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2016

When a Culture Unmans Itself By David Solway

Men need to “be better.”

—Michelle Obama in conversation with Oprah.

Western civilization is clearly coming part at the seams. There are so many destructive elements at work, they are almost impossible to list. But one of the most destructive of these elements, incited by a punitive feminist ideology, is the relentless campaign to delegitimize the very idea of manhood. And the most effective way to do that is to impugn male sexuality.

We are told constantly that we live in a virtual rape culture, a culture in which rape is widespread and condoned, victims are blamed, and rapists receive little or no punishment. There are rape cultures in the world. If one wants to see one in action, all one need do is look at the Muslim world or at Muslim enclaves and populations that have burrowed into Western nations, where atrocities and scandals continue to multiply. In the Western world, by contrast, rape and other forms of sexual misconduct—even mere allegations of sexual misconduct—are universally condemned and harshly punished.

No matter. Islamic culture gets a free pass while Western culture is said to be ravaged by gynophobia under the reign of male supremacism. In the new sexual paradigm that has clamped succubus-like upon the culture, the heterosexual male mainstream is under attack for the crime of harboring a normal sexual drive, which must be ruthlessly expunged in an offensive characterized by media propaganda, legislative bias and institutional practices. Respectable-seeming websites promote the total reform of masculinity using terms such as “mascupathy” to define masculine traits such as aggression and competitiveness as forms of disease needing to be cured. Western men are being progressively demasculanized, a deficiency which results, as Andrew Klavan argues, in “tremulous feminists who hysterically fear rape culture on college campuses where it is not, and Western leaders who don’t dare to see the rape culture inherent in invading Islam, where it is.”

What the Feminization of the West Has Wrought

The signs of anti-male bias are everywhere we look. The university, for example, has become a veritable minefield for male students, who may at any time be hauled before an administrative tribunal and their careers put in jeopardy for sexual misconduct, however trivial or ambiguous. A recent memo from my wife’s university mandates a statement against “sexual violence” in all course syllabi—mind you, nothing against harassing and lying about one’s professor for a better grade, shutting down conservative, Zionist, pro-Life or anti-feminist speakers, perpetrating racist hoaxes, denouncing the teaching of good English and male authors as forms of “microagression,” or any of the other violations of civil conduct that we have witnessed on university campuses recently. The only sexist harassment that takes place regularly in academia is feminist harassment of male students and staff—but that is considered not intimidation but enlightened practice.

Poll: Geert Wilders would lead Dutch Party for Freedom to 50% more seats than nearest rival By Sierra Rayne

A new poll in the Netherlands shows that Geert Wilders would, if an election were held today, lead his Party for Freedom (PVV) to 36 seats, or 50% more than the seats that would be obtained by the nearest rival party.

The Brexit results appear to have significantly boosted the popularity of the PVV. The same poll conducted a year ago had the PVV projected to receive 20 seats, almost half the level of current support.

Euroskepticism appears widespread in the Netherlands. When asked their opinion about the statement that “[t]he EU has made a significant contribution to economic growth in the Netherlands,” just 14% of PVV supporters and 50% of the overall public agree.

Similarly, only 14% of PVV voters and 51% of the public agreed that the “EU has helped to ensure that there are fewer wars in Europe.”

Only 2% of the PVV base and 14% of the Dutch public want the EU to become one country. An overwhelming percentage (83%) of PVV voters and 46% of all Netherland residents believe that the EU will fall apart within a decade.

Almost all PVV supporters (91%) and half (49%) of the public want to eliminate the Schengen Agreement, which involved the abolishment of internal border checks between EU members.

Support for a full withdrawal from the EU is high among PVV voters (86%) and at nearly 40% among the general public. Similar levels of support are seen for removing the Netherlands from the Euro.

Just 20% of the public (down from 50% in 2011), and effectively no PVV supporters, want to see any more powers transferred to Brussels.

About half the public worries about the outbreak of another world war, and a similar proportion sees a likelihood of revolutions across Europe during the coming years. Both percentages are substantial increases compared to how the Dutch public felt five years ago.

Two worthy documentaries By Marion DS Dreyfus

A portrait of an iconic movie director and the recovery of an autistic child provide the subject matter for two excellent documentary films just released.

De Palma Directors: Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow

Life, AnimatedDirector: Roger Ross Williams

A fascinating and by no means entirely hagiographic week of recording the master filmmaker — he wore the same shirt throughout shooting, for continuity’s sake — of the some-say misogynistic but suspense-drenched filmmaker.

Speaking directly to the camera, the genial, occasionally self-mocking De Palma discusses his methodology, why he chooses certain tracking angles, why specific actors are caught from various heights and distances, and in general gives a chewy, nutritious take on his trademark process, a privileged behind-the-scenes look at an avatar of a certain generation of great lensers, up there with Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg ,and our other faves.

De P delights in talking about the young De Niro and Pacino, whom he discovered in his own early filmmaking and school. De Palma unabashedly honors Hitchcock in camera setups, plotting, framing, suspense sequences and so forth. Provocative, tantalizing excerpts of his many iconic and still virulent films include Sisters, Obsession, loosely inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Dressed to Kill, and the taut G-man drama, Untouchables, high-school nightmare Carrie, nose-candy Scarface, and illegal eagle skeeves, Carlito’s Way.

There is much adult content, violence and sudden gore, which cut into the overall enjoyment, as did scenes involving women not being treated all that chivalrously. De Palma’s recollections and powerful opinions about his film, and others’ filmmaking, are worth the discomfort. No one is forcing anyone to see those films that handle women as props for bloodletting and screams.

As a doc, it ranks up there with the recent “Brando on Brando” — almost must-viewing for aficionados of the genre.

Shooting the Feminist Sheriff By David Solway

Sometimes one is tempted to shoot the sheriff. When we take note of what is going on in the town — the moral degeneracy of its affairs, the raging puritanism that has installed itself as a twisted form of prurience, cruel punishment for perceived sexual misconduct and natural behavior meted out under cover of the law, and indeed, the wielding of the law as an instrument of repression — the sheriff can no longer be respected or obeyed. Defiance of an entrenched administration that wears the badge of cultural authority and determines the politics and mores of our lives becomes a duty.

What I call “the town” is simply the place where we now live, the decaying precincts of Western civilization. In the name of “social justice” and a sterile version of sexual propriety — code for a species of depravity — a once-vigorous culture has proceeded to devitalize itself. Normative male heterosexuality is under assault while gays, lesbians, and transgenders are routinely celebrated and seldom if ever the object of police investigations or criminal proceedings for rape, assault, or molestation.

The same exemption applies to heterosexual women who are almost always deemed innocent in sexual misadventures while men are almost inevitably found guilty. Moreover, women who have lied by misrepresentation or salient omission in rape or assault cases are rarely sentenced for perjury or legal mischief. The docket is remorselessly slanted against the male defendant. Just ask the Canadian public broadcaster’s Jian Ghomeshi, the Duke lacrosse team, Columbia University’s Paul Nungesser falsely accused by “mattress girl” Emma Sulkowicz (who has not only remained unpunished but received a “Woman of Courage” Award from the National Organization of Women), the targeted fraternity at the University of Virginia in the Rolling Stone scandal, the as yet unidentified man falsely accused by the RCMP and a provincial judiciary of assaulting his autistic, non-verbal daughter (a suit based on a largely discredited therapeutic technique called “facilitated communication,” the Ottawa University hockey team (in which two players were charged with sexual assault — as yet unproven — and the entire team suspended by former Liberal justice minister and university president Alan Rock).

The feminist attack on a nebulous entity called the “patriarchy” asserting its putatively illegitimate sexist power over the female half of humanity is a paranoiac absurdity, a pathological misandry masking as a cultural verity. The feverish fixation on male sexual “perversion” and on the need for “liberating” alternatives can only lead to social confusion and mental derangement. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world,” a truth rejected by the sexual vigilantes of the day pushing a distorted system of sexual values — really a system of anti-values — at the cost of cultural sanity.

Will EU exit NATO after Brexit? Punishing Britain for leaving may outweigh defense concerns- Jed Babbin

Donald Trump says NATO is obsolete, too expensive and lacks the right makeup to deal with terrorism. He may be right, but if he wants to abandon NATO he may not get the chance because the European Union may beat him to it. It’s part of the fallout from the U.K. vote to leave the EU in the “Brexit” referendum.

The EU may cast NATO aside — not because the threat NATO faced is ended — but because the European Union’s members think it’s more important to punish Britain for Brexit than defend themselves against Russia, Iran and China.

Five days after the June 23 Brexit vote, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, released a new defense strategy plan that envisions replacing NATO with an all-EU defense structure. She’s aiming for a strategic independence that cannot exist inside NATO.

Ms. Mogherini’s “global strategy” proposal is part of the grandiose plan envisioned in Article 42 of the EU’s 2009 Lisbon Treaty. That article mandates a common security and defense policy for the EU and implies the need for a separate EU armed force outside NATO.

Ms. Mogherini, according to a Financial Times report, suggests “streamlining our institutional structure” in common security and defense policy which the FT characterizes as “a nod to calls for a joint EU military and planning headquarters.” In short, NATO without the United States and the U.K.

Does Islam Belong to Germany? “Islam is a political ideology that is not compatible with the German Constitution.” by Soeren Kern

“Former German President Christian Wulff said: ‘Islam belongs to Germany.’ That is true. This is also my opinion.” — Chancellor Angela Merkel, January 12, 2015.

“Angela Merkel’s statement obscures the real problem: A growing proportion of Muslim citizens in Europe does not share the Western system of values, does not want to culturally integrate and seals itself off in parallel societies.” — Thilo Sarrazin, renowned former central banker and a member of the Social Democrats, January 20, 2015.

“Islam is not a religion like Catholicism or Protestantism. Intellectually, Islam is always linked to the overthrow of the state. Therefore, the Islamization of Germany poses a threat.” — Alexander Gauland, AfD party leader for Brandenburg, April 17, 2016.

“An Islam that does not respect our legal system and even fights against it and claims to be the only valid religion is incompatible with our legal system and culture. Many Muslims live according to our laws and are integrated and are accepted as valued members of our society. However, the AfD wants to prevent the emergence of Islamic parallel societies with Sharia judges.” — AfD Manifesto.

“Anyone who believes Islam belongs to Germany should not hesitate to go one step further and declare: Sharia law belongs to Germany. Without Sharia law, there is no authentic Islam.” — Henryk Broder, German journalist, May 16, 2016.

A Ramadan Piece: The “Other” Islam by Salim Mansur

Abrahamic monotheism as represented in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, precedes and stands apart from politics as an ethical vision that transcends history. It was a vision which invited people to embrace their common humanity as created and gifted by one omnipotent deity, and to follow a revealed code of ethics for righteous living, holding the promise of peace with an end to interminable conflicts that divided people into warring tribes.

Thoughtful Muslims, for nearly a century before the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate, had been writing about the need for an Islamic reform. Europe’s cultural advancement following the Reformation and Enlightenment held up a mirror for the Islamic world to follow in similar direction to similar ends. There was a consensus among Muslims that Islam was not intrinsically opposed to the modern world, and a readiness to follow in the footsteps of the West.

This is the “other” Islam. This is submission to truth, whose most righteous exemplar was Abraham when his faith was tested by his Deity, according to the Hebrew Bible, to sacrifice his son. And this is the faith of Sufis who took Muhammad’s message to people in places far removed from the desert confines of Arabia. It is simply, as the Qur’an reminds (30:30), deen al-fitrah, the natural religion, or inclination, of man to know his Creator. There is no return of this “other” Islam; it never went missing.

The cover of the January 1976 issue of Commentary magazine announced its main story, “The Return of Islam,” by Bernard Lewis. The year of publication coincided with the coming end of the fourteenth century of Islam, and the anticipation of a new Islamic century beginning in 1979. Forty years later this essay by Lewis, widely recognized and respected as the most eminent scholar on the Middle East and Islam alive today, came to be celebrated as the first warning of the coming upheaval inside the world of Islam.

Lewis’s essay was a corrective to viewing the Middle East and its people, Arabs and Muslims, in terms of Western values. “Modern Western man,” wrote Lewis, “being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to conceive that any other peoples in any other place could have done so… [or to] admit that an entire civilization can have religion as its primary loyalty.” This meant, Lewis continued, the “inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world”.

Tony Thomas: Pauline Hanson’s Mixed Bag

Her economic policies reek of ratbaggery, so let us hope she doesn’t use her Senate clout to revive protectionism and tariffs. On multiculturalism and de-funding Big Climate’s fools and charlatans, however, she is with the angels. No wonder the ABC is already spitting insults.
Pauline Hanson is now a powerful force in a divided Senate. She may head a team there of two, three (with a NSW seat) or even four senators, on a platform including a Royal Commission into the corruption of global warming science. “This whole climate change is not based on empirical evidence and we are being hoodwinked,” she says. “Climate change is not due to humans.”

The Hanson policies will now, unavoidably, be brought into the mainstream political conversation. Hitherto, the media has chosen to treat her and her policies as “racism and bigotry” (they aren’t), “divisive” (code for “intolerable for us Leftists”) and as a butt for sex gibes.

The ABC has just now displayed a caricature of her as “Pauline Pantsdown”. The ABC’s only pretext for this crudity is “Simon Hunt’s Pauline Pantsdown character (right) was popular in the 1990s.”

Somehow I can’t imagine our ABC running an equivalent caricature of Labor’s Penny Wong as “Penny Pantsdown”, ditto Julia Gillard.

Expect new ABC managing director, Michelle Guthrie, to crack down hard on her myrmidons responsible for this sexist crudity against Hanson. Expect feminist Anne Summers to fly to Hanson’s defence any minute now. Expect ex-General David Morrison, Australian of the Year, to issue a new missive deploring ABC sexism – as he says, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Oh, and expect pigs to fly. The ABC illustration, published apropos of nothing at all, is below.

Actually, worse things have been done to Hanson by way of misogynist abuse. On March 15, 2009, while she was in her final week’s campaign as an independent for the Queensland State election, News Corp’s Sunday Telegraph and four other Murdoch tabloids published nude photographs purporting to be of Pauline Hanson in 1975. The papers paid a paparazzo $15,000 for them. Hanson’s election bid was defeated amid taunts and mockery, but the pictures of “Hanson” were manifestly fakes. In May Sunday Telegraph editor Neil Breen published a signed three-paragraph apology to her saying, “We have learnt a valuable lesson”. She obtained an out of court settlement.

Hanson is no longer easy prey. She is very likely to have as her running mate in the Senate the prominent climate sceptic Malcolm Roberts. He has been project leader for a sceptic think-tank, the Galileo Movement, founded by Case Smit and John Smeed.[i]

Roberts is an engineering honors graduate and MBA from Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is a one-time underground-coal miner and project executive, and his primary motive for joining Hanson is the fight against global warmists. The Galileo website says Roberts had been “statutorily responsible for thousands of people’s lives based on his knowledge and real-world experience of atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide.”

Roberts explains his move to the Hanson party: “She is not as the media and political opponents have portrayed. Pauline is intelligent, quick, honest, courageous and persistent. We are passionate about bringing back our country.”

Anything is possible among Senate minor candidates and Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats includes up-front warming sceptics[ii] and a sceptical/agnostic view of the warming panic. This includes a halt to warmist propaganda in school.

What a conundrum for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his side-kick, Greg Hunt, who brought their faux carbon tax into operation last week, under the emissions trading label. Turnbull said last month that Hanson “is not a welcome presence on the Australian political scene.” She responded reasonably that this was the electors’ call, not Turnbull’s.

What a conundrum for Tony Abbott, who organized the funding for the legal persecution of Hanson, claiming she had committed electoral irregularities. Hanson in 2003 was sentenced to three years gaol for fraud and served eleven weeks in maximum security, including some time in solitary confinement. In November, 2003, the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction but she was still left $500,000 out of pocket.

What a conundrum for The Greens, with their agenda to suicidally switch Australian energy to those expensive unreliables, wind and solar. Hanson outpolled the Greens in the Senate on Queensland first preferences, 9.15 per cent to 7.57 per cent.

On the Unity of Terror Orlando, Istanbul, Dhaka, Baghdad—and a 13-year-old girl murdered in her sleep.By Bret Stephens

Islamic terrorism has had a banner few weeks, with 49 Americans gunned down in Orlando, 45 travelers killed in Istanbul, 20 diners butchered in Dhaka, and more than 200 Iraqis blown up in Baghdad.

Oh, and some Israeli settlers were killed, too. But they’re not quite in the same category, right?

In November, after Islamic State’s massacres in Paris, John Kerry offered some unscripted thoughts on how the atrocity differed from others. “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” he said, referring to the January 2015 attack on the satirical French newspaper. He continued:

“There was a sort of particularized focus [to the Hebdo attack] and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday [in Paris] was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.”

Mr. Kerry’s remarks again betrayed the administration’s cluelessness about ISIS, which aims to annihilate anything it doesn’t consider . . . Islamic. Understanding its takfiri version of Islam, with its sweeping declarations of apostasy, is essential to understanding how it thinks and operates.

But no less telling was Mr. Kerry’s view that not all terrorism is fundamentally alike; that some acts of terror have a rationale “you could attach yourself to.” The comment is striking not for being unusual but for being ordinary, another formulation of the conventional wisdom that terrorism, like war, is politics by other means. From such a view it’s a short step to treating some acts of terror as legitimate, or nearly so.

Which brings me to the case of Hallel Yaffe Ariel, a 13-year-old Israeli girl who on Thursday was stabbed to death in her sleep by a 19-year-old intruder named Mohammad Tra’ayra. It’s difficult to imagine any act as evil or as cowardly as murdering a child in her sleep. But Hallel lived with her family in the West Bank Israeli town of Kiryat Arba, making her a settler, while Tra’ayra, who was shot dead on the scene, came from a nearby Palestinian village.

What happened to Hallel has happened to countless settlers: five members of the Fogel family, butchered in their beds in 2011; the three teenage boys who were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 2014; the rabbi who was shot and killed on Friday on a West Bank road while driving with his wife and two children. Yet their deaths are supposed to be different from those of other terrorism victims, since they were all “occupiers” whose political crimes rendered them complicit in their own tragedy. That’s how much of global public opinion has long treated terrorism when the target is Israel. It has a rationale. It’s understandable, if not justifiable. It’s Israel’s problem, Israel’s fault, and has no bearing on the rest of us.

For many years, the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan made common cause with Hamas. Israeli officials have accused Turkey of hosting a Hamas command center—a key point of contention in Jerusalem’s efforts to reconcile with Ankara—and Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly met with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, including just days before last month’s airport attack.

The Turkish people deserve full sympathy for that atrocity. But no sympathy is owed a Turkish potentate who has been sympathetic to terrorists as long as they aimed their fire at Israel or other convenient targets. All the more so since until recently Mr. Erdogan’s attitude toward Islamic State matched ambivalence with indifference, to put it diplomatically.

What’s true of Turkey goes for other recent victims of terrorism. Pakistan has long played a double game with terrorists, supporting groups that hit civilian targets in Afghanistan and India, only to be shocked when the same groups, or their cousins, turned against the mother country.

Saudi Arabia’s former interior minister, the late Prince Nayef, was for years the head of the Saudi Committee for Supporting the Al Aqsa Intifada, in which capacity he distributed millions to “the families of martyrs.” As late as November 2002, he blamed 9/11 on a Zionist plot, only to be disabused of the view once al Qaeda began attacking Saudi Arabia directly. CONTINUE AT SITE

MY SAY: A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE ON JULY 4

I have received several friendly notes reminding me that the founding fathers whom I revere were also slave holders. They were and for the record let me state that slavery was a vile, corrupt and corrupting institution.

But when our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were drafted, what was the scene in Europe?

In England, public executions were the norm and they were conducted at lunch time so that parents and children could watch like a spectator sport.

In France, seventeen years after 1776 the Reign of Terror (September 1793 – July 1794), disregarded the motto of the Revolution “liberte, egalite, fraternite.” The “enemies of the revolution” were summarily executed and the death toll in ten months was 25,000.
In Russia, Catherine the Great (Empress 1762-1796) who has been called an”enlightened” despot she maintained a system of “serfdom”…a form of slavery whose victims lived in squalor and misery working mines and foundries and seldom lived beyond their thirties. She used them as chattel and “gifted” them to her friends and lovers.