...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Wild world, a revisionist take: Two men of the world, Pete 'n' Joe, do a weird, atonal version of the Cat's old Tea for the Tillerman tune.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:39 | link | comments (1)

Grovel. Scrape. Shuffle. Bow (Part II): Dutch dhimmis offer profuse apologies via You Tube for Fitna. From wired:

Dutch people eager to dissociate themselves from the anti-Quran film Fitna have taken to the web to apologize for the controversial video.

Hundreds of Dutch citizens have uploaded videos to YouTube showing themselves holding signs with apologies for the film. In other anti-Fitna clips, the subjects simply say the words, "I'm sorry."

Fitna, a 17-minute film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, juxtaposes passages from the Islamic holy book with graphic footage of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe. In one scene, the sound of paper ripping can be seen as a reader pages through the Quran.

A website called Sorry for the Film encourages users to upload photos of themselves to indicate they do not support the views propagated in Fitna. Mediamatic, a technology collective based in Amsterdam, posted instructions for making "Sorry Fitna" videos…

There's only one word for these characters: pathetic.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:00 | link | comments (1)

Political chameleon: He's black, white, rich, poor. Why, this graduate of Harvard law school is even "blue collar". Whatever you want him to be, he'll be, so long as you're taken in by his "Everyman" scam and elect him president.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:37 | link | comments

Trinity United’s pity party: You can understand why Bambi’s church is so sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. As the Wrightists see it, whitey’s to blame for all their tsuris; as the Palestinians (and other Arabs) see it, the Zionists are to blame. Also, both victim groups are always up for a good nutty-as-baclava conspiracy theory, especially one involving the Jews.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:45 | link | comments

Growing by leaps and bounds: For the first time in history, there more Muslims in the world than there are Catholics.

Don’t worry, though. Only a tiny minority of the new Numero Uno are violent “extremists”. The vast majority of those who want to see sharia calling the shots are perfectly content to allow nature take its course and let demographics do the heavy lifting.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:28 | link | comments

The naked truth: Under the terms of sharia, dhimmis get to live (under humiliating circumstances) provided they don’t criticise the religious doctrines of their overlords. Geert Wilders has dared to defy those terms. In so doing, he has rent a small tear in the Iron Veil that has fallen on Europe. That makes him and his subversive film a clear threat to those who think sharia and dhimmitude are the way to go. From FrontPage Magazine:

Even before its official release, Fitna, the new film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, served to demonstrate the dire threat that radical Islam poses to the West.

 

Muslim indignation at the film has fueled a phenomenon that has habitually stifled honest discussion about Islamic terror and its origins. When non-Muslims point out that Islamic jihadists commit acts of violence and are inspired to do so by the Qur'an, many non-Muslim and Muslim apologists for jihad, including many who are widely known as "moderates," respond by claiming that those who point to this truth are committing an act of "hatred," "bigotry," "Islamophobia," and the like. Curiously, these supposed voices of reason have not a word to say about the actual acts of violence and hatred committed by the jihadists -- or about the sources that engender them. Rather, the daring voice that reports on these actions is vilified.

Wilders' film speaks for itself. Quoting Qur'anic verses and Muslims themselves, Fitna clearly demonstrates that Muslims who engage in violence and hatred do so with reference to the Qur'an. In making this clear, Wilder's film also points the way to a solution to the crisis within the Islamic faith: Only when peaceful Muslims begin to turn their indignation upon the extremists among them, rather than upon Wilders and others critics who speak out against the dangers of Islamic fanaticism and its sources, will there be progress against the spread of jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism within the Muslim world and beyond. Unfortunately, the intolerant reaction to Wilders' film shows yet again that this is, at best, a dim hope.

Like the little boy in that Andersen story, Wilders had the audacity to point out that the Emperor is buck nekkid. The clueless and the craven are hoping that, since it was a “right wing” “anti-immgration” “Islamophobe” who did the pointing, the vast majority of people will ignore him, and continue to hail the Emperor’s beautiful haute couture. So far, that seems to be what’s happening.

Update: Der Spiegel interviews Wilders--and the interviewer is Fitna to be tied by the Dutch guy's audacity.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:46 | link | comments

The sunny side: The executive director of the Canadian Islamic Congress in Ottawa laments the kafirs’ inability to see the Prophet Mohammed as he really was (i.e. one peaceful, righteous dude):

If the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) were to live among us today in our democratic Canadian society, he would not recognize or accept the explanation of Islam that some self-proclaimed "authorities" are promoting and offering to Muslims and the world.

Their inflexibility and rigidity in response to changing times and cultures goes against the encouraged moderation, logic and consideration he stood for and the perversions of these values stand in the path of progress. They produce an "in-captured mentality" that is excessively pessimistic, rigid, spiritless, visionless, and intellectually dead. It undermines the core of God’s powerful message in the Qur’an: "And We have not sent you (Muhammad) except as a mercy to humanity." (21:107)

When the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was asked to curse non-Muslims, he - the best and wisest of teachers and mentors -- emphatically refused, saying "I have not been sent to curse people but as a mercy to all humanity." (Muslim)

So, what about abuse, violence, or terrorism in the name of Islam (sometimes "hidden" behind less direct words)? Muhammad forbade it ALL; he was not sent just to those who wish to be "true representatives," but to all people, as the MERCY of God.

And that is why the loud voices who call themselves over and over "sole" representatives of Islam cannot be what they proclaim, because they do not follow the Prophet’s teachings in spirit. In their understanding of Islam, there is only ritual but not the essentials; their interpretations are void of true Islamic logic.

Muhammad (pbuh) was not sent as a dictator, but as God’s messenger, advisor, guide, mentor, reformer, teacher... He was sent to heal society, not to oppress or poison it; to build good relations among all peoples, not to fragment them; to ease life for humanity, not to make it onerous; to bring hope to all, not fearful anxiety; to help us develop social responsibility, not just retreat into "survival of the fittest."

He was sent for all of these good reasons; both theory and the praxis, both concept and hands-on. In contrast, those who claim to be "sole representatives of Islam" do quite the opposite in their words and deeds.

Are those who act so zealously against the Prophet’s logic blinded by their egos to the extent that they cannot recognize how much he disliked acts of abuse, violence and injustice?! If only these self-appointed "representatives" could know how much they do not know about Islam; if only they would follow the humbler example of those Muslims who seek to live their faith in spirit and action, rather than by ritual alone. But perhaps if they did stop to reflect and become spiritually enlightened, our 21st- century media would have little to talk about. Imagine; all those Islamophobic reporters, columnists and editors laid off - gone!

Tragically, it is part of the human condition that some of the worst-off among us are those who are so full of their own importance that they are unaware of their ignorance. Out of their ignorance and arrogance, they produce daily this excitement for the media, who wait in breathless anticipation - like Hollywood paparazzi -- for juicy tidbits to use against Islam and Muslims. Truth goes out the window long before pens hit paper or fingers tap the computer keyboards of manufactured journalism…

Some “juicy tidbits,” huh? Oh, you mean like these? I can see why they would really bum you out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:32 | link | comments

Bambi and Oprah: A MadTV parody.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:53 | link | comments

The audacity of cluelessness: Young, old, black, white—they all love their Bambino. From the Chicago Sun-Times (my bolds):

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Barack Obama supporters in the Steel City must not have read the national polls.

Young white males in this town also must not have heard that Gov. Edward Rendell, the state’s top booster of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s push in Pennsylvania, doesn’t believe they will vote for a black man.

Because Pittsburghers — in all shades — came out en masse, filling up the auditorium at the Soldiers Military Museum where his more-than-40-minute speech was interrupted repeatedly with raucous shouts, whistles, clapping and stomping.

Children too young to see over the heads of standing adults stood on the seats and clapped as if they understood every word.

‘Half hour too long’

Seith Reighard, a 20-year-old microbiology major at Pittsburgh University, sat with a row of other young white males as they waited for Obama to appear.

“I think Obama is the most genuine politician I have seen in a long time,” Reighard said. ”My generation had lost our faith in politicians to actually do something, and finally I see a guy come along who will. It doesn’t matter, the color of his skin.

“I am here because I feel for once my views will be heard.”

National polls put Obama behind by double digits in Pennsylvania, but given the enthusiastic turnout (all of the free tickets were taken), you couldn’t tell he’s an underdog in the state.

He was introduced by Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who told the crowd that Obama’s campaign offers a “chance for America to chart a new course” and cited Obama’s “intellect” and “integrity” as some of the factors leading to Casey’s endorsement.

“We need to hear and listen to the voices of young people all across the country,” Casey said. “Young people have sparked a renewed sense of hope and optimism.

Under fire, Obama has appealed to the “better angels of our nature,” Casey said…

Yeah, he’s a regular Martin Luther King, rolled into one.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:35 | link | comments

Building faux-democracy at the expense of crippling the real McCoy: What happens when an American president grossly misunderestimates the enduring appeal of jihad, sharia and Islamic Judenhass? The Jews get shafted—again. By Mort Zuckerman in JWR:

The world applauded when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, forcibly removing Jewish settlers. At last, the Palestinians were free to show how they could build their own society.

But what did they do with their freedom? They elected the terrorist organization Hamas in 2006. First Fatah and now Hamas have rained 4,000 rockets on Israel, killed 24, and wounded 620 — the equivalent of killing 1,200 Americans and wounding 31,000. The citizens of Sderot and Ashkelon have suffered a collective trauma; children fear that when parents leave for work, they will never see them again.

And what does the world do?

It criticizes Israel — Israel! — for a "disproportionate" response. Israel is discriminating in trying to defend its people. It attacks Gaza's rocket launchers, weapons factories, and terrorists, all hidden in civilian areas.

What is a proportionate response? None at all, it seems.

Hamas kills indiscriminately. It makes no distinction between civilians and combatants. But it is Israel that earns the opprobrium. The moral equivalency was evident in a New York Times headline: "Hamas and Israelis Trade Attacks, Killing at Least Nine." Nor did TV broadcast pictures of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza celebrating the news that eight teenagers had been shot dead and many more injured in the library of a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem.

Would Paris, London, Bonn, or New York sit back quietly if terrorists attacked from sanctuaries somewhere just off their borders? Silent voices. Where is the world's outrage against these Palestinian war crimes? Twelve resolutions have passed the United Nations Human Rights Council on the conflict, but not one has made even a passing reference to the terrorism against Israel.

Where is the appreciation that while under attack, Israel has continued to supply its enemies with electricity and with 2,500 tons of food and medicines every day? Last year, 14,000 Gazan Palestinians were treated in Israeli medical facilities.

But Palestinians continue to get away with their confidence trick of persuading the world that they are the victims. The death of every Arab woman and child is a propaganda victory for Hamas, so it uses women and children as human shields and then exaggerates the casualties. The distortion foisted on the world is manifest in the celebrated case of the death of Mohammed al-Dura, who was alleged to have been shot by the Israelis in Gaza on the first day of the intifada. Now an independent French ballistic expert reports that he could not have died from Israeli gunfire. The technical analysis shows the shots could have come only from Palestinian positions.

And what of the Palestinian leader supposed to be leading the peace effort? Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas says, "What is happening now in Gaza is more than a Holocaust." Absurd? This from the "peacemaker" whose doctoral dissertation included the theory that European Zionists conspired with the Nazis to push for the Holocaust so that it could ultimately result in the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. According to Abbas's writings, 6 million Jews were not sent to the gas chambers to be killed but were among corpses cremated for sanitation reasons.

Some suggest Israel should deal with Hamas; there is talk of Egypt negotiating a truce. But why negotiate with an enemy dedicated to Israel's destruction? Recognition of Hamas would prove that terrorism, not diplomacy, is the way to gain Israeli concessions — not to speak of international support — and would strengthen Hamas in the West Bank. Any truce would protect the smuggling of arms and munitions until Hamas can attack again, with missiles that can reach Tel Aviv.

This current turmoil is a direct outcome of Bush administration misjudgments. We forced the Israelis and the Palestinians to include Hamas in the 2006 election. Later, we caused the removal of Israeli control of the Philadelphi road, a crucial barrier in the protection against the smuggling of arms, insisting it be left to the Palestinians under Egyptian and European supervision. Israeli protests that foreign troops would not stop either terrorists or arms from making their way into Gaza went unheeded.

America has an extra moral obligation to defuse this crisis…

Not happening, Mort. Instead, Condi Rice is adding accelerant to Israel’s funeral pyre with her incessant calls for “peace”. (Ms. Rice is being ably abetted by Israel's clueless leadership, which is delighted to collude in their state's demise.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:20 | link | comments

Grovel. Bow.  Shuffle.  Scrape. Repeat: Dutch Jews do the ever-popular dhimmi dance. From ejpress:

AMSTERDAM (EJP)---The umbrella representative group of Jewish communities in Holland, called the newly-released anti-Islam film ‘Fitna’ by extreme-rightist Dutch MP Geert Wilders “counterproductive” and “generalizing”.

 

But the country’s "Centraal Joods Overleg" (Central Jewish Platform) drew the attention to the fact that the 15-minute film, entitled "Fitna" a Koranic term meaning ‘strife’, shows Muslim clerics calling to behead Jews, Koran passages equating Jews to "pigs and monkeys" and photos of demonstrators promising "another Holocaust" and praising Adolf Hitler.

 

 

The film, which shows footage of the New York 11 September terrorist attacks followed by the Madrid train bombings, was posted on the internet on Thursday.

 

Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV) which holds nine of the Dutch parliament's 150 seats, said he wants to show that the Koran "is an inspiration for intolerance, murder and terror".

 

In a statement, the Dutch Jewish body said Wilders’s film "was guilty of serious generalizations." "Only the negative elements of the Koran are shown," it said, adding: "By presenting graphics on the explosive increase of the Muslim population in Holland and Europe in relation with pictures of terrorist attacks and with the slogan ‘stop Islamization, protect our freedom", Wilders suggests that all Muslims are potential terrorists."

 

While the anti-Jewish statements Wilders compiled "demonstrates some Muslim clerics have dreadful ideas about Jews and that even children are being brainwashed," the film only serves to "polarize Dutch society and is counterproductive to the fight against extremism,” the Jewish body said.

The Central Jewish Platform said it wants to work with the Muslims in Holland and the rest of the country in order to halt extremism and radicalization…

 

It heartens me not at all to know that the Dutch Jewish establishment is as out to lunch as the CJC.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:41 | link | comments

Speed demons: The bad news is that driving in Saudi Arabia is extremely dangerous, and traffic fatalities in the Magic Kingdom keep going up and up.

The good news is that they can't blame it on the women drivers.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:30 | link | comments

The real deal: Racist ranter Jeremiah Wright showed up at a Chicago church for a birthday party the other day—and the crown went wild. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor surprised a South Side congregation Friday night by showing up at an event marking poet Maya Angelou's birthday.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright received a thunderous, standing ovation from members of St. Sabina Church, which hosted Angelou as she nears her 80th birthday.)

"When he came out, people literally went wild," said St. Sabina's pastor, the Rev. Michael Pfleger.

Wright, Obama's spiritual adviser for years, has lain low ever since his fiery past sermons became political fodder in the presidential campaign.

Obama has condemned remarks by Wright that denounced America for allegedly racist and genocidal acts. Wright recently scrapped plans to receive an award in Texas and to speak at Houston and Tampa, Fla., churches.

Wright did not talk publicly about Obama on Friday night. Instead, he gave the benediction at St. Sabina and smiled as the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to Angelou.

Wright attended at the invitation of Pfleger, who called recent criticism of Wright "shameful."

"I wanted him to come here so he could see that people really stand with him and support him while he's under all this attack," Pfleger said Saturday. "America, unfortunately, has been really cheated of knowing the real Dr. Wright."…

Oh, so you mean the real Dr. Wright isn’t an obnoxious conspiracy-purveying, America-loathing, Jew-despising, Farrakhan-adoring hate monger? Good to know.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:22 | link | comments

“Silent” treatment: The Los Angeles Times calls the Muslim response to Fitna “muted”. Here’s some of the mutedness, as reported by Reuters (my bolds):

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Muslim nations on Friday condemned a film by a Dutch lawmaker that accuses the Koran of inciting violence, and Dutch Muslim leaders urged restraint.

Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigration Freedom Party, launched his short video on the Internet on Thursday evening, prompting an al Qaeda-linked website to call for his death and increased attacks on Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan.

"The correct Sharia (Islamic law) response is to cut (off) his head and let him follow his predecessor, van Gogh, to hell," a member of Al-Ekhlaas wrote on the al-Qaeda affiliated forum, according to the SITE Institute, a U.S.-based terrorism monitoring service.

Dutch director Theo van Gogh, who made a film accusing Islam of condoning violence against women, was murdered by a militant Islamist in 2004.

Wilders' film "Fitna" -- an Arabic term sometimes translated as "strife" -- intersperses images of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and Islamist bombings with quotations from the Koran, Islam's holy book.

The film urges Muslims to tear out "hate-filled" verses from the Koran and starts and ends with a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb under his turban, accompanied by the sound of ticking.

The cartoon, first published in Danish newspapers, ignited violent protests around the world and a boycott of Danish products in 2006. Many Muslims regard any depiction of the Prophet as offensive.

"The film is solely intended to incite and provoke unrest and intolerance among people of different religious beliefs and to jeopardise world peace and stability," the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) said…

Yup. You can barely hear them.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:58 | link | comments

Lovely to look at; as left as they come: He has little experience; his heroes include a racist Christian (Jeremiah W.) and a racist Muslim (Malcolm X); and he has lots of unresolved, ahem, parental issues. And yet folks are still all gung-ho for Bambi. What gives? Well, according to Kenneth Blackwell (no, not that Mr. Blackwell, of the egregiously lame best-and-worst dressed lists), it’s because the Bambino is so gosh-darn purty. From the New York Sun:

It's an amazing time to be alive in America. We're in a year of firsts in this presidential election: the first viable woman candidate; the first viable African-American candidate; and, a candidate who is the first frontrunning freedom fighter over 70. The next president of America will be a first.

We won't truly be in an election of firsts, however, until we judge every candidate by where they stand. We won't arrive where we should be until we no longer talk about skin color or gender.

Now that Barack Obama steps to the front of the Democratic field, we need to stop talking about his race, and start talking about his policies and his politics.

The reality is this: Though the Democrats will not have a nominee until August, unless Hillary Clinton drops out, Mr. Obama is now the frontrunner, and its time America takes a closer and deeper look at him.

Some pundits are calling him the next John F. Kennedy. He's not. He's the next George McGovern. And it's time people learned the facts.

Because the truth is that Mr. Obama is the single most liberal senator in the entire U.S. Senate. He is more liberal than Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, or Mrs. Clinton.

Never in my life have I seen a presidential frontrunner whose rhetoric is so far removed from his record. Walter Mondale promised to raise our taxes, and he lost. George McGovern promised military weakness, and he lost. Michael Dukakis promised a liberal domestic agenda, and he lost.

Yet Mr. Obama is promising all those things, and he's not behind in the polls. Why? Because the press has dealt with him as if he were in a beauty pageant.

Mr. Obama talks about getting past party, getting past red and blue, to lead the United States of America. But let's look at the more defined strokes of who he is underneath this superficial "beauty."…

We know who he is. Jesse Jackson. With bigger ears.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:42 | link | comments

First things first: Pakistan's new prime minister was sworn in the other day. His first order of business--slamming that dastardly Dutch exposé, Fitna.

Second order of business: trying to keep the "insulted" from doing too much damage to civic infrastracture.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:24 | link | comments

Spitzer tchotchkes: It never ceases to amaze me what people try to flog on e-Bay. For instance, Eliot Spitzer “memorabilia”. Here are some of the many incredible items which, according to a Newsday article, are going for a song:

·         the Web domain name clientnine.com., priced at a bargain-basement $250,000

·         a photo greeting card from the Spitzer family, current high bid just $9.99.

·         a signed, 8x10 glossy photograph of the disgraced governor--$75 .

·          The Emperor’s Club VIP coffee mug

·         a bald baby doll from the 1940s advertised as a Spitzer look-alike

Who the heck would want to spend actual money on this chazerai? According to Moe Berkowitz, who's been in the political memorablia game since folks were going Madly for Adlai, "There are local collectors: people who collect senators and governors, they of course need to have that (Spitzer item) in their collection…There are people who collect items of people who have fallen in disgrace. Another Spitzer area is people who will collect Judaica; people who collect items that are Jewish."

Thanks, but I think I'll stick with my dreidel collection.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:40 | link | comments

Memo to fox: please see to that sticky hen-house situation: Muslim groups are calling on the Arab League to be more pro-active in "solving" the problems in Darfur.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:10 | link | comments

Fear, loathing and cluelessness in the U.K.: A pundit in the Daily Mail frets that Fitna may propel Old Blighty into an unwanted jihad:

From the Netherlands drift the first sparks of a firestorm that threatens to engulf Britain and the rest of Europe.

At its centre stands one man, a 44-year-old by the name of Geert Wilders.

He is a Dutch MP who likes sharp suits and has a shock of blond hair.

It's a look not dissimilar to that of car salesman "Swiss Toni" from classic comedy series The Fast Show - but mention the name of Geert Wilders in Holland and it won't raise a laugh.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

His actions, the Dutch government is warning, have put countless lives at risk. Plans are being drawn up to evacuate Dutch embassies around the world, riot police are on standby in Amsterdam and ordinary citizens are cancelling foreign holidays as they prepare for trouble.

There are already protests on the streets and by the goverments of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

Wilders, you see, has spoken out against the Muslim faith. He's attacked the "tsunami of Islamisation" that he says is engulfing traditional Dutch society.

He's attacked the prophet Mohammed, saying that were he alive today he should be "tarred and feathered" and deported as an extremist.

He's attacked the culture of political correctness that has seen immigrants given housing and benefits without even having to try to assimilate into Western culture.

And he's attacked the Koran, a book he likens to Hitler's Mein Kampf, describing it as the cornerstone of a "fascist ideology" that aims to destroy all who oppose it.

Wilders has also made a 15-minute movie. Called Fitna (Arabic for "strife"), it was broadcast on the internet for the first time on Thursday afternoon, prompting fears of a backlash against Dutch citizens of unprecedented proportions.

Wilders remains unrepentant. Over the past few years the Right-wing MP has received many death threats and knows his life is in danger.

Even so, he says: "If I were to moderate my voice, if I stop saying what I think, then the people who use undemocratic arguments like death threats would have won.

There have been protests on the streets in response to Wilders' anti-Islamic statements

"So I will never stop, because if I moderate my voice, if I do not tell the truth according to me, then the people who use threats will win. I believe that in a democracy those people should never win."

Opinions of Wilders are mixed. The Establishment seeks to discredit him as an over-ambitious, Right-wing, pro-Israeli politician who will do anything to gain popularity.

It says his comments are so inflammatory that they have no place in a civilised society.

But others insist he should be free to express his opinions and that those who seek to silence him are the real threat.

Surveys show that many people agree with him. Where others have been cowed into silence, Wilders has given voice to the concerns of the masses (or so the argument goes).

And, as Wilders has noted, those concerns are not unique to the Dutch - but are also boiling close to the surface in Britain.

When a Danish newspaper published caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2005, more than 100 people died during ensuing protests across the Muslim world.

So it is hardly surprising that mainstream TV companies haven't been keen to broadcast Wilders's video.

The sensitivities surrounding the film mean that even making it available on the web hasn't proved straightforward.

When an early clip from Fitna was placed on YouTube, the internet moviesharing site, the authorities in Pakistan took the unprecedented step of blocking access to it.

Then, earlier this week, the website on which Wilders had proposed showing the film was closed down by its internet service provider amid concerns over its content.

Undeterred, Wilders vowed that, if necessary, he would personally hand out copies of it on DVD in Amsterdam.

In the end, he didn't have to, as he posted the footage on LiveLeak.com, a Britishbased video-sharing website.

It is that connection which yesterday dragged the UK into the controversy.

"This heinous measure by a Dutch lawmaker and a British establishment. . . is indicative of the continuation of the evilness and deep vengeance such Western nationals have against Muslims," Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said.

The documentary juxtaposes Koran extracts against footage of terrorist atrocities, of Sharia law in action and of jihad...

Quel horreur! Grounds, indeed, for a relaunch of the holy war. Thing is, though, the pundit hasn't noticed that it’s already well underway.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:01 | link | comments

Some gentle words from a true believer: North Carolina Muslim to Geert Wilders: Islam Will Dominate Europe, Destroy Western Civilization, Tear Out Dutch MP's Heart.

As always, thinking globally; acting locally.

Update: Chill, fellah. It seems Geert left a lot out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:40 | link | comments

Donkey shenanigans: In keeping with today’s (unintentional) animal theme (so far, dogs, sheep and wolves), here’s an excerpt of a book review by Raymond Ibrahim, editor of The Al Qaeda Reader. (I have a well-thumbed copy, if anyone cares to borrow it.) Ibrahim is explicating Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam by Dr. Tawfik Hamid, who knows all about the subject since he’s a former jihadi:                                                    

…Hamid’s metaphors are more poignant and instructive. After accurately likening radical Islam to a “cancerous cell” within the Islamic body, he goes on to discuss Western “myths and misconceptions” regarding the spread of this cancer (i.e. that Islamist terror is the inevitable byproduct of poverty, discrimination, ignorance, absence of democracy, colonialism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, U.S. foreign policy, et. al.). He then reminds us that “Every medical doctor [i.e. people who truly apply the “scientific method”] will assert that it is very difficult to treat a disease if it is misdiagnosed or if the disease is confused with symptoms. If we misdiagnose, then we treat the wrong illness. If we confuse the roots of the illness or superficially mask its symptoms, we cannot effect [sic] a cure. The same applies to the societal disease of terrorism.”

Bringing his psychological background in play, Hamid carefully delineates the phases of radicalization — from hatred to suppression of conscience to desensitization to violence — with a stress on how radicals seek to suppress the human capacity for critical thinking, well demonstrated by a telling dialogue with a senior member of al-Gam’a who once explained to him that “One’s brain is similar to a donkey…you can ride it to the palace of Allah, but you must leave it outside when you enter.”

To sum it up: the trouble with the world today is that too many asses have parked their brains.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:31 | link | comments

Baaaa, humbug: A Reuters blogger describes a scene supposedly redolent with meaning—Obama campaigning in a building where a scene from The Silence of the Lambs was shot:

PITTSBURGH – Sen. Barack Obama held a campaign rally on Friday in the Soldiers and Sailors museum in Pittsburgh. No drama there? Well, the building was used to film a crucial sequence in the movie “The Silence of the Lambs.”

For anyone not familiar with the 1991 thriller, the scene occurs when serial killer Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, is locked in a large cage from which he toys with Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee played by Jodie Foster .

It’s in this scene that she discloses to him her childhood memory of finding a slaughterhouse for lambs.

The cage is super secure but not secure enough to hold Lecter, who escapes by clubbing his guards to death, stringing one of them up from the walls and then ….

Actually, you should see the movie for yourself. It didn’t win five Oscars for nothing.

Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey held a news conference to explain his decision to endorse Obama in the very room where the cage was constructed, a spacious, opulent chamber with an ornate balcony.

Obama, who is running for the Democratic nomination, made no reference to the film in his speech in a hall downstairs.

But there was a distant echo of one of its most chilling lines. Lecter taunts Starling when she visits him in the cage with the words: “People will say we’re in love.”

During his speech, a supporter shouted to Obama: “I love you, Obama.” And he replied smoothly: “I love you back.”

There’s another chilling echo, of course, one that has nothing to do with Hannibal the Cannibal but much to do lambs. It’s the sound of Jesse J. and Malcolm X seeping out from under Bambi's ill-fitting sheepskin. Not that the bewitched would notice. Even after the Wright revelations, to them he's still the same sweet, appealing lambikins--the café au lait JFK. And unless it turns out he was frolicking with Eliot and "Kristen" at the Mayflower, they're voting for him no matter what. (And afterwards, perhaps, they'll celebrate with fava beans and a little Chianti?)

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:30 | link | comments

Dog days: In Malaysia, they’re merely “annoyed” at Fitna, a remarkably brief film which highlights certain violent passages in the Koran. In Pakistan, though, the country that practically invented the mass seethe-a-thon, they’re “angry”. Meanwhile, the Euro-poodles did what they do best when confronted by Islamic annoyance and rage: they groveled, bowed, trembled, apologized, and rolled over on their backs so as to expose their bellies to those they were certain were the Alpha dog.

Diana West asks us to consider "the unified effort of Muslims and Europeans to censor a critique of Islam--something not tolerated under Islam:

From EU to NATO officials, from the head of France to (sadly) the head of Denmark, the official European response to "Fitna" is less in line with Western traditions of free speech than with the censorship of Islamic law. Indeed, Dutch officials couldn't find a Dutch law under which to ban "Fitna," and they tried. The pressure to silence "Fitna," however, reveals the extent to which Islamic law has already eroded core conceptions of Western liberty."

Changes in body postures and facial expressions by which dogs indicate their feelings and intentions to other dogs. A-B Neutral to alert attentive positions. C: Play-soliciting bow. D-E: Active and passive submissive greeting - tail wags, ears fold back, weight is transferred to hind legs. I: Passive submission. J: Rolling over and showing belly and genitals. F-H: Gradual shift from aggressive display to ambivalent fear/defensive/aggressive posture.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:37 | link | comments

Peace-mongery: There’s a scene toward the end of Joel Gilbert’s terrifying two-hour-long  documentary, Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran, and the Revolt of Islam, (I saw a screening this week) showing the two Israeli architects of the Oslo Accord, Yitzak Rabin and Shimon Peres, singing on a stage following what they were convinced was the dawning of a new era of peace. There they are, ecstatic with joy, belting out “Shir Leshalom”—“Song for Peace”—along with an equally ecstatic buxom blonde vocalist. Quick cut to the message which, unbeknownst to the revellers, was being broadcast by Yasser Arafat over Palestinian TV. As Israelis are singing of peace, peace, peace, Arafat is shrieking, “jihad, jihad, jihad.” Cut to the rapturous Jews and their peace song. Then back to Arafat, and his yelps of holy war.

An effective bit of juxtaposition, showing what should have been—but which, clearly, wasn’t—obvious at the time: Yasser Arafat has about as much resemblance to a “peace partner” as a camel resembles a fish. And Israel’s peace-mongers were so addled by daydreams of peace that they refused to twig to the obvious, and put their nation’s existence in danger.

 

We know what happened next. The failure of Oslo. The launch of the second Palestinian uprising. Then another, and another, and another, failed attempt at peace-making. And with each attempt, Israel’s—but not the Palestinian—reputation is further blackened (“racist”, “apartheid state”), and the international coyotes, sensing that their prey is growing ever-weaker, howl even louder for Israel’s demise.

 

Not a pretty picture, but one that was more or less inevitable given that, for more than three decades now,  Israeli peace-mongers--ably abetted by the Americans--have been chipping away at Israel’s strength. As Gilbert’s documentary makes clear, it’s neck and neck at this stage to see who’ll win the race to finish Israel off—the mullahs and their nukes, or Israel’s feckless leaders, and their absurd delusions about “peace”.

 

As Gilbert sees it, the current problems started back with Menachem Begin. In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War—a war which, if not for a last minute shipment of weaponry from the U.S. Israel would likely have lost—Begin sought to make a peace deal with Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat. The deal was brokered by American president, Jimmy Carter. According to Gilbert, Begin wanted to reach a deal to wash away the taint of his having been an Irgun terrorist. Sadat wanted to make a deal because, after four kicks at the can—in ’48, ’56, ’67, and ’73—he realized that the Arabs weren’t having much luck wiping out the Jewish state through military means, and maybe it was a good idea to try another tack—like trying to defeat it through diplomacy. Again, Gilbert shows how the Israeli completely misunderstood the Arabs’ intent. Sadat does indeed arrive in Jerusalem, and—wonder of wonders—addresses Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Over and over he reiterates Egypt’s desire for “peace with justice.” The Israelis, who, though despite having been situated smack in the middle of Dar al-Islam for many decades have somehow managed to remain bone ignorant about their neighbours’ theology, take  Sadat’s words to mean that he is reconciled, once and for all, to Jewish sovereignty. In reality, Sadat, a devout Muslim, is referring to something very specific that harkens back to a famous episode in Islamic history. To him, “peace with justice” means that, for now he’s content to hold off on military solutions and sign a peace treaty (as Mohammed signed peace treaties with his enemies—a tactical lull in hostilities that allowed his forces time to rest and regroup). Looking down the road, however, “justice” demands that Israel—a dhimmi entity whose existence Muslims, for reasons spelled out in Islamic teachings, can never countenance—must cease to be, and that the land briefly “occupied” by the Jews, having once been claimed by Islam, will be returned to Islam. Then, and only then, will there be “peace”.

 

Sadat was speaking in code that, to this day, Israelis and other Westerners—including, alas, George W. Bush and Condeleezza Rice—refuse to crack. Instead, the peace-mongers wax rhapsodic about “land for peace”—as Menachem Begin gave Sadat “land for peace”—little realizing that each bit of land Israel “returns” is a setback for Israel and a victory for Israel’s enemies, bent on annihilating Israel through diplomacy and the never-ending peace process.

 

The most depressing aspect of this process is how Israel’s peace-mongers, ever besotted by the prospect of peace, under pressure from America, and with “Shir Leshalom” and other peace songs (of which there have been more than a few on Israel’s hit parade) ringing in their ears, remain clueless about Islam’s coded, loaded language, and continue to collude in their own destruction.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:16 | link | comments

Religion of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens: ABC News asks a "Quran expert" to interpret some of the same passages mentioned in the film Fitna. And--whaddya know?--the way he explains them, they sound so much more "historical" and less theatening than they do when Wilders or Hirsi Ali or Ibn Warraq or Robert Spencer explain them.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:31 | link | comments

Brits at sea: The cover story in the Spectator is a cri de coeur for what the Brits have lost—their guts, their wits, their moral compass, their sense of themselves. The British are at sea, all right, and not in their former “Britannia rules the waves” kind of way. But then, so is the rest of the Western world:

…Indeed, the harms being done by liberal democracies to themselves are now greater than those being caused by foes. Physical self-wounding is on the increase in ‘free societies’. But so, too, is a self-wounding which is political, moral, cultural and economic. For example, the taking of liberties with Western societies by Muslims has been greatly aided not only by the appeasement of Muslim demands — again in the name of liberty itself — but by a seeming will to self-destruction.

In consequence, Islamists have judged liberal democracies to be internally weak, and rightly so. In particular, in its conflicts with the ‘purified’ Wahhabi form of jihadist Islam — no ‘religion of peace’ this — the West is militarily strong but on its many home fronts is daily giving ground.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent intervention upon the issue of Muslim ‘rights’ to religious self-determination in a non-Muslim society was a classic of its kind. Unnoted were the surrenders at its heart. Without dissent, he cited the assertion by the Islamist Tariq Ramadan that sharia law is an ‘expression of the universal principles of Islam’. Universal? The head of the Anglican Church further described sharia, without qualification, as a ‘method of jurisprudence governed by revealed texts’, thus acquiescing in Islam’s claim not only to universality but to divine authority and inspiration. A Muslim could wish for no greater abjection in the ‘unbeliever’.

Misjudgments of Islam and this kind of trahison des clercs are historic commonplaces. Even Gibbon thought that the ‘option of submission or battle’, offered by Islam to the non-Muslim, was ‘fair’; while the chance of conversion to Islam — as an alternative to subjugation or death — he regarded as a sign of ‘clemency’. However, sternness was also once displayed in Britain’s conflicts of faith, and cruelly so in the struggles with ‘Popery’. A Cromwell could even describe ‘Papists’ as ‘strangers to God, and to the works of God, and to spiritual dispensations. We in this land’, he declared to parliament in January 1655, ‘have been otherwise instructed’. In relation to Islam, we have also been ‘otherwise instructed’. But we do not say so.

With such retreats, many from moral cowardice, there has necessarily come lost identity and lost sense of nation. Indeed, in these times of misjudgment, sense of nation is now as if under taboo, to civil society’s peril. Citizenship (of an increasingly identityless country) has also been permitted to signify so little that no polity could cohere on its basis, ‘modernise’ as you may. Moreover, no society can rest, or has ever rested, upon the possession of rights alone, whether ‘human rights’ or other. But in these times of misjudgment, duties, and especially enforceable duties — the duties that bind us — are once more perceived by many as intrusions and impositions upon personal freedom…

"Duties"? That’s just sooo WW2. These days we have thought cops and multicultism and feeling morally superior by trashing the world’s one and only Jewish state? Who needs or wants “duties” when you can have all that other yummy, soul-destroying stuff?

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:23 | link | comments

Motoon ‘toonist sues Fitna filmmaker: Okay, the world has officially become too bonkers for words. From the Beeb:

Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who depicted the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, says he will sue the maker of an anti-Islam film.

Mr Westergaard says his cartoon, which sparked riots two years ago, was used in the film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders without permission.

Mr Westergaard told Danish TV that his cartoon was a protest against terrorism, not Islam as a whole.

The Danish journalists' union is suing on his behalf for copyright violation.

"Wilders has the right to make his movie but he has not permission to use my drawing," Mr Westergaard told Denmark's TV2.

"This has nothing to do with freedom of speech," he said. "I will not accept my cartoon being taken out of its original context and used in a completely different one." …

Mr Westergaard has lived in hiding in Denmark since his cartoon led to unrest in the Middle East and beyond following its publication in 2005...

It’s “original context” is that his ‘toon was packaged along with some much more inflammatory images by some Danish zanies, which set off a seethe-a-thon that has yet to subside completely. It’s “original context” is that of our man-made law, and its insistence on free expression, and their God-law, with its proscriptions on such freedom, and calls for complete submission. Any other “context” the ‘toonist cares to mention is totally irrevelevent.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:11 | link | comments

Bambi’s wool: Barack Obama won a Grama, er, Grammy recently for the CD of the recitation of his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. Mark and Hugh listen to some of the disc’s choice cuts, and mull over another of Bambi’s heroes—Black Muslim/racist Malcolm X:

HH: As a way of talking about that, I’m going to play some of the clips, some my audience has heard before, some new ones today. And let’s just walk through it. Cut number one, Barack talking about Malcolm X and what it meant to him. It’s audio number three: 

BO: Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me.  The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided. Religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life. And yet, even as I imagine myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect, my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing, if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border. 

HH: Mark Steyn, clearly a first for presidential memoirs, if he becomes president.  

MS: Yes, I think so, and I think as we were saying earlier, the key word there, what he identifies with in Malcolm X, is self-creation. And I think it’s, in a sense, there’s a tragedy about Barack Obama, because he didn’t have to be a guy who mired himself in all the grim pathologies of the racial grievance industry. I thought when he first appeared on the national stage, that he was a character more like Colin Powell. Colin Powell and Barack Obama are both the children of British subjects. In Colin Powell’s case from the West Indies, in Obama’s case, from Kenya. And the advantage of that is that they’re not part, they’re not part of what we call now the African-American experience. They’re not part of the Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton narrative. So there’s something very bizarre about Obama in effect artificially trying to find ways of identifying with that particular, I would regard, that particular self-defeating narrative.  

Like I said, Bambi is Jesse Jackson in sheep's clothing, only now the disguise is slipping.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:53 | link | comments

Tit for tat: A Texas woman is irate because airport security forced her to remove her nipple rings when they kept setting off the metal detector.

Man, I hate when that happens. From AP via the Globe and Mail:

LOS ANGELES — A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

“I wouldn't wish this experience upon anyone,” Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. “My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way.”

Ms. Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.

The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Ms. Hamlin's chest, the Dallas-area resident said.

Texas woman says security officials forced her to remove a nipple ring with pliers before boarding an airplane. She wants an apology

Ms. Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewellery, Ms. Hamlin said.

Ms. Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewellery was out, she said.

She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.

“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Ms. Hamlin's attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA's Office of Civil Rights and Liberties.

Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-coloured bra with the rings on it, Ms. Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring.

She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.

“After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove,” Ms. Allred said in the letter.

TSA officials said they are investigating to see whether its policies were followed.

“Our security officers are well-trained to screen individuals with body piercings in sensitive areas with dignity and respect while ensuring a high level of security,” the agency said in a statement.

On its website, the TSA warns that passengers “may be additionally screened because of hidden items such as body piercings, which alarmed the metal detector.”

“If you are selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search,” the site says.

Ms. Hamlin would have accepted a “pat-down” had it been offered, Ms. Allred said.

If an alarm does sound, “until that is resolved, we're not going to let them go through the checkpoint, no matter what they're wearing or where they're wearing it,” said TSA spokesman Dwayne Baird in Salt Lake City.

People routinely pass through security wearing wedding rings without problems, and it might take a larger bit of metal to trigger an alarm, Mr. Baird said.

Ms. Hamlin filed a complaint, but the TSA's customer service manager at the Lubbock airport concluded the screening was handled properly, Ms. Allred said.

Ms. Hamlin wants an apology from the TSA and an investigation by the agency's civil rights office.

Ms. Allred said she might consider legal action if the TSA does not apologize.

“The conduct of TSA was cruel and unnecessary,” Ms. Allred wrote. “The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon.”

Speak for yourself, Gloria. Have you ever seen Pam Anderson’s ta-tas? Those puppies could poke your eye out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:27 | link | comments

Dhimmis try to cast Wilders into the wilderness: In defiance of those who prefer their kafirs be kept dumb and happy, Dutch politician Geert Wilders finally released his movie Fitna. Notice how the MSMers attempt to keep the blinkers in place—by trying to make Wilders, a brave, brave man, sound like some “right wing” crank. From two mega-dhimmi media outlets, AP via the Ceeb:

A Dutch politician has posted a graphic film on the internet warning the West about the teachings of Islam, as a Muslim group prepares to challenge the movie as a potential violation of hate speech laws.

Right-wing legislator Geert Wilders released the film Fitna — the Qu'aranic term for "strife" — Thursday, despite warnings from the Dutch government that it could spark violent protests in Islamic countries similar to those held over cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Credits at the end of the film list Wilders as co-scriptwriter.

The film quotes verses of the Qu'ran alongside footage of terrorist attacks in the United States and Spain, at times showing graphic footage of bloody, mutilated bodies set to music, and even a beheading of a Caucasian man by men garbed in black.

"The government insists that you respect Islam, but Islam has no respect for you. Islam wants to rule, submit, and seeks to destroy our Western civilization," says text appearing near the film's end that eventually calls on Europeans to defeat the ideology of Islam.

The film ends with a caricature of Muhammad, his head drawn in the shape of a bomb that explodes into a crack of thunder and lightning.  

A Dutch judge is scheduled Friday to review a petition from a Muslim group seeking an independent review of whether the film violates the country's hate speech laws…

Well, if the Netherlands is anything like Canada, darn tootin’ it does. Just ask Maclean’s, which has to defend its right to print the truth about Europe’s burgeoning Muslim population (construed as “hate speech” by a well-known Jew-hater/Islamst) in a “court” where the truth is no defense.

Update: Iran calls the film "heinous"--which, when you think about it, is actually a ringing endorsement: If the mullahs call you "heinous", you're certain to be on the right track. ("If they say your behaviour is heinous/Kick them right in the Coriolanus." Sorry. Just had an overwhelming urge to paraphrase Cole Porter.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:14 | link | comments

Creep vs. creep: How ridiculous, pointless, pathetic, and yet dangerous, is Canada’s “human rights” racket? Read Mark Steyn’s biting take-down of the thought cops and learn of the loopy twilight world where human rights creeps and their prey, white power creeps, are locked in virtual, mortal combat. My favourite part of the Maclean’s piece:

…I'm sure many Canadians have found themselves in that embarrassing situation where you cruise an Internet dating site, hook up with a hot blond 17-year-old cheerleader and arrange to meet only to find that Candii is, in fact, a 54-year-old overweight male accountant. Alas, the problem's far worse for a neo-Nazi hoping to find a friendly website and meet a few kindred spirits. There must be a few genuine white supremacists whooping it up over at "Stormfront," but they seem to be thin on the ground. Mr. Steacy, the CHRC's lead investigator, is a member of Stormfront; Richard Warman, celebrated Canadian "human rights" crusader and plaintiff on every CHRC case since 2002, is a member of Stormfront; and Sgt. Stephen Camp is a member of Stormfront. What proportion of Canada's "white supremacists" are, in fact, government employees? On a quiet day, chances must be pretty good that you'll log on and find the joint deserted except for "jadewarr" (Mr. Steacy) trying to entrap "estate" (Sgt. Camp) while "estate" (Sgt. Camp) is simultaneously trying to entrap "axetogrind" (Mr. Warman). "There really should be a register of pseudonyms," urged lawyer Doug Christie, "so that investigators don't wind up investigating each other."

Welcome to the wacky world of Canadian "human rights." If it sounds like a fetish club for servants of the Crown, well, that would be a lot cheaper. This is a long battle to reform a secretive and decadent institution. But Keith Martin is right: Section 13 should be repealed. We need a royal commission. And "jadewarr" and chums might be encouraged to find more useful employment.

A “fetish club”? Sounds more like a bunch of pimply, socially-retarded teenage boys, sitting in the folks’ basement and zinging each other with virtual lasers via the 'net. Maybe “jadewarr” and chums could make themselves more useful by testing new video games. In the meantime, these silly servants have managed the impossible: they have made the white power creeps' defence lawyer of choice, Doug Christie (his impressive roster includes practically every Hitler-lover who's ever faced prosecution in Canada), sound like the sanest guy in the room.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:35 | link | comments

The Beeb in bed with the bad guys: During the last run-in with fascist totalitarians, Lord Haw Haw, a traitorous Brit, tried to demoralize his people by broadcasting fascist propaganda. Fast forward to today, when Lord Haw Haw seems to have been given a big promotion. As Melanie Phillips observes, he’s now in charge of the BBC (my bolds):

Trevor Asserson is a British lawyer (who now lives in Israel) who for years has campaigned against the BBC’s bias against Israel. He has now produced an even more serious charge against the BBC — that during the 2006 Lebanon war, the BBC’s Arabic service provided a platform for the campaign by Hezbollah and Iran to delegitimise and demonise both the USA and Israel in the eyes of the Arabic speaking world.

With Deena Pinson, he recorded, translated and transcribed the BBC’s principal news analysis programme, Hadeeth Al-Sa’a, for a period of four weeks from 19 July to 20 August 2006. Their report (you can down load the pdf at number 6) says that during that period the programme put on 17 spokespeople for Hizbollah and Iran amongst programme guests but only 5 for Israel. It comments:

 

Many programme guests expressed blatantly and viciously anti American positions… In addition we came across a number of quite extreme statements. For example we were told that the bombing of an electricity station was a ‘crime’ which is ‘unprecedented historically’ and we learn that it is US policy ‘to crush the Palestinians completely and to take all of their lands.’ When comments as extreme as this go uncorrected and unchallenged, the BBC appears to have tossed its moral compass into the waves and completely to have lost its bearings…

The BBC Arabic gives little indication of the destruction, the evacuations and the deaths (often of Israeli Arabs), caused by the thousands of Hizbollah rockets fired into Israel. By contrast some of the language used to describe Israel is hysterical in tone and the translated transcript reads like an Islamist extremist tract.

The implications of such findings are clearly far more serious than merely transgressing the BBC’s own impartiality guidelines. When such propaganda is transmitted back into the Arabic-speaking world – and with the kite-mark of BBC journalistic integrity, no less -- this is bound to incite yet more violence and aggression, turning the BBC effectively into an accomplice of Iran against America and Israel…

Funny thing--here in Canada, his eminence seems to be running the Ceeb, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:02 | link | comments

Mama mia!: The Cosa Nostra diversified into Mozzarella, and now Italy is being roiled by a cheese scare.

Wasn't that a Bob Marley song--"Buffalo Mozza/Controlled by the Mafia"?

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:45 | link | comments

Ho Ho Ho: Eliot Spitzer sings:

Here I Ho again.

I know just where to go again.

All aglow again.

Takin’ a chance on sex.

 

Hotted up am I.

No need to find an alibi.

"Mr. Clean"’s a lie.

Takin’ a chance on sex.

 

I thought that I was so mighty.

Would never get caught.

Now look where nooky has got me--

In a terrible spot.

 

Took an awful spill.

Still had to pay my prosti bill.

Now I got lots of time to kill.

Takin’ a chance on sex.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:09 | link | comments

Heh: Nic and Carla drop by Buckingham Palace for brewski and canned cheese canapes, and everyone but Carla wears a ribbon. CNN's list of the day's most popular news stories headlines it "Mr. and Mrs. Sarkozy woe the Brits"--a most amusing Freudian slip.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:45 | link | comments (3)

The myth of protection: In the mistaken belief that the HRCs protect Canadian Jews from Nazi-like hatred (or Canadians from any kind of hatred), Holocaust survivor Nate Leipciger wrote this letter to the National Post:

The question posed by Jonathan Kay has a much simpler answer. It takes media pundits who, comfortable with their blindness, attempt to impose it on others.

I survived Auschwitz, in great suffering. I lost my entire family at the hands of the Nazis. To suggest a neo-Nazi is a free-speech hero goes beyond the absurd and ridiculous. We the survivors are not yet dead. We must protest such articles wherever and whenever they appear.

The Mark Lemires of this world are trying desperately to emulate the propaganda-pushers of the Nazi era. I do not have words to tell you how it feels to read the equation of "Nazi = hero." If this is the new moral math, then I prefer an abacus.

Nathan Leipciger, co-president, Canadian Holocaust Survivors, Toronto

Gordon MacDonald, in a thread on Ezra Levant's blog, does an excellent job of explaining why Nate’s faith in the thought cops is so profoundly—nay, tragically—misplaced. (Gordon’s words, some of which I've bolded, are sage, although, like me, he could use the services of a good copy editor):

sadly the commentor in the National Post like so many others has implied that stopping abuses of the HRCs is a pro neo-nazi stance. PEN, EGALE, Chomsky and Borovoy from the CCLA ALL recognise the threat of HRCs - and they sure as hell are not neo-nazis (or even mildly conservative for that matter).

The Holocost is one of those things that only someone who was there will ever understand. The rest of us can only imagine the horror.

The terrible irony is that in todays world, those who would wipe Judasim off of the face of the earth in a heartbeat (radical Muslims), are leveraging the HRCs as one more tool in their ongoing attempts to scrape democracy from the face of the earth and replace it with a world of their making - a world in which no Jew would survive.

Way to nail it, Gordon.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:13 | link | comments

Better duck: Massive ice shelf collapsing off Antarctica.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:20 | link | comments

Hollywood’s “quagmire: The Atlantic has an interesting piece on Hollywood’s depiction of the war. Given the people who are making these “ain’t-we-awful” flicks—i.e. those situated on the self-loathing end of the political continuum—it should come as no surprise what kind of utter crapola has been foisted on unsuspecting movie public (most of which has declined to pony up any dollars to see it):

Less than two weeks before the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, in March of 2003, Sony Pictures released a war movie called Tears of the Sun. The director was Antoine Fuqua, fresh off the success of 2001’s Training Day; the star was Bruce Willis, playing a Navy SEAL lieutenant whose platoon is assigned to extricate an American caught up in a Nigerian civil war. The plot was a straightforward brief for moralistic interventionism: Willis and his men flout the orders of their caution-minded superiors and take on an army of Muslim rebels who are raping and pillaging their way through the African countryside. “For all the years that we have been told to stand down and stand by,” one of the soldiers says as they lock and load. “For our sins,” Willis’s lieutenant agrees. Then they sweep in, guns blazing.

Tears of the Sun was a relatively modest film, budgeted in the tens rather than the hundreds of millions, but it was significant even so for being precisely the sort of movie 9/11 was supposed to spawn: righteously patriotic, confident in American might, and freighted with old-fashioned archetypes, with the rugged Willis saving the helpless Africans (and the lissome Monica Bellucci) from a horde of machete-wielding savages. It represented the kind of culture-industry sea change anticipated by the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s famous remark that 9/11 had slain irony. It seemed to vindicate the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan’s prediction that the attacks would resurrect the spirit of John Wayne. And it was the sort of movie the left-wing critic Susan Faludi presumably had in mind when she lamented, in her recent book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, that “the cultural troika of media, entertainment and advertising declared the post-9/11 age an era of … redomesticated femininity, and reconstituted Cold War manhood.”

Nothing in this commentary, however, bears much resemblance to the way American popular culture actually has evolved since 9/11. The latter-day cowboys have conspicuously failed to materialize: in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Tears of the Sun proved to be an outlier; more typical of our cultural moment are the movies that its director and star turned out early last year. In Fuqua’s Shooter, a redneck sniper goes up against a conspiracy that’s headed by a villainous right-wing Montana senator (who happens to be a Dick Cheney look-alike) and aimed at covering up an oil company’s human-rights abuses. In Robert Rodriguez’s B-movie homage, Planet Terror, Willis plays another military man, but this time the plot, such as it is, turns on a zombie-creating nerve agent that may have been tested on Willis and his soldiers, the movie hints, as punishment for their having killed Osama bin Laden when the government wanted him kept alive and at large.

Such self-conscious nods to contemporary controversies should be taken, in part, as proof that our popular culture is more impervious to real-world tragedy than most critics would care to admit. The machine that churns out Hollywood blockbusters grinds on remorselessly, and nothing so minor as a terrorist attack is going to keep the next Pirates of the Caribbean from its date with box-office destiny.

But it wasn’t just the reassertion of America’s usual frivolity that caused the 9/11 moment to be stillborn; it was the swiftness with which the Iraq War replaced the fall of the Twin Towers as this decade’s cultural touchstone. It’s Halliburton, Abu Ghraib, and the missing WMDs that have summoned up a cultural moment in which bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek punch line for a zombie movie and the film industry’s typical take on geopolitics traces all the world’s evils to the machinations of a White Male enemy at home.

Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many on the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era, returning us to the shackles of censorship and conformism, jingoism and Joe McCarthy. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, another decade entirely seems to have slouched round again: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.

We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead…

Here’s my pitch for a movie: At a G-7 gathering, the cocktails of Western leaders are secretly infused with a magic clarity potion. One by one they awaken to the global threat of Islamic supremacism, and muster the wit and the spine to prevent Islam from sweeping the planet.

Nah. They’d never go for it. It requires far too great a suspension of disbelief.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:17 | link | comments

On the street where they live: Hard on its probe into the matter of Swastika, Ontario's name (the town and its name have been around for 100 years, but the CJC just now got around to asking whether its moniker had anything to do with, you know, the Nazis) comes another CJC investigation. Here's the CJC's Frank Bialystock (didn’t I see him in The Producers?) defending the CJC’s interest in a street named Swastika in another North Ontario town, Kirkland Lake. It's in response to an op-ed piece criticising CJC buffoonery that appeared in the Kirkland Lake paper:

It's unfortunate that columnist Rick Owen felt the need to attribute sinister motives to Canadian Jewish Congress' straightforward effort to educate itself about the origin of the name of Swastika Avenue.

Our goal was nothing more than to better inform members of the Jewish community from outside this region about this matter.

Your March 17 news story helped to mitigate Mr. Owen's unfair interpretation of our efforts to learn more about the Town of Kirkland Lake to some degree, but did not fully address his views of our actions.

Mr. Owen chastised CJC for not going to the source to gather information.

On the contrary, this is exactly what we did by sending a very cordial letter to Mayor Bill Enouy, asking how this came to be the name of a street we thought had been established in 1998.

We received an equally cordial and very informative response from Swastika historian Carolyn O'Neil, explaining the street's origins and providing very interesting information about the history of the street, the area, and the people who live there, as well as their commitment to Canada and its values.

As a professor of Canadian history, I appreciate the clear explanation by Ms. O'Neil of this significant piece of regional lore.

This clears up the misunderstanding and underscores the pride of the residents of Kirkland Lake.

To accuse CJC of "making an issue out of something that has never been an issue" is an attempt to create controversy where none exists.

Sincerely,

Dr. Frank Bialystok,
Chair Canadian Jewish Congress Ontario Region

Thanks, Frank, for that unintentionally hilarious explanation--and for helping make new friends for the Jewish people. It's heartening to know that the CJC has its priorities straight, and is determined to get to the bottom of every last location in Canada named Swastika. That'll keep those Nazis at bay!

(I admit to having something of a personal connection to the story. My father grew up in Kirkland Lake, a town which has no lake, but where the streets were literally paved with gold—tailings from the nearby mines. A wild and woolly kind of place whose main drag featured a brothel, and which attracted the likes of Benny Goodman to come and entertain the miners--who tended to come and go--and other townsfolk--who were more settled. I’ve often thought of writing a novel about it, and the travails of a Jewish family living up there during the gold rush. Maybe I still will.)

Update: According to Swastika, Ontario's Wiki entry, the town is pronounced Swas-tee-ka. Please bear that in mind when reading the following:

The CJC’s freaked ‘bout Swastika

All because of the Nazi mystika.

Thinking such imbecility

Has any utility

Puts Canadian Jews up a crika. (Without a paddle, one might add.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:08 | link | comments (5)

Alive and kicking: According to a new poll, Bambi's presidential bid has withstood the challenge of racist Wright.

Charisma and rampant stupidity save the day!

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:21 | link | comments

Edifice complex: Egregiously rich oil entity, Abu Dhabi, is building a humungous Guggenheim art museum that Der Spiegel describes as “Pharaonic.” The Abu Dhabians, er, ites, er, whatevah, are hoping that their Guggenheim will rival the Bilbao one as a tourist destination—and so is Guggenheim mastermind, Thomas Krens. Here he is tap dancing around a couple of sticky issues. First, the kind of images that may—and not be—be appropriate to hang on the walls of a museum in a sharia-ridden land (my bolds):

SPIEGEL: The government there is also paying for the construction of the museum. But it's hard to imagine a museum for the sometimes drastic art of the modern age and the present, side-by-side with strict Islamic culture, which permits only purely ornamental art.

Krens: You think so?

SPIEGEL: The salacious early photography of someone like Jeff Wall in Abu Dhabi -- inconceivable.

Krens: I can assure you that no one, throughout the entire time I was there for the negotiations, so much as created the impression of wanting to impose censorship. You know, the Guggenheim owns the largest collection of photographs by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe…

SPIEGEL: …many of which could be described as pornographic, even brutal.

Krens: And we would never even exhibit 30 percent of his photographs in New York. We would be allowed to do so there, and it would probably be possible in Abu Dhabi, as well. The question is: Why should we challenge a local culture? Perhaps to provoke political confrontation? That's unnecessary. And if an increasingly small portion of our collection is in fact not exhibited, this does not diminish the entire presentation.

Bow. Scrape. Shuffle. Grovel. Krens has the dhimmi dance down pat.

Next, the chances that kafirs are going to be willing to make the trek to Abu Dhabi which, let's face it, ain't exactly sunny Spain, and how “the Jews” who fork over mucho shekels to the Guggenheim are likely to feel about some of them being directed to an Arab museum:

SPIEGEL: But if you assume that people travel everywhere anyway, why Abu Dhabi, of all places?

Krens: Take a look at the map. Abu Dhabi is surrounded by interesting countries: Iran to the north, Iraq farther to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the west and south.

SPIEGEL: Many of these countries aren't exactly friendly to the West. Doesn't that pose a major risk for the project?

Krens: Our world is filled with political conflicts. Allowing them to stop us is exactly what we don't want to do. When I went to Bilbao for the first time, it was truly dangerous there. Basque terrorist groups threatened me and told me to stay away. I had bodyguards and an armored car. It isn't a coincidence that we are now going to the Middle East.

SPIEGEL: But doesn't it irritate your many Jewish donors?

Krens: What do you think this really is? It's a cultural bridge. We are setting a clear example. We have a Jewish name. Solomon Guggenheim, the founder of the museum, was a Jew. Frank O. Gehry, our architect, is Jewish. And, of course, we talked with a lot of people, with Israeli politicians and with the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

Ah, yes, more “bridges”. And no doubt lots of dhimmified Jews will cross this particular bridge in order to take in this new cultural hotspot. Alas, the Jewgenheim is also likely to attract another, unwanted, kind of visitor—holy warriors who will view it as an especially enticing target for their wrath.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:45 | link | comments (1)

Hands off, John: John McCain gives us a preview of how he’d handle the presidency—ineptly, due to profoundly bad thinking. From the National Post (my bolds):

LOS ANGELES - Republican candidate John McCain said yesterday he would devote "personal deep engagement" to the Middle East peace process if he were elected U.S. president.

In response to a question after a speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, he indicated he would have a much more hands-on attitude toward Middle East peacemaking than George W. Bush, the current President.

"I would devote every effort including personal deep engagement and involvement in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process," he said. "It is too important ... for us not to give it the highest priority."

The Arizona Senator, who has clinched the Republican nomination for the November presidential election, visited Israel this month as part of a Middle East fact-finding tour.

His remarks came after a formal speech in which he called for a more vigorous international diplomacy and a new effort to rebuild frayed relations with allies.

Distancing himself from Mr. Bush's sometimes unilateral diplomatic approach, Mr. McCain said the United States needs to live up to its responsibilities as a world leader and become a "model citizen" in the global community.

"The United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone," he said.

"Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom and knowledge necessary to succeed. We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies."

Mr. McCain, who has been criticized by Democrats for hewing too closely to the policies of Mr. Bush, his fellow Republican, acknowledged the damaged U.S. image around the globe after five years of the Iraq war.

"Leadership in today's world means accepting and fulfilling our responsibilities as a great nation. One of those responsibilities is to be a good and reliable ally to our fellow democracies," he said.

He slammed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the two Democrats seeking to become their party's candidate in the November election, for advocating quick withdrawals from Iraq.

The Republican candidate also restated his opposition to torture and said the United States should close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where it holds terrorism suspects.

"America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model," he said. "How we behave at home affects  how we are perceived abroad. We can't torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured."

Call it “the Boy Scout platform”. If America is really nice, doesn’t flex its muscles too much, and escorts little old Middle East problems across the street, the world will be a kinder, gentler place. (Hmmm. Sounds kind of familiar.)

Sorry, John. A “republic of virtue” is the worst idea I’ve heard so far during this campaign—worse even than the vapid maunderings of Barack Obama.

Cursed are the “hands-on” peace-mongers, for they shall lead us to rack and ruin.

Update: If McCain is so bent on sprucing up America's "image", maybe he could ask Israel for some hints on "rebranding".

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:11 | link | comments

Get with the dhimmi program, Benedict: Arab chick gripes about the Pope’s backbone in comment page of the Globe and Mail:

…By focusing so much attention on Magdi Allam's conversion, the Pope appeared to be engaging in a petty one-upmanship unbefitting the religious leader of more than a billion Catholics.

 

It was especially frustrating given that, on March 15, the first Catholic church opened in Qatar, and a Vatican official confirmed it was in talks with Saudi Arabia to build its first church - the Saudi kingdom being the only country in the region that bars non-Muslim houses of worship. (This last has been especially galling, considering the hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers from many faiths who keep Saudi Arabia running. Granted, it also makes it easy to deflate the double standards of Saudi officials when they condemn Denmark or the Netherlands for cartoons or a film, reminding them that Muslims in both those countries can publicly proclaim their faith in ways non-Muslims in the Saudi kingdom can only dream.)

 

But back to the Pope: What is achieved by his public gloating over a conversion? I am just as incensed when I hear Muslim leaders boast that Islam is the world's fastest growing religion. So what? How sad that faith has become a hollow competition of "my numbers versus yours."

 

Let me be clear - everyone has the right to convert to any religion they want. Magdi Allam was clearly unhappy with Islam, which he attacked frequently in his writings. I want to be even clearer in my condemnation of any death threats that he or any other convert receives should they decide to leave Islam. We are taught as Muslims that there is no compulsion in faith, and our clerics should convey that message.

 

But those of us who call for freedom of worship, and who condemn threats of violence against those who choose another religion, are certainly not helped when the leaders of those other religions seem to exploit a conversion to score points. The Vatican seemed to want to have it both ways, holding up Magdi Allam as some kind of victory for Catholicism while, at the same time, claiming it was a private matter of faith.

 

I hope Magdi Allam finds peace in his new faith, but I agree with Rev. Christophe Rouçou, the French Catholic Church's top official for relations with Islam, who told Reuters: "I don't understand why he wasn't baptized in his hometown by his local bishop."

 

This Pope seems to relish unnecessary run-ins with Islam. In a lecture he gave in 2006 in his native Germany, the Pope quoted a medieval text that described Islam as violent and irrational. This was rich coming from the leader of a church with its own bloody history. Of course, it certainly didn't help that, in response, some Muslims staged angry demonstrations living up to that offensive description.

 

Interestingly, the Pope sought to make amends when he visited Turkey's Blue Mosque and prayed toward Mecca with its imam. And he is due to meet Muslim representatives later this year. Muslim scholars and leaders had written to the Pope and other Christian authorities after the fallout over his speech, urging dialogue between the two faiths for the sake of the "survival of the world."

I long ago gave up waiting for clerics of any kind to save the world, but I'd much rather they sit and talk to each other than boast over who's joined their team.

 

If the Pope wants to play a numbers game, there is another equation he should keep in mind. The bin Ladens and Geert Wilders - the latter being the Dutch politician behind the above-mentioned anti-Islam film - appeal to minorities at opposite ends of a spectrum of hate.

 

As the head of a much bigger flock, Pope Benedict should wield his responsibility with more wisdom.

 

Yeah, Ben, what’s up with that? My response:

 

Mona Eltahawy is upset that the Pope had the audacity to baptize a prominent Italian Muslim while the TV cameras were rolling, seeing it as another instance of the Vicar of Christ going out of his way to provoke Islam. She goes on to state that, as far as she’s concerned, there’s no problem with Muslims converting since there’s “no compulsion in faith”, knowing full well that the death penalty as the punishment for apostasy is a fundamental tenet of sharia law, and will remain so despite her condemnation of it.

 

If Ms. Eltahawy is looking for a Christian leader who does not “relish unnecessary run-ins with Islam,” she need look no further than the Archbishop of Canterbury. I’m guessing that his agenda of Christian humility and placation is far more to her taste.

 

In veritas, it isn't "a numbers game"; it's a law game--their God-law vs. our man-made law. And it looks like they're winning, since we don't "get" the game and are thus playing right into their hands.

 

Update: Here's the kind of dhimmi who'd get thumbs up from Ms. Mona.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:38 | link | comments (1)

Gay caballeros: If you’re gay, there isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room when it comes to sharia: Homosexuality is punishable by death. However, that hasn’t stopped a gay Muslim filmmaker from trying to reconcile his faith with his sexuality. From the times online:

…Sharma says this was a “very personal” film to make: he is a Muslim himself and dislikes the polarisation of discussion of Islam “between the Jihadists and the Bush supporters”. It makes for difficult viewing, forcing us belief-bare Western liberals to examine why gays would have anything to do with a religionthat rejects them at every turn, and sometimes violently.

Sharma filmed in secret in many countries for six years, amassing more than 400 hours of footage. He would put tourist-related material at the beginning and end of each tape so that if Customs took an interest in what he was doing it would find innocuous pretty pictures. He found his subjects through the internet and underground gay or HIV organisations. As a Muslim he could make himself “invisible” – it would have been much harder, he says, as a white Western film-maker to travel and film as he did.

The film shows Imam Muhsin Hendricks, a Muslim man in South Africa publicly speaking out against the homophobia of Islam. We watch the flight of four gay men out of Iran in a desperate attempt to gain asylum. Two are afraid to show their faces. Nearly all have faith which they try, and inevitably fail, to square with their sexual orientation. They feel desperate that they will never see their families again, but know they have to get out. Kazemi’s boyfriend was executed for sodomy; another man worries about the fate of his partner. “He was my introduction to love,” he says.

One Egyptian, Mazen, recalls the lashing he received after being apprehended, with more than others, after attending a gay party. One half of a lesbian couple (Maha and Maryam), deeply in love, feels her faith has been compromised by her desire. Two Turkish lesbians, Ferda and Kiymet, go to visit Ferda’s mother. Two of the Iranian men are granted asylum in Canada. “How can I be free when so many others aren’t?” one says to his friend, who replies, with steely hope, “One day they will all be free.”

Since filming, the subjects’ lives have changed generally for the better, says Sharma, who reveals that three of the Iranians are now safely living in Canada – one has become a gay rights activist. The fourth has been granted asylum but is still waiting to enter the country. Muhsin has been given funding to set up a group for lesbian and gay Muslims. Mazen, living in Paris, is “trying to find work in a xenophobic France,” says Sharma. “It’s terribly difficult for me, having got so close to so many of them, not to be able to materially help them.” Ferda and Kiymet have broken up.

Sharma doesn’t believe homosexuality will become acceptable within Islam in his lifetime: “It is not top of the agenda,” he says. But he hopes gays will make “significant advances” within Islam and that his film will be used as a “tool” for debate and also to give visibility to a group often rendered invisible…

More likely it’ll be used as a “tool” to convict and execute more gays.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:02 | link | comments

The bad and the beautiful: With mucho apologies to the late Jim Croce:

In the Southside of Chicago

Some are lookin’ for a fight.

And if you go down there

You better just beware 
Of a guy known as Rev’rend Wright.

 

Well, he’s angry as a hornet,

And he stings just like one, too.

And like his man, Farrakhan,

He’ll go on and on about the infamy of Jews.

 

And he’s bad, bad, Rev’rend Wright.

Loves to whinge about his people’s plight.

Nine one one’s Jews’ trick.

White folks made blacks sick.

 

Well, he’s pumped so full of outrage

And he’ll shout it out again.

And he’ll roam the stage just like a bantam rooster

Who’s a-cruisin’ for a hen.

 

And he’s bad, bad, Rev’rend Wright.

Listen up, and he’ll give you a fright.

Meaner than a Jesse J.

Nothing like an MLK.

 

Well, Obama’s like his nephew.

But really, more a son.

And since Rev’s a pistol

No way Bambi’s distancin’ himself from that son of a gun.

 

Now someone outs the racist

Who was up to his old tricks.

And so Bambi O

Learns a lesson ‘bout a-messing ‘round

In racial politics.

 

Well, he’s bad, bad, Rev’rend Wright.

Won’t be showin’ up election night.

Time that he lay low.

So he doesn’t sink O’s show.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:32 | link | comments

Shocking: Some Arab officials and journalists concede that Hamas is responsible for the escalation in Gaza.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:47 | link | comments

Freedom-envy: Sometimes I like to daydream that I live in a country where people can speak their mind without having to worry that someone will be offended by their words and snitch to the local or national thought cops. A country where, for instance, Geert Wilders could release a film that many will take as being an “insult” to Islam.

At the moment, under the terms of Section 13(1) of our “human rights” rules, that would not be possible. As Dutch-born Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from the American republic writes in the WSJ, though, such talk is still possible in the U.S. of A. (my bolds). (And, to quote a tuneful Jew, God bless America):

…Reasonable men in free societies regard Geert Wilders's anti-Muslim rhetoric, and films like "Fitna," as disrespectful of the religious sensitivities of members of the Islamic faith. But free societies also hold freedom of speech to be a fundamental human right. We don't silence, jail or kill people with whom we disagree just because their ideas are offensive or disturbing. We believe that when such ideas are openly debated, they sink of their own weight and attract few followers.

Our country allows fringe groups like the American Nazi Party to demonstrate, as long as they are peaceful. Americans are permitted to burn the national flag. In 1989, when so-called artist Andres Serrano displayed his work "Piss Christ" -- a photo of a crucifix immersed in a bottle of urine -- Americans protested peacefully and moved to cut off the federal funding that supported Mr. Serrano. There were no bombings of museums. No one was killed over this work that was deeply offensive to Christians.

Criticism of Islam, however, has led to violence and murder world-wide. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie over his 1988 book, "The Satanic Verses." Although Mr. Rushdie has survived, two people associated with the book were stabbed, one fatally. The 2005 Danish editorial cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad led to numerous deaths. Dutch director Theodoor van Gogh was killed in 2004, several months after he made the film "Submission," which described violence against women in Islamic societies. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch member of parliament who wrote the script for "Submission," received death threats over the film and fled the country for the United States.

The violence Dutch officials are anticipating now is part of a broad and determined effort by the radical jihadist movement to reject the basic values of modern civilization and replace them with an extreme form of Shariah. Shariah, the legal code of Islam, governed the Muslim world in medieval times and is used to varying degrees in many nations today, especially in Saudi Arabia.

Radical jihadists are prepared to use violence against individuals to stop them from exercising their free speech rights. In some countries, converting a Muslim to another faith is a crime punishable by death. While Muslim clerics are free to preach and proselytize in the West, some Muslim nations severely restrict or forbid other faiths to do so. In addition, moderate Muslims around the world have been deemed apostates and enemies by radical jihadists.

Radical jihadists believe representative government is un-Islamic, and urge Muslims who live in democracies not to exercise their right to vote. The reason is not hard to understand: When given a choice, most Muslims reject the extreme approach to Islam. This was recently demonstrated in Iraq's Anbar Province, which went from an al-Qaeda stronghold to an area supporting the U.S.-led coalition. This happened because the populace came to intensely dislike the fanatical ways of the radicals, which included cutting off fingers of anyone caught smoking a cigarette, 4 p.m. curfews, beatings and beheadings. There also were forced marriages between foreign-born al Qaeda fighters and local Sunni women.

There may be a direct relationship between the radical jihadists' opposition to democracy and their systematic abuse of women. Women have virtually no rights in this radical world: They must conceal themselves, cannot hold jobs, and have been subjected to honor killings. Would most women in Muslim countries vote for a candidate for public office who supported such oppressive rules?

Not all of these radicals are using violence to supplant democratic society with an extreme form of Shariah. Some in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark are attempting to create parallel Islamic societies with separate courts for Muslims. According to recent press reports, British officials are investigating the cases of 30 British Muslim school-age girls who "disappeared" for probable forced marriages.

While efforts to create parallel Islamic societies have been mostly peaceful, they may actually be a jihadist "waiting game," based on the assumption that the Islamic populations of many European states will become the majority over the next 25-50 years due to higher Muslim birth rates and immigration.

What is particularly disturbing about these assaults against modern society is how the West has reacted with appeasement, willful ignorance, and a lack of journalistic criticism. Last year PBS tried to suppress "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center," a hard-hitting documentary that contained criticism of radical jihadists. Fortunately, Fox News agreed to air the film.

Even if the new Wilders film proves newsworthy, it is likely that few members of the Western media will air it, perhaps because they have been intimidated by radical jihadist threats. The only major U.S. newspaper to reprint any of the controversial 2005 Danish cartoons was Denver's Rocky Mountain News. You can be sure that if these cartoons had mocked Christianity or Judaism, major American newspapers would not have hesitated to print them.

European officials have been similarly cautious. A German court ruled last year that a German Muslim man had the right to beat his wife, as this was permitted under Shariah. Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, stated last month that the implementation of some measure of Shariah in Britain was "unavoidable" and British Muslims should have the choice to use Shariah in marital and financial matters.

I do not defend the right of Geert Wilders to air his film because I agree with it. I expect I will not. (I have not yet seen the film). I defend the right of Mr. Wilders and the media to air this film because free speech is a fundamental right that is the foundation of modern society. Western governments and media outlets cannot allow themselves to be bullied into giving up this precious right due to threats of violence. We must not fool ourselves into believing that we can appease the radical jihadist movement by allowing them to set up parallel societies and separate legal systems, or by granting them special protection from criticism.

A central premise of the American experiment are these words from the Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." There are similar statements in the U.S. Constitution, British Common Law, the Napoleonic Code and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. As a result, hundreds of millions in the U.S. and around the world enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and many other rights.

These liberties have been won through centuries of debate, conflict and bloodshed. Radical jihadists want to sacrifice all we have learned by returning to a primitive and intolerant world. While modern society invites such radicals to peacefully exercise their faith, we cannot and will not sacrifice our fundamental freedoms.

Kind of puts the kibosh on sharia, since it holds that people are fundamentally unequal, so saith the supreme authority on such matters--and on all matter--Allah.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:54 | link | comments

Disproportionate comparison: A pundit on the Der Spiegel site calls Tibet "China's Gaza Strip"--thus placing a behemoth (China) on par with a pipsqueak (Israel). If the pundit had even a glimmer of a clue he'd be able to see that, in actuality, Israel, a lone Jewish state surrounding by 22--count 'em--22 ever-hating Arab nations, not to mention the zanies over in Iran and the nutbars of non-bordering Pakistan, all bent on Zion's destruction, is the Mideast's Tibet.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:34 | link | comments

Rancid fruit: Cherry-picking hatred. (hat tip: Ben Hur)

I'm sure it's not so bad once it's put back into context (or so I've heard).

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:01 | link | comments

A rude awakening: The Globe and Mail belatedly discovers the terrorists in our midst.

Hey, I thought that was the Post's bailiwick.

Oh, wait. Looks like the Star has twigged to it, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:48 | link | comments

Shill-com hijinks: I missed this episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie first time around.

Well, maybe not “missed” so much as purposely avoided like the plague:

Ban the Burka (Repeat: March 26 at 8PM/8:30 NT) – There’s trouble in Mercy when a mystery woman shows up at a mosque wearing a face veil. Sarah finds it oppressive. Fred finds it creepy. Baber falls in love. But he doesn’t have a way with women so he enlists Yasir to turn him into a ladies’ man.

Reminds me of the episode of Happy Days when the Fonz tries to turn Ritchie into a ladies’ man. ‘Cept for the sharia, of course.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:43 | link | comments

Avi's new gig: Kathy Shaidle examines the dhimmi dauphin of Canadian socialism and his lateral move to Al Jazeera.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:35 | link | comments

Model behaviour: With apologies to Simon and Garfunkle, er, Lennon and McCartney, er, you know who:

I am the very model of a human rights commissioner.

I listen to and weigh in on the claim of each petitioner.

My Weltanshauung’s leftist and I want you all to think like me.

And when you don’t I must say that it is the biggest mystery.

 

I’m very well acquainted, too, with elements heretical

I understand what activates and keeps them so kinetical.

About “hate speech” I’m well apprised and verging on the Stalinist.

And my deliberations are a fact that they cannot resist.

 

I’ve swallowed all the Kool-Aid of the Trudeau multi-culti cult

And what you see before you is the ultimate and end result.

In short, like a contemporary Spanish inquisitioner,

I am the very model of a human rights commissioner

 

I know our mythic history from way back in the 70s.

I ask the trenchant questions and subject folks to the third degree.

I sat there, stunned, as Ezra’s eloquence hit like a tsunami

And told him he’s entitled to opinions--yes, most “certainly”.

 

In my court we don’t worry ‘bout the truth and such like niceties.

We only are concerned about hurt feeling and those vice-ities.

I’m proud to say that my conviction rate’s a full 100 per cent.

And that success has not occurred by happenstance or accident.

 

I want you all to think nice thoughts and always act with politesse,

‘Cause if you don’t you must agree we’ll be stuck with an awful mess.

In short, consider me society’s “niceness” conditioner

And heed the very model of a human rights commissioner.

 

That’s why I’m most perturbed about the skin heads and Islamophobes

And why they are the subject of my furtive and important probes

It’s folks like them who shred the very fabric of society.

And silencing these miscreants is vital, you must all agree.

 

The CJC, Soharwardy and Elmasry are all in synch.

Convinced that it is crucial that we keep close tabs on what you think.

While Section 13(1) is something some like Steyn are wary at

There’s no recourse when they are hauled before our commissariat.

 

And should it come to pass that free expression is a casualty

So what? We aren’t American, and free speech ain’t our cuppa tea.

So I’ll keep clamping down on those with that predisposition, er,

And be the very model of a human rights commissioner.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:43 | link | comments (2)

Entente cordiale?: History repeats as Sarkozy calls for a "French-British brotherhood."

Embattled birds of a feather stick together?

Likely a pointless accord since, as Tony Blankley (on the RealClear Politics site) observes with profound sadness, England has no fight left:

...Where once our parents marched through the mud, jungle, sand or urban bombscapes of world combat -- asking nothing, offering all -- and prevailing, gaining glorious victory, we, their diminished progeny, whine that the world has not given us enough of a living.

But into every generation, a storm must come. And as we boomers slide toward our incontinence and as our children approach their young-adult vigor, the new barbarism reveals its menace to our civilization. Every week has its own largely ignored example of the coming struggle.

Two weeks ago, the story came from a town with a college that has been a leading force in the advancement of Christian civilization for 900 years: Oxford, England. Once again, something more than bluebirds threatens English skies. It seems that authorities at the Oxford Central Mosque have requested permission to use loadspeakers to blast the call to prayer five times a day from atop their minaret across the town that has heard for the past 900 summers, falls, winters and springs only the bells of the local churches.

Unsurprisingly, the Church of England's bishop for Oxford, the Right Rev. John Pritchard, has announced his support, calling on his congregation to "enjoy community diversity." He would be a likely successor to the current archbishop of Canterbury, who called for Shariah law for England recently.

Perhaps surprisingly, two Englishmen stepped forward to oppose the proposal: professor Allan Chapman, an Oxford University historian, and Charlie Cleverly, the rector of St. Aldates Church in the heart of Oxford. "I don't have any problem with Islam, but don't force it on the people. I'm a liberal; I want to be inclusive, but I don't want to be walked over," stated the professor.

The Anglican rector of St. Aldates was a bit more blunt: "It is common knowledge, though few will say it, that radical Islam has a program to take Europe, take England and take Oxford. In this strategy, some say the prayer call is like a bridgehead, spreading to other mosques in the city."

As if to support this politically incorrect assertion, Inayat Bunglawala, the assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain rejected the complaint dismissively, asserting that the "call to prayer will be part of Britain and Europe in the future."

A week later, England's ruling class again displayed its unfitness to rule. In Manchester, England, the Greater Manchester Police rejected the application to join it offered by Craig Briggs, who had just completed four and a half years with the 3rd Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment. He seemingly was qualified but for one shortcoming. He has a tattoo on his lower arm that spells out the shocking name: "ENGLAND." He was formally informed that "Home Office policy precludes applications with tattoos ... which may cause offence and/or invite provocation from the public or colleagues." Informally he was told, "Unfortunately, some people feel intimidated by the word England." And I thought only Nazi swine (and in olden days, the French) were intimidated by the thought of England.

England, in her tolerance, has admitted into her midst -- and given succor -- those who loathe her. But more loathsome yet are the natural born Englishmen -- most in high places -- who have forgotten the simple truth of another World War II song:

"There'll always be an England,

And England shall be free,

If England means as much to you

As England means to me."

You can revise that to: Where once there was an England/An England that was free/It crumbled when the Islamists' sharia crossed the sea.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:56 | link | comments (2)

The return of Moqty: Last time we checked in with Shia firebrand, Moqtada al Sadr, he had hightailed it to Iran and was said to be deep in religious studies, training to become a full-fledged holy rollah. (His mother must be so proud!)

Guess the Ayatollah lessons weren’t enough to satisfy him, though, since Moqty is right back at it, fomenting all sorts of civil strife in Iraq. From Reuters:

NAJAF, Iraq, March 25 (Reuters) - Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called on Iraqis to stage sit-ins and threatened a countrywide "civil revolt" if attacks by U.S. and Iraqi security forces continue against his followers.

"We call upon all Iraqis to stage sit-ins all over Iraq as a first step. And if the people's demands are not respected by the Iraqi government, the second step will be to declare civil revolt in Baghdad and all other provinces," Sadr said in a statement read out by senior aide Hazem al-Araji.

He also threatened a "third step", but said it was too early to announce what that would be.

Iraqi security forces launched a major crackdown on militia, including Sadr's Mehdi Army, in the southern oil city of Basra on Tuesday.

Sadr declared a ceasefire last August and extended it in February, but his followers took to the streets in some Baghdad neighbourhoods on Monday and Tuesday to stage what they called a "civil disobedience campaign", ordering shops to shut.

"We call upon all the religious, political and social figures to intervene to stop the attacks against our people, which have been supported by occupation forces," Sadr said in the statement read out by Araji. (Baghdad newsroom)

A bit confused aren’t we, Moqty? The attacks against your people are being conducted by—go figure—your people. And by “your people” I mean your fellow Muslims, not your fellow Shias. 

Nothing you guys like better than blasting the bejeesus out of each other.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:06 | link | comments (1)

Um, because Israel is Jewish and not Chinese?: Dennis Prager asks "Why do Palestinians get more attention than Tibetans?"

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:46 | link | comments

Come again?: There are times when Globe and Mail pop culture opinier, Lynne Crosby, can be bracing and amusing. Then there are times— like today, for instance—when her shotgun marriage of high and low culture composed in Byzantine prose is utterly confounding. Upon reading the following, embedded in a fulmination about, of all people Jamie Lee Curtis and her preternaturally perky ta-tas, the only possible response is to scratch one’s noggin and go, “Huh?”

…Discourse about old, ugly women is at the root of feminist consciousness for a reason: Best branded in our souls via the (here is T.S. Eliot) "withered dugs" of the Playboy crone, who capered among the nubiles as an object lesson in contempt, we have long learned that those being put out to sexual pasture are largely mares...

“Withered dugs”? Not exactly something you want to read as you’re tucking in to your morning All-Bran. Doesn’t anyone edit Lynne’s columns to see if they, you know, make sense?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:19 | link | comments

Stupid: What else can you call Jews who, despite knowing that Barack Obama has been shaped by a racist, Jew-loathing mentor, persist in wanting to vote for him?

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:05 | link | comments (1)

Kvetching victims club, American branch: Decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the launch of the feminist movement, Democrats are still kvetching about racism and sexism. Bruce Walker on the American Thinker site tries to account for the perpetual whinging. Why, after all this time and the enactment of so many laws, are these folks so upset?:

…Why?  Because the sins of America are a religious article of faith to self-appointed black leaders and to self-appointed representatives of the female sex.  And it is crucial that the sin is not racism or sexism, but specifically American (or, perhaps, Western) racism and sexism.  There is a reason why black leaders long ignored the genocide in Sudan, in which whites were enslaving and murdering blacks:  the whites in question were not American.  There is a reason why feminist yawned when told about honor murders, female circumcision and the imprisonment of rape victims:  the men in question were not American.   The catechism of the Left is that America is evil. 

 

Actually, America has been very good to women.  Men and women are different, and every human society has reacted to those differences in some fashion.  No society provided equivalent rights to men and women.  Whether that meant that women were treated unfairly is a matter of judgment.  Women in America have never been subject to a wartime draft.  The first labor laws protected the health of women and children.  Currently federal laws affirmatively discriminate in favor of women.  The Violence Against Women Act, for example, only provides funds for violence against women, not violence against men.  The Child Support Enforcement Program does not enforce family law orders, but only family law orders related to support -- and the vast majority of custodial parents are women.  Title IX requires that women sports in college receive funding far out of proportion to actual interest in those sports.

 

None of this is necessarily bad, but it is certainly evidence that the unequal legal status of men and women often discriminates against men, not women.   That should lead a sensible person to determine that the different treatment of men and women in society is not bigoted sexism, but rather a serious attempt to be fair to classes of Americans who have basic and natural differences.

 

The record of American on racism and ethnic discrimination is different.  Blacks, undoubtedly, have faced hateful bigotry on account of their race.  The enslavement of Africans was a sin, and it was recognized as a sin while it was happening by many American leaders.  The foundation of Liberia under President Monroe was an early attempt to rectify that wrong.  The carnage decades later in the Civil War was a more desperate attempt to rectify that wrong.  The history of black Americans for a century after the Civil War was largely a battle between whites who wanted to elevate the black man and whites who wanted to degrade the black man.  Ultimately the former won.

 

Blacks were not the only Americans who faced discrimination because of their race.  Even Europeans -- Germans, Irish, Jews, Poles and Italians (among others) -- all went through a cycle of disdain and yet all rose above that and assumed a full measure of the American Dream.  More significantly, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans have all come to America with oral and written languages completely alien to English, with no common theological or philosophical system, and with a physical appearance that made them as distinct as black Americans.  These Asian-Americans faced racism, but they rose above it -- and without much in the way of civil rights laws, affirmative action programs or similar government advocacy.  In fact, Asian students, themselves once the victims of racism, are made to stand aside in some state college systems for less-qualified other minorities.  

 

The words of Emma Lazarus "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddle masses yearning to breath free" are true about America:  victims of bigotry throughout the last two centuries have flocked to America precisely because it was a global haven for those who were persecuted and despised, denied equality and fair treatment.  These people sought America.  These people, emphatically, never damned America.

 

This is not a defense of racism, but rather an observation that racism has proven very easy to transcend in America, when a group adopts American values or when a group adheres to its own values of work, family, study and thrift.   This formula has worked well with all different colors of Americans, including many black Americans.

The outspokenness of civil rights leaders and feminists -- indeed, the outrageousness of their comments -- is the best evidence that racism against blacks and misogyny are very weak in America.  If we lived in the land and time of the Taliban, feminists would be silent and shuddering.  If we lived in the land and time of Jim Crow, then blacks would be overly polite and subservient.  Thank goodness we do not.   

 

Hating America is a religion with radical feminists and militant blacks.  It is a very bad religion.  It is a religion immune to any cure.  It is a religion founded upon lies.  It is, in fact, more like a sick cult than any religion that normal Americans might follow.   The greatness and goodness of America, as has so often been the case, is well defined by its mortal enemies.

 

Funny how the kvetchers don’t seem terribly concerned about other ethno-religio-cultural groups wherein sexism and discrimination are not only rampant, but are taken as a matter of faith.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:01 | link | comments

What the UN does best: Enable tyrants, facilitate dictatorships, and wrap itself in a mantle of irreproachable self-righteousness while making things much, much worse. By Michael Holman in the times online:

Here we go again! Seven years after the World Food Programme helped to save Robert Mugabe’s political bacon by unilaterally and unconditionally deciding to feed his starving people, the UN agency is making the same mistake.

At the end of 2001 Zimbabwe’s leader was in trouble. Presidential elections were looming. The consequences of his land grab were becoming clear. After denying that hunger was imminent, Mugabe finally admitted that half a million Zimbabweans faced famine.

At this point the WFP stepped in to feed the country – but without an insistence on minimum conditions, such as an end to the land policy which created the crisis that donors sought to alleviate.

The outcome of the operation was predictable: food aid became institutionalised as the land grab continued. The WFP has fed millions of Zimbabweans and Mugabe has been cushioned from the consequences of his policies.

Seven years later history repeats itself. Mugabe is fighting for his political life. Elections are imminent. And he has been forced to admit that his country is starving. But again, help is at hand from the same source.

In a statement last week the WFP announced that it “plans to complete this month’s food distributions in Zimbabwe earlier than usual to avoid any overlap with the final run-up to the presidential and parliamentary elections on 29 March”. In other words, in time for Mr Mugabe to use the resources of the State to distribute the food as he deems fit.

The WFP claims that it has “zero tolerance for political interference . . . in the distribution of its food assistance,” a claim as pompous as it is hollow. For a start, it should be unacceptable to the WFP that reporters from the very countries who pay for the food should be banned from Zimbabwe. It is also unacceptable that election monitors are similarly proscribed.

No one underestimates the UN agency’s predicament. What if Mr Mugabe responds to a WFP attempt to impose conditions by choosing to let his people starve rather than accept foreign reporters, and the presence of independent monitors?

But there is another question to ask: if Mr Mugabe’s political life is in the balance, could these terms prove the straw that will break his back? If he agrees, the better the chance that democracy prevails on March 29. If he refuses, might this tip the scales towards his overthrow?

Selecting and applying the conditions that should accompany food aid is no easy task. But the record suggests that the naïve and unconditional generosity the WFP has displayed has done long-term harm, whatever short-term good.

The UN, in a nutshell, doing long-term harm since 1945.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:14 | link | comments (2)

Today’s doggerel: With profound apologies to O. Nash:

Obama’s Grama—she is white.

Obama’s preacher—he’s a fright.

And, whaddya know?, for B. Obama

It’s the “fright” who’s like the Dalai Lama.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:00 | link | comments

Thugs call the shots:  In FrontPage Magazine, John David Lewis describes his encounter with “thugs” on a university campus who could not abide his free expression (since it wasn’t in line with their way of thinking). A harrowing account, indeed. What jumped out at me, though, was the following, since it resonates with what’s happening here in Canada with our very own thought cops (my bolds):

…The topic of my talk was theocracy and Islamic law. Islamic governments, as ideological states founded on claims to divine revelation, must jail—or worse—those who speak out against the clerics. This was the thug’s ideal: In lieu of rationally demonstrating the “truth” of his beliefs, he would criminalize me, or jail me, or perhaps kill me, to stop the spread of ideas contrary to his. In Iran, this ideal has already been achieved; there I would have been arrested, condemned, and thrown into solitary confinement. But in America, the thug’s ideal is frustrated; without the power of the law to silence me he was reduced to name-calling.

What deeper attack on civilization, freedom, the mind, and human life could be possible than to propose the establishment of thought crimes in an American university? His was the voice of a dark-age Nazi brownshirt longing for the day when he can destroy those who vocalize ideas that make it difficult for him to evade the irrational nature of his whims. Who is it that should be empowered to peruse articles and determine which ones constitute crimes? The thug made that very clear…

Lewis is lucky that he lives in the States. In Canada, “thought crimes” have been a fait accompli for quite some time.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:47 | link | comments

Buffoon with forehead icky re-bloviates: Ayman is off his meds again. From AP:

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — Al-Qaida deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri called on Muslims in a new audiotape released Monday to strike Jewish and American targets in revenge for Israel's recent offensive in the Gaza Strip.

The al-Zawahri tape came on the heels of a message from Osama bin Laden, who called for a holy war to liberate the Palestinian territories. Together, the two messages appeared to be a more direct push by the terror network's leadership to use widespread anger over the Gaza violence to whip up support.

Israel's weeklong offensive in Gaza ended in early March. It was launched in an attempt to put down Palestinian militants firing rockets against nearby the Israeli town of Sderot and city of Ashkelon. The Israeli assault killed more than 120 people, including many civilians. Three Israelis also were killed.

Bin Laden and al-Zawahri have frequently referred to the Palestinian cause in their past messages, but usually in broader terms of liberating Jerusalem and denouncing Israeli violence. Their latest calls for attacks, however, had a more immediate and urgent tone.

The string of messages has raised concerns that al-Qaida could be planning new attacks in the West — or is seeking to inspire its sympathizers to carry out violence. In another message last week, bin Laden warned of a "severe" reaction against Europe after Danish papers published a cartoon seen as insulting Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

The authenticity of the 4 minute, 44-second audiotape could not be independently confirmed. But the voice resembled that of al-Zawahri on previous audio and videotapes confirmed to be his. It was posted on an Islamic militant Web site where al-Qaida usually releases its statements, and a banner advertising the tape had the logo of al-Qaida's media arm, Al-Sahab.

"Muslims, today is your day. Strike the interests of the Jews, the Americans, and all those who participated in the attack on Muslims," al-Zawahri said. "Monitor the targets, collect money, prepare the equipment, plan with precision, and then — while relying on God — assault, seeking martyrdom and paradise."

Al-Zawahri said attacks should not be limited to places in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

"Today there is no room for he who says that we should only fight the Jews in Palestine," he said. "Let us strike their interests everywhere, just like they gathered against us from everywhere."

"Let them know that they will get blood for every dollar they spend in the killing of the Muslims, and for every bullet they fire at us, a volcano will turn back on them," he said, referring to American military aid and other ties to Israel. "They cannot expect to support Israel, then live in peace while the Jews are killing our fugitive and besieged people."

Israeli officials did not immediately respond to repeated messages seeking comment.

Al-Zawahri also referred to the publishing of the cartoon seen as insulting Islam's prophet. The cartoons, which sparked deadly riots across the Muslim world in 2006 after they were first published, were reprinted last month.

"They will never be able to insult and make a mockery out of our Prophet, peace and prayers of Allah upon him," al-Zawahri said…

Wanna bet?

Update:

About Ayman al-Zawahiri

One has now become bored and quite weary.

Such a cranky old scold.

And it's same old, same old.

And that head icky--that's just plain eerie.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:14 | link | comments

Hugh crunches the numbers: A Jihad Watch reader asked Hugh Fitzgerald if he would be willing to shift his loyalty to the Palestinians “If the Israel/Palestinian conflict were exactly the same…only the roles of the two warring parties were exactly reversed.” Hugh responded as follows:

…Let's see.

If there were 22 Jewish states, and only one tiny Arab state, and if in those 22 Jewish states every other group was denied anything like equality (see the various groups of Christians all over the Muslim Arab world, or for that matter see the various groups of non-Arab Muslims -- such as Kurds, Berbers, and black Africans in Darfur), and if those 22 Jewish states also possessed fantastic oil reserves and the one tiny Arab state possessed nothing but the intelligence of its populace, and if those 22 Jewish states were the size of the 22 members of the Arab League, with 14,000,000 square miles of territory, and the one tiny Arab state had less than 1/1,000th of that, or about 10,0000 square miles, and if those 22 Jewish states were possessed of an ideology that required them to move heaven and earth in order to eradicate that one tiny Arab state -- oh, and did I forget to mention all the other "not-quite Jewish states" that would be the correct analogue to the non-Arab Muslim states that the Arabs (and Islam) have convinced that they, too, have a stake in opposing Israel and wishing to see it destroyed? (See those frenzied mobs in Iran, or Pakistan.)

And if, furthermore, I knew that if those 22 Jewish states were intent on rewriting, or destroying, or utterly effacing, the history of those Arabs in their one tiny "Arab" state, because the rewriting of other peoples' history was what, for 1350 years, those Jews had been doing, and if there were a figure in Judaism akin to Muhammad, who was held up as the Model of Conduct, uswa hasana, as the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, and if that Perfect Man in Judaism was not like any figure known to me in Judaism, or in Christianity, but was remarkably like Muhammad, as described in the Sira as teased out of the words and deeds attributed to him in the Hadith, and if, furthermore, I knew that if those 22 Jewish states, with their 14,000,000 square miles, and their fantastic unmerited oil wealth, and their unbelievable fixation on destroying a sliver of territory that was less than 1/1,000th of the territory they controlled, ever managed to destroy that tiny Arab state in the area bounded to the east by the River Jordan and on the west by the Mediterranean, a place so small one could not find it on the map, were ever to succeed, that would not satisfy them, but make them ever more eager to recover other lands that had once been in their possession, and indeed to work, with a sense of triumph, for the final acceptance, all over the world, of Judaism as the dominant faith, and with Jews assuming the role that Muslims look forward to assuming themselves, then yes, I would of course be on the side of that tiny Arab state.

Oh, I forgot to mention that to make your little hypothetical complete, one would also have to posit that the Jews had long ago conquered that little area, and many of the Arabs had fled to Europe, or elsewhere in the "Jewish lands," and in both places had had to endure different kinds of difficulties, and suffering, and recently, in Europe, had endured what the Jews endured under the Nazis. And those Arabs, who had in the last century come to realize that in order to deal with the entrenched prejudice, complicated in its origins, against them, that it made sense for them to return to that little sliver, which under Jewish rule had fallen, by all accounts, into ruin and desolation, and they had done so, buying up land at exorbitant prices, and managing to have their right to establish the Arab National Home on this little territory recognized by the civilized world, even if those Jews, in their vast territories and many (22 by now) states, were determined never to let those Arabs have their tiny country -- why, yes, if all of that, and all the rest that I haven't bothered to give here were offered, with Arabs in place of Jews, and vice-versa, I would have not the slightest difficulty being on the side of the Arabs in that case.

The reality, of course, is that Israel is the tiny besieged state, whose people are threatened by a permanent Jihad. Israel is the tiny state where, against all odds, the fantastic achievement of Israel came to be, the resurrection of the ancient Jewish commonwealth. The great Italian journalist Indro Montanelli once wrote, toward the end of his long life (he died at the age of 90) that the greatest thing to have happened during the twentieth century, through which he had lived and during which he had experienced and observed and studied so much, was the establishment of the State of Israel. And then, he added, "and possibly the only good thing to come out of the twentieth century."

Moral idiots will not share this view. I invite you to think clearly about how I have taken your invited hypothetical, and worked it out, and ask yourself if you wish to remain a moral idiot, or care to embrace what is just, what is right. Many people born into Islam, by the way, once they have jettisoned Islam, have had no trouble recognizing what Israel faces. See Ibn Warraq, see Wafa Sultan, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, all of whom were subject to environments where anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments were their daily fare.

As they have managed to retain their intellectual and moral clarity, and to develop mentally in the freedom of the West, they have come to certain conclusions about Islam. And they have also reached certain conclusions about much-maligned Israel, the conclusions that I too have come to, and you, I'm afraid, have not.

Game, set, match: Hugh.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:51 | link | comments (1)

And a damn fine job it's doing, too: Dick Cheney says Hamas is trying to 'torpedo' peace talks--as if Abbas is qualitatively different from his extremist "compadres".

Actually, Dick, they're two peas in one festering pod.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:12 | link | comments

Song and dance: If only the one-eyed black Jewish Rat-Packer were around to sing it:

I knew a man Obama and he chants for you

In dulcet tones.

Defendin’ his attendance at an awful church

He made no bones.

Said Granny’s like Wright, Granny’s like Wright,

And that was so wrong.

 

Comparin’ his old mater to that racist Rev.--

It’s such a joke!

But see the silly people hang on ev’ry word

As Bambi spoke.

He talked of his life, talked of his life.

Afterwards they all cheered.

 

He said his name “Obama” came from Africa

Along with Dad.

But Mama and his Grama came from Kansas plains,

Which made him sad.

He needed “street cred”, needed “street cred.”

Jeremiah Wright was his man.

 

Mr. Obama, Mr. Obama,

Mr. Obama, chants.

 

He chanted and he panted ‘bout “audacity”.

And all his “hopes”.

He said that “change” was possible if you “believe”--

And other tropes.

The young’uns all swooned, young’uns all swooned.

Lots of others did, too.

 

His chanting had incantatory properties--

It hypnotized.

So folks who listened to his spiel soon didn’t mind

Lame alibis.

Their brains turned to mush, brains turned to mush

And they adored him still more.

 

Mr. Obama, Mr. Obama,

Mr. Obama, chants.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:19 | link | comments

Et tu, Dick?: Cheney says Palestinian state long overdue.

The final nail in the coffin of Bush et Co.: From "you're either with us or against us" to Cheney's pathetic and blatantly false observation.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:48 | link | comments

Which would explain Ontario's endless winter of '08: Scientist says global warming ended a decade ago.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:40 | link | comments

Heh: The duplicity of hope.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:29 | link | comments

He’s baa-aack!: Guess who just turned up like a bad penny, like a recurring nightmare, like a stubborn case of lice, like a burrito that doesn’t want to digest? The one. The only. Mr. Personality hisself--Kofi Annan. From the New York Sun:

UNITED NATIONS — Kofi Annan, who spent the last years of his decade-long tenure as U.N. secretary-general clashing with members of the Bush administration, says he hopes a widely held perception that his successor, Secretary-General Ban, is "too close" to America is nothing but a "passing phase."

Mr. Annan, who became secretary-general in 1997 with strong backing from the Clinton administration but ran afoul of Washington when he criticized the war in Iraq as "illegal," was in New York City yesterday to receive an international justice award from the MacArthur Foundation. In a wide-ranging discussion with U.N. reporters, he opined on world affairs in a style that fans and detractors alike once likened to that of a "secular pope."

"Almost every secretary-general at one point or the other is perceived as close to the Americans, and at another point fighting the Americans," he said. "I hope this perception that Secretary-General Ban is too close to the United States is a passing phase."

Mr. Annan, who is now based in Geneva, said he is following the "revealing" American presidential campaign closely, adding that he has "no horse" in the race. "I used to ask myself the question, 'Is society ready for a woman, a black man?'" he said. "It seems to me that there have been major shifts in the American society that I missed even though I have been here for a long time and I thought that I understood" America. "This election has been an eye-opener for me, and I think for many people around the world."

Mr. Ban's critics say his closeness to America is harmful for the world body. "The U.N. flag is no more a protection, but rather a target because of its failure to preserve impartiality in different conflicts in the world," a former aide to Mr. Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, whom Mr. Ban appointed to investigate a bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Algiers, told Algerian reporters this week.

While Mr. Ban has often said he would rather achieve results in areas where the United Nations can be effective than make public his views on world situations, Mr. Annan spoke of "a bully pulpit that I believe as secretary-general I should use." In reality, Mr. Annan said, "There are very few things that the secretary-general can do," so what is left is to "challenge the member states" and "inspire" them.

In his recent memoir, "Surrender Is Not an Option," a former American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, had strong criticism for Mr. Annan's "secular pope" stance. He supported Mr. Ban, Mr. Bolton wrote, because "of all the candidates to succeed Annan, I thought he was the least likely to wake up at one point during his five-year term concluding he was God's gift to humanity."

Bolton might have quoted Winston Churchill’s famous line about Sir Stafford Cripps, an insufferably pompous M.P.:“There but for the grace of God, goes God.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:22 | link | comments

Don't believe it: Cold doesn't hinder Ontario Easter bunny.

Sez you. Poor critter nearly froze his tail off.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:08 | link | comments

Seethe-a-thon expected in five, four, three…: The Pope just turned a prominent Muslim into an apostate. Better take cover, Benedict. From AP via the IHT:

VATICAN CITY: A prominent Italian Muslim - an iconoclastic writer who has condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel - converted to Catholicism in a baptism by the pope at the Vatican Easter service.

Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Roman Catholic, has infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he is a deputy editor.

Allam titled one book "Long Live Israel."

As a choir sang Saturday night, Pope Benedict XVI poured holy water over Allam's head and said a brief prayer in Latin.

"We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another," Benedict said in a homily reflecting on the meaning of baptism. "Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close."

Allam, 55, told the newspaper Il Giornale in a December interview that his criticism of Palestinian suicide bombings had provoked threats on his life in 2003, prompting the Italian government to provide him with a security detail.

Yahya Pallavicini, vice president of Coreis, a group of observant Muslims in Italy, said he respected Allam's choice but said he was "perplexed" by the symbolic and high-profile way in which he chose to convert.

"If Allam truly was compelled by a strong spiritual inspiration, perhaps it would have been better to do it delicately," Pallavicini said, according to a report by the ANSA news agency.

Allam, who has a young son with his Catholic wife and two adult children from a previous relationship, indicated in the Il Giornale interview that he would have no problem converting to Christianity. He did not speak to the press Saturday, and his newspaper said it had no information about his conversion.

Allam explained his decision to title a recent book "Viva Israele" by saying he wrote it after he received death threats from Hamas.

"Having been condemned to death, I have reflected a long time on the value of life. And I discovered that behind the origin of the ideology of hatred, violence and death is the discrimination against Israel. Everyone has the right to exist except for the Jewish state and its inhabitants," he said. "Today, Israel is the paradigm of the right to life."

In 2006, Allam was a co-winner, with three other journalists, of the $1 million Dan David Prize, named for an Israeli entrepreneur.

The prize committee cited Allam for "his ceaseless work in fostering understanding and tolerance between cultures."

Sounds like a good guy. He better watch his back too, though.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:00 | link | comments

No bell, but dhimmis kvell*: The  Ceeb’s Nalah Ayed on the significance of Qatar’s new (dhimmi) church:

…At the opening ceremony, Qatar’s deputy prime minister said the country’s decision to open the church would send a positive message to the world about the possibility of coexistence, that just as mosques can be built in the secular West, churches can be built in countries where Islam is dominant.

Qatar has been sponsoring interfaith conferences for several years now, encouraging dialogue between different religions. Allowing churches in the country reinforces that position.

Observers here suggest there’s more to it than that. For some time now, Qatar has sought to differentiate itself from its more conservative neighbour Saudi Arabia, and although it has only a fraction of Saudi’s size and power, it has sought to counter its influence.

The opening of the church also leaves Saudi as the only Gulf country that still doesn’t allow the establishment of churches on its soil.

Qatar is also trying to project an image of modernity, analysts say, especially as it prepares a serious bid for the 2016 Olympic Games.

“This is a purely political decision,” says Mehran Kamrava, director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Doha.

“What we see is an attempt to brand the country, project a certain image of the country as forward-thinking, forward-looking, modern, progressive and so of course, having a church is part of the project of modernity.”

No bell, no crosses

Whatever the reason behind the decision, there are detractors. Qatar is, after all, a deeply conservative Muslim country that follows the same strict interpretation of Islam as Saudi Arabia. Many believe that had the question been put to Qataris, in a referendum for instance, they would have rejected it.

Former justice minister Najeeb al-Nauimi says he doesn’t oppose the building of a church in principle.

But he has criticized the decision because it was imposed by the leadership without consulting its citizens, likely for political reasons.

It was done, he says, “to please Britain, to please Europe, [to say] you see, we are like you, you open a mosque, we open a church. But [U.S. President George W.] Bush, when he says we have a mosque, he did not grant that mosque to the people, it was done through a normal democratic process. We have to do the same.”

Al-Nauimi is also concerned that the church will become a target. There have already been threats made against it on extremist websites.

The Vatican of course is aware of all this. To avoid offending local sensitivities, the church was built without a bell and without crosses on the outside.

For greater certainty, its entrance is also protected by metal detectors.

Christians deeply appreciative

Among Christians, though, who have made Qatar their home, there is only deep appreciation.

In their first few years here, Robert and Debbie would attend clandestine prayers held in garages and living rooms. For many decades, the presiding Catholic priest operated here without official sanction.

With time, the situation improved. Catholics acquired a parish centre and seven priests held 56 masses a week at other locations around the country. But having a real church, they say, makes Qatar feel more like a home.

“We were really praying and praying that a miracle take place,” Debbie told me. “God has heard everybody's prayer.”

At the church’s official opening, the celebrations were full of jubilation and went on for hours. The crowning achievement: having it open in time for Easter festivities this weekend.

“It's really great. We can celebrate the Holy Week, the passion of our Lord and Easter here in this wonderful monument,” beamed Robert.

It is a transient community. Many of those who attended the church’s opening will likely eventually go home. But the church will remain to serve new generations of expatriates who come looking for opportunity…

If “opportunity” doesn’t knock for the testy “extremists,” that is.

*Yiddish for “cries of delight at this joyful turn of events” (or something like that).

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:50 | link | comments

Blast from the past: Aging former pop star Chris de Burgh, whose last hit that I can recall was “Lady in Red” back in the decade of Wham! and Flock of Seagulls, is defying “media misinformation” and planning to perform in Iran (for all the ladies in black, I s'pose). From Fars News:

Speaking exclusively to the Record, pop legend Chris de Burgh confirmed that he would have an open-air concert with popular Iranian band Arian in Tehran this summer, press tv reported.

Chris then responded to critics who believe he should not play in Iran and said, "I don't believe virtually anything we read [on Iran] because we are on the receiving end of a lot of propaganda."

"The only way you get the truth is by talking to people in Iran and finding out what goes on," he explained.

"About 12 years ago, we became aware that I was very popular in Iran and we tried to figure out how to get there because I like playing new places," he continued. "I'm visiting Iran to make people a little happier."

The Irish singer, 52, is a UN ambassador for promoting food campaign initiatives against malnutrition and had earlier collaborated with Arian to sing A Melody for Peace.

Why am I not surprised?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:23 | link | comments

Anniversary shmaltz: Just in time for anniversary festivities (60 years since the "nakba"), don't miss the Washington Report's special "Nakba Blog."

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:16 | link | comments (2)

Feel the love: Radical Hamas and "moderate" Fatah sign a reconciliation deal.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:56 | link | comments

Harpoon hypes the HRCs: The Toronto Star’s revered “editorial page editor emeritus” (his billing each and every time his column appears), Harpoon Siddiqui, finally gets around to the subject of HRCs. I’m sure it will come as no surprise on which side of the divide Harpoon looms. Like the Canadian Islamic Council, the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and, oh, yeah, the Canadian Jewish Congress, he’s gung ho about allowing shifty lefty bureaucrats decide—usually in camera—what constitutes acceptable speech in this country. Harpoon argues that since HRCs have, up till now, been sauce for the goose (the Jews who’ve successfully kvetched about Ernst Zundel and his ilk) it is only fair that they be sauce for the ganders (Islamists like the CIC’s Mo Elmasry and the law kids who Mark Steyn—the object of their disaffection—cheekily refers to as Elmo’s sock puppets):

...The pattern is clear. Those [Macleans, Steyn, Levant]  hauled before the commissions howl "censorship."

But the Supreme Court of Canada has upheld the anti-hate provisions of both the human rights codes as well as the Criminal Code. It ruled that curbing hate speech is a reasonable and justifiable limit on free speech.

That, then, is the law in Canada.

Liberal MP Keith Martin now wants to change the law. He has introduced a private member's bill to delete section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which prohibits messages "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."

He has been hailed as a hero, especially by right wingers. But the Liberal party has distanced itself from him, for good reason: There was little or no hue and cry when human rights commissions were ruling on complaints by various groups, but there is when the complainants are Muslim.

Martin and others need to address that if they are not to be seen as hypocrites.

The media, including the Star, also vehemently oppose human rights tribunals regulating the press.

They do so to protect press freedom. They also point to disparities in the human rights codes in different jurisdictions. Ontario's refers to signs, symbols, emblems etc. but not the media. The federal statute, and the ones in Alberta and B.C., are clearer, which is why the tribunals there heard the cases they did.

It follows, then, that the federal and British Columbia commissions have no option but to hear the complaint against Maclean's. Otherwise, they will stand accused of double standards.

As for the Ontario commission, it needs to address the irony that it may rule against a crackpot holding up a sign, "Gays pose a threat," but not a media outlet conveying a similar message to a far wider audience.

One tactic being used to undermine the complaint against Maclean's is to cite a 2004 statement by Mohamed El Masry, the controversial head of the Islamic Congress. He had said that all Israeli civilians are fair game for suicide bombers. As vile as that sentiment is, must it be used as a weapon of guilt by association against the student complainants?

Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney thinks so. He has attempted to vilify them by focusing on El Masry, while wrapping himself in the flag of freedom of speech.

But as a minister, his job is to stay neutral and refrain from trying to influence independent tribunals. It is also his duty to uphold the law, which empowers many of them to adjudicate alleged hate speech.

We should get the human rights commissions out of the business of regulating the press. But until Parliament and the provincial legislatures do so, the commissions – and ministers of the Crown, in particular – have a duty to ensure equal applications of the law for all citizens.

As Harpoon's peroration makes clear, it's time to change this dreadful law, not promote it.

Here’s a rule of thumb by which I am delighted to live my life and to share with you: In general, if Harpoon is for something, you won’t go wrong by being agin’ it.

Harpoon does have a point, though. So far, Islamists--or, more specifically, resistance to Islamists and their flawless law--have managed to put the kibosh on: religious family tribunals (Catholic, Jewish); funding for religious schools in Ontario; and, the way things are looking, HRCs may be next. One would have thought  by now the CJC, which persists in tying up its efforts with Muslim ones ("building bridges" in CJC parlance), would have detected a pattern, and realized that maybe it's time to take a new tack.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:56 | link | comments

Wishy-washy damage control: Some boycott types got on Motorola’s case for selling things to the Zionist “occupiers”. Here’s what Motorola said (from JTA):

Motorola responded to a U.S. group that demanded that it end its sale of products to Israel's army and settlements.

The campaign launched last month by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation singled out the sale of fuses for air-launched bombs; communication devices for the army; and radar devices to secure Israel's security barrier and settlements.

"As a well-respected and responsible corporate citizen, all of Motorola's global activities are conducted in strict accordance with U.S., local, country and all other applicable laws, as well as our own code of business conduct," Motorola said in a March 11 reply.

Motorola said it periodically reviewed its business conduct. "Such a review is currently being conducted and we plan to post the revised documents to our website when our review is completed," it said.

Here’s what Motorola should have said (shorter, more direct, much more to the point): Get stuffed, Jew-haters.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:36 | link | comments

A tough sell: Washington Post pundit E.J. Dionne, Jr. claims that of all the presidential candidates, the only one who has a complete grasp of this religion thing is—wait for it, ‘cause it’s certainly worth waiting for—Barack Obama.

And I hear that his mentor/spiritual leader, Jeremiah Wright, has a pretty good handle on it, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:21 | link | comments

Berman ‘splains it (“radical Islam”) to the squishes: Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and of that book-length evisceration of faux-moderate Tariq Ramadan in the New Republic, offers this assessment in the NYT of the continuing appeal of “radical Islam”—and of America’s serial feckless responses to it. Berman, who mostly “gets it,” but who’s not yet prepared to go over completely to the dark side (booga booga), tries to let the Times’ squishy readers down easy. Yes, some of the mess has to do with Bush (quel relief!), but most of it is due to pathologies over which America has absolutely no control.

…A lot of people right now make the common-sense supposition that if extremist ideologies have lately entered a sort of grisly golden age, the Bush administration’s all-too-predictable blundering in Iraq must bear the blame. Yes, certainly; but that can’t be the only explanation.

Extremist movements have been growing bigger and wilder for more than three decades now, during that period, America has tried pretty much everything from a policy point of view. Our presidents have been satanic (Richard Nixon), angelic (Jimmy Carter), a sleepy idiot savant (Ronald Reagan), a cagey realist (George H. W. Bush), wonderfully charming (Bill Clinton) and famously otherwise (George W. Bush). And each president’s Middle Eastern policy has conformed to his character.

In regard to Saddam Hussein alone, our government has lent him support (Mr. Reagan), conducted a limited war against him (the first President Bush), inflicted sanctions and bombings (Mr. Clinton, in other than his charming mode), and crudely overthrown him. Every one of those policies has left the Iraqi people worse off than before, even if nowadays, from beneath the rubble, the devastated survivors can at least ruminate about a better future — though I doubt that many of them are in any mood to do so.

And each new calamity for Iraq has, like manure, lent new fertility to the various extremist organizations. The entire sequence of events may suggest that America is uniquely destined to do the wrong thing. All too likely! But it may also suggest that America is not the fulcrum of the universe, and extremist ideologies have prospered because of their own ability to adapt and survive — their strength, in a word.

I notice a little gloomily that I may have underestimated the extremist ideologies in still another respect. Five years ago, anyone who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the region have gone through any number of phases — liberal, Marxist, secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.

Oh, no. Reality intrudes into the pages of the Sunday Times. Beat it back—quickly—lest it frighten and confuse the bien pensants.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:11 | link | comments

Is this the end of Bambi?: After being the focus of outrage due to his ranting Rev., it must have a been a relief for Bambi to be able to express outrage over the egregious breach in his passport security, and to have Condi Rice be the one offering the panting apologies.

Too bad for Bambi that the person responsible for the violation was one of his consultants.

I will now attempt--and fail--to supress the Eliot Spitzer levels of schadenfreude I am experiencing: Why deprive myself of such unsought for--and such delicious--joy?

In a rational world, this would be Bambi's coup de grace. However, in a rational world, that would have come last week with the revelations about his longstanding membership in Reverend Wright's black power chuch--and yet here we are a week later, with Bambi's presidential hopes still very much alive.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:40 | link | comments

Alternate realities: Growing up in Canada back in the day, one often heard the phrase “two solitudes.” It described our two founding peoples—the French and the English—and how their differences in language, history and sense of nationhood kept them permanently apart. I recalled that old-fangled, pre-multiculti expression just now, when I read this Obamanation by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek. The two solitudes of our day refer to those who “get it” and those who don’t have a clue. You can slot Alter into the latter group:

"The Presidency," Franklin D. Roosevelt told a reporter shortly after he was elected in 1932, "is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership." We don't know yet whether Barack Obama can get himself elected president, much less prove a success in office. He could get swamped by unanticipated problems or suffer from crippling flaws we haven't seen yet. All presidents are blind dates. But Obama is showing signs that he could project his voice in the theater of the American presidency. Even if his legislative agenda founders, he might be able to help the nation raise its sights in new ways. You might think of it as the Obama Dividend.

As the afterglow of last week's landmark Philadelphia speech on race fades, even many conservatives agree with liberal editorial writers that Obama's approach was brilliant. I'm skeptical of that adjective and reluctant to hazard a guess about the political impact of the speech on blue-collar whites. Until the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, we won't know if they even heard about the story of his white grandmother, or how he gave voice to white frustration about affirmative action and busing. But I do know that the speech was "presidential" in the best sense of that word, and for reasons beyond a tone of gravitas and a backdrop of American flags. To succeed in a crisis (and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.'s inflammatory sermons were at least a mini-crisis for Obama), presidents must do more than rally the country enough to win backing in polls for a course of action. That's relatively easy. The hard part is using the bully pulpit to instruct and illuminate and rearrange our mental furniture. Every great president has been a captivating teacher. By talking honestly and intelligently about a subject that most Americans would rather ignore, Obama offered a preview of how he would perform as educator-in-chief.

Obama's unique assets have usually been viewed in international terms. The election of President Barack Hussein Obama would blow the minds of people in the Middle East and other regions, and help restore American prestige. Of course, given unpredictable global events, the Obama Dividend abroad may last about as long as the much-hyped post- cold-war "peace dividend." It could pay returns for only weeks or months instead of years. Just look at Kenya, where one tribe involved in the recent unrest loves Obama (because his father was a member), and the other tribe has no use for him.

But in the United States, black opinion is now nearly unanimously behind Obama, with as many as 90 percent supporting him in the primaries. While Obama can do much to guide white Americans toward a better racial future and a greater appreciation that poor kids are not, as he says, "someone else's children," his most exciting potential for moral leadership could be in the African-American community...

I know how "the other tribe" feels, being a member of it myself. As for Bambi's much-vaunted but largely phantasmagorical "moral leadership"--his 20-year membership in the Chuch of Hate Whitey and Abominate America pretty well makes mashed potatoes of that.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:53 | link | comments

Too funny!: Ceeb radio just referred to the Ceeb as "the mothership."

Darn tootin'. It's the mothership of loopy, Bush-bashing, Palestinian-loving, Sharia-shilling, U.S.-and-self-loathing hardline lefties. People like Mr. Naomi Klein, who feel equally at home at the Arab Ceeb (the one without Coach's Corner), Al Jazeera.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:14 | link | comments

Adios, scaramouche?: Given my "untamed" proclivities, it's a looming possibility.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:03 | link | comments (2)

Defective reasoning: Sometimes, for no particular reason other than cockeyed optimism, I like to think that people are smarter and more sceptical than I imagine, and that, in the final analysis, they won’t let themselves be pushed around and bamboozled by the tricksters.

Then, of course, I read something like this—a letter to the editor in the Toronto Star by one Ruth Cohen—and the whole shaky edifice comes crashing down (my bolds):

No amount of golden-tongued oratory can ever erase the damage so incredibly visited on the Barack Obama campaign by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Strangely enough, there may be a fortuitous sense in which the diatribe may be the salvation of Obama and the Democratic party. Because Obama has been cut down to size, he may finally grasp that his gifts can best be used as the vice-presidential nominee, thereby providing a solution to all the problems plaguing the party and the nation.

Good thinkin’, Ms. Lincoln. So you mean America’s problems would disappear—poof—were Jeremiah’s "nephew" to be but a heartbeat away from the presidency?That that would "cut him down to size"? In light of his inability to make good decisions and own up to his bad ones (like his decision to choose the nutty Jeremiah as his mentor, expose his impressionable daughters to his racist rants, refusal to renounce this obnoxious bigot, and equating him with the loving Granny who raised him), wouldn’t it make a whole more sense to keep him as far away from the (typical ) White (person) House as possible?

My thinking, anyway.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:53 | link | comments

Wrong pin: The Toronto Star’s man on the scene, Oakland Ross, advances the fiction that cleaving Jerusalem in two is “the linchpin of any bid for peace”:

JERUSALEM–This 3,000-year-old city would remain united and in Israeli hands if Benjamin Netanyahu were returned to power, the right-wing former prime minister assured a gathering of foreign ambassadors recently.

Widely considered the Israeli politician most likely to take over should the current government fall, Netanyahu was broaching a sensitive issue, and he knew it.

If peace is ever to prevail between Israelis and Palestinians, it will be achieved in large measure through difficult compromises on the future of this bitterly contested city.

Some of those compromises would be territorial, some would be religious and none would come easily. Right now, they do not seem to be coming at all.

"We want to negotiate Jerusalem," says Ghassan Khatib, former Palestinian minister of planning, now vice-president of Birzeit University in the West Bank. "Unfortunately, Israel is refusing to negotiate Jerusalem."

There are reasons for that, and they include efforts by current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to hold together a fractious parliamentary coalition that threatens to collapse every time his government so much as whispers the word "Jerusalem" in peace talks now underway with Fatah, the more moderate of the two main Palestinian political factions.

That is how strongly some people here feel about the age-old dream of a Jerusalem united under Jewish sovereignty, a dream Israelis now claim as a reality even though most of the world disagrees.

No foreign embassies are located in Jerusalem because no foreign government officially recognizes the city as Israel's capital or endorses the Israeli claim to jurisdiction over the entire city.

Nonetheless, Trade and Industry Minister Eli Yishai, who heads the right-wing Shas party, has threatened to withdraw from the Olmert-led coalition, along with his 12-member caucus, if the future status of the holy city is put on the bargaining table.

That would leave Olmert six seats short of a majority.

In fact, despite Yishai's warning, there have been recent discussions between Israel and Fatah on the subject of Jerusalem – and the government has not fallen, or not yet – but the threat of collapse remains, hindering a peace process that is already stumbling.

It was at least partly to placate Yishai and his followers that Olmert recently approved a renewal of Israeli housing construction in Givat Ze'ev, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank north of Jerusalem, further jeopardizing peace talks.

"I think it's going to kill this process," said Khatib.

A united Jewish-ruled Jerusalem has been an article of faith for many Israelis both before the city was "reunited" under Jewish rule following Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War and in the four decades that have followed.

The policy was most memorably articulated in 1973 by prime minister Golda Meir.

"Arab sovereignty in Jerusalem just cannot be," she told an interviewer. "This city will not be divided – not half and half, not 60-40, not 75-25. Nothing."

This is a position still held by at least some Israelis, and it would stop any conceivable Middle East peace train dead in its tracks.

"It is very clear, at the end of the day, we will have two Jerusalems," said Moshe Amirav, an Israeli expert on the subject who advised yet another former prime minister – the current defence minister, Ehud Barak – during the second Camp David, Md., round of peace talks in 2000. "Israelis will have to give up on the idea of a united Jerusalem."

When Israelis took control of East Jerusalem in 1967, they also vastly increased its size by absorbing adjoining parts of the West Bank.

Since then, Israel has sought to populate the eastern parts of the city with Jewish residents, who now number about 180,000, compared to roughly 240,000 Arab inhabitants of East Jerusalem.

Legally, with the possible exception of the Old City, all of East Jerusalem would become part of an independent Palestinian state, if one is ever established.

But, in fact, many or even most of the Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem – or "settlements" to the Palestinians – would likely remain under Israeli jurisdiction

"In principle, these are illegal settlements," said Khatib. "But negotiations are negotiations. There could be trade-offs between different components."

Meanwhile, the Arab communities of East Jerusalem would become parts of the Palestinian city, known to Arabs as Al Quds. The city, or two cities, would then serve as capital of both countries – Israel and an independent Palestine.

This may seem complicated, but the territorial challenges of Jerusalem's future are probably much easier to resolve than the religious issues, almost all of which centre on an eastern section of the Old City, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary.

For Jews, this is the holiest site on Earth. For Muslims, it ranks third in holiness, after Mecca and Medina. Currently, the area is under Israeli sovereignty but is administered by a Muslim authority known as the Waqf.

Some believe the site constitutes the thorniest obstacle to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

For Khatib, however, the solution is simple.

"From my point of view, it's not a religious conflict," he says. "It's a legal matter."

The Noble Sanctuary and, in fact, all the Old City lie on the eastern side of the so-called Green Line, a boundary drawn in 1949 as part of an armistice agreement to end hostilities between a nascent Israel and several neighbouring states.

Therefore, says Khatib, the holy site "has to fall under Palestinian sovereignty."…

Dream on, Khatib. Clearly, it is a religious matter, since Islamic delusions of grandeur and supremacy preclude the acceptance of Jewish sovereignty in Israel. That, and not the status of Jerusalem, is and always has been the “linchpin” of any final peace deal. Giving Arabs sovereignty over part of Jerusalem is no "linchpin." It is actually part of the plan for weakening Israel and destroying Jewish sovereignty.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:31 | link | comments (2)

Hot air: The Globe and Mail has the first part of its hard-hitting, six-part series, "TALKING TO THE TALIBAN." And, well, I couldn't resist sending the following:

If we could talk to the Taliban, just imagine it

Chatting to jihadis in Pashtun.

Imagine intellectual wrangles, discussing all the angles.

Trying to arrive at a bargoon.

 

If we could talk to the Taliban, learn their rationale,

Maybe find a way to cool ‘em down.

We’d study up on their sharia, teach them Ave Maria.

Our dialogue’d be our shining crown.

 

We could converse with clerics who despise us.

And they would curse our presence in their land.

If they should ask, “Do you want the caliphate?”

Say for the helluvit, “It’s grand!”

 

If we could talk to the Taliban, open up that door,

Think of all the things we could discuss.

Although we’d talk to the Taliban,

Flock to the Taliban,

Bow and scrape and squawk to the Taliban.

No way they’ll bow and scrape and squawk to us.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:52 | link | comments

I figured it out: Thought I’d share my “eureka” moment. Lying in bed this morning it suddenly struck me why the Canadian Jewish Congress is so fixated on the phantom menace of decrepit and neo-Nazis. It’s not because they pose such a threat to Canadian Jews. It’s because pursuing “Nazis” enables the CJC to preserve its membership in good standing in Canada’s Special Victims Unit, a.k.a. the Human Rights Fraternity. As Shelby Steele has observed, there’s a hierarchy of moral authority in the West. At the summit-- the victim di tutti victims, so to speak: the Palestinians. At the bottom: Israel, the world's designated nasty “victimizer”. Also clinging to the totem pole (in no particular order): blacks, aboriginals, Muslims, the disabled and other ethno-cultural groups who have a stake in playing the victim card. The Jews claim a place on the greasy pole by virtue of having been on the receiving end of “the longest hatred”, up to and including their victimization at the hands of the Nazis. However, there is absolutely no status to be had in complaining about Islamic anti-Semitism (hatred borne of antipathy for Israel and Judenhass embedded in Islamic texts)--the real and present danger for Jews both here and abroad--because A) Israel has been deemed morally indefensible by much of the international community and the SVU and B) according to fraternity rules, you’re not allowed to complain too loudly that another “victim group” is purveying hatred, even if it is. Add to that the well-nigh unshakeable perception in leftist quarters that a "vicitm" is incapable of being racist, and that what would be tagged as "racist" were a  non-victim doing it doesn't qualify as such when a victim does it because of the victim group's unfortunate history. One need look no further than Barack Obama's rationalization of Jeremiah's Wright's racism to see clear evidence of that.

Then, too, the CJC has been so intent on “building bridges” with Muslims (a bridge on the river Kwai, with the CJC in the Alec Guinness role, if you ask me)--mostly because it had some cockamamie notion of marching arm-in-arm with these groups to lobby for religious school funding in Ontario--that it dare not put those painstakingly constructed relationships in jeopardy by, say, issuing a statement condemning Israeli Apartheid Week.

 

That’s why the CJC continues to pursue harmless white power creeps--and why, foolishly and dangerously, it has hitched its wagon to the most regressive and repressive force in the nation: Canada’s Thought Commissars. In a bizarre kind of way, it needs the Nazis and the HRCs so it can retain its moral authority (such as it is) and its paid-up membership in Canada's kvetching victims club.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:45 | link | comments (2)

Throw Granny from the train: Bambi's disproportionate response, in verse:

The candidate, Bambi Obama,

Found himself in the midst of high drama.

Sought to soften Wright’s sin

With historical spin

And by casting aspersions on Grama.

 

Update: Mark Steyn, on the drama and Grama:

 

...The Rev. Wright has a hugely popular church with over 8,000 members, and Sen. Obama assures us that his pastor does good work by "reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS." But maybe he wouldn't have to quite so much "reaching out" to do and maybe there wouldn't be quite so many black Americans "suffering from HIV/AIDS" if the likes of Wright weren't peddling lunatic conspiracy theories to his own community.

Nonetheless, last week, Barack Obama told America: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."

What is the plain meaning of that sentence? That the paranoid racist ravings of Jeremiah Wright are now part of the established cultural discourse in African American life and thus must command our respect? Let us take the senator at his word when he says he chanced not to be present on AIDS Conspiracy Sunday, or God Damn America Sunday, or US of KKKA Sunday, or the Post-9/11 America-Had-It-Coming Memorial Service. A conventional pol would have said he was shocked, shocked to discover Afrocentric black liberation theology going on at his church. But Obama did something far more audacious: Instead of distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that the guy is not just his crazy uncle but America's, too.

To do this, Obama promoted a false equivalence. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother," he continued. "A woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street." Well, according to the way he tells it in his book, it was one specific black man on her bus, and he wasn't merely "passing by."

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest Cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life." In Philadelphia, Sen. Obama topped that: Greater love hath no man than to lay down his grandma for his life...

Well, after all, she was expendable.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:05 | link | comments

Bambi boosters: The “deep thinkers” of Tinseltown (and one from snowy Canuckistan) are sticking with the café au lait JFK no matter what. From the L.A. Times:

CAREER disasters (which usually involve some embarrassing bootlegged video or gossip magazine exposé) are commonplace in Tinseltown. If you're lucky, you can redeem yourself by being honest -- and then dazzling audiences with an unexpected Oscar-worthy performance.

Perhaps the same holds true here for politicians.

After the YouTube videos surfaced showing Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, making racist statements, the senator's entertainment industry supporters were beyond worried: Some thought Obama was, quite simply, finished.

"I was getting calls from celebs who were pretty upset and pretty scared," said music industry executive Steven McKeever, who serves on Obama's finance committee. "Major figures in this town were nervous and losing sleep over it."

And then, on Tuesday, their candidate made the speech of a lifetime: He talked about race relations in America in terms never before used by a U.S. presidential candidate. (By Thursday, the speech was viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube.)

If Hollywood had a prize for political reinvention, Obama would have won it.

"He spoke from the heart, and it was one of those most remarkable moments you'll remember all your life," McKeever said.

It had all the makings of a Hollywood thriller: disaster, triumph and the promise of a great finale. With everything on the line, Obama went into himself, wrote his own script and penned a comeback. Sort of like Bruce Willis making a great escape from a burning building.

And since Tuesday, McKeever said his phone hasn't stopped ringing. Stevie Wonder, an avid Obama supporter, called, as did a number of other entertainers. "Everyone knew this was a historically significant moment," McKeever said. "I even talked to people who weren't even supporters. They came away with a sense of awe."

Wonder went on his KJLH radio show Thursday morning to make a few statements about his favorite candidate.

He said: "Every communicator -- whether artist, actor, reporter or media -- should use their gift to unite us and not divide us. The reality is, conscious Americans know that Barack Obama is the color of truth."

Entertainment executive Alex Avant, son of Motown great Clarence Avant, said he was also impressed by the senator's words.

"Barack's speech was a beacon of hope that went beyond surface dialogue regarding racial issues," said Avant, a partner in creating the website iamhiphop.com. "What you believe defines the time you're living in. Belief systems have time periods, and he just shattered them."

So in less than a week, the mood among pro-Obama forces in Hollywood went from despair to delight, and that means a reenergized campaign out here.

Expect lots of pro-Obama efforts from the glitterati in the coming weeks. Moveon.org already has a major initiative underway. The group announced last week that it is teaming with Academy Award winners Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Oliver Stone, multiple Grammy winner John Legend, author Naomi Wolf and others to hold a new ad contest called "Obama in 30 Seconds."

The effort provides a platform for Obama supporters to show in 30-second spots what inspires them about the senator's candidacy. MoveOn will buy time to run the winning ad on national television before Pennsylvania's crucial April 22 primary. Affleck explained the effort this way: "MoveOn's 'Obama in 30 Seconds' ad contest is a chance for everyone, from aspiring filmmakers to armchair pundits, to raise their voices to put Obama over the top and help make history."

Legend called the contest a "powerful way for ordinary citizens to be involved in an extraordinary moment in our history."

The list of other people involved in the MoveOn campaign is dazzling. It includes musician-activist Michael Franti; actor-musician-director Adrian Grenier; Academy Award-nominated producer Ted Hope; author and civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson; award-winning documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy; Stanford Law professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society, Lawrence Lessig; recording artist Moby; Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas; Lionsgate Entertainment President Tom Ortenberg; Native American activist and documentary filmmaker Heather Rae; Focus Features President James Schamus; producer and entrepreneur Russell Simmons; hip-hop musician DJ Spooky; Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg; and Grammy Award-winning songwriter and musician Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam.

Of course, if the going gets really tough, Obama still has George Clooney as his ace in the hole, though Clooney has kept a low-key profile in this campaign.

Hollywood friends understand, perhaps better than anyone, what it means to make a comeback. And what it takes.

Also, they happen to be thick as a brick and smug as a bug in a rug--pre-requisites for voting Obambi.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:55 | link | comments

Foggy Bottom hits bottom; digs: This one, as they say, takes the cake. From JTA (my bolds):

The U.S. State Department urged Americans of Arab origin to report difficulties encountered entering Israel.

"The United States Government seeks equal treatment for all American citizens regardless of national origin or ethnicity," said a travel warning issued Wednesday.  "American citizens who encounter difficulties are encouraged to contact the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv or the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem." It listed phone numbers of consular officials.

The warning described difficulties that Arab Americans might face.

"American citizens whom Israeli authorities judge (based on their name or other indicators) may be of Palestinian origin are likely to face additional, and often time consuming, questioning by immigration and border authorities," it said.

The warning came days after Arab American groups sent a letter to Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, urging her to press Israel to lift such restrictions, claiming they violate U.S.-Israel treaties.

The travel warning also warned Americans of Israeli descent that Israel regards them as Israeli citizens.

It repeated warnings urging Americans not to travel to the Gaza Strip and to postpone travel to the West Bank. Americans who do travel to the West Bank are warned to avoid demonstrations and exercise caution at checkpoints…

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:14 | link | comments

Fascist pot calls kettle black; Swiss make fondue: Iran is very worried about how human rights are being violated in Europe. From the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN, March 17 (MNA)— Iran is seriously concerned about human rights violations in Europe especially those Muslim prisoners in certain European countries, Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki said here on Monday in a meeting with his Swiss counterpart Micheline Calmy-Rey.

The Swiss foreign minister arrived in Tehran on Sunday for a two-day visit.

Mottaki and Calmy-Rey discussed various issues of interest including bilateral relations, Middle East developments and international cooperation.

Mottaki condemned the silence of the Western states about the Zionist regime’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza and criticized the United Nations Security Council for its failure to take proper action to remedy the situation in Palestine.

At times, the Security Council chooses to ignore realities, he stated.

He expressed vehement objection against the recent UN Security Council resolution against Iran, saying it would seriously undermine the International Atomic Energy Agency’s status.

Calmy-Rey appreciated Iran for its cooperation with the IAEA. She also called for the continued Iran-Switzerland dialogue on human rights.

Looks like Switzerland’s not “neutral” this time around. (Channeling Homer Simpson: "Mmmm. Fondue.")

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:05 | link | comments

Ending the fear: Robert Spencer has a five point plan for ending “Islamophobia.” I urge everyone to send it to the Canadian Jewish Congress, so it may perhaps belatedly come to its senses about its lunatic alliance with Canada’s Islamists in support of our nation’s thought sanitizers. (Wishful thinking, I know. The CJC enjoys being part of the national Victimhood Fraternity too much):

…Once you declare one group off-limits for critical examination or declare that these people must at all costs not be offended, or that if they are they’re perfectly within their rights to stone, or lash, or imprison, or kill the offender, then you have destroyed free speech. In a free society, people with differing opinions live together in harmony, agreeing not to kill one another if their neighbor’s opinions offend them. If offensive speech had been prohibited in the 1770s, there would be no United States of America, and that is one of the reasons for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Whenever offensive speech is prohibited, the tyrant’s power is solidified. No less in this case, although the tyrant in question is of a different kind.

This is especially true since Islamic spokesmen brand as offensive to Islam any inquiry into the use of Islamic teachings by the jihadists. Over the weekend the Al-Arabiya news channel fumed at my book The Truth About Muhammad. Among other things, Al-Arabiya was upset because the book “claims that Muhammad said terrorism made him victorious and that he used to tempt people with paradise so they would crush his enemies.” They do not mention the fact that Muhammad is quoted as saying “I have been made victorious with terror” and promising Paradise to those who die in battle in the collection of Islamic traditions that Muslims consider most reliable.

The upshot of this is that even reporting accurately about the teachings of Islam that jihadists use to justify violence, as Mark Steyn did when he ran afoul of Muslim leaders in Canada, will be branded hate speech that is offensive to Muslims.

That’s why all free people should oppose the OIC’s legal initiative. Not only does it threaten the foundations of Western society, but as it would render us unable to analyze it, it is an attempt to leave us defenseless against the jihad threat.

But what about “Islamophobia”? Here is a five-point plan that Muslims could adopt to eradicate it instantaneously:

1. Focus indignation on Muslims committing violent acts in the name of Islam, not on non-Muslims reporting on those acts.

2. Renounce definitively not just “terrorism,” but any intention to replace the U.S. Constitution (or the constitutions of any non-Muslim state) with Islamic Sharia law even by peaceful means.

3. Teach Muslims the imperative of coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims on an indefinite basis.

4. Begin comprehensive international programs in mosques all over the world to teach against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism.

5. Actively work with Western law enforcement officials to identify and apprehend jihadists within Western Muslim communities.

Do those things, and “Islamophobia” will vanish.

Here's an example of the CJC's ongoing committment to battling hatred in Canada. From JTA:

CJC says Swastika's name is okay

The Canadian Jewish Congress is comfortable with an explanation of the origins of the name of the Ontario community of Swastika.

The community will celebrate its centennial this summer. The planned festivities prompted the CJC to request information on the community's name.

Swastika's name is not affiliated with the Nazi symbol, community historian Carolyn O'Neil told the Ontario's Northern Daily News on Tuesday.

O'Neil said the community's name may have derived from the language of Northern Ontario's Cree Indians, in which "swas" means joining and "ika" means water.

"It was never the CJC's intention to wipe Swastika off the map," CJC spokeswoman Wendy Lampert told the News.

I'm sure that comes as a great relief to the good folks of Swastika. And I know that I, for one, sleep more soundly at night knowing that the CJC is on the job and protecting me from the phantom menace of place names. (Just a thought: Shouldn't the fact that this town is 100 years old, and thus predates the Nazis by more than  a few years, have been a clue that "hatred" wasn't a factor in its naming?)

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:32 | link | comments

Unholy hijinks: The times online’s Web Watcher has a suggestion for a “fun” way to spend Good Friday:

Today is Good Friday, so it's only appropriate for this review to begin with a serious analysis of the internet's religious content. In that spirit, I say to thee: go forth and play Bible Fight (www.adultswim.com/games/biblefight/). This highly blasphemous game - you've been warned - allows you to choose between Jesus, Eve, Mary, Noah or Satan in a fight to the death. Each character has their own special moves. Moses, for instance, can use his “stone tablets of fury” or, if really riled, the deadly “burning bush”. Mary is a weak character, as she has to punch with one hand while holding baby Jesus in the other. My favourite is Noah, who can, with a quick wolf-whistle, summon a herd of animals to trample, two by two, on his biblical rivals. Should that not work, a quick tap of the keys will bring forth a flash flood. Bible Fight is a bit like the old Streetfighter games of the 90s, except you'll go to Hell for playing it.

You’ll notice that a certain, ahem, Prophet fails to make an appearance in this “highly blasphemous game.” Guess that’s ‘cause no one wants people to get “insulted” and start burning  stuff.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:03 | link | comments

Why Obama is toast: The white working stiffs (dare we call them "typical white persons"?) won't vote for him.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:36 | link | comments

Holocaust envy: Palestinian Media Watch has a photo of Palestinian moppets at a display showing Israelis incinerating Arab children in ovens.

Why bother with historical fact when you can simply confabulate your own "reality"?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:57 | link | comments

Mum’s the word: A Toronto woman—a mother of six—was decapitated by her husband the other day, but so far police have yet to release their identity.

How come?

Update: Oh, wait. An Ottawa paper has some info that--go figure--seems to have been left out of Toronto reports:

…One woman, who would not give her name, said the victim, in her 40s and from Afghanistan, had disclosed to her past physical abuse at the hands of husband.

"(She told me) he hits my kids but stopped hitting me because I said I would call the police," the neighbour recalled Tuesday. She said she saw the husband handcuffed and being placed into a police cruiser.

The family had lived in the building for two years with their four daughters and two sons, she said.

"His kids and wife were always scared."...

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:40 | link | comments

Bambi's church hearts Hamas: World Net Daily reports that the "Pastor's Page" of the church's newsletter featured these words by a Hamas zany. The zany compares his outfit's charter--a warrant for genocide--with the Founding Fathers' Declaration of Independence.

Way to go, Trinity United!

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:01 | link | comments

Buh bye, Bambi?: Clinton overtakes Obama in polls.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:40 | link | comments

Religious “tolerance” in Qatar: No linky (that I can see) on its site, but on this Good Friday, Ceeb radio news has been trumpeting the opening of a new church in Doha, Qatar. Al Jazeera (the Ceeb sans hockey) has more on this momentous event:

When Regina Setiadi moved from Indonesia to the Gulf last year, she left her Bible, crucifix and rosary behind.

"I never think that here in [the] Middle East there's a church," the 37-year-old Catholic, who now lives in Doha, Qatar, told Al Jazeera. "I thought we have to pray secretly at home."

Or in schools. Or rented halls.

But now, after decades of worshipping in borrowed spaces, Qatar's growing Christian community is celebrating - albeit quietly - the opening of the country's first church since pre-Islamic times.

For Christians, the milestone is a validation of their growing community, comprised of expatriate workers mainly from South Asia and the Philippines.

For others, the church symbolises a step forward for rapidly developing Qatar, a tiny energy-rich country bidding for the 2016 Olympics.

"The church will send a positive message to the world," Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, Qatar's minister of energy and industry, told reporters on Friday during the unveiling of the complex.

But because some say the church flies in the face of Qatar's Islamic values, religious leaders and government officials have been cautious about trumpeting the news too loudly.

"You have to respect the sensitivities of the country," Reverend Bill Schwartz, an American priest fluent in Arabic, told Al Jazeera. "The people here have no cultural foundation to perceive Christianity. I don't think it's a negative thing – [the exposure] just hasn't been there.

Large and unassuming

The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, to be consecrated on Saturday and open for Easter services on Sunday, will serve Doha's Catholic community, which comprises 90 per cent of the city's 150,000 and growing Christian expatriate population.

Construction of buildings for four other groups - Anglican, Coptic and the Greek Orthodox communities, as well as an inter-denominational centre where 11 Indian churches will converge under a single roof - is also under way, says Schwartz, who is involved in the Anglican Church of the Epiphany effort.

When completed, the complex will be one of the largest Christian structures in the Gulf, Naim Fouad Wakin, the project contractor, told Al Jazeera.

The $20m Catholic church, which seats 2,700, is located in the southern outskirts of the city on land donated by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Qatar's emir, and leased for a nominal fee.

Though it sits amid mounds of uneven gravel and sand, Schwartz predicted rapid development within the next two years. Around 7,000 housing units are going up in the area, he said.

Because of the controversy surrounding the church's opening, security patrols are to monitor the complex for months to come.

In keeping with government requests, the building's exterior bears no crosses, steeple or church bells. The interior is similarly cautious, awash in soft blues and yellows, subtly airbrushed Biblical imagery - including a few crucifixes - and understated stained-glass windows.

"We have complied and intend to keep complying with every regulation set by the government," Archbishop Paul Hinder, the Apostolic Vicar of Arabia and the senior Roman Catholic cleric in the region, said on Friday…

In other words, a dhimmi church presided over by a dhimmi cleric. Not exactly a breakthrough in hidebound thinking.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:08 | link | comments

Golly Gee: Marcus Gee is the latest Globe and Mail pundit to fall under Bambi’s spell. So captivated is Gee by the eloquent bamboozler, whom he compares to another politician of “mixed” heritage—Pierre Elliot Trudeau—that  he pegs him as America’s best shot at breaking through the “racial stalemate” (whatever the heck that is). Here’s some of Gee’s gush:

…Mr. Obama, too, is of mixed background: the son of a black man from Kenya and white woman from Kansas; raised with the help of a white grandmother; now married to a black woman. As such, he is ideally placed to understand the dual realities of the U.S.: black anger and white fear.

He made it clear that he condemns the invective unleashed by Rev. Wright in his sermons: the suggestion that U.S. foreign policy is to blame for 9/11, the ranting against Israel; the cursing of "God damn America;" the claim that Washington "nuked" Japan without "batting an eye."

Those remarks, he said, "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America." But at the same time, he refused to disown Rev. Wright, the man who officiated at his wedding and baptized his children. Instead, he asked white Americans to try to grasp the roots of the anger that sometimes marks the florid rhetoric of black churches, where the love, kindness, struggles, successes "and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America" are on full view.

That anger is not always productive, he said. "All too often ... it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

His critics say he is speaking out of both sides of his mouth, trying to distance himself from the former pastor without alienating black voters. In fact, this was a sincere attempt to address the anger that channels African-American politics into the cul-de-sac of victimhood and countless black men into the dead-end of crime.

Old-style black leaders have often encouraged black Americans to wallow in that anger; critics on the right simply tell them to get over it. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, says blacks must learn to honour their past without being trapped by it. Rev. Wright's real fault, he said, was to speak "as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made, as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past." That's not true. His own amazing candidacy proves it.

His message about white fear is just as profound. Just as conservatives shrug off black anger as mere strutting or whining, liberals tend to dismiss the anxieties of whites as the cringing of a privileged race that sees its hegemony at risk. In fact, said Mr. Obama, lower- and middle-class Americans have real fears about slipping wages, lost jobs, threatened pensions. They resent it when they hear an African-American is favoured for a place in college because of a past injustice they didn't commit. They resent it when their anxiety about urban crime is dismissed as nothing more than racism. Mr. Obama remembers his own grandmother expressing fear when black men passed her own the street. Like black anger, white fear is often ugly and counterproductive, but to call it groundless only "widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding."

This, says Mr. Obama, is the "racial stalemate" that afflicts the United States. On one side, black anger, legitimate but often self-defeating; on the other, white resentment, equally real, equally futile. To help end the stalemate will require someone who has seen both sides of the divide. Who better than Barack Obama?

My response:

Marcus Gee asks “who better than Barack Obama” to heal the racial divide in the U.S.? How about someone who didn’t spend the last twenty years of his life trying to gain “street cred” by worshipping at a black power church in Chicago? How about someone who didn’t take as his mentor an obnoxious bigot who spewed hatred from his bully pulpit? How about someone who didn’t position himself as being post-racial but who turned out to be up to his pretty neck in identity politics?

How about a black Republican?

Expect to see the above missive in the G&M when Hades freezes solid.

Update: Basta with Gee and all the Bambi-fawners (heh). All the way with Charlie K!: 

...Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.

His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.

(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Bambi is Jesse Jackson in sheep's clothing; a guy who, like Jesse, thinks that, because of their tragic history, African-Americans are both incapable of being racists and yet entitled to their racist beliefs. Bambi is no more capable of "healing" the racial divide in America than Mahmoud Abbas is of "healing" the religious/nationalistic divide between Israel and the Palestinians.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:43 | link | comments

Good plan: Obama tries to shift focus from race.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:35 | link | comments

Wise one: Hot Air’s Allahpundit on the NYT’s editorial (the one which lauded the "eloquent" Bambi for laying “bare his fundamental beliefs”:

…Hey, guys? If the last 20 years count for anything, the best estimates of his “fundamental beliefs” are that the United States is a racist hegemon begging to have jets flown into office towers to teach it a thing or two about imperialism. He’s a gutless, opportunistic coward who was afraid to say an unkind word to one of the power brokers in the black community on whom he counted for votes as an Illinois politician, and now that he’s a national figure he’s throwing the same guy under the bus to preserve the illusion that he’s a “post-racial” politician. And you’re sitting there cheering him on because you don’t care what sort of idiocy or anti-American vitriol you have to swallow to put a Democrat back into the White House. Does that about sum it up? Have I missed any “nuance” in the “U.S. government created the AIDS virus” rant that Obama never, ever heard anything about and that you’re now willing to wave away?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:21 | link | comments

"The world's greatest champion of women's rights": Emmeline Pankhurst? Susan B. Anthony? Gloria Steinmen?

Heck, no. It's Mo. Back in the 7th C. his "feminism" was real cutting edge.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:57 | link | comments

This just in: Bambi clarifies his previous slur against Granny (the women who helped raise him). Apparently, she's not an obnoxious big. She's not even in any way racist. She's just "a typical white person."

Glad you could clear that up, Bambi. It's most reassuring (and makes you, not Granny, sound like someone with racial issues).

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:09 | link | comments

No good deed goes unpunished: Especially those aimed at the Palestinians.

Live and learn. (Something, unfortunately, the West refuses to do.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:55 | link | comments

Obama envy: Toronto Star editorial page editor, Big Bob Hepburn, wants a Bambi of his very own:

Why doesn't Canada have its own version of Barack Obama?

Many Canadians have been asking that question ever since Obama launched his presidential campaign complete with his spell-binding speeches, his slogan of "Yes We Can," and his promise of real change in America.

That question became more obvious after listening to Obama, who is trying to become the first black U.S. president, deliver a bold and passionate speech on Tuesday that confronted head-on the deep racial divisions that have long existed in the United States.

In the speech, which he gave in a bid to address a campaign uproar sparked by controversial comments by his former pastor, Obama talked of anger that persists among black Americans, of the resentments of white Americans, of how America is stuck in "a racial stalemate."

It was the type of speech you never hear from Canadian politicians – tough, poignant and addressing a serious issue that touches the lives of every citizen and that far too many people, politicians included, want to ignore or dismiss.

Can you imagine Stephen Harper weighing in passionately on the debate raging in Quebec over "reasonable accommodation" of immigrants moving to that province?

Even in America, rarely does a candidate such as Obama come along, one with a real chance of winning and who can energize politics, who can inspire a generation of new voters, who can allow a nation to believe, maybe naively, that change for the better is possible.

In my years as the Star's Washington correspondent, I never saw such a candidate. Jesse Jackson came close, but he had no hope of winning. Ronald Reagan had a folksy charm, but little else other than a desire to cut down the role of government. Michael Dukakis? The first George Bush?

What makes Obama so different?

And why isn't there a Canadian equivalent?

Obama clearly has the ability to inspire people in a way no Canadian leader has done since Pierre Trudeau. He is seen almost as a rock star, able to fill arenas with 20,000 madly cheering supporters, as Trudeau did in the late 1960s.

Everywhere he goes, Obama sells himself as a change agent. He is pushing progressive policies, promoting health care, rebuilding cities, jobs, getting American troops out of Iraq. He is influencing people around the world.

But his biggest asset is his ability to mobilize and motivate young Americans. This election season, young adults are much more actively involved in the U.S primary elections, and they are choosing Obama over Hillary Clinton, herself an attractive candidate, by margins ranging up to four-to-one.

To fight Obamamania, Clinton supporters portray Obama as a great orator who looks and sounds good, but is all style, no substance.

In sharp contrast to Obama, Canadian political leaders are seen as uncharismatic. And too often Canadians dismiss U.S. politics as too celebrity- and money-driven, where stars and cash count more than principles and policies.

Yet we need our own Obama.

We need someone who can excite the public. Currently, we have a disengaged and disinterested electorate. This disinterest is reflected in the abysmally low voter turnout in federal and provincial elections.

At the same time, though, we face huge national and local issues.

We have troops dying in Afghanistan; our environment is deteriorating; our cities are crumbling; poverty is rampant; our medicare system is under siege.

But voters see our present national leaders as lacking. Harper is viewed as cold, almost as if he preferred to read his technical briefing books rather than meet with people. Stéphane Dion is seen as dedicated, but aloof and rigid.

Obama may not win the presidency or even the Democratic nomination. Not everyone in America is swept up in Obamamania and Clinton is a formidable opponent. There is also the issue of whether America is ready to elect either a black or a woman as president.

But he has brought hope and energy to American politics.

Hopefully that energy, especially among younger voters, will eventually flow north into our politics.

Bring on Obamamania – right here in Canada!

I believe a repeat of the Rabbi’s blessing for the Czar in Fiddler on the Roof is in order here (with the appropriate revision): May God bless and keep Obama/Obamamania—far away from us!

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:51 | link | comments

Acclaimed playwright awakens up from Rip van Lefty coma: Wall Street Journal opiner Daniel Henninger asks whether David Mamet’s 180 is the start of trend:

The American playwright David Mamet wrote a piece for the Village Voice last week titled, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" Mr. Mamet, whose characters famously use the f-word as a rhythmic device (I think of it now as the "Mamet-word"), didn't himself mince words on his transition. He was riding with his wife one day, listening to National Public Radio: "I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: 'Shut the [Mamet-word] up.'" Been known to happen.

Toward the end of the essay, he names names: "I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

This of course is an outrage against polite American wisdom. Isn't Paul Krugman supposed to be our greatest living philosopher? One would have thought that David Mamet saying bye-bye to liberalism would have launched sputterings everywhere. But not a word.

As I think Groucho Marx once said, either no one reads the Village Voice anymore or my watch has stopped.

That one of the language's greatest living playwrights would say this in our hyperventilated political times was news worth noting in most of the English-speaking world. Commentaries appeared the past week in England, Canada and Australia. But there's been nary a peep about Mr. Mamet going over the wall in what some call the Mainstream Media.

Matt Drudge put news of the Mamet essay at the top of his Web site the day it appeared, so it was hard not to notice. Yesterday the Los Angeles Times printed an op-ed piece on it by the crime novelist Andrew Klavan, welcoming Mr. Mamet. For the most part, though, this is being treated in liberal drawing rooms like a favorite uncle gone suddenly dotty. A reporter for the Times of London put the apostasy to actor Kevin Spacey, now appearing there in Mr. Mamet's "Speed the Plough." "I didn't pay it much attention," said Mr. Spacey.

Which raises the question: If a liberal falls in the liberal forest and no one says they heard it, can you say it didn't happen? Mr. Mamet must feel like the guy in a mob movie who knows the hit is coming but has to sweat through to the bullet.

There is a more benign explanation for the silence of American punditry's liberal lambs. They have their hands full with Barack and Hillary. No playwright since blood-soaked Greece would have tried to script the furies let loose by the struggle between these two senators.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose mad lines no one would think to write -- "God damn America!" -- has returned to haunt the holy candidacy of Barack Obama. In turn, Sen. Obama has been forced to give a speech reanimating racial ghosts back to the nation's founding -- a Constitution "stained by this nation's original sin of slavery." This is primal stuff. Meanwhile the Democratic elders, in their role as Super Delegates, must wrestle with knowing that this foul poison was set by factions loyal to Hillary Clinton, whose own personal loyalties are . . . well, you don't need me to get into all that.

With blood on the party's temple floor, who has time to give a flying [Mamet-word] about what this guy thinks? (Also, his essay appeared the day after the Spitzer melodrama began its short, but unforgettable, New York run.)

Still a thought: If David Mamet says he can't take it anymore, can others be far behind?...

Don’t count on it. That presupposes that the “cool kids” (or at least, the kids who think they’re the cool kids) possess critical thinking skills, which presupposes that, first off, they can think. If all you know, however, is moral equivalence, multiculturalism and Po-Mo amorality, your brain, alas, is mush and likely incapable of regenerating sufficient function to allow you to come to your senses.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:42 | link | comments

Monkee shines: This one's for Bambi, the Missus, their pastor and all the fine folks who find spiritual succor at the shrine of victimhood:

Oh, you were caught in crunch

‘Cause of Jeremiah’s punch.

End of line for your “audacity”?

Just when your ship was a-sinkin’

Got up and acted all Abe  Lincoln.

And now it seems that you’ll get off scott  free.

 

Cheer up, Bambi O.

They fell for your snow.

All those daydream believers

Lapped up your story of woe (oh oh oh)…

 

You pretended you

Were both black and white, it’s true.

That’s why Bambi O you seemed so right.

But now here’s something odd--

Turns out it was all a fraud..

You loved your “black” but not so much your “white”.

 

Cheer up, Bambi O.

They fell for your snow.

All those daydream believers

Are still so gung ho (ho ho ho)…

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:48 | link | comments

Double your displeasure: It’s a religion. It’s a totalitarian ideology promoting global conquest. It’s two, two, two mints in one. From FrontPage Magazine:

…Wearing the mantle of a victim has its advantages, including the ability to camouflage aggression as a form of self-defense.

 

However, the dynamics of Muslim-non-Muslim interaction in the developing world tells an entirely different story. Far more aggressive tactics have been employed by Muslims against much weaker opponents, be it in Darfur against black Africans or against brown unbelievers in South Asia. Here too terrorism is employed, but only as part and parcel of a multi-front religious war of conquest (called jihad).

 

In the past sixty years, from every Muslim majority region of South Asia – without exception – be it Pakistan, Bangladesh or from India's own Kashmir valley, non-Muslims have been driven out in massive numbers to Hindu-majority India. This occurred when Muslim populations in these regions obtained political power. In 1971 about three million Hindus were slaughtered by the Pakistani army in the then East Pakistan and many more were driven to India, never to return. Surrounded by many Islamic nations, even the mostly non-Muslim India is seeing signs of an Islamic siege – the necessary instrument of an Islamic conquest.

 

This data bespeaks conquest in the name of Islam, using terror and more. This has no parallel with any other religion in the modern era. Most of these expulsions and genocides occurred before 1972 – well before the large-scale infusion of petrodollars and Wahhabism. This occurred despite the populations sharing ethnicity, language, culture and food habits. Also notable is that unlike the advanced, powerful and wealthy West, South Asia consists of populations that are among the most impoverished and deprived on the planet.

 

The geographical extent and the size of Muslim populations (about a third of the worldwide total) in South Asia make the above data an unlikely anomaly. This data is indicative of absolute violation of coexistence and hence is outside of the scope of the religion model. It compels one to scrutinize the roots of Islamic scriptures and study Islamic history of conquest.

 

Bill Warner has published a ground-breaking statistical analysis of the Islamic trilogy (consisting of the Koran, Hadith and Sira). His analysis emphasizes the point that that the Islamic scripture is predominantly political and that the religion itself was probably designed to extend Islam's founder Mohammed's powerbase upon an edifice of theology.

 

That a conquest-based ideology should use religion in its framework should be no surprise. Religion provides enduring and powerful legitimacy, inspires followers and helps impose the will of a civilization on unsuspecting alien populations.

 

Had western analysts been perceptive to the ongoing dynamics of the Islamic conflict in South Asia, they would have likely concluded that that the religion model of Islamic terrorism would be grossly violated by this data and that a different model is required…

 

Western analysts aren’t even perceptive to the ongoing dynamics of Islamic conflict in their own backyards. To expect them to see “dynamics” that are so far afield might me asking too much of people who are terminally short-sighted.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:26 | link | comments

Obama’s problem: Po-Mo-relativists—like those who find safe harbour at the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune—have no problem with the way Barack Obama equated his raging Granny and his raving preacher. For them (and for him) one balances, and thus cancels out, the other.

Thankfully, there are some people, for instance the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, who still possess a moral compass:

I HAVE known my rabbi for more than 20 years. The synagogue he serves as spiritual leader is one I have attended for a quarter-century. He officiated at my wedding and was present for the circumcision of each of my sons. Over the years, I have sought his advice on matters private and public, religious and secular. I have heard him speak from the pulpit more times than I can remember.

My relationship with my rabbi, in other words, is similar in many respects to Barack Obama's relationship with his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright. But if my rabbi began delivering sermons as toxic, hate-filled, and anti-American as the diatribes Wright has preached at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, I wouldn't hesitate to demand that he be dismissed.

Were my rabbi to gloat that America got its just desserts on 9/11, or to claim that the US government invented AIDS as an instrument of genocide, or to urge his congregants to sing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America," I would know about it straightaway, even if I hadn't actually been in the sanctuary when he spoke. The news would spread rapidly through the congregation, and in short order one of two things would happen: Either the rabbi would be gone, or I and scores of others would walk out, unwilling to remain in a house of worship that tolerated such poisonous teachings. I have no doubt that the same would be true for millions of worshipers in countless houses of worship nationwide.

But it wasn't true for Obama, whose long and admiring relationship with Wright, a man he describes as his "mentor", remained intact for more than 20 years, notwithstanding the incendiary and bigoted messages the minister used his pulpit to promote.

In Philadelphia yesterday, Obama gave a graceful speech on the theme of race and unity in American life. Much of what he said was eloquent and stirring, not least his opening paean to the Founders and the Constitution - a document "stained by the nation's original sin of slavery," as he said, yet also one "that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time." There was an echo there of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in his great "I Have a Dream" speech extolled "the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence" as "a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."

The problem for Obama is that Wright, the spiritual leader he has so long embraced, is a devotee not of King, - who in that same speech warned against "drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred" - but of the poisonous hatemonger Louis Farrakhan, whom the church's magazine honored with a lifetime achievement award. The problem for Obama, who campaigns on a message of racial reconciliation, is that the "mentor" whose church he joined and has generously supported is a disciple not of King but of James Cone, founder of a "black liberation" theology that teaches its adherents to "accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy."

Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns America to the enthusiastic approval of the congregation, and not until it threatened to scuttle his political ambitions did Obama finally find the mettle to condemn the minister's odium…

Problem? What problem? He’s JFK, FDR, and Abe Frikkin’ Lincoln rolled into one.

Never mind the presidency. Let’s give the guy a Nobel Peace Prize!

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:48 | link | comments

Ceeb hyperbole: Just heard on Ceeb radio that "hundreds of thousands" of Iraqis have been killed in the past five years.

Really?

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:32 | link | comments

Reality bites: The Jeremiah Wright Show.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:15 | link | comments

It just gets better and better: Obama speech captivates America.

More like "bewitches," I'd say.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:11 | link | comments

Mega-barf!: Astoundingly, the New York Times calls Obama’s “throw Granny from the train/Jeremiah’s my main man” speech—I still can’t believe I read this right—a (gag) “profile in courage.”

You remember “Profiles in Courage,” don’t you? It’s that book by the white Bambi (or so Bambi's followers would have you believe), JFK:

There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.

Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better.

 

Mr. Obama had to address race and religion, the two most toxic subjects in politics. He was as powerful and frank as Mitt Romney was weak and calculating earlier this year in his attempt to persuade the religious right that his Mormonism is Christian enough for them.

It was not a moment to which Mr. Obama came easily. He hesitated uncomfortably long in dealing with the controversial remarks of his spiritual mentor and former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who denounced the United States as endemically racist, murderous and corrupt.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama drew a bright line between his religious connection with Mr. Wright, which should be none of the voters’ business, and having a political connection, which would be very much their business. The distinction seems especially urgent after seven years of a president who has worked to blur the line between church and state.

Mr. Obama acknowledged his strong ties to Mr. Wright. He embraced him as the man “who helped introduce me to my Christian faith,” and said that “as imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me.”

Wisely, he did not claim to be unaware of Mr. Wright’s radicalism or bitterness, disarming the speculation about whether he personally heard the longtime pastor of his church speak the words being played and replayed on YouTube. Mr. Obama said Mr. Wright’s comments were not just potentially offensive, as politicians are apt to do, but “rightly offend white and black alike” and are wrong in their analysis of America. But, he said, many Americans “have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagree.”

Mr. Obama’s eloquent speech should end the debate over his ties to Mr. Wright since there is nothing to suggest that he would carry religion into government. But he did not stop there. He put Mr. Wright, his beliefs and the reaction to them into the larger context of race relations with an honesty seldom heard in public life.

Mr. Obama spoke of the nation’s ugly racial history, which started with slavery and Jim Crow, and continues today in racial segregation, the school achievement gap and discrimination in everything from banking services to law enforcement.

He did not hide from the often-unspoken reality that people on both sides of the color line are angry. “For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation,” he said, “the memories of humiliation and fear have not gone away, nor the anger and the bitterness of those years.”

At the same time, many white Americans, Mr. Obama noted, do not feel privileged by their race. “In an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game,” he said, adding that both sides must acknowledge that the other’s grievances are not imaginary.

He made the powerful point that while these feelings are not always voiced publicly, they are used in politics. “Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan coalition,” he said.

Against this backdrop, he said, he could not repudiate his pastor. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” That woman whom he loves deeply, he said, “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street” and more than once “uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

There have been times when we wondered what Mr. Obama meant when he talked about rising above traditional divides. This was not such a moment.

We can’t know how effective Mr. Obama’s words will be with those who will not draw the distinctions between faith and politics that he drew, or who will reject his frank talk about race. What is evident, though, is that he not only cleared the air over a particular controversy — he raised the discussion to a higher plane.

Abe Lincoln, FDR and JFK? What, no Martin Luther King, Albert Schweitzer and Jesus Christ Superstar?

What planet are these people from?

Gee, do you think if John McCain had been a member of a "white power" church presided over by a flagrant racist for the past two decades, and he gave a speech explaining how much belonging to such a congregation meant to him (even though his crazy unc, the pastor, spewed lots of KKK-type teachings from the pulpit) the Times would be calling it a "profile in courage"?

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:58 | link | comments

Rick Mercer (somewhat reluctantly) defends Ezra Levant: If a "ranting" Ceeber--a smug, self-satisfied lefty of the first order--"get its" about HRCs and free speech, why, oh why, can't the Canadian Jewish Congress?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:02 | link | comments

A look back: After Don Imus make some offensive, racially-charged remarks about a Rutgers women's basketball team (remarks which, in retrospect, seem tame compared to Reverend Wright's revved-up, racially-charged rhetoric), Bambi appeared on MSNBC and vowed that he would never again be a guest on Imus's show .

Well, the man has his standards, after all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:38 | link | comments

From the "hear only what you want to hear" dep't: A Chicago Tribune pundit claims that Bambi's speech "was not about race."

No. It was about "hope" and "change" and "change" and "hope" and how "audacious" it all is, right?

So what if Bambi has been consorting with an out-and-out racist/America-loather/Jew-hater for so long? Nothing to see here, folks. Best y'all move along now.

Update: VDH's reality check.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:57 | link | comments

Women’s lib, Wahhabi-style: Chicks in the Magic Kingdom now have their own hotel where they can get “spa treatments.” My question: why bother if you have to hide the effects of the treatments under an all-encompassing tarp?

Further evidence that things are looking up for Wahhabi chicks: A council has recently recommended that, at some point in the unspecified future, and under certain conditions, some Saudi women may be able to--wait for it--drive a car! From MEMRI:

The Recommendations

 

A source in Saudi Arabia's Shura Council reports that the council has submitted a recommendation to senior elements in the country to permit women to drive vehicles, with the following stipulations:

 

·         The woman driver must be under 30.

·         The woman's driving is conditional upon the permission of a relative [father, husband, brother, or son].

·         The woman driver must obtain a driver's license from the center for teaching women to drive.

·         The woman driver must be modestly dressed.

·         The woman driver will be permitted to drive alone in the cities, but outside the cities she must be accompanied by a relative.

·         The woman driver will be permitted to drive Saturday through Wednesday between 7:00 AM and 8:00 PM.

·         The woman driver must have a cell phone with her, so she can call for help in an emergency.

·         The woman driver must pay a certain sum when her license is issued; this sum will be set aside for car repairs.

 

The Shura Council also ordered the following:

 

·         The establishment of a special women's transportation department; this department will collect the fees.

·         The establishment of a telephone emergency center.

·         The establishment of transportation centers for women in the cities, which will be under religious supervision.

 

The council stipulated that a woman driver who violates these rules will have her license revoked.

 

In the framework of this recommendation, the Shura Council is required to impose a one-month prison sentence and a fine on anyone talking with a woman driver from another car, and an eight-month prison sentence and a fine on anyone who sexually harasses a woman driver.

 

A transportation administration source reports that the Shura Council has as yet issued no guidelines for establishing a women's transportation department.

I guess Mrs. Wahhabi had best hold off on picking out that cute little Prius for now, but maybe, someday, her granddaughters or great-granddaughters will be able to drive.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:47 | link | comments

Sucked in by charisma: Better hose down Globe and Mail pundit John Ibbitson. He’s all hot and not at all bothered by a certain slick-talkin’ guy’s speechifying:

PHILADELPHIA -- In words beautifully crafted even by his high standards, Barack Obama gambled his hopes for the presidency yesterday by asking Americans, black and white, to confront their own assumptions about race.

Recent dissonant debates "reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through, a part of our union that we have yet to perfect," the Illinois senator declared at a major address in Philadelphia's National Constitution Center.

"And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together."

Mr. Obama had no choice but to address the race issue, which he once hoped his candidacy could transcend, but which now plagues and threatens to undermine his campaign.

The proximate cause of the speech was the pastor of his church. Snippets of past sermons by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, recently retired, accusing white America of ongoing racism and oppression of blacks have been showing up on the Internet.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly condemned Mr. Wright's comments, broadcast endlessly and devoid of context by cable news networks and radio talk shows. But this controversy is only the latest in a string of events, from former president Bill Clinton's comparison of Mr. Obama to Jesse Jackson, to former vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro's assertion that Mr. Obama would not be doing so well in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination were he not black.

The accumulating controversies appear to be undermining support for Mr. Obama among white, working-class voters in industrial swing states. In particular, it contributed to his loss in Ohio, and threatens to do the same in Pennsylvania on April 22.

These defeats, past and threatened, bolster the argument of challenger Hillary Clinton that she is the more electable candidate. Mr. Obama must counter that argument, or risk the flight of superdelegates to her campaign.

And so in Philadelphia yesterday, Mr. Obama addressed the question of race head on, by confronting our mutually destructive views about those whose skin is not our skin, whose culture is not our culture.

He reminded white America that "many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow."

For the men and women of Mr. Wright's generation, the "memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away. Nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. ... And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning."

But it is not only black Americans, he went on, who harbour anger and resentment. "Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race," he said. "Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything; they've built it from scratch." When they are forced to bus their kids across town to preserve racially mixed schools, or hear of a black person landing a job or a university placement because of affirmative action, "resentment builds over time."

Mr. Obama again condemned Mr. Wright's extremist rhetoric, while acknowledging he had listened to his pastor preaching controversial sermons, which will discomfit some. But he refused to distance himself from his mentor and spiritual leader.

"As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me," he declared. "He contains within him the contradictions, the good and the bad, of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."

The 45-minute speech was one of Mr. Obama's finest. But it is a dangerous thing for a politician to ask voters to own up to the lesser angels of their nature. Mr. Obama is betting that by asking Americans to confront and push past their own stereotypes, he can get them to assess his candidacy on its own merits…

Either that or he’s betting that sufficient numbers of Americans find him so enchanting that they'll be willing to overlook his utter hypocrisy. In which case, I’d say that’s a fairly safe bet. (In the words of Guys and Dolls, I’d put it at “a logical 12 to 7”.)

 

My letter:

 

Barack Obama built his entire campaign around one central idea: that, as someone who was both black and white, he represented something new in American politics--someone who had transcended matters of race. In reality, Mr. Obama’s choice of mentor/spiritual leader--an obnoxious bigot named Jeremiah Wright--and  his 20-year association with a church dedicated to “black liberation theology” prove that he is every bit as mired in identity politics as, say, Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

 

Mr. Obama’s pride in his African-American heritage bothers me not at all. What bothers me is that, like Eliot Spitzer, he completely misrepresented who he really was.

 

Update: Then again, maybe I should rethink the odds.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:03 | link | comments

Love’s really young dream: Why wait till the hormones kick in? Do it the medieval way, and get hitched before puberty. From AFP via news.com.au:

AN 11-year-old boy has married his 10-year-old cousin in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Mohammed al-Rashidi and his unidentified cousin would seal the marriage they contracted under the sharia laws of Islam and move in together after a ceremony to take place later this year, Al-Shams newspaper reported today.

"I am ready for this marriage. It will help me study better," Mohammed, who goes to primary school in the northern province of Hail, was quoted as saying by Al-Shams.

"I invite all my classmates to do like me," the boy said.

He wanted to "crown a love story through marriage".

The boy's father, Muraizak al-Rashidi, told the newspaper he was busy sending out invitations for a celebration to seal the marriage.

Dahim al-Jaber, the headmaster at Mohammed's school, said marriage at such a young age was "inappropriate" but wished the couple a happy life together.

Can’t think of what to buy these two kooky kids? No worries, mate. I hear they’re registered at the Jeddah branch of Toys ‘R’ Us.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:45 | link | comments

Kiddie porn: Judehass for rug rats, on Iranian TV.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:33 | link | comments

Faulting Feldman: In response to this, Noah Feldman's over-the-moon report about sharia, I sent the following letter to the New York Times Magazine (I used the Times' style--"Shariah"):

I read every last word of Professor Feldman’s rapturous assessment of Islamic law, and I have one question for him: Have you taken complete leave of your senses? I don’t know which school of Islamic jurisprudence the Professor consulted in his research. Presumably, it wasn’t the one same one used by, say, Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice; nor the one employed by those “righteous”  mullahs, with their “bread and circuses” displays of punishing homosexuality—a strict no-no, according to Shariah—by hoisting homosexuals from giant cranes and hanging them in public. And, not to cherry-pick or anything, but Shariah—God’s law, which makes no division between the religious and the temporal—includes other laws which are completely antithetical to our own: laws dealing with woman, who do not have anywhere near the same rights as men; with Christians and Jews—dhimmis—who, under Islam, must submit to a whole gamut of humiliating regulations befitting their second-class status; and with non-Muslims, like, say, Hindus, who, if conquered, have the “right” to become Muslim, or be killed. And, heaven knows, you wouldn’t want run afoul of those laws pertaining to apostasy, since Shariah has the same departure policy as the Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And if you do leave, the penalty is death.

Then there’s that problematic area of jihad, which, I know, I know, is said to be an internal and collective struggle to follow in God’s path. Since time immemorial, though, it has also been understood in another way: as justification for waging a holy war and conquering vast swaths of land for Islam—for believers, the one, the only, true faith.

There is only one place where Shariah has even the remotest shot at producing an environment where a freedom-loving Westerner would want to live: in the mind of Professor Feldman and those like him who have become adept at framing Shariah in the best possible light. In so doing, they do us, as well as Islamic law, a grave disservice.

Update: Noah Feldman's fantasy sharia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:54 | link | comments

Bambi Benneton: Did you know that Bambi has a brother living in China?

No? Neither did I. And neither did NYT scribe Roger Cohen, who is thrown into a veritable tizzy of delight by the “news”:

So there I was, a couple of weeks back, sitting under a mango tree in western Kenya, when Senator Barack Obama’s half-sister Auma says to me:

“My daughter’s father is British. My mom’s brother is married to a Russian. I have a brother in China engaged to a Chinese woman.”

My understanding is that this half brother living in China is Mark. He’s the son of Obama’s father and an American woman named Ruth, whom Obama Sr. met while at Harvard in the 1960s and brought back to Kenya.

That was after his marriage with Obama’s mother in Hawaii ended. Another son from the union with Ruth, called David, was killed in a motorcycle accident. In all, Obama Sr. fathered eight children by four women.

I’ve been thinking about this because not enough has been written about Obama’s family. As Auma suggested, it’s unusual in the extent of its continent-crossing, religion-melding, color-fusing richness. But the Benetton-ad family is less unusual than it may seem. This is the age of globalized, far-flung families. Remittances make the world go round.

More needs to be written because if Obama gets the Democratic nomination, you know the Republican attack machine, through innuendo and otherwise, will go after his identity, just as it went after Senator John Kerry’s in 2004.

The difference is that Obama is much more certain and coherent about who he is than Kerry was. He has built his identity in a shifting world; that resonates with a lot of Americans. His radical Chicago pastor contributed to that journey. Now Obama has grown beyond him. I have no problem with that.

But you can already see the headlines: Obama has brother in China! You can hear the whisperings about a polygamous father.

That not enough has been written about his family is strange in that Obama himself devoted a remarkable book, “Dreams From My Father,” to his quest to fill the void left by an absent Dad.

As Auma said to me: “He was trying to figure out who he was. He needed to be whole to be able to do what he’s doing now. He went about it the right way. A big chunk of his life was missing. It’s very healthy that he now knows he has these roots here.”…

A big chunk of his life may have been missing—after all, his father, the object of his veneration and obsession, vamoosed when Bambi was only two, and played no part in raising him. But he found the missing link 20 years ago, years before the publication of his Daddy book, when he joined Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.’s black liberation church. So spare us the blather about Bambi’s rainbow coalition. Say it loud. He’s black and he’s proud. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that—only with the pretense that he’s something else.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:34 | link | comments

Woof!: Drudge has a transcript of Bambi's "Checkers" speech--minus, of course, the cute puppy.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:16 | link | comments

Appearances are deceiving—but who cares?: Years ago, Rolling Stone Magazine ran a famous advertising campaign—“Perception/Reality”—that centered on the observation that the two are so often at odds. What’s happened to Barack Obama is an example of the expansive gap between them. The perception was that racial issues were not even on his GPS since, as someone who was both black and white, he was, in effect, colourless. One would have expected such a person to affiliate with some bland, ecumenical congregation where people joined hands and harmonized as an acoustic guitarist strummed, say, “Imagine”—The First Church of Kumbaya. Instead, he’s spent the last 20 years—his entire adult life—worshipping at the Church of Hate Whitey and Abominate America.

Not exactly a Coke commercial.

For anyone with half a brain, that reality should be enough to quell any desire to vote for the man—and thus signal the death knell of Obama's campaign. But since so many people prefer perception to reality, and remain enraptured by the image, maybe, just maybe, he’ll be able to squeak through.

After all, as is evident from all the bad craziness about Israel, we live in time when perception holds far more sway than reality, i.e. the truth.

I hope I’m wrong about this one. We shall see.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:15 | link | comments

Three from Expatica Netherlands: A German journalist accuses a former Dutch P.M. of anti-Semitism:

THE HAGUE – German journalist and author Henryk Broder has accused former Prime Minister Dries van Agt of anti-Semitism because of his criticism of how Israel treats the Palestinian people. On television programme Netwerk on Monday Broder called Van Agt "a proper Christian anti-Semite."

Broder says Van Agt uses 83-year-old Jewish Dutchman Hajo Meijer to make his statements "kosher." Meijer, who survived Auschwitz, wrote a book in which he criticised Israel policy of occupation in the Palestinian territories.

Broder says Meijer too is an anti-Semite.

Van Agt said Broder's accusations were "very serious and particularly painful." He says it is a typical method to silence critics of Israel.

Van Agt sounds a lot like Jimminy “Cricket” Carter, another “proper Christian anti-Semite.”

In two other links, Dutch Christians and Muslims have gotten together to try to head off the frenzy likely coming  their way when the Wilders film is released, while Wilders says he’s going to release it on the Internet before April 1:

AMSTERDAM - Dutch Protestants and Muslims have joined in preparing a statement critical of the yet-to-be-released Koran-film of MP Geert Wilders, a Protestant Church spokesman said Monday.

The film by the founder of the Freedom Party, which runs on a platform of criticism on (sic) the Islam and migrants, is expected to be released on www.fitnathemovie.com any day.

Wilders says his film will demonstrate why the Muslim Holy Scripture "is a fascist book that incites people to commit violence."

The film has captured the headlines of the Dutch media ever since the legislator announced he was working on it last November.

The Protestant Church and two umbrella organisations of the Muslim community in the Netherlands - Contact Group Muslims CGI and Contact Muslims and Government CMO - were due Monday to discuss the text of a joint statement.

The Council of Churches, an umbrella organisation of all Dutch Christians - Protestants and Catholics - was also expected to take part in the meeting.

Who are they kidding? There’s no way such a statement is going to cool down the soon-to-be seething.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:08 | link | comments

Bambi’s unlikely communications consultant: Jonah Goldberg tells Bambi what he needs to say in today’s race speech. From the Los Angeles Times:

…Obama needs to do two things. First, he needs to make it incandescently clear that Wright doesn't speak for him in any meaningful way. If he won't do that, his campaign is a fraud and he is not qualified to be president.

Second, he needs to explain to black America why Wright's views are so poisonous.

By now, if you've paid any attention at all, you've read the quotes and seen the video clips of Wright at the pulpit. A supporter of Louis Farrakhan, Wright has echoed his view that the U.S. government created AIDS to perpetrate a black genocide. He suggested that America had it coming on 9/11.

His most infamous from-the-pulpit sound bite -- at least to date -- is this from a 2003 sermon: "The government gives [blacks] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America!"

Obama and his surrogates are denouncing attempts to link the candidate and the views of his pastor and mentor. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) on "Fox News Sunday," for instance, said, "Guilt by association is not typically American. We've all been around in places where people have given speeches or said things that we've thoroughly objected to, totally objected to."

OK. But even Obama didn't spin it that way. More implausibly, Obama claimed that he'd never heard his mentor say anything of the sort, in public or private.

Obama has been a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years. Wright baptized Obama's daughters; he officiated at Obama's wedding. The title of Obama's career-making book "The Audacity of Hope" is from a Wright sermon. Wright worked with Obama as a community organizer. Saying you were out back catching a smoke during one sermon or another won't cut it. The issue isn't what Obama sat through, but what he stands for.

Even Wright's tone is poisonous.

Obama righteously deplores "divisiveness." And yet he literally worships at the altar of division. He wants to transcend race, but his black nationalist church and his liberation theology pastor consider race permanent and central issues.

Obama claims that he's a different kind of politician, but his "repudiation" of Wright last week is traditional pol-speak and nothing more. To listen to Obama, you'd think he was the only person in Chicago not to know that his minister is a hatemonger. Either Obama is the worst judge of character in living memory or he's not the man he's been portraying himself as.

Or there's a third option. Perhaps Obama didn't hear Wright's bilious rhetoric because it blended in with the chorus around him. This is the fact that Obama really needs to address if the "Obama movement" is about more than getting the junior senator from Illinois elected.

What does it say that Trinity United Church is the most popular in Obama's old state Senate district, with a membership of 8,500? One of Wright's flock responded to the controversy by telling ABC News, "I wouldn't call [Wright's theology] radical. I call it being black in America." NPR's Michelle Norris explained on "Meet the Press" that Wright's tone, at least, is "not something that is unusual" in black churches.

A Rasmussen poll released Monday found that 29% of blacks surveyed said Wright's comments made them more likely to support Obama, while only 18% said the opposite, and half said Wright's comments would have no effect on them.

That is a symptom of a problem that platitudinous "hope" cannot alone remedy…

Even if it’s that especially “audacious” type of hope that Bambi and the Bambi-ites tend to favour.

Update: Satirical blogger iowahawk--also an unlikely advisor--has some different advice.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:25 | link | comments

Least surprising headline of the day: Obama's race speech to stress "moving on."

Good luck with that one, Bambi.

Update: Bambi is going to ask everyone to "tone down the racial rhetoric."

Because it's wreaking havoc with his carefully-crafted but completely fraudulent image?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:10 | link | comments

In a pinch: The jihad in Londonistan is well underway says Melanie Phillips, an expert on the subject:

I wrote yesterday about the attack on Canon Michael Ainsworth in his own east London churchyard by three ‘Asian’ youths. From the rather fuller stories about this incident in today’s papers, it is clear that this is far from the first such attack in the area. Indeed, there appear to have been many attacks on vicars or churches by Muslims who are clearly intent on turning east London into a no-go area for Christians (and, given the stoning of the Jewish group visiting the area on Holocaust Remembrance Day, for Jews as well. The mosque in the picture, by the way, was once St Sophia cathedral which was converted into a mosque on the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the fate of innumerable churches under Islamic conquest).

The jihadi nature of the attack on Canon Ainsworth, who was taken to hospital after being kicked and punched in the head when he asked three ‘Asian’ youths who had gathered in the churchyard of the ancient church of St George-in-the-East to quieten down, is unmistakeable. The Mail on Sunday reports that the church

has regularly had windows smashed by youths - who on one occasion shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque.’…In another attack on the church, families were showered with glass when a brick was thrown through a window during a service. Mr Allan Ramanoop, a member of the Parochial Church Council, said often parishioners were too scared to challenge the gangs. The Asian church member, who lives nearby, said: ‘I've been physically threatened and verbally abused on the steps of the church.

On one occasion, youths shouted: “This should not be a church, this should be a mosque, you should not be here”. I just walked away from it - you are too frightened to challenge them. We have church windows smashed two to three times a month. The youths are anti-Christian.’ … The Reverend Alan Green, Area Dean for Tower Hamlets, said it was the latest in a series of ‘faith hate’ crimes in the borough… ‘There are one or two incidents of faith hate every month across the borough and across all faiths’.

The Sunday Telegraph further reported:

A survey of London clergy by National Churchwatch, which provides personal safety advice, found that nearly half said they had been attacked in the previous 12 months. The organisation suggested that vicars should consider taking off their dog collars when they are on their own.

Pinch yourself. This is Britain.

Vicars are under attack and the response of the craven authorities is…a resounding silence.

Pinch away, Brits. This isn’t a dream—it’s a nightmare.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:07 | link | comments

Bambi’s other uncle: Jeremiah Wright isn’t Bambi’s only mentor/nutty uncle. He has another one—nutty Yasserite Rashid Khalidi. From Salon:

…In Hyde Park, Obama also met Rashid Khalidi, who recently became the first Arab-American scholar to make the pages of the National Enquirer, where he was called "a harsh critic of Israel" in an article titled "Obama's Secrets."

In 2000, when Khalidi was a professor at U. of C., he held a coffee for Obama's congressional campaign. I was at the event, which Obama attended with his wife, Michelle, and their toddler Malia. Khalidi's wife, Mona, set out pita and hummus and Khalidi, a Christian Arab born in New York to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, praised Obama in unaccented English. Khalidi was head of the Center of International Studies, so his support suggested Obama was a faculty darling. There was talk that year that Obama was backed by a "Hyde Park Project" -- a group of well-funded, mostly white intellectuals aiming to push him up the political ladder.

Khalidi is a proponent of a Palestinian state, and has represented Palestine at international conferences, but he also recognizes Israel's right to exist.

Like Ayers and Obama, Khalidi was a member of the Woods Fund board, where he granted $75,000 to the Arab American Action Network, which was run by his wife. The AAAN is a social service agency aiding Southwest Side Arabs, but the right-wing Web site World Net Daily nonetheless has insisted it is anti-Israeli. That wasn't radicalism, it was nepotism, Chicago style.

Obama's tenure as Hyde Park's state senator gave him two advantages he has used to become the Democratic front-runner. The first is his ability to build a biracial coalition. Representing the campus and the 'hood, Obama had to appeal to educated whites and inner-city blacks. Those groups are now the pillars of his presidential support. As a state senator, he promoted bills that pleased both constituencies: opposing racial profiling, reforming death penalty laws, stiffening ethics requirements for legislators, providing health insurance for poor children.

Obama has also benefited from the district's leftist, academic bent. In Hyde Park, he ran with a crowd that harshly opposed this country's policies in the Middle East. Khalidi has gone so far as to say "we owe reparations to the Iraqi people." When Obama spoke against the Iraq war in 2002, it was hardly a gutsy stand. (He didn't have to take a stand at all, since the Illinois General Assembly can't declare war on foreign countries.) But it looks good now next to Hillary Clinton's "aye" vote. Obama comes off as a principled progressive because he represented a district that demanded clean government and liberal social policies -- values cherished by activist Democrats.

To Obama's credit, he hasn't repudiated anyone from his past. His campaign strategist, David Axelrod, admits that Obama and Ayers are "friendly." And Obama denounced Wright's comments without rejecting the man himself. How can he? Wright played an important role in shaping him as a politician. Ayers and Khalidi nudged him along the way. To apologize for knowing them would be to apologize for who he is: an African-American, a Christian, a city dweller, an academic, a liberal. Most of those would be exotic qualities in a president. And maybe that's the real problem.

Yeah, that must be it. Either that or the fact that his entire campaign is built around his assertion that he represents something new, something better, in American politics. In light of the guys he has chosen as his mentors, though, it is now clear that his image is a wilful misrepresentation of who he really is: not someone who stands above the messy fray of identity politics, but someone who’s up to his pretty neck in the doo-doo.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:45 | link | comments

Mama’s boy: A murderous mater lures her daughters to their deaths at the behest of her son, who she adores above all else. The plot of a gruesome, low-budget horror film? Nope. A true life tale of an “honor killing” in Texas. By Phyllis Chesler in FrontPage Magazine:

Texas-born Patricia (“Tissie) Said, formerly of the Owens family, is the mother who lured her two teenage daughters, Sarah and Amina, to their deaths at the hands of their own father this past New Years Day in Dallas. How can a mother do such a thing? Even if her own life was threatened, even if her husband Yasser had literally held a gun to her head and told her to trick her daughters into returning, isn’t a mother supposed to sacrifice herself for her children? Or at least to protect them? What can explain such a perversion of maternal instinct and of the life force itself?

 

“Tissie” Said is not the first mother to have participated in an honor killing on American soil. In 1989, in St Louis, Missouri, Brazilian-born second wife, Maria Isa, held her daughter Palestina (“Tina”) Isa down for twenty minutes as her father, Zein Isa, a Palestinian Abu Nidal terrorist operative, viciously and repeatedly stabbed her to death. The entire murder had been taped by federal authorities who were tracking the Abu Nidal group. The jury got to hear the girl’s heartbreaking cries and found both parents guilty. (Unsurprisingly, Zein Isa had the same mind-set that Islam Said, the brother of the honor murdered Dallas girls has. Isa said that “he had stabbed his daughter in self-defense, that she had so shamed him, that he had to commit a crime to restore his honor.”)

Palestina tried very hard to please her parents. She was overworked, treated “like dirt,” chronically beaten and constantly abused, both verbally and psychologically. But, like Amina and Sarah Said, Palestina also had academic ambitions—and she had an African-American “boyfriend.” Such Americanized behavior doomed all these honor murdered girls.

Both research and anecdotal evidence document that women collaborate, both directly and indirectly, in honor killings. According to a study which I cite in my 2002 book, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, Arab girls and women gossip about and slander others' girls and women in a way that demands that the men “do something” to restore their families’ honor. Palestina Isa’s three sisters kept pestering their father to “do something about the nigger-loving whore.”

Sometimes, a mother might physically murder her own daughter on her own, by herself, directly, not indirectly. For example, in 2003, on the West Bank, Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud, brutally murdered her 13 year-old daughter Rofayda who had been raped and impregnated by her two brothers. Amira was quoted as saying that “I had to protect my children. This is the only way I could protect my family’s honor.”

Surely, I am not saying that this mother in Texas murdered her own daughters physically, with her own hands, am I? No, I am not.

Indeed, in Texas “Tissie’s” favor, let me note that in late December, she ran away with her girls, whom she also calls her “angels.” At that time, “Tissie” also admitted to one of my interviewees that Yasser had threatened to kill the girls.

Once, long ago, “Tissie” had also admitted that Yasser had been sexually abusing Sarah and Amina when they were seven and eight years old. But she didn’t turn him in—her mother, the girl’s maternal grandmother, did that. And, according to her Owens relatives, “Tissie” laughed it off, “giggled,” minimized it all. “Tissie” stood by her man and she helped the children recant their sworn testimony because otherwise, “daddy would go to jail.” The girls subsequently told relatives that their recantation was false.

After “Tissie’s” own mother had turned Yasser in to the police, “Tissie” kept all the relatives on her side of the family far away from the girls. She and Yasser kept moving, roving, “like nomads,” (or like sociopaths), to escape school or child protective agency scrutiny.

According to my interviewees, “Tissie” also went to jail for her man when she was caught collecting welfare and a housing subsidy based on Yasser’s presumed absence. (In reality, he would sneak into the government subsidized housing at night). “Tissie” also worked as a store clerk, as did her daughters. According to my interviewees, “Tissie,” not Yasser, was the main support of the family. Yasser only worked as a taxi driver “when he felt like it.” And he kept his money to himself—or so they think.

Even now, when her daughters are dead and her man is still on the run, “Tissie” has chosen to live with one of Yasser’s brothers and she has warned her great-aunts not to speak out and not to call this cold-blooded murder an “honor killing.” She claims that her first-born son Islam needs her, and that he has grown up with his first cousins on his father’s side. Indeed, Islam’s need for her—perhaps her need for Islam—is the reason “Tissie” gave for having to return to Yasser, leaving her girls behind somewhere in Kansas.

According to my informants, “Islam bosses his mother around. And he stalked his sisters, he spied on them. But Islam also spends all his time at home with his mother. That’s where he’s been ever since he dropped out of school when he was 14. There is something wrong with him.” My informants tell me that “Tissie” could never control her son; that she minimizes, denies, and forgives his “weird, frightening, anti-social behaviors.” He is her wounded child. He still needs her. None of my interviewees are clear about whether Islam Said suffers from a learning disability, a psychiatric condition, or has simply been raised to be an aggressive predator against women with a deep hatred of America.

“It’s all of the above,” my interviewees say...

Islam and Tissie—the most heart-warming story of “mother-love” since Norman Bates and his mama in Psycho.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:13 | link | comments

Pre-emptive confession: Newly-sworn-in Governor of New York David Patterson—and his wife—have both come clean about affairs. Thus sparing us, presumably, from the sight of one or both wearing pearls and ‘fessing up at some point later on. (If the wife is doing the ‘fessing, I say it’s only fair that the guy has to wear the pearls.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:41 | link | comments

Bambi is toast: Literally.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:03 | link | comments

Faulty diagnosis: Shmuley Boteach takes a crack at explaining Eliot Spitzer’s passion for having sex with hot, young prostitutes—and gets it completely wrong (I think). From the Jerusalem Post:

…Powerful men like Spitzer are especially susceptible to the irrational self-loathing that is increasingly affecting the American male. Whatever level of achievement he attains, it is never enough to quiet the inner demons that tell him he is worthless. A culture built on soulless success has raised a generation of men to believe they are anonymous unless they accumulate money or fame, with women being yet another prized possession that accrues to the alpha male.

TRAINED TO feel like they are important only through professional achievement, these men are clueless about being in a relationship. They know how to master rather than relate, how to conquer rather than open up, how to manipulate rather than connect.

For the man to whom power is an aphrodisiac, paying a woman for sex becomes an erotic thrill. And men with low self-esteem are profoundly susceptible to women who are not their wives.

The man who sees himself as a loser sees the woman dumb enough to marry him as a loser squared. His wife's affection, therefore, cannot make him feel like a winner. It is only the woman to whom he is not married, the one that has not been devalued through a merger with a failure, that can make him feel consequential. And a woman who is so desirable that a night with her can set you back thousands of dollars can make a guy feel like a million bucks...

Spitzer? Self-loathing?  You’ve got to be kidding. He didn’t hate himself; he adored himself—to the point that thought he was so high and mighty, so damned superior, that the regular rules did not apply to him. And he wanted to have sex with hot, young prostitutes because they were hot, young prostitutes, and because he thought he was entitled to enjoy this kind of no-strings-attached sex.

Sorry, Shmuley. You’re no Dr. Freud. For that matter, you’re not even Dr. Ruth.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:54 | link | comments

Bambi’s kids: Back in the day (the day well before my day, of course) the young ‘uns who didn’t “like Ike” were “madly for Adlai.” Today, of course, everything’s changed. Those who aren’t keen for McCain are part of “Generation Obama.” Sort of like “Generation Pepsi”—but a lot more effervescent.

William Kristol, the New York Times’s newish token Conservative pundit, comments on the “G. O.” phenomenon:

Sunday evening, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner held a “Generation Obama” fund-raiser at Boston’s Rumor Nightclub. In case you’re not up on the Boston club scene, I should tell you that Rumor “brings together the sexiest and hippest people from around the globe” and “has raised the bar in Boston’s night life” (if Rumor may say so itself). Presumably, Ben and Jennifer raised the bar a notch further on Sunday.

Which is fine. Obama supporters are allowed to have fun. And celebrities are entitled to headline fund-raisers. But one has the sense that elsewhere in this great land the bloom is coming off the Obama rose.

For one thing, it’s becoming clear that Obama has been less than candid in addressing his relationship to his pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. For example, Obama claimed Friday that “the statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity.”

It certainly could be the case that Obama personally didn’t hear Wright’s 2003 sermon when he proclaimed: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God bless America, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. ... God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.”

But Ronald Kessler, a journalist who has written about Wright’s ministry, claims that Obama was in fact in the pews at Trinity last July 22. That’s when Wright blamed the “arrogance” of the “United States of White America” for much of the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks. In any case, given the apparent frequency of such statements in Wright’s preaching and their centrality to his worldview, the pretense that over all these years Obama had no idea that Wright was saying such things is hard to sustain.

This doesn’t mean that Obama agrees with Wright’s thoroughgoing and conspiracy-heavy anti-Americanism. Rather, Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives. Now he sees the utility of distancing himself from that church. Obama’s behavior in dealing with Wright is consistent with that of a politician who often voted “present” in the Illinois State Legislature for the sake of his future political viability.

The more you learn about him, the more Obama seems to be a conventionally opportunistic politician, impressively smart and disciplined, who has put together a good political career and a terrific presidential campaign. But there’s not much audacity of hope there. There’s the calculation of ambition, and the construction of artifice, mixed in with a dash of deceit — all covered over with the great conceit that this campaign, and this candidate, are different.

Which brings us back to the “Generation Obama” event. If you go to the Obama campaign Web site and click on “people,” you’ll see 14 categories of people you can choose to hook up with — women, labor, people of faith ... and “Generation Obama.”

What is Generation Obama? It’s a “grass-roots movement led by young activists with a simple goal: electing Barack Obama the next president of the United States of America,” the Web site says, adding that “you and other members can utilize the many talents of our country’s next great generation in support of the campaign in a variety of meaningful ways.”

So in fact, “Generation Obama” is just a fancy name for young activists for Obama. But the (remarkable) conceit is this: The “next great generation” of Americans can appropriately be called “Generation Obama.”

Um, I’d hold off on pinning an entire generation with that label until I saw how things panned out with the Jeremiah Wright revelations. The way it’s going at the moment, the whole Bambi thing may turn out to be a bust.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:56 | link | comments

Bambi hopes washed away: Identity politics rears its ugly head—and quells the Bambi tsunami (not to mix a metaphor, or anything). From ABC News:

Officials at Sen. Barack Obama's church have taken offense at the controversy born out of the fiery statements made by their senior pastor who sermonized that black Americans should sing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America."

Since last week's media eruption after the controversial sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright left the campaign's African American Religious Leadership Committee and Obama distanced himself from his pastor of 20 years.

"I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have [been] the subject of this controversy," Obama said, saying that he'd never heard any of them personally.

"One of them I had heard about after I had started running for president and I put out a statement at that time condemning them," he continued.

But more than a year ago, Obama disinvited Wright from speaking at his candidacy announcement. Wright told The New York Times then that Obama told him, "You can get kind of rough in the sermons. … It's best for you not to be out there in public."

Church member and University of Chicago theology professor Dwight Hopkins says Wright's message has been taken out of context.

"The whole point to Dr. Wright's sermons is to how do you make America a better America. If anything he's a true patriot," Hopkins said.

He also argues that the furor surrounding Wright smacks of a general attack against the idea of a black church born during slavery…

It does?  To me it smacks more of a general attack on the idea of someone who holds himself out to be above matters of race, but who in reality has been mentored for the past 20 years by an obnoxious bigot.

But, hey, that’s just me.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:32 | link | comments

Abe’s kids: A Muslim and a Jew at the usually fraught campus of York University (a.k.a. Gaza U) make a plea for calm based on their common provenance—i.e. both have been rocked in the bosom of Abraham. From the York U campus rag, Excalibur (my bolds):

Two brothers, one family

Torah, Genesis 17:3-7: “God spoke to him saying ‘...your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.  I will make you most exceedingly fruitful, and make nations of you; and kings shall descend from you.’”

Qur’an 2:136: “We believe in God, and in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, and that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and, their descendants…we make no distinction between any of them.”

We are here to stand, in contrast, to the racism and bigotry that has spiraled out of control on our campus.  Over the last few months, the amount of hate being publicly expressed towards Jews and Muslims, as well as other minorities, has skyrocketed drastically.  There have been numerous events that have taken place which have done nothing but perpetuate hate and cause division.  As Jews and Muslims, we must come together and focus on peace building.  We have much more to offer when we’re united than when we’re divided.

The commonalities between Islam and Judaism are astounding.  As descendents of Abraham, we share history and core religious values, which stress peace and togetherness.  At the end of the day, our religious teachings come down to a manifestation of mercy and loving our fellow man.    

We hope this can be the start of a long-lasting relationship between the Jewish and Muslim students at York University.  Students should not find themselves walking through Vari Hall feeling isolated and unwelcome.  This university should be a place that embraces multiculturalism and academic debate.  While issues and differences of opinion exist in every family, our discussions must be civil and productive, and our distinctions must serve as a way for us to learn and grow from each other.

Together, we can work towards common values that serve to benefit the entire York community.  Today, we face important social issues in our own backyard where we bear primary responsibility.  We are not here to try and rid the world of global conflict and religious fundamentalism. Instead, it is incumbent upon us to strive to create a peaceful campus as a stepping stone to a more peaceful world.

-Haseeb Kamal is the president of the
Muslim Students’ Association at York.
Eva Zucker is the president of Hillel @ York.

Yes, it’s nice to see them hugging instead of sniping. However, emphasising their “commonalities” only serves to paper over the one humungous difference between the two: only one of Abe’s kids has jihad and dawa as his core religious values. But, given the current level of anger and blind hatred for the Jewish state, I’m not sure that that kind of academic debate can occur at Gaza U without students coming to blows.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:18 | link | comments

Another sharia shiller: As I’ve previously opined, the struggle in which we’re currently embroiled is not, pace Samuel Huntington, a “clash of civilizations.” Rather, it as a clash of laws—their transcendent, immutable, perfect God-law versus our Earth-bound, un-transcendent man-made law. Thus, if we don’t want to end up perambulating in pup-tents with facial grilles (for the chicks) and long flowy robes (for the guys); if we don’t want our banking system to be run according to Islamic financial rules; if we want to be able to enjoy an occasional glass of Chablis or Merlot; we had better get off our duffs and halt the onrush of sharia in our own backyard.

That’s how I’ve come to understand it at least. A clueless dhimmi named Noah Feldman writing in the New York Times has a vastly different outlook (a tip o’ the touque to WriterMom):

Last month, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture in London about whether the British legal system should allow non-Christian courts to decide certain matters of family law. Britain has no constitutional separation of church and state. The archbishop noted that “the law of the Church of England is the law of the land” there; indeed, ecclesiastical courts that once handled marriage and divorce are still integrated into the British legal system, deciding matters of church property and doctrine. His tentative suggestion was that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce.

Skip to next paragraphThen all hell broke loose. From politicians across the spectrum to senior church figures and the ubiquitous British tabloids came calls for the leader of the world’s second largest Christian denomination to issue a retraction or even resign. Williams has spent the last couple of years trying to hold together the global Anglican Communion in the face of continuing controversies about ordaining gay priests and recognizing same-sex marriages. Yet little in that contentious battle subjected him to the kind of outcry that his reference to religious courts unleashed. Needless to say, the outrage was not occasioned by Williams’s mention of Orthodox Jewish law. For the purposes of public discussion, it was the word “Shariah” that was radioactive.

In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them — hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.

In the Muslim world, on the other hand, the reputation of Shariah has undergone an extraordinary revival in recent years. A century ago, forward-looking Muslims thought of Shariah as outdated, in need of reform or maybe abandonment. Today, 66 percent of Egyptians, 60 percent of Pakistanis and 54 percent of Jordanians say that Shariah should be the only source of legislation in their countries. Islamist political parties, like those associated with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, make the adoption of Shariah the most prominent plank in their political platforms. And the message resonates. Wherever Islamists have been allowed to run for office in Arabic-speaking countries, they have tended to win almost as many seats as the governments have let them contest. The Islamist movement in its various incarnations — from moderate to radical — is easily the fastest growing and most vital in the Muslim world; the return to Shariah is its calling card…

Yeah, that Shariah—it’s just soooo progressive. If it’s all the same to you, though, Noah, when Shariah comes a-calling, I’m hoping and praying that lots of us clued-in non-dhimmis don’t answer the call.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:17 | link | comments

Wolfmen: An utterly contemptible piece of dreck—an example of the bad craziness infesting the world—by Oakland Ross in the Toronto Star:

JERUSALEM–A United Nations panel voted overwhelmingly this month to condemn Israel for a recent armed incursion in the Gaza Strip that claimed more than 120 lives, many of them civilian.

Thirty-three member countries of the 47-seat UN Human Rights Council endorsed the resolution, which accused Israel of war crimes in its ongoing battles against Palestinian militants in Gaza.

Those in favour of censuring the Jewish state included China, India and Russia. Thirteen countries abstained, among them seven European governments.

But one nation stood alone against the denunciation of Israel, and that country was not the United States – Israel's leading foreign supporter – or even Israel itself, for neither country has a seat on the human rights body.

Instead, the lone dissenter was Canada.

"We're very happy that we see things in a similar way," Carmela Shamir, deputy director of the North America division at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in an interview last week.

"Canada has adopted several times in recent months very brave positions."

People are beginning to take notice.

"There is a widespread impression that Canada's position is more pro-Israel than it has been in the past," said Peter Jones, an assistant professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.

"It is a bit of a departure."

A tilt toward Israel was becoming apparent under Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, said Jones, but the shift has become even more pronounced since Stephen Harper's Conservative government took power in Ottawa in 2006.

In January, for example, Canada announced it was pulling out of a UN anti-racism conference slated for next year in Durban, South Africa, out of concern the meeting could degenerate into a binge of Israel-bashing, which was what happened at a similar gathering there in 2001, in the view of some participants.

"Canada is interested in combating racism, not promoting it," Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, said in January.

"We'll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance."

Just one other country – Israel itself – has so far withdrawn from the Durban conference, but the Israelis waited until Feb. 25, a month after the Canadian decision, before announcing they, too, would be staying home.

"Dialogue between our two governments is very good, very open," said Shamir.

To a considerable degree, it always has been.

Like other Western governments, Ottawa has fully supported the existence of Israel since its creation in 1948, and there are close cultural, political, and social ties between the two countries.

Since 1997, Israel and Canada have had a free-trade agreement, and two-way commerce has more than doubled during that time.

But the moral and political complexities of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict frequently oblige even Israel's most ardent backers – including the United States – to temper their support with sometimes blunt criticism.

During a visit here in January, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke out clearly against continuing Israeli housing construction in East Jerusalem on land it annexed in 1967 and now occupies illegally in the eyes of most of the world.

But, only days later, on a visit of his own, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier seemed to muddy Ottawa's position on the same issue by declining to express specific opposition to Israeli settlement activity in East Jerusalem.

Like the United States and Europe, Canada has traditionally drawn no distinction between Israeli housing construction in East Jerusalem and its settlements in the West Bank, opposing both.

Following Bernier's visit, however, some ambiguity seems to have crept into a once straightforward Canadian policy.

"The ambiguity raises questions," said Jones at the University of Ottawa. "I don't know what it means."

At least some other people think they do.

"I think the Harper government made a deliberate calculation," said Mohamed Boudjenane, executive director of the Canadian Arab Federation. "They are reaching out to the Jewish vote. I can't see any other reason."

Whatever its stance toward Israel, Ottawa has not abandoned the Palestinians.

Canada maintains a diplomatic office in Ramallah, the West Bank capital and disbursed $39 million in economic assistance to the Palestinian territories in the fiscal year 2006-07.

Canada fully supports the eventual establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

Maybe so, says Boudjenane, but Ottawa under Harper's leadership has nonetheless adopted a "negative" tone toward Arabs and Muslims.

For example, he said, the Canadian Arab Federation recently requested a meeting with Kenney to discuss Ottawa's decision to withdraw from next year's anti-racism meeting in South Africa. But they were refused.

"This is our government, too," he said. "You cannot decide to boycott one group."

Other observers see different factors at work in what they regard as Canada's increasingly forthright backing for Israel, the sole functioning democracy in a region of authoritarian Arab states.

"Most people you talk to tend to take the view it's an ideological feeling by the Harper government," said Jones, who attributes the shift largely to a personal decision by the Prime Minister and his immediate staff.

"Certainly, around Ottawa, there's a general feeling that the (Prime Minister's Office) and the (Privy Council Office) have taken a greater interest in this part of the world."

Shamir regards the change less as an overt show of support for her country and more as a reflection of shared principles.

"I would say this government, on issues like fighting the war on terror, has a similar analysis of global trends as the Israeli government has," she said.

"I would put it in terms, not of supporting Israel, but of taking positions concurrent with Israeli ones."

Whatever its cause, one test of Ottawa's shifting Middle Eastern vision is the practical effect it stands to achieve in a region of stubborn hostilities, great suffering, and abiding fears.

"In terms of just Canada, per se, it probably does not have that great an impact" said Jones.

"But it has a diplomatic and moral impact."

Shamir welcomed the apparent shift, even though it comes from a country that is not exactly a powerhouse of international influence.

"Canada is part of the G-8," she said. "It's taking part in the global war on terror. The size of the population is not relevant."

But Boudjenane surveys the same trends and laments what he sees as a loss of Canada's once vaunted moral stature.

"We used to be one of the most respected voices," he said.

"We were seen as a peace-making nation. It was Canada's trademark. That perception unfortunately is now tainted."

So you see, Canada is “tainted” through its association with Israel—a “taint” that won’t be expunged until Canada admits its “sin” and joins up with the rest of the slavering wolves, er, virtuous international community.

My letter:

To bolster his case that Canada is supposedly “shifting towards Israel,” Oakland Ross points out that only two countries--Canada and Israel--have so far declined to participate in the upcoming Durban II conference on racism. Since Durban II, like Durban I, has little to do with racism, and amounts to yet another attempt by Israel’s enemies to argue that Israel’s existence is morally indefensible--the better to justify its destruction--I would not call Canada’s refusal to attend a “shift.” I’d say it’s more like a “wake-up.” Canada has woken up to the fact that Israel--the Middle East’s sole Western-style democracy--is the Western world’s “canary in the coal mine,”  and that as Israel goes, so goes the West. It is thus in Canada’s interest to help ensure that Israel--the beleaguered canary--remains alive and well.

Durban II is a year away, so there is still time for other Western nations to wake-up and shun this deplorable event.  Canada is to be commended, not criticised, for having the moral courage to lead the way.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:55 | link | comments (4)

Bambi karaoke: A Three Dog Night standard, tweaked for our times:

Jeremiah was a bulldog.

Was a mentor of mine.

Never was around the times he said "God-damn"

So I never heard those lines.

And he always has some mighty fine lines.

 

Singin’ oy, he’s my unc.

Likes to speak some bunk.

Oy, I’m in trouble ‘cause of something that he’s said.

Oy, hope I’m not dead.

 

You know I love his praises.

Love to hear him gush.

But when he’s on a tear ‘bout Jews and nine one one

You know he oughta hush.

 

Singin’ oy, he’s my unc.

Likes to speak some bunk.

Oy, I’m in trouble ‘cause of somethin' that he’s said.

Oy, hope I’m not dead.

 

If I were the  Dem’s candidate

You know just how I’d cope.

I’d try to hide my dealings with this crazy old coot

And harp about “change” and “hope.”

 

Singin’ oy, he’s my unc.

Hope my ship ain’t sunk.

Jeremiah made me who I am today.

What a price to pay!

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:33 | link | comments

The biggest loser: The votes are in and, according to mullah-mouthpiece, the Tehran Times, there was a clear loser in Iran’s parliamentary elections. It was—drum-roll, please—the United States:

TEHRAN -- Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini declared here on Sunday that the United States is the main loser of the parliamentary election in Iran.

“Surely the biggest loser of this election was the United States, and the real winners were the people of Iran,” Hosseini told reporters at his weekly press briefing.

About 60 percent of eligible voters in Iran took part in Friday’s parliamentary elections.

The Western plot to discourage the Iranians from participating in the elections was foiled, the Foreign Ministry spokesman stated.

The U.S. put great pressure on its European allies and other countries sitting on the Security Council to approve additional sanctions against Iran prior to elections in order to discourage people from turning out for polls.

Surely the biggest loser of this election was also the biggest loser of the previous one, and the one before that—and the loser of every pathetic exercise in pseudo-democracy since Khomeini flew in on his broomstick (or whatever it is warlocks ride on): the Iranian people.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:59 | link | comments

The point of it all: Al Jazeera--you know, the CBC without hockey--puts the ummah's cards on the table. The goal, as I've noted before, is to make Israel's existence morally indefensible so as to justify its erradication on moral grounds.

As reprehensible as anything A. Hitler ever came up with, but much sneakier.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:04 | link | comments

How do you say “death," er, “dearth” in Spanish?: The New York Times reports on an extreme mosque shortage in sunny Espana (my bolds):

LLEIDA, Spain — As prayer time approached on a chilly Friday afternoon and men drifted toward the mosque on North Street, Hocine Kouitene hauled open its huge steel doors.

Skip to next paragraphAs places of worship go, the crudely converted garage leaves much to be desired, said Mr. Kouitene, vice president of the Islamic Association for Union and Cooperation in Lleida, a prosperous medieval town in northeastern Spain surrounded by fruit farms that are a magnet for immigrant workers. Freezing in winter and stifling in summer, the prayer hall is so cramped that the congregation, swollen to 1,000 from 50 over the past five years, sometimes spills onto the street.

 

“It’s just not the same to pray in a garage as it is to pray in a proper mosque,” said Mr. Kouitene, an imposing Algerian in a long, black coat and white head scarf. “We want a place where we can pray comfortably, without bothering anybody.”

Although Spain is peppered with the remnants of ancient mosques, most Muslims gather in dingy apartments, warehouses and garages like the one on North Street, pressed into service as prayer halls to accommodate a ballooning population.

The mosque shortage stems partly from the lack of resources common to any relatively poor, rapidly growing immigrant group. But in several places, Muslims trying to build mosques have also met resistance from communities wary of an alien culture or fearful they will foster violent radicals.

Distrust sharpened after a group of Islamists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people, and in several cities, local governments, cowed by angry opposition from non-Muslims, have blocked Muslim groups from acquiring land for mosques.

The result, Muslim leaders say, is that some Muslims feel anchorless and marginalized.

“A proper mosque would act as a focus, a reference point for Islam here,” said Mohammed Halhoul, spokesman for the Catalan Islamic Council. A quarter of Spain’s Muslims live in Catalonia, the northeastern region that is home to Lleida, but the area has no real mosques.

“I feel like a Catalan,” Mr. Halhoul said, “except when it comes to the question of the mosque.”

Muslims ruled much of Spain for centuries, but after they were ultimately vanquished in the 1400s, their mosques were either left to ruin or converted into churches. Since then, fewer than a dozen new mosques have been built to serve Spain’s Muslim population, which has grown in the past 10 years to about one million from about 50,000 as immigrants have poured into the country.

That rise has coincided with a decline in church attendance in overwhelmingly Catholic Spain, giving new echo to an old rivalry between the two religions. It was the Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, who defeated the last Moorish ruler in Spain in 1492 and oversaw the expulsion of Jews and Muslims. Now, as churches struggle to draw a dwindling flock, Muslim prayer halls are overflowing.

“The reality of this country has changed much faster than that of other countries,” Ángel Ros, Lleida’s mayor, said in an interview. “A process that took 30 years in Italy or France has taken 10 years in Spain.”…

Hasta la vista, Catholic Spain. Welcome back to your “Moorish” future.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:49 | link | comments

Mentors: Bambi Obama’s mentor/spiritual leader is a splenetic Black Power zany who’s suffused with hatred—for white people, for America, for Israel. Compare that to another African-American mentor/spiritual leader from Chicago—Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr. of Beth Sholom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation.

If I lived in Chicago, I think this might be the congregation for me.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:40 | link | comments

"The Road" to boredom: I am finding it next to impossible to slog though Cormac McCarthy's extravangently praised-and-prized (it won the Pulitzer) novel The Road, the current selection of my book club. It could be the so-spare-it's-arid prose--faux Hemmingway that reads like a parody of the worst of that author (who has never been one of my favorites). It could be the plot--a post-apocalyptic journey of a father and son, with lots of blood are gore: also not my cuppa. It could be its utterly bleak view of humanity, unleavened by even the barest glimmer of humour or wit. In fact, let's say that that's what it is--that the book is so utterly foreign to my ironic (Jewish) sensibility, which allows for--nay, demands--humour in the bleakest of situations, that, for someone like me, it is well-nigh unreadable. (A classic example of the Jewish sensibility: Two Jews have decided that they can no longer abide the pogroms and persecution their people have had to suffer, and they are going to kill the Czar. They hear that he is en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and hunker down at a hidden section of road to await their prey. They wait. And they wait. And they wait. But the Czar never arrives. "I wonder what's keeping him," says the first Jew. "I don't know," says the second. Long pause. "I hope nothing's happened to him." Now, I find that joke hilarious, but I have a strong hunch that the humour would be completely lost on Cormac "Make-It-Grim-And-Unbearable" McCarthy.)

Anyway, I was delighted to discover that I'm not the only one who finds The Road to be a gigantic load of pretentious twaddle. (Amusingly, I found the link by googling "I hate The Road.")

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:21 | link | comments

Protesters’ non-sequitur: Thousands of anti-war types turned out in cities across Canada yesterday to rally against parliament’s passage of a measure which will see Canadian troops remain in Afghanistan until 2011. Here’s a photo on the Ceeb site showing placards at the Toronto protest:

“END THE SEIGE OF GAZA”—good God y’all, what does that have to do with Afghanistan? Absolutely nothin’. (Say it again.) It was nice of them to leave their “behead those who insult Islam” signs behind, though.

 

While I would never have joined it this lefty whinge-fest/Israel-bash, I, too, have concerns about Canada’s continuing military presence in Afghanistan. But they’re due entirely to the fact that the Afghan constitution upholds Islamic law. Call me crazy, but I’m not so sure that sharia--even in a Taliban-lite version--is something Canadians should be fighting and dying for, nor that doing so is going to end up serving our long-term interests.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:54 | link | comments

You had to know it was coming:

Me? I'm not an audacious hoper. In fact, upon careful consideration of the rampant craziness that's loose in the world, I'm what you might call a pissed-off pessimist.

If I were a frog, though, I'd be an audacious hopper.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:17 | link | comments

Daddy dearest: Bambi claims to have transcended identity politics with his audacious hopefulness/hopeful audacity (a claim that’s become rather more difficult to swallow since the release of the collected rants of Jeremiah Wright, Bambi’s mentor, spiritual leader and the guy who coined the phrase that became the title of Bambi’s latest book; guess he and the Missus happened to be on hand for that particular sermon). But clues to what and who he really is—i.e. someone who takes great pride in his black heritage but who is profoundly conflicted about his white side—were evident years ago. Back in 1995, he penned a memoir about his father (with whom, apparently, he’s obsessed, even though the guy took a powder when Bambi was two and had next to no contact with him thereafter). Here are some of  Bruce Bawer’s impressions of the book:

…I can’t exactly say I’ve caught Obama fever.

 

I’m eager, however, to understand as best I can what all the excitement is about – really I am. So when a friend lent me his copy of Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, I gave up my dream of spending my week’s vacation on the Costa Blanca blissfully unplugged from current events and took the damn thing with me. To my surprise, it turned out not to be a bad beach book at all – it was well written, richly human (i.e., not the usual politician’s pap), and genuinely moving.

 

But it disturbed me, too.

 

As the title intimates, the figure in Obama’s carpet is his father, a Kenyan exchange student who met Barack’s white, Kansas-born mother at the University of Hawaii. After marrying her and fathering Barack, Dr. Obama – as he was universally known – returned to Kenya to take up a high-ranking government position. Thereafter, he showed little or no interest in Barack, whom he met only once, when the boy was ten. Though Barack’s mother had a brief second marriage that took her and the boy to Indonesia, she raised him mostly in the Aloha State – and, by his account, was unfailingly selfless and loving, as were her parents, “Gramps” and “Toot,” who helped bring him up.

 

Yet on whom does Barack’s memoir focus? On his father – whom Barack, against all evidence (which suggests that Dr. Obama was colossally selfish and narcissistic), seeks to portray as heroic, sympathetic, indeed near-mythic. Obama père was a polygamist (and a lousy husband to all his wives), but Barack gives no indication that he finds this morally problematic; on the contrary, he seems determined to excuse his father’s many failings as consequences of imperialism, colonialism, and/or racism. One can, of course, well understand why a small boy – or even a young man – might idealize out of all proportion the father he never met. But Obama shows few signs in this book of recognizing that he’s doing this. Meanwhile, perversely, he treats his mother and grandparents, who by his own account raised him with extraordinary devotion, all but dismissively. At one point he even suggests that Gramps and Toot were really racists – and that all white people, in fact, are racists, and that black people have been so deformed by this racism that black individuals can hardly be held responsible for their own moral lapses.

 

Forget the content of our character; this is a work preoccupied with skin color. It’s drenched with the legacy of Malcolm X (whom Obama, at least in this book, openly idolizes). At times it’s as if there were no historical injustices in the world other than those visited upon blacks by whites. Obama routinely refers to other black men (but never white men) as “brothers”; he exhibits considerably more concern for the dignity of black men than for that of women or non-black men; and he’s acutely sensitive to perceived racial slights (yet even as he deplores the subordination of blacks in America, curiously enough, he appears to accept as his due his family’s lofty position in Kenya). While occasionally gesturing toward an ideal of colorblindness à la Dr. King, in his heart of hearts he’s anything but colorblind, fervently endorsing black solidarity while repeatedly expressing distrust of, and even contempt for, whites. When, lamenting Kenya’s intertribal rivalries, he tells a relative that “We’re part of one tribe. The black tribe. The human tribe,” the last three words feel like an afterthought – as does his attempt, in the book’s closing pages, to move beyond strict racial line-drawing and to articulate broader sympathies. As if all this weren’t enough, it seems clear by book’s end that his heart’s home is not America but Kenya.

 

What does it say about the young Obama that he was well-nigh obsessed with his vain braggart of an absentee father but trivialized his mother’s accomplishments? What does it mean that he himself plainly can’t see that his father comes off in these pages as a world-class jerk and his mother as a woman of admirable self-discipline and quiet achievement? What does it mean that throughout his account of his work as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama himself is in sharp focus while the underprivileged folks he’s supposedly trying to help are hazy figures in the distant background? What does it mean that some of the characters in this book – whom one would otherwise assume to be important people in his life – are, as he admits in the introduction, composites? What does it mean that despite his fixation on his father and his Kenyan kin, their religion (Islam) is barely mentioned, and that in the most substantial reference to it, he gives a genial thumbs-up to his brother’s newfound religious fervor?...

 

Sounds like the fatherless lad was looking for a father figure, and found him in Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Too bad his “daddy” is an obnoxious bigot who's convulsed by anger and a sense of victimhood; a man who admires the repellent Louis Farrakahn, despises “rich white people” and Israel, and who God-damns America from what is literally a bully pulpit.

Update: Pat Buchanan, of all people (that paleo-Republican Jew-hater), has a piece in the Toronto Star about Geraldine Ferraro getting in heck for her comments about Barack Obama, and Obama's appeal to black voters. I responded thusly:

I disagree with the Pat Buchannan/Geraldine Ferraro assessment that Barack Obama would not be where he is today if he were not an African-American. In reality, Obama has built his campaign around the idea that, as someone of a mixed racial heritage, he transcends identity politics. That makes him radically different than, say, a Jesse Jackson, whose message held little appeal beyond his own community. With his youthfulness, charisma, and message of “hope” and “change”—amorphous though it may be—Obama has a much broader appeal, attracting both black and white, and especially the young.

The problem is that, while Obama claims to have transcended matters of race, his two-decade long affiliation with Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago calls that claim into question. From what is literally a bully pulpit, Reverend Wright purveys the most outrageous conspiracy theories about whites and Israelis (white people, apparently, being responsible for infecting black people with AIDS; Israel, apparently, being responsible for 9/11). He also “God-damns” America—hardly the most “spiritual” message—while praising the likes of Louis Farrakhan, an egregious anti-Semite. Indeed, he holds Farrakhan in such high esteem that his church honoured him with a special award.

In recent days, Obama has tried to distance himself from Reverend Wright, his mentor and spiritual leader, insisting that he’s like some harmless old uncle who occasionally goes a bit overboard. However, that’s going to be a rather tough sell, since Wright’s church has played such a central role in his life. It is where he and his wife were married, and their children were baptized. Over the years, the Obamas have donated large sums of money to the church, attending it on a regular basis.

It is evident from this affiliation—and from his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father—that, despite his claims to the contrary, Obama has not managed to transcend race. He is someone who identifies strongly with only part of his makeup—his father’s part. From all indications, it seems he not yet been able come to terms with that part of him—his mother’s part—that is white.

Update: Obama's church accuses media of "character assassination" (i.e., of having the "audacity" to tell the truth).

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:11 | link | comments

A tsunami of bad craziness: Foreign envoys press Israel to die, already, er, macht mit das peace-machten.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:18 | link | comments (1)

That avuncular old Jew-hater, Jeremiah: Bambi is trying to distance himself from his pastor by claiming he’s like some crazy old uncle you sometimes want to hide in the attic. Mark Steyn, for one, isn’t buying it. From NRO:

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright thinks that, given their treatment by white America, black Americans have no reason to sing “God Bless America.” “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America,” he told his congregation. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.”

I’m not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vaudeville of rival politicians insisting this or that candidate disassociate himself from remarks by some fellow he had a 30-second grip’n’greet with a decade ago. But Jeremiah Wright is not exactly peripheral to Barack Obama’s life. He married the Obamas and baptized their children. Those of us who made the mistake of buying the senator’s last book, The Audacity of Hope, and assumed the title was an ingeniously parodic distillation of the great sonorous banality of an entire genre of blandly uplifting political writing discovered circa page 127 that in fact the phrase comes from one of the Reverend Wright’s sermons. Jeremiah Wright has been Barack Obama’s pastor for 20 years — in other words, pretty much the senator’s entire adult life. Did Obama consider God Damn America as a title for his book but it didn’t focus-group so well?

Ah, well, no, the senator told ABC News. The Reverend Wright is like “an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” So did he agree with goofy old Uncle Jeremiah on September 16th 2001? That Sunday morning, Uncle told his congregation that the United States brought the death and destruction of 9/11 on itself. “We nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” said the Reverend Wright. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards.”

Is that one of those “things I don’t always agree with”? Well, Senator Obama isn’t saying, responding merely that he wasn’t in church that morning. Okay, fair enough, but what would he have done had he happened to have shown up on September 16th? Cried “Shame on you!” and stormed out? Or, if that’s a little dramatic, whispered to Michelle that he didn’t want their daughters hearing this kind of drivel while rescue workers were still sifting through the rubble and risen from his pew in a dignified manner and led his family to the exit? Or would he have just sat there with an inscrutable look on his face as those around him nodded?

All Senator Obama will say is that “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” And in that he may be correct. There are many preachers who would be happy to tell their congregations “God damn America.” But Barack Obama is not supposed to be the candidate of the America-damners: He’s not the Reverend Al Sharpton or the Reverend Jesse Jackson or the rest of the racial-grievance mongers. Obama is meant to be the man who transcends the divisions of race, the candidate who doesn’t damn America but “heals” it — if you believe, as many Democrats do, that America needs healing.

Yet since his early twenties he’s sat week after week listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race huckster.

What is Barack Obama for? It’s not his “policies,” such as they are. Rather, Senator Obama embodies an idea: He’s a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don’t boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do…

I must say that one of the best things about no longer affiliating on the left is that I have lost the overwhelming urge to feel guilty. It’s like an enormous burden—an anvil, if you will—has been lifted from my shoulders. Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almightly, I am free at last.

 

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:04 | link | comments

More video evidence of Rev. Wright's warped perspective: This one's my favourite so far, since Bambi's pastor accuses the Jews, or Israelis, or Zionists, of being behind the 9/11 attacks (and urges "negroes" not to be shy about saying so).

Guess Bambi must have missed that sermon, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:33 | link | comments

A call for action—if it’s not too late: One of the good guys, Salim Mansour, says it’s time to dismantle multiculturalism, a doctrine whose time has come, done lots of harm, and should be banished to history’s dust heap of bad ideas. From the Toronto Sun:

…It was the idea of equality that took hold of this generation's thinking and out of it was hatched multiculturalism.

The best and brightest of this generation went forth into the world to study other cultures and like Mark Twain's "innocents abroad," returned to instruct the less cosmopolitan of their compatriots. The lessons included the goodness to be found in every culture meant the culture which devised man's walk on the moon had much to learn about communal living from the clan solidarity of peasants in the Mekong Delta or the husbandry of the camel-herding Bedouins of the Arabian desert.

It is when people are confronted with crisis of some existential nature that the mettle of the ideas and values by which they live gets tested.

For the generation that invested in multiculturalism as a political ideal, the test came with the Islamists unleashing their cult of death ideology against the West.

For the multiculturalists the dilemma posed by terrorist assaults questions fighting Islamists instead of appeasing them through accommodation. That question arises since all cultures are equal according to their ideology and, moreover, their ideal instructs them there is nothing specific and precious about the West to begin with, thus no sacrifice is meaningful in its defence.

The logic of multiculturalism goes against the thought of Canadian soldiers waging war against the Taliban in Afghanistan when multiculturalists would accommodate Taliban values in Canada.

SHARIA LAW

It is such thinking that led the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, in recently addressing the Royal Courts of Justice, to commend "public or legal recognition" of Islamic laws (sharia) in England while ignoring Muslims seeking freedom from sharia.

In the archbishop's world the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume's warning, "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once" raises little concern.

However, only when liberty is at stake and people are prepared to defend it, are false ideologies such as multiculturalism exposed as sham requiring their quick internment for freedom's survival.

Multiculturalism facilitates the advance of sharia. Period. The sooner we realize it (today, if possible), the better off we’ll be.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:56 | link | comments

Afghan Idol: No simpering Ryan Seacrest; no babbling Paula Abdul; no nasty Simon Cowell. And definitely no two weeks devoted to the work of Lennon and McCartney (even though how great would it be to hear “Oh-Bla-Di-Oh-Bla-Dah” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” sung in Pashtun?) They even let the chicks have a crack at competing—much to the disgust of the usual “conservative” spoilsports. From the Ceeb:

The first Afghan woman to make it to the top three of her country's version of the TV singing contest American Idol has been voted off.

Lima Sahar was a finalist in Afghan Star, a popular television show now in its third year.

"I am very happy to have come in third place," Sahar said on the show broadcast Friday night.

"This is an honour for me that the people voted for me. I really thank them and I also congratulate them."

Sahar, who comes from Afghanistan's conservative Pashtun tribe, also reminded her countrymen that there had been little music in the country in the past two decades.

Under the Taliban regime, women were forbidden to venture out of their homes unaccompanied, while music and television were banned.

The 20-year-old singer had become the target of fundamentalist Muslim critics who say a woman should not be allowed to sing in public.

The country's conservative clerics' council has protested to President Hamid Karzai over Afghan Star and Indian shows shown on Tolo TV, the country's most popular station.

Sahar, who wears a headscarf and sang Pashtun oldies, had pledged to give her winnings to the poor if she was triumphant.

A winner for Afghan Star will be picked next Friday. The two finalists are Hameed Sakhizada, a 21-year-old from the Hazara tribe, and Rafi Naabzada, a 19-year-old ethnic Tajik.

The winner takes home about $5,000, considered a colossal amount in Afghanistan.

Let’s see how long the show lasts before it’s pulled for being “un-Islamic.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:16 | link | comments

What is it with dogs and shoes?: My goofy retriever has a penchant for one of my sheepskin-lined boots (but only the left one, mind you). The canines in these photos find other types of footwear more appealing—even though some of them (like that strappy number with the high heels) don’t seem particularly cuddly.

There’s only thing my dog would find even more appealing than an uninterupted slobber session with my left boot: an uninterupted slobber session with my left boot when it has a bagel inside it. To him that would be the ultimate in doggie nirvana.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:59 | link | comments

Here is the church and here is the steeple: Oh, wait. It’s a dhimmi church in Qatar.

Never mind.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:38 | link | comments

Least surprising headline of the day: Islamic Conference unites over Israel.

What would the ummah do without the Jews to bring 'em together?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:30 | link | comments

A walk on the mild side: The National Post has a piece detailing the so-called “hidden lives of MPs.” It offers the following “revelations” about dull-as-dishwater Liberal leader, Stephane Dion:

A closet chocolate addict, he is into cross-country skiing, fishing and hockey—on the road, not the ice. He is an early riser who does not sleep much, say his staff.

On the road, eh? Whoa. Quite the risk taker.

Move over Eliot Spitzer.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:07 | link | comments

Wright’s wrongs: Poor Bambi. The minister who, for the past 20 years has been his revered “spiritual leader” is making him look bad, and now some are calling the wisdom of that reverence into question. From the Beeb:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has denounced remarks made by his pastor that the 9/11 attacks were like "chickens coming home to roost".

 

The Illinois senator said the 2001 comments, which have resurfaced on the web, were "completely inexcusable".

Mr Obama said he had not been present during Rev Jeremiah Wright's sermon, at the Trinity United Church of Christ.

The black Chicago pastor brought Mr Obama to Christianity, officiated at his wedding and baptised his daughters.

Mr Obama, a member of the church since the early 1990s, posted a blog on the Huffington Post about his relationship with the pastor, who is now retired.

"I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies," he wrote.

'God damn America'

Mr Obama, who conducted a number of media interviews on Friday to reject Mr Wright's comments, said he had looked to him for spiritual - not political - guidance.

In a sermon on the Sunday after the attacks of 11 September 2001, Mr Wright told his congregation: "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards.

"America's chickens are coming home to roost."

In a 2003 sermon, Mr Wright said blacks should condemn the US.

"God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human", he said.

Mr Obama said he expects his political opponents will use videos of the sermons to attack him as the campaign goes on…

Bambi is being attacked for his inexperience; how might President Obama react, asked one pundit this week, should he be awakened at 3 a.m. with a call on the red phone? If his two decades-long allegiance to a racist, anti-American church is any indication, Americans are wise to question his ability to make sound judgements.

Looks like Bambi's chickens are coming home to roost.

Update: Buh bye, Jeremiah.

Update: VDH on the the roosting chickens. From The Corner:

The problems with Rev. Wright and Sen. Obama are fivefold. They won’t go away, but they will raise dilemmas for him that have no analogy, no parallel with other religious leaders of dubious past declamations who have supported the other candidates:

1) The Obamas were not merely endorsed by, or attended the church of, Rev. Wright, but subsidized his hatred with generous donations, were married by him, and had their children baptized by this venomous preacher; there is nothing quite comparable in the case of Sens. Clinton and McCain.

2) Rev. Wright’s invective is not insensitive or hyperbolic alone, but in the end disgusting. And when listened to rather than read, the level of emotion and fury only compound the racism and hatred, whether in its attack on the Clintons, or profanity-laced slander of the United States and its history, or in gratuitous references to other races. Its reactionary Afrocentrism, conspiracy-theory, and illiberal racial separatism take us back to the 1970s, and compare with the worst of the fossilized Farrakhan—and have no remote parallel in the present campaign.

3) Sen. Obama has proclaimed a new politics of hope and change that were supposedly to transcend such venom and character assassination of the past. Thus besides being politically dense, he suffers—unless he preempts and explains in detail his Byzantine relationship with the Reverend—the additional charge of hypocrisy in courting such a merchant of hate. And then he compounds the disaster by the old-fashion politics of contortion and excuse by suggesting the Rev. Wright is not that controversial, or is analogous to the occasional embarrassing outburst of an uncle—some uncle.

4) There is a growing sense of betrayal among some of his supporters. Sen. Obama promised to transcend race; millions of sincere people of both parties took him at his word and invested psychologically and materially in his candidacy. Part of his message was that collectively America had made great progress, and their Ivy League and subsequent careers, in addition to his rhetoric of inclusiveness and tolerance, bore witness to that progress in racial equality. Now we learn, that for much of his career, he was not only attending hate-filled sermons against “rich white people” and the “g-d d——d America” (in hopes of solidifying his racial fides in regional Chicago politics?), but subsidized that ministry of intolerance. So while he promised an evolution beyond the race-identity politics of Jesse Jackson or the Rev. Sharpton, his own minister trumped anything that either one of those preachers might have sermonized. All in all—a betrayal.

5) The timing is especially troubling. In delegate mathematics, Obama seems to have the nomination; but this scandal—and it is a scandal despite the best efforts of sympathetic journalists to downplay it—will only cause worry for the super delegates, who now must either nominate a candidate (no doubt the vast right-wing conspiracy is examining the multivolume DVDs of Rev. Wright’s collective corpus of hatred) who will bleed all spring and summer, or “steal” the nomination from the “people” and “hand it over” to Hillary.

Oh, no. A whole new round of "we wuz robbed." I don't think I can bear it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:25 | link | comments

So sad: You had to know that a reflection on NPR--a.k.a. National Palestinian Radio--about the failure of the "road map" would be a sob story about the plight of a poor, suffering Palestinian. (Is there any other kind on NPR?)

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:15 | link | comments

Isn’t that always the way?: One door closes as another one opens.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:58 | link | comments

Jurgen’s expensive “insights”: I happened to pick up a dead tree copy of the New York Times today, and there, on pp. A5-A6, found a two-page, paid-for spread, in teeny-tiny print, full of the loopiest West-bashing/Islam-is-wunderbar mishegas this side of Al Jazeera (or maybe the Ceeb). It was written, apparently, by someone named Jurgen Todenhofer (he has a couple of umlauts in his name, but I left them out), a former politician from Germany, who promises to cap off today’s peroration with another spread in Sunday's paper. These “ads” are excerpts from Jurgen’s new book, Warum Totest Du-Zaid? (in English,  Why Do You Kill, Zaid?, although it isn’t clear from today’s excerpt who Zaid is—someone Jurgen met during his ramblings, I suspect). Here is but a mere taste of the screed (my bolds):

Terrorism is never religious. To be a terrorist is to adopt the methods of the devil; no terrorist may invoke God. There is no “Islamic” terrorism, just as the terrorism of the IRA in Northern Ireland was never “Christian” or “Catholic”. There is merely terrorism that bears an Islamic mask, and it does not lead to paradise, but to hell, as do wars of aggression that bear a Christian or democratic mask.

I’m sure that will come as a great surprise—and immense disappointment—to all those dudes and dudettes who are so pleased to shout “Allahu Akbar” just prior to self-detonation.

My question: Is Jurgen independently wealthy and paying for this egregiously expensive display himself, or is someone with even deeper pockets who has a vested interest in “spreading the word,” so to speak, involved?

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:38 | link | comments (1)

Spitzer and Stark: Here’s how Wikipedia describes Willie Stark, the governor in Robert Penn Warren’s novel All The King’s Men:

Willie Stark (often referred to as "the Boss"), undergoes a radical transformation from an idealistic lawyer and weak gubernatorial candidate into a charismatic and extraordinarily powerful governor. In achieving this office Stark comes to embrace various forms of corruption and builds an enormous political machine based on patronage and intimidation. His Machiavellian approach to politics earns him many enemies in the state legislature, but does not detract from his popular appeal among many of his constituents, who respond with enthusiasm to his fiery populist manner.

Aside from that part about the “radical transformation”—Spitzer having started out as a pit bull and remaining one throughout his public life—much of the rest of the description is most a propos.

In private life, though, Spitzer was much the bigger scumbag, canoodling with God knows how many sex kittens for-hire. Willie fooled around on his long-suffering wife, too. But he had “affairs”, one of which leads to his assassination (thus sparing Mrs. Stark from having to do a “Silda”—stand behind her man while he confesses his sins in public).

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:10 | link | comments

Dirty words: Mahmoud Abbas, that old silver-tongued smoothie, is accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing.” That’s the highly-charged phrase which usually refers to a genocide, or a mini-genocide, but which, from the Arab perspective, refers to the Jews’ effrontery in thinking they could take a little piece of Dar-al-Islam and call it their own. Here’s how Carolynne “Mrs. Malarkey” Wheeler reports the story in the Globe and Mail:

JERUSALEM — Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has accused Israel of a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" of the Arab presence from Jerusalem, as criticism of Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank mounts ahead of a critical meeting with U.S. officials today.

"Our people in the city are facing an ethnic cleansing campaign through a set of Israeli decisions such as imposing heavy taxes, banning construction and closing Palestinian institutions, in addition to separating the city from the West Bank by the racist separation wall," Mr. Abbas said yesterday at the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Dakar, Senegal. "What is taking place on the ground today is in total violation of [the peace process]."

Israel annexed East Jerusalem after its capture in the 1967 war and regards the entire city as its capital, though the claim is not recognized internationally and Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. Palestinian residents have long complained that building permits are nearly impossible to obtain for Arab neighbourhoods, even as Jewish neighbourhoods expand.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert criticized Mr. Abbas's statement. "The peace process has many challenges and ... the responsibility of the leadership is to promote dialogue to overcome those," Mark Regev said. He referred to Mr. Abbas's comment as "inflammatory."…

That kind of understates things, don’t you think, Mr. Regev? Abbas’s charge is actually part of the concerted international campaign to heap such opprobrium on Israel—for being “racist”, “apartheid”, “Nazi”, etc.—that its existence is not longer morally defensible, and the international community can rationalize its destruction on those grounds.

You want to see real “ethnic cleansing”? Here it is.

My letter:

Mahmoud Abbas certainly picked an appropriate forum—the Organization of the Islamic Conference—in which to accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing”.  The 55 members of the OIC are extremely well-acquainted with the term, since more than a few of them have unleashed it on their own or adjacent populations. That includes Sudan, where Blacks and animists have been “cleansed” (a manifestly inappropriate way to describe something that is often so bloody) by Arab Janjaweed militias; Iraq, where Christians are being “cleansed” by Islamic extremists; and Indonesia, responsible for “cleansing”, i.e. murdering, large numbers of civilians in East Timor.

By no stretch of the definition can what’s occurring in Jerusalem, where Israel continues to take steps to defend its people from terrorist attack, be described as “ethnic cleansing.” Ironically, the only “ethnic cleansing” that has taken place in the area in recent years occurred in 2005, when 8,5000 Jews were “ethnically cleansed” from Gaza.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:33 | link | comments

Protocols of the Elders of Shia Islam: Funny, they look kind of Jewish. From MEMRI blog:

Source: Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, London, March 12, 2008

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:47 | link | comments

Something borrowed: Bambi responds to charges of plagarism.

He's so goshdarned eloquent.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:29 | link | comments

Obama’s “spiritual leader”: Racist, profane, anti-American, and a loopy conspiracy theorist to boot.

Other than that, he’s a regular Des Tutu.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:20 | link | comments (1)

Oscar and Felix, redux: The new odd couple--a pair of horny, mismatched ex-governors.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:07 | link | comments

Vote early, vote often: Political rhetoric in the U.S.—all that palaver about “hope” and “change”—has nothing, and I mean nothing, on the bloviations emanating from the glorious mullocracy on “election day”. From the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN – Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on Wednesday said the March 14 legislative election is “a great national test” to show the “power and dignity of the Iranian nation and Islamic system”.

Addressing a large number of people from various parts of the country, Ayatollah Khamenei said, “By voting for the most efficient and devout nominees who believe in social justice, defend Iran’s national interests and have a clear stance towards the enemies, the determined Iranian nation will elect a powerful Majlis, loyal to Islamic principles.”

The Supreme Leader criticized “the enemies of Islam and the Islamic Republic” for trying to discourage Iranians form voting.

Since they have realized that Iran is a leading power in the Islamic world, they appose whatever contributes to Iran’s progress, he opined.

A high turnout in Friday vote will once again disappoint the hegemonic powers, especially the United States, the Supreme Leader observed.

He dismissed the UN Security Council resolutions against Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities as a pretext to discourage people from voting.

“Those who claim democracy are blatantly opposing democracy and elections in Iran because they know Islamic democracy will provide the ground for the Iranian nation’s progress

“But the vigilant and brave Iranians will participate in the election more enthusiastic than ever and will foil the bullying powers’ plots to weaken the Islamic system and increase pressure on Iran,” Ayatollah Khamenei insisted.

The Supreme Leader also described as “political propaganda” some rumors by enemies that Iran does not hold free elections.

“I confidently assert that previous elections were sound and Friday’s vote will be the same.”

The totalitarian imperative: Ask not what the mullahs can do for you; ask what you can do for the mullahs.

Update: Unintentionally amusing VOA headline--Iranians vote for new parliament; few surprises expected.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:01 | link | comments

A song for Silda: The psychology of someone who sets himself up as a paragon of virtue, and them proceeds to recklessly dynamite his own pedestal, is fascinating. But perhaps even more fascinating is the psychology of the woman who stands there in the background, looking grim-faced and impecably-groomed, as the scoundrel 'fesses up.

This one's for you, Silda, and all the other wronged political wives:

Sometimes it’s hard to be a helpmeet.

Givin’ up your life to be his wife.

You’ll have good times.

But he may do crimes.

Lots of things that you don’t understand.

But, ah, the spotlight is so warming.

And you’re one mighty lucky spouse.

So don’t be frosty

‘F he buys a prosti

‘Cause after all, he’s still your louse.

 

Stand by your louse.

Put on some pearls, be stoic.

Make sure you act heroic

When he admits his failings.

Stand by your louse.

Though it will cost you plenty.

And it’s so hard to be his spouse.

Stand by your louse...

 

Just kidding, of course. I think she should give the faithless blighter the old heave ho.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:59 | link | comments

Eliot's devolution--in Yiddish: He went from being Eliot "Shpritzer"--the high-flying politico who seems to have "shpritzed" on a regular basis under the auspices of the Emperor's Club VIP; to being Eliot "Shvitzer"--sweating it out when he knew authorities had uncovered his secret life, and he was in a heap of trouble; to being Eliot "Sitzer"--reduced, now, to sitting amidst the wreckage that was once his marriage and career.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:47 | link | comments (2)

"Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be shaheeds": Or words to that effect.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:05 | link | comments

De trop: I post the following—a commentary on the Spitzer self-immolation by Wall Street Journal pundit Daniel Henninger—not only for its insights, but because it is so refreshing to read the word “disproportionate” being used in a context other than Israel vs. its enemies:

…Eliot Spitzer has been brought low by a sexual indiscretion. This fantastic tale of the Emperors Club VIP, however, can't be separated from the rest of Mr. Spitzer's life. It has been a disproportionate life.

Just as he went waaay over the top in his sex quest, he was over the top as a prosecutor and even as governor.

The office of public prosecutor by its nature carries with it extraordinary powers. People in other walks of life also hold great power over the lives of others -- policemen, CEOs, doctors, your boss. What anyone should bring to these powerful roles is a sense of balance and proportion. While he held the powers of prosecution, Mr. Spitzer displayed neither. He was a man unable to discern the existence and the need for limits -- on his authority or on his behavior.

Prosecutors of their nature disrupt and often ruin the lives of private citizens. Compare Eliot Spitzer's behavior as attorney general with that of a prosecutor for whom he worked for two years in 1991-92, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

Mr. Morgenthau will enter history as one of the toughest prosecutors in the U.S. His most famous recent prosecution was of Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski. There have been legions of others found guilty under Mr. Morgenthau's unstinting sense of justice. What Mr. Morgenthau also brought to his duties was a sense of proportion and judgment.

Eliot Spitzer's prosecution of former AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg is a case study of prosecutorial abuse. Of the Greenberg case, Attorney General Spitzer once said: "The evidence is overwhelming that these were transactions created for the purpose of deceiving the market. We call that fraud. It is deceptive. It is wrong. It is illegal." He said that on Sunday morning on ABC-TV. Then after saying this, he never brought criminal charges against Mr. Greenberg.

Mr. Morgenthau, now 88, was old school. Eliot Spitzer is, or was, new school. He may be in disgrace this morning, but Eliot Spitzer is a totem for our age. He is of a piece with a culture that elevates and publicizes individuals who "push the edge of the envelope," who do what they gotta do to win and attract adulation. Eliot Spitzer -- the man and his methods -- were admired, even lionized, in some media precincts.

Somewhere along the line in our culture, we all became complicit in elevating and celebrating that which is outsized, not normal -- disproportionate. Eliot Spitzer was a prosecutor on steroids. His audience cheered, until he got caught. Then, quite naturally, it leered.

In a more restricted, even straitlaced age, people had internal monitors. One was discretion. It had its uses. Still does. Now we live in a less hinged age. We have unrestrained personalities with unrestrained behavior. Want to see one? Turn on your TV. Check the prose on the Web. No surprise that some people, like Client 9, hit the wall. Judgment is always the first thing to go.

Eliot Spitzer has a screw loose, a screw that should have been kept tight. He floated up through the hot celebrity vapors of our time to become governor of New York. Eliot Spitzer is of a piece with the outsized personalities this ethos breeds into our politics now. It would be slanderous to name any public figure alongside the current news cycle of the Emperors Club VIP. But the type flourishes.

The current presidential campaign is flirting with the weird fires that we've set all over the American landscape. The too long campaign requires the outputting of too much naked ambition. Political desire -- wanting it so bad for so long -- runs risks. One wonders what it may be doing to Barack Obama.

There may be no going back to a more balanced time, when unhinged personalities kept their excesses inside their own homey hells rather than sharing with all of us. As modern ballast, we use what we've got, which is schadenfreude, that wonderful word for this moment of watching Eliot Spitzer's fall into the mud. Schadenfreude is German for pleasure at another's misfortune. The worse the better.

In the spirit of the age, Eliot Spitzer pushed prosecution off its traditional moorings and turned it into a public spectacle. Bread and circuses, with his targets thrown to the lions. Now he's the circus. As spectacle, Eliot Spitzer's public resignation yesterday was as good as it gets, with Silda standing there to define the outer edge of the horror. We do what we've been trained to do: Show up and watch.

On Monday, Mr. Spitzer said that he had violated "my, or any, sense of right and wrong." Yeah, whatever. He was up and now he's down. Proportion restored, sort of.

Eliot Spitzer’s in my new favourite “rise and fall” saga. More compelling than Willie Stark’s. More action-packed than Arturo Ui’s. And a whole lot tawdrier than Richard Nixon’s.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:46 | link | comments

Looking for a lifeline: The Dutch are bracing for the seethe-a-thon that’s likely to erupt if and when the Geert Wilders film, Fitna, is released. Knowing what’s ahead (buildings/vehicles aflame; frenzied protests by the affronted; “Behead those who insult Islam,” etc.) the Dutch are testing the EU waters, trying to see whether their confreres are prepared to offer them more support than they gave Denmark during that unfortunate Motoon fracas (which yet continues).

Good luck with that one, Dutch. You may want to go batten down the hatches—now. From Expatica:

BRUSSELS – Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende will explain the Dutch government's standpoint on the upcoming film from Geert Wilders to his European colleagues on the first day of the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday.

Balkenende is hoping for European solidarity in the event that the film Fitna unleashes violent reactions against Dutch people, companies or embassies in the Islamic world.

Wilders' film is not an official agenda item, but Balkenende will broach the matter during the dinner on Thursday evening. Balkenende and other Dutch ministers have been already talking with other European governments for months about the possible consequences of the film.

The Dutch are hoping for more support than Denmark received two years ago after the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in Danish newspapers led to major unrest.

The EU leaders will also be discussing the progress of the Lisbon agenda for modernising the European economy, the French plans for a Mediterranean Union, and the European Commission's climate and energy tasks.

The finance ministers of the 27 EU members will also have a separate meeting on the unrest on the financial markets and the position of foreign state funds. The foreign ministers will discuss the EU police mission in Afghanistan.

They see it as a “police mission”? As in, “My name is Inspector Clouseau: Put down that ‘minkey’ and stop in the name of the ‘low’”? Kind of funny—but also très pathetic.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:20 | link | comments (3)

The audacity of experience: The Bambi-supporters believe there’s a clear-cut choice: “change” and “hope”, or same old, same old. In one sense, they're correct. The choice is clear. It’s between a president who doesn’t “get it” and one who does. A New York Sun editorial deals primarily with the latter, but also with the former:

Senator McCain is remembered in Israel for, among many other things, a wonderful incident that happened at the annual gathering of policy intellectuals at Herziliya. The senator attended via a large screen projecting his voice and image from America. It turned out that the hookup allowed the man from Arizona to see the assembled guests in Israel. At some point, he noticed, off to the corner, the Israeli most identified with the universal struggle for democratic rights. "Is that my friend Natan Sharansky?" he called out from across the seas. The man who had survived the Gulag Archipelago acknowledged the greeting. Then, referring to charges relating to various forms of corruption swirling around Israeli leaders, he said: "Both Senator McCain and I know that it is better to go to jail before being elected to public office."

Next week, Mr. McCain will present himself in the flesh — not through a video relay — in Israel and other Middle East countries. He is starting off on March 18 at Jerusalem, where he is scheduled to confer with Prime Minister Olmert, Foreign Minister Livni, and Defense Minister Barak. He will also visit London and Paris. The GOP nominee-to-be just denounced the Palestinian Arab attack on students at a yeshiva in the Israeli capital, calling it a "heinous massacre" and supporting Israel's right to self-defense. His campaign issued a statement saying, "This gruesome attack once again makes clear to the world that Israel faces extremists whose cause is not peace but the slaughter of Israelis."

Mark that Mr. McCain issued no comments about a "cycle of violence," no moral equivalence, no question about which side he and America are on. Cynics will attribute this to a campaign desire to firm up support among American Jewish voters, heretofore a Democratic bastion. If so, legitimate. We are more interested in what his visit and his comments portend for the type of president he would be. On Tuesday, Mr. McCain told Reuters that if elected, he would focus on the Middle East. Until quite recently, Democrats have been criticizing the Bush administration for having swapped a focus on Israeli-Palestinian peace-making for the war in Iraq.

So what exactly did Mr. McCain mean? He told Reuters that the reasons he would focus on the Middle East is because of "… the level of tensions, the exchange of fire across Israel's border aimed at innocent people. There's Hamas, a terrorist organization, now governing Gaza ... considerable unrest in southern Lebanon. There's very big issues that need to be addressed." It seems the question for Mr. McCain is not the matter of securing a state for the Palestinian Arabs but rather a "struggle ... between radical extremist Islamic forces throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East, and West[ern] values and standards and beliefs and everything that we stand for." The conflict involving Israel, Mr. McCain said, "is all part of this struggle that we're in."

It would be a mistake, history has taught us, to read too much into all of this. But it would not be a mistake to watch with interest Mr. McCain's progress as he sets out on an important tour, particularly given that "national security experience" — or the lack thereof — has become a major issue of contention among Senators Clinton and Obama. Mr. McCain naturally wants to play to his strength in this field. The question of who one wants to answer the red phone ringing at 3 a.m. with the latest report of crisis is not merely about "experience" but about the substance of the world view held by the next president.

A 3 a.m. call on the red phone to Bambi?—the blood chills.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:52 | link | comments

Not a “cycle”; a “two-step”: Victor Davis Hanson has Hamas’s number. From RealClear Politics (my bolds):

Gaza erupted in celebration last week to the news that a Palestinian had murdered Jewish religious students in Jerusalem. And almost daily terrorists send rockets from Gaza into nearby Israeli cities, hoping to kill civilians and provoke Israeli counter-responses -- and perhaps start another Middle East war.

This is not the way some imagined Gaza two and half years after the Israelis withdrew both civilians and soldiers from the territory in September 2005. At the time, the Palestinian Authority controlled Gaza, but in early 2007, Hamas took over in a violent civil war, claiming legitimacy after once winning a popular election.

Gaza has plenty of natural advantages. It enjoys a picturesque coastline on the Mediterranean with sandy beaches and a rich classical history. There is a contiguous border with Egypt, the Arab world's largest country and spiritual home of pan-Arabic solidarity.

The Palestinians are a favorite cause of the oil-rich Middle East, and would seem to be in store for at least a few billions that accrue from $100 a barrel oil. In short, an autonomous Gaza might have been a test case in which the Palestinians could have crafted their own Singapore, Hong Kong or Dubai.

Instead, despite Palestinian rule of Gaza, Hamas has continued its civil war with the Palestinian Authority, and looters have ruined infrastructure that was left by the United Nations and the Israelis. Mobs crashed the border crossing with Egypt. Hamas-led terrorists have launched over 2,500 mortar rounds into Israel, as well as over 2,000 Qassam rockets.

We all now know the familiar Gaza two-step. The Israeli Defense Forces respond to Hamas rockets with targeted air strikes against terrorist leaders or small-rocket factories. Hamas makes certain both these targets are intermingled with civilians in the hopes of televised collateral damage.

Hamas counts on the usual sympathetic European and Middle Eastern media coverage and commentary. Terrorists deliberately trying to murder Israeli civilians are seen as the moral equivalents of Israeli soldiers trying to target combatants who use civilians as shields. To the extent that the IDF kills more of the terrorists than Hamas kills Israeli civilians, sympathy goes to the "refugees" of Gaza.

This tragic charade continues because Hamas wants it to continue. Its purpose is to make life so unsure and frightening for nearby affluent Israelis that they will grant continual concessions, hopefully leading to such wide-scale demoralization that the Jewish state itself will collapse and disappear. In that regard, the last thing Hamas wants is calm and prosperity in Gaza, which would turn the population's attention toward living rather than killing and dying.

Hamas in Gaza also feels that the war is not static -- and that it is already winning on all fronts. As Europeans, Middle Easterners and the United Nations lecture Israel about "inordinate" or "disproportionate" responses, the terrorists' smuggled missiles increase in range, payload and frequency of attack…

Not only Europeans, Middle Easterners and the United Nations. Sanctimonious Canuckistani letter-writers in the Globe and Mail, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:40 | link | comments

Mega-feh!: What really creeps me out about the whole “Kristen” thing—aside from the fact that this 22-year-old was trying to make ends meet (no pun intended—well, maybe just a little bit intended) by servicing older men—is that she looks like she could have been one of Spitzer’s daughters.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:26 | link | comments (1)

Dershsy’s defence: He’s dead wrong about the Spitzer scandal (sorry, Alan, it is a big deal when the governor of New York, a guy who’s built his career on his spotless ethical behaviour, is caught with his pants down in a hooker honeypot), but he’s dead on about Israel’s right to defend itself against the war being waged on it by Hamas. From FrontPage Magazine:

Article 51 of the United Nations Charter guarantees its members “the inherent right to…individual self defense” against “an armed attack.” In January of 2006, Hamas was elected to govern the Palestinian Authority. After Israel ended its occupation of Gaza and removed all of its settlers, Hamas threw the Palestinian Authority out of the Gaza and assumed de facto as well as de jure control over the entire Gaza Strip. Its leaders then instructed its military wing to direct rockets at civilian targets in southern Israel. At first these rockets were Qassams with a relatively short range. Now they include Katyushas, which can reach to Israel’s large cities, including Ashkelon, with its population of 120,000 civilians. Hamas has officially declared that its policy is to develop or smuggle even longer range missiles capable of reaching Israel’s largest city Tel Aviv and its lifeblood, Ben Gurion Airport. It has promised to keep aiming its missiles at civilian targets until the Jewish state is finally destroyed.

 

If this is not an “armed attack” under Article 51, then I don’t know what is. The only argument against it being an armed attack is that rocketing civilian population centers, as Hamas is doing, is a war-crime. International law prohibits, even during a declared war, the deliberate targeting of civilians or the bombing of areas of civilian population centers with absolutely no military significance. But war-crimes may also constitute an armed attack: Hitler’s invasion of Poland was both, as the Nuremberg Tribunal determined. If anything, an armed attack that is also a war crime justifies the right of self defense even more than a mere armed attack.

Nor can it be said that these attacks on Israeli towns and cities are merely the work of individual terrorists or terrorist groups. The military wing of Hamas is in fact a terrorist organization, as the Untied States and the European Community have recognized. But since Hamas is in political and military control of the liberated Gaza Strip, the military wing of Hamas is also the official army of that government, as Hamas itself has proclaimed.

What then are Israel’s rights under international law, under the law of war, under historical precedents and under various treaties and human rights concepts? What have, and what would, other nations whose cities and towns were attacked by enemy rockets do? Israel certainly has the right to counterattack its enemy, destroy its capacity to fire rockets and engage in “belligerent reprisal.” The only constraint on Israeli action is “proportionality.” Israel’s military actions must be proportional. But proportional to what? Certainly not to the actual number of people who have thus far been killed or injured by rocket attacks. Israel has spent an enormous amount of money building shelters to protect against rockets. Close to a thousand rockets have been aimed at southern Israel in recent years. Each one of them had the capacity to kill dozens, if not hundreds of civilians. The fact that no Hamas rocket has yet hit a school bus, a kindergarten, an ambulance, a synagogue, or a school yard is simply happenstance. It is only a matter of time until this happens. No nation has to wait until the goals of its enemy are fulfilled before it engages in a proportional response. Proportion must be defined by reference to the threat posed by the enemy and not by the harm it has produced. No nation need allow its enemies to play Russian Roulette with its children.

Israel has tried several options, each of which has been condemned by vocal members of the international community, human rights groups and religious organizations – some of whom have been silent about the Hamas war crimes that precipitated the Israeli actions. Israel has tried economic sanctions, border controls, targeted attacks on terrorists and ground incursions. Each of these generally acceptable war measures carry with it the risk of some civilian casualties. The reason for this is that the distinction between combatants and civilians has deliberately been blurred by Hamas. Rockets are fired from densely populated areas, precisely in order to force Israel into choosing between allowing its own civilians to continue to be killed by its inaction, or taking actions that risk hurting killing some Palestinian civilians. Either way Hamas wins. If Israel does nothing, then Hamas accuses it of impotence. If it does something, then Hamas accuses it if disproportionally. Hamas leader Khaled Mashal characterized Israel’s military actions in Gaza as “the real Holocaust.” Even Mahmoud Abbas, the so-called moderate Palestinian leader in the West Bank said that Israel’s military efforts to stop the rockets was “more than a Holocaust”.

The time has come for Israel’s critics to tell Israel what it should do in the face of these escalating rocket attacks on its civilian population centers. If economic sanctions, border controls, targeting terrorists and ground incursions should not be done, what are the alternatives?

The answer to this question is important not only to Israel, but to the United States and other democratic nations that will surely face the prospect of having to take actions to prevent terrorist attacks by enemies who deliberately hide among civilians. The barrage of unconstructive criticism directed against Israeli self-defense actions will only encourage more terrorism of this kind.

Here’s an example of unconstructive criticism: yet another Israel-bashing letter in the Globe and Mail:

Vancouver -- Patricia Marchak is right to reproach The Globe for its consistent pro-Israel bias (Cycle Of Mideast Violence - letters, March 11), but it's also worth noting that the bias is not even in favour of "Israel" as such, but the Israeli government.

Many Israeli groups (Gush Shalom, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) and individuals such as veteran peace activists Gila Svirsky and Uri Avnery and journalists Gideon Levy and Amira Hass have deplored their government's occupation and onslaught against the Palestinian people.

The Globe’s “consistent pro-Israel bias”? Maybe in editorials. The rest of the rag, especially its news coverage and letters page, is heavily invested in the “it’s the occupation”/”cycle of violence”/moral equivalence narrative.

As for “veteran peace activists”—clueless bien pensants who have lost all confidence in their own civilization and are delighted, in a masochistic sort of way, to see it going down the tubes. And the current Israeli government isn’t a whole lot better.

My letter:

Letter writers Patricia Marchak (Cycle Of Mideast Violence - letters, March 11) and Carl Rosenberg (Israel’s Government Isn’t Israel – letters, March 13) both detect a “consistent pro-Israel bias” in the pages of the Globe and Mail. As individuals with an evident anti-Israel bias, what they’re really reacting to the fact that, on occasion, a Globe editorial makes no bones about supporting Israel’s right to defend itself against enemy attack—the same right granted to every other nation in the world. It is awfully difficult, to say the least, to discern any “pro-Israel bias," consistent or inconsistent, in the news coverage by Mark MacKinnon and Carolynne Wheeler. And while the words of Israel-supporters may sometimes appear on the comments page, that is largely offset by the regular writings of Rick Salutin, Rami Khouri and others.

If Ms. Marchak and Mr. Rosenberg are looking for a newspaper whose bias “consistently” matches their own, it is readily available—in online English versions of the Arab press.

And there's always the New York Times and the Ceeb.

Update: I like the way Charles put it--"There's a bad craziness loose in the world."

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:12 | link | comments

Where's "Kristen"?: The Zombies have the answer.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:50 | link | comments (1)

A brief moment of clarity before the cluelessness kicked in again: For one brief shining moment, an American politician actually had a clue about the Silver Fox and his faux-moderates. But it was only a tiny, little clue, and, without nourishment, it quickly perished. From the New York Sun:

WASHINGTON — The chairwoman of the House subcommittee that funds America's foreign aid will lift her objections to disbursing some $100 million in economic assistance to the Palestinian Arabs, a week after freezing the funds.

Rep. Nita Lowey, a Democrat of New York, will lead a hearing of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs today on the foreign aid budget, featuring testimony from Secretary of State Rice. With a fragile cease-fire taking hold between Israel and Hamas days after her return from the Middle East, Ms. Rice may have avoided a grilling from Ms. Lowey.

Last week, Ms. Lowey and others in Congress were threatening to withhold $150 million in aid from the Palestinian Authority as fighting between Hamas and Israel worsened. Days earlier, President Abbas said in an interview with a Jordanian newspaper that the Palestinian Arabs could take up armed resistance if negotiations failed. Western powers had backed Mr. Abbas for the Palestinian presidency in part because of his speeches against the suicide terror offensive in 2000, 2001, and 2002 known as the second intifada.

"I remain skeptical about the political will of a Palestinian leadership that all too often lapses into inflammatory rhetoric that belies their stated commitment to peace," Ms. Lowey said in a letter yesterday to the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Henrietta Fore.

But with the release of a new memorandum of understanding between America and the Palestinian Authority on how to spend the funds, Ms. Lowey informed Ms. Fore that she would withhold $50 million in aid, not $100 million, until the Palestinian Authority transferred its funding into a single treasury.

Yesterday, Senator Obama, a Democrat of Illinois and the leader in pledged delegates for his party's presidential nomination, called the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, and expressed his support for Israel's right to defend itself against rocket attacks, expressed his shared concern about Iran's nuclear program, and expressed condolences for the attack on Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva last week, a campaign spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said. He added, however, that the senator also "expressed admiration and support for the ongoing commitment to negotiations with President Abbas," a sentiment in line with the Bush administration and European leaders...

Mahmoud Abbas seems to have sprinkled his “stupid powder” over the entire world.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:30 | link | comments

 Don't miss: A most enjoyable piece in Eye Weekly about Kathy "Five Feet of Fury" Shaidle.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:45 | link | comments

Sanity prevails: Loopy lefty NGO Amnesty International tried to get Canada’s Charter rights stretched to include the Taliban, but a judge has told them “no dice.” From the Ceeb:

A federal judge has ruled the Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply to Afghan prisoners captured by Canadian troops.

The court's decision came just hours after Canada's civilian-run military police watchdog announced it will hold public hearings into the military's detainee transfer policy in Afghanistan, in response to "delays and difficulties" in obtaining relevant documents and information from government authorities.

The federal ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Amnesty International Canada and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association against the minister of national defence, the chief of defence staff and the attorney general of Canada in a bid to halt the prisoner transfers.

In her decision, Judge Anne Mactavish concluded that while detainees held by the Canadian military in Afghanistan "have rights accorded to them under the Afghan constitution and by international law, and, in particular, by international humanitarian law, they do not have rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the court decision during question period in the House of Commons.

"They have accepted the government's arguments," Harper said. "We're obviously very pleased by the decision and will look at it more carefully."

NDP Leader Jack Layton fired back, accusing the government and Harper himself of hindering the Military Police Complaints Commission's investigation into a complaint that transfers of Afghan detainees to Afghan security forces are in violation of international and Canadian law.

"This prime minister stands accused of withholding holding key information, witnesses and documents" from the commission, Layton said. "Why the refusal to co-operate?"

But Defence Minister Peter MacKay said the government has given the complaints commission "as much, if not more information that would have been provided" had a public hearing with subpoena powers already been called.

"Canada has met a very high standard when it comes to disclosure and transparency on this issue," MacKay said. "We're always to prepared to work with this commission."

Paul Champ, a lawyer representing Amnesty in the case, told CBCNews.ca on Wednesday the human rights group was disappointed by the decision.

"It basically says that Canadian government actors on foreign soil are not subject to Canadian law in any way, and I think that's a bad precedent," Champ said from Ottawa following the ruling…

Actors? He thinks Canadian soldiers are actors? As in “all the war’s a stage, and all the men and women in the military merely players?”

Guy has been sucking back some mighty potent purple Kool-Aid.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:33 | link | comments (1)

Off the hook: A French court has aquited a French magazine editor of "offending" Islam by publishing those Danish Motoons.

Bet Ezra and Mark are very jealous.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:35 | link | comments (2)

Literary apartheid: Muslim countries are shunning this year's Paris book fair because it is featuring the work of Israeli writers.

Well, there's always Abu Dhabi.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:31 | link | comments

A remarkable transformation: Playwright David Mamet explains why he's no longer a "brain-dead liberal."

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:27 | link | comments

That Client #9: One of my favourite songs of the early rock era—Lieber and Stoller’s cheeky paean to souped-up love, pre-Viagra—has been revived in light of how a certain (now) former governor was labelled by a high class establishment purveying sexual services. I thought I’d have my own go at it (the song, not the purveying):

I took a trip down to the Emperor’s Club.

A tony joint where you can get a rub.

And what I purchased there was nothing short of divine--

A little taste of heaven like

That Client #9.

 

I told ‘em that I was a shmuck with cash.

Liked dressing up, and sometimes getting lashed.

They hooked me up with Kristen and she made me feel fine.

Just like she did in Washington

For Client #9.

 

She bent down and spun around and strutted her stuff.

She told that she didn’t mind it dirty and rough.

We had some fun till time ran out and she’d had enough.

I wanted more. I yelled, “Encore.” Left in a huff.

 

I didn’t know if it was day or night.

Got so addicted that I couldn’t fight.

My bank account’s depleted now

Through no fault of mine.

Got hooked on all the hookers of

That Client #9.

That Client #9.

That Client #9.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:16 | link | comments

A bad egg:

Eliot Spitzer stood unusually tall.

Eliot Spitzer had a great fall.

All his crusading and ethics so fine

Reduced to a label: Client no. 9.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:30 | link | comments

Rami Khouri, peace-monger: The editor-at-large of Lebanon’s The Daily Star is pushing for “peace” between Israel and Hamas ‘n’ Islamic Jihad. From the Globe and Mail:

…The importance of a long-term truce between Hamas-Islamic Jihad and Israel cannot be overstated. It would represent a historic breakthrough that could open the way for future negotiations to a permanent resolution of the conflict. It would allow both populations to live a reasonably normal life, free from fear of missile, bomb and rocket attacks. This would spur economic growth that would provide a powerful base for more urgent peace negotiations - as Northern Ireland taught us. Political leaders on both sides would enjoy enhanced credibility, at home and in the eyes of the enemy with whom they must negotiate a full peace one day.

Most significantly, a truce would mark a historic and permanent shift in the negotiating balance between Palestinians and Israelis. By entering into a truce, Israel would have acknowledged the impact of the Palestinian Islamic resistance movements, and signalled that it is prepared to engage diplomatically with them. Israel should not refuse to do this out of an exaggerated sense of honour or political pride, or on the assumption that it is giving an inch and will soon have to concede a mile. For the Palestinians would be making the same concession in return: tacit recognition of and negotiations with the state of Israel, whose legitimacy they had always rejected. When both sides give, they both gain.

The current "peace process" is an embarrassing sham: The Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas meaninglessly suspends and resumes peace talks and pleads shamelessly and unsuccessfully for American life-boats; Israel expands its colonial settlements, which Washington meekly calls "not helpful" to the peace process, and the Arabs, Europeans, Russians and UN seem blissfully oblivious to their potential to play a constructive role in this saga.

The indirect contacts between Israel and Hamas-Islamic Jihad offer a rare opportunity to build a more credible diplomatic structure based on two formidable warring parties who respect each other because they have proved themselves able to kill and terrorize each other.

It's not pretty, but this is how history and nationalism work. This is also how lasting peace can be negotiated by parties of equal credibility.

“Equal credibility”—incroyable! My letter:  

Rami Khouri is encouraged by Israel’s “indirect contact” with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, seeing it as way for the parties to build a relationship based on mutual respect which, ultimately, could lead to a lasting peace. I see something completely different: Israel’s desperation, borne of sixty years of insisting on its right to be; wishful thinking on an unprecedented scale, as Israel is pressured to make concessions to groups committed to waging a jihad against it.

The notion that Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any other outfit of holy warriors could actually “respect” Israel, which they view as nation of presumptuous dhimmis who dared to set themselves up on land that will forever belong to the Islamic world, is wishful thinking that veers into the delusional. However, such thinking may well lead to a kind of “peace”--the jihadi kind. That’s the “peace” that will be in place once Jewish sovereignty--the real sticking point--has finally been overcome.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:30 | link | comments

Hagiography makes for bad journalism: Kimberly Strassel says there’s a good reason why Eliot Spitzer’s fall comes as such a tremendous shock. It’s because the press, which could see certain, ahem, warning signs, couldn’t get past its adulation for this hyper-"virtuous" alpha dog, and thus failed to do its job. From the WSJ:

The fall of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer holds many lessons, and the press will surely be examining them in coming months. But don't expect the press corps to delve into the biggest lesson of all -- its own role as his enabler.

Journalists have spent the past two days asking how a man of Mr. Spitzer's stature would allow himself to get involved in a prostitution ring. The answer, in my mind, is clear. The former New York attorney general never believed normal rules applied to him, and his view was validated time and again by an adoring press. "You play hard, you play rough, and hopefully you don't get caught," said Mr. Spitzer two years ago. He never did get caught, because most reporters were his accomplices.

Journalism has many functions, but perhaps the most important is keeping tabs on public officials. That duty is even more vital concerning government positions that are subject to few other checks and balances. Chief among those is the prosecutor, who can use his awesome state power to punish, even destroy, private citizens.

Yet from the start, the press corps acted as an adjunct of Spitzer power, rather than a skeptic of it. Many journalists get into this business because they want to see wrongs righted. Mr. Spitzer portrayed himself as the moral avenger. He was the slayer of the big guy, the fat cat, the Wall Street titan -- all allegedly on behalf of the little guy. The press ate it up, and came back for more…

A cautionary tale for those now swooning and slavering over Bambi Obama, but one that you can be sure far too many will fail to take to heart.  

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:21 | link | comments

Pictures from Spitzer's bordello: Kind of like Paradise, except there's not a single virgin in sight.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:28 | link | comments

Feel the love?: Not so much.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:34 | link | comments (1)

Retroactively amusing: In light of recent events, this Spitzer for Governor ad is particularly tickling. ("Imagine what he'd do as Governor"? Bring "passion" back to New York? Tres tee hee.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:32 | link | comments (2)

Desperately seeking absolution: Eliot “Humperdink” sings:

Please forgive me, let me be.

For I’ve done something wrong, you see.

I paid for sex; enjoyed it then.

So forgive me and I won’t “sin” again.

 

I had found a call girl, dear.

Thought I had nothing to fear.

Her lips were new where yours were old.

Forgive me, my darling, please don’t scold.

 

Please forgive me, that’s the plan.

I’m only flesh and blood—a man.

My wife has got me by the nuts.

So forgive me though I am such a putz.

 

Update: And one from A Chorus Line:

Kiss my job goodbye,
And pack my stuff tomorrow.
What did me in is so complex.
And I will regret
What I did for sex,
What I did for sex.

Look, my eyes are dry.
But I feel lots of sorrow.
Let my pecker lead the way.
And it’s gonna vex--
What I did for sex,
What I did for sex.

Gone,
My career is gone.
Never travel on,
Get into the White House.

Kiss my job goodbye,
And pack my stuff tomorrow.
Hope that I don’t
Land
In jail.
Can’t forget
I’ll regret
What I did for sex.
What I did for sex..

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:48 | link | comments

Sell a kidney; kill a Jew: The last word in macabre, courtesy the Ayatollah’s barefoot boys with cheek. From Fox News:

TEHRAN —  Iranian students are offering rewards totaling a million dollars for the execution of three top Israeli military officers over the deadly strikes on Gaza, and encouraging fellow Iranians to donate their kidneys to raise the funds, the student news agency ISNA reported on Monday.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Mossad spy agency director Meir Dagan and military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin are the targets of the bounty and are blamed for last month's assassination of Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mughniyeh.

The rewards were announced by the Justice Seeking Students Group on Sunday at a ceremony in Tehran entitled "setting the bounty for the revolutionary execution of the designers of state terrorism," ISNA said.

The bounty for Defense Minister Barak is set at $400,000 while those for Dagan and Yadlin are $300,000 each, AFP reports. It is not clear where the funds will come from.

"These sums will be given to any person or their families who could punish these individuals in any part of the world," the organisers of the event announced.

Pictures taken at the ceremony showed a banner bearing pictures of the three Israelis against the backdrop of an Israeli flag, with rifle sights stencilled onto the foreheads of the trio, according to AFP.

"Israel must be wiped off the map," read a