Friday, November 11, 2011
What's the real danger of Islamophobia? Think of it as a license to kill.
the most pernicious thing about the Islamophobia myth is that once it is used to legitimize Muslim grievances, it is then used to legitimize the violent Muslim response to those grievances. Once you accept that Islamophobia is a serious problem, you have taken the first step to justifying violence as a response to that problem.
That is how it began in Israel, once the narrative of Muslim suffering under the “occupation” was accepted; Muslim terrorism became legitimized as a resistance to the occupation. Once you accept that Muslims in France have been marginalized by an Islamophobic society, then criticizing their religion marginalizes them further and justifies their violent response.
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That’s the Orwellian Doublespeak of Islamophobia: we are to be afraid of being afraid and if we are afraid enough, then perhaps we won’t need to be afraid anymore. The left’s twisted politics endorse militant terror and then warn us not to be terrorized by them. Only the guilty condemn the violence, the innocent cheer it on or pretend that it isn’t there. From the French Revolution to the USSR’s Great Terror to the Black Panthers to Islam, nothing has changed.
See the rest in my Front Page Magazine article: Islamophobia: A License to Kill and back over in Libya that wonderful war we had to fight in order to set the Islamists free to run the place.
In this week’s issue of The Australian, Sheikh Hamza Abu Fas, Libya’s new Minister for Religious Affairs, gave Westerners a taste of the “free and democratic” that NATO had been fighting for.
The law that allowed a first wife to veto marriage to a second wife will be overturned. “The woman is not equal to the man in the body,” explained Sheikh Hamza. Thieves will have their hands chopped off: “If this happens it will only happen once because other people will not want it to happen again and will not commit theft,” said the good Sheikh.
Islamic banking will be the only kind of banking in Libya. “In the future, we hope all banks will be Islamic,” Sheikh Hamza said. “The Islamic bank is best for all people. All Europeans and Australian people will realize the best solution for banks is Islamic banks.”
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How extreme a figure is Sheikh Hamza? In Feb 2010, he participated in a symposium on “Revisionist Studies of the Concepts of Jihad, Verification, and Judgment of People” held under the auspices of Sheikh Salman bin Fahd al-Awda, secretary of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, Qaradawi’s organization, and a member of the European Council for Fatwa, another Qaradawi group.
Sheikh Hamza has participated in sessions of the European Council for Fatwa and in Muslim World League events. The Muslim World League is another Muslim Brotherhood group for the promotion of Sharia and is funded by Saudi Arabia.
So the good news is that Libya is now free. Free to kill Africans, oppress women and eagerly await the latest interpretation of Islamic law. See this and more in my FPM Article, "Meet Libya’s New Islamist Boss."
THE ELECTION FOLLIES
I doubt the Democrats could have imagined that the primaries would sink to this level of absurdity. And there's no escaping the inevitable trajectory.
Bachmann was supposed to be the anti-Romney, then the task fell to Perry and Cain, and both of them are in trouble. Gingrich is waiting in the wings and while I think he could be a very effective president, I'm not altogether convinced that he could win an election.
Cain's problem is very basic. While this is a political hit job, no doubt about it, the only way to shake it loose is to conclusively prove that at least one of his accusers is lying. And in a He-Said, She-Said situation that's going to be hard to do. Next to impossible. And multiple accusers and preexisting cases raise the possibility that where there's smoke, there's fire.
I like Cain, I would very much like to see him take on Obama in a debate, but this isn't just going to go away. Cain has demonstrated that he has a certain measure of that teflon that I discussed in last week's roundup, at least among Republican voters, but I'm not that confident the same bulletproof thing will work for him with the general body of voters.
This is still a developing story so we'll see where it heads and where it ends up.
Perry has his own problems that he keeps creating.Going into the race as a front runner, all he really had to do was grin a lot, deliver platitudes smoothly and denounce Romney. So far he's managed to grin a lot and that's only one out of three.
The debate moment won't end his campaign, obviously, though it will reinforce all the existing doubts and while the way he's exploiting it shows a certain amount of teflon stamina, it doesn't change that he screwed up in a bizarre way to get to that point.
The screwup isn't that he forgot a key plank of his program that he had managed to compellingly lead into, it's that he couldn't think of a way to work around that memory loss except to go around asking Ron Paul if he remembered what it was. That's more unforgivable in a way.
Speakers are only human and everyone makes mistakes. Do you think that Reagan never forgot anything or didn't face a question to which he didn't know the answer? Obviously, again. But there are ways to handle that. Watch some of Reagan's speeches, debates and conferences and you'll see how a masterful speaker dealt with it.
The no-brainer for Perry, in this situation, would have been to begin talking about his second department, and going into detail and throwing in something controversial to divert a follow-up question. It might not have saved him, but it would have been a much less problematic moment.
The issue isn't really that Perry couldn't remember, that's bad in its own way, it's that he handled it in the worst way possible in a public forum watched by millions of people. And this isn't exactly the first time. That confrontation with Romney comes to mind.
In a national campaign against Obama, the Republican opponent is going to have to be on the ball with a media and a nutroots that will take anything and turn it into a viral video or a smear. Perry's response shows a certain amount of cleverness and resilience, but I have to wonder if the credit goes to him or his people for that one. The cleverness and resilience was needed on stage.
In the debates, Perry has been either stiffly over-rehearsed or just impulsive, letting himself be carried away. The impulsive Perry is better than the robotic Perry clumsily delivering attacks, the former won't be able to win an election, the latter might, but the latter is giving his opponents a ton of ammunition.
Again all is not lost. Bush said plenty of things in front of an open microphone during and before the campaign. It didn't cost him the election, and his good humor about it helped build his image. Perry might sail by under the same flag. Maybe.
THE OCCUPATION CONTINUES
Local businesses near Zuccotti Park are being vandalized by the occupiers. Oakland is being vandalized by the occupiers. Rape, TB and other fun stuff are all part of what being the 3 percent who pretend to be the 99 percent before getting degrees in philosophical anthropology and a job at the EPA regulating people's carbon emission means.
And naturally the whole thing slips into increasingly pointless occupation spinoffs. "Occupy Birthright." Should people who are against occupations be occupying anything at all? It would be like pro-Israel activists calling themselves terrorists. It's bad just at a common sense linguistic level. But then we're dealing with people who create checkpoints to protest against checkpoints.
Occupy Wall Street at least had the virtue of choosing a widely despised target. But Occupy Oakland? What did Oakland ever do to anyone? Or Denver? Or Newark?
Like Hitler invading Russia, the occupation's worst enemy is the weather. Their second worst enemy is themselves. Downtown Manhattan is full of dogmatic liberals and most people want them gone. If the media wasn't spinning everything they did 24/7 it would be much worse.
That this entire national human bedbug infestation even exists can be put down to a lack of municipal leadership and the desperation of the Obama campaign. But how many rapes, murders and disease outbreaks is it going to take before the whole thing backfires on the left?
The good is that OWS at least has a new poster.
OLD GLORY
(Via Director Blue at The Volokh Conspiracy)
Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified School District (N.D. Cal.), decided the day before yesterday, upholds a California high school’s decision to forbid students from wearing American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo. (See here and here for more on this case.)
The decision might well be correct under Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist. (1969), which allows a “heckler’s veto” in K-12 school: Schools may indeed restrict student speech when it’s likely to cause substantial disruption, even when the disruption stems from other students’ hostility to the speech.
You want bad? We're at the point where American flags are too controversial to allow in schools not just because of some leftist administrators, but because of the students... in a decision upheld by a court.
Here, for the reasons discussed above, Defendants have provided a non-discriminatory basis for asking Plaintiffs to remove their American flag attire. Defendants have put forth significant evidence demonstrating that Plaintiffs were asked to change clothes in order to protect their own safety. Plaintiffs have not offered any evidence demonstrating that students wearing the colors of the Mexican flag were targeted for violence.
If Mexican students terrorize American students, then a Mexican-American vice-principal can order American students to get rid of the flag, without there being any discrimination involved. Except on the part of the Mexican students.
Beautiful, isn't it? And the school system is paid for through compulsory taxes levied on homeowners who have to fund the schools and all the minority homeowners too, and the cost of bailing out the banks which were brought down by those mortgages and a local government deep in debt to pay for the schools, the health care and anti-gang programs.What could be more American than that?
This in a nutshell is the problem with Perry. National debt, growth of government, those won't matter if much of the country is just an extension of the disaster area south of the border. If this goes on for another 30-40 years there isn't going to be an America, there are going to be American enclaves in Greater Mexico.
And that American flag will be in the trash.
GREEDY RADICALS
Won't you please save a leftist? Every day Nation editors have to cut back to drinking only one glass of chardonnay and only one Michael Moore Netflix rental.
As the protesters of Occupy Wall Street voice their frustrations just a few blocks south of our offices, we’re facing our own very real challenges. It’s simple: because of the economy, donations to our Nation Associates program are down $200,000 for 2011.
This is no time to pull punches, scale back or otherwise take our eye off the ball. Not with a presidential election heating up and so much at stake. We must make up this shortfall before we sit down to plan our Election 2012 coverage for the coming year. Help us by bidding in our online auction.
So instead of buying your loved ones holiday gifts that enrich the corporate establishment, why not share your passion for progressive journalism by bidding on a one-of-a-kind gift from The Nation.
But isn't the Nation a corporation? Aren't its editors and advertisers enriched by its operations?
It's begging for donations, so it's not a very good corporation, but it's certainly isn't a non-profit. It's The Nation LP. I can see a Sears ad on the front page. Sears is a corporation that pays money to place ads on the site of a magazine with paid subscriptions.
What is Teresa Stack's salary? I don't know, but I suspect it's a number close enough to that donation shortfall.
It was certainly possible for The Nation to run without losing money, but by maintaining the image of a money losing operation that's subsidized by donations, it never really had to develop a workable business model. It can just ask for money. Advertising makes up 20 percent of its revenue. How much of the rest is made up by radicals with their hand out?
If you have nearly a fifth of a million of subscribers at 40 to 50 bucks for an annual subscription and you can't figure out how to make money from that or find advertisers, then it's a real problem. But instead The Nation wraps itself in its own radicalism and goes panhandling, while pretending that it's more moral because they're not greedy capitalists, they're greedy radicals.
But if you are moved to help out a red mag, you can pick up Memories of Lenin at their auction for a steal.
THE LIST
From American Digest
The twin towers loomed over everything, thought of, if they were thought of at all, as an irritation in that they blocked off so much of the sky. It was 1975 and, Vietnam not withstanding, America was just about at the midway point between two world wars. Of course, we didn't know that at the time. The only war we knew of was the Second World War and the background humm of the Cold War. It was a summer Sunday and we were in the midst of what now can be seen as "The Long Peace."
In front of the lawns at Battery Park was a monument that caught my attention. It was formed of an immense stone eagle and two parallel rows of granite monoliths about 20 feet wide, 20 feet tall and 3 feet thick. From a distance you could see that they had words carved into them from top to bottom. There was also a lot of shade between them so I took my hot dog and my coke and wheeled my bike over, sitting down at random among the monoliths.
I remember that the stone was cool against my back as I sat there looking at the stone across from me on that warm afternoon. As I looked up it dawned on me that the words cut into the stones were all names. Just names. The names of soldiers, sailors and airmen who had met their death in the north Atlantic in WWII. I was to learn later that there were 4,601 names. All lost in the frigid waters, all without any marker for their graves -- except those in the hearts of those they left behind, and their names carved into these stones that rose up around me.
I read across several rows, moving right to left, then down a row, and then right to left. I got to the end of the sixth row and went back to the beginning of the seventh row.
At the beginning of the seventh row, I read the name: "Gerard Van der Leun." My name. Cut into the stone amongst a tally of the dead.
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