TwentyFirst C Christianity

UK Moslems use freedom against their own State

2006-08-11T16:25:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-31T19:08:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-11T18:01:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-30T17:42:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-06-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-26T17:50:00.000-07:00

"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

2006-05-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/theism-origin.html

Wonderfully 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?

2006-05-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-24T17:24:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-24T02:14:00.000-07:00

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.html

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/011107.php#more

Western media do not care about balance or freedoms

2006-04-22T16:12:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-17T04:23:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-16T17:45:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-04-15T18:54:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-15T17:02:00.000-07:00

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 The 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

2006-04-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

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.html

Iranian 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.

Bushies are the more generous people

2006-04-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

John Ray’s Blog http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/ often comments on the lack of symmetry between leftists’ claims and their real actions, something which is rarely emphasised in the MSM, though it is one of the best documented and most powerful realities of world political history over the last century..

Ray writes about the Bush voters and non-Bush voters; the first are far more numerous in the less populated states, and by implication they are also more generous and less leftist.
The data graphs supporting this wouldn't translate here, but they are quite telling:

“What's surprising is that there seems to be an even stronger correlation against the "Generosity index", a measure of what percentage of income people reported as giving to charity on their tax returns (See here for the data). One would think that people who say they are for the common person would be more charitable.
In retrospect, the Leftists seem very ready to "give to the poor" as long as it's somebody else's money they are giving."

Eco-Doomslayers

2006-04-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

If you didn’t already know the worst [until next time], an ABC Aust Government radio spokeswoman for The Doomed Planet Ecology Society [DOPES] (I’m kidding.) warmed us all with the claim the other day that:
“Increased Global Warming will kill 25% of ALL the Earth’s species..”
(No kidding.)

This was her riposte in questioning the Government banning of a large wind farm in Victoria because it endangered a very rare species of bird, and risked some 16 other species too.

"Why worry only about a few severed species when the Sky is Falling?" was her essential argument.

An Evangelical Optional Resurrection

2006-04-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

Bishop N. T. [Tom] Wright is a very prominent evangelical Anglican scholar who is willing to sell cheap the most central doctrine of the Christian message. He would call this 'generous orthodoxy', but it in fact means a fundamental intellectual re-definition of what it means to BE Christian. In accord with the Postmodern Age, Wright professes to personally hold to and to defend a literal resurrection of Christ. Yet of what importance is this defence in practice?
As someone 'tolerant of difference' as this age likes to say, Wright shows in the following recent interview, how very fuzzy his defence of the doctrine really is. The objective secular reader is forgiven [to coin a phrase] for concluding from Tom Wright's own authoritative lips, that the literal resurrection is really an optional extra - Christianity is better defined by being a good bloke, by 'loving Jesus', or by believing in some sense in 'a resurrection'.

When Paul wrote to the Corinthians "If Christ has not been raised , your faith is worthless: you are still in your sins" and "If we only hoped in Christ in this life we are of all men to be pitied" [1Cor 15: 14ff] Paul must have mean a bit 'muddled' himself, as the Bishop might put it. Wright might also say that there was a 'variety of doctrines' in the early Church when Paul wrote, just two decades after the defining Resurrection itself.
So to the evidence:

Not all Christians believe in the resurrection of Jesus
reports religious affairs writer Jill Rowbotham [The Australian 13 April 2006]

JESUS "dies" every year on Good Friday but rises on Easter Sunday and church attendance is resurrected with him. More than 4.5 million Australians will make time for tomorrow's services of remembrance or Sunday's services of rejoicing. Some will do both.
Secular citizens should not assume such devotion is automatic. Some believers stay away, and some of those who go are not really believers, at least not in the bodily resurrection. The latter include some high-powered Christians.
Attesting to this is one of the Church of England's heaviest hitters, the Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, who was in Australia recently on a lecture tour. An eminent theologian, an expert on the historical and biblical Jesus and a staunch believer in the resurrection, he baulks at denouncing those who are not.
"I have friends who I am quite sure are Christians who do not believe in the bodily resurrection," he says carefully, citing another eminent scholar, American theologian Marcus Borg, co-author with Wright of The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions.

"But the view I take of them - and they know this - is that they are very, very muddled. They would probably return the compliment.
"Marcus Borg really does not believe Jesus Christ was bodily raised from the dead. But I know Marcus well: he loves Jesus and believes in him passionately. The philosophical and cultural world he has lived in has made it very, very difficult for him to believe in the bodily resurrection.

"I actually think that's a major problem and it affects most of whatever else he does, and I think that it means he has all sorts of flaws as a teacher, but I don't want to say he isn't a Christian.
"I do think, however, that churches that lose their grip on the bodily resurrection are in deep trouble and that for healthy Christian life individually and corporately, belief in the bodily resurrection is foundational."
On that basis, there is no problem in Australian churches: according to the most recent figures, compiled in 2002 by the Christian Research Association's Philip Hughes, a whopping 83 per cent of people who attend church monthly or more often believe in the bodily resurrection. Surprisingly, so do a fair number of the general population, 40 per cent or thereabouts. About 35 per cent were neutral or unsure and 26 per cent disagreed.

"A lot of liberal Christians would say resurrection is really about Jesus coming back to his followers in a new form and it was not a physical form," Hughes observes. "As far as a lot of people in the pews are concerned, I don't think that the exact form of the resurrection is critical. "While some people may consider that the resurrection was not an event that could have been recorded scientifically, I do not know any Christian who says the resurrection did not occur in some sense."

Wright understands even firm believers can jib at the notion that Jesus died and re-emerged into life, but says it is not a new problem: "It's not that modern Western culture makes it difficult to believe in the resurrection; it's always been difficult to - indeed, impossible - to believe in the resurrection. In the ancient world nobody believed it."

Wright has not been misinterpreted by this journalist. What she realises he is saying is that even key Christian leaders and thinkers can doubt the literal, historical truth of the central Resurrection claim because it has always been a difficult doctrine. It follows, for Wright, that saving faith in the Gospel message does not stand or fall on believing this.

Here's the crunch: in other words, it might be better not to insist on it in our teaching!
If it is 'impossible' to Wright, it must be because the testimony in the Gospels, and Scripture interpretation such as Paul's above, is pretty inconclusive to a good thinker! [What does that say about 83% of regular churchgoers?!]

This is the public view of a world-travelled, card-carrying evangelical expert. Note that Wright on the one hand insists the literal teaching is essential for a 'healthy' church, but he would not go farther than that: If it's just too hard for you to believe, he accepts you fully anyway, even as a Christian scholar and colleague!
Why not opt out on this one?

Old Europe is failing fast, with a poor prognosis

2006-04-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

What can replace Europe in the 21st C? When the leading middle-of-the-road national newspaper puts it on the line [created by Rupert Murdoch in 1962], people have to sit up and take notice. Europe is in rapid decline, and the most recent prognosis is poor. Who would have thought that this 2000 year-old Christian culture at the height of its social and cultural success, would have a pusillanimous and selfish population, not only failing to peer beyond its borders at the real world, but failing even to replace its own citizens... ??

But it is all true. At least Americans can say 'In God We Trust', the Europeans cannot even trust themselves to reproduce. 25 years ago I was impessed by the dynamic entrepreneurship of German industry, as it was presented in the trade and news magazines I saw on their well-used, efficient trains. They seemed to know then that looking outward was the key to their economic future; to my eyes they had a better internationalist vision than the USA then. A generation later, and their Generation X+ has sunk back into a complacency which only wants a future as coddled as their parents is by very generous government over-spending. But that way means only decline.

While Hitler dreamed of a Greater Reich for them, the German grandchildren have very small dreams that don't stray past secular European borders to comprehend the troublesome, burgeoning world beyond. For most of them The World is just a sort of theme park for their occasional backpacking. That it could actually threaten them at all sounds like an absurd American nightmare movie, or worse, a US political con....

Editorial in The Australian: April 13, 2006

The sick man is Europe

Events in France and Italy point to a dismal future.
CONTINENTAL Europe is at a crossroads. No, scratch that. Continental Europe was at a crossroads a few years ago. This week, it appears to have chosen its path. Taken together, the results of Italy's general election (which turfed out an economic reformer in favour of a former EU president) and the French Government's cave-in to rioters protesting against employment law reform suggest that the strongest forces in Europe today are those of appeasement, stasis and socialism. In Italy, voters were faced with a choice between media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who was swept into office five years ago promising to cure the country's economic troubles, and the centre-left Romano Prodi, whose campaign was tinged with anti-Americanism.

Certainly, Mr Berlusconi did not do himself any favours with his flamboyant campaign style. But the choice of Mr Prodi suggests Italy will turn its back on its alliance with the US and Mr Berlusconi's economic reforms. Italy's 24 per cent youth unemployment, anaemic growth (the lowest among industrialised nations) and broader malaise – demonstrated by a shrinking birth rate and armies of adults who live with their parents well into their 30s for lack of career-track jobs – will be major challenges for Mr Prodi's fragile nine-party coalition.

These poll results will also be interpreted by Islamic fundamentalists as further Western capitulation to the threat of terrorism – recall the Madrid train bombings in 2003, which caused Spain's then pro-US government to be ousted. Mr Berlusconi was a fierce defender of Western liberalism and the US who deployed troops to Iraq despite massive public opposition. Mr Prodi, on the other hand, famously responded to the Madrid bombings by saying: "It is clear using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists."

In France, meanwhile, riots in the heart of Paris have seen the Government abandon the most minor of economic reforms. Coming on the heels of last year's nationwide violence led by young Muslims from isolated urban ghettos, or banlieus, the latest round of protests was driven by middle-class whites opposed to a proposed law that would have encouraged employers to take on young workers by making it easier to sack poor performers. The mob won and the Government caved: Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin scrapped the plan on Tuesday. Bad as that result was, the violence is symptomatic of France's deeper problems. A recent survey of 15- to 30-year-olds indicated that 76 per cent of French youth dream of becoming fonctionnaires – 35-hour-a-week civil servants with virtually lifetime employment. The riots, in essence, were not for change (as they were last year) but for stasis. But this stasis, which seeks government insulation from any and all risk, is unsustainable. And in giving in to the mobs, France has sent a powerful and dangerous message that violence gets results.

None of this is good news for Europe. At a bare minimum, the past week's events suggest that this is a part of the world where no one is capable of facing reality. It also suggests a broader lack of cultural confidence. Europeans are not having children at replacement rates any more; birth rates are supported largely by Muslim immigrants. And that community's more radical members are increasingly flexing their political muscle in the face of a timorous host culture. An example is the fallout of the Danish cartoon controversy. In what was essentially a battle between theocratic and Enlightenment values, the theocrats largely won. Yes, there are some hopeful signs, such as Chancellor Andrea Merkel's reform-oriented leadership in Germany. But economic reforms can only go so far towards curing the deadening malaise at the heart of European society.

Extremist Greenie 'Science'

2006-04-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

The Green movement often does itself harm by adopting noisy projects based on bad science. The Founder of Greenpeace has long ago left them because of this behavior. He cited the attack on the use of chlorine, especially PVC products, an enormously useful valuable part of modern life.
Greenpeace call chlorine the element from Hell and want it removed from modern life! Their ex-Founder thought this ridiculous, but he was over-ruled because it was claimed a useful campaign for scaring people into contributing a lot of money to this essentially undemocratic organisation.
Another clear example of unscientific, extremist language:
Heard on ABC radio from a greenie rep. In reply to the recent banning of a proposed Australian wind farm because it endangered at least one very rare bird species, the spokeswoman replied: “Why are they worried about only ONE extinction [17 at-risk species were identified, actually], if we don’t stop GLOBAL WARMING, ONE QUARTER of the WORLD’s species will become extinct”.
Now that’s extremism at work! I wonder how she knows that?

French Muslim Youth prove their Violence is, maybe, Rational

2006-04-03T19:11:00.000-07:00

This, from UK Commentators blogspot, is probably not emphasised in the MSM, but it shows that French Moslem youth can see at least how the privileged marching French youth are the enemies of jobs, even if the French in general can't:

The attacks by the casseurs on French demonstrators are being covered by the BBC. They're just not being given the kind of prominence they would be if the attackers were natives and the victims not.During a recent protest "thugs hit the shop windows on their way up the avenue, and hit the demonstrators on their way down". Who are they? Ask any shopkeeper, and they will tell you that they are the same youths of immigrant origin who rioted across France's impoverished suburbs in November. This report manages to tell the truth and ignore it simultaneously. Can you imagine the BBC's coverage if the casseurs were white 'right-wingers' ?"
The festival atmosphere quickly darkened as a small group of troublemakers began to target trade union stewards trying to keep order on the march. Those youths smashed the windows of a cafe and soon took on the trade unions' security men in random brawls, as the peaceful protesters - young and old - continued on their route across the River Seine and on to Place de la Republique" "But once they reached their destination in the eastern city centre, most student demonstrators - and the workers who came out in support of them - quickly left as more youths descended on the square, with the sole aim of picking a fight with the riot police. These youngsters - aged between 15 and 25 - were wearing hooded tops that obscured their features. Many wore masks, so they could not be identified.""The irony is that the government's new job contracts were brought in hurriedly to help youngsters in France's troubled suburbs - where last November's rioting brought severe social and racial problems into sharp focus."An irony not lost on the great Dalrymple."Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the youth of the banlieues — who recently so amused the world for an entire fortnight with their arsonist antics — exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed.
For unless the French labour market is liberalised, they will never find employment and therefore integration into French society. You have only to speak to a few small businessmen or artisans in France — the petits bourgeois so vehemently despised by the snobbish intellectuals — to find out why this should be so. The French labour regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them.".

The Dangers of Anti-Hate legislation in the West

2006-04-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

Here is an extract from an excellent article in The Weekly Standard, where it can be read in full:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

....So genocide-denial laws can now be used to sanction professional historians whose research leads them to findings that these laws classify as unacceptable. And the anti-Nazi slope has proven more slippery than that. Denial laws have been supplemented by new laws that are even more prone to sanctioning reasonable people.

ESPECIALLY SINCE THE 1970s, Western Europeans have been passing bans on speech that "incites hatred" based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, and other criteria. These were adopted or beefed up in the 1980s in the face of rising violence against minorities and rising far-right parties like the French National Front. Such laws are now in place in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, France, Britain, and elsewhere. France's 1972 Holocaust denial law was expanded by the 1990 Gayssot law, which extended sanctions to denial of other crimes against humanity and points of view deemed racist. France's Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel monitors broadcasters for any statements that might incite racial hatred. Earlier British legislation against incitement of racial hatred was expanded in 1986 and was extended again in February 2006, this time to criminalize intentionally "stirring up hatred against persons on religious grounds." This is spreading to the European Union level, where a stream of rules now prohibits the broadcast, including online, of any program or ad that incites "hatred based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation" or--crucially--is "offensive to religious or political beliefs."
The highest-profile prosecutions under these laws have been of people and organizations very vulnerable to the charge of racism. Incitement charges have repeatedly been brought against the French National Front's Jean-Marie Le Pen, who regularly trades in slurs against blacks and Arabs. Similar charges were leveled against the Vlaams Blok, a Flemish nationalist party advocating the breakup of the bilingual Belgian state, which sometimes luridly stereotyped immigrants from the developing world as predisposed to criminality and welfare dependency. In November 2004, Belgium's highest court found the party guilty of racism, allowing the government to deny it state funding and access to television, in effect forcing the Blok to dissolve and re-form under a new name. At the time, the Blok was jockeying for first place in polls among Belgium's Flemish voters.
But the anti-incitement laws now regularly target people who are well within the political mainstream. This is political correctness backed up with prison time. Britain's then-home secretary Jack Straw remarked in 1999 on criminal activity by people many of whom posed as gypsies or "travelers"--hardly a slur on all gypsies even without that qualifier. But a Travelers' group filed a complaint of inciting racial hatred, prompting a formal investigation and extensive media coverage asking whether Straw was racist. In 2002, the prominent French novelist Michel Houellebecq was charged with inciting racial hatred in a novel and interview in which he referred to Islam as "the stupidest religion." Veteran Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was motivated by 9/11 to criticize Islam as violent and subversive of traditional European mores. As a result she faced a French attempt in 2002 to ban her book as racist, and she is scheduled to stand trial in Italy in June for statements "offensive to Islam." One of her accusers, in turn, faces charges for calling the Catholic Church a "criminal organization."
In May 2005, Le Monde, France's premier center-left newspaper, was found guilty of defaming Jews in a 2002 editorial that criticized Israeli policies while referring to Israel as "a nation of refugees." The appeals court found such juxtapositions made Israelis synonymous with Jews, so criticism of the former constituted incitement of hatred against the latter. After it published a series of controversial cartoons of Muhammad, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was formally investigated to determine whether the cartoons constituted prohibited racist or blasphemous speech.
This swirl of speech-law charges, lawsuits, and investigations is now sustained by an "antiracism" industry.

History as anti-West propaganda

2006-03-27T13:50:00.000-08:00

DhimmiWatch [below] has an example of the academic prostitution of history to promote a 'tolerant' Islam. It reminds me in reverse of the British-hating Australian historians, who created an industry of Aboriginal Holocaust/Frontier War mythology. They have finally been exposed as fraudulent soft marxists by real historians, but their influence continues, along with their tenure and their popular books posing as truth..

A miscellany of indictments of the current state of American education:
1) The alacrity with which Princeton University hired Cornel West as a university professor, and the delight expressed by the Provost and others in the Princeton administration at this great catch. [They also appointed the radical animal liberationist philosopher Australian Peter Singer].

Edward Said is a similar notorious example, who had a vogue way beyond his competence or his integrity as an academic.

2) The elevation of Maria Rosa Menocal, author of a book that purports to study the wonders of the "convivencia" in Islamic Spain, to the supreme authority on this subject.
Menocal’s book itself is sentimental nonsense, not only in form but content. It is a perfect compendium of all the twaddle that has been passed off as history about Andalucia. Her bibliography, incidentally, fails to mention any of the authoritative sources on the history of Muslim Spain -- in particular, it does not even list (much less give any sign of her having actually read) Evariste Levi-Provencal. Nor does it show any sign that she has read Dufourcq.
Instead, her notions of Spain are right out of the works of romantic fiction -- Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (tales indeed) and Chateaubriand's Le Dernier des Abencerages. What is fine for Chateaubriand is not fine for what is supposed to be an historical study. I mean, for god's sake, some of his best passages in the Memoires d'Outre-tombe are entirely fictional: see his sonorous sentences about his visit to "les champs de Lexington," where he never was. And that’s not all: there is also much more fantasy about il sospiro del Moro, the nobility of those Muslims, the wonderful way Maimonides was treated (why, then, did he flee Moorish Spain?), on and on.

The Islamic Principle of Killing Infidels

2006-03-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

The case of an Afghan convert to Christianity being threatened with death, despite being conveted in Germany, is a wake-up call to the West, who through Wodehousian upper class twits like Prince Charles [yes I am a monarchist, but make an exception for him] continue to miss the point.
While Charles castigates the West for its freedom of speech, a Christian in 'Free Afghanistan' faces death. So intent are the medieval mullahs on circumventing their courts if they find a way to let the traitor live [like calling him insane!], that one has said 'If you let him go free, the people will be told to tear him apart'.
The courts are acting on a veto attached to the Afghan constitution which says any law cannot oppose the principles of Islam. So now we know offically that Sharia law involves killing defectors from Islam, either officially or failing that, by mob vigilantes.

I add a few paragraphs by Mark Steyn, the perceptive Canadian international journalist:

This is what His Royal Highness [Prince Charles in Egypt] had to say to 800 Islamic "scholars":

"The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others. In my view, the true mark of a civilized society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers."

That's correct. But the reality is our society pays enormous respect to minorities -- President Bush holds a monthlong Ramadan-a-ding-dong at the White House every year; the immediate reaction to the slaughter of 9/11 by the president, the prince, the prime ministers of Britain, Canada and everywhere else was to visit a mosque to demonstrate their great respect for Islam. One party to this dispute is respectful to a fault: after all, to describe the violence perpetrated by Muslims over the Danish cartoons as the "recent ghastly strife" barely passes muster as effete Brit toff understatement.

Unfortunately, what's "precious and sacred" to Islam is its institutional contempt for others. In his book Islam And The West, Bernard Lewis writes, "The primary duty of the Muslim as set forth not once but many times in the Koran is 'to command good and forbid evil.' It is not enough to do good and refrain from evil as a personal choice. It is incumbent upon Muslims also to command and forbid."

Or as the shrewd Canadian columnist David Warren put it: "We take it for granted that it is wrong to kill someone for his religious beliefs. Whereas Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him." In that sense, those blood-curdling imams are right, and Karzai's attempts to finesse the issue are, sharia-wise, wrong.

I can understand why the president and the secretary of state would rather deal with this through back-channels, private assurances from their Afghan counterparts, etc. But the public rhetoric is critical, too. At some point we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies.

Is a Palestine Viable?

2006-03-26T14:51:00.000-08:00

I crosspost this article from Israpundit.com. It's good to read some straight talk from Israelis who are actually in the middle of the Middle East. I think Ted Belman makes a lot of sense, writing last December, before the demise of Sharon and the rise of Hamas..

“Palestine” will never come into existence
By Ted Belman
One would think the opposite is true, what with the Roadmap endorsing it and all members of the Quartet supporting it even to the point of giving a pass to Arab violence, the end of which is supposed to be a pre-condition to its establishment.
The US is backing the Plan because it wants to curry favour with the EU who are demanding a resolution of the “occupation” and the refugee problem. This is the price it must pay to get their support in the war against terror and the war in Iraq. Paradoxically they care not a whit for the Palestinians. The EU lavishes billions on the PA without requiring that the money be spent to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinian Arabs and is content to allow the money to be used to support the terrorists among them and to line the pockets of kleptocrats at the head of the PA. In effect they support Palestinian terror and not the peace process.

The main reason Palestine won’t come into existence is that the Arab Palestinians don’t want it to, nor does Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, notwithstanding protestations to the contrary.
Ever since the Palestine Mandate was created, the Arabs have resisted the Zionist enterprise and Britain supported this resistance. They rejected the Partition Plan in ’47. They rejected the State of Israel when it was declared in ’48 with the support of the US State Department, and invaded Israel en masse. In ’64 they created the PLO which they dedicated to destroying Israel. They massed for invasion again in ’67 and after being soundly defeated by Israel, they rejected Resolution 242. Instead they passed a resolution at Khartoum which advocated “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it."
They finally accepted Res 242 and the State of Israel in the Oslo Accords because it was part of their “phased plan” to destroy Israel. They never had any intention of honouring it and they never did. It is not the Islamic way. Agreements with the infidel are not binding.

The “Palestinians” are making war, not peace. It has ever been so. Aside from the odd pro-peace comment, I challenge you to identify one thing they have done in the furtherance of peaceful coexistence. Just one.
Incitement continues without abatement, arms and terrorists are smuggled in and the PA publicly supports and praises its terrorists and martyrs. The populace is voting in favour of the terrorists including Hamas and the terrorist arms of Fatah. The convicted mass murderer, Barghouti, is leading the polls. Suicide bombings and rocket attacks continue. All this in brazen disregard of their government’s commitment to end incitement and dismantle the terrorist infrastructure. Abbas is the walking dead.
The Charters of both the PLO and Hamas, dedicate these organizations to the destruction of Israel.
The Arabs cling tenaciously to the “right of return” because if it were accepted it would destroy Israel and if it were to be rejected, which is a certainty, the conflict would go on. on.

The conflict suits the needs of the Arab world which wants to concentrate the world’s attention elsewhere than on themselves. Iran wants to get the bomb. Egypt and Saudi Arabia want to avoid democratization and to avert the gaze of Human Rights organizations. Jordan wants Israel to remain on the Jordan River to ensure its survival. Syria continues to support the terrorists in Israel as a bargaining chip to make a deal for their survival or as a deflection of attention from them. So they all have vested interests in keeping the conflict alive.

The UN is also dependant on the conflict not being resolved. It has created a vast bureaucracy since ’48 which is obsessed with the Palestinians. If the conflict were to be resolved this bureaucracy would have to be dissolved. No bureaucracy would stand for this. I urge you to visit Eye on the UN which fully discloses how infested with hatred it is. What Roadmap? There is no evidence that the UN really is committed to it.

Then there is al Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They plan to re-establish the Caliphate. They are just beginning to flex their muscles. The Palestinian cause fuels their recruitment. A defeat of Israel would fuel it even further.

Iraq is another case in point. The coalition wants out, desperately. It realizes, lead by the US, that the US bit off more then it is prepared to chew. If Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia wanted them out, the insurgency would end immediately. But it continues. They want America bogged down and in need of their help. They want the US to be more concerned with an exit strategy then with preventing Iran from getting the bomb or with democratizing them or with regime change.

Furthermore behind the scenes lurks the inevitable conflict for power and ascendancy between the Shiites and the Sunnis.
Finally the Iraq conflict is filling the coffers of OPEC and the oil interests in the US making it financially rewarding for the conflict to continue.

A Jewish One State Plan has been proposed and many supporters rejected this plan because the world wouldn’t allow it or because it involved absorbing many more Arabs into Israel. The Plan argued that the ratio of Jews to Arabs in the expanded state would be 2:1 and that it could be maintained. But many felt that the Arabs, who have been nurtured on hate, could not be domesticated.
I mention this because the Arabs themselves are still advocating their One State Solution which is a euphemism for the destruction of Israel. Search the web and you will see that this idea is alive and well not only in the Arab world but also in many parts of the Western world.
The Roadmap is the flavour of the month. But it won’t always be so. Much can happen in the next few years which would change the paradigm. The US is in retreat but it doesn’t want to retreat from the ME. It may well decide not to force retreat on Israel. There are other solutions that it may develop an appetite for.
Palestine will never come into existence.

December 9, 2005

Open letter on Public Religious bias in Australia

2006-03-21T15:04:00.000-08:00

Today I heard an incredible attack on Christianity by an Aboriginal Australian who spent at least 14 years in gaol for serious crime, and was converted to Islam there. He now wants to help Aborigines by getting them to accept social assistance from his Moslem friends [much like a Hamas approach]. The occasion was the regular Religion Report half hour news show on ABC government radio. The interviewer is an expert religious broacaster, so he can hardly be excused as ignorant of the real issues. Here is my letter, written to him as an official complaint.
It is a tract of our times, I'm afraid.

Dear Mr Crittenden,
I have just listened to you interviewing a Mike Davis [name?]. He is an Australian Moslem convert with a serious criminal record, and he was allowed by you to make sweeping negative statements about Christianity, which offended me and I imagine thousands of other Christians because of their extreme bias and inaccuracy. There can be no doubt that he was intending to defame Christian missionaries past and present, as well as the very basis of my religion..
His only 'positive' statement about Christians was an oblique attack, since he contradicted all the known historic evidence for the faith based on Jesus Christ. He claimed that Jesus was really a Moslem, which is historically absurd, as you know, unless you accept the view that the Gospels and many other records are an entire fraud..
He made false claims that 'Christians' began slavery, promoted rape, and that they sexually abused children, among other similar hate-filled statements, too many to recall..
You asked no questions at all that would help him moderate his extraordinary views, which would have been very easy to do. For instance, did not the Moslems 'invade' [his term] both Christian Jerusalem and Constantinople?

By your complete inaction I say you colluded in his vilification by doing nothing to limit it.
Mr Davis and yourself must know that such an approach by any Christian towards Islam in any Islamic country would not be broadcast at all, but would result in immediate arrest and heavy penalties, and probably public demonstrations too. Even in Afghanistan today a person legally endangers his life by defecting from being a Moslem.
The ABC has not even allowed the Australian public to view a few innocuous Danish cartoons portraying Mohammed, or to my knowledge even described them in detail so that listeners could judge for themselves how truly moderate they are. Does the ABC have a biased view of what is moderate in religious discussion?

Mr Davis promotes himself as a person who wants to convert others to Islam, and demands the freedom to do so. Is this how he intends to do it? [A very good unasked question, since he claimed to be just a social worker, like Hamas I guess.]
You must be aware that there are laws in Victoria to prevent just such religious vilification, and that these have been used to produce a conviction of Christians based on evidence far more accurate, far less disseminated, and far less offensive than the views you broadcast Australian-wide with public money.
I ask you to apologise publically on behalf of the ABC for the offence you caused to Christians like me by this incitement to hate them, which you and your fellow programmers broadcast on 22nd March.

Very Sincerely

Is anything new in Iraq post 2003?

2006-03-19T14:41:00.000-08:00

Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, in his thoughtful book Cruelty and Silence, writes:
The state the Ba'th built in Iraq is far worse than one built on purely professional or ethnic criteria. It is worse because it is consistently egalitarian in its hostility to everything that is not itself. They demand from all Iraqis absolute conformity with their violence-filled, conspiratorial view of a world permanently at war with itself. Saddam Hussain positively expect[ed] to breed hate and a thirst for revenge in Sunni and Shi'i alike. Every Iraqi carries the marks [of complicity and victimhood] deep inside him or her. As a consequence civil society, attacked from every direction, has virtually collapsed in iraq. A desperate recourse to Shi-ism or Sunni sectarianism or Kurdish nationalism .. is a refuge of last resort, a proof of how complete social collapse inside Iraq really is..

This was written when?? ............. In 1993! Saddam had a full ten more years to destroy his society. Makiya makes telling points about the enemy still faced there in 2006.

1. The remnants of Ba'athists, who are trained totalitarians with a Nazi-like world view.
2. 'a world permanently at war with itself' Makiya meant the Ba'athists, but they have now been joined by the radical Islamists with a similar worldview since 1993. They would have appealed to many Iraqis if Iraq was left under under Saddam in 2003.
3. The hatred engendered between Sunni and Shi-ite is not new, but the result of an old, cynical policy of divide and rule by Saddam. The present regime is struggling to unite these people, who are still being attacked on either side by Ba-athists or Islamists, to foment civil war.
It must be understood that the Western allies are not responsible for 'upsetting a stable society' in 2003, which never existed. This myth is gaining strength in the USA.
4. Makiya saw the need in 1993 for some form of federalism as a possible solution, at least for the Iraqi Kurds. This is proving successful, but only because they had fairly efficient protection from Saddam's depredations for many more years.
It is good evidence of the need for patience and further Western military protection. Will it emerge?

Propaganda IS Truth in today's media

2006-03-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

There is a disturbing effect of postmodernist relativism now in the media, which often no longer regrets its plain errors of fact, but covers them up or excuses them as 'metaphor', 'valid political comment', 'inaccurate but true' etc..

Tim Blair's blog has nailed many examples of this. Despite it being a real turkey, the so-called 'fake turkey' George Bush is supposed to have had in Iraq is still retailed as true years later. Recently someone published a hoax speech by Prime Minister Howard. This too is justified as 'true'.
Spielberg does not bother to consult the living Israelis he portrays in his very inaccurate film 'Munich', misrepresents them badly, then claims his film has 'the truth of art' nonetheless. Actors seem not to care that they are portraying these powerful lies for big money.

Here are some recent examples from Tim Blair:

Don’t forget Brit Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan. After photos in the paper of troops maltreating Iraqi prisoners were found to have been faked, he said they “accurately illustrated the reality about the appalling conduct of some British troops.”

The Boston Globe published a picture of US troops supposedly gang raping an Iraqi prisoner that turned out to be a still from a Hungarian porn movie. The Globe semi-apologized, but published first. No one was fired. And so it goes.

Following Webdiary’s latest gullibility episode, Bryan Law provides the usual fake but true defence:
It doesn’t really matter who wrote the ['Howard'] speech. It’s an important public speech and it needs to be aired.

Blair: Congratulations all.

Facts never matter to hoaxed lefties. Here’s Barbra Streisand after she’d fallen for a Shakespeare fraud:
It doesn’t detract from the fact that the words themselves are powerful and true and beautifully written.

Blair: The words are true!

Similarly, Professor Juan Cole:
The story of the interlibrary loan request for Mao’s Little Red Book that produced an interview by the Department of Homeland Security turns out to be a hoax.
However, it is one of those hoaxes that bespeaks a reality ...

And Jeff Alworth:
Whether or not the turkey was fake has little bearing on its purpose as metaphor ...

Blair: Spoken on behalf of the reality-based community.

Me:
I hear Orwell’s 'Propaganda is Truth'. I hear postmodernists, Islamists, leftists, artists and communists admiring their own lies as politically useful tools.

It is one thing to admire the cleverness, the irony, or the satirical purpose in a successful hoax.
But if the public and truth itself are to be protected, public figures like judges, artists and journalists must never use their power to blur the distinction between propaganda and truth.
Yet they do, all the time.

Crushing Academic Freedom in England and the US

2006-03-15T14:41:00.000-08:00

The resignation of Larry Summers as President of Harvard University represents the face of intolerant political correctness in a great institution. While the brilliant Summers was an old-style academic eccentric, unsuited in many ways to the slick world of the PR CEO, it was his support for the possibility of real gender differences that led to his hounding out of office. No room, it seems for expressing a non-PC opinion at Harvard, even if it has some sound scientific support behind it. Summers has an open academic mind, so he must go. Harold Bloom's closing of the American mind advances apace.

Across the Pond, the 76 year-old, 100 member Birmingham University Christian Union is in trouble for similar reasons. It seems students have to belong to the University Guild to be granted funds and use campus rooms, a sort of compulsory unionism banned in Australian universities only last year, after a century of universal imposition.

The BU Guild has made a policy that no groups can discriminate in their membership against lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people, and this must be made explicit in all campus constitutions. Even the British national Church of England has not gone so far yet, though PC is already imposed and absurdly policed in many other British institutions.
Of course the BUCU, being Christian, does not do this. Spokesman Matthew Crouch said: "All guild members can attend our meetings, but only [our] members can vote." This is not good enough for the guild council policy.
This exclusion follows the evangelical Christians in Sport group also being denied the use of campus guild rooms on similar grounds. [article in The Times]
One can only wonder how closely the Guild scutinises the rules and practices of any Islamic groups on campus, Birmingham being a major multicultural city where the London commuter bombers lived...

History repeating itself

2006-03-11T00:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a pinch, a comment on Tim Blair's blog -a quality one.

It simply proves the Left's lineage today goes straight through the Third Reich.

America’s “Irresponsible” President Is the “Chief Culprit of this War”
One of Europe’s foreign ministers denounced America’s president as the “chief culprit of this war” and went on to bemoan the “American people” for having been betrayed by such an irresponsible leader. “I don’t see much future for the Americans” added the head of state of the aforementioned minister. “It’s a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities … My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. … How can one expect a State like that to hold together — a country where everything is built on the dollar.

America’s “historically unique and shameless ill treatment of truth and of right”, he added that the “so-called” president was “guilty of a series of the worst crimes against international law”..."first, he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy, and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack …

"A threatening opposition was gathering over the head of this man. He guessed that the only salvation or him lay in diverting public attention from home to foreign policy … Thus began the increasing efforts of the American President to create conflict … For years this man harboured one desire — that a conflict should break out somewhere in the world. [The fact is that one country] has at last become tired of being mocked by him in such an unworthy way fills us all … I think, all … decent people in the world, with deep satisfaction.

Who is the President? Who is the European Statesman?

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Clinton and Clueless Clooney

2006-03-09T19:34:00.000-08:00

The George Clooney film Syriana and Spielberg's Munich typify the moral selectivity and historical dishonesty of thess Hollyood anti-patriots.
This is lifted from a Krauthammer analysis. I do not intend to see Syriana or Munich because I have read enough reviews of both to know what they are doing to trash US and the Israelis, for money and the most morally-blind glitterati.

It is interesting, 6 years after the Clinton Presidency, that except for looking at the Somalia debacle, Hollywood has decided that GWB must take the rap for anything that Clinton did wrong. Here's some more evidence on Syriana :

The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women's rights and democracy. [ed: Is this a comedy?] What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less — at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish 'oilman of the year' celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans.

What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today concerns America's excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote — against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism — local leaders like the Good Prince.

The movie’s slogan, ‘Everything is connected’, belies the film’s main failing: that it is not at all reflective of the contents of Baer’s book, which describes how he saw the Clinton White House put out the welcome mat for the very dirtiest people in the oil business in return for campaign donations and fat payments to the president’s cronies.
Roger Tamraz, then a fugitive from an outstanding Interpol arrest warrant for fraud, got to pitch his plan for an oil pipeline face-to-face with Bill Clinton over coffee in the Oval Office. He began his career, Baer tells us, by working to channel millions of dollars in kickbacks from an oil pipeline deal to Kamal Adham, the long-time head of Saudi intelligence, and went on to partner everyone from the Sicilian mafia to Colonel Gadaffi of Libya.
Another notorious businessman benefiting from Clinton’s interventions was the commodity broker Marc Rich, who spent over a decade on the run from American justice before Clinton pardoned him just before leaving office. Instead of depicting this history, we get a political fairytale pushing the anti-business agenda of Clooney and Stephen Gaghan, Syriana’s writer and director. Imagine if the story of the journalists who investigated Richard Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate, All the President’s Men, had been filmed to show Jimmy Carter as the villain and you might get some idea of the liberties they take with the facts.
Syriana portrays the giant American oil companies as villains, a collection of crude Texas cowboys who cheerfully admit to bribery while presenting themselves as patriots and Christians. The international middlemen, wheeler-dealers like Tamraz and Rich, who operate with shell companies, post office boxes and a complete lack of scruples, are conspicuous by their absence. The tragedy of the film is the missed opportunity it represents. Clooney and Gaghan are right to recognise corruption in the oil industry. But by attempting to score domestic political points they miss the bigger picture.

Europe slumbers on, says The Spectator

2006-03-06T00:32:00.000-08:00

Britain's The Spectator magazine is reputedly the oldest of its type in the world and often contains some of the best and most incisive English prose anywhere. It respects its writers by not putting summarizing sentences within the articles, nor even any marker to show when they are finished. The concise, quality writing is allowed to speak for itself, and rarely are any words wasted. I always read this magazine with pleasure even when I don't agree with the content.

Here is an extract from Max Hastings in the 4th Feb 2006 edition, commenting pessimistically on the behaviour of Europe in 'supporting' the USA in Afghanistan.

"[Since the US is stretched in two wars] If NATO does not stake up the strain in Afghanistan, no one else is going to. The Taleban and the drug barons will prevail. Yet to preserve a pretence of common purpose among the European nations, Tony Blair and his ministers will not acknowledge what a charade this silly little Nato employment is.
Despite the UN's authority for what is being attempted, most European nations privately regard Afghanistan as another American-created shanmbles they want nothing to do with....
Nothing is going to get better in the field of European security and defence until the nations of the Continent awaken from their fools' slumber. It is undersandable that they lack enthusiasm for George Bush's foreign policy -many of us do. What is incomprehensible is that they offer no alternative. They appear to believe that absolutely nothing is worth fighting for. Thus they refuse to maintain credible armed forces even for the contingency of military action."

It is worth noting that the UN officially pretends to support the West and the world in rebuilding Afghanistan, so its lack of teeth there is simply another indication that the US was not wrong in being very cynical about its shaky authority over Saddam and Iraq.

A 'Famous' Homicidal Mother?

2006-03-05T01:07:00.000-08:00

The way the Western media bends over backwards not to declare themselves clearly in any moral sense amazes me.
Today I heard a story about the Hamas' mother who has recently been elected to the PA legislature. She has sent 3 of her 6 sons separately to homicidal deaths, the last an 18 year-old who shot five young Israelis before being shot himself. She declares her pleasure in knowing that Hamas has now formed the first New Arab Caliphate, ready to impose the sort of laws the Taliban did, and of course, to oppose democracy. She says she wishes she had 100 sons to send on murderous death missions. [This in the same story.]

This media called her 'the notorious or famous mother of suicide bombers, depending on your point of view'. Now, does this journalist want to give the impression there can be a point of view which associates 'fame' [acclaim, renown] with such acts? Moreover, my Longmans dictionary points out that the word 'notorious' still has something of its original neutral flavour of 'well-known', so it's not terribly negative anyway. Is the English language so barren of suitable words to use of this appalling, hate-filled individual?

Would the media have told us in about 1940 'Adolf Hitler, the notorious or famous German leader, depending on your point of view, whose aim is to ethnically cleanse Europe of all its Jews, or just try to prevent them from damaging it.' ???

There is a wide moral blindness abroad in the media today.

1968's Mindlessness now repeated by French Islamic Youth

2006-03-02T14:29:00.000-08:00

The intellectual poverty of the young New Left ragers of 1968-74 has long been exposed by the collapse of Communism and the failure of Free Love to create Nirvana on Earth.
But the Islamic rioters in France now oppose the old European national leaders who have no other faith offer.

Hence the wise words from Alexandra Colen from the blog The Brussels Journal:

Though Islamic fundamentalism and the stifling French social welfare system are partly to blame [for the French riots of 2005], 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.

Are they Suicide or Homicide Bombers?

2006-03-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

An example of the subtle propaganda value of a word, the accepted use of the term 'suicide bomber' needs to be questioned. Here is a typical report, about a foiled attack in Jordan:

"The authorities did not name the installation that was targeted but said they had confiscated four kilograms of explosives that were to be used in a suicide operation.
The Government said three militants were arrested a Libyan national, Mohammad Darsi, 25, who was to be the suicide bomber, and two Iraqis, Muhsen al-Lousi and Abdul Karim al-Jumaili, who gave him logistical support."

Note that the bomber was not young nor a local, and had two assistants, probably to ensure the bomb worked as planned.
These extremists do not even like the term 'suicide-bomber', preferring 'Islamic martyr/hero' or similar term. They are choosing to get directly into heaven by their horrific deeds, in the cause of furthering Islam.

A religious motive is not typical of a suicide. This term in the West suggests sympathy, pity, desperation and personal motives that become very questionable when the practice of 'assisted suicide' is added, requiring elaborate planning in most cases.
We have homicide laws against assisted suicide for good moral reasons.
Moreover, suicidal people rarely choose to kill others as well as themselves, since their motive is usually a lack of self-worth. They are secretive, because they usually act alone and feel shame. They do not leave elaborate taped last messages, often involving filmed family members.
'Suicide bombers' deliberately wish to kill many innocent people, whom they callously define as enemy.

So I suggest we should not use 'suicide bomber' at all, because it either dignifies or explains the act in some way, or encourages a warped and undeserved sympathy for it. Since lone attempted suicide is not a crime at all, the word diminishes the perception of these very evil actions. The media should immediately recognise the propagandistic use of the term, and use 'homicidal bomber' instead.
The practise is simply too barbaric to dignify or misrepresent in any way at all.

For Christians, the Flux Stops Here

2006-03-01T03:54:00.000-08:00

Here is a post I just put on The Evangelical Outpost blog by Joe Carter.
Joe is very perceptive on evolution and other thorny arguments. He gets his serve from the sceptics and the rusted-on evolutionists, so I like to encourage him. It's No 64 comment within a recent post, so he's very popular.

This is my contribution. Some may not have the background to follow me, so read Joe:

Great post, Joe. Your critics often sidestep your best points in order to nitpick..
You quickly get to the key point about the alleged 'inevitability' of our universe and everything it allows. This is an incoherent, fuzzy concept [and NOT the same as rejecting 'chance'], since in this universe we can never even know about the existence of the 'infinite other real or possible ones'; the multi-verse people are committing the same fallacy they accuse the pagans and deists of committing, namely infinite regression. 'So it's Turtles all the way down supporting the Great Elephant, is it?' they laugh, correctly. And 'But who created God?' they sneer in that wonderful materialist's way.

Because the Initial Conditions were so precisely balanced, they posit every other measurable condition really holds too in the Big Bang.
But by positing the reality of 'every possible universe' they create their own 'turtle soup'!
At least creationists stop with the Big Bang and God, which does seem more rational given our present state of knowledge of physical laws!

They can only get to our present 'working model universe' by comparing it with the literally incomparable. Such are the moves necessary to suppress the knowledge of the True God.
To coin a phrase, The Flux stops here!.

Of Germans, Jews and 'moderate' Turks

2006-02-26T16:54:00.000-08:00

Crossposted today from Little Green Footballs blog. You have to ask how this film came to be distributed in Germany at all. If there's anything good to come out of it, it might be secondand third thoughts about admitting 'moderate' Turkey to the EU -ever.
Note that even the German PM can only 'appeal' to the good will of cinema operators. Contrast that to the reaction in the UK to a cartoon being posted! [See below]

Antisemitic Film a Big Hit in Muslim Germany
Gary Busey and Billy Zane are the stars of a sick antisemitic Turkish film—a film that is a huge hit in Muslim areas of Germany: Outcry in Germany as anti-Semitic film sells out. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)
A virulently anti-Semitic film about the Iraq war has provoked a storm of protest in Germany after it sold out to cheering audiences from the country’s 2.5 million-strong Turkish community.
Valley of the Wolves, by the Turkish director Serdan Akar, shows crazed American GIs massacring innocent guests at a wedding party and scenes in which a Jewish surgeon removes organs from Iraqi prisoners in a style reminiscent of the Nazi death camp doctor Joseph Mengele.

Bavaria’s interior minister admitted last week that he had dispatched intelligence service agents to cinemas showing the film to “gauge” audience reaction and identify potential radicals.
Edmund Stoiber, the state’s conservative prime minister, has appealed to cinema operators to remove what he described as “this racist and anti-Western hate film” from their programmes.
The £6 million film, the most expensive Turkish production ever made, had already proved a box office hit in Turkey, where it first opened last month at a gala attended by the wife of the country’s prime minister.The production went on general release in Germany a fortnight ago and has had full houses ever since. More than 130,000 people, most of them young Muslims, saw the film in the first five days of its opening. At a packed cinema in a largely Turkish immigrant district of Berlin last week, Valley of the Wolves was being watched almost exclusively by young Turkish men. They clapped furiously when the Turkish hero of the film was shown blowing up a building occupied by the United States military commander in northern Iraq.

In the closing sequence, the hero is shown plunging a dagger into the heart of a US commander called Sam, played by Billy Zane. The audience responded by standing up and chanting “Allah is great!”

What more do the Germans need to start worrying as much as the French? Whether Germans can worry is the problem!

When a WAR is just a STRUGGLE

2006-02-26T16:18:00.000-08:00

It just occurred to me that the title of Hitler's 1925 manifesto [note the date!] is Mein Kampf which means My Struggle. Now Jihad is a very similar word. Islamists tell us that it is not about 'war' or 'intifada' or 'fatwa' [though it can be!], that it is just about being faithful to Mohammed and 'struggling' to be a good Moslem wherever you are. Jihad can, apparently, mean just trying to pray five times every day and give alms. Like 'striving to be a good Christian'..

Yesterday an Australian Moslem convert was convicted of processing money in Australia for bin Laden, whose camps he had visited, and whom he claims to have met. Curiously, he was acquitted of being a bin Laden sleeper/potential terrorist, even though he gained the nickname of 'Jihad Jack' for his activities.
So even our juries seem to think that jihad is not synonymous with training for violence and criminal terror, just misuse of money. Bin Laden's many references to 'war' were lost on them.

But the similarity is plain: Hitler wrote about his 'Struggle', which fooled many readers for 10 years, until he was firmly in power and planning world war.
Jihad, at the very least, means the same thing.. It is historical reality that the bin Ladens have always meant jihad to mean "unremitting war against all infidels and those who do not submit.'' You see, it wasn't a mere 'struggle' against Hitler either.

Christians Intimidated by Hamas

2006-02-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

This is crossposted by Jihadwatch http://jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/ from Jeruslam Post, showing what happens when Islamists get control of societies.

Christians under cover
Islamic Tolerance Alert from the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to JS:
Palestinian educator Dr. Maria Khoury geared up for the winter chill with what was at the time a meaningless purchase: a black silk scarf with silver stripes to drape around her neck.
But now, on her daily excursions from the West Bank's Taiba to nearby Ramallah, the scarf serves as a political symbol of the changing times.
"Since Hamas took over, I cover my head in Ramallah," she says. "I don't feel comfortable."
In the largely cosmopolitan Ramallah, though they comprise some 10 percent of the population, Christians are becoming less and less visible.
The first time that Khoury ran into her local parish priest there with her head covered, he raised his eyebrows and laughed.
"I see more and more women covered up," Khoury says, explaining that for now, it's preferable to play it safe and assimilate on the street, even if she would never choose to cover her head otherwise.
"Years ago I even used to go in short sleeves," she says. "You'd have to put a gun to my head to get me to wear short sleeves now."
With fear of government-supported religious coercion on the rise since Hamas's unexpected win in January's Palestinian elections, Christians across the West Bank and Gaza Strip are keeping a low profile, with eyes wide open.
Read it all.

UK Political Correctness runs wild

2006-02-26T14:39:00.000-08:00

This is crossposted on Tim Blair's very witty and popular politics and media blog http://timblair.net/

If it weren't so serious for freedom of speech in the UK, it would be laughable. There have been equally ridiculous police enquiries there into 'hate speech', where anything negative about Islam is called 'racism', but vilification of Christ is called 'fair comment'!
It shows how even petty intimidation by Islamists is working so well in the West, with police being diverted into Orwellian behaviour. It should be noted that this bomb-turbaned likeness of 'Mohammed' is really the face of an unpopular Danish imam - the same one who spread the riots and deaths months after the cartoons first appeared. He must be laughing at what he has achieved :

MANCHESTER ERUPTS
Call the police! Begin an inquiry! A cartoon has appeared, and the BBC is rocked:
Extremists have been blamed after a cartoon featuring the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was put up in a housing office in Oldham.
Extremists? Plural? It took more than one of these “extremists” to stick a cartoon on a noticeboard or wherever? How big was it?
The cartoon, which has sparked protests from Muslims worldwide since it was published in a Danish newspaper last year, appeared at First Choice Homes.
Managers acted quickly to remove it and have begun an inquiry.
Again with the plural. Exactly how many managers were involved? Were their actions approved by the First Choice Homes Cartoon Review Committee, and the Oldham Noticeboard Squad?
First Choice Homes - which runs the town’s council housing - said the matter had been reported to police.
Well, of course. Something like this, who knows where it could lead? Next the extremists will be subjecting offices to Andy Capp or Bristow [cartoons].
Steve Yorke, its Director of Management and Operations, said many staff had been offended by the cartoon.
If only the Cartoon Review Committee had acted with greater speed. It’s awful that so many staff witnessed the cartoon before sufficient managers were rounded up to do something about it, but I guess it’s always best to proceed cautiously when dealing with ... a cartoon.
Greater Manchester Police said they were treating the incident “extremely seriously” and were worried the incident could affect “community cohesion”.
It’s a wonder the streets aren’t already awash with blood. I mean, a cartoon and all.

Kowtowing to The Wild East

2006-02-25T22:40:00.000-08:00

The following is sober comment from a Beijing Correspondent Catherine Armitage, published in The Australian Feb 25-26 2006:

"China's leaders cultivate the image of a benevolent superower in the making. Yet so much could go wrong. I fear that Australia, in its eagerness to be a partner in China's growth, is too easily seduced by the hype....
"China is like a bubbling mud pool, with small eruptions threatening to combine at any time. Who knows whether a volcano lies beneath? No wonder any attempt at organised opposition is mercilessly crushed. Just for the privilege of negotiating a free trade agreement we gave China what it most wanted from the deal before talks even began, by going along with the obvious fiction that it is a 'market economy'....

Armitage talks about life for the many poor who have not yet benefited from the boom years, and who may remain exploited by the corrupt elites in the future. What will happen when it is realised that present warp-speed growth will quadruple pollution levels within 15 years in a country that is not in Kyoto and is already heavily polluted? She finds that there is little 'people faith' in the corrupt systems still in place in China: "loyalty is to the family, then village, then the province and only lastly to the motherland itself... a somewhat belligerent nationalism is cultivated by the CCP as the only unifying ideology, but its authority not universally accepted."
Armitage concludes that she worries about the 700-800 milion poor Chinese who will have little chance to fulfil themselves in the future unless their country reforms its whole government and systems radically to respond democratically to the real voices of its little people fairly. Western-type advancement only of the elite minority is not sufficient for stability.
Her picture is of a proud nation, full of a desire to project itself powerfully upon its region if it can, despite severe ecological limitations and a failure to support civil rights and genuinely democratic institutions. To my mind, this is a description of a new, emerging fascist-type state.

Mumbo Jumbo conquers my State Government

2006-02-24T13:35:00.000-08:00

My state of South Australia gives a 'Seniors Card' to applying 60 year olds. Its direct benefits are few, mainly cheaper public transport, which I rarely use. If you fail to tick a little box it uses the addresses to post advertisements to my age group . The latest can only be described as New Age Nonsense aimed at fleecing the old through their infirmities.

Here's a sample: Slavic barbers reveal secret hair restorer formula, A love potion as used by Cleopatra, A US Army all-natural, sure-fire[!] allergy defense [nice to see something positive said about this group, but the 's' in defence gives away the probable US origin of all of this], Backyard brain food, An Indian recipe rejuvenates older men, Prozac on your spice rack [no quotes around this 'Prozac' or 'rejuvenates']. A coffee grinder[!?] can remove 'all cellulite'
Some claims, and I haven't even opened the plastic cover!

Our state government also administers our hospitals, but they are promoting radically bizarre non-medical 'remedies' ['Proven on TV!'] through their 'Office for Aging'.
It shouldn't be legal to exploit oldies like this. Mumbo Jumbo conquers good government.
Do we need a law against 'intellectual vilification' by the State?

My new word: MuFticulturalism

2006-02-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

I hereby announce that I recently invented a neologism: MuFticulturalism. A single altered letter gives us a useful new concept for our difficult times. Let me explain it.
'MuLticulturalism' is an omnibus word that is now starting to be seen as a weasel word standing for a confused group of ideals at best, a word that has been damaged by being used as a liberal catchall, a stick to beat us Westerners with, like 'capitalism', 'colonialism' and 'neocolonialism' etc.
In Australia it became so popular that we even appointed political commissioners for it. They preached ethnic pride to such an extent that many successful recent immigrant societies became privileged groups with access to large amounts of state money for no other reason than to reinforce their former overseas identities and culture within their new home, Australia. The reverse, a program to educate them in 'Australian values' [which Americans and others take for granted will be done], was neglected since it was seen to imply undue coercion and integration - seen as old 'failed' policy that neglected 'immigrants' rights'.
As politicians systematically courted these ethnic leaders for votes [usually in Labour Party seats], the suspicion arose that it was advantageous to minimize your allegiance to Australian traditional values, systems and interests. No-one thought that the majority Anglo and Irish and older groups like Germans were 'ethnic' too, so these groups were actually criticised for being antagonistic to the new 'Multicultural Australia'. Words like 'redneck' are widely used by people who think they are fighting, not using, racist and colour language! It was just another form of leftish self-loathing. It was paradoxical, as these very people have created the successful, tolerant immigrant society we live in! Our own history was systematically devalued.
The new idea was that there are no definable central values to emphasise as 'Australian'. The Multi-Culture was to be built on an expanding loose almalgam of allegiances to a hundred other nations' history and culture, not anything unique to our national history of over 200 years.

In a sense this was a product of postmodernism - the view that there is no one 'story' so no coherent idea of national identity is there to defend. So the average tolerant Australian became suspicious of being criticised for being Australian, for having our fine culture compared as inferior to almost any other ones which were now being feted as 'new' and therefore more interesting, as 'older' and so more valuable for our joint future.
The Old Aboriginal culture was feted in the same years for this reason too; we 'former Europeans' were told to apologise for imposing our alien culture aggressively on their so-called pristine '50,000 year old wisdom'. No-one defended us by saying that WE also have 'valuable ancient cultural roots', just as any human culture obviously does. Ironically, the Aborigines actually identify 70% as 'Christian', among other similarities like wide intermarriage. Yet they were now praised for resisting us 'new Australians', while WE are being criticised for narrowness and resistance to other newcomers today!

So to Mufticulturalism. Our Prime Minister Howard recently stated the obvious in public [a terrible thing to the old multiculturalists, now under some strain]: that there are for the first time a minority of Moslems in Australia who bear no allegiance to our rule of law or our social arrangements including democracy, but actually seek to remain separate from it and to actively challenge it, despite quickly accepting our citizenship.

The word 'mufti' describes a respected Moslem expert in Islamic law. Local imams rely on these for their authority. It is well known that Islamic culture sees no useful division between a Western secular state and religion. Radical Islam today makes very explicit its desire to destroy the separation of religious authority and state authority. Also, some small groups are using their freedom to claim special rights to conduct their civil affairs and schools under Sharia Law here, despite the fact that it conflicts at many points with modern Western law. And what we call civil they also see as their wider political authority, to be exercised in Moslem cultural enclaves.

So Mufticulturalism is multiculturalism with a vengeance, or reversed. It aims to replace a mixed free society, based on democratic freedoms and tolerance of others, with an intlerant Moslem Monoculture. Moreover, it wishes to do this even within Western societies where Moslems are a small minority, so proving that it takes the confused multicultural ideals seriously, to the point of denying that a society like Australia has any central or overarching values to preserve for the good of ALL minorities, who need to conform by living under its aegis and ethos. It is a medieval concept reinvigorated.

So mufticulturalism is the nadir of multicultural idealism, exposing it as a naive and inadequate liberal concept. Some say the recent rioting in some 300 Moslem sections of French society was the result of the absence of multicultural policy - the result of an ill-defined One France mindset.
It can better be seen as an extreme chauvinistic revolt by second generation French Moslems who see no purpose in trying to integrate with a Western culture they have been taught by their religion to despise for its Enlightenment values.

Chomsky Chumpski

2006-02-16T22:14:00.000-08:00

Just listening to Noam Chomsky on Australian radio, the award-winning 'intellectual' whose world is always made to conform to his anarchist left prejudies even if he must talk nonsense to achieve it.

Examples of Chomsky illogic [it didn't take long]:

1. He really expected a series of follow-up attacks after 9/11 on the US.
2. The Bush Administration 'sharply increased the threat'.
3. In 4+ years there have not been any follow-up attacks under Bush.

1. He expected a 'very easy, brief occupation' after the Iraq War and was very surprised that there was not. [Not a misprint: because it sounds like he is one of those 'dumb neocons'.]

2. Yet Bush promised from the start that the War on Terror would be neither easy nor short..

Who's the more reliable prophet and realist?
Moral: Ignore Chomsky.

Just Don't Call it War, pleease..

2006-02-13T17:45:00.000-08:00

"Just Don't call it War"
Boris Johnson, Tory MP and editor of The Spectator is a 'war' sceptic. He wrote an article with this title a week after 7/7 in London, and his arguments need refuting. Why call it a 'war on terror' he complains? Isn't that too extreme - warmongering even? Unproductive?
He thinks so. Johnson admits that Islamic terrorism pre-dates the Iraq War, but he fails to take it as far back at the first WTCentre attack in 1993. That was a radical Islamic response to the Gulf War, the same sort of motive for 7/11. He is totally preoccupied with the Iraq situation, as many Europeans have been.
He also confines his remarks to 'solving' the problem in 'our country', thus revealing the typical European myopia. Can it be solved only there? Weren't even the London bombers trained in Pakistan? He claims that by calling it war 'we concede several points to the enemy', setting up 'odious false equivalences'. He states none of these though. He does not help his argument by implying that if we just refuse to admit it's a war, Islamofascism won't really want to destroy Christian Europe and the USA or Australia, despite repeatedly saying it intends to.
Secondly, Johnson makes a false comparison with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which the UK refused to call a war but a struggle of our soldiers against their 'murderers'. Yet this is little different from calling them 'irregular combatants', and imprisoning them all the same with similar special laws today. Also, Northern Ireland was a one territory, one government conflict which did not involve religion in its essence, nor suicide bombers [properly called homicidal bombers]. It did require dedicated, dangerous anti-insurgent soldiering though, not dissimliar to Iraq today - and for more than twenty years.

Thirdly, Johnson makes the common mistake of thinking that the term 'war on terror' has only been applied widely since the alleged distracting invasion of Iraq, even though it was 'declared' in September 2001. Because that Iraq war encouraged Al Qaeda to involve itself there it was a mistake, he implies, to wage this war at all. What about Afghanistan? He avoids mentioning that at all, though an invasion and regime change happened there first, and terror continues there too. His argument depends on narrow selectivity, yet this conflict isn't of a narrow, predictable nature. Does he even realise that the Straits of Malacca near Singapore are probably a major target too, that even a French vessel was attacked years ago? What has mere choice of terminology got to do with these global realities?

Fourthly, Johnson conveniently avoids mentioning the broad support in the Middle East that Saddam Hussein's defiant regime gave to dangerous anti-western and anti-Israel agitation, long underway in the whole world. Saddam certainly had that in common with Al Qaeda. Johnson makes his next error by claiming that Iraq caused the radical Moslems to believe there was a 'war for oil' and a cultural attack by the West on Islam generally, so 'humiliating' them unecessarily. But surely Al Qaeda et al. needed no convincing of this since the late 80s! And Hussein was already very good at 'humiliating' the West and the whole UN, not least in nearly getting sanctions removed in 2003 and, as we now know, horribly corrupting the UN Oil for Food program and, along the way, killing his cowering people by neglect. All these things are forgotten in the difficulties the Iraq project inevitably involves.

Johnson unconvincingly believes that the democratizing of the Middle East could be achieved by democratic gradualism and even neocon-type 'peaceful persuasion', anything short of war. He completely ignores the large numbers of Westernized Arabs who appreciate democracy and wanted to see it in Iraq and elsewhere, and who in no way condemn the removal of Saddam as a valid means to that end, despite all the problems. It is as if Johnson sees all Arabs in monochrome light. Don't upset one country and all will go quietly. This is unreal.
Johnson is unrealistic in thinking that more of 'the pre-2003 same thing' could actually do what he, in principle, claims to admire and want. In 2003 you simply could not be in favour of ME democracy and against regime change as well. It was either/or. That is how new this project really is. 'Containment' of Saddam was the only other option canvased, and what a feeble and corrupt response that was. Rather than a 'fatal elision' - wrongly seeing war and democracy together, as he puts it - the two needed to be linked for anything to move in the area.
The most specious sentence he writes is 'To keep talking of war plays on the militant Muslim paranoia'. Militant they indeed are, but only we must go 'softly, softly', not letting them know we know this! If we just say we are at war, we 'create' war martyrs of many of them, he says. Really? That sounds like a perfect blame the victim argument. Keep quiet and they might go away! Is that our advice to Israel too, whom Johnson dares to criticise for being too tough on terror, in the craven self-blame spirit of the 'Munich' film. The London bombers were not in a war zone, were they? They were indoctrinated and sent to war anyway.

Johnson is an intelligent Tory politician, but exposes his mindset as a Little Englander, when a world perspective is so obviously required. That is the reality of the 'cultural calamity' Johnson admits we have, and have had for decades now, as Islamofascism grew strong in the world's mosques. Johnson seems to only half-understand this basic point. Theo van Gogh was killed just because he 'was not a Moslem'. So were the Bali 200. At this point Johnson urges the UK to get tough on their local radicals, allowed for years to preach their violent message in mosques unhindered. But they are also doing so worldwide - hasn't he notice that too? And how do you get tough without new, specific laws to remove religious leaders, the same sort of laws used to remove traitors during any wartime?
Did the British Government have much success in Northern Ireland in removing the radical Catholic priests? No, because the conflict was different. Religion kept arms length from direct blame. That conflict cooled down only when the wider ideology supporting it, communism, failed catastrophically in Europe. And why was that? The Cold War was won!

So Johnson may sincerely claim 'Britain is not at war' today, but that does not make it so, because he's fighting the last war not the present and future one. This is a sad comment on an intelligent young English politician's lack of vision. Was the UK 'at war' in September 1939, or only after the Phony War violently ended some months later? Well, it has ended for Londoners again, and they better realise it.
'The more we talk of war the more we big up the terrorists' and make the West more unpopular with Islam, Johnson declaims. Was the West ever popular with these religious people?
The reply to him is that Hitler also preferred everyone's surrender, without any real war at all. It took much more than quiet police work to stop him in the end.

Throwaway Hollywood lines on the Iraq War

2006-02-12T15:58:00.000-08:00

Many People take far too much of their mindset from Hollywood. Is this true of George W. Bush?
Many celebrity interviews these days seek to share with us the glitterati's wisdom on GWB and that 'mistaken' War on Terror. It is a way to reinforce in the public mind the accepted left wisdom that it is 'a bad thing'. A good example is the view of the director of the serious film [note the title] A History of Violence, David Cronenberg: "Bush has adopted the [Western movie] myth as his foreign policy. We were attacked, and so anything we do to defend ourselves is justified." Spielberg's Munich is likewise supposed to be a plea not to 'overreact' to terrorism as it just perpetrates an immoral 'cycle of violence' and achieves nothing.

What about the strange irony that the views of movie directors are thought to be an important corrective to whole national governments ['The Coalition of the Willing', in fact] which are supposedly in danger of living in a 'movie world'?
They are insulting not only Bush, but many other leaders of other sovereign nations - a measure of their own limited vision.
I have earlier dealt with the very warped interpretation of 1972 Munich's reality by Spielberg.

Is it really true that the US under GW Bush now behaves as if it can do 'anything' in revenge?
Or is it more true that the many naive, would-be pacifists love to exaggerate the inevitable failings associated with fighting any war, to condemn the very idea of fighting it? Abu Ghraib was a fairly minor abuse that the US itself exposed and dealt with. It was not even a massacre, but it had the same propaganda value as if it were. Later, an Australian photojournalist in Afghanistan tried to beat up his own story about the supposed atrocity of US soldiers burning several dead enemy bodies on a stony hillside. He would have been happy if an embassy or two had been burnt down in 'moral' outrage, I guess, at his gross exaggeration of a very minor allied event. War must not only be fought morally [by one side only, ours] it must not hurt anyone, or anyone's sensitivities either. It looks like the unreality is with the moviemakers and left opinionmakers, not Bush.

Jarhead is jet another anti-war 'War is Hell' movie made about one of the least bloody and quickest wars ever fought. Actual battle is hardly mentioned, so what is its point, except the pacifist one - to question whether Kuwait was worth liberating after all if it made some professional soldiers feel bad for a while? It apparently ends with the theatrical effect of the burning oil wells. We were assured that these would take many years to put out, and the whole world's ecology would be badly affected. It didn't happen, but it frightened millions into an anti-war stance at the time. So this film wants to re-frighten us about war. Likewise, the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq - more anti-war films to follow?.... You bet.
Effete moralising has cache in Hollywood. Except, unlike in the Wild West, they think there are no goodies or baddies left in the world.

Is iraq what the armchair moralists mean by 'doing anything to defend ourselves' -overreacting and pursuing just mindless revenge, for instance??
Bush is trying to behave as any responsible world leader should - use force where it can actually protect his own country and others in the long term. The fact that some 40 million Moslems are getting their first taste of democracy is also important [as it was post-WWII], though the rich, lazy Western media seem quite immune to the value, and great difficulty, of that laudable project.

I can't help comparing the War on Terror to the Unfought War against Hitler in the 30s, starting with France [who else?] in the Rhineland. Winston Churchill MP., out of favour and power, made himself very unpopular with the glitterati and pseudo-intellectuals of his time as a 'warmonger' - the same word now used of Bush. WSC had been deeply involved in some war errors in WWI, but he did not shut up and wring his hands in self-blame in the 1930s, because a new Big Picture had emerged needing his real attention- Totalitarian Fascism.
Today we easily forget Churchill's great unheeded wisdom then, and instead overpraise the clever but limited perspicacity of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator. Yet this film was not made in the 30s but the early 40s, and even then it was strongly opposed by -yes- Hollywood, as too insulting to Hitler!!

That should be a lesson to get our moral indignation and our values into proper perspective now, when the whole world faces a new, long war against Islamofascist terror and propaganda, with greater destructive and disruptive insanity than even Hitler commanded.

More on Australian anti-religious biases.

2006-02-11T16:07:00.000-08:00

This is taken from an article by columnist Christopher Pearson in The Australian for 12-13 Feb 2006. Could such a blatantly anti-religious T-shirt be seen on a politician in the House of Commons or in the US Senate? I think not:

ONE thing at least has become clear during the course of the [Australian] debate on RU486, the so-called abortion pill. Sectarian bigotry, which seemed almost to have vanished from Australian politics, is still with us, as dim and rancorous as ever. "Get your rosaries off our ovaries" is its latest mantra. Tony Abbott belled the cat on Monday, arguing that he should be judged on his actions as a minister rather than "on other people's prejudices". What grounds, he asked, has senator Lyn Allison "for thinking that I am less capable than she is of distinguishing between what's rightly rendered to God or Caesar?"
Catholic politicians realise, more acutely than most, that Australia is a pluralistic society with a clear-cut separation between church and state. Theocratic government is not an option, but that same pluralistic principle accords them, along with everyone else, the right to argue in the public square for policies based on personal convictions.
However, if their arguments are to be broadly persuasive, they have to be based on first principles, such as the sanctity of human life, and appeals to reason and common sense, rather than what the Pope thinks.
Abbott's position on abortion in general and RU486 has been bizarrely misrepresented. It is neither noticeably Catholic nor even particularly Christian. As he said on Wednesday, it's a view shared by most people with religious convictions, from the Dalai Lama to Mohandas Gandhi.

It is apparently OK to mock Christians for their political views, while defending views based on non-religious philosophies as valid and reasoned. Compare the different attitude to the mocking of Islam in cartoons.

Coretta King's politicised Funeral

2006-02-11T15:39:00.000-08:00

I only saw a few soundbites of Coretta King's funeral and I know a lot of people spoke, but it was obviously politicised in a partisan and distasteful way by Democratic spokesmen. David Brooks on The Lehrer Hour which we get in Australia, made this point well.
My comments refer to the opportunism of one black clergyman who dragged the Kings into an anti-Iraq war context. Why? Doesn't he have his own pulpit or TV show to do that?
Jimmy Carter couldn't resist a dig at the President sitting just behind him. Was he speaking for Coretta or for his own grotesque publicity? Is this ex-president otherwise silenced from taking full part in public affairs if he wishes?
Do the Democrats wish to disguise the fact that it was their party who resisted civil rights in the South for decades? What if either of the Bush presidents, who both spoke with appropriate nonpartisan dignity for the occasion, had made even a tiny mention of this political stain? There would have been howls of 'righteous left' protests, I am sure.
Are we supposed to forget that MLKJr's self-styled successor, the Rev Jesse Jackson, for years courted almost any anti-American dictator in public, Libya's Muhammar Gaddafi being only one?
So what was this self-righteous parade of 'Democratic Party Defence of Freedom' supposed to prove?
And the Clintons could not resist a tag team act, with Hillary looking like a celluloid doll nodding her head mechanically like an endorsed candidate. More self-serving, symbolic politicisation.

As an Australian I was dismayed by the sheer opportunism and lack of taste by these prominent Americans who have ample opportunities to express their current political views. After all, Martin Luther King Jr., the real focus despite Coretta, died some 37 years ago at the tail end of a very controversial eight year Democratic incumbency.
I am dismayed by the meanspiritedness and partisanship of these influential US Democrats at a funeral. It unfortunately reflects a wider incivility in the country in my opinion, and this poor example of leadership spleen cannot have helped.

An Open Letter on Anti-Conservative Bias in Australian Radio

2006-02-11T14:36:00.000-08:00

I copy here a letter I wrote to the Australian ABC Religion Department today. This is a salaried government-paid group who make programs for the national state radio network. For many years they have shown a strong 'study of religions' bias that gives unrepresentative attention to non-Christian religions, while consistently misrepresenting or ignoring evangelical and conservative Catholic positions. They are dominated by very liberal Christians and non-believing others who are untouchable, and unaccountable except through such letters.
This letter is typical of others I have written to no effect over many years now.

Producers of 'Encounter' and ABC Religion,
Dear Controllers,
I have written to you many times over the years to criticise the consistent biases against, and sheer neglect of, Christian conservatism on your programs, despite the reality that it is the most healthy and flourishing form in Australia today. Sadly, I see no change at all in your prejudices in 2006.
Today I listened to 'Secularism and its Discontents', a title which at the very least suggested a balanced, critical examination. What I heard instead came from many strong apologists for secularism, described under terms like 'democracy', 'liberalism' and 'progressivism'. These words were consistently set against conservative Christianity as if it were a natural enemy of them.
The discussion of the US Constitution was similarly a biased one. For instance, it was just assumed that a 'liberal society' can only allow state funding for its secular schools. Listeners were given the belief that Christians in the USA and Australia are a threat to 'secular freedoms' today. Cardinal George Pell of Sydney [I am protestant myself] was quoted as defending 'personalism' as a way forward from aggressive secular humanism, atheism or agnosticism, the views championed by all your other experts. No evangelical Protestant voice was included that I heard, despite the 40+ million [and growing] in the USA.

Typical of the ABC Religion's treatment of Pell, he was not allowed to define his own term as deriving both from ancient philosophy and from Biblical revelation. You referenced www.acton.org as some kind of sop to any fair treatment of him. You segued away quickly to Martin Luther King Jr. and Boston University, where 'personalism' was defined in SECULAR terms, despite King being a strong Baptist Christian and Pell a traditional Catholic! The implication was that Pell and King had no right to define their personalism from explicitly Christian or even natural law roots. Natural law was not even mentioned!

Incredibly, Susan Maddox, the superficial author of the biased tract 'God Under Howard' was far more widely used by you. Her book, like your whole program, was simplistically slanted against conservative Christianity.

Above all, how can you possibly have discussed the 'discontents of secularism' WITHOUT even mentioning the word communism!! This ideology was and is violently anti-religion, and exclusively, illiberally secular. Its long history contrasts starkly with the development of liberal freedoms in Christian countries everywhere, yet your program implied that the Christian resurgence, in the USA at least, was the real threat to 'secularism', which was exclusively described as the champion of 'progressivism' and real freedom. This is a travesty.

I did hear the one bland comment that secularism was challenged in the 1970s by the [unmentioned] failings of 'the left', an extraordinary way to 'cover' over a century of leftist anti-religious ideology and domination! By this omission, you gave the strong impression that traditional Christian belief is far more lethal to freedoms than communism! So conservatives [can GWBush be in your mind?] are its 'unprogressive' discontent!

Your program unaccountably failed to do what Pell and all conservative Christians do - to trace the roots of liberal free societies not to 'secularism', but to the doctrine of the dignity of each human being taught in Christian revelation - Judaism included. God help us, it was Christian churches in Poland, East Germany and Romania which were at the forefront of challenging atheistic, illiberal, secular communism just 16 years ago.. How could you forget that so soon??
Instead of ANY mention of this, you chose to praise Buddhist 'secularism' and atheism at the end of the program, although Buddhist countries have no such tradition of political liberalism that Christian countries pioneered and still defend today.

I consider you have proven YOURSELVES illiberal in failing to give a fair treatment of traditional Christian influence on free societies. Instead, you falsely prejudiced your listeners against what you like to term 'fundamentalist Christianity'.
I will continue to remind you of your obvious biases and inadequacy in presenting balanced programing reflecting the reality of Australian religious groups.
Sincerely

Turin Olympics Dishonours Christianity and Anti-Communism

2006-02-11T00:32:00.000-08:00

Yoko Ono has just been guest introducer at the Turin Winter Olympics opening ceremony, one of the most prestigious events in the world. Ono is a former hippy and very undistinguished artist. She is famous only as a 'professional mourner' for her late husband John Lennon. What did she do on this occasion? In her hard-to-understand English she read a brief message which used 'peace' in every sentence as she introduced Lennon's tune Imagine. What did that song tell the world? 'Imagine here's no heaven, no hell, no religion too'. Work for 'The Brotherhood of Man', etc.
We know that Lennon's famous song was naively inspired by another Lenin. It is a hymn to communist unity and ideals, along with its humanist anti-religion stance. Of all the accomplished world figures Italy could have chosen, the home and centre of Catholicism came up with this!
What were they thinking? That all the anti-communists and Chrisitans in the world would be impressed? Will they protest this gratuitous insult?
Here's proof that Postmodern Europe-at-play has no understanding at all of its own culture or its essential values.
But the song attacks all religion too. Will the 'Islamic Street' show its anger at this insult, as it has with a few feeble Western cartoons in an obscure country?
Will anyone at all protest this pathetic World Cultural Event which lauded communist 'peace' 15 years after its ignominious collapse in Europe and the USSR, while also condemning all religion in line with communist ideology?

Woody's Woollywood-on-Manhattan

2006-02-06T14:50:00.000-08:00

A recent article by Suzy Hansen on Woody Allen at 70 serves to sum up one kind of over-praised American artist. He's well described as 'the gold standard of New York cuteness' and compared, fairly, with Barbra Streisand and the Mets. 'His milieu is his persona not him, he claims. 'My conception of Manhattan was based strictly on Hollywood movies'.
What has been seen as Woody's virtue in being independent of Hollywood is vitiated by his career aim of creating an equally false, childish, rather than child-like, Woollywood on Manhattan: 'I make stories come out the way I want them to. So I have always led a very unreal life.'
Agreed, Woody, but how does that translate into a serious film-maker at 70?
His universe is as small as Jane Austen's, but with no excuse like she had for not exceeding her social milieu. It is sad that he made so little of such a great city. He now claims he wants to do 'serious' films at last. But he can't if he puts himself in to them, he admits, because they must become comedies then . 'I'm not believable on any other way'. That's a sad comment that there is no person behind the persona, at least artistically.
He's still just the stand-up comic, after a lifetime of expensive therapy. This is an admission of his spiritual poverty, of failing to look for any truth outside himself.
So if he does do a movie in London, London will be as unreal as his Manhattan.
Yet Woody tried to convince two generations he was at least a pseudo-intellectual, and he wasn't even that. He only knows a few great quotes to play with, and admits, like the lazy undergraduate, that he has never read serious texts seriously.
As a clever man, Woody knows there are big questions, but at 70 he is still incapable of dealing with them in art or in life.
He admits 'People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems that keep them from dealing with the more terrifying, unsolvable problems about the universe.' That could be his artistic epitaph, but it is not true of most New Yorkers, or real people anywhere. And that is why Woody is not a great artist, only a minor, repetitive one.

And not a great man either because like Hollywood, he has made the world conform to his fantasy. Look at his assessment of Bill Clinton, whom he 'always liked' and thinks deserves yet another term. Criticism of Bill's lubriciousness is dismissed as 'laughable evidence of a prudish population' and 'totally absurd'. In contrast, he judges G.W. Bush's adminstration as the 'worst' in US history: 'he let the country down brutally'. Hmmm.

He thinks Philip Roth is a great artist too. 'A New York state of mind', indeed. Despite 9/11 just down the street, Woody will have to wait for the first comedy on the War on Terror before he makes up his mind on that issue.
He might even write it. That is sad, not funny.

The Very Mild Danish Cartoons

2006-02-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

I confess to not even *understanding* several of these mild creations. Some are just funny, quite valid comments on Moslem-inspired violence. If the religious motivations of homicidal bombers cannot be mocked, what can?
The Australian and other press are hypocritical and cowardly since publishing is essential and germane to true debate.
By denying their readers the ability to judge the level of offence, they deny them the right to assess the absurd level of hysteria in the Moslem world, as well as the correct limits of free speech. Are mullahs behind these riots and arson? Probably. So this is a major cultural issue. By censoring the cartoons now, they leave the impression that they are much, much worse than they are, and distort the debate in favour of much greater censorship everywhere.

I remember when Australians were given [in the leftist The Age newspaper, I think] at the time of the badly-mispreported Jenin operation] a disgusting cartoon equating the Israelis graphically with the Nazi creators of Dachau. Leftist journalist David Marr loudly defended this on ABC's Media Watch, reproducing the cartoon online. I considered this very offensive, false, and so unworthy of publication. It was much greater in level of offence to the present cartoons.

I hear that some Moslems are now to have a competition to mock the Holocaust. So pointing out the widespread violence by Moslems is equated with the Holocaust’s level of violence to Jews? Hmmm.

The Left's slowness to admit their errors since 1990

2006-02-01T02:22:00.000-08:00

I quote here from an excellent Australian blogspot site by John Ray, http://dissectleft.blogspot.com. He is a no-nonsense, prolific retired academic. Look him up.
Since world communism was seen to be a complete failure about 1990 - even in still 'communist' lands like China - many thought the left academics would at last admit they were wrong for lauding many anti-capitalists since the 40s, and even convicted Cold War traitors, whose guilt they often denied on the grounds of the lies of state secrecy.
Ray notes that even now many leftists cling to exploded beliefs about the morality and 'courage' of such people who supported communism in the West.
The Venona documents, however, [see below] also proved beyond doubt that one of the most important USSR defectors in the 1950s, Vladimir Petrov, who defected in Australia bringing many secrets with him, was entirely genuine.

The Australian Left for decades ridiculed this man as part of a right-wing 'coup' and a political conspiracy using scare tactics to stay in power -McCarthy-ish; they claimed this clever 'scandal' falsely implicated traitors high up in the Australian government. But Venona entirely vindicated the Liberal coalition government's actions and their postition at the time. The Cold War, in other words, was very real and a very deadly threat in Australia too.

The interesting thing about John Ray is that he claims to be an atheist, but has a lot of sympathy for conservative Christianty nevertheless. I think he sees clearly that Christians have a basis for a true, workable morality, and the left does not. I think he'd rather be in a bunker with them than leftists or agnostics.

The Left still love traitors to America and the West:
"You would think, by now, with a half-century of scholarship behind us and a great deal of damning evidence on display, we would not have to be arguing about the guilt or innocence of various iconic figures of the late 1940s and 1950s: Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White or, perhaps most notoriously, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But the martyr status of such figures seems irresistible, even today, to a certain kind of sentimental leftist. They still remain symbols of some malevolent American quality--never mind the truth of what they actually did.... In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev noted that the Rosenbergs "vastly aided production of our A-bomb." Joyce Milton and Ronald Radosh wrote a damning account of their activities in "The Rosenberg File" (1983). And the Rosenbergs' guilt was corroborated by the 1995 declassification of the Venona documents, thousands of decrypted KGB cables intercepted by the National Security Agency in the 1940s. The notion that anyone would today deny their fundamental complicity in Soviet subversion is extraordinary, almost comically so"

"Munich" - Revenge or Just Defence?

2006-01-30T01:36:00.000-08:00

I write as a non-pacifist Christian trying to see all events clearly..
Publicity for Spielberg's new film 'Munich', as seen in this magazine article published by Murdoch's 'Weekend Australian' Jan 28-29, emphasises the 'brutal' Mossad attacks which targeted all the PLO perpetrators later.
It concludes: 'Of the 11 names on their hit list they crossed off 9 [80% success] and by some accounts they also killed 2 of the 3 terrorists relaeased by the Germans .. an innocent waiter, several policeman, a wife and a neighbor also lay dead.' That looks like a very successful result.

The book behind the film is called Vengeance, and the article uncritically takes up this word, while giving an apparently much more accurate account than the film does of what Mossad actually did. The makers claim that it does not 'matter' that they fictionalised some of the deaths because their main point is to stress the 'eye for an eye' nature of Israel's 'retaliation'. So historical accuracy doesn't matter? They assert the view that the revenge was unsuccessful long-term anyway, so was it truly moral?
The article also stresses that the Mossad's aim was to 'strike terror' in the whole PLO. Is this a fair description of surgical assassinations of known terrorists? And why not, anyway, since they were in a real war?
It seems to me that both the film and the publicity fail to place these events in a valid moral context, so I will try to.

Israel had won the 1967 Six Day War and was occupying the Sinai. PLO terrorism was hijacking civilian planes and blowing them up on the ground, so Israel was not only at war, but was seemingly aggravating PLO terror against other nationalites as well. The Munich massacre was just the biggest publicity coup of all, and showed up the limitations of the German authorities to protect their Games, and the dead Israelis in particular, with the awful symbolism of being Jews in Germany.. In October 1973 Israel was almost defeated in a sudden treacherous attack on its holiest day Yom Kippur, so it can hardly be blamed for being on edge after 1972!

So is it correct to call Israel's response, which was mostly surgical and targeted, simply vengeance? Surely vengeance would have involved a similar indiscriminate attack on Palestinians, showing no concern for their personal guiit - just as the terrorists chose innocent Olympic athletes to kill. In just war theory proportional retaliation is justified if it produces a defensive and useful result. Israel's was proportional and limited. In the PA areas it still is, though you would not think so from the media biases

The publicity and the 'moral equivalence' style of the film ignores all these things. How can it be said that successfully taking out most of the murdering terrorists was either comparable or fruitless? What further terror actions were prevented by this, so how many Israelis were kept safer by these Mossad operations? We cannot know, but we can guess. True, they had to violate non-combatant territory, and there was some collateral damage - but didn't those countries, such as France, bear some responsibility for harbouring those Mossad pursued? Israel had relied tragically on the Germans to provide security, remember.

Surely there can be no true comparison between the terrorists' violation of the Olympics and Mossad's actions? In one case at least, there was great care taken not to kill family of the terrorists. That does not look like simple vengeance, despite the enormous, horrible provocation of Munich.
The heavy moralising of the film script -written by a very biased writer handpicked by Spielberg and severely re-arranged from the original- shows no understanding of the radical differences between PLO terrorism and the Israelis' self defence against them. Of course the same equation continues today - with the same poor media judgment in trying to see it all as merely 'an eye for an eye' or a 'cycle of violence'. Today the whole world must take account of this very moral equation as we tackle Jihadist terror - and some innocent people like 'the tube runner' in London will inevitably get hurt, as in any war ever fought.
I was myself travelling on three of the bombed routes in London just three days before 7/7. Let us not blame the lawful authorities for doing their best to protect us all. And Israelis stand in the forefront of these moral authorities.
Let's not get sucked into meaningless moral relativism.
I don't think I want to see this expensive fiasco of a film. But I do want this generation to understand the evil of continued terrorism and how to respond to it morally.

The Protocols Ride Again

2006-01-28T17:16:00.000-08:00

The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion get re-treaded
Most historically-educated people have heard of this notorious booklet, which was even favourably referred to in Hilter’s Mein Kampf. Perhaps because of this very unsavoury past, few have read it today, or the books that continue to expose it in great detail as one of the world’s worst libels. I had not read it myself until recently when a friend put a copy in my hand. In the English translation by Victor E. Marsden it reads as a very crudely composed and repetitive forgery that could not possibly have come from the minds of Jewish scholars anywhere. It is the modern Daddy of World Conspiracy theories, purporting to be the plan of a hidden, small group of 19thC Zionists representing ancient Jewish ambitions, intent on taking over the whole world in a clever series of apparently co-ordinated coups, though no actual plan emerges from all the hate-filled verbiage. What is striking is how the rhetoric of the 24 Protocols describes, with exaggerated relish, many of the real features of totalitarian rule decades before this became the curse of the last century via the terrible revolutions that brought Stalin, Hitler, Mao and others to power.

Here I want to quote a few selected parts that eerily mimic the features of these dictators’ later methods. The full context is not so important here because so much is repeated. The hoaxers saw the international Masonic Lodges as one of the main means of control and propaganda, always being manipulated by the co-called Elders behind them. The hoaxers see all the monarchies - such as the Russian or Japanese - and all liberal democracies too, as mere pawns in this grand Jewish Conspiracy. Yet what actually occurred was not really predicted by the authors. The 1917 communist revolution was antagonistic to all religion including Judaism, and Nazi socialism was both deeply anti-semitic and semi-pagan in its imposed nationalistic ideology. They failed completely to predict the great persecutions of Judaism which were to come, while actually setting the stage for it all. Various supporters thought that by the 1920s they might already be too late to stop the nefarious Jewish world take-over coming to fruition.

So what today’s propagators of this stupid and pernicious tract want their readers to believe is that the Zionists planned a world very much like that which Hitler and Stalin almost achieved! In particular, the ‘plan’ was very similar to Hitler’s ambition of world military domination. Yet we all know that Nazi Germany was the antithesis of a Jewish-friendly regime, and the ‘wicked’ Jewish Diaspora has contributed enormously, not to totalitarianism, but to the success of all the free liberal democracies instead. Moreover, the Protocols imply that the Diaspora was permanent, allowing Jews to attain really universal control, without the encumbrance of having their own state. In fact, this tract did not envisage Zionism producing the State of Israel, which is itself the opposite of the phony Jewish model of dictatorship it glorified.
It is not surprising that the new Hamas Palestinian Authority administration has always believed in spreading the lie of the Protocols, because it contains all the repressive totalitarian elements that their inspiration -resurgent Jihad Islamism - glorifies. So study of this awful hoax is unfortnately necessary again. I believe nothing replaces actually reading evil texts like this, Mein Kampf too. We must hear the real voices of the enemies of freedom. I magine this text being spoken in the harsh tones of Hitler that we can still hear in such films as The Triumph of the Will.
My own italicised comments follow the quotations below. The term goyim or goy means Gentile. It can be understood here as ‘anyone not Jewish’. The capitalised passages were probably not in the original text, which underwent changes as it was appropriated for use by various anti-semitic groups and individuals before the 1930s. Among these was the notoriously gullible Henry Ford, who is famous for his anti-intellectual saying ‘History is Bunk’.

BRIEF SUMMARY
The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion originally a Russian creation, is a text frequently quoted and reprinted by anti-Semites in early 20th century Europe, purporting to describe a plan to achieve Jewish global domination. It has been repeatedly exposed as a hoax by numerous independent investigations during the last hundred years. The Encyclopædia Britannica describes the Protocols as a "fraudulent document that served as a pretext and rationale for anti-Semitism in the early 20th century".
Mainstream historians in the United States of America and Europe have long agreed that the text is fraudulent; this has also been stated in a number of court cases worldwide, e.g., as early as the 1930s in Bern, Switzerland. In 1993, a district court in Moscow, Russia, formally ruled that the Protocols were faked in dismissing a libel suit by the ultra-nationalist Pamyat organization, which had been criticized for using them in their anti-Semitic publications.
Despite all this, many Arab governments fund the publication of new printings of the Protocols, and teach them in their schools as historical fact. The Protocols have been accepted as fact by many Islamic extremist organizations, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al Qaeda.
In the past, the Protocols were publicly recommended by Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, one of the President Arifs of Iraq, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Colonel Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, among other political and intellectual leaders of the Arab world, and in March 1970, the Protocols were reported to be the top 'nonfiction' bestseller in Lebanon. [For more, see Wikipedia online.]

PROTOCOL NO. 7 [all are extracts only]
The intensification of armaments, the increase of police forces - are all essential for the completion of the aforementioned plans. What we have to get at is that there should be in all the States of the world, besides ourselves, only the masses of the proletariat, a few millionaires devoted to our interests, police and soldiers. Throughout all Europe, and by means of relations with Europe, in other continents also, we must create ferments, discords and hostility. Therein we gain a double advantage. In the first place we keep in check all countries, for they well know that we have the power whenever we like to create disorders or to restore order. All these countries are accustomed to see in us an indispensable force of coercion.

The similarity here with the secret aims of the Nazis is striking. They re-militarized quickly and kept all their concerned neighbours off balance, creating discord among Germans outside the Reich as a pretext for ‘restoring order’ by later invasion. Within the Third Reich, the military and the police were both co-opted as integral parts of state coercion.

PROTOCOL NO. 9
Our Super-Government subsists in extra-legal conditions which are described in the accepted terminology by the energetic and forcible word - Dictatorship. I am in a position to tell you with a clear conscience that at the proper time we, the law-givers shall execute judgment and sentence, we shall slay and we shall spare, we, as head of all our troops, are mounted on the steed of the leader. We rule by force of will, because in our hands are the fragments of a once powerful party, now vanquished by us. AND THE WEAPONS IN OUR HANDS ARE LIMITLESS AMBITIONS, BURNING GREEDINESS, MERCILESS VENGEANCE, HATREDS AND MALICE. IT IS FROM US THAT ALL-ENGULFING TERROR PROCEEDS.

Hitler as Fuehrer ruled by his threatening charisma and extra-legal thugs, backed by full control of the judiciary, building a society fearful of imprisonment for dissent, educated to conformity, steely in its military hardness, and Jew-hating. He saw himself as the embodiment of the Will to Power of the German Nation. It is curiously appropriate that Hitler read and admired this text, as its ideas mimic his closely.

You may say the goyim will rise upon us, arms in hand if they guess what is going on before the time comes; but in the West we have against this a maneuver of such appalling terror that the very stoutest hearts quail - the undergrounds, metropolitains, those subterranean corridors which, before the time comes, will be driven under all the capitals and from whence those capitals will be blown into the air with all their organisations and archives.

This passage shows the fanciful ‘futurism’ of terror bombers imagined by the 19th century mind, when underground urban transport was very new and seen as making its citizens vulnerable. Interestingly, the modern Jihadists also target urban train systems!

PROTOCOL NO. 10
The mob cherishes a special affection and respect for the geniuses of political power and accepts all their deeds of violence with the admiring response: "rascally, well, yes, it is rascally, but it's clever! . . a trick, if you like, but how craftily played, how magnificently done, what impudent audacity!" . . .
We count upon attracting all nations to the task of erecting the new fundamental structure, the project for which has been drawn up by us. This is why, before everything, it is indispensable for us to arm ourselves and to store up in ourselves that absolutely reckless audacity and irresistible might of the spirit which in the person of our active workers will break down all hindrances on our way.

This passage could well be a prediction of the attractions of communism and fascism worldwide in the 30s, and probably still today. Both systems seemed successful, daring, violent and unscrupulous all at once, seemingly ‘irresistible’ and ‘ mighty in spirit’ to the many sympathetic foreigners who did not live under their rule. Both promised to build a ‘ new fundamental structure’ for all social life.

WHEN WE HAVE ACCOMPLISHED OUR COUP D'ETAT WE SHALL SAY THEN TO THE VARIOUS PEOPLES: EVERYTHING HAS GONE TERRIBLY BADLY, ALL HAVE BEEN WORN OUT WITH SUFFERINGS. WE ARE DESTROYING THE CAUSES OF YOUR TORMENT - NATIONALITIES, FRONTIERS, DIFFERENCES OF COINAGES.
TO SECURE THIS WE MUST HAVE EVERYBODY VOTE WITHOUT DISTINCTION OF CLASSES AND QUALIFICATIONS, in order to establish an absolute majority, which cannot be got from the educated propertied classes. In this way by inculcating in all a sense of self-importance, we shall destroy among the goyim the importance of the family and its educational value and remove the possibility of individual minds splitting off, for the mob, handled by us, will not let them come to the front nor even give them a hearing; it is accustomed to listen to us only who pay it for obedience and attention. …The people will submit to this regime because it will know that upon these leaders will depend its earnings, gratifications and the receipt of all kinds of benefits.
Liberalism produced Constitutional States, which took the place of what was the only safeguard of the goyim, namely, Despotism; and a CONSTITUTION, AS YOU WELL KNOW, IS NOTHING ELSE BUT A SCHOOL OF DISCORDS, misunderstandings, quarrels, disagreements, fruitless party agitations, party whims - in a word, a school of everything that serves to destroy the personality of State activity.

This account was predictive of the Nazis as they constructed their growing German Reich, which abolished regional governments, class, applied censorship and propaganda in schools and all government, set children against their non-conforming parents with the Hitler Youth, and like communism, taught an absolute unquestioning obedience to the state. All this was justified by an exaggerated deriding of the immediate past societies, and an ideology of absolute equality in exchange for building the New Order.

PROTOCOL NO. 11
The goyim are a flock of sheep, and we are their wolves. And you know what happens when the wolves get hold of the flock? . . There is another reason also why they will close their eyes: for we shall keep promising them to give back all the liberties we have taken away as soon as we have quelled the enemies of peace and tamed all parties....
For what purpose then have we invented this whole policy and insinuated it into the minds of the goys without giving them any chance to examine its underlying meaning? For what, indeed, if not in order to obtain in a roundabout way what is for our scattered tribe unattainable by the direct road? It Is this which has served as the basis for our organisation of secret masonry which is not known to, and aims which are not even so much as suspected by, these GOY cattle, attracted by us into the "show" army of Masonic lodges in order to throw dust in the eyes of their fellows.
God has granted to us, His Chosen People, the gift of the dispersion, and in this which appears in all eyes to be our weakness, has come forth all our strength, which has now brought us to the threshold of sovereignty over all the world.

I include this passage as typical of the Protocols’ claim that only a dispersed Jewry could have the power to succeed in its world aims, using ‘secret masonry’. It also includes the demeaning animalistic language actually used by the Nazis against all Jews, another ‘mirror image lie’. Ironically, today’s anti-semitism again targets the Zionists for possessing the focus of the State of Israel, being now the ‘real’ danger to the world peace. The Protocols failed to predict this non-conspiratorial national aspect of Judaism, which followed the Holocaust and repression under communism too.

The word "freedom" which can be interpreted in various ways, is defined by us as follows: - Freedom is the right to do that which the law allows. This interpretation of the word will at the proper time be of service to us because all freedom will thus be in our hands, since the laws will abolish or create only that which is desirable for us according to the aforesaid programme.
We shall deal with the press in the following way: What is the part played by the press to-day? It serves to excite and inflame those passions which are needed for our purpose or else it serves selfish ends of parties. It is often vapid, unjust, mendacious, and the majority of the public have not the slightest idea what ends the press really serves. We shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb: we shall do the same also with all productions of the printing press.. NOT A SINGLE ANNOUNCEMENT WILL REACH THE PUBLIC WITHOUT OUR CONTROL.

A clearer description of the regimes of Stalin and Hitler could hardly be imagined. ‘Inflaming passions’ is always the role of one-party state propaganda. Legalism becomes a tool of repression, not ‘freedom under the rule of law’.

PROTOCOL NO. 13
In order that the masses themselves may not guess what they are about WE FURTHER DISTRACT THEM WITH AMUSEMENTS, GAMES, PASTIMES, PASSIONS, PEOPLE'S PALACES... SOON WE SHALL BEGIN THROUGH THE PRESS TO PROPOSE COMPETITIONS IN ART, IN SPORT OF ALL KINDS..

Hitler’s cleverly-staged Olympic Games is an example, and ‘people’s palaces’ were actually so named by Stalin’s regime. Both dictators sought to control the people’s tastes in leisure, art and literature with zeal, but with mixed success

PROTOCOL NO. 15
OUR GOVERNMENT WILL HAVE THE APPEARANCE OF A PATRIARCHAL PATERNAL GUARDIANSHIP ON THE PART OF OUR RULER. Our own nation and our own subjects will discern in his person a father caring for their every need, their every act, their every inter-relation as subjects one with another, as well as their relations to the ruler. They will then be so thoroughly imbued with the thought that it is impossible for them to dispense with this wardship and guidance, if they wish to live in peace and quiet, THAT THEY WILL ACKNOWLEDGE THE AUTOCRACY OF OUR RULER WITH A DEVOTION BORDERING ON APOTHEOSIS..

How true of both Stalin and Hitler, and the later Mao and Castro! The religiosity and paternalism of totalitarianism is a feature well noted also by George Orwell.

PROTOCOL NO. 16
Classicism, as also any form of study of ancient history, in which there are more bad than good examples, we shall replace with the study of the programme of the future. We shall erase from the memory of men all facts of previous centuries which are undesirable to us, and leave only those which depict all the errors of the government of the goyim. The study of practical life, of the obligations of order, of the relations of people one to another, of avoiding bad and selfish examples..

‘He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future’. George Orwell understood that totalitarians must obliterate any real history, as its truths condemn such rule as inhumane. It is anti-intellectual in the proper sense of the term, though it encourages ‘practical’ pseudo-intellectuals.

PROTOCOL NO. 19
In order to destroy the prestige of heroism for political crime we shall send it for trial in the category of thieving, murder, and every kind of abominable and filthy crime. Public opinion will then confuse in its conception this category of crime with the disgrace attaching to every other and will brand it with the same contempt.

True heroism, like truth itself, will be crushed by horrible slander and unjust suppression, and state propaganda will ensure that the public believe the lies it is told about the evils of the dissidents. The gulags and concentration camps were essential elements of this process. The authors and promoters of the Protocols knew that the viciousness of its anti-semitic rhetoric was an integral part of the intentions of their own racism.

So we see how remarkably the Protocols understood the full intentions and nature of the real totalitarian dictatorships that followed. No wonder Hitler liked them. This is a clue both to its hoax nature, as well as to the mindset of the anti-semitic authors themselves

A Walk near St Moritz, 2005

2006-01-28T01:40:00.000-08:00

In June 2005 I was privileged to visit my married daughter in beautiful Switzerland. This sort of scenery does the heart good, and the exercise was great too. There's a picturesque little white church in the distance.

Calm spirituality wins in the end

2006-01-28T00:55:00.000-08:00

ISAIAH 40:31 but they that wait for Jehovah shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.

In about 1960 I heard a 60-ish former China Inland Mission missionary explain true spirituality from this passage. He had amazing experiences to tell of living with the church under persecution in the awful Maoist 50s, so his opinion carried much weight for me, then aged about 16.

He looked at all us eager teens gently and said there were several stages to the spiritual walk. Each have their own characteristics that can easily deceive us. The youngest Christians 'mount up with wings as eagles' - like people newly in love, they are full of the glow of their feelings of faith which are very intense but can be counterfeited. Like all first love feelings, they do not last for long, though they are deeply felt at the time and can be all-persuasive, blocking out all other people and their needs.
Settling down, married couples have children, jobs and life's problems, but they enjoy the challenge and 'run without being weary' mostly because of their human strength, which they can mistake for God's strength at work in them. So they can become proud of their own human achievements and think they are so spiritual.
Here the missionary's voice became like that of the older man. He said only long experience of walking with the Lord gives the wisdom to distinguish between the life of human emotions and human strength, and the true faith-walk itself.
This requires a humble day-by-day trust in the faithful God who never will forsake the believer; this stage rests more on God when he knows his own strength is limited and waning. This, he said, was the strongest and best faith, the one that endures to the end, unspectacularly, modestly and seemingly slowly - ' they shall walk, and not faint'.
I can say that this one message has stayed with me for 46 years now, and I know it is more true today than when I heard it.
This proves to me that this Godly man had it right - he spoke 'true prophecy' and invited us all to take his own humble non-feelings-driven walk with the Lord.
I invite you to meditate on this great verse as he taught me to do.

In praise of non-emotive Christian language

2006-01-27T20:29:00.000-08:00

I am hoping to find some common-minded [in the best sense!] people by blogging. So here is a glimpse of my thinking on my faith. I found the following some time ago on the very good popular religious blogger site of Adrian Warnock in England, who is both Reformed and charismatic in theology. I am only the first, and distrust the second.
What do you think of my comment to his site, which received no reply?

Warnock: "are you desperate for a greater touch of God's Spirit to restore to us something of the supernatural feel of the great Revivals of the past?"

Barrie:
I note the words 'desperate', 'touch' and 'feel' here. I do not think Christians should ever be desperate, which has the feel of its French root word 'despair'. That is literally anti-faith, isn't it?
This reads like a secular 'touchy-feely' sales pitch. We need nothing but what Paul The Apostle preached -the Whole Counsel of God in the Gospel. I was brought up with just the Bible [KJV at first], and the Billy Graham Crusades, which had a true revival atmosphere and results without this kind of 'charismatic, super-additive emotive ingredient'.

Graham did not stress feelings to endorse the Gospel, nor the 'supernatural' in healings either.
If that makes me a 'Reformed Cessationist', I'm sorry, but I don't believe in joining in with the spirit of the New Age that we have absorbed so much into our self-regarding, self-promoting feely culture.

Revival is not ours to manufacture or be wistful about. It is the power of God Himself at work.
God's Spirit gives us the Real Thing, NOT a 'touch' and NOT just 'something of the feel' etc.
Trust Him to bring revival in His Time and by His Will.
He's still Sovereign.

Allowing for your comments

2006-01-27T20:25:00.000-08:00

I originally had the provision made for comments below, but I seem to have switched it off for the next postings. If you want to comment on these use this posting to comment. IHTH.

Why isn't redneck a racist term?

2006-01-27T19:49:00.000-08:00

This is an issue I have written about before to the press, but I have never seen the word anywhere in a list of non-PC racist terms. I have never read a criticism of its use, which I again have just read in the respectable Australian press.
It means, variously, a poorly-informed working class type, or a country hick who has been too long out in the sun. It always implies stupid and bigoted ideas, usually about race, religion or politics. But doesn't it only describe a white-skinned Caucasian [never an American Indian of course!]? So isn't it a derogatory term of colour?
Isn't it a general slur upon country people who get sunburnt in the normal course of their hard working lives?

I am going to send this to the newspaper and tell you later if it gets printed..

Like-minded Bloggers

2006-01-27T18:30:00.000-08:00

I just noticed that clicking on my interests brings up other bloggers listing the same. This looks like a good start for corresponding, but it may be a false lead in some cases.
I still haven't worked out how to put my photo witihn my profile right. Any help?

When I chose my template I didn't see the small statue. As I look at it now, it resembles the statue of Colonel William Light, the brilliant designer of my home city Adelaide in 1837. This statue sits proudly above the city, showing Light holding his plans and pointing to the laid out reality, which has been praised for its foresight in setting aside a ring of parklands about 800 metres wide to insulate the central grid of streets.
The statue on my blog looks a lot like him, so it will serve well.

Is only Islam to be protected in the press?

2006-01-27T17:31:00.000-08:00

Crossposted from Little Green Footballs, another favourite blog, where they have stopped new posters because they are so popular:

Barrie:
How long has it been since the Norwegian press protected the sensibilities of Christians about the portrayal of Christ in their Christian country? Their response below to a few cartoons contrasts strongly with the Danish media's backbone.
The 'tolerance policy' looks very hollow and inconsistent now. I would bet [if I did bet] that they published that Piss Christ 'art' picture some years ago - a crucifix immersed in urine by a very prominent 'artist'!

From LGF:
The left-wing government in Norway apologizes to Muslims worldwide for the publication of twelve Muhammad cartoons in the Norwegian newspaper Magazinet. Oslo sent out instructions to all the Norwegian embassies on how to respond to queries about the cartoons. Unlike the Danish government, the Norwegian government is not concerned about safeguarding the right to freedom of expression. Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Store, a leading member of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s Workers’ Party, wrote the following e-mail to the Norwegian embassies:
I am sorry that the publication of a few cartoons in the Norwegian paper Magazinet has caused unrest among Muslims. I fully understand that these drawings are seen to give offence by Muslims worldwide. Islam is a spiritual reference point for a large part of the world. Your faith has the right to be respected by us.
The cartoons in the Christian paper Magazinet are not constructive in building the bridges which are necessary between people with different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Instead they contribute to suspicion and unnecessary conflict.
Let it be clear that the Norwegian government condemns every expression or act which expresses contempt for people on the basis of their religion or ethnic origin. Norway has always supported the fight of the UN against religious intolerance and racism, and believes that this fight is important in order to avoid suspicion and conflict. Tolerance, mutual respect and dialogue are the basis values of Norwegian society and of our foreign policy.
Freedom of expression is one of the pillars of Norwegian society. This includes tolerance for opinions that not everyone shares. At the same time our laws and our international obligations enforce restrictions for incitement to hatred or hateful expressions.

Is Democracy the problem?

2006-01-27T17:17:00.000-08:00

I posted my reply below to 'Leonard' on Israpundit.com, a favoutite of mine

Leonard:
President Bush & his advisors must have recognised by now that by introducing Democracy to the Middle East this policy has resulted in the imposition of radical fundamentalist uncompromising regimes being established in the Region. If followed through AL Qaida will control Saudi Arabia, and Mubarak of Egypt will be replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood. Iraq will become a theocracy like Iran, and Fundamentalist would run Algeria. This has been a failed policy with devastating consequences for the Region & should be abandonned.

Barrie said:
Leonard, your reasoning is flawed. You imply that the democratic USA should deal normally with dictators worldwide, instead of seeking real democracy in other countries. In reality the only way to see progress in the world is to expose all dictatorships as corrupt, and seek a free press and fair elections everywhere.
In the PA there is no free press. If radical Islam gets elected anywhere, it will then have to justify its governing against real opposition. We have seen already in Iraq and Afghanistan that the example of people's democracy is real when it is allowed expression.
Even countries like Saudi Arabia and Syria are now aware of the tide of real democracy around them. Hamas will have to learn this too, or it will destroy its people. The West can stop funding the PA as a protest against its radicalism, or be exposed itself as self-defeating and without values. Recall how it once appeased Hitler? It must not act the coward again.

Sorry, more on Israel and the PA

2006-01-27T15:59:00.000-08:00

I'm most amazed by the Panglossian 'expert' commentators that are arguing Hamas really just wanted to get into power so it could repudiate its platform and renounce the worldwide, resurgent tide of radical Islam it rode into power on.
Just watch them now 'clamp down' on the PLO's Own Brand Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade... ridiculous, since they've just won the whole PA terrorism franchise.
Sadly, the PLO will have to try to out-compete them now, if it wasn't already doing so.
Shades of 'Hitler is now going to be a nice guy', circa 1933.

It's a real worry when people who should know better can't see the reality of the intolerance of radical islam to any part of the world not submitting to its domination, especially in the Middle East where it began..
I am a fan of the witty political blogger Tim Blair at http://timblair.net/ where you can see crossposted comments of mine often.
I must find out how to do a list of favourites here.

Hamas wins Palestinian Authority Election

2006-01-26T18:49:00.000-08:00

Let’s not get too excited. It’s as if the voters elected Mark Latham [Lathamas?], the failed Australian politician -the Crazies are now in the driver’s seat and we won’t have to listen any more to Arafatisms, which were made from both sides of the mouth and in both directions at once.
Arafat never missed the chance to miss a chance in 40 years, and now we know it wasn’t just him -it was the whole Palestinian electorate, now living on Planet Jihad.
In 2000 Arafat realised that he had to finally stop his terrorist career. Israel gave him a good offer and he could have banked it for interest later. They had allowed him into the territories in 1994 only on the basis that he had to give up all terrorist activities, but the First Intifada showed him that this wasn't going to happen. A secular socialist Palestine was inconsistent with radical Islam.
Instead, their children were to be the new martyrs for total victory over Israel. So he sided with them secretly, and bequeathed a new generation of Palestinians to the violent future of a Second Intifada, which sputters along and prevents any peace at all.
Hamas now must reform and accept a fair peace, or destroy their people. Sadly, the first choice is very unlikely, since Jihad Islamism is growing around the world.

2006-01-26T18:29:00.000-08:00

This is me in 1986 after a marathon. I hope to do one in my 60s, at shuffling pace.

Please be the first to correspond with me here...

2006-01-26T18:11:00.000-08:00

I am not vain, just trying to get my photo into the profile right, without success so far.
I've a lot more to learn, obviously. Please be the first to write to me.

2006-01-26T18:04:00.000-08:00

Is China the new Fascist Germany?

2006-01-26T16:50:00.000-08:00

We need to see doing business with China in the context of countries and industries doing business with Nazi Germany in the 30s. The characteristics of China today are very fascist because of its economic success coupled with totalitarian social control and military ambitions. It wants to march into Taiwan as Hitler did into Austria.
It shows no signs of being pro-Israel because it is not pro-democratic and is racist.
It occupies Tibet on a false nationalistic basis -Lebensraum revisited..
Google has caved in and sullied its motto. Where will it end?

My first posting here! I just posted this on a new blogger site questioning Google's relations with China.