MARILYN PENN: BEWARE OF THE VIRTUECRATS ****
http://politicalmavens.com/
So the Dalton School has decided that satire is not an acceptable form of comment in their rarified academic cloister. After getting some flak from students who watched “CSA: The Confederate State of America,” a pseudo-documentary of the U.S. had the south been victorious in the civil war – the administration immediately apologized for its insensitivity. Rather than using the opportunity to teach the unique, historic value of satire in the arts, the school chose to beg for mercy from the parents of those wounded students. How many of the parents and students have been to see “The Book of Mormon” and laughed comfortably through its skewering of Mormons? How many of the parents also went to see “The Producers,” making light of Hitler and the Nazis? Both of these plays were award-winning box-office mega-hits geared to the same demographic group that sends its children to New York’s elite private schools. Yet the doyens of our politically correct culture have deemed it ok to spoof certain topics but not others. Slavery is sacrosanct though genocide is not. Women and gays are; white men not. Palestinians and Muslims protected; Israelis and Jews – fair game.
Dalton is just a small speck in our politically correct world. Another guardian of our selective morality is Oxfam International, a collection of aid groups purporting to combat hunger and poverty everywhere – except the west bank of the Jordan river where an Israeli company operates a factory with 900 workers, 500 of whom are Palestinian. They work alongside Israelis, earn the same salary and receive the same benefits except for one extra – there is a mosque on the premises exclusively for their religious needs. The workers are happy to have well-paid jobs and by their reportage, get along well with each other. This integration is exactly what we westerners profess to value, and for some political thinkers, economic cooperation is the key to peace in the middle east. But for the holier than thou Oxfam, SodaStream is a business operating on occupied territory. Despite the enormous advantage of a company providing 500 workers with an excellent livelihood – Oxfam prefers that we boycott any Jewish employers operating from these disputed areas to the logical conclusion of unemployment for the very population they are pretending to help.
And, related to the attitude of Oxfam, there are those brave Jewish liberals who objected in writing to Mayor de Blasio extending his support for AIPAC at the organization’s dinner in New York. The long list of Jews consider AIPAC a right wing group supporting a right wing Israeli government which they cannot abide, notwithstanding the fact that the government was duly elected in a democratic state. Many of these same names would be on a list for ongoing dialogue with Iran and immediate cessation of sanctions. They would surely have been at home at Columbia University on the two occasions when Mahmud Ahmadinejad was invited to speak after Iran had announced its plans to eradicate Israel from the map of the world. They are not offended that some of de Blasio’s appointees are people closely connected to a lying, race-monger – Al Sharpton. They are representatives of synagogues that worry more about Islamophobia than about the safety of Israel in a world increasingly accepting of anti-semitic rhetoric, rioting and violence.
With political correctness, everything depends on which issues become your sacred cows and which become your betes-noir. These have less to do with right and wrong than with currently fashionable trends whose morality gauge is more akin to choosing the right hemline length than to the core values of western civilization.
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