UK Moslems use freedom against their own State
Thought you'd like this snippet of the Australian ABC TV failing to ask any pertinent questions after the recent arrests for plane bomb plotting:
I add my own suggested questions. This is not a direct transcript but the sense is accurate.
A UK Moslem spokesman via satellite made the usual self-serving defensive remarks that went right past the subservient dhimmi ABC interviewer on Friday night 11 August:
1.
The UK Moslem kids are VERY ANGRY because Moslems are being terrorised the world over, including in Lebanon and Iraq.
Unasked Qu: You mean the Sunnis terrorising Shi-ites in Iraq, and the Shi-ite Hezbollah taking over the Lebanese Government?
2.
Why does the West call it [bombing planes] terror and not address this other terror? Unasked Qu: So you implicitly want British Moslems to fight for Hezbollah with their own anti-West terror? Or you at least ‘understand’ them doing so?
3.
I talk to UK Moslems lads and say that they should try to influence the UK government through democratic means to change its polices, but I can’t get through to them because of the UK government they are so angry about.Unasked Qu: Do you urge them not to destroy the country that gave them all they have, or do you worry that they are going to become terrorists within it, and so do you work against this in your capacity?
4.
I can’t get through because you call what they plan terrorism, don’t change your policies, and I worry more that my people will be targeted with backlash.
Unstated ABC conclusion: So there we have it. A UK Moslem State within the UK State.
The Plot Against America and Israel
I haven't posted for some time, but now we are witnessing a new, unasked-for war in the Middle East involving Israel's survival and Hezbollah terrorism, the recent Spielberg fim Munich
seems already totally out of touch with reality. History is my witness. This is crossposted and slightly edited..The Plot Against America. Writing in the New York Observer, Rosenbaum reported the new Phillip Roth novel had “the makings of a thrilling, suspenseful and profound movie.” He suggested that Steven Spielberg make it.
Roth’s novel is a work of counter-history about America and World War II—an imagination of what might have happened, but did not, which thus sheds light on what actually did. In the novel, Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940 and becomes president at a pivotal moment in history, when only Britain was still fighting Hitler and Churchill’s resistance seemed doomed. Lindbergh seeks to keep America out of the war.
Roth appended to his novel the actual speech Lindbergh gave at an America First rally in Des Moines, Iowa on September 11, 1941. In that 9/11 speech, Lindbergh warned against three groups—the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration—whom he accused of leading America by subterfuge and lies into a foreign war for their own purposes, against American values:
“[T]he leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. . . . We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. . . . [N]o person of honesty and vision can look on [the Jews’] pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them.”
Lindbergh asserted the Roosevelt administration had used the war
“to add unlimited billions to a debt which was already the highest we have ever known,” to “justify the restriction of congressional power” and to assume “dictatorial procedures.” He complained that “no one has offered a feasible plan for victory.”
He ended his speech by concluding that it was
“not yet too late to retrieve and to maintain the independent American destiny that our forefathers established in this new world.”
It was not yet too late, in other words, to come home—as George McGovern, John Kerry, or the main character in Munich might have put it—to quit our participation in a morally compromised effort in the larger world, and to be America again.
As Rosenbaum noted, if America had followed Lindbergh’s advice, Hitler might have in fact created his Thousand Year Reich.
Spielberg of course did not make a movie of Roth’s novel. Instead he made a movie that connects Israel’s counter-terrorism to September 11, suggesting the current American war is counterproductive and morally compromised, the result of an administration and its neocon supporters (and we all know who they are) who refuse to come home.
The ultimate irony is that America’s most successful director—a liberal, a Jew—made a movie that Charles Lindbergh might have liked.
Poor Gitmo Reporting in Australia
Here is a letter I wrote to our local ABC [Government-funded] radio after hearing an extremely, but typically, biased account of the recent SCOTUS 5-3 ruling on Gitmo.
Australians are not being well-served about this
war issue.
Dear M&D [announcers],
I thought your female commentator on the Guantanamo Bay prisoners was pathetic; she even admitted that she knew nothing about the complex legal issues she was commenting on. It didn't make her give careful or balanced comments, though.
You let her get away with a description of the conditions there as 'appalling' or something. It's a prisoner of war camp after all, but still much better than Schappelle Corby [convicted drug courier] is enduring in Indonesia. I saw yesterday on TV one of the ex-Gitmo prisoners working hard in Afghanistan to kill Australians and US soldiers . Maybe you could mention that result of 'US justice' too?
This travesty was followed by the usual ABC News recourse
only to the single Australian Hick's Lawyer Moro and Hick's father as if a one-sided soap opera tale is all South Australians need to know or care about.
Just 10 minutes online would inform anyone properly. If you guys can't do better than I can, even with 'pro' commentators, why should I continue to listen to twisted and minimal ABC agitprop?
Sincerely etc
I added an informative article that might help to educate listeners on the effects of a rather radical and problematic [5-3, really 5-4] US Supreme Court ruling. The superficial anti-Bush, pro-Hicks bias of the ABC does not do any justice to this issue. The Court has wrongly assumed that terrorist guerrillas are simple 'Geneva PoWs', so the Congress will have to legislate a new regime.
No-one has been properly informed of this by the news reports here in Australia.
The 1930s Debate Revisited Worldwide
Today's political debate very is like the 1930s debate about 'peace' with Stalin, Hitler and Bushido. That's why it's scary. Add Mao, post-war.
In two cases world war really happened, but it crept up on the Anglosphere, who tried to think 'peace' because we are basically moderate Christians. We now cultivate the 'moderate Moslems', if we can.. This is no easier than countering anti-semitism and marxism.
The Germans And Russians were 'moderate Christians' too, but like most Moslems today, failed to organise to resist the hateful ideologies in their midst.
Today 20 million Moslems are within Europe, which changes the cultural and also the political equation. Their Islamists think like Hitler and Stalin, so
the West must force their Moslems to take sides by increasing social pressure. Our Moslems cannot hide by being blind chauvinists. We know they have their
own divisions, so they can add a
vital new one.
This is not racism but realism, protecting our Western values and systems. Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia are not Arab, but have the same problems.
The West suffered very costly world war and Cold War to save its civilised values -the same threat conditions exist post-communism now. Let's see how leftist China decides to take sides! So far it's not promising. They too love oil, but not the West, being chauvinist.
We either take tough smaller actions now, risking some civil rights to do so, or wait for the big explosions later.
Media 'suicides' Cooperate with PLO desires.
This is taken from the
Jerusalem Watchman site. It confirms my earlier post questioning why the false term 'suicide bomber' is widespread and accepted:
Banner headlines on the front pages of Israeli newspapers and news websites Thursday trumpeted the startling news that Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas had called “suicide” bombings “crimes against humanity.”
He did no such thing of course. But clearly the headline writer of the report in The Jerusalem Post (June 22, 2006) thought he and his liberal colleagues had been vindicated in their efforts to portray the veteran terrorist leader as a moderate.
But Abbas has not become more moderate, just more sly.
He has taken a page out of the book (Quran) of his fellow Muslims who, out of one side of their mouths (in English) say they condemn the killing of civilians, while out of the other side (in Arabic) they stress that no Jewish Israelis are civilians.
Because, don’t you know, that little Jewish toddler playing in the park in Hebron is a “settler,” and he is being readied from his earliest years to become a soldier.
Like Yasser Arafat before him, Abbas has learned that it’s not what you say that counts, but who you say it to.
It’s always been about matching the right words to the right audience.
So at a gathering of Nobel Peace Laureates in Petra, Jordan, Wednesday, when Shoah survivor Elie Wiesel challenged Abbas (who wrote a thesis denying the Holocaust!) to declare “suicide” attacks as crimes against humanity, Abbas easily obliged.
“First of all, as Muslims, it is a crime to commit suicide,” he said solemnly from inside his suit.
“Muslims believe that if you commit suicide you go to hell and that goes without saying for killing others.”
It was easy for him to say this, all wide-eyed and sincere. To Abbas, the Arab who boards an Israeli bus and detonates the bomb he is carrying, shredding and maiming Jews young and old, is not committing suicide and murder. No. He is laying down his life for Allah,
and exacting the judgment of Allah on unrepentant infidels.
You think I’m a skeptic? You bet I am. My eyes, and my ears, are open. Abbas has been word-smithing to fine hone his image ever since taking over from Arafat.
In February 2005, the newly elected chairman instructed Palestinian television
to stop referring to “suicide bombings” as “martyrdom operations” but instead use the more neutral “explosions.”
But Abbas himself, in crowing over the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip a few months later (the Arabs having successfully achieved that part of their goal), credited the Jews’ abandonment of a part of their ancient homeland to 'suicide bombers', among others.
“This step is only the first step that will be completed in the West Bank and in Jerusalem. But the step has come as a result of patience and sacrifices of our people, of martyrs, of wounded, of houses destroyed.
All of those have brought us the fruit we are celebrating today.”
To show who he includes among his
“martyrs,” Abbas approved a law earlier this year for lump sums in thousands of dollars to be paid to the surviving members of “shahids” including “suicide bombers.”
Mao, the Demon who gets away with it
I have been slow to post for a while. One of the reasons is a big book I have read, and I recommend to you. It's startling and important..
I have almost finished 'Mao -The Untold Story' by the author of 'Wild Swans' [1991] The first is a famous account of the long suffering of Jung Chang's family under Mao. I have been waiting for something like this since the 70s when Russia's Solzhenitsyn became well-known for exposing the Gulag.
I need to tell someone about it now, though I have always believed in its thesis since I heard CIM missionaries who experienced the early 1950s there! This 700+ page bio is very readable, but lacks close foot-notation, although I do not doubt the accuracy of its details because of the massive appendices and research of the authors. It is a much lighter read than Solzhenitsyn, but it serves a similar purpose - to expose the extraordinary murderous, nihilistic rule of Mao, as Solzhenitsyn did of Stalin's. It lacks detail of the Chinese Gulag -this still needs to be done. It is actually rhetorically understated , unlike Solzhenitsyn's much longer works. It is co-authored with her English husband Jon Halliday.
I had not realised the truly sadistic and medieval character of Mao [who ruled a quarter of humanity!], who declared himself as an egomaniac and an amoralist quite early on, despite his highbrow literary bent.
Almost every part of his character is disgraceful and demonic to an extent that not even Stalin really compares, except for their god-like personality cults. Far from 'modernising China, but by force', as most believe he did [compare the same thing, said of Stalin],
all his instincts were those of an ignorant and savage demagogue who merely used communism as a tool for his own irresponsible power.He was no patriot, which many believe, but an anti-Chinese vandal who actually preferred non-Chinese buildings and loved to destroy! He stole and bullied as much technology and arms as he could from everyone [even Stalin].
In all respects except for world influence, he held China back for three decades.
All his policies, internal and external, were either tragically stupid and disastrous, or designed to keep his enemies at bay and create a Superpower Military China hegemony. Starting in the early 1950s before any 'progress' had even started, he sought a grandiose equality with the USSR and the West! He was very shrewd and intelligent-cunning, but only in using power in the same way Stalin did. He out-Stalined Stalin. He created a servile Emperor's Court of almost all his early comrades, of whom Chou En-Lai was the most able and so the most culpable. [Someone recently wrote a semi-sympathetic bio of him. Chou must have been just as evil.]
Mao applied brainwashing -even the term itself to mean clearing out the former mind and destroying memory- to many millions in a way that even George Orwell would have been shocked by if he had lived, though he described it well.
He seems to have used Confucianism's respect for stratified obedience cynically for his own ends, just as Hitler used Prussian discipline, to murder millions without a conscience.
There is no evidence he believed in the socialist equality or fraternity that some other communists did. He cared nothing for peasants, and never did any real manual labour in his life.
He was remote, treacherous, indolent, crude and lascivious in his private life.
He killed more by famine in one year - 22 million in 1960 - than any leader in history. In all about 70 million perished under a man who early on knew all the evils of Stalin, but decided to repeat them with interest, and with an even greater ignorance of science or economics.
He scared the Russians by declaring that even 1 billion+ dead would be OK to win a hot war against the USA. He actually gloried in all the dead he 'needed'.and caused.He followed one terror campaign closely by another - just to cover the earlier one's disasters.
He knew the consequences of his imposed choices.
If you are tempted to think I exaggerate, I would only say that that proves the huge success of Chinese propaganda in influencing the Western academic and the public world of our life-time. I will never forget the brutish British Maoist academic who, in about 1969, said that Mao was 'creating a New Chinese Man' superior to the West.
Chinese history is STILL 'unknown' in the way Nazi Europe's and even Stalin's is not. The way leftists still excuse China and Mao is even a sign they may be racist, or just absurdly relativistic. They can hardly be ignorant today!
This man's reputation has been PROTECTED unlike any other, from deserved public vilification. Compare Hitler, and multiply by many. Even today Mao is still formally revered, and his main aim - to make China a world-dominating Superpower -is still the aim of his fascist socialist Party. I believe the Chinese leadership so easily shed communism because the insiders already knew Mao never really believed in its program. It was simply useful to him.
The current leaders' cynicism is total, and totally national-chauvinist, following Mao himself. They too are unable to admit that they had a Stalin-Hitler amongst them, so they maintain a national fiction about him in a way Japan and Germany cannot about their history. This make the Chinese leaders deeply reactionary people, but the West ignores this.
Their legacy is corruption, since idealism has always been rare in the system Mao created. He believed only in wielding a truly demonic power without responsibility, or any care for his people's lives.
Yet the West happily does business with China hoping to better the capitalist lot of the peasants and a middle class once Mao preyed upon and beggared.
China is still too big to isolate, or change in any basic way by policy other than trade. It is in most respects still pre-modern and undemocratic in any Western sense, largely thanks to Mao's baneful effects for 40+ years. Australia once sold iron ore to Fascist Japan -the left still condemn PM Menzies for an apparent 'lack of vision'. Today we do huge resource and trade deals with Chinese fascism, and pat ourselves on the back
as we go very quiet on the serious faults of China. We kowtow to bigness....The left academics are culpable of double standards because they have failed to expose Mao in a way they once failed to denounce Stalin. Hitler, however, is demonised. But heran a fascist system not unlike the continuing 'socialist-nationalist' state which China has inherited from Mao.
Europe does homage to a Marxist anti-Christian
"John Lennon’s Imagine was banned in the US after 9/11." This ridiculous claim was made by anti-war campaigner Cindy Sheehan in Australia this week, among many other wildly false claims this woman is now famous for. 'Imagine' is one of the most pernicious and diabolically clever songs ever written. Here's the proof:
A more anti-Christian, Marxist rant is hard to ‘imagine’. No religion, no Hell, no Heaven, so nothing to die for. Instead, Unite the World and all be one, join us for the Marxist Peace Paradise a la 1970.
Now those ideas, you would think,
are antique since 9/11, or even 1990, but guess what?
It was the
featured song at the Torino Winter Olympics 2006, where Yoko Ono was even the honoured guest, mumbling 'peace' repetitively and unmemorably in a thick English accent.
I don't recall either celebrity having the slightest connection with sport or even winter sport.
So this needed a contrived political motivation, and Italy found it.
So Europe and Olympic sports have been Ononised and de-Christianised too, officially.
God help us all.
Who was the personal Creator?: great philosophy
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/theism-origin.htmlWonderfully Complex Creation!I just refer readers to the author's site, William Lane Craig's, for a very lucid defence of the need to posit a Personal Creator of the known universe unravelled by recent cosmology. Very subtle reasoning, but not hard to follow.
He summarizes most of the important positions being argued by the greatest physicists and thinkers today, with his telling conclusions..
Can we trust the loyalty of Islamists?
From 'The Weekly Standard':
The nuclear program is just a part of Tehran's larger game. With Saddam gone, there is an opening for someone to wage the fight for the liberation of Jerusalem and hold high the burning banner of anti-Americanism. The fact that a Persian, Shiite state is doing the dirty work of mainstream Sunni Arabism is hugely discomforting to Arab regimes. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was only the most recent Sunni Arab ruler to vent
his grief in sectarian terms, when he told an Arab TV audience last month, "Most of the Shias are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in."Here's proof that the West will have very serious problems integrating Islam into Christian-based societies. Even within the supposedly Islam-friendly Islamic states there is a deep sectarianism that maintains strong cross-border tensions and allegiances. Pan-Arabism as a secular progressive movement is all but dead [except that Turkey and Indonesia still maintain non-Arab forms of secularism], though the US in Iraq would like to revive it there and spread it in the Middle East.
It is unrealistic to think that Sunni-loyal and Shi'ite-loyal minorities in Western countries will lose their deep religious allegiances
and the political loyalties behind them, if they do not do so even in their historical homelands.
Multiculturalism is at its weakest when religion is involved. Even Northern Ireland proves this point abundantly.
Last night in Melbourne, a very large Greek immigrant city where long-time Australian Greeks have been very well-integrated, there was a large group of fans loyal to the Greek team that played the World Cup-bound Socceroos. One commented 'it was an ambiguous night for a lot of us who did not know who to a support'.
That's fine, and quite innocent. No-one doubts that this form of multiculturalism works.
Would a large group of second or third generation Australian-Arab Islamists hold such an innocent loyalty to two countries in this way? The evidence says that they would not.
Sins of the Hippies are Visited on their Older Selves
I have tried to make this point before. The cultural vandals of the 1968-1975 period in the West are now its leaders, and they can't understand why others want to do the same to their aggressively secular and morally empty culture.
The following is extracted from
The Brussells Journal:""Things will never be the same, however. The fact the European Union is giving exorbitant sums of money to buy the peace of France’s Muslim population betrays that they are uncomfortable about the unrest spreading to other European cities. Not only in France but all over Europe, tensions in society are rising. Though issues of unemployment and inequality in the French suburbs may have contributed to the recent explosion of arson and aggression, they are not the only cause.
The riots are not just a response to social injustice.
One striking aspect of the riots was the hatred reflected in the faces and demeanour of the rioters.
It is time to ask where this hatred comes from. Is this Islam waging Jihad? Is it social breakdown caused by welfare dependency? Or are the
young Muslims filled with contempt for the secular Western culture of intolerance and indecency, a hedonist society that does not believe in God, that no longer procreates and merely consumes to the detriment of its own future generations – a civilization which discusses gay marriage and adoption while its girls and women dress as whores and are displayed as such on the pictures and in the songs that fill the streets and shops of European cities?
Though Islamic fundamentalism and the stifling French social welfare system are partly to blame, I suspect that many immigrants hate the West not because they see it as an enemy – that may be true of the United States – but because they despise it – especially liberal, secular Western Europe. They are filled with hatred for the arrogance of the Europeans, who regard themselves as enlightened and tolerant, but
in their sense of infinite superiority fail to see that they are merely imposing their own culture upon others.Interestingly, the latter is exactly what the liberal mainstream in Europe accused traditional Western society of doing in the 1960s. The “youths” of the 60s broke loose from the perceived imperialism and intolerance of conservative morality in a largely Christian society during a spate of unrest and protests on university campuses, culminating in the symbolic month of May 1968, when marxist students rioted and burned cars in the streets of Paris. Today, the culture of this so-called post-modern “Generation '68” is the dominant one.
Through their almost totalitarian control of politics and education, the revolutionaries of '68 have reshaped European society into a secular and anti-religious one. That is the kind of society which their leaders, who dominate politics and the media today, like to describe as “enlightened” and “tolerant.” But they cannot comprehend that a new generation with a different culture is doing exactly the same as they did in their youth: rebelling against the arrogance of a dominant culture in a wave of large-scale vandalism.
Those same cultural leaders, who still think of their own behaviour almost four decades ago as heroic and justified, find it hard to condemn the rioting “youths” of today. They are now condoning those who hate and despise them, because in their own secular “jihad” against the last remnants of the conservative Christian culture of Old Europe, they think that the Muslim immigrant “youths” are their allies. Hence, they fail to see their own mortal enemy. Conservative Christians and others who do not worship secular “multiculturalism” are branded as intolerant, racist xenophobes and laws are made to silence them. In doing so, however, the liberal establishment is feeding the beast that will eventually destroy it.
Perhaps the secularists think that it will be as easy for them to destroy Islam as it was to destroy Christianity. ""
I would only add to this analysis that the 'white youth rebellion' of the 60s and 70s was a false and ignorant one, framed by half-digested Marxism and existentialism. The Black rioters in the US were not rioting
against whites, as much as protesting for the right to
become like them, which many now have.
In comparison, the Moslem youths of Europe are
quite ignorant of the causes of huge corruption, hypocrisy and stagnation in the countries of their ancestors because they are being force-fed Jihadism and its unreal fanaticism, as if it is justified criticism of Western culture
as a whole.
Sadly, it is likely their elders,
who are themselves ambivalent about the West though they fled to it, may not be able to withstand the radicalisation of their children, as much as many of them probably want to. This is because the money and energy is not to be found in their own institutions, or in their moderate mosques.
World Muslim-Christian Conflict Areas
Though not all of these are
recent conflicts, the sheer number tends to support the Huntington thesis that there is a 'conflict of civilisations' going on. I recommend Samuel P. Huntington's new book
Who Are We? [2004] which examines astutely the US national identity,
and challenges to it. He strongly emphasises the Protestant influence in USA's history and culture.Here's my incomplete list of current or simmering, religious-influenced conflicts:
Israel and the PA [includes Christians in Israel and PA territories]
Lebanon, and suppressed minority Christians in many Moslem Middle East areas.
Kosovo and Serbia
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Chechnya and Russia
Georgia [parts]
Azerbijan and ethnic Armenians [a very ancient Christian cemetery was recently completely destroyed there, to erase the presence of centuries of revered Christian history].
Sudan, Darfur in the north, and in the south.
Nigeria
Ethiopia
Sulewesi, Ambon and West Papua, all parts of Indonesia with a strong Christian missionary influence
Southern Philippines
Historical, but not to be overlooked: The Christian Armenian Genocide, carried out in WWI by Turkey.
These are areas of Muslim and non-Christian conflict:India and Pakistan
Thailand [southern area, bordering Malaysia]
Kashmir
Some provinces of China [one area where Muslims are definitely being repressed.]
It can be seen that the 'rim' of Islamic civilisation is not at peace in many areas today, particularly where it meets or mixes with Christians.How much blame should be apportioned to 'aggressive Christians' in all these regions?
We are Funding our Enemies' Propaganda
One of the dangers of foreign funds, even state tax funds, supporting education and chairs in the US, Britain and Australia, is that some of it is turned to anti-democratic, Jihadist ends.
The recent case below, where a US professor has finally confessed to financing Jihad, is a case in point, because it became a cause celebre in the US leftist MSM and with civil liberties groups,
who now have egg on their faces because of their false, biased campaigning for him. [Will they now apologise? Read the comments too.] It simply proves that cases like this are real, not 'persecution'.
It is too easy to claim that democracy can always defend itself simply by being libertarian,
but that is never true in a war environment, which this case proves the West really is in.
In Australia and Britain the anti-war left [there is no Australian anti-war right] are intent on arguing that there is no 'real' war on terror, it's all a beat-up by the Right to impose their power
and take away liberty, like Hitler did.. I have seen evangelical Christians argue this view, as pacifists.
The other news link is to Britain, but we have similar public legal issues in Australia.
If anti-democratic foreigners can buy our academics, imams and other operators, to spread pro-terror lies systematically among us and collect funds for terror, how can we defend ourselves?
The classic case is in the PA territories now, where there is now so-called democracy, but no balance at all exists in their poisonous media, where the Palestinians are force-fed with outside money and ideas for decades.
Yet the MSM stupidly overlooks this frighteningly obvious fact in assessing both sides.
The US, pleading civic virtue and freedom, used to turn a blind eye to the IRA collecting funds in places like New York for a long time - by fools and worse, enamoured of the old 'Republican, anti-British, independence' tags.
Now it has to learn to deal effectively with its own fifth column again, a religious one this time - in fact, we all do.
My hunch is that the Jihad will 'go quiet' on Europe as long as it seems to be getting political results [as in Italy now]. The demographics strongly favour a much stronger Islamic voice there in a decade or two, even if they do nothing much.
France is leading the way to appeasement again! They can even get results cheaply with scare campaigns like the cartoons!
The US is different because it has a much smaller Islamic population plus a really committed Christian and Jewish minority ...so far......
So too Australia.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2142403_1,00.htmlhttp://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/011107.php#more
Western media do not care about balance or freedoms
Many in the MSM seem not to care about presenting stories fairly and without biases, despite making big claims for
their profession's importance and status in a free society. Many have lost credibility in recent years when they have been caught out in this way, but it continues. See below.
Perhaps the most typical bias is in
unfair reporting of the Middle East, especially of Israel and their many enemies. Syrian occupation dominated and subverted Lebanese politics for two decades, but the MSM reported
very little on that intrusion, preferring to condemn Israel for its
partial occupation of this area in order to protect its borders from direct attacks.
Little is reported from the PA areas on the insidious failure of a free press there, or in Arab countries generally. Al Jazeera is presented as somehow 'liberal', yet it is banned in Iraq for its obvious anti-American bias.
The two PA
Intifadas were widely represented as 'spontaneous' and 'understandable' protests, instead of condemning the cause,
a virulent antisemitic press that dominates these people, and now produces martyr bombers backed by an elected terrorist government.
In fact, M-E Western journalists show every sign of
warping their reports to ensure they do not
offend the anti-Israel groups they report on there.
The same tailoring of reports is found in
China journalism increasingly, where the commonality is also
a complete absence of a free press.
A gross example is the local Adelaide [SA] paper reporting on the female 'reporter' who gate-crashed the address of the visiting Chinese leader in the presence of George Bush. She was protesting the lack of freedom of religion in China and said, before being 'dragged away' :
'Pres. Bush, stop him from killing', and, addressing President Hu: 'Your time is over. Evil people will die early.' Later reports said she faces jail for this harmless act.
This symbolic act was in a context of peaceful 'anti-Chinese demonstrations in almost every large American city', yet the report, from Britain's Daily Mail, said nothing about the importance of freedom in the West this illustrates.Instead, as 'comment', it reported a former Defence 'Asia adviser' as saying 'Security's failure to control the situation
[it did in fact] would only increase China's suspicion of the US.'
So this only has relevance for defence relations with China, and public control???What a travesty of support for basic Western freedoms, especially as this is about a Falun Gong
protestor against horrific religious suppression -'banned and brutally crushed' in the report's own words.
Needless to add, the Chinese filming of this event was immediately
blacked out, and no reference in China was made to the incident 'as if it had never happened'.
Recently the MSM was recalling the similar failure of the Soviet press to report properly to the people on Chernobyl. Yet China gets an armchair ride here and now.
The final journalistic absurdity is in the headline above this piece:
Lone Chinese Protestor Humiliates Bush.
Martyr bombings are not Suicides
Tim Blair on his blog lists recent terror bombings that violate the Palestinians' own commitments:
Attacks on Israel and the West Bank since the February 2005
truce declaration:
• April 17, 2006: A bomber blows himself up at a Tel Aviv restaurant targeted previously, killing eight other people.
• March 30, 2006: A bomber disguised as a Jewish hitchhiker blows himself up in a car outside a West Bank settlement, killing four Israelis who stopped to pick him up. The Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a violent offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party, claims responsibility.
• Jan. 19, 2006: A bomber disguised as a peddler blows himself up at a Tel Aviv felafel restaurant, wounding 20 people.
• Dec. 29, 2005: A bomber explodes at an Israeli army checkpoint in the West Bank, killing an Israeli soldier and two Palestinians.
• Dec. 5, 2005: A bomber blows himself up at a shopping mall in the coastal town of Netanya, killing five.
• Oct. 26, 2005: A bomber blows himself up in Hadera at a food stand, killing five.
• Aug. 28, 2005: A bomber blows himself up in the southern city of Beersheba, killing only himself.
• July 12, 2005: A bomber blows himself up outside a shopping mall in Netanya, killing five.
• Feb. 25, 2005: In the first attack after a truce is declared, a bomber blows himself up near a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing four.
I have one just problem with Tim's quotes.
The word 'terrorist' does not appear. It must always precede 'bombing', 'bomber' or 'attack' to describe these fairly.
I have a point to praise too.
Note that Tim does not use the inaccurate but common term 'suicide' at all. Those involved don't either, since they know these are quite different.
Let's use their own term, and place the evil squarely where it lies. These are all 'MARTYR bombings'.The term 'suicide' to a Western ear always involves some level of sympathy.
It is barbaric in my view to imply any sympathy in these very evil, religious-inspired acts.
Art Elites advance the Barbarians' Assault
I have never done a course in art history to match my education in literature. So to my shame I did not even consciously know of
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, just one significant French classicist who is now being given an airing in the Louvre. Those that know say, that while not great, he had a 'jaw-dropping outpouring' of drawings alone over some 70 years. He was an obstinate and proud man [as a self-portrait shows well], and strangely, he did not value his many fine and profitable portraits as much as others do now. Even in the early 1800s era he was a stern classicist, but he also did many striking romantic, historical and religious themes. He was eclectic and prolific, commanding all the astonishing traditional skills of his art. He lived in Rome for 18 years,
absorbing and reinterpreting all the classicism it had to offer.
I choose him as just one example of a great artistic achiever which our 'enlightened' age hardly knows or cares about. In literature greats like Shakespeare, Austen, Trollope and Dickens can survive in the public mind in TV and film versions, but in art
the stern doorkeepers of modernism have banished to obscurity centuries of huge achievement, so that no-one benefits
even from an education in them. I am not asking for world student tours of art museums, only for
the serious passing on of a serious art history tradition in the same sense as Harold Bloom's Great Tradition of literature. Both are in eclipse. The reason is the
usurpation of education by the intellectually barren, anti-cultural marxist left, as can be seen in the terms used quite unselfconsciously below.
Here's what a art contrarian [so on my side] Sebastian Smee thinks of the present treatment of great achievers like Ingres:
""For those embroiled in the polarised politics of art, looking at Ingres can feel like
a guilty pleasure. The problem, most obvioulsy, is that
he is seen as reactionary ... although painting itself is still alive, and even undergoing a resurgence, the 'culture of painting', of connoisseurship and academic training and all the things that mattered to Ingres, is dead.
...In the art schools painting is associated with elitism, with silly money, with comfort and repose and backwardness, all of which one can presumably sidestep by taking up
video art... [A very fashionable US 'kitsch' artist John Currin recently said]: "Museums have come to favour forms such as video art as
....'good for the public' or as 'educational'.
Painting itself is not a progressive form.... it has too big a history to be use in this way. "" Currin himself describes this elite as made up of 'left intellectuals'.. 'the clergy who control who feels ashamed and who doesn't. They are the big shamers...".
This is an example of cultural insanity. Art has for a century now been in the vanguard of the march of the barbarians over everything worthwhile before it. This is like the Romans, say of 300 AD, saying to each other
"We know we have more than 600 years of great artistic and cultural achievement to pass on to our young, but it's just too big to be done, so let's ignore it all and promote unconstructive, effortless trivia and profitable dross." And they proceeded to do just that...
This is exactly the feeling I had when I walked [quickly] through the cavernous halls of the New Tate, in an old power station on the banks of the Thames.
Not a single 'installation' of modern art captured my eye or my memory in all that space. I also saw little enthusiasm among the other wanderers, mostly
the young, who in Milton's famous words 'look up and are not fed'. It was all free to look at, but it also gave nothing of real value back. People sauntered into the 'interpretation areas' for mental sustinence, where pompous statements were made about
usually political ideas behind 'art' works that said nothing at all to the eye. Here was an empty hall celebrating great intellectual and moral emptiness, in direct comparison with the Old Tate nearby.
In education we are in the process of denying our young not only the enormous skill, feeling and intellectual education of an Ingres, but doing the same with the history and literature of our great Western civilisation.
I was struck by the fact that Ingres, a relatively minor figure, has so much depth and value to communicate easily to anyone properly introduced to him - in my case by a news magazine article. It only takes dedicated teachers, properly trained themselves.
We deserve the barbarians' overthrow as much as the Romans did, because we actually favour their mental vacuity within the halls commanded by our cultural elites.
The World ignores Zimbabwe
Did you know that some 3 million Zimbabweans, not all whites by far, have left their country of now some 11 million recently? That some 600,000 poor were ruthlessly driven out of their town dwellings suddenly into barren countryside, in a program very
reminiscent of Year Zero in Kampuchea.
Did you know they now have
a life expectancy in the low 30s, one of the worst in the world, only partly the result of AIDS?
In Zimbabwe today, out of a population of 11 million:
· 25% of adults and children are HIV-infected, including 56,000 children under 15 years of age.
· In the last year alone, 160,000 people died from AIDS.
· More than 600,000 children living there today have lost their mother or both parents due to AIDS.
Much of this catastrophe could have been easily prevented by sensible, progressive government which the colonial British left their colony with a generation ago.
Did you know that the world community is just as effectively
prevented from helping as it is in changing the lives of Cubans, because their decades-old
dictator Robert Mugabe has many of the same policies and advantages as Castro [of about the same age].
Just as with Castro in his American setting, there is no African nation capable or willing to promote or achieve regime change. Both are equally repressive, running their country on fear and ideology, but Mugabe is perhaps the less rational. He has reduced his country to bankruptcy quickly by deliberate socialist 'redistribution', so that there is constant near famine in a land that was called the 'Breadbasket of Africa'.
Rampant inflation makes the poor citizens' lives a misery, after a post-colonial period when the country was arguably the most successful in Africa. meanwhile
the MSM, the EU and the UN agonize about the morality of 'regime change' of applying pressure to remove any regime even in the face of near genocide. The US is even branded a moral failure for putting Saddam out of power after decades of mayhem in his country.
Western and other critical journalists can only enter the country under disguise, but enough do so to tell us all the real situation. One, the white Zimbabwean author of a new book
House of Stone, says that the people do not resent Westerners
. She has found the people very friendly, despite Mugabe's marxist propaganda. They know it is not 'white capitalism' that has ruined them all.The United Nations achieves nothing substantial here, just as it could not improve or change the Iraqi regime by all its slow policies. Moreover, its ineffective attention is fixed on the north in Chad and Sudan, or Liberia, or Eritrea, Ethiopia, or Uganda, or, or, or....The world press is easily distracted by bigger issues and natural disasters, forgetting
the human-forged disaster that is Zimbabwe, yet another total failure for a marxist dictator. As for awareness in Australia, where there were once large protests and punitive polices against racist South Africa, there is just polite unease as we welcome many mostly white expatriates here as migrant-refugees.
We banned sporting contests with South Africa for two decades, but the Australian cricket team
still plays Zimbabwe, where their white cricketers [the best they have] have recently been banished from the national scene for their colour. Just
one of our best players, Stuart McGill, has twice now declared that he will not tour that country, which is to his cost as an outstanding player. He has no supporting colleagues.
What a strange absence of protest and action against vicious marxist oppression by our so-called enlightened people and press.
Calling Terror Terror
Oliver Kamm is a moderate and careful online commentator. Here is a part of what he says about the misunderstanding of what terrorism really is in the media, and when the term should be used:
"" The democratic state uses violence, and terrorists use violence; but these acts are not alike.
No one has perceived the essential moral difference more clearly than the historian Conor Cruise O'Brien, who as a Labour member of the Irish government in the 1970s argued cogently (and at great personal risk) against Republican terrorism and its sympathisers. In a lecture on Granada Television in 1976 (reproduced in his book
Herod: Reflections on Political Violence 1978, pp. 77-8) he said:
Institutionalized violence is a necessary part of every organized state, since without its availability any state would disintegrate. But
those who make most use of the term tend to ignore the fact that the institutionalization of violence within a democratic system is the most responsible way available to us for containing violence.
Democratic institutions can be altered by non-violent means; the use of violence by the democratic state is subject to scrutiny and criticism, and abuses can be punished and corrected. None of this works perfectly, but it works to some extent, and
no such restrictions at all apply to other uses of violence, whether by non-democratic states or by terrorist organizations. If the violence used by the young men who bombed London's trains and buses last July is classified as
"primarily an extreme form of demonstration", it elides the most important aspect of this issue.
""Indeed, a British professor did use that absurd phrase recently.Despite O'Brien's rational and enlightened view, the media are regularly glossing over whether even Jihadists are
really terrorists. If Iraq is 'occupied' by a foreign army, supposedly anything goes in using violence to stop that. "Look at France in WWII", they cry, ignoring all the vital distinctions. Iraq has had several democratic elections, and the foreign military are now there at the express wish of those elected.
Moreover, the
terrorism in Iraq is not aimed only at this military, but indiscriminately at all kinds of citizens. There is also
sectarian terrorism there between Sunni and Shi'ite, which is partly carry-over terror revenge issuing from the horrible treatment various groups suffered under Saddam Hussein; but it is also
a terror tactic to try to foment a civil war.
None of this is comparable to the Resistance in France.
Another bad example of avoiding the word terror when it fully applies, is the recent use of a weaselly circumlocution
to avoid calling Hamas terrorists, presumably because an elected party cannot be so called despite their recent history. [Following the ambiguity always allowed to the terrorist Arafat's PLO]
The sort of phrase used instead of 'Hamas' terrorism' is
'employing means that are not supported by Western ideals or aims'. This is like saying that Hitler stopped terrorizing Jews and others when he was appointed leader of Germany.Good grief. Moral blindness and relativism rules!
BBC report Says Babies don't feel pain
Biased BBC
http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/ nails the pro-abortion style of the BBC.
The BBC prefers the term anti-abortion to pro-life, but ALSO pro-choice to pro-abortion!
It publicises a view that is supported by the radical Princeton philosopher Peter Singer [an Australian] that small babies are not truly human until some months after birth because their brains are not developed enough.
Both arguments - now a new one that these babies cannot feel pain - posit a category of human being that is disposable at the will of other human beings. Note that the spokesman is merely a 'psychologist':
Here's the transcript (note Humphrys' self-correction of 'baby' to 'foetus', so
characteristic of the BBC):
John Humphrys : "Right - so your contention is that the baby - er, the foetus, cannot feel pain until ... ?"
Dr Stuart Derbyshire, psychologist : "Until it's had an opportunity to undergo some sort of learning process - until it's had an opportunity to undergo a process whereby pointing and showing occurs"
Humphrys (interrupting) - "But that would suggest it's weeks - possibly months - after birth - and surely that's nonsense, isn't it ?"
Derbyshire : "It possibly is weeks, possibly months - I mean it's very difficult of course to ever draw a line as to precisely when it happens - but I do think we can draw a line and say that it is vitally dependent upon a process that's going to take place outside of the womb. Pain - in the same way - all experience is in a sense social - it's dependent on other people, and that doesn't occur until the point of birth."
Humphrys : "Dr Derbyshire, many thanks"
Dr Derbyshire was propounding an identical theory in the magazine
Living Marxism ten years ago. Why is the BBC suddenly
publicising him ?
BBC report Says Babies don't feel pain
Biased BBC http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/ nails the pro-abortion style of the BBC.
The BBC prefers the term
anti-abortion to pro-life, but
also prefers
pro-choice to pro-abortion! So even in its choivce of terms it is biased, not evenhanded.
In making these choices, it publicises the view that is supported by the radical Princeton philosopher Peter Singer [an Australian] that small babies are not truly human until some months after birth because their brains are not developed enough. Singer believes that parents should have the right to kill [
pro-choice!] their newborn babies 'for a limited time'.
Both arguments - now a new one that these babies cannot feel pain because their brains supposedly haven't developed sufficiently- clearly propose making
a category of human beings that is disposable at the will of other human beings.
There was a time not so long ago when that was called advocating slavery, or at least racism.
Attacking Christian Heritage in State schools
What Kevin Donnelly writes in
The Australian on Easter Monday says much about the insidious problems of
Australian state education, which is increasingly losing students to the faith-based education sector. But this fact does not alter at all the agenda of the crusading secular educational elite:
"One hopes that the editors of Jacaranda Press's Year 7 and 8 textbook SOSE Alive 2 will study the Harmony and Understanding material [a study of tolerance objectives], because they are in urgent need of guidance about what constitutes religious intolerance.
In its teachings about medieval life, the Jacaranda book presents the Catholic Church in a negative light, portraying its teachings as based on fear and its monks as indolent and selfish.
As if that's not bad enough, the accompanying CD vilifies icons central to the church's faith.
One of the scenes shows a medieval village where a heretic is about to be burned. Close by is a religious figure holding a cross incorporating the figure of Jesus;
after clicking on the cross it changes into what appears to be a witch's broom. Whether intended or not, the implication is that Catholicism equates with witchcraft and superstition.
In the same scene, several religious figures are shown looking at the figure tied to the stake. On clicking on the head-piece of what appears to be a senior member of the church, it changes into a dunce's cap.
That students are expected to see the church as the villain is confirmed
when they click on the word "heretic" inscribed above the victim's head. It changes to "heroine" and there is no doubt where the allegiance lies of those responsible for the material.
The most unsettling thing about the Jacaranda book's treatment of Christianity is that it illustrates, once again, how
left-wing thought police have succeeded in their long march through the education system. Forget Woodstock, Vietnam moratoriums and flower power; the cultural revolution of the '70s and '80s was also about the way
education was identified as a critical instrument to overturn the status quo. "
A Good Atheist goes to a Good church
John Ray is a brilliant Aussie atheist blogger, with whom I often agree. You may see why when you read that he attends church with his wife, and shares a love of singing hymns. I think he'd make a fine Christian, don't you? I enjoyed his recent description a lot.
Pray for him. I wonder how John's clever mind filters out the meanings, just to leave the music and the feeling?
He has intellectual hangups that prevent him believing, as you can see if you follow all his prolific blogsites.
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/For my part I attended with a Catholic friend a Saturday night Catholic church service, a candlelight Easter vigil, one of the very few times I have done that, though once I was in Notre Dame in Paris, at an Easter service with choir singing that was moving .
GOOD FRIDAY
Anne was determined that we were going to go to a church service on Good Friday. Unfortunately, I had had a rather sleepless night the night before so I woke up a bit after 8am. But when I did,
there was Anne hovering over me all dressed up for an outing -- complete with red sandals. So I knew it was going to be a happening morning. Most churches have their Good Friday services at a rather unearthly hour from my point of view but somewhere deep in the ratlike recesses of my brain was a conviction that the Prebyterians would be more humane about such things.
So after a good face-washing, a hot-cross bun and a cup of tea we headed out in the direction of the Ann St Presbyterian church, which is for both of us our old church. I had hoped for a 9.30 am service but it was unfortunately a 9 am service so we were a few minutes late in arriving.
As we were walking from the car to the church however I sang the Doxology by myself -- so that got us started in proper form. I sang it in full voice so it is lucky the streets were fairly empty at that hour. Anne of course is used to my eccentricities.
We arrived about half way through the opening hymn, "There is a green hill far away", so I was a bit peeved at missing the whole of such a good hymn. Much to my surprise the old church was packed and we had to do that which all churchgoers avoid -- sit up the front. Sitting up the front meant however that I noticed a few things I had not noticed before. In particular, I was a little surprised to see a plaque beneath the pulpit bearing the legend: AMDG. I thought that to be a bit "Popish" for a Presbyterian church but I suppose Latin is the property of all humanity. It is of course an ancient ecclesiastical abbreviation for "Ad Majorem Gloriam Dei", or "To the Greater Glory of God".
The congregation was of course mostly elderly but it was pleasing to see some young people there too. There were even a few babies! And there was one lady wearing a rather impressive big black hat. It is amazing how hat-wearing seems to have gone out of style among women in congregations these days -- from Catholics to Jehovah's Witnesses. Very strange in the light of 1 Corinthians 11:13.
The minister, Archie McNicol, wore his academic gown throughout of course -- though supplemented by a large and attractive royal-blue stole. Wearing an academic gown is of course an expression of the traditional Scottish reverence for education. Mr. McNicol gave the expected long opening prayer in his delightful Edinburgh accent. There was rather a lot in it that I liked. His petition that people be saved from the "delusions of the Devil" certainly made it clear that we were not in an Anglican church. There is plenty of that sort of language in The Book of Common Prayer but it is not heard from any Anglican pulpits these days that I know of. Though perhaps you would hear it in the Sydney diocese.
Mr McNicol also very traditionally prayed for blessings on the Queen and the members of the Royal family and prayed also for divine guidance for the "authorities that rule over us" -- An allusion to Romans 13: 1, of course. Particularly pleasing however was that he prayed for members of the armed forces overseas who were fighting "for freedom and liberty" -- A genuine appreciation of reality that one expects from a conservative Christian. You will note that I refer to the minister as "Mr". That is the Presbyterian way. Presbyterianism is a very democratic form of Christianity -- with the congregation and its elders being supreme rather than the minister.
Being Easter, it was of course a Communion service and in the modern way all were invited to partake. But although I have much more appreciation of traditional Christian culture than most atheists do, I did not. I am not that much of a hypocrite. Nor did I join in the recitation of the Apostle's creed or the Lord's prayer.
I certainly joined in the hymns however, and our final hymn -- "Rugged Cross" -- was one of my favourites. Rather oddly, throughout the service, the organ was supplemented by a solo violinist and, instead of an organ voluntary at the close of the service, the violinist played "He was despised and rejected" from Handel's Messiah -- which was great to hear.
When we got home, Anne cooked us some smoked haddock for a late breakfast, which was at least very Scottish, though not, of course, to everyone's taste. We had it with toast, Rotkohl and pickled cucumbers.
Amo, Hamas, Amat. Don't you love their Logic?
The Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/ has a fascinating take on
how ignorant and twisted the anti-Israel Left and Hamas is about American Christians, so much so that you really have to worry. On the other hand, the US 'non-Christian' population seems still to favour Israel fairly strongly [45%] on these figures.
And so they should!
The Latest Zionist Conspiracy: Hamas explains why American Christians support Israel. by Mark D. Tooley
A PROMINENT HAMAS member of parliament has explained why most American Christians support Israel. The churches are run by "converted" Jews who are exploiting Christians for Zionist purposes. "Even the churches where the Americans pray are led by Jews who were converted to Christianity, but they were converted to keep controlling the Americans," Sheikh Mohammad Abu Tir explained on an American radio show on April 7.
A Gallup poll released on April 6 shows that religious Americans tend to be more pro-Israel. But Gallup, according to Abu Tir, did not understand the real reason for this. "I made a study and I know very well that all this radicalism in some parts of the Christianity, [including] the Anglicans who are being led by Bush, is because of the control of Zionists," said the orange-bearded Abu Tir.
Jewish control of the media is, of course, old hat. Jewish control of the churches, however, is a new twist. Thanks partly to the antics of Hamas officials such as Abu Tir,
Americans sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians by 59 percent to 15 percent, according to the latest Gallup poll. But 64 percent of regular churchgoers sympathize more with Israel, compared to 45 percent of Americans who never attend church.
How 'good' Christians will back Hamas
Meanwhile, the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) conference held at Georgetown University in March offered helpful advice on how pro-Palestinian activists can penetrate American church groups. A report from the American Jewish Congress provided an account of the PSM event. [On the Web]
Activists were encouraged to "look Christian," to "study Christian culture, understand it, so you can create Christian solidarity to then reach out to Palestinian solidarity," to dress conservatively, maintain proper grooming and a good social demeanor, and to "become the Ned Flanders (a Simpsons' character) of your church."
An Army of Self-hating Educated Elites in Australia
Australia is just as much infiltrated by the anti-traditional left pseudo-intellectuals as anywhere else, unfortunately.
What they have in common is hatred of their own culture.
Here are the musings of Andrew Bolt a fine journalist in Melbourne, with a fine blog too.
All he had to do to prove this point was to read the local leftist
Age newspaper over Easter!
This paper's gloom is matched by a similarly jaundiced one in Sydney, which cover together most of influential Australia.
No-one would suspect from these elites that Australia is close to the best place in the world to live. Now read why:
[After looking at the negative aspects of Europe's cultural cringing in the face of Islam]:But even we in Australia should now worry.
As I flicked with mounting alarm through that Saturday paper -- The Age, incidentally -- it seemed clear to me that we're in trouble, too.
Sure, I still trust in the good sense of most Australians, but it's clear we can no longer count on our cultural elite to defend our civilisation, if I may put it that grandly. Just flick with me through this one paper, and you'll see
how hard it is for many of them to make their country seem worth joining, loving and defending. Flick. Here already is an article by Guy Rundle, the former ABC producer and magazine editor, calling our flag a "piss poor" and "dismal bit of bunting" flown by a country created by a century of "slaughter".
Flick. Here's arts writer Raymond Gill, dismissing Advance Australia Fair as the "national jingle", sung in a way that "borders on the creepy Tomorrow Belongs to Me anthem from Cabaret.
Did that reference go over your head? He's referring to a song sung by a Nazi.
Flick. Here's columnist Traceeee Hutchison, fresh from being "smoked" in a "sacred" fire of Aboriginal protesters, insisting between coughs that there's a "national disquiet on sovereignty", as if many of us really doubt whose country this is.
Flick. Here's book reviewer Steven Carroll, urging us to consider whether "true democracy can only exist when institutions that justify the dominance of one group over any other -- such as prisons -- are abolished".
Damn. So Australia isn't a democracy, after all, but a prison camp. And who'd want to belong to that?
Flick. Here's now arts vulture Peter Craven, suggesting that Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America, a paranoid anti-American rant by Sydney playwright Stephen Sewell, is held by some as "the most sophisticated dramatisation of the new age of terrorism that has been done anywhere". Sigh.
Flick. Here is theatre director Neil Armfield, saying our society is doomed because "capitalism is based on a myth of unlimited resources" and "money has the ability to destroy every human bond".
Armfield (who must sadly work for nothing to preserve his human bonds) is now directing a play warning that our gas-belching society has us "dancing around in a kind of endgame". Hurry and see it before you choke. Or see it and choke -- I'm not sure.
Flick. Here, now, is a reviewer praising a film he says exposes "the racist underbelly of modern urban life".
Flick. Here is author Peter Carey, claiming the world's greatest democracy is led by a "coward" and "creep" in charge of a "criminal government", while our own Prime Minister is another of our usual "toadies".
[Carey, a prize winning Aussie author, actually lives in New York City, so he must know, of course. It must be terrible there.]He has a bit more, but he's made his point well hasn't he?
PC Principles exposed as Cowardly and Empty
Many Western MSM have defended their failure to reproduce or even describe the Danish cartoons [a set-up 'offence issue' peddled by a crusading imam] on the PC grounds of not offending a strong religious sensitivity. This is, of course, bogus. It exposes the extreme double standards of secularists who for decades have
cared nothing about respecting the religious sensibilities or the central beliefs of Christians and others.
When really challenged about upholding the liberal principle of 'publish or perish', the secular- worshipping MSM in the UK, USA and Australia decided
not to publish these cartoons and not risk perishing.Here's one example of their blatant double standard over the cartoons, and their feeble defence. Many MSM have put to air a
South Park episode that has a statue of Mary titled
Bloody Mary [itself an insulting reference] squirting menstrual blood into the face of Pope Benedict XVI. [Yeah, insult the world leader of the faith too!] This sparked Catholic outrage in New Zealand in February, and the pre-publicity even increased the SP audience six fold.
Forewarned, Australian Catholics prevented the episode from going to air on
national SBS as planned on March 6, but it was only held back in the light of the Mohammed cartoon controversy,
not on comparison with the 'protect Moslems' principle.
The sheer indifference to Christian sensitivity is obvious by the recent response from
SBS, the multicultural [!] national [!] government-funded [!] TV network.The Catholic archbishop who officially protested any screening of the episode on the grounds of extreme offence and sense of insult to his religious flock, has received the following letter from the Head of Programming:
"When SBS does broadcast the 'Bloody Mary' episode, it will be preceded by a viewer advice warning. I hope this warning provides viewers with enough information." [Published in T
he Southern Cross Catholic newspaper]
So the network says it is inviting non-Catholics and the irreligious to laugh at the Catholic religion's revered leaders being grossly portrayed and insulted.Other episodes of South Park have pointedly insulted Jesus Christ, mocking Christians and other religions, which seems to be the only justification for airing this one too.Note that this particular network has
an official mandate to respect and reflect the multicultural character of Australians like no other TV network. It used this aim to refuse to use on air any of the very moderate 'Mohammed cartoons'.The gross insensitivity and inconsistency of this 'liberal' network is typical of so many others. It is also known for airing salacious semi-porn 'art' films from Europe, and very violent Asian films that would not be used by any commercial network. Moreover,
South Park was hardly well-chosen by this station as a worthy reflection of US cultural life.
The German Weakness Revisited
The alarming point behind this alarming report is that no German leaders seem to fear their obedient citizens marching in the streets in objection to them, like they do in France.
Is this a true measure of the continuing immaturity of German democracy?From
http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/appeasing_dicta.htmlIranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
has called the Holocaust "a myth." He's called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." He's the head of one of the most repressive governments on earth. And, as far as most German authorities are concerned,
he's a welcome guest at this summer's
2006 FIFA World Cup.
German Interior Minister
Wolfgang Schaeuble (CDU) recently stated that Ahmadinejad is welcome at the World Cup because Germany wants to be "a good host." Schaeuble, who is considered conservative by German standards, said that
he would "talk to him about his statements" in the event of a visit and added that "it will not be entirely simple." Once again, German leaders are paying lip service to ideals that they have no intention of honoring. One day they pose as moral paragons of virtue, the next they are in bed
doing deals with the world's most repressive regimes. It doesn't matter if you're the leader of a brutal theocracy who has denied the Holocaust and called for the destruction of Israel.
Germany's special historic responsibility to the millions of murdered Jews and the state of Israel is apparently less important than being "good hosts" and rolling over to placate tyrants. What really matters is that the World Cup goes smoothly and serves German interests.
In a story on the potential Ahmadinejad visit, the
FAZ newspaper detailed all of the problems with Iran and its President but pointed out:
"On the other hand, German-Iranian trade is being promoted." Just another reason not to rock the boat! When in doubt, appease and call for more "dialog." If this is any indication of Germany's sincerity in negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program, the American "friends" ought to be quite concerned.
The only person who seems to have any sense in this is
Edmund Stoiber, Governor of Bavaria (CSU). Stoiber warned that Iran's President would be less than welcome for his "tirades against the Jewish state and contesting the Holocaust."
But even he wasn't willing to challenge the national government's right to allow Ahmadinejad into the country.
