The brutal reality that cannot be spoken, lest it undo the fanciful authority of our appeasing elites

Fitzgerald: The New York Times, and That Business At the Cathedral In Cordoba - Jihad Watch - Hugh Fitzgerald, quoted below, tells us what happened, at the end of his long but worthwhile account of what the New York Times will never talk about....

A deliberately-planned display of Muslim force took place in the cathedral of Cordoba on April 2, in the very middle of Holy Week, the holiest time of the year for Christians. Nearly 120 Muslims from Austria slowly filtered into the cathedral, so as not to attract the attention of guards and, using walkie-talkies, arranged to meet at a certain time, in one of the naves of the cathedral. There a number of them began, in the hush of the Christian services, to turn toward Mecca and prostrate themselves, and to loudly chant in unison. When asked by the security guards to please stop, they refused, and began to threaten the guards who, in turn, had to call for reinforcements from the Spanish police. When the Spanish police arrived, thus further disrupting the holy hush of ancient sacrifice, and the spiritual tranquility of the Christian worshippers, they found the Muslims unwilling to stop. At least one pulled out a knife, and at least two of the Spanish guards, one policeman and one from the cathedral detail, were wounded sufficiently to go to the hospital.

And here's Phyllis Chesler also telling what the MSM won't.

Muslim terrorists take over Cambridge University, what's next?

The terrorism in academe continues; you can no longer say anything that offends Muslims at UK universities, whether true or not, or else. The totalitarian agenda could not be clearer (original source with more details on Islamic terrorism).

As Gil Bailie notes a propos of the Geert Wilders trial (now postponed for several months, as the court perhaps waits to see if Wilders might not be assasinated first) and free speech:

As René Girard argues, the real struggle in our world is not between violence and peace; it is between violence and truth. All attempts to avoid the former by silencing the latter will end in catastrophe.

I'm trying to decide whether it's worth juxtaposing something I just came across, the reaction to some "Jewish"/Anarchist violence in Russia/Ukraine in 1879:

Grigorrii Goldenberg, the assassin of Governor-General Kropotkin, was not so fortunate. He was transporting back some of the dynamite from Odessa, having learned of its location during another chance meeting with Kibalchich, when he raised the attention of some railroad porters who reported him to the police. They were waiting for him at Elisavetgrad Station down the line. He tried to run but was surrounded. He pulled out his pistol, cocked it and threatened to shoot, but numerous men from a crowd of waiting passengers jumped him and disarmed him. The policemen actually had to rescue him from a beating at the hands of the crowd when someone labeled him a "terrorist." They confiscated from him his suitcase, finding in it a pood (36 pounds) of dynamite.

Now that's how you deal with terrorists. But when it comes to those who terrorize Jews, the world seems to have forgotten. Those who would try to appease the Islamic mob will reap the whirlwind.

It used to be illegal to mask your face in public in Vancouver

- because we had a right to live without unnecessary fear of the other. And maybe that bylaw, originally targeting the KKK, is still on the books, I'll have to check. Why is it so hard today for people obsessed with Western society's alleged victimization of various others not to understand that our others are engaging in potentially violent othering too? Anyway, this is just an introduction to George Jonas' latest in the National Post: Canada's medieval rights commissions

Canada's "human rights" commissars are ready. Having spent the last couple of years positioning themselves as our brave new multicultural world's vanguard against such reactionary traditions as free speech, they now feel it's time to extend their horizons. This year's target is the criminal justice system.

HRCs wish to be recognized as "experts." They're seeking intervener status before Justice Frank Marocco of Ontario's Superior Court, who is asked to determine whether a Muslim woman should remove her veil while testifying as a witness at a hearing in a sexual assault case.

Apparently the original presiding judge said yes, please, take it off. He didn't add, as I might have: "Remove it, dear lady, because you're now in Canada, and here it isn't our custom to try people on the evidence of masked witnesses."
[...]
Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Barbara Hall's troops are pawing the ground to be heard in the matter. Predictably, their view is that a believer's right to exercise her religious practices trumps the right of an accused to a fair trial. The way the law has evolved in Canada, they say, it's the courts' duty to accommodate outlandish customs. How could it be otherwise, when the vital right of a Muslim woman to be ritually veiled is balanced against a mere bagatelle, such as a man's rightoid to give full answer and defence to the criminal charges against him?

Ah, you're describing a Monty Python skit, someone might say. No, I'm not. I'm describing Canadian reality.

Here's an institution, ostensibly established to safeguard human rights, including, among others, a right Canada's Charter of Right and Freedoms calls fundamental, the right to a fair trial. Crossexamination-- "the engine of truth" as a legal cliche has it --is integral to a fair trial, and seeing a witness' face while testing his or her veracity is integral to cross-examination. Given this, what is there to say about "human rights" officials offering themselves as "experts" to testify that the right to a fair trial in 21st-century Canada takes second place to a medieval Muslim notion of feminine modesty?
[...]
Barbara Hall & Co. are masquerading as the defenders of human rights, the very rights and freedoms they're seeking to undermine.

Hall's commissars aren't demanding access to Judge Marocco's court as advocates for shariah. No, they're calling themselves experts on Canada's evolving law. They're not urging the courts to accommodate veiled Muslim witnesses, they're stating as their expert opinion that, as a matter of law, accommodating such witnesses is the duty of Canadian courts. In other words, they're trying to parlay their ideology of Advanced Matriarchal and Transsexual Multiculturalism into expertise on Canadian law. That's a fraudulent pitch, made under false pretenses -- at least, that's what I'd say if the judge asked me.

Kangaroos Chicken Out - Maclean's-Steyn Free, Free, at Last

Free until the next trial: evil law stands, Steyn and Maclean's let off, this time (full decision not yet available): SteynOnline - Home

The panel has concluded that the complaints are not justified because the complainants have not established that the Article is likely to expose them to hatred or contempt on the basis of their religion. Therefore, pursuant to s. 37(1) the complaints are dismissed.

Maclean's, Ted Rogers, please don't cave in to this

Ezra Levant thinks Mohammed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress is Canada's Al Sharpton, in other words some kind of racial/leftist ideological hustler who creates or blows up scandals, and then seeks to get the figure of blame to pay him off, literally and/or symbolically, to make the scandal go away. At Wednesday's CIC press conference Elmasry's p.r. sidekicks, the law students widely know in the blogosphere as "Elmo's kids" or "Elmasry's sockpuppets" sat quietly while some lawyer tried again to blackmail Maclean's, to use the term that Jay Currie advocates. By again demanding that Maclean's give up its property rights and publish an article by an author approved by the complainants, by demanding a "right of rebuttal" that has never existed in Canada, Elmasry and his homespun organization tried to regain the much vaunted victim position on the stage of Canada's leftist political culture.

In treating Maclean's as if it were a public good to be distributed by some big man or big momma, the Canadian Islamic Congress only revealed that they have yet to learn - or perhaps they know but don't appreciate - what it means to live in a free society with property rights. What is unsettling about this event is that Elmasry did not show up. The man whose name is on all three complaints against Maclean's filed with various provincial and federal "human rights" commissions did not make himself accountable to the assembled media. Rather, the law students who only signed on to the now dismissed Ontario Human Rights Commission complaint took the stage, their youthful faces bait for those tempted to see Maclean's and Mark Steyn as victimizers of struggling young Canadian Muslims, at a time when many people are criticizing the religion and ideology of Islam.

Why exactly did Elmasry leave his kids alone with some lawyer to face the wrath of some fierce opponents, a Kathy Schaidle, or Right Girl, for example? What exactly is the symbolism in play in this theatre, where various parties compete to appear most threatened: what is more terrorizing, asks Schaidle, Mark Steyn's essays or the attempt to shut them up? Her answer is clear.

Again, let me remind that it is Elmasry's name that appears on the complaints to the federal and British Columbia Human Rights tribunals, the complaints whose status was supposedly in question, and being opened for negotiation, at this press conference.

Now the common assumption in the blogosphere is that Elmasry didn't show because he and his people know it is bad p.r. to put before the Canadian media a guy famous for his proclamation that all adult Israelis are legitimate targets for Palestinian terrorists. But is this sufficient to explain the symbolism of his absence, whatever the "real" reason may have been?

I'd suggest that Elmasry would appear, to many a journalist, a tough old bugger, someone who should not feel readily threatened by the tussle of public debate in a free society. He conferences with Marxists and the Liberal Part of Canada; he's seen with secular academics and imams. He's been around and survived some knocks. But this press conference really needed to re-iterate the claim that Maclean's and Mark Steyn make Muslim Canadians feel threatened. It was a scene in a victimary theatre, and young people, in the full bloom of their sexual, if not intellectual, productivity have a much higher sacred charge - and thus make more powerful victim figures - than do old farts. That Elmasry was not on hand to behave as a responsible adult, making himself answerable to the outrage he has in good part sparked in Canada in respect to the "human rights" commissions and their desire to police what we once thought was our inalienable right to freedom of expression, is, I think, suggestive of a worldview antithetical to a free society.

The growing alliance worldwide between postmodern victimary politics and Islam entails a politics positively in need of victims, or martyrs, to make sense of itself and its claims against the established or normal order; it has such a need that it will willingly create its own victims (putatively of the Western or capitalist Other) to that end. We have thus elsewhere called this kind of politics a death cult

Perhaps I am going off on a wild tangent, but this got me thinking of the parent's duty, as implied by those Palestinian tv programs that encourage the young to die as martyrs for the Jihadi cause (see, e.g., here, here and here ). I mean when was the last time you heard of elderly suicide bombers? If the future of their people were their first concern, wouldn't it be more rational for the Palestinians to send older guys, about Elmasry's age, rather than their children and youth to blow themselves up? Well, that's to ask the question, and imply a rationality, from a world view quite different from that which motivates Islamist Palestinians and their supporters today.

I know I'm getting sidetracked: Elmasry's law students are young adults and playing a role as leftist and minority group political activists not unknown in the West...

...but just to let you know an interesting factoid: I googled "elderly suicide bombers" and discovered only three uses of that phrase on the internet. And two, or maybe all three of them, are satirical: see here and here.

The saddest news from the CIC's press conference was the revelation that the NDP is falling yet more in line with Elmasry's variety of antisemitic and victimary politics: a letter of support from Jack Layton to the CIC was part of the press package.