August 31, 2010
The West Is Done In
You don't need to understand the German dubbing, I'll explain all you need to know. This is a "professional dancer and choreographer" from India. But what makes this REALLY interesting is the fact that he is a Jesuit. No lie. His full name is Dr. Saju George Moolamthuruthil SJ. In the Bildungs- und Exerzitienhaus (a house for education and spiritual exercises) "Maria zur Sonne" of the Würzburg diocese, he held, in cooperation with the Catholic mission project Missio, a four-day clinic dubbed "Stretching the body -- stretching the soul". The first dance in this film is supposed to allegorize the Crucification of Christ. No lie. The attendees interviewed, one of them a Catholic priest, are over the moon about it. No need to say that it is no lie.
Pater Geurge SJ has given 200 odd (pun intended) performances in India and worldwide, adopting both, as he puts it, Hindu and Christian themes in his performance. He states that his art involves prayer and adoration, self-awareness and divine realisation, aesthetic delight (you bet) and cosmic integration, social service, the promotion of inter-religious peace and harmony, ecumenism as well as other dimensions. And I'd bet a couple of other politically correct themes as well.
Here he does it around the altar of the Schottenkirche in Vienna:
Not this obscene, heretic priest is the problem, but those who are embracing perversion in their futile search for "spirituality".
After it didn't manage to make the people practise what it teaches, the contemporary church decided to teach what they practise.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila translated by me from the German.
Hat tip: CCC!
An Antisemite Doesn't Hate What a Jew Does, He Hates His Existence
Edited to add:
I got an interesting comment by email from a co-blogger who goes by the self-effacing name "Genius" and who dislikes registering, so here it is:
Of course, early anti-Zionism wasn't necessarily antisemitic. However, the Holocaust and the existence of a Judenstaat has changed that. Today the arguments against Israel mirror those against Jews and, of course, nobody has anything against Israel, it is Israel that is hateful towards others. There still is no LOGICAL equation between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, but contemporary APPLIED anti-Zionism is nothing but plain old antisemitism in disguise. Just a fact. Never expect Jew haters, antisemites, whatever, to be logical. It used to be "Jews out TO Plalestine" in Germany, now it's "Jews out OF Palestine". So there!
A bit off topic: I looked for a translation of Wilhelm Marr's pamphlet and found one at Mr. Kevin "Squeaky Clean" MacDonald's website. The translator is a Dr. Gerhard Rohringer, a retired doctor from Santa Barbara, California, born in Linz, Austria, a Holocaust relativist/denier and prolific letter writer to David Irving. (No links for obvious reasons. It can be easily retrieved via a Google search.) Birds of a feather and all that.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what one calls it. If you find Judenhass more apropos than Jew-hatred, it is because German isn't your native language. Words from a foreign language don't touch one emotionally. For example, I can freely cuss and swear in English and use words I'd never use in my native German because I grasp the vulgarity not emotionally. I know on an intellectual level that the English word "shit" is vulgar, but I was taught from an early age that the German equivalent "Scheiße" is an absolute no no, I sensed my mother's anger about such a word when I was little, so the objection to it is deeply ingrained in my mind.
End of addition.
There is an interesting and multi-faceted debate going on at Lawrence Auster's VFR about antisemitism and what makes one an antisemite. It made me picking my brain for a concise definition. What makes "antisemitism" different from assorted prejudices, whether veryfiable of falsifyable, or from a phenomenon like racism.
First, I think what we are dealing here with ought to be spelled "antisemitism" and not "anti-Semitism". There really is no "Semitism". Although there is an entry listed at Merriam-Webster ...
Now what IS antisemitism when it is stripped from the pseudo-scientific lingo with which Marr masked it? First and foremost, antisemitism is not a prejudice, but a resentment.
Prejudice is aimed at people's behaviour, resentment at their existence.
An antisemite doesn't dislike what a Jew does or how he is, he dislikes his existence. The antisemit reacts with scorn to assimilation as well as to distinction. Rich Jews are exploiters, poor Jews leeches, clever Jews are arrogant, dumb Jews a disgrace for the Jewish race, they are responsible for capitalism and for communism, for internationalism, and now they've got their own brand of nationalism, it is vilified with a passion. The antisemite resents everything about the Jew and the opposite as well. In contrast, racism is targeted at the, real or perceived, flaws of people of a certain race. Only in a very few, very extreme cases it is aimed at the very existence of all people of a race.
Antisemitism is no constant. Like all social phenomena, antisemitism is subject to change. Poverty, too, isn't anymore what it used to be at the times of Charles Dickens. Modern antisemitism isn't strutting around in boondockers anymore, yelling "Death to the Jews". Instead, it mourns the Holocaust victims and is asking at the same time why the survivors haven't learned anything from their past, so that they now subject another people to the same fate. The modern antisemite doesn't believe in the "Protocols", instead, he is hallucinating about the "Israel lobby" that rules American politics. Of course, he commemorates every year on January 27 the liberation of Auschwitz and demands at the same time that Iran has a right to have nuclear weapons. He reverts cause and effect and states that the nuclear threat emanates from Israel, not from Iran. Once again, it's the Jew's (the über-Jew Israel's) own fault if he is hated. The modern antisemite abhors vulgar antisemitism, but is quite unselfconsciously anti-Zionist (sic!) and grateful to be able to live out his antisemitism in a politically correct way. However, anti-Zionism is as much a resentment as good old antisemitism is. It aims not at anything Israel does or leaves, it targets her existence. Therefore, he is so passionate about a "solution of the Palestine question" which would be, for Israel, a final solution. What happens in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Tibet or Kongo or anywhere else, where neither the über-Jew Israel or the ersatz-Jew America, is involved doesn't matter to him.
At the time of Wilhelm Marr, Austria's Karl Lueger or court chaplain Adolf Stoecker everybody was unabasedly antisemitic. There were Jews, there were antisemites, and there was antisemitism. Following the war, we had, at least in Germany, antisemitism without Jews. And now we have antisemitism without antisemites. It's called anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionists criticize Israel not for what she does, it denies her the right to exist, just what the good old antisemites did to the Jews.
The above may have a strong focus on Germany, but I think in essence it applies to the entire West, America included, as well. For this, I have paraphrased and translated parts of a speech "Der Antisemitismus in seinem neuen Gewand" (something like "Antisemitism's new Clothes") given by the writer Henryk M. Broder, invited as an expert, to the Committee on Internal Affairs of the German Bundestag in July 2008.
Henryk M. Broder, born 1946, is the son of two Holocaust survivors. His epochal book "Der ewige Antisemit: Über Sinn und Funktion eines beständigen Gefühls" (something like: "The Eternal Antisemite: Meaning and Purpose of an Everlasting Sentiment"), marked a new milestone because it famously and firstly thematized the antisemitism of the Left. In Germany, it was akin to a palace revolution. For those strapped for time, it will replace entire libraries about that phenomenon.
A major part of Broder's writing is targeted at antisemitism and anti-Americanism (antiamericanism?).
I got an interesting comment by email from a co-blogger who goes by the self-effacing name "Genius" and who dislikes registering, so here it is:
Excellent post. I'm glad to see someone writing sanely about this topic.First I don't think Marr objected specifically to Jewish assimilation. His definition of Jews as the target of his animosity was unmistakably racial. In his writings he shows another typical trait of the antisemite, namely the firm belief that he has nothing against Jews, but that THEY have something against HIM. That is one of the core topoi of antisemitism. He wanted the Jews to go away, one way or the other, assimilated or not.
I find Marr to have been a little imprecise and think it's important for us to dwell on the term anti-semitism (or however you wish to conceive it by its spelling) until we get to an understanding of what semitism is. I did that and came to the conclusion that, by "semitism," Marr meant Jewish assimilation, and that this is what anti-semites really opposed and continue to oppose. The fixation on race was simply their tool for opposing Jewish assimilation and, ultimately, emancipation.
Unlike you, I make a clear distinction between anti-semitism and anti-zionism (I am a Jew and a Zionist who made Aliyah, by the way), though I am most interested in expressions of the former in the latter and ways that different ideas about Judaism, Jewish emancipation/assimilation and Zionism all seep into the opposition to each. For example, how is it that you see very early and even ahistorical expressions of anti-semitism in the Book of Esther and in 16th century Spain, and also in rejection of Israel, which should by logic be western anti-semites' dream to empty the western world of Jews?
I also looked around for an all-encompassing term for opposition to Jews, Judaism, Jewishness and Jewish nationalism, and I settled on the term Judenhass because it sounds a little more neutral to English-speakers than Jew-hatred and because terms like Judenstadt were meant to evoke it.
Of course, early anti-Zionism wasn't necessarily antisemitic. However, the Holocaust and the existence of a Judenstaat has changed that. Today the arguments against Israel mirror those against Jews and, of course, nobody has anything against Israel, it is Israel that is hateful towards others. There still is no LOGICAL equation between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, but contemporary APPLIED anti-Zionism is nothing but plain old antisemitism in disguise. Just a fact. Never expect Jew haters, antisemites, whatever, to be logical. It used to be "Jews out TO Plalestine" in Germany, now it's "Jews out OF Palestine". So there!
A bit off topic: I looked for a translation of Wilhelm Marr's pamphlet and found one at Mr. Kevin "Squeaky Clean" MacDonald's website. The translator is a Dr. Gerhard Rohringer, a retired doctor from Santa Barbara, California, born in Linz, Austria, a Holocaust relativist/denier and prolific letter writer to David Irving. (No links for obvious reasons. It can be easily retrieved via a Google search.) Birds of a feather and all that.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what one calls it. If you find Judenhass more apropos than Jew-hatred, it is because German isn't your native language. Words from a foreign language don't touch one emotionally. For example, I can freely cuss and swear in English and use words I'd never use in my native German because I grasp the vulgarity not emotionally. I know on an intellectual level that the English word "shit" is vulgar, but I was taught from an early age that the German equivalent "Scheiße" is an absolute no no, I sensed my mother's anger about such a word when I was little, so the objection to it is deeply ingrained in my mind.
End of addition.
There is an interesting and multi-faceted debate going on at Lawrence Auster's VFR about antisemitism and what makes one an antisemite. It made me picking my brain for a concise definition. What makes "antisemitism" different from assorted prejudices, whether veryfiable of falsifyable, or from a phenomenon like racism.
First, I think what we are dealing here with ought to be spelled "antisemitism" and not "anti-Semitism". There really is no "Semitism". Although there is an entry listed at Merriam-Webster ...
Sem·i·tism... it doesn't make for a justification of the current majority-spelling. First, according to Merriam-Webster, the word isn't much older than the German "Antisemitismus", which was coined by the writer and confessing Jew hater Wilhelm Marr 1879 in his pamphlet "Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum – Vom nichtconfessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet" ("The Path to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism -- from a Non-Religious Point view") who thus became the doyen of political antisemitsm of Wilhelmine Germany. Also, I have never heard or seen the term "Semitism" in actual usage and while there is a theoretical possibility that "Semitism", in the sense of the number 1 definition, may have been used, I can not imagine that it was, is or will be ever used in the meaning listed under 2. The possible German equivalent "Semitismus" isn't listed in the German Duden at all. It doesn't go together with Marr's intentions as well. He introduced this, until then non-existing, phrase explicitly as an alternative to the religious-Christian anti-Judaism (sic!) to make the ostracism of the Jews plausible to all German gentiles, religious or not. Thus, "improvement" by baptism was excluded, and specifically assimilated Jews were targeted as "artfremd". This very specific and so far unique definition Marr's antisemitism implies is another reason to stay as close to the original German term as possible.
Pronunciation: \ˈse-mə-ˌti-zəm\
Function: noun
Date: 1851
1 a : Semitic character or qualities b : a characteristic feature of a Semitic language occurring in another language
2 : policy or predisposition favorable to Jews
Now what IS antisemitism when it is stripped from the pseudo-scientific lingo with which Marr masked it? First and foremost, antisemitism is not a prejudice, but a resentment.
Prejudice is aimed at people's behaviour, resentment at their existence.
An antisemite doesn't dislike what a Jew does or how he is, he dislikes his existence. The antisemit reacts with scorn to assimilation as well as to distinction. Rich Jews are exploiters, poor Jews leeches, clever Jews are arrogant, dumb Jews a disgrace for the Jewish race, they are responsible for capitalism and for communism, for internationalism, and now they've got their own brand of nationalism, it is vilified with a passion. The antisemite resents everything about the Jew and the opposite as well. In contrast, racism is targeted at the, real or perceived, flaws of people of a certain race. Only in a very few, very extreme cases it is aimed at the very existence of all people of a race.
Antisemitism is no constant. Like all social phenomena, antisemitism is subject to change. Poverty, too, isn't anymore what it used to be at the times of Charles Dickens. Modern antisemitism isn't strutting around in boondockers anymore, yelling "Death to the Jews". Instead, it mourns the Holocaust victims and is asking at the same time why the survivors haven't learned anything from their past, so that they now subject another people to the same fate. The modern antisemite doesn't believe in the "Protocols", instead, he is hallucinating about the "Israel lobby" that rules American politics. Of course, he commemorates every year on January 27 the liberation of Auschwitz and demands at the same time that Iran has a right to have nuclear weapons. He reverts cause and effect and states that the nuclear threat emanates from Israel, not from Iran. Once again, it's the Jew's (the über-Jew Israel's) own fault if he is hated. The modern antisemite abhors vulgar antisemitism, but is quite unselfconsciously anti-Zionist (sic!) and grateful to be able to live out his antisemitism in a politically correct way. However, anti-Zionism is as much a resentment as good old antisemitism is. It aims not at anything Israel does or leaves, it targets her existence. Therefore, he is so passionate about a "solution of the Palestine question" which would be, for Israel, a final solution. What happens in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Tibet or Kongo or anywhere else, where neither the über-Jew Israel or the ersatz-Jew America, is involved doesn't matter to him.
At the time of Wilhelm Marr, Austria's Karl Lueger or court chaplain Adolf Stoecker everybody was unabasedly antisemitic. There were Jews, there were antisemites, and there was antisemitism. Following the war, we had, at least in Germany, antisemitism without Jews. And now we have antisemitism without antisemites. It's called anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionists criticize Israel not for what she does, it denies her the right to exist, just what the good old antisemites did to the Jews.
The above may have a strong focus on Germany, but I think in essence it applies to the entire West, America included, as well. For this, I have paraphrased and translated parts of a speech "Der Antisemitismus in seinem neuen Gewand" (something like "Antisemitism's new Clothes") given by the writer Henryk M. Broder, invited as an expert, to the Committee on Internal Affairs of the German Bundestag in July 2008.Henryk M. Broder, born 1946, is the son of two Holocaust survivors. His epochal book "Der ewige Antisemit: Über Sinn und Funktion eines beständigen Gefühls" (something like: "The Eternal Antisemite: Meaning and Purpose of an Everlasting Sentiment"), marked a new milestone because it famously and firstly thematized the antisemitism of the Left. In Germany, it was akin to a palace revolution. For those strapped for time, it will replace entire libraries about that phenomenon.
A major part of Broder's writing is targeted at antisemitism and anti-Americanism (antiamericanism?).
August 29, 2010
You still think it's a game, right?
There are people who are hatching the brilliant idea to build a "gay community center" next to the Ground Zero mosque. Yes, it's SO apropos, original, lateral thinking-y and deliciously provocative. Not.
The Middle East cultures makes no distinction between sex with a woman and sex with a boy. In fact, they know no word for same-sex intercourse. Sex in Middle Eastern societies follows social hierarchies, dominant and subordinate social positions. Adult men on top, women and boys (and slaves) below. Having sex with another man while being the active partner "doesn’t make a man gay", it just means that he is engaging in homosexual activity. Passive partners will carry, if their role becomes known, a life-long stigma, akin to the way a women who has lost her virginity might be seen.
It's all about dominance and power -- like everything else about Islam.
There are, I guess, three different groups of people supporting such a braindead idea, the provocateurs, then those who know all that quite well and are taking this as a chance to expand their clientele, and the more dimwitted, politically correct faction who seriously think "gays" deserve a community center. Will they have a dark room and other swinish installations there? A glory hole maybe? (Yes, don't they all just want to marry a one and only beloved and raise a family?) There are already plenty of homosexual community centers. They are called "gay bars".
Muslims who come to America may indeed "come out" once they are free from the rigidly controlling cultural systems of their native countries. And when two shrill, demanding, arrogant, pushy pressure groups who are deeply convinced of their own supremacy join together, THEN you'll have a problem.
Hat tip: Beak!
No, this is not a joke. In fact, it is instead one of the most brilliant pieces of provocations in recent years. Greg Gutfeld from Fox News’ Red Eye announced today via his blog that he is actively speaking to investors and plans on opening a gay bar next to the controversial mosque being built near Ground Zero in New York. To make matters worse (better?) the bar will be specifically designed to cater to homosexuals of the Islamic faith. God, this is going to be an exciting block.Indeed! It's just that the premise is faulty. Coming from a culture, in which homosexual sex may be heavily tabooed but is in fact widely practised, the Cordoba Center dwellers will probably go on like the proverbial house on fire with American homosexuals. Now what exactly means catering "to homosexuals of the Islamic faith"? The answer is not pretty. What is widely practised as well but NOT tabooed in the Islamic world is sex with pre-pubescent boys, What about the dancing boys of Afghanistan? And no, that is not an isolated case. Do yourself a favour, dear reader, go to Google Trends and search for "sex boys". We've discussed this before here, by the way.
The Middle East cultures makes no distinction between sex with a woman and sex with a boy. In fact, they know no word for same-sex intercourse. Sex in Middle Eastern societies follows social hierarchies, dominant and subordinate social positions. Adult men on top, women and boys (and slaves) below. Having sex with another man while being the active partner "doesn’t make a man gay", it just means that he is engaging in homosexual activity. Passive partners will carry, if their role becomes known, a life-long stigma, akin to the way a women who has lost her virginity might be seen.
It's all about dominance and power -- like everything else about Islam.
There are, I guess, three different groups of people supporting such a braindead idea, the provocateurs, then those who know all that quite well and are taking this as a chance to expand their clientele, and the more dimwitted, politically correct faction who seriously think "gays" deserve a community center. Will they have a dark room and other swinish installations there? A glory hole maybe? (Yes, don't they all just want to marry a one and only beloved and raise a family?) There are already plenty of homosexual community centers. They are called "gay bars".
Muslims who come to America may indeed "come out" once they are free from the rigidly controlling cultural systems of their native countries. And when two shrill, demanding, arrogant, pushy pressure groups who are deeply convinced of their own supremacy join together, THEN you'll have a problem.
Hat tip: Beak!
August 24, 2010
The Maverick Prophet
The last book by Karl Kraus "Die dritte Walpurgisnacht", published 1952, 19 years after Kraus wrote it, took off with the sentence, “Zu Hitler fällt mir nichts ein” (“I can't think of anything worth saying about Hitler”), meaning that he found him beyond description in his hatefulness.Who was Karl Kraus? Karl Kraus (1874 – 1936) was an Austrian writer. He is regarded as one of the foremost German-language satirists of the 20th century. However, he is little known in the Anglosphere. Why I can only guess and my money would be on the facts that his idiosyncratic work is not for translation (I had to learn that the hard way when I wrote this entry) and that the English and specifically the American BENIGN interest in German culture starts at BMW and ends at Miele kitchens with a little bit of Bach and Beethoven and some Rommel and Guderian thrown in. After all, there aren't many other Germanophone satirists known in England or America either. The fact that Kraus can be hardly fit into a political pigeonhole doesn't help matters. He was an uncompromising advocate of Jewish assimilation and thus a foe of modern Zionism, he hated, and was a vocal antagonist of, psychoanalysis, the corruption of the Habsburg empire, nationalism of the pan-German movement, laissez-faire economic policies, Social Democrats (most of the time), numerous other subjects and most of all hypocrisy.
1899, he converted to Roman Catholicism, but left the Church in 1923 because of political, not theological, reasons.
1899, too, he founded his newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch), which he published and for which he wrote until his death. From here, he launched his attacks on people of whom he disapproved, which resulted in many lawsuits. Die Fackel was privileged in its editorial independence because Kraus, who was independently rich, funded it. In its first decade, contributors included many renowned writers and artists such as Peter Altenberg, Richard Dehmel, Egon Friedell, Oskar Kokoschka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schönberg, August Strindberg, Georg Trakl, Frank Wedekind, Franz Werfel, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Oscar Wilde. After 1911, Kraus became the almost sole author and his work was published nearly exclusively there. Die Fackel targeted corruption wherever Kraus saw it. Notable enemies were his former friend Maximilian Harden (in the quagmire of the Harden-Eulenburg affair), Moritz Benedikt (owner of the newspaper Neue Freie Presse), Alfred Kerr, Hermann Bahr, Imre Bekessy, Felix Salten and Johannes Schober.
1934, thus estranging himself from many of his followers, he supported Engelbert Dollfuß' right-wing coup d'état, hoping Dollfuß would keep Nazism from swallowing Austria. This is not as surprising as most people think it is. Kraus' criticism was always ethically based, not political, his cultural background was not that of the 'Left' but that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He had a passionate love affair with language and was convinced that every little error shows the great evils of the world and times. Thus, he could see in a missing comma a symptom of a state of the world that would allow a world war. One of the main points of his writings was to show the great evils inherent in such seemingly small errors. He viewed his contemporaries' careless treatment of language as a sign for their careless treatment of the world as a whole and was adamant that language ought not to be subjected entirely to man's will. Even in its most maimed state, Kraus said, language will show the true state of the world, quoting Austrian supporters of WWI calling it "Mordshetz", an Austrian word for great fun that can also be understood as "murderous chase" or "chase for murder". Was he a cranky old grouch? You bet. But a genius as well.
One of his last works, which he declined to publish for fear of Nazi reprisals against the opposition and the Jews in Germany, was the anti-Nazi pamphlet Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht (The Third Walpurgis Night) of 1933. It is online in the German original here. Reading it now, it comes across as eerily prophetical. The entire book is full of similarities between the Nazi movement and Islam and the appeasement of the ruling elites. Regarding the Austrian Social Democrats, for example, he observed how they were lying to themselves about what they saw as 'tolerance', because "nothing is more urgent than to meet violence with "democracy" so that the former can use the latter to destroy it even more effectively" (p. 299f.). A couple of pages more into the book (p.305), he talks, depressingly accurate, explicitly about "the new Turkish menace" thus describing chillingly the contemporary and even newer second Turkish menace.
Kraus didn't miss a single trick. "Unwavering remains the trust in those who visit Germany and who conclude from the fact that they "haven't seen anything" that nothing happened and everything is fine. Many of them have really been present at such an omission, about which he can now from his own first-hand knowledge testify with some credibility" (p. 185) he writes about those who refuse to see evil as what it is. About the homoerotic overtones of the Nazi-movement and the degradation of women (p. 268 ff.) he said: "The problem of procreation is difficult to solve because specifically in Prussia the young men through adaption to synchronized* intercourse don't know the guidelines of it and so Gretel doesn't get what Hänsel doesn't know." Follows a detailed description of the brutal public humiliation women who comitted "Rassenschande" suffered (p. 271ff.)
*Kraus alludes to the Nazi term "Gleichschaltung" here.
Even taqqiya isn't new: "But what is so special is the ability ... to further develop creatively and thus to acquire a native regeneration, which adapts the language to a need for deep dishonesty and which will be able to cope with a penchant for hypocritical sanctification, the obfuscasion of shameful matters" (p. 148) and "... really, as far as German doublespeak goes, the listening world receives more conviction than it needs" (p. 282).
It is not a similarity of several symptoms and qualities which Islam and the Nazi-ideology happen to share, far from it. Here and there we have exactly the same traits, which are, and it is that which makes them so lethal, bound by interrelation and which share an inner bond. Kraus unmasks party politicians, the media, intellectuals and bystanders and the part played in the victory of Nazism by downplaying the crimes, about Nazi doublespeak (taqiyya), about the ruthless and violent degradation of women to silent birthing machines, about the suicidal "tolerance" of the Left, specifically the Social Democrats, about the don't-see-don't-tell mentality, even about anti-Amerikanism (p. 60: "American Jew-protectors"), about a "Volksgemeinschaft" (Ummah) that devours its children and brutally suppresses individualism, about homosexuality, which was as heavily tabooed as widely practised, about the exculpation and glorification of political crime. 400 pages of a pamphlet have taught me more about my people's history than entire libraries could.
Edited to add following a comment: No detail Karl Kraus mentions about the Nazis and their enablers in "Walpurgisnacht" is new. He wrote it 77 years ago, after all. But the way he put them together makes for an epiphanous moment. I'm afraid most of his genius is lost in translation.
Online edition of "Die Fackel" (registration needed.)
My thanks go to Gudrun Eussner. Without her help and inspiration this wouldn't have been written.
August 22, 2010
The Empress Wears an LBD No Clothes
Always worth a look, VFR discusses Ann Coulter's surprising decision to speak at a political convention for openly gay Republicans, Homocon 2010. One reader suggests that "female conservatives" like Coulter (or Sarah Palin) ought to be called "Republican Feminists", because "(t)hese type of women have, through some accident of circumstance, discovered that liberalism does not benefit them... But, they are not really conservatives. They just want to banish those parts of liberalism or feminism that do not benefit them." And: "This is why Ann Coulter has no problems with homosexuality. Women, in general, like gay men because it allows them to interface with men on a level they understand and in the absence of any sexual tension. Ann Coulter is like any other woman in this respect. Her conservatism goes out the window as soon as her status is under no real threat. The same thing with Sarah Palin." To which Lawrence Auster replied: "This needs to be fleshed out more. What are the parts of liberalism that do not benefit Coulter, or Palin?" Well, good question. What about: private property and a somewhat understandable aversion to the thought that in order to achieve "social justice" the government ought to own their revenues from book sales or speaking events?
By the way, the great mutual empathy between women and homosexual men is a myth by which only, somewhat endearingly, straight men are taken in, and to say that Ann Coulter might be (no matter the context) "like any other woman" is so mind-bogglingly insensitive that it defies belief.
Why would Coulter speak at such an event? Money? Hardly. She knows quite well that attention like that will alienate a lot of her core audience and that she'll lose more than she'll win. Does she think then that those homosexual Republicans have a legitimate cause? Good joke. My money is still on Coulter being homosexual herself. Should her shrivelled little black, well, heart really be in this, that would be an explanation of her utterly over-the-top reaction to Joseph Farah's criticism, a reaction which came across for once not as coldly calculating, but as genuinely deranged. But whatever.
At my German blog I commented in January 2008 that the punditesse was receiving lately some, albeit scant, notoriety in Germany, namely by the small and disorientated wannabe-neocon-faction, because she is so deliciously "different" and Germans like it masterful.
I wrote:
By the way, the great mutual empathy between women and homosexual men is a myth by which only, somewhat endearingly, straight men are taken in, and to say that Ann Coulter might be (no matter the context) "like any other woman" is so mind-bogglingly insensitive that it defies belief.
Why would Coulter speak at such an event? Money? Hardly. She knows quite well that attention like that will alienate a lot of her core audience and that she'll lose more than she'll win. Does she think then that those homosexual Republicans have a legitimate cause? Good joke. My money is still on Coulter being homosexual herself. Should her shrivelled little black, well, heart really be in this, that would be an explanation of her utterly over-the-top reaction to Joseph Farah's criticism, a reaction which came across for once not as coldly calculating, but as genuinely deranged. But whatever.
At my German blog I commented in January 2008 that the punditesse was receiving lately some, albeit scant, notoriety in Germany, namely by the small and disorientated wannabe-neocon-faction, because she is so deliciously "different" and Germans like it masterful.
I wrote:
The problem is that we are satisfied with attacking an undefined Left, the more vocal the better, to be considered a "conservative". Any content, positive goals, commonsensical arguments or even a basic ethical consensus are superfluous, which guarantees somebody like Ann Coulter a secure, warm little place at the humble hearth of a "conservative" movement that is as free from perception as from shame.I think that is still a pretty apt description of Coulter and those who will fall for her.
August 20, 2010
Say Goodbye to the Buttonpusher
Another case of First Amendment interpretation, closely following the controversy about the Ground Zero mosque: So the (for me, as a European) unspeakable "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger has lost her job because she used the word "nigger" in one of her broadcasts and now she's whining that that the "bullying and scary" tactics of the left are a direct threat to the First Amendment rights of anyone who dares to speak out in defense of traditional American values. What is the First Amendment about? It protects Americans from government censorship, it does NOT protect them from reactions by their peers/co-citizens, not from disapproval, pressure, criticism, indignation or from the forces of the market. Nobody tells this hypocritical old slattern that she can not spew her hate- and deliberately hurtful drivel. It's just that if "Dr. Laura's" sponsors don't like what she says or have something better to broadcast, they have every right to get rid of her. Here we have those two wonderful things in action America has given to the world and which stand for freedom and liberty. They are called "free market" and "public discourse".
And of course she was right about the caller, who expressed concern over her white husband's friends being racist, that if she's that "hypersensitive about color" and doesn't "have a sense of humor" she oughn't have married "out of (her) race". That said, this came, if the media reports are correct, after she said the word "nigger" 11 times in a string of expletives. OF COURSE that usage was intended to be -- and was -- provocative, even though she was "only quoting". However, I wonder, too, why somebody in such a predicament would go to that heartless bitch, of all people, for advice, and I wouldn't be amazed if she was framed.
It's not what she said, but how she said it, and it will never fail to amaze me how such a deliberately provovative and violative, vulgar and ungiving bitch, one that was exposed several times as a hypocrite to boot, was able to become a paragon of conservative values. It must have been because she knows how to push the right buttons of conservatives (and "conservatives"), as she knows, no doubt, how to push the buttons of her hapless audience.
I always thought humility was part and parcel of conservative values. I may be wrong. But whatever, now she's forced to learn a painful lesson in it. Good.
And of course she was right about the caller, who expressed concern over her white husband's friends being racist, that if she's that "hypersensitive about color" and doesn't "have a sense of humor" she oughn't have married "out of (her) race". That said, this came, if the media reports are correct, after she said the word "nigger" 11 times in a string of expletives. OF COURSE that usage was intended to be -- and was -- provocative, even though she was "only quoting". However, I wonder, too, why somebody in such a predicament would go to that heartless bitch, of all people, for advice, and I wouldn't be amazed if she was framed.
It's not what she said, but how she said it, and it will never fail to amaze me how such a deliberately provovative and violative, vulgar and ungiving bitch, one that was exposed several times as a hypocrite to boot, was able to become a paragon of conservative values. It must have been because she knows how to push the right buttons of conservatives (and "conservatives"), as she knows, no doubt, how to push the buttons of her hapless audience.
I always thought humility was part and parcel of conservative values. I may be wrong. But whatever, now she's forced to learn a painful lesson in it. Good.
August 19, 2010
The Serious Duty to Instruct and Improve Jews
The debased cruelty with which Israeli soldiers treat their prisoners to then have their photographs taken and published at Facebook is a historically unique crime of Jewry as such, reaching so far unknown proportions and not the brainfart of an abysmally dumb &%*$§. The history of the Holocaust will have to be re-written. Germans breathe a not-so-clandestine sigh of relief.
What does Google, always so helpful, say? If one googles for "trophy photos soldiers" one gets 531,000 hits, some as interesting as this one or this one. And no, they are not about Israeli soldiers.
Head of a Japanese, Burma 1945.
Life Magazine,May 22 1944
This is the execution of Sergeant Len Siffleet of the Australian Z Special Force Unit on October 24, 1943, at Aitaoe beach, New Guinea, performed by a Japanese civilian. Such a duty was considered an honour. Japanese have immaculate manners.
That, we must only do to the Jews.
What does Google, always so helpful, say? If one googles for "trophy photos soldiers" one gets 531,000 hits, some as interesting as this one or this one. And no, they are not about Israeli soldiers.
Head of a Japanese, Burma 1945.
Life Magazine,May 22 1944Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her.As it ought to be, and I am serious here, those pictures are put in a historic perspective by many contemporary and more recent commenters. It is an enlightening lecture about history and human nature. If one goes then on googling for "trophy photos soldiers -israel -jews" one gets 322,000 hits, for "trophy photos soldiers -israel -jews -iraq" only 242,000. What conclusion can be drawn from that? I'm not 100% sure, but a possible one would be that American war crimes, real or perceived, only started to become truly interesting for a wider public, and not even mainly in Germany, when America had mutated in the public eye to the Ersatz-Jew, acting as proxy for Israel, the Über-Jew.
Defense worker N. Nickolson writes to her sweetheart thanking him for his letter and "souvenir." This skull of a Japanese soldier bears the inscription: "Here is a good Jap -- a dead one!"
This is the execution of Sergeant Len Siffleet of the Australian Z Special Force Unit on October 24, 1943, at Aitaoe beach, New Guinea, performed by a Japanese civilian. Such a duty was considered an honour. Japanese have immaculate manners. The faded photograph was found in a Japanese soldier's pocket and yet still chills the heart of Australians.I'm sure the Australians wouldn't have gotten their knickers in such a knot had they only known, what Israelis would do to their prisoners sixty-odd years later.
Not to forget the recent cases, but they are part of the culture of the performers and thus above criticism per se. Culture is wonderful, as long as it's not Western. Never forget, too, that they are deeply traumatized by the cruel treatment they received from the West. And who are we, anyway, with our past and present, capitalism, imperialism, White Supremacy, colonialism, not to speak of the Holocaust, to be arrogant enough to lecture them what is wrong or what is right.
That, we must only do to the Jews.
August 17, 2010
Please help me understand
So the First Amendment protects freedom of religion. I looked it up:
Any Americans out there to help me understand?
Edited August 18, 2010, 22:20.
Here are the comments I received. Thank you all for helping me to understand this weired bit of politics better!
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.It doesn't say that a religious group can build their houses of worship anywhere they like. I fail to see how Muslims' freedom of religion is in any way compromised because they can not build a mosque next to Ground Zero. Nobody of any weight has ever as much as hinted that their status as a religious community ought to be taken away from them, although it comes across as quite a good idea, but nobody can build everything he wants everywhere. There are the rights of others to observe, aren't they? What about construction noise, disruption, water runoff, loss of light? A brothel next to a school? Are there no health codes, local ordinances, nuisance laws which may prohibit these conditions?
Any Americans out there to help me understand?
Edited August 18, 2010, 22:20.
Here are the comments I received. Thank you all for helping me to understand this weired bit of politics better!
August 16, 2010
A Cackling Cockatoo's Cognitive Cacophony
In September, a political convention for openly gay Republicans, Homocon 2010, will be held in New York City to celebrate their rationalizations and Ann Coulter's Adam's apple. The organizers are GOProud, who have entered the political arena to represent gay conservatives and their enablers. "GOProud is committed to a traditional conservative agenda that emphasizes limited government, individual liberty, free markets and a confident foreign policy. GOProud promotes our traditional conservative agenda by influencing politics and policy at the federal level." I fail to see what all that has to do with one's sexual orientation, but whatever.Now I am known for having called Coulter an unprincipled, intellectually dishonest, attention-seeking cackling parrot who would say anything to boost her book-sales figures and a screeching drag queen, so I can, with all the confidence a clear conscience bestows on one, lay back and watch the fray, which is quite a treat. Obviously, both, conservatives and "conservatives", think that Coulter is submitting to the gay agenda and are now mouthing helplessly like dyspnoeic carps. To me it seems that they're both missing the obvious. Rather than thinking that Coulter is making an error in judgement, they should be thinking that perhaps their gilded lily is as gay as the rest of the attendees at Homocon will be.
A previous entry re Coulter: Another Delusional Bubble Burst.
August 15, 2010
What One Needs to Know about Islam
The controversial "Ground Zero" mosque will be launched by the so-called Cordoba Initiative. So Cordoba stands for the legendary Al-Andalus, where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in peace, right?
Not quite. Cordoba stands for many other things as well. It was the name of the Islamic empire's center, from where Islam ruled most of the then known world. It's stands for one of the grandest mosques of that time which was, notabene, built on the ashes of a Christian Visigoth church. It stands, too for a massacre of the Jews of Cordoba in 1011 (yes, Al-Andalus wasn't quite what Muslims and their enablers would like us to believe) and for the rape of the city by the Almohades in 1148. Some websites claim that the year 1011 carries some symbolism as well, but while that is entirely possible, it is too far-fetched to make it a point here.
To understand the full implications one has to know two basically simple things:
First, Christians and Jews build their places of worship to, well, worship. Muslims build mosques to symbolize Islamic supremacy over others, to proselytize, to politicize, as an arsenal.
Second, Muslims act on symbols.
The Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on top of the Jewish temple symbolizes Islamic supremacy over Judaism, the Ummayyad Mosque in Syria is built on top of St. John the Baptist, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was converted into a mosque as a symbol of Islamic supremacy over Christianity. The Cordoba Initiative mosque will be built on the ashes of almost thousand Americans who couldn't be recovered after September 11, 2001. An innocent naive fallacy? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Here are some examples from Germany, my country, a country with, as of 2009, 4.3 million Muslims (5.4% of the population). Of these, 1.9 million are German citizens (2.4%). As of 2006, there were about 15,000 ethnic German converts. The large majority are of Turkish origin. Most Muslims live in Berlin and the big cities of former West Germany, mainly in the those of the industrial stronghold along the rivers Rhine and Ruhr.
The Yavuz-Sultan-Selim mosque in Mannheim is one of the biggest in Germany. Its patron, Selim I was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520. Selim carried the empire to the leadership of the Sunni branch of Islam by his conquest of the Middle East. On the eve of his death in 1520, the Ottoman empire spanned almost 1 billion acres.
More than 50 mosques in Germany are called Fatih. Fatih means conqueror and refers to Mehmet II who was Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for a short time from 1444 to September 1446, and later from February 1451 to 1481. At the age of 21, he conquered Constantinople in a bloodbath, bringing an end to the Byzantine Empire. Mehmet continued his conquests in Asia, with the "Anatolian reunification", and in Europe as far as Belgrade.
Other popular names for mosques in Germany are:
Aksa/Aqsa means "farthest", and in this context the "farthest [so far] from Mecca". The Muslim claim to Jerusalem and the Holy Land comes in here as well.
Ayasofya is emblematic for and purposefully reminiscent of Christian humiliation.
Hicret (arabic مسجد هجرة hidschra) refers to Mohammeds flight from Mekka to Medina in 622.
Imam Ali.
Al-Quds stands for Jerusalem. (It was an Al-Quds mosque in Hamburg from where Mohammed Atta set out to promote his very own brand of conquering.)
Selimiye refers to the megalomaniac Selimiye mosque in Edirne:
Then we have the Merkez mosque in Duisburg (Merkez means stronghold in Turkish), currently the biggest in Germany and probably in Europe as well. I discussed it previously for example here and here.
The controversial projected mosque in Cologne is called "Merkez" as well, which is (politically correct) translated not as "stronghold", but as "center". Everything not to let Muslims appear in a less than angelic light. I have covered the interesting and complex controvery that was triggered by the Cologne mosque, but went far beyond, it here:
Ask for the name of the mosque next to you and do a quick Google search. The result might be interesting.
One more word about the Cordoba Initiative. Granted for argument's sake that the Ground Zero mosque, pardon me, the Cordoba outreach center to make better people of infidels, was planned and is being realized in good faith. Then we still have to deal with the sensitivity aspect, haven't we. Wasn't it abundantly clear in the first stages of the planning process already that only too many Americans wouldn't react kindly to a project like that? It seems that the sensitivity and respect Muslims are always so stridently demanding for themselves is utterly missing when they are addressing non-Muslims. Is it too far fetched to speculate how the idea of a German cultural center together with Protestant church, theater, swimming pool, the lot, as a gesture of reconciliation at the Westerplatte would be received by the Poles? Or why the Japanese did never propose a center for the promotion of their culture at Pearl Harbor?
I will never forget where I have been when 9/11 happened and how long it took for the reality of WHAT had happened to seep in -- and the horror when it finally had. Shortly after 9/11, an anonymous New Yorker released a Macromedia Flash presentation with a collage of news photos from the attacks and the victims. "Only Time" by Enya (which I hadn't heard before) was used as a soundtrack. The Flash presentation spread rapidly over the internet and it is still available. I don't know how many times I've watched it during the days and weeks following 9/11, bawling my eyes out. 30 times? 50 times? How can I ever forget the pictures of those who chose to fall to their death rather than to burn or to suffocate. Some choice. How the thought of the hundreds of firefighters who rushed to the scene to never come back? How the face of the gallant Father Mychal Judge who died, 68 years old, in a hail of steel and concrete as he administered the last rites to a firefighter and an office worker. And you, you who have been there, allow THEM to build one of their disgusting symbols of heathen supremacy over YOUR culture on the ashes of the victims.
What else do you need to know about Islam?
Not quite. Cordoba stands for many other things as well. It was the name of the Islamic empire's center, from where Islam ruled most of the then known world. It's stands for one of the grandest mosques of that time which was, notabene, built on the ashes of a Christian Visigoth church. It stands, too for a massacre of the Jews of Cordoba in 1011 (yes, Al-Andalus wasn't quite what Muslims and their enablers would like us to believe) and for the rape of the city by the Almohades in 1148. Some websites claim that the year 1011 carries some symbolism as well, but while that is entirely possible, it is too far-fetched to make it a point here.
To understand the full implications one has to know two basically simple things:
First, Christians and Jews build their places of worship to, well, worship. Muslims build mosques to symbolize Islamic supremacy over others, to proselytize, to politicize, as an arsenal.
Second, Muslims act on symbols.
The Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on top of the Jewish temple symbolizes Islamic supremacy over Judaism, the Ummayyad Mosque in Syria is built on top of St. John the Baptist, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was converted into a mosque as a symbol of Islamic supremacy over Christianity. The Cordoba Initiative mosque will be built on the ashes of almost thousand Americans who couldn't be recovered after September 11, 2001. An innocent naive fallacy? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Here are some examples from Germany, my country, a country with, as of 2009, 4.3 million Muslims (5.4% of the population). Of these, 1.9 million are German citizens (2.4%). As of 2006, there were about 15,000 ethnic German converts. The large majority are of Turkish origin. Most Muslims live in Berlin and the big cities of former West Germany, mainly in the those of the industrial stronghold along the rivers Rhine and Ruhr.
The Yavuz-Sultan-Selim mosque in Mannheim is one of the biggest in Germany. Its patron, Selim I was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520. Selim carried the empire to the leadership of the Sunni branch of Islam by his conquest of the Middle East. On the eve of his death in 1520, the Ottoman empire spanned almost 1 billion acres.
More than 50 mosques in Germany are called Fatih. Fatih means conqueror and refers to Mehmet II who was Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for a short time from 1444 to September 1446, and later from February 1451 to 1481. At the age of 21, he conquered Constantinople in a bloodbath, bringing an end to the Byzantine Empire. Mehmet continued his conquests in Asia, with the "Anatolian reunification", and in Europe as far as Belgrade.
Other popular names for mosques in Germany are:
Aksa/Aqsa means "farthest", and in this context the "farthest [so far] from Mecca". The Muslim claim to Jerusalem and the Holy Land comes in here as well.
Ayasofya is emblematic for and purposefully reminiscent of Christian humiliation.
Hicret (arabic مسجد هجرة hidschra) refers to Mohammeds flight from Mekka to Medina in 622.
Imam Ali.
Al-Quds stands for Jerusalem. (It was an Al-Quds mosque in Hamburg from where Mohammed Atta set out to promote his very own brand of conquering.)
Selimiye refers to the megalomaniac Selimiye mosque in Edirne:
Then we have the Merkez mosque in Duisburg (Merkez means stronghold in Turkish), currently the biggest in Germany and probably in Europe as well. I discussed it previously for example here and here.
The controversial projected mosque in Cologne is called "Merkez" as well, which is (politically correct) translated not as "stronghold", but as "center". Everything not to let Muslims appear in a less than angelic light. I have covered the interesting and complex controvery that was triggered by the Cologne mosque, but went far beyond, it here:
- 02/17: What Americans don't twig
- 04/26: Innocents Abroad
- 04/30: The Unembarrassables
- 05/10: Loose Apes with Razors
- 05/10: Shameless Cologne
- 05/13: The "Fission Fungus"
- 05/15: Rent-A-Nazi
- 10/02: German Patriot now Muslim
Ask for the name of the mosque next to you and do a quick Google search. The result might be interesting.
One more word about the Cordoba Initiative. Granted for argument's sake that the Ground Zero mosque, pardon me, the Cordoba outreach center to make better people of infidels, was planned and is being realized in good faith. Then we still have to deal with the sensitivity aspect, haven't we. Wasn't it abundantly clear in the first stages of the planning process already that only too many Americans wouldn't react kindly to a project like that? It seems that the sensitivity and respect Muslims are always so stridently demanding for themselves is utterly missing when they are addressing non-Muslims. Is it too far fetched to speculate how the idea of a German cultural center together with Protestant church, theater, swimming pool, the lot, as a gesture of reconciliation at the Westerplatte would be received by the Poles? Or why the Japanese did never propose a center for the promotion of their culture at Pearl Harbor?
I will never forget where I have been when 9/11 happened and how long it took for the reality of WHAT had happened to seep in -- and the horror when it finally had. Shortly after 9/11, an anonymous New Yorker released a Macromedia Flash presentation with a collage of news photos from the attacks and the victims. "Only Time" by Enya (which I hadn't heard before) was used as a soundtrack. The Flash presentation spread rapidly over the internet and it is still available. I don't know how many times I've watched it during the days and weeks following 9/11, bawling my eyes out. 30 times? 50 times? How can I ever forget the pictures of those who chose to fall to their death rather than to burn or to suffocate. Some choice. How the thought of the hundreds of firefighters who rushed to the scene to never come back? How the face of the gallant Father Mychal Judge who died, 68 years old, in a hail of steel and concrete as he administered the last rites to a firefighter and an office worker. And you, you who have been there, allow THEM to build one of their disgusting symbols of heathen supremacy over YOUR culture on the ashes of the victims.
What else do you need to know about Islam?
August 09, 2010
Western Exculpation Strategies for Muslim Terror
The reprobate anglophone media are falling over themselves in their ardour to inform us that the murdered Westerners had not been Christian missionaries. "British doctor murdered by Taliban was 'true hero' and not a Christian missionary, say family", one headline says.Of course, had they been Christian missionaries, it would have made murdering them appear somewhat alright. I am reminded of the 2007 "Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case" of the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, where the Brits, instead of sending a gunboat (or whatever the equivalent is nowadays) ,sent a couple of Muslims, among them such a strong defender of Western values like Lord Ahmed, to explain that the teacher wasn't knowing what she did. Of course, had she named the teddy bear Muhammad with intent, she'd deserved to die.
In Germany, the eculpation efforts go different, and arguably worse, ways. Christian missions are virtually no topic here, but IDEALISM. Nobody who does something NOT for money (like, say, the Holocaust) can't be all bad. So they ignore the Taliban's own admission, ignore the fact that they spared the chauffeur who was able to quote from the Koran and go on pondering, earnestly, seriously and throughly, why it might have been still a hold-up robbery (Raubüberfall):
August 06, 2010
The Compatibility of Western "Progressivism" with Islam
The previous entry It's Islam, Stupid! -- Redux got a couple of interesting comments. Let me summarize: Why do liberals, artists, atheists, homosexual activists, feminists favour Islam over a traditional Christian society? Isn't that illogical? No it isn't. That would only be the case if one would assume that they were, in fact, into freedom. But that is not the case. They are into control, and that's exactly why those people are usually not into just one "progressive", politically correct cause, but into all of them. A leftist will be as well feminist, into "equal rights" for homosexuals, vegetarian- or veganism, teetotalism (which, funny enough, doesn't extent to drugs), "animal rights", the cult of man-made climate change, the choice to murder your unborn child, agnosticism or atheism, "progressive" pedagogy and art, gun control, anti-racism and a rabid egalitarianism, and and and... In fact, it is all about control, bullying and might. They want to see the separation of powers, so fundamental for the rule of law, abolished. They are their own lawmakers, judges and law enforcers, political correctness is their constitution. They are abhorred at the thought that anybody anywhere on this earth might have fun. Wholesome fun, above all. They'd ban heterosexual sex, if they could. They want people sick of body and soul, helpless and frightened.
And that is exactly what Islam wants as well. They are mutually compatible, and each faction think they can control the other and we are supposed to lean back and wait who wins.
I'd like to add that the mutual hatred of Jews fits perfectly well into all this. For to the rebels in the West against God and the Ten Commandments, the godless cult of Islam must appear as the perfect ally.
And that is exactly what Islam wants as well. They are mutually compatible, and each faction think they can control the other and we are supposed to lean back and wait who wins.
I'd like to add that the mutual hatred of Jews fits perfectly well into all this. For to the rebels in the West against God and the Ten Commandments, the godless cult of Islam must appear as the perfect ally.
August 03, 2010
It's Islam, Stupid! -- Redux
Commenter Fabio Barbieri replies to my entry It's Islam, Stupid!:
So here we have a woman, an immigrant to Britain, who owes everything she is to the culture in which she was raised. She was showered with honours and important positions where she had considerable influence on the opinion making process within the culture that raised and made her. And as I don't know the circumstances, I am not even saying that this remarkable career was, all or partly, a matter of affirmative action, white guilt, Western self-loathing or whatever. Let's assume she was, and is, truly deserving of all that. And yes, there is no veil in sight and let's, too, reflect for a precious moment what would have happened to her had she remained in Sudan.
And when all is said and done, where do her loyalties lie? It's Islam, stupid!
I don't know why Zeinab Bedawi made me think of this.
On the same day as you published this (Sunday 25 July) I saw a long (half-hour) BBC interview with Eileen Gittins, the founder of the print-to-order company Blurb. (Print-to-order companies are internet-based businesses that allow anyone to publish a book and make as many or as few copies as they can sell or pay for. The best-known is Lulu.) The interviewer was Zeinab Bedawi, a Muslim of the same kind as Aygül Özkan, dressed in subdued chic, gracefully made up and coiffured, and with not the shadow of a veil in sight. From the beginning, Ms.Bedawi was visibly hostile, and her questioning was clearly aimed at showing, either that there was something unethical – as in the case of old-fashioned vanity publishers – about print-to-order, or that it would lower the level of communication. For the first ten minutes or so of the interview, I felt that this was the caste arrogance of the professional journo coming out – we cannot allow all that blogger rabble to pollute the sanctuary of mass communication with their muddy boots and vile manners. But then, at first from behind a tangle of words and claims, and then more and more clearly, another agenda showed itself. Suppose someone published something that was offensive. Well, answered Ms.Gittins, we have mechanisms in place – we don’t vet everything ourselves, but we encourage the public to make complaints. Ah, said Ms.Bedawi, but what about things offensive to particular groups? Like, say, the Danish cartoons? She started really hammering at this point, which is when I switched the TV off – though I must say that Ms.Gittins was being admirably stout and refusing to privilege a group’s claims over freedom of expression.Astute observations like that always spur my interest, so I did a quick Google search on Zeinab Bedawi (or Badawi). Here is an exerpt from her Wikipedia entry. She ...
This made me think. It seems evident to me that what Ms.Bedawi instinctively opposed was the thought of thousands, maybe millions of people, each publishing freely - what is already happening with the internet, but in the more permanent and respected medium of paper. Where the surface of caste prejudice and the inner reality of religious threat meet, was in hating the idea of mass action - mob action - in the print media. Now Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims, certainly do not dislike mob action as such: it is their main way to be felt - yelling crowds of bearded youths pouring from mosques on hot Friday afternoons. On the other hand, the appeal clearly made by Bedawi to non-Muslims in general is clearly coded in a language of snobbery, intended to reach the elites and those who regard themselves as elite. It says: "Don't allow this banausic mob of Sunday scribblers to take control of the media from you - you who are educated, professional and enlightened. See what risks you run when you allow Uncle Tom Cobbley and all to say what they think about things they know nothing of - such as Islam?" In other words, there is an inherent attempt to co-opt the non-Muslim societal leaderships into the job of Muslim repression, by flattering their intellectual and social presumptions. You can hear it in the constant but never justified claim that anyone who criticizes or opposes Islam does so because he is ignorant: this is frequently repeated by establishment supporters of Islam - and you can see that the assumption involved helps them accept the claim, by flattering their own self-image. Hey, you don't understand Islam - because we do! Who else but us, the educated, the enlightened? So a religion that lives on the unleashing of its own mobs - and in which sometimes the mobs even devour some of the elites, and always threaten them - also advances by flattering the natural snobbish and repressive instincts of the elites of opposite groups; and not just by threatening them. That is not necessary when you can just arouse their own contempt - laced by unspoken fear - for the mobs in their own world. Of course, fears remaining a useful unadmitted motivation, but there is no need to ever mention it: to the contrary, you may act for all the world like the most quivering of cowed dhimmis and still see in the mirror the face of a paragon, a hero of enlightened vision and principle.
... was born in Sudan and has lived in Britain since the age of one. Badawi was educated at Hornsey High School for Girls in North London, followed by the University of Oxford (St Hilda's College) in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) with a post-graduate degree on the Middle East from the School of Oriental and African Studies, awarded with a distinction. At Oxford she was a member of the Oxford University Broadcasting Society.
Journalism career
Badawi was a researcher and broadcast journalist for Yorkshire TV from 1982 to 1986. After a spell at BBC Manchester she joined Channel 4 News in 1988, and co-presented the programme from 1989 until leaving for the BBC in 1998.
At the BBC Badawi worked at Westminster on live political programmes for five years, and also worked on BBC radio, regularly presenting The World Tonight on Radio 4 and BBC World Service's Newshour. In 2005, Badawi became the new presenter of The World on BBC Four, the UK's first daily news bulletin devoted principally to international news. In May 2007 the programme was rebranded as World News Today.
In November 2009, Badawi was named "international TV personality of the year" in the annual AIBs, the international media excellence awards organised by the Association for International Broadcasting.
From 2010, in addition to her presenting role on BBC World News, Badawi has presented on the BBC News Channel.
Public positions
Badawi has been an adviser to the Foreign Policy Centre and a Council Member of the Overseas Development Institute. She is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery (since 2004) and the British Council.
So here we have a woman, an immigrant to Britain, who owes everything she is to the culture in which she was raised. She was showered with honours and important positions where she had considerable influence on the opinion making process within the culture that raised and made her. And as I don't know the circumstances, I am not even saying that this remarkable career was, all or partly, a matter of affirmative action, white guilt, Western self-loathing or whatever. Let's assume she was, and is, truly deserving of all that. And yes, there is no veil in sight and let's, too, reflect for a precious moment what would have happened to her had she remained in Sudan.
And when all is said and done, where do her loyalties lie? It's Islam, stupid!
I don't know why Zeinab Bedawi made me think of this.
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The first amendment is viewed as sacred and one of the founding principles is freedom of religion. To the best of my knowledge I do not remember a zoning requirement for a house of worship. Topless bars and so forth may be zoned into special districts.
Mosque Proponents fall into one of three groups
1) Extreme civil libertarians like Bloomberg and Nadler.
2) Communists like the Duck who want to rub Americas nose in the dirt no matter what.
3) Muslims will a mixture of a persecution complex, genuine ignorance over the significance of 9-11 and those with dreadful taste..
18 August, 2010 01:39
Nora, I can't help you understand because I don';t understand. The St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, destroyed on 9/11 by one of the falling towers is still struggling to rebuild. The Greek Archdioceses has accused New York officials of turning their back on them while giving the Muslim Mosque the green light to go ahead. Talks with the New York Port Authority have stalled and authority officials say they will not be revived. The same government officials who are facilitating the mosque, regularly put zoning roadblocks in the way of Christian and Jewish congregations to build or expand their facilities. As far as the claim that we are somehow denying Muslims their rights, they have hundreds of mosques and prayer rooms in New York. The argument is a red herring. This is about sensitivity to victims.
Americans agree that building the mosque may be legal but this is a sensitive spot. We are constantly told by our officials to be sensitive to Muslims beliefs. Well, what about them being sensitive to our values? I just watched some talking head idiot on TV say that opponents to the mosque were just being "too emotional" Well, 2,900 people were incinerated and America was thrown in a tumult because 12 adherents of the "religion of peace" hijacked four airliners. I think we have a right to be emotional. Our government officials are either cowards and think appeasement will make Muslims like us or they just are so PC brainwashed they are absolute morons. Either way, they are trying to cuddle and coddle a cobra. When it finally rears up and bites them, they are going to be surprised as hell.
Oh yes, the "moderate" Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who is behind the mosque, it appears that what he says in English and in Arabic are two different things.
Sorry I can't help you understand. The world is turned upside down right now.
18 August, 2010 05:06
The Constitution and Amendments are brief and don't spell out what they mean. So everyone has an opinion, and often it falls to the Supreme Court to decide. Then people talk about court precedent, usually in slogan form, such as creationism can't be taught in school due to "separation of church and state." Court precedent on zoning laws and houses of worship are not well known, so people are just shooting from the hip when they spout off First Amendment.
18 August, 2010 09:32
Madison, "Memorial & Remonstrance"
Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, "that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considerd as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance. True it is, that no other rule exists, by which any question which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the will of the majority; but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.
18 August, 2010 15:13
Yes Editrix you are right that the First Amendment has nothing to do with where a place of religious worship can be built. First Amendment when it comes to religion is about separation of church and state and the right to practice a religion.
The issue comes in the Fourteenth Amendment in the second sentence (which I underline):
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
See to say American-Muslims who bought a building that they cannot make it a mosque because it’s Islamic technically violates the 14th Amendment. Because there would be no issue if Christians bought the building and turned it into a church or if an American-Muslim wanted to open a grocery store there would be no issues. But to take it away without legal reasons and due process because it’s a particular religion of a citizen or citizens would violate the 14th Amendment and possible the 1st Amendment by default because it religious discrimination. A group trying to stop the mosque there did try to get the building deemed historical but it failed because it didn't meet the requirements.
Now there are eminent domain laws. Fifth Amendment allows the Federal government to take property for “public use” but they must compensate the owners. States also have eminent domain laws which can take land for public use or the public good. But depending on the circumstances Federal and States can be overruled by the 14th Amendment.
This really comes down to the property owner, he can have a mosque or he can be sensitive to the matter and not have a mosque. From what I understand Muslims have been worshiping there since 2009.
As Gator pointed out the sad thing is that this mosque is two blocks away but yet a church at Ground Zero is being given the run around. A Greek Orthodox Church accused New York officials of turning their backs on the only church destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks,
Problem in America is our hyper PC sensitivity when it comes to Islam. People have no problem challenging or criticizing Christianity or Judaism but when it comes to Islam everybody become mute, of course this wouldn’t have anything to do with acts of violence and threats of violence that are committed by Muslims when they are offended. If there are truly moderate Muslims they need to speak up and challenge the fundamentalist. Moderate Muslims only seem to pop up after a fundamentalist commits an act of violence and tells us non-Muslims that this is not Islam. Hey don’t tell me, tell the Islamic fundamentalist.
18 August, 2010 15:19