuming some close proximity in ape/animal and human "cultures" by suggesting that the recurring human desire to assimilate the human to the natural world has been exacerbated by the phenomena of the post-World War II "white" guilt that has wracked the Western world. To the practitioners of white guilt, our domineering relationships to the non-human "environment" have become, along with our relationships to various human Others, signs of wrongful oppression and arrogance that must be countered by claims that we are not distinctive and must not see ourselve morally apart from the natural order, but rather in all respects indebted to it, such that we have no business posing any "threats" to its well being. In such thinking, the idea that we are quite different from apes is taken to be a mark of arrogance. In contrast, the notion that it is rather the attribution of human traits to the animal and natural worlds (e.g. calling it "Gaia") that is the mark of human arrogance has not been taken seriously by many in recent years.

But maybe we are now seeing signs of serious opposition of the extension of the signs of post-war White Guilt into the natural sciences. If so, it will require interest in new hypotheses of what is specifically human, in short the project of a Generative Anthropology.

Back From Ottawa

2010-08-03T21:20:00.011-07:00

Inspiring and perspiring; my entwined memories of hanging out in our hot nation's capital during the first real summer vacation I've gotten in the last ten years.

The real purpose behind the visit was to see my ailing father one more time, to give thanks for him having been the dad he's been to us, while I could still deliver such appreciation in person.

Long before his eventual retirement, we used to visit Ottawa on rare father-and-son Saturday trips by train from nearby Quebec. An unplanned ritual emerged: starting with his repeating the workings of the Rideau Canal for the slow-to-learn child who walked at his side, followed by coaching on the function of the majestic buildings greeting us on Parliament Hill, inevitably ending up with being treated to a book at the War Museum gift shop before taking the train back home.

A patient teacher, a thoughtful guide, a proud immigrant, he made each visit a stirring occasion for his oldest son.

These are now my memories more than his, it seems, our private talks revealing that such details have largely faded in the sunset of age and illness. Now it's become my turn to be patient, to be thoughtful...

And to be proud.

Los perdidos, los olividados, y los muertos

2010-08-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

Murder (al)most foul.

Just across the Mexican border into the city of Ciudad Juarez there is a war going on that's taking the lives of thousands of people, most of whom will be buried without ceremony or memorial. They are the lost, the forgotten, the dead. I don't know them, and they ain't no friends of mine. I don't care. Most of the dead seem to deserve whatever horrible fate they meet. But....

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2010/08/los-perdidos-los-olividados-los-muertos.html

French Minister: "We Won't Tell You How Many Cars Get Burned Tonight"

2010-07-14T06:15:00.006-07:00

France celebrates Bastille Day today.

Some French celebrants will honor their Fête Nationale by attending veterans parades and fireworks displays.

Others tend to pursue less noble traditions: 35,000 extra police are being mobilized throughout the country in the hopes of subduing France's notorious generation of uncivilized youth, a show of force to prevent the expected spike in the number of nightly car burnings which, sadly, now haunts the annual French holiday.

Trouble has already begun: the night of July 13th, the eve of the national holiday, the police brought charges against 306 arrested young arsonists and thugs, compared to 190 at this time the year before.

One statistic, however, will apparently escape us this year, according to Brice Hortefeux, France's Minister of the Interior: he officially declared today that there will be no official figures released on the number of cars set ablaze throughout the country on France's Bastille Day:

"[...] no numbers for burned cars will be released for the nights of July 13 and 14, in order to put an end to this unhealthy tradition which promotes, every year at this same time, these criminal acts."

"Instructions have been issued to police headquarters so that they too will not release the number of cars burned in their départements. Hereafter, only annual reports will be made public."

French commentors cynically recommend that the French government adopt this approach to reporting on unemployment statistics and health figures as well, if hiding from the truth can prove such an effective remedy for dealing with their beleaguered nation's social nightmare.

[A tip of the Phrygian cap to the French blog Le Salon Beige]

One of the more pleasant results that has come from years of blogging about this unpleasant mess in France, has been the many inspiring emails, heartening comments (and even face-to-face meetings) we have received from our French readers in France. It's easy to lose sight of the full scope of the truth that there is such a thing as a French Heartland, there are many good and decent people there deserving of support, encouragement and appreciation... deserving a respite from the incessant French-bashing that North American blogs tend to engage in.

We read that the Lord was willing to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there could be found as few as 50 good people there; well, there's a much higher number than that in France today, so why not put aside the inevitable English-French fraternal spite, and on this day more than most, continue to pray for those within this overwhelmed minority, determined to love family, honor honest labor and engage in social civility despite the surrounding amorality that attempts to seduce them from these values; to pray that they may withstand the folly of their confreres; and that their steadfastness in the face of so much adversity may one day result in a renewal of national spirit, leading to the emergence of a nation more worthy of them.

Time for a moderate immigration policy?

2010-07-13T16:21:00.002-07:00

Jihadi bloodshed has become so commonplace, it seems to me one is hearing relatively little in the media about the latest murderous atrocity:
74 Killed In Uganda By Al-Shabab

Canadians, however, should take serious note and start making demands for more pro-active policies from our politicians:
From teens to terrorists: How Al-Shabab recruits Western 'martyrs' (HT: Odehad)
Somalia's struggles play out in Canada

And more

Waiting for Achilles Godot

2010-07-11T11:46:00.004-07:00

Erasmus somehow saved a fragment from Aeschyus' Mymidones, a play now lost that deals with Achilles' bodyguards in the war against Troy, known to us as Turkey, a few lines from a Libyan saying about an eagle seeing itself impaled by an arrow:

"Thus not by others, but with our own feathers/ are we undone."

Aeschylus, The Myrmidones.

It's a mad, mad, Mad magazine world. What? Me worry? The only problem is Christians and other rightwing bigots, the racists, the conservatives, the pick your imaginary villain. The problem is whatever is not the problem. That settles it. Everything else is fine and improving. Thank the gods for the government. This is the best in the best of all possible worlds and the government is making everything better. Jihad? It's a spiritual striving, only turned against Western Arrogance when we deserve to be punished for past transgressions, slavery and the CIA over-throw of the Iranian Communists in the 1950s, and so on. If there are any problems in the world, then we are responsible for them, and if we are nicer people, we can change all that so everyone loves us. Jihad? What? Me worry?

"Normalcy bias."

The normalcy bias refers to an extreme mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred that it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Glazov interviews some folks below to see if there is a Muslim/World problem we aren't facing honestly. I think "Normalcy bias." O.K., I think that when I'm on a date. Maybe I worry too much. But what if Geert Wilders is right, that Islam is a serious danger to the world as a place of freedom and safety and relative affluence? What if our intelligentsia comprises fools who are dangerous to us as individuals and nations?

Jamie Glazov, "Symposium: The Fear that Wilders is Right," Front Page Magazine. 9 July 2010

FP: Roger Simon, Robert Spencer and Kevin Levin, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Today we witness the blatant desperation in our culture and media for a “moderate Islam” — an Islam that many non-Muslims vehemently insist exists, but that mysteriously eludes them. This moderate Islam will make everything better, we are told, once the “extremists,” who are the “minority” in Islam, will be sedated. This sedation will be most easily achieved, the argument continues, when the Islamophobes stop blaming Islam after Islamic terrorists point to Islamic scriptures in explaining what inspired them to perpetrate their terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, in terms of the planet that we happen to be occupying, a “moderate Islam” is nowhere to be found; no school of Islamic jurisprudence exists that counsels Muslims to renounce the Qur’an’s teachings on Islamic supremacism and the obligation of violent jihad. And yet, to suggest the truth of this reality in our culture gets one only the accusation of being a racist and an “Islamophobe.”

Roger Simon, let me begin with you. What do you think of this phenomenon? You recently wrote a profound piece at Pajamas that touched on one of its crucial foundations. In analyzing why the likes of Glenn Beck and Charles Krauthammer have attacked Geert Wilders, you interpreted that these conservative individuals, from whom we might have expected something different on this score, are, what it all comes down to it, rejecting Wilders because they are afraid that he might be right....

Simon: [...]

Islam is an almost unsolvable conundrum. How do you deal with a religion with a billion adherents that is expansionist in ideology and threatens to kill its apostates? How do you get a reformation of that religion when its holy book, from which those dictums come, is reputed to be dictated verbatim by God and is therefore immutable? Talk about “inconvenient truths,” these are about as inconvenient as they get. No wonder they are buried from the discussion and ignored. We in the West live in a society that cannot even begin to wrap its mind around that. I know – it’s hard for me.

So where does that leave Wilders? I believe that consciously or unconsciously those who brand him as excessive, or even racist, are living in fear that he may be right. They have to hate Wilders, because if he is correct, their whole world disintegrates. Who would want that?

He and the small group like him have therefore morphed into our clearest contemporary examples of those poor Greek messengers to be killed for bringing the bad news. A salient recent example is Nicholas Kristof’s unhinged attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the New York Times Book Review – a supposed liberal going off on a woman who had a cliterodectomy for daring to dwell on how women were oppressed in the Islamic world. It’s almost pathological. Another recent example are the similarly unhinged attacks on Israel over the Gaza flotilla incident while completely ignoring vastly more horrific acts occurring in the Muslim world on an almost daily basis. We dare not insult them lest they go mad.

It’s almost as if the world has become a giant dysfunctional family, enabling their huge Muslim branch to remain besotted – or drugged out – on sub-Medieval ideology. And the situation is getting worse. The principle bastion of hope of reformation of the Islamic world – Turkey – made its turn back toward fundamentalism years ago now.

So again, where does that leave Wilders? One lonely canary. We have to support him, but I’m not optimistic. I hope my colleagues are.

FP: Thank you Roger Simon.

Kenneth Levin your thoughts? A species of the Oslo syndrome is involved in this phenomenon right?

Levin: I do see a form of the Oslo Syndrome operating here. [...]
The perpetrators of 9/11 and their myriad supporters quickly made clear their objective of imposing their Islamist rule worldwide and their comprehension of doing so as a religious duty. Yet many in America sought, and continue to seek, to recast the threat, to rationalize it, and to urge policies aimed at appeasing Islamist leaders and followers in the delusional hope of thereby extricating the nation from the dangers it faces.

Geert Wilders argues that Islamofascism derives directly from Islamic teachings, including Koranic exhortations. His movie, Fitna, advancing this argument, is unimpeachable in its citations of Islamic scripture and in its images of Islamofascism on the march. That those who oppose him are motivated in large part by a wish to appease the purveyors of the Islamist threat is indicated by the fact that the negative responses to Wilders have focused not on rebutting his arguments but on demonizing him and using anti-democratic means to silence him. As Roger Simon suggests, they are compelled to hate Wilders because they so want to cling to their delusional denial of the threat.

The ugly, perverse, self-destructive nature of the assault on Wilders, and the necessity to defend him, have been articulated by many. ...

Beyond the unconscionable attempts to silence Wilders, there are other indications, both in Europe and America, that the hostility directed against him is motivated primarily by a wish to deny the threats we face and to appease its agents. Thus, in both Europe and the U.S., we have a huge chorus of officials insisting Islam is a religion of peace, They insist that Islamist forces pursuing a war of world conquest have “hijacked” the religion and that the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving and tolerant. Yet these same officials give virtually no public support to those - too few - Muslims within their nations who at once declare themselves to be believing Muslims and do speak out forcefully against Islamofascism. On the contrary, such people are typically ignored and government outreach is almost invariably directed to individuals and groups linked to Islamist, hatred-promoting agendas.

[....]

One can argue there is often a more venal motive behind this phenomenon. Saudi Arabia is the prime financier of Muslim extremism in the U.S., including of education in bigotry – particularly anti-Jewish and anti-Christian bigotry - in U.S. mosques and Islamic schools, and Saudi Arabia is pandered to because of its oil wealth and its readiness to use its prodigious financial resources to win official tolerance of its intolerant message. But if officials and others looked honestly at the existential threats we face from Islamofascism, the likelihood is they would be less inclined to politics as usual and to being swayed against defensive measures by Saudi blandishments. The impact of the Saudi role is a reflection of widespread official averting of eyes from the nature of the threat.

One can also argue that much of the Western accommodationist reaction to the Islamist threat, and desire to silence Wilders’ message, are a product of Western leftist orthodoxy. The combination of hostility towards the West, moral relativism, and boosterism regarding virtually anything non-Western or anti-Western – all seminal doctrines of the contemporary leftist catechism – inevitably leads to denial of, or excuses for, or even defense of, the Islamist challenge.

But even among those whose ideological allegiances weigh against looking honestly at the nature of the threat, there were many individuals who responded to 9/11, and the additional terror that followed on the atrocities of that day, and the declarations of Islamofascism’s leaders and minions, by reevaluating their leftist ideology and abandoning their old verities for a saner comprehension of the realities we face. Those who continue day after day to cling to their delusions regarding the nature of the threat do so by persisting, day after day – out of a desperate desire to believe reality to be otherwise, to believe the threat can be wished away or rationalized away or appeased away – to continue averting their eyes from the nature of the challenge.

FP: Robert Spencer, your thoughts on the need to hate Wilders so one can cling to one’s delusional denial of the threat we face? What do you think of Roger Simon’s and Kenneth Levin’s perspectives?

[....]

Spencer: Jamie, Roger Simon is quite right that those who call Wilders “excessive, or even racist…have to hate Wilders, because if he is correct, their whole world disintegrates.” [I]’ve encountered this phenomenon many times: people essentially admitting that they don’t want to face up to the truths that Wilders and others enunciate because they believe the implications of those truths are simply too terrible to contemplate. I was told several years ago that the editorial board of a major American publication, when asked to do a profile on me and feature my writing, turned down the proposal because if what I was saying were true, “the U.S. would find itself at war with every Muslim country in the world.”

I don’t accept that as a natural outcome of what I say, but I find interesting the open avowal of the idea that what I say about Islam and jihad simply cannot be true, because if it were, the implications would be too disturbing to contemplate – and so therefore it must be false, or at least should be ignored! I encountered this again in a debate with a professor of Islamic studies at a significant American university, whose opening gambit in response to my initial presentation was to tell the audience that if what I said were true, it would be very depressing – as if that were sufficient to establish its falsity.

Contributing to the persistence of this unreality is something that Kenneth Levin alludes to – the fact that “the negative responses to Wilders have focused not on rebutting his arguments but on demonizing him and using anti-democratic means to silence him.” That demonization is a tested and true weapon in the Islamic supremacist arsenal, as well as that of the Left, ... and it is so frequently employed because it is so very effective. There are so many spineless conformists on the Right in America – they are very easily cowed by charges that someone is a “racist,” or a “bigot,” or even worse, an “Islamophobe,” and maybe even a secret “neo-Nazi.”

It doesn’t matter if there is absolutely nothing to these charges (and in the case of Wilders and others thus charged and shunned, including my colleague and coauthor Pamela Geller and myself, there isn’t); for many prominent mainstream “conservatives,” the charges themselves are enough. They will shun any contact or association with people who have been thus tarred. They are thoughtless and cowardly enough to run in the other direction at the mere suggestion of a taint, often without even investigating the case themselves. They don’t seem to realize that by doing this they’re playing the Leftist/Islamic supremacist game — effectively allowing the opposition to define the terms of the debate, choose the playing field, and make the rules. And that, it goes without saying, is a sure path to defeat.

More at: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/07/09/symposium-the-fear-that-wilders-is-right/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_campaign=806d38e0e6-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

That's four guys in agreement talking to each other. Leftards aren't going to give up their religion due to that. They cling to their 'normal' and resent any disruptions, sometimes hysterically. Normalcy bias is probably lovely for those attached to it. It isn't, as I know from having seen vivid examples in life, but what the hey? Let's look at it further and see what we can. It won't change the minds of the biased, but for some it might clarify the situation, giving us confidence in our understandings, firming us up, as it were, in this battle against the disaster that is Left dhimmi fascism in practice in our Modern world.

Richard Landes, "The Hidden Costs of Jew-Baiting in England," Pajamas Media. 10 July 2010

London is an amazing place, full of vitality, intensity, foreign tourists and residents, a patchwork of pluralism. Talk to the average person, and nothing seems amiss: this cab driver, having driven in London for 40 years, sees no significant change in the neighborhoods he travels through; this financier sees no signs of intimidation; this shopper, this tavern-hopper, this man on the bus, lives in an interesting and relatively normal world. A superficial walk through the [Regent’s] park gives the distinct sense of normality.

But talk to the Jews, and you get a different story. The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists held a conference here this week. The topic: Democratic and Legal Norms in an Age of Terror. Panels discussed everything from the Goldstone Report, to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, to “universal jurisdiction” (lawfare against Israelis brought in foreign courts). Here, in the Khalili Lecture Theatre of the SOAS (School for Oriental and African Studies), Jewish lawyers discussed a grim reality whose only public appearance on an everyday basis is the drumbeat of calumny that a boisterous elite — NGOs, journalists, academics — rain down on Israel.

Perhaps the most startling of the sessions concerned the BDS movement. Jonathan Rynhold, from the BESA Center at Bar Ilan, and Anthony Julius, author of Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, both presented a picture of British anti-Zionist activity whose intellectual and moral foundations were profoundly irrational, a dogmatic will to stigmatize and destroy Israel that responded to no argument about proportion (what about other places?) or reason (you make no moral demands of the Palestinians). And behind that lies a much weightier volume of negative feeling, a kind of unthinking animosity that expressed itself in its most banal form when a woman explained to Julius: “We all know why the Jews are hated: you marry among yourselves and live in ghettos like Golders Green and Vienna [sic].” In so doing, she put her finger on the most widespread subtext for hostility to Jews – “they think they’re the chosen people.”

Daniel Eilon, an English barrister, explained to me one of the mechanisms. It isn’t real anti-Semitism. In fact, most of the stuff that comes out against Israel is intellectually hopeless — phony narratives based on fantasy “facts.” This is really just good old-fashioned Jew-baiting. It’s saying things in all righteous innocence that you know will hurt the Jews to whom you address the criticism. The problem for the Brits (and the Europeans in general), he pointed out, is that historically, there’s never been a particularly high price to pay for Jew-baiting. Now there is.

What my friend referred to with this last remark is lucidly analyzed by Robin Shepherd in his recent book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel. The elephant in the room, of course, is radical Islam — the people who interpret being “chosen” by Allah as a charter to dominate the world and submit everyone, willingly or not, to Islam. They’re the people no one dares bait; and they’re the folks who take full advantage of every deference to press for more. Daily aggressions from violent gangs constantly expand the territories where the Queen’s writ does not run. In tempo with the retreat of British law and enforcement, Sharia advances from internal community affairs (explicitly on the model of Jewish religious courts) towards the policing of community boundaries and claims on the state for special treatment. The British — like so many other Western nations –mainstream the extremists and marginalize the moderates. As Nick Cohen put it: “The world faces a psychotic movement and won’t admit it to themselves.”

A documentary filmmaker reveals a double assault on freedom of speech: on the one hand, everyone is terrified of peers calling them Islamophobes; and on the other, anyone who does something negative on Islam puts his or her life in danger. When I respond animatedly to her point, she looks around nervously and signals for me to lower my voice. How often did my British informants tell me in hushed tones about being intimidated!

News agencies send their journalists to special courses in self-defense for how to deal with hostile situations. How much of this responds to the pervasive dangers of doing journalism in Muslim countries, and how often does it come up in those areas where the Queen’s writ does not run? One such journalist who works for the BBC reports that when a mob turns ugly, they are told to stand back to back, palms open, pointing down and out — a posture of non-threat, but also one of subjection.

And of course, the best protection is positive coverage. Most of the time, “but we’re from the BBC” works to allay Muslim hostility: it’s code for “we’re on your side.” But for some crowds, even that’s not enough.

The result of this pervasive intimidation that comes from both peers and enemies is a body politic that feels no pain. Like a victim of CIP (congenital insensitivity to pain), the British public receives only vague hints of the assaults on its body. A widespread omerta operates in the mainstream news media, guaranteeing that many, if not most aggressions go unreported, or in a code — Asian street gangs — that only those looking for clues will notice. Aggregator sites online offer deeply disturbing collections of news items.

As a result, Brits look away while their Muslim communities are taken over by fascist zealots who enforce dress and behavior codes, who silence dissent, and who mobilize a resentful youth with violent hatreds. For these men, infidels are by definition guilty, deserving rape and lethal assault, as part of Allah’s justice. Douglas Murray’s study of twenty-seven Muslims, targeted by zealots, reveals the workings of a community hijacked by thugs.

The trials and tribulations of Afshan Azad, the Bengali Muslim-born actress in the Harry Potter films, beaten and threatened with death by her family, illustrate the depth of the community pressures. Her brothers’ failures to bring her to heel (or kill her) endanger their lives: “We are going to get trouble from the community now. It is bad news for our safety, her safety. My younger brother is going to get harassed at college. All our family is going to be harassed by the community because of this.” The tribal community rules, even in college.

So while a large and growing population falls under the grip of a Mafioso culture with an imperialist ideology of world conquest, the British look away. The “prestigious” London School of Economics disinvited Douglas Murray from speaking, lest his presence provoke violence. Paralyzed by an inability to discuss the problem, they become a train-wreck in slow motion. The lavish expenses that the government has paid out to immigrant families, which has at once increased their numbers and stilled their rage, is now run out. Budget cuts of up to 40% across the board will only exacerbate the frictions, and if the government pours money into appeasing the Muslims, they will alienate the British working class losing their benefits.

Which brings us back to Jew-baiting. As Shepherd explains in his chapter on Islam in Europe, this is a European-wide phenomenon that is directly related to the fear of criticizing Muslims. Anti-Zionism is the key extremist discourse by which jihadis radicalize communities and mobilize warriors for Allah’s armies. The disturbing figures for how many British Muslims support terror, think Muslims did not commit either 9-11 or 7-7, think the law should punish people who insult Islam, and think that apostates from Islam should die should not be read the way we read political polls in the West. These minorities are the dominant voices in their communities, if only because they use their terror tactics against fellow Muslims far more readily than against outsiders.

So while their enemies advance, the British elites are like deer in the headlights, incapable of speaking up for even their own principles of free speech and tolerance. Intimidated into silence about Muslims, somehow, they find their voice in denouncing the “real” genocidal evil empire: Israel. Thus some wax eloquent, like the Methodists with their thinly-disguised, resentful supersessionism; and others wax violent, like the anti-Zionist vandals, who damaged hundreds of thousands of pounds of property and got off scott free to the cheers of a Green MP.

Of course, every sin these brave ideologues accuse Israel of committing is done a thousand-fold by the very people who generate their demonizing narrative — the radical Muslims. It is these zealots who interpret their chosenness as a warrant to rape and massacre, to dominate and humiliate infidels. They are the toxic communitarians who believe in their side right or wrong, to the death — not the Jews, who can’t stop publicly beating their breasts about all their sins. Indeed, one of the mysterious factors in this madness is the role played by Jewish anti-Zionists, who, in Julius’ memorable phrase, are “proud to be ashamed to be Jewish.”

Instead of taking note of such sobering perspectives, Western anti-Zionists shy away from the dangerous and painful but legitimate and necessary criticism of Muslim radicals. They prefer the easy, cost-free baiting of any Jew proud enough to feel that his or her own people deserve a state. Instead of turning to the Muslims and saying “why can’t you express a fraction of the self-criticism of the Zionists?” they prefer to repeat the most toxic accusations against the Jews and claim: “I’m not saying anything that Jews haven’t said.”

They are the true Islamophobes — afraid to criticize Islam, eager to join in its chorus of hatred.

And in this act of demission before the Islamist challenge, British opinion makers and shapers also submit to their own bullies, their own zealots who push the Jew-baiting beyond the weekend sport of the salons, into the professional arena of anti-Zionist activism. When the founders of Hamas in 1988 penned their genocidal charter that explicitly targeted all infidels, little did they suspect that within twenty years, those infidels would chant “We are Hamas!” in the streets of London. Who could hope for a more useful infidel than that?

In the European past, Jew-baiting may have seemed relatively cost-free. After all, humiliate a Jew and the worst he’ll do is hector you. Sure, sometimes the sport got out of hand, and killing Jews en masse, or forcing them to convert, or kicking them out may have deeply damaged the economy and empowered repressive forces, like the Inquisition, to go after other religious dissidents. But who really noticed?

Today, however, the situation has changed dramatically because Europe doesn’t just run the risk of internal failure, but getting vanquished by an implacable and merciless foe. By failing to denounce toxic Muslim communitarianism and instead adopting its shrill discourse of demonization about Jews, Brits feed the monster that devours them. If it continues apace, if the British do not make Muslim civility towards Jews the shibboleth of assimilation to a free and democratic culture, they risk losing that civil polity entirely. As always with real anti-Semites, the Jews are only their first target.

Can Britain wake up in time? And if and when it does, can it swallow the painful price of giving up its addiction to Jew-baiting? Or will it be, as some close observers think, the first country in Europe to succumb to Islamism? Walking through the delightful streets of London, watching a brilliant performance of Henry IV Part II at the reconstituted Globe Theatre, passing by a multi-cultural mass of dancers by the embankment at night, viewing the vibrant energy of the city, one has little clue to the problem.

Or is watching this joyful celebration akin to seeing a fat man with a serious cholesterol problem dine on his deep-fried fish-and-chips and wash down those tasty truffles of moral Schadenfreude that so grieve the Jews and comfort the resentful?

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-hidden-costs-of-jew-baiting-in-england/?singlepage=true

"Normalcy bias" screams out at me here. People are terrified of being afraid. Those of us who aren't afraid of being pissed-off await our hero, which makes me think of Achilles skulking in the background, refusing to come forward to lead our army against the threat we face, the threat we must act against, normalcy bias predominant or not. It's not that jihadis are a billion strong and we can't possibly fight them without nuking the whole world. A couple of well-placed punches and Islam's rotten edifice will fall of its own corruption.

In keeping with the hero Achilles in a mad, mad, Mad Magazine world, here's a bit more to finish this off:

Ulysses:

And 'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,
Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida.
Act 1, Scene 3, L. 133-35

Colour my world

2010-07-09T14:50:00.006-07:00

I got an email recently about hydrogen peroxide. I felt compelled to respond. I'll pass it one to the general public here:

[X.], you recently sent me a piece on hydrogen peroxide and its benefits compared to chlorine bleach. Well, in defence of chlorine I feel I must respond with at least this:

In the early 1760s in Britain Josiah Wedgewood was having trouble refining enough blue glaze to keep pace with his pottery production, and worse than that, the wool industry had a bottleneck with the rise of production due to increasing use of increasingly sophisticated looms, and then power looms. Usual production techniques were not keeping pace with the new technologies.

"Traditional methods of bleaching wool involved dipping the fabric in water, boiling it in weak lye water, exposing it to sunlight ofr several days or weeks in bleach fields, and finally 'souring' the fabric by soaking it in sour milk." Richard Olson, Science Deified, Science Defied, Vol. 2. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990,) pp. 340-41.

That process is time, space, and resource wasting. The wool industry couldn't afford to wait a few weeks for the sun to process fabric. They needed it NOW. Where there's money involved, yes, we can expect some clever fellow to figure out how to make some.

Francis Home writes in Experiments in Bleaching, (1754) that diluted sulfuric acid is a good substitute for sour milk that also cuts the 'souring' process time by 90 per cent. Still, there was inefficiency. In 1774 Karl Scheel completely transformed the bleaching industry. (Ibid. p. 341.) He produced dephlogisticated marine acid, or chlorine, as we know it today. In March 1788, Joseph Baker took 28 yards of Grey calico, bleached it in the evening, printed it the next day, and sold it to the public on the third day. (Ibid. p. 341.)

Now, as is happened, I was researching something unrelated to chlorine bleach when I got your email on peroxide, and next day read about chlorine. Who on earth would care? Take a man named Walker. Think wool trade, and imagine plump and sexy Italian girls mushing grapes. But not Italian girls, Scots and English wool trade workers. "Walkers" in the wool trade weren't named as such because they traipsed the glens of the bonny Highlands: no, instead, like Italian girls, they trod in vats, these filled with wool and piss. I'm starting to like chlorine much more. It got me curious, so I looked a bit further, and this is some of what I found. I hope it interests you and your friends and makes us all a little more sympathetic to bleach than we might have been otherwise.

Although ancient methods of bleaching remain unknown, historians have evidence that early civilizations must have known how to bleach fabrics. White cloth was produced by the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Hebrews, as well as by the Greeks and Romans. After the Crusades of the 1100s and 1200s, the practice of bleaching fabric spread throughout Europe. In the old days, people simply spread wet cloth on the ground outdoors and left it to dry in the sunlight until it turned white, which could take weeks or even months. This process came to be called crofting, after the Scottish word for a small meadow (croft). As early as 1322, crofting was practiced on bleaching grounds in England near Manchester. In Scotland and Ireland, some people still bleach their cloth on the grass in this way. High-quality linen that was dried on plots of grass became known as lawn.
By the 1700s, Dutch weavers had improved the bleaching process and emerged as the leaders of Europe's bleaching industry. They discovered that linen, which was still the most common type of cloth, could be bleached more efficiently by first soaking it in lye (a concentrated alkaline solution of potassium or sodium hydroxide). After the lye was washed out, the linen was spread on the ground as usual. After repeating this step a few times the Dutch soaked the linen in buttermilk, or soured milk, then washed it and dried it outdoors again. Although major bleaching operations were known outside Holland, the Dutch enjoyed a near-monopoly on bleaching linen through the 1700s. Fabric produced by the Dutch process was called holland cloth. However, this process was problematic in that it could take several months, especially in northern countries with limited sunlight. Furthermore, it used up large amounts of valuable space.
In 1756, scientists found that dilute sulfuric acid would work better than buttermilk and the time required for the bleaching process was greatly reduced. An even more dramatic improvement in bleaching technology resulted from the discovery of chlorine in 1774 by Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786). French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet (1748-1822) discovered that this gas is a very effective bleaching agent. Berthollet, who was director of a French tapestry factory, developed a method of using chlorine to bleach textiles. In 1785, he introduced a bleaching liquid called lye de Javelle and publicized his technique without patenting it. When James Watt learned of the method, he passed the information on to Scottish chemist and manufacturer Charles Tennant, who began using the bleaching liquid in Glasgow. But the chlorine gas needed for the liquid bleaching process was not readily available, so Tennant invented a more convenient bleaching powder and introduced it in 1799. The solid powder, which was made by combining chlorine with slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), was much easier to handle and ship to other fabric manufacturers. When added to a little dilute acid, the powder released the chlorine gas which bleached the cloth very quickly. By the 1830s, factories were churning out huge quantities of bleaching powder for textile use. This abundant supply of chlorine bleach helped stimulate the cotton industry. [More]

I have nothing against peroxide, to be honest, but I do feel some sympathy for chlorine. I care enough about this area of history to spend some time reading a two volume book on the history of science so I can find out about, among other things, chlorine bleach. Why would a man who spends most of his time writing about Islam and Leftist promotion of Islamic fascism care about bleach and the wool industry? Look at yourself at this moment, assuming you're not nekked. You must be wearing something, and it is coloured. It's coloured because of bleach and dye. Nature doesn't throw up coloured fabric from the ground: we have to manufacture it, i.e. we must use our manos, our hands, to factura, to work it. Industrial hands can do so much more than man alone. It makes me love machines and chemistry and sciences I can't begin to comprehend. It makes me decidedly happy to live in a world of bleached wool, for example, that is dyed. Better still, for me, is cotton. I thought about this a bit and took out my camera and went looking for things that, thanks to the wool industry and the revolution in cotton spinning, also lead to colouring it all. I looked for things yellow, red, and blue, which you might recall.

Primarily Blue

And

Primarily Yellow

We can take our modern world for granted because we aren't involved in making much of it ourselves, most of us limited to some tiny fragment of making something that makes a part of something else we don't see till maybe it shows up on a shelf somewhere at Walmart. But all of us together make this greatness of Modernity. We all rely on the whole of production to give us things like "yellow." Some would have us "get back to Nature." We'd have to give up a lot of colour in our world if we did so. Colourful peasant costumes? They come from Walmart. Cf. "Contempt and Authenticity."

I love the Modern world, and in part because it's been bleached and dyed to become vibrant and beautiful. So, if you will, take a moment to thank Chlorine for its part in this incredible journey to what I think of as Paradise on Earth.

Happy Independence Day

2010-07-04T15:59:00.002-07:00

A Thought for Independence Day (Eric Gans, 1998)

Dominion Day & Canada Day

2010-07-01T11:38:00.015-07:00

Today we celebrate Canada Day, known until the progressivism of the 1960s took hold as Dominion Day (the name was legally changed in 1982). Now I have no beef against progress, serious ethical progress. But as we often whine at this blog, our culture is wracked by a false Gnostic cult of progressivism in which our "progressive" "prophets" actually think they have special elect knowledge, an intellectual key that opens all or many doors to some Utopian technocratic future. The appeal to some of us of the original name - the Dominion of Canada - given to this country by the Fathers of Confederation lies rather in the connotations of the religious and ethical tradition from which the name was chosen. "Dominion" was taken from the eighth line of the seventy-second Psalm, which is a prayer in respect of King Solomon. Before reminding ourselves of the psalm, we might attend to the words of the Commonwealth's Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, regarding the nature of prophecy (just so we don't confuse the hopeful humility of prayer with prophecy):

[W]hat is the Hebrew word for tragedy? Exactly! Tragedia! They couldn't find a word for it. There is no Jewish word for tragedy because Judaism is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope. And I find this extraordinary, that despite the many tragedies of Jewish history, there is no word. There are words for catastrophe. There's a word like asson. There's a word like churban. We have even borrowed a word from sacrificial stuff and use the word shoah. But not one of those words means what the Greek tragedy is about, namely bad things that happen because of the innate structure of reality which is fundamentally blind and deaf to human hopes and aspirations. There cannot be a Jewish tragedy. You can't write it. It doesn't translate.

And, incidentally, of course, that explains the difference between a prophet and - what would be the Greek equivalent of a prophet? An oracle. Yes. What is the difference between a prophet and an oracle? Listen to this. If an oracle predicts that something is going to happen and it doesn't happen - that is a failure. If a prophet tells you something is going to happen and it doesn't happen - that is a success. And that is what Jonah didn't understand. You understand one of the great phenomena that's hit me in the last ten years which I'm sure has struck you: that converting non-Jews is easy. The hard thing is converting the Jews!

In other words, the principle (if not only) purpose of prophecy is to warn us that bad stuff is going to happen, so that we can work to avoid it from happening. In contrast, as I see it, the "progresssivist" actually wants his Utopian prophecy to happen; he wants us to defer to his special semi-secret expert knowledge that alone can save us from our rotten selves.

The true prophet realizes that real progress is what happens when we stop that which is truly foreseeable - violent things - from happening. Real progress, as Psalm 72 has it, is merely the victory of justice and industry and a rejection of the sacrificial violence inherent in the falsely progressive desire to make some special Utopian "prophecy" happen (like the regime of Chaiman Mao killing millions in order to "let a hundred flowers bloom"). Prayer, I imagine, evolved as a substitute for sacrificial acts. Real progress is just what happens, unpredictably, when people are free and well governed, so that we may find progress in the freedom of mediating our conflicts and deferring the bad stuff the prophet warns about. This, at least, is how I read the King James version of Psalm 72:

1 A Psalm for Solomon. Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king's son.

2He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment.

3The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness.

4He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor.

5They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure, throughout all generations.

6He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.

7In his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth.

8He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.

9They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust.

10The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.

11Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him.

12For he shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper.

13He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy.

14He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be in his sight.

15And he shall live, and to him shall be given of the gold of Sheba: prayer also shall be made for him continually; and daily shall he be praised.

16There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains; the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon: and they of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth.

17His name shall endure for ever: his name shall be continued as long as the sun: and men shall be blessed in him: all nations shall call him blessed.

18Blessed be the LORD God, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things.

19And blessed be his glorious name for ever: and let the whole earth be filled with his glory; Amen, and Amen.

20The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.

One might well wonder if it is not the evident and all too particular Jewishness of the Psalm that had inspired our country's original name, that was in part the reason for the "progressive" legislative substitution of "Canada Day" for Dominion Day in the year when Canada cut the last of our Constitutional ties to the British Parliament at Westminster. But on this day of celebration it is not really worth griping about the name change. The proof is in the pudding. And so follows a collection of my snapshots from the last couple of months of weekend day trips in and around Vancouver.

What do I like to photograph? People, yes, but my family and friends will not be of interest to readers here and besides they deserve privacy. Just as much I like landscapes - not usually photos of raw nature, but pictures of nature transformed by human industry. And by "transformed" I don't mean radically changed; I mean added to, layer upon layer, with things that make the Creation more beneficial to humankind. I like the mixing of natural and human beauty and good. I particularly like how lines of transportation and communications do not so much transform as create what is to my mind the quintessentially Canadian vision of "nature". However, I am not a serious photographer and you get what you get below (click on the photos for better resolution). Yet, the point of this little collection is to demonstrate the true applicability to Canadian life of the "Dominion" words of Psalm 72 above. I'll also add another illuminating passage from Jonathan Sacks' talk, on the Jewish concept of time, in among the photos.

Time, as linear time, is not time in which we say ma shehaya hu sheyiheyeh - what happened is what will happen. This is time in which tomorrow can be radically unlike today. Today has to be radically unlike yesterday. In which, unlike the time on a clock, each day is unique because each day is a particular stage in the journey; a particular chapter in the story. And that concept of time generates a whole set of concepts that literally could not have been imaginable otherwise. Concepts like new, like adventure, like surprise, like originality, creativity. Like revolution. Concepts like the key word of the modern age. I mean, from the 17th century onwards, what was the key word of enlightenment? Progress. Exactly.

And another word which I think is much, much more profound, which is for me the key word of Judaism and not by accident did it give its name to the national anthem of the reborn State of Israel, Hatikvah: the concept of hope which I think is far more subtle and powerful than the concept of progress. In fact, all the key words of Judaism - emunah: faith; bitachon: trust; even the concept of brit, of covenant itself - are essentially linked to the idea of linear time.

Let me give you a very small example of how contemporary historians measure the impact of linear time. There is a wonderful book - I don't know if you've seen it; it came out a couple of years ago - by the Harvard economic historian David Landes. David Landes published a book called "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations". A fascinating book about why some nations become rich; why some stay poor. And he said in this book, he asked a good kashe. He asked the following: We know that in the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th centuries the Chinese had made many, many inventions long before the West - printing, gunpowder, paper, porcelain, even spinning machines - and yet China did not have an industrial revolution. Europe did. Why was it, asked Landes, that China so advanced in these many technical ways and never had an industrial revolution. And one of his answers - it is only one of them - is that the West had what China did not have, namely a concept of linear time.

His argument, in other words, is that before you can have a revolution you have to be able to think revolution. Or you have to be able to think "revolution - good" instead of "revolution - disaster". And that, in other words, in order to be able to make progress you have to have a word that means progress. At any rate that is Landes, and certainly Thomas Cahill - who as I say isn't Jewish. He's very ecstatic in terms of his evaluation of the significance of linear time, and here are his words - I think they end the book.

"The Jews gave us the outside and the inside, our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. (We ought to make him Jewish, don't you think?!) We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words are the gifts of the Jews."

Now, the question is: Why? What was it about Judaism that allowed Jews to come up with or to hear or to respond to this radically new concept of time according to which the future does not endlessly recapitulate the past? And the answer, I think, is simple. Here it is. Until Judaism, God had been seen in nature. With Judaism, for the first time, God is seen as above, or beyond, nature. If God is above nature, then God is not bound by nature. In other words, God is free. In other words, what is interesting about God and important about Him, is His choice, His will, His creativity. God chooses - asher bochar bonu micol ho'amim etc. etc. - God wills. Veyomer elokim yehi - God said, "Let there be". God creates. Bereishit barah. Those are the key things about Judaism and you cannot find them in the universe of myth because choice, creativity and will are aspects of a Being that is somehow above nature, not determined by natural laws.

It therefore follows that if human beings are betzelem elokim - they share the image and the nature of God - then we too, for the first time, were able to see ourselves as beings with the capacity to choose, to will and to create. And that remains the single most striking - and I think most controversial, even to this day - of Judaism's assertions. It is denied by Adam who, when God blames him for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge says, "Don't blame me! It's my wife. It's your fault. You introduced me to her!" Etc. etc. Cain, when God says to him, Lepetach chatat rovetz - sin is crouching at the door - ve'elecha teshukato - and it desires to have you - ve'ato timsho bo - but you can master it. When he says to Cain: You are free. And Cain rejects that as well.

And that proposition has been rejected by determinists of all kinds, ancient and modern, be they astrological, sociological, Marxist, Spinozist, Skinnerian, genetic, psychological, neuro-physiological, socio-biological or any other kind of determinist you care to mention. They are all alive and well and all of them - no, at least some of them actually were beautifully lampooned to music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim in that wonderful song from 'West Side Story', "Gee, Officer Krupke". You know that song? - 'It wasn't my fault.' 'You're suffering from a social disease.' - You know the kind of thing!

Anyway, every attempt to reduce human behaviour to science or to pseudo-science is a failure to understand the nature of human freedom, of human agency, of human responsibility. A failure to understand that what makes us human is that we have will, we have choice, we have creativity. Every single attempt - socio-biological, genetic etc., and they are published by the hundred every single year - represents the failure to distinguish between a cause and an intention. Between phenomena whose causes lie in the past: those are scientific phenomena - and human behaviour, which is oriented towards the future. A future which only exists because I can imagine it and because I can imagine it I can choose to bring it about. That is in principle not subject to scientific causal analysis. And that is the root of human freedom. Because human beings are free - therefore we are not condemned to eternal recurrence. We can act differently today from the way we did yesterday - in small ways individually, in very big ways collectively. Because we can change ourselves, we can change the world.

And in that capacity, to change the world, cyclical time is transcended by linear time which says that because I can change, the world can change, and therefore I can move from where I am now to where I would like to be ultimately. That is where linear time is born. That is where hope is born and that is the incredible concept, the Jewish drama of redemption.

Jewel's Gem

2010-06-30T23:15:00.001-07:00

Below is an introduction to some elegant and intelligent writing by our friend Jewel, writing about the difference between a half-naked creep celebrating his nihilistic personal urge to destroy, and the making of a high-precision, high-intelligence piece of work in the form of a musical instrument. This is one of the nicest pieces of short prose I've read in a long time. The link at the bottom will take you to the original.

Is the young anarchist in the photograph proud of himself? Is he? He is all but naked, he is holding in his teeth a pair of very expensive sunglasses, and though frozen for a moment forever, you can make out the swagger of a man who believes he has accomplished something very important with his wanton act of vandalism. He has made a statement, of course.

Death to the police! The law be damned.

But I am not interested in him...he's a piece of wondrous crapmanship, all right. No. It is the trumpet that has caught my eye.

The trumpet was made according to very strict guidelines. The combination of copper and nickel and other metals was exact, the precise width and bend of the pipes were carefully hammered out, and it was passed on to someone else who buffed and cleaned and polished and buffed again and again and again.

http://tastyinfidelicacies.blogspot.com/2010/06/if-trumpet-could-speak.html

Love for sale

2010-06-30T18:27:00.002-07:00

50 percent off!

Search for Gnosis, at the local library

2010-06-27T15:16:00.003-07:00

So I'm at the local library trying to get some work done and I'm distracted because I'm sitting next to the "Teen" paperback racks and I can't help but wonder at what the book marketplace is producing... Can the culture that can imagine anything, imagine something?

France: Chinese Clash With "French Youth" And Police In Belleville

2010-06-24T07:55:00.008-07:00

Cries of "Stop The Violence" and "Security For All" rang through the streets of Belleville, on the outskirts of Paris France last Sunday, as over 8,000 fed up and frustrated Chinese residents, belonging to as many as 40 separate business and community organizations, marched in united protest against France's lax attitude towards its feral "french youth". The Chinese community of Belleville are tired of being preyed upon by their city's vandals and thugs, and a crowd that police estimated reached 8,500 people demanded committed and coordinated actions by authorities to bring security to their afflicted neighborhoods.

Violent crime is on the increase in the 20th arrondissement of Belleville, one of the two primarily Chinese communities in the Paris region. The ferocity of the spiraling crime wave, combined with the devaluation of the Euro and Europe's overall economic crisis, is leading the hardworking community to bankruptcy, says local business spokesman Wang Jiaqing, in a Chinese media site originating in France.

The People's Daily also reports that one individual crime proved one crime too many for the besieged Chinese community: the massive Sunday protest was the result of an attack on a Chinese wedding at the Hotel Belleville back on June 1st. A group of "youths" burst in to the hotel's restaurant, barred the doors and tried to rob those attending a marriage ceremony at the hotel. (An alternative account says that the assaults took place outside the building, on the street in front of the party) One of the guests was armed, and he shot and wounded one of the would-be robbers. When police arrived, they made one arrest: the armed guest.

While the French media is well-known for its contorted tapdancing and side-stepping around the demographics of its "french youth" generation of vandals, the protesters stared reality square in the face of French journalism's preferred shadows and fog. One example: Radio France International's interview of a young female Chinese protester on her motives for joining the march:

"There are too many people attacked by Arabs. They steal purses [off you] in the street, they break [shop] windows, we don't feel safe".

As if to underscore the whole point of the gathering, a purse snatching actually took place that day, over on the margins of the protest. The thief was seen, caught through the quick initiative of the marchers, who held him until the police came. Once he was handed over to the police, however, they promptly let the thief go!

"We're not violent, but that was too much", said a witness to the escape and the resulting battle that raged for the next two hours between the summoned riot squad and outraged Chinese protesters. As French paper Le Figaro's describes the reaction:

According to eyewitnesses, the incidents were provoked by the theft of a protester's purse. The first time the police came to intervene, they were pelted with projectiles, and they responded with tear gas. After they left, several small groups of protesters assaulted drivers and cyclists, as well as overturning cars in order to block traffic, which in turn caused a new police response.

A follow-up account in Le Parisien identifies five arrests at the protest, all Chinese; they are "suspected of having participated in Sunday's violence, during skirmishes that broke out during the protest, between protesters and a dozen youth not part of the protest."

It's in the verbal battleground of the French media's online comments sections that one looks to shed light on any story reporting on the crimes of "french youths". According to a commentor at the aforementioned RFI article:

"I interviewed several protesters, all the ladies said they had been victims of purse snatchings at least once.
As for the refusal of police to arrest the aggressors, this is what they told me: "they were hungry."
... Even when Paris police deign to arrest thieves, they are immediately let go giving them the chance to start all over again. And yet the law provides for 3 years in prison for this type of theft. France is a free country where its thieves have no troubles.
Of course, security is not uniquely a Chinese concern. But it is the Chinese that are the principal victims, because they always have cash on them, compared to the French who only carry bank cards. As well, the police only intervene in Belleville in order to check Chinese ID, never to arrest the thieves. ...

You can follow the repercussions of last Sunday's protest at a (French) Facebook page initially set up to chronicle the the protest itself: Belleville Security For All. It's a gateway to witness' photos and personal accounts of the story, each going into far more detail than any media report ever could, given the shroud of political correctness blanketing France's state-licensed journalism.

[Hastily translated by myself, from the linked French sources; corrections or clarifications welcomed in the comments section.]

The last time we visited Belleville was in a December 2007 post, French Youths Attack Police On Christmas Eve.

[Hat tip to Tiberge's detailed report at GalliaWatch]

Terror Works, until you laugh in its hysterical face

2010-06-18T14:18:00.001-07:00

More good stuff from LatmaTV, creators of "We Con the World":

Putting Choices In Perspective

2010-06-17T07:45:00.010-07:00

"You have nobody to blame but yourself". In this day and age, is that advice still considered wise counsel?

A small confession. I possess a bad habit that I particularly regret, yet it's a bad habit that I've never been able to shake: I tend to talk over people after I've asked them a question, stepping on their answer instead of being patient and polite enough to wait my turn to listen and learn.

It's a natural problem I have. As frustrating as it is to admit, it seems to be in my nature to behave this way.

An admission that leads to this observation: just because something comes naturally, that does not make it welcome, that does ennoble it as "good". Shouldn't it be a sign of maturity, that we can grow to recognize how much the ability to do something is in itself not the justification for actually doing it..? Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should... even if it's something that comes naturally to us.

If we're truly committed to survival through self-improvement, shouldn't we search for when and where it makes sense to place ourselves at odds with our own nature? Could we not say, that the most worthwhile self-improvement can most readily come to us when we are at war with nature?

What is the true result of our natural behavior; for any individual aspiring to a more righteous life, this would be one of the hardest answers to perceive, requiring as it does a full measure of honesty, humility, and patience... qualities that tend to come rather unnaturally to the human species.

Looking back over a mis-spent life, I can see now, with painful clarity, how so many of my natural habits have hurt me. Was this an insight that needed so much time to come into focus?

The honest answer is no. But for too many years, I was at war with reality instead of being at war with nature. The real reason for my finding myself in my present situation can be found... in my mirror: in the accumulation of habits I've nurtured, and in the ones I've denied myself.

Can this be one of the dividing lines between the conflicting worldviews imperfectly labeled "left" and "right"? Does being "on the right" mean that I am now at war with nature, as when I used to be "on the left" meant that I was at war with reality?

When someone allows themselves the false belief that bad habits should produce good results, what happens when reality contradicts them? They either look inward, towards the history of their behavior, to perceive which of their chosen reactions, which of their natural habits, deserves the blame. Through this insight we can come to see the need for a second nature, a renewal of ourselves through the adoption of more fruitful behavior.

Or: they may deflect their gaze outward, where the only conclusion remaining in sight is to look to fix the blame upon the habits and behaviors of others. They are then looking for a scapegoat, an excuse that will enable them to engage in a false conflict, rather than the necessary one to be waged against their own inner nature.

So much for honesty. So much for humility. So much for reality.

As we review our reactions to the circumstances that life has dealt us, as we trace a line to connect the results that have arisen from our choices, which direction does the search lead us, where do we find ourselves looking: to a destination within, or without?

When we find ourselves soaking wet, can it really be someone else's fault that we chose to take a long walk off a short pier..?

First they come for the Pamela Gellers

2010-06-12T15:20:00.003-07:00

Then they come for you (and Israeli comedians). Pamela stands up for the kind of people - Rifqa Bary - whom the speech censors going after Pamela would see quietly die as victims to their code of silence on Islam.

Paypal Cuts Off Atlas: Truth is the New Hate Speech - Atlas Shrugs

Support Atlas, tell Paypal (founded by Peter Thiel, a student of Rene Girard, who should know better) that writing cheques or supporting competitors isn't that hard after all... (HT Blazing Cat Fur)

Liveleak still has "We Con the World"

There is no Israel-Palestinian problem

2010-06-11T16:35:00.003-07:00

American Thinker: Eternal Islamic Enmity toward the Jews

In their latest book, Al-Yahud: Eternal Islamic Enmity & the Jews, authors Elias Al-Maqdisi, an expert on Islamic teachings, and Sam Solomon, a former professor of shari'ah law and Christian convert, examine the historical and doctrinal sources of Muslim enmity and the continuing jihad against the Jews and Israel. The work follows their previous book, Modern Day Trojan Horse: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration, in which they explain how the hijra (migration) and jihad function today to further worldwide Islamic conquest.

Their important new book exposes the story behind the Palestinian "crisis," giving readers new insights into the perceptions and actions of the Arab-Muslim world vis-à-vis Israel, popularly maligned as the "Zionist entity." Al-Maqdisi and Solomon, both raised as Muslims, reveal the truth about the doctrinal foundation of a conflict engineered for Muslim dominance.

The authors detail how, five times daily, observant Muslims worldwide condemn all non-believers in ritual prayers, singling out Jews and Christians. Muslim students readily identify Jews and Christians respectively as "those against whom there is wrath" and "those who are astray," phrases found in the Koran's opening Sura (chapter). This veiled cursing of non-believers has occurred for 1,400 years, even amidst duplicitous attempts to appear conciliatory and engage in interfaith dialogue.

[Truepeers: if I may make a suggestion, have a look at the interpretation of this video by Australian scholar, Mark Durie - here and here.]

Muslim enmity toward Jews is a special, more extreme case than that against other non-believers, Al-Maqdisi and Solomon argue. The dispute with Israel has a religious and moral basis rather than a territorial one. So its presentation as a solvable political crisis over land claims is little more than a smokescreen for an intrinsic, unending jihad against the Jews. The authors draw parallels between Muslim displacement of Arab Jews from Iran, Egypt, the Sudan, Morocco, and Syria in the last century and similar threats facing Jewish (and Christian) populations today in Europe and the Middle East.

In Al-Yahud, the authors reveal how Israel is systematically discredited by the alleged Israeli victimization of Muslim-Palestinians. The so-called Arab-Israeli conflict provides a flash point and platform to advance Islam under cover of a struggle for statehood and "restoration" of "stolen" land. These issues are cloaked in the vernacular of a desperate human rights tragedy; yet, the authors observe, all aid to Arab-Palestinians comes from the non-Muslim world. Fellow Muslims fail to lift a finger to aid their "victimized" brethren. They sabotage efforts to alleviate Palestinian suffering by refusing to accept Palestinians as citizens elsewhere in the Arab world.

While Israelis are denounced as "occupiers" and history is rewritten to deny more than four thousand years of Jewish presence in the land, the reality of terrorist and rocket attacks by Hezb'allah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Iran are largely ignored. The conflict is presented to the West in terms of Israel's recent actions -- the 1948 "occupation," 1967 "expansion," West Bank wall, and "settlement expansion." Recognition of relentless, decades-long Arab attacks on Israel, Jewish rights to the land, and legitimate national security measures of a sovereign state are all ignored or denied. Academia and the media willingly participate in the deconstruction of Israel and the legitimization of "Palestine." So the issue appears to outsiders to be over land, when in reality, the present-day enmity toward Israel is based on the Koran's 7th-century doctrines against the Jews. Modern-day Muslims are seeking to enforce this mandate of the Koran, according to Al-Maqdisi and Solomon.
[...]
In Al-Yahud, Maqdisi and Solomon refer to another doctrine, the Fitrah Doctrine, which Muslims also use to establish present-day land claims. The Fitrah Doctrine proclaims that all mankind from eternity is Muslim. The proclamation is irrevocable and mandatory and labels anyone who is not in observance of it as having gone astray. Jews in particular are viewed as perverted, and they are purported to be followers of the path of Satan for their refusal to recognize the Prophet Mohammed even though being forewarned in the Jewish scriptures.

These proclamations and doctrines help bolster Islamic attitudes in which any perceived criticisms of Islam or the very existence of non-Muslims within a Muslim society is viewed as an attack against Islam. Non-Muslims, simply by their religious choices, are resisting Allah. Thus, kuffars are considered to be in rebellion and must be "returned" to their Muslim faith by "reversion" or by force (jihad). Jihad is always viewed by practicing Muslims as a defensive move against unbelievers for rejecting Islam. Thus, by their deaths, Islamic martyrs receive exalted status, celebrations, and rewards, having gained favor with Allah.

Lamentably but realistically, the authors conclude that there is no Arab-Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but instead, a Muslim-Jewish conflict that dates from the time of Mohammed. They demonstrate through well-researched and extensive citations of passages from Islamic doctrine how the policies of enmity and supremacy have their origin in the Koran and Sunnah, and not in the present-day situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories. They clearly illustrate that throughout Islamic history, treaties with infidels have been employed as temporary deceptive measures to be broken at an advantageous time, in accordance with Allah's instructions and commandments. Al-Maqdisi and Solomon discouragingly surmise that any Israeli attempts to forge land or peace treaties with Muslims are destined for failure, as has been repeatedly illustrated since Israeli statehood.

UPDATE: Vlad Tepes interview of Sam Solomon:

Congratulations Geert Wilders

2010-06-10T16:22:00.001-07:00

The consensus in the reports I am reading is that Geert Wilders and the Freedom Party, while coming in third in the Dutch elections, must still be considered the big winners as they have almost tripled their representation in Parliament. It seems that the Dutch will either have a dubious alliance of (somewhat) free market/fiscally conservative and socialist parties aimed at keeping Wilders' party out of government, thus no doubt only highlighting the issues for which Gilders is persona non grata in the salons of the moribund EU elite, or he will be brought into government and Dutch politicians will attempt to hash out the kind of compromises that may become viable in future in a poorer, more EUrosceptic, Europe, or the Dutch will soon be returning to the voting booths.

Dutch electorate votes right-wing and populist | Radio Netherlands Worldwide

The conservative VVD has won its first parliamentary election ever, but Geert Wilders and his populist Freedom Party (PVV) are seen as the real winners of these elections. The Islam-bashing party nearly trebled its seats. What do the Dutch see in the populist Geert Wilders?

'Fellow party members, bring along a battering ram, because tomorrow we are going to break down the doors”. With this admonition Geert Wilders marked his party’s election victory. The one-and-a-half million voters who cast their ballots for the man and his relentless crusade against ‘mass immigration’ and the ‘Islamisation of the Netherlands also celebrated his victory. The Freedom Party has nearly trebled in size compared to the 2006 elections, and is now the third largest after the conservative VVD and the social democratic PvdA.

Jeering
When PvdA leader Job Cohen at a party meeting in Amsterdam congratulated Geert Wilders and his PVV on their major election victory, his remark was greeted with loud jeering. However, the former Amsterdam mayor rebuked his supporters, saying: ”I don’t want to hear any jeering, the PVV has won a major victory and we should respect that”. All established parties have since congratulated Wilders, and much of the criticism has died down now that one in six Dutch voters cast their ballots for the populist party.

The much-vaunted Dutch ‘polder model’, i.e. the system of ensuring economic prosperity and political stability by seeking broad political consensus on major issues, is unlikely to provide an answer to the current situation. The major parties are deeply divided on how to fight the economic crisis and how to address the thorny issues of immigration and Islam. And the election has failed to provide a clear winner with a strong mandate to form a coalition.

Come on World, do you really want to belong to a death cult?

2010-06-10T13:10:00.003-07:00

Lebanese Threaten Mass March on Israeli Border - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

The anti-Israel flotilla has turned the tide of world opinion against Israel, Fatah leaders in Lebanon say, and the time is ripe for a mass civilian charge against Israel’s border.

Mounir Al-Makdah, a leading Fatah leader in Lebanon, says plans are being made for a mass charge against Israel’s northern border. “What can Israel do,” he asks, “kill the entire Palestinian nation [sic]?”

“And even if they kill all those who take part in the march, the number of remaining Palestinians will still be more than all the Jews in the world.”

That's some fancy number crunching, but what the heh, this guy is clearly another sane and responsible "Palestinian" leader.

Many Die as Anti-Jews Shape World's Media

2010-06-10T10:53:00.003-07:00

Poor Palestinians taunted with empty "aid ships" full only of gawking-at-suffering tourists and Shahid Youngsters of Anti-Zion.

Gobsmacked Gazans teased with expired and near-expired medicines and crushed cargo.

It's Official: There was No Humanitarian Aid on Mavi Marmara - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

In other news:

The president of the United States has just announced that his country must give in to the defiance of a dictatorship with about 1.2 million people. The chief executive of the greatest power in the world (even if he doesn't think that's true) is changing his policy because a few dozen radical Islamists picked up iron bars, hit Israeli soldiers, and forced a confrontation. How do you think that lesson will be absorbed by others in the world, especiallyAmerica's enemies, and what do you think that will motivate them to do?

And so now President Obama is going to subsidize and stabilize a genocidal-intentioned, antisemitic, terrorist regime allied to Iran for no material gain to U.S. interests.

Sign the petition to classify IHH (the Gaza flotilla attactivists) as a terrorist entity under Canadian law

2010-06-08T16:54:00.007-07:00

Sign here

Because standing up for the truth and against the most corrosive forces of the present global order is a good thing.

And because, notwithstanding the humanitarian work the IHH does, its Turkish members and supporters are Islamists who take an obvious pleasure in drawing Infidel blood and don't deny that they instigated the Gaza flotilla fight. The close ties of IHH to the present Turkish government that is turning that country away from modernity and liberal democracy, and deepening its alliance with the most tyrannical and regressive forces (Iran) in its quest for leadership of the Islamic Umma, in hopes of building another Turkish/Islamic empire, is all the more reason to sign.

(And even because it pisses off all the right people.)

B'nai Brith has proposed... the petition against the Turkish Islamist group that sent armed "martyrs" to attack Israel and die to serve the cause of a death cult and the blood libel of the Jews who, they allege, have no right to defend themselves.

Background on IHH here:

Though my DIIS paper made no mention of IHH's activities in Gaza or in support of suffering Palestinian refugees, some of those angered by the Israeli flotilla raid have instead turned their emotional animus on past critics of IHH, such as myself. While I certainly can't speak with any authority on what took place on the Gaza flotilla boats, I'm rather mystified why the flotilla killings--whether right or wrong--would have any bearing on the factual question of whether the IHH has engaged in illicit financing and episodic support to extremist groups. The evidence in this regard is fairly weighty, and much of it comes directly from the Turkish government -- not the United States, nor the Israelis.

and here:

In practice, besides its legitimate humanitarian activities, IHH supports radical Islamic terrorist networks. In recent years it has prominently supported Hamas (through the Union of Good). In addition, the ITIC has reliable information that in the past IHH provided logistical support and funding to global jihad networks.

Motivation:

Anyone want to infiltrate the next Vancouver hate rally with me?

2010-06-07T16:45:00.001-07:00

How To Deal With Moonbat Protests : Israellycool

Free them or kill them: in the end will there be any other choice?

2010-06-06T13:24:00.003-07:00

I got a laugh out of the scene in the film Downfall where Hitler, facing death in his Berlin bunker, decides to marry Eva Braun. They bring in a marriage commissioner who is on his bureaucratic best behaviour. At the appropriate point in the "ceremony", he asks for Hitler's certification of pure Aryan ancestry. Hitler doesn't have it. Goebbels breaks the pregnant pause... "But he's the Fuhrer!!?". The commissioner proceeds.

When antisemitism take over a people's minds, it drives them crazy and self-destructive; no matter how many you kill, there is always the need for another "Jew" or Zionist or Yankee blood sucker to confirm the rightness of the regime and one's personal identity; it becomes a mad quest: one cannot face up to and deal with one's resentment of the way the world is - with all its necessary differences - letting go of much of the uncreative resentment in good faith; one can only dive deeper into it. Hell, if Hitler had survived to lead some rump of hold-out Nazis in the Alps, Argentina, or somewhere, his followers may eventually have turned on him, discovering that he had deceived them because, they would conclude, he must have been at least part Jewish. Such is often the fate of those who step out of the mob and into history, by making some significant difference, good or bad.

I wonder if in the last of days, the Muslims will witness a similar marriage scene.

Cairo to Strip Citizenship from Men Who Marry Israelis - Defense/Middle East - Israel News - Israel National News

Cairo's High Court of Justice has upheld a lower court ruling that ordered the Interior Ministry to ensure that Egyptian men lose their rights if they marry Israeli wives.

Administrative Supreme Court Justice Mohammed al-Husseini handed down a decision Saturday that Egypt's Interior Ministry must ask the country's Cabinet to take what steps it must to strip citizenship from men married to Israeli women -- and from their children.

At present, Egyptians marrying Israelis are allowed to retain their Egyptian citizenship, and their children are automatically considered Egyptian citizens as well. The practice parallels that of the Muslim faith, in which custody of the children, and the religious faith, follows that of the father.
[...]
Al-Wahsh explained to the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite news network that he wanted to prevent the creation of a generation who are “disloyal to Egypt and the Arab world.” The children of such marriages “should not be allowed to perform their military service,” he commented.

Al Jazeera reporter in Cairo, Rawya Rageh, commented that the case has “highlighted the divide between the official Egyptian stance on peace with Israel versus the real sentiment on the street of the Arab world's most populous nation.”
[...]
“It's not clear whether the Egyptian government will indeed enforce the verdict,” commented Rageh. “but for now, the verdict has quenched the thirst of many in an increasingly angry population seeking action against Israel.”

Ahh, but just as an Arab in the desert can never stop dreaming of water, and enemies, the only thing that will really cure Jew hatred is a conversion to the truth, the truth that the world, that any kind of possible social order, will always provoke some amount of resentment; and so if we want to progress as a culture or civilization, we will have to deal with this resentment without madhouse conspiracy theories that target those who are in some way different, or creative, unless we want forever to live in a madhouse of conspiracy and human sacrifice, which is where today's left-Islamic alliance now lives, as any cool reading of the movement to deny Israel's right and responsibility to defend itself from those who would destroy it now makes clear.

The resurrection and prominence given to the anti-Jewish blood libel by the recent MSM "reporting" of the Gaza attactivist flotilla is a very scary sign of things to come. The mob in the Arab and "Western" worlds will not be sated for long by one or another anti-Israel measure. They will still return to the desire to kill the Jew, i.e. to kill free societies with rational justice and economic systems; and if they ever get their way they will just have to find more "Jews" to kill, unless and until they can be converted to the truth, to good faith full of doubt and real thinking and not ritualistic certainties.

Humanity in future is going to have to revisit, I fear many times, the "neocon" or Lincolnian proposition that we cannot live with any kind of security in a global village that is half free and half slave. If the mad mobs of the Arab world are allowed to fester in self-righteous scapegoating, they will forever be in need of another victim to sacrifice to guarantee their unity, to forget, if only for a moment, all their internal tensions and resentments. We can feed them Israel, but it will not, cannot, stop there. They will forever project their internal resentments onto external enemies. And what will the rest of us have to do about it? Can we bottle them up, with real walls, without seeing many of them die (in populations that have grown through access to Western technology, trade, migration, to numbers that "Sharia economics" or isolated big man tyrannies can never support), thus provoking further our "white guilt"? And can we continue to let them into our Western world without also seeing many people killed through the growing irrationalism of the Islamist-left alliance, one that can never produce enough victims of "the Jews"/America to flaunt and to justify revenge against white guilt?

If we value life, we must face up to this historical challenge sooner rather than later.

Binks is back in the saddle with a great slew of links

2010-06-04T15:05:00.001-07:00

Steynite 412nd « Free Canuckistan!

Of course his pro-freedom topics are numerous and diverse. I was, in present mood, natually drawn to his writing on the Gaza Attacktivists in service to Turkish Hubrislam (HT to our punster, David).

~ ITEM: Ayers, Dohrn top activists in Gaza flotilla group; and Connecting Some Communist Dots: The Free Gaza Movement Flotilla, Illegal Migrant Workers, May 1st Coalition and Organizing for America

~ ITEMS: Batchelor: Terror Soup; plus Commander of Gaza flotilla announced participants wanted to become ‘martyrs’. Also declared activists planned ‘resistance’ against Israeli commandoes; Gaza Flotilla activists chanted anti-Jewish battle cries. Prepared ‘resistance’ against Israeli commandoes, spoke of welcoming ‘martyrdom’; plus Flotilla activists ‘tried to lynch Israeli soldiers’. ‘They were fully prepared to provoke this deadly confrontation’

~ ITEM: More Mavi Marmara video released by the IDF

~ ITEM: Muslim Brotherhood Heavily Represented In Gaza Flotilla; B’Nai Brith says: Kangaroo courts rush to condemn Jewish State

~ ITEM: “Pictures of Weapons Found on the Mavi Marmara Flotilla Ship, 31 May 2010″

~ OUR BS-DETECTORS are off-kilter when it comes to stuff we like, people we hate, and “news”. Nonetheless, this elf smells boatloads of BS in the coverage of the Gaza Fauxtilla.

When it comes to the Paleostinian talent for staging news-events– add Hizbie/ Hamas, some Turkish Jihad, a dash of American Bolshies (including Obama-buddies Ayers & Dohrn), and you got a grade-A world-class “official memory” established via the usual Israel-hating world establishment. They’ve done it over and over again, ever since the Paleos and their Jihadi buddies realized the craven evil that resides in most of our media-outlets.

Facts? Truth? The Eternal Jew! (Der ewige Jude). Jewsdidit! Even when everybody else made it up. Hence this 2010 Bolshie-Jihadi Pirate Adventure.

This is a media-stunt, done by evil people, to cripple Israel. Media. Stunt.

The clueless man-child Obama is aiding and abetting the Jew-bashing, and what we are seeing is his own radical activists cuddling with Paleos, Hamas, Hizbullah, and the Turks in the logical extension of the seething of both groups against Israel & America. Israel will be destroyed first, and then America. It’s all about the utopia/ Caliphate thing.

Get it? ~

I also found this video highly related to the madness of the Atacktivists:

We are the bloodthirsty

2010-06-04T10:11:00.001-07:00

(HT: Augean Stables)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recognizes that an honest conversation is one that tries to convert the Other

2010-06-04T01:33:00.002-07:00

On why Christians should try to convert Muslims - Books, The Interview - Macleans.ca

Q: One of your more startling arguments in Nomad is that Christian churches should proselytize in immigrant communities to try to convert Muslims.
A: Look at the amount of money Saudi Arabia spends on coming into Muslim communities in America and Europe, building schools and also taking leaders and training them in Mecca and Medina, then replanting them. It’s surprising that no other group of people is targeting the same communities. If you look at Western civilization, at the institutions [and movements] that were engaged in changing people’s hearts and minds—the Christian Church, humanists, feminists—they are doing next to nothing in these Muslim communities. When I was in Holland [recently], I heard about a Christian mission that had been proselytizing in Morocco. The government kicked them out and sent them back to Holland. I thought, “You don’t have to stop proselytizing—just go to the Muslim community in Amsterdam west and carry on there.” But of course there, they’re not only going to face the radical Muslims as opponents, they’re also going to face the multicultural opponents, saying they’re not supposed to be telling people to leave their religion.

Q: So how would they do it?
A: Next to every mosque, build a Christian centre, an enlightenment centre, a feminist centre. There are tons of websites, financed with Saudi money, promoting Wahabism. We need to set up our own websites—Christian, feminist, humanist—trying to target the same people, saying, we have an alternative moral framework to Islam. We have better ideas.

Q: But you also argue that children are indoctrinated very early in Islam. How would you even get them to listen to such a message?
A: They only get indoctrinated if they go to Muslim schools. I would, if I had the power, abolish Muslim schools. Children born to Muslim parents in North America or anywhere else in the West would get Islamic teachings at home, which is fine. But when they go to school, they would get the regular education that’s going to enable them to be absorbed into our society and become law-abiding, well-established citizens.

Q: In a multicultural and democratic society, how could we ban Muslim schools?
A: It depends how we weigh this problem of jihadism and terrorism. If we think it’s a chronic disease we have to live with, and I think that is actually the dominant opinion, people will take more trouble to look at what is going on in these schools and abolish them. If we think of these children as kids who, when they finish school, will be hostile to our society, then I can compile a whole host of arguments why they can and should be abolished.

Q: Let me ask a question you once posed. You said, “Western civilization is a celebration of life—everybody’s life, even your enemy’s life. So how can you be true to that morality and at the same time defend yourself against a very powerful enemy that seeks to destroy you?”
A: That is the big question for the open society today. We want to be distinct from closed societies, have less authoritarianism, allow people to make their own choices. And what we’re seeing now is that as far as that applies to an Islamic subset of society, there are other factors at work that are frightening. To have a whole generation of people just indoctrinated with this jidhadist mentality and for us to do nothing about it, and then every time there’s a terrorist attack, we panic—it’s not viable.

Blood libel as standard MSM narrative

2010-06-01T00:38:00.007-07:00

This evening I decided to bite the bullet and see how the CBC - supported by Canada's taxpayers with a billion dollars annually - is reporting on the Gaza flotilla story. I knew it would be anti-Israel, but I was not expecting such utter and complete hatred of the Jew/Israel, depicted in officious tones as a fundamentally violent blood-sucker. The radio report began by saying that, unprovoked, Israel attacked with deadly force (who could believe such incredible fantasy, as if Israel just goes about randomly murdering people; and yet it was stated with absolute certainty and "authority"?). We were also told that Israel faces massive international critcism, with no mention of what Israel's friends are saying. We were told that this violence is troubling to friends and foes alike because it is not just a one-off but a pattern of repeated use of disproportionate force. And that was it. They picked up the report of a smarmy BBC p.o.s., Jeremy Bowen, and not a word from the pro-Israel side. Not a mention that this - the one ship that violently resisted the Israeli boarding party - was clearly a Turkish state provocation in the battle to lead the Umma by taking up the cause of Hamas. No mention that maybe some of the dead were killed by their own side in a hurry to have "martyrs" to flaunt before a credulous world.

It was a viscerally shocking experience that left me with a feeling no amount of intellectual study and understanding leaves, an experience of what it must have been like to be a Jew living under the most oppressively Jew-hating of modern states.

When opinion leaders in a country like Canada can fall so deeply into a bizarre narrative of unprovoked violence from evil Jews, we are all in serious trouble, whether we like Jews or not. Nothing good can come from such hatred but only the further erosion of a once free society.

But we must remember that no historical trend lasts forever (even if some evils, like Judeophobia, have always existed as long as there have been Jews). We must remain hopeful that narratives with some grasp on reality will one day gain ascendance and the horrible anachronism that is the CBC and the BBC will be put to their fitting ends by indignant tax payers. To this end, let us keep trying to promote writers and narratives that are not completely delusional. And let us even demand more and better from the state of Israel when it comes to defending itself. Israel should be on the offensive, making demands of Turkey for supporting (and apparently there are another two ships on the way) this attempt to crash a blockade of an armed enemy committed to the elimination of Israel (an act which should be seen as tantamount to war) and to get people killed in the attempt, as was surely desired.

To this end, I recommend another great piece from Barry Rubin.

See also Melanie Phillips.

Covenant Zone

Netanyahu at the UN

For "na"

Jew sues Israel haters: are the Canadian courts capable of enforcing just reciprocity?

Ezra Levant interviews the always-fascinating Sam Solomon, ex-imam, and now a Christian and advisor on Islam to Western politicians

The Rapture

If the new Parliament is to get a clean start...

First thoughts on news of the Lorna Pardy- Guy Earle- Zesty's decision from the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal

Real diversity stems from the unity of human truth, faithfully pursued

Praying For Japan

"War Is War"

One Thing Jimmy Carter Got Right

Iranium

Dutch White Guilt has another run-around with Geert Wilders

The Least Of Egypt's Problems: Virtual Looting

Lars Hedegaard acquitted, without winning the right to speak freely in public about Muslim violence

Barry Rubin on the Palestine Papers Fraud and Blood Libel

The self-mutilation of Europe continues, now even Denmark lives in shame...

Flying The Silver Lining

Being Kind Without A License In Houston

Love Israel, win an iPad

Praying For The Victims Of The Arizona Massacre

E-Topia

Republican Dumbth

Last Time For The First Team

France's Secret Weapon For Preventing Car Burnings: Secrecy

Holy Night

Peace

Snow!

Voting For Life Or Death In Minnesota

Remembering A Happy Warrior

Lest We Forget

Remembrance Day, 2010

Blazing Cat Fur needs your help!

Geert Wilders' speech in Berlin - The kind of talk Europe's totalitarian elites want to ban

Show Trials 2010 - Geert Wilders quietly watches poor imitation of Maoists

Dennis Prager Interviews Ezra Levant

The bad joke that is "justice" in the Netherlands

Weeding The Human Plant From The Garden Of Eden

More evidence there has never yet been a serious "Palestinian peace partner"

The guilty white Left: Making Excuses for those who would rape and enslave infidel activist women

A light unto the nations

Monday Numbers

Obama The Sphinx

"No one Innocent" - Roberto Luongo

More evidence of relationship between Canadian state and Jewish covenant

Jumping Jehosaphat - Sockeyes as far as the eye can see

More evidence for Hitler being part Jewish

The limits of Darwinian evolution

Back From Ottawa

Los perdidos, los olividados, y los muertos

French Minister: "We Won't Tell You How Many Cars Get Burned Tonight"

Time for a moderate immigration policy?

Waiting for Achilles Godot

Colour my world

Happy Independence Day

Dominion Day & Canada Day

Jewel's Gem

Love for sale

Search for Gnosis, at the local library

France: Chinese Clash With "French Youth" And Police In Belleville

Terror Works, until you laugh in its hysterical face

Putting Choices In Perspective

First they come for the Pamela Gellers

There is no Israel-Palestinian problem

Congratulations Geert Wilders

Come on World, do you really want to belong to a death cult?

Many Die as Anti-Jews Shape World's Media

Sign the petition to classify IHH (the Gaza flotilla attactivists) as a terrorist entity under Canadian law

Anyone want to infiltrate the next Vancouver hate rally with me?

Free them or kill them: in the end will there be any other choice?

Binks is back in the saddle with a great slew of links

We are the bloodthirsty

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recognizes that an honest conversation is one that tries to convert the Other

Blood libel as standard MSM narrative

Recommended links on Israel vs. Hamas high seas event (staged for MSM/death cult)