Displaying posts published in

2016

How The Satanic Verses failed to burn:John Sutherland

In 1988, Bradford Muslims didn’t apparently manage to incinerate Rushdie’s book — symbolic, says Kenneth Baker, of the endurance of the written word.

This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if it ought to come with an option to buy a cut-price John Lewis coffee table.

On the Burning of Books is, in fact, much more than that. It wears its scholarship lightly. A weightier treatment of the topic for those interested can be found in Matthew Fishburn’s Burning Books (2008).

Kenneth Baker? A name that rings bells. But what did he do? He enjoyed high office in the Thatcher years. At one point he was touted as a contender for Downing Street. His legacy is the National Curriculum. Best forgotten is the Dangerous Dogs Act. Spitting Image caricatured him, spitefully, as a beslimed slug. He was probably the last politician in England seriously to use Brylcreem.

He has been out of the political game for decades now and, as Baron Baker of Dorking, has enjoyed his later years as a connoisseurial man of letters. Over the years (he is now 81) he has compiled notes on flagrant examples of book-burning. It’s something that gets his goat.

Fishburn devoted thoughtful chapters to what he called humanity’s ‘fear of books’. ‘I’ll burn my books,’ screams a desperate Faustus in Marlowe’s play, thinking thereby to escape the flames of Hell. He doesn’t: he can’t obliterate the books in his brain. He is what he’s read and must burn for it.

Monotonously cited, in various forms, is the Miltonic epigram, ‘Where men are burned, books are burned.’ (Baker recalls being setAreopagitica as an A-level text in 1952: things were different then.) There’s a sacred aura in printed books, even in the lowliest pulp paperback. My Waitrose has a rack or two. But whoever said ‘Where baked beans are burned, men are burned’?

How Much of our Culture Are We Surrendering to Islam? by Giulio Meotti

The same hatred as from Nazis is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.

It is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses of a poem, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.

It all occurred in the same week. A German judge banned a comedian, Jan Böhmermann, from repeating “obscene” verses of his famous poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A Danish theater apparently cancelled “The Satanic Verses” from its season, due to fear of “reprisals.” Two French music festivals dropped Eagles of Death Metal — the U.S. band that was performing at the Bataclan theater in Paris when the attack by ISIS terrorists (89 people murdered), took place there — because of “Islamophobic” comments by Jesse Hughes, its lead singer. Hughes suggested that Muslims be subjected to greater scrutiny, saying “It’s okay to be discerning when it comes to Muslims in this day and age,” later adding:

“They know there’s a whole group of white kids out there who are stupid and blind. You have these affluent white kids who have grown up in a liberal curriculum from the time they were in kindergarten, inundated with these lofty notions that are just hot air.”

As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “Western liberals are doing their dirty work for them; they’re silencing the people Isis judged to be blasphemous; they’re completing Isis’s act of terror.”

A few weeks earlier, France’s most important publishing house, Gallimard, fired its most famous editor, Richard Millet, who had penned an essay in which he wrote:

“the decline of literature and the deep changes wrought in France and Europe by continuous and extensive immigration from outside Europe, with its intimidating elements of militant Salafism and of the political correctness at the heart of global capitalism; that is to say, the risk of the destruction of the Europe and its cultural humanism, or Christian humanism, in the name of ‘humanism’ in its ‘multicultural’ version.”

Kenneth Baker just published a new book, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word. It is a compendium of so called “bibliocaust,” the burning of books from Caliph Omar to Hitler, and includes the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. When Nazis incinerated books in Berlin they declared that from the ashes of these novels would “arise the phoenix of a new spirit.” The same hatred is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

Mizzou: Telling Disabled People They’re ‘Inspiring’ Is a Microaggression Someone had better tell the Special Olympics. By Katherine Timpf

According to materials distributed by the University of Missouri Diversity Office, saying “you people are so inspiring” in reference to disabled people is not nice, but actually a microaggression.

The piece of advice is one of many included on a handout titled “Racial Microaggressions in Every Day (sic) Life,” which is available on an official school web page.

According to the handout, declaring that you consider people with disabilities to be “inspiring” is a problem because it amounts to “patronization.” Interestingly enough, the Special Olympics includes a link to subscribe to e-mails of “inspiring stories” on its website — which must mean that the supposedly charitable organization is actually just one giant, offensive microaggression.

Personally, I always considered it pretty normal to be inspired by people who are able to overcome difficulties of any kind — be they physical, mental, socioeconomic, or anything else — but I guess not. Thanks to Mizzou, I can see that this is actually very wrong, and that I am in fact a big jerk.

Among the list of sexist “microaggressions” on the handout is the fact that women aren’t asked as often as men are to help move boxes around the office. Of course, statistically and scientifically, men more often are physically stronger than women — but I guess science and facts don’t matter when discussing microaggressions. (Note: One of my favorite things about being a woman is that no one asks me to move boxes.)

The racial microaggressions include “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” because saying these things amounts to saying that “race does not play a role in life’s successes.”

RONALD LAUDER AT THE U.N.: BUILDING BRIDGES-NOT BOYCOTTS

World Jewish Congress (WJC) president Ronald S. Lauder addressing the plenary session of “Building Bridges, Not Boycotts,” the international summit on the delegitimisation of Israel at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and affirming his organisation’s commitment to the fightback against BDS.

Addressing more than 1,500 students, dignitaries, public officials and representatives of Jewish organisations at the conference convened by, inter alia, the WJC and Israel’s Mission to the United Nations, Lauder pledged that the WJC “will commit all of our resources, and all of our abilities, to help fight BDS.”

And he observed, inter alia:

“I wonder if all those people who support BDS have the slightest understanding of what this movement really means. Those BDS supporters who join marches on campus and chant: ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!’ I wonder if they realize that the River is the Jordan, the Sea is the Mediterranean. These activists are calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. The Muslim groups have their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood …

Make no mistake. The BDS movement doesn’t support the Palestinian people. It is strictly a campaign to delegitimise Israel, which is simply the latest attempt to deny the Jewish People their right to self-determination. Every other people on earth have the right, but BDS wants to deny that basic right to Jews…. ”

“[T]he day of the quiet Jew … of the ghetto Jew are long over,” he warned.

The Trump Nuclear Bomb Other public figures won’t admit they agree with him — but they often quietly adopt his ideas. By Victor Davis Hanson

Donald Trump has a frightening habit of uttering things that many people apparently think, but would never express. And he blusters in such an off-putting and sloppy fashion that he alienates those who otherwise might agree with many of his critiques of political correctness.

Nonetheless, when the dust settles, we often see that Trump’s megatonnage strikes a chord — and, with it, sometimes has effected change. In an odd way, the more personally unpopular he becomes for raising taboo issues, the more resonant become the more refined variants of his proposals for addressing these festering problems.

For the last several months, anti-Trump demonstrators have sought to disrupt his rallies; they attack his supporters and wave offensive anti-American and often overtly racist placards, while burning American and waving Mexican flags — often with a nonchalant police force looking on.

Trump shouts back that their antics are only further proof of his general point: Illegal immigration and an open border have subverted our immigration laws and created a paradoxical movement that is as illogical as it is ungracious. After fleeing Mexico, entering the U.S. illegally, and being treated with respect (try doing the same in any Latin American country), some foreign nationals have been waving the flag of the country they do not wish to return to, while scorning the flag of the country that they demand to stay in. But apparently they are not fond of Trump’s larger point, disguised by his barroom rhetoric, which is that the old melting-pot protocols of rapid assimilation, integration, and intermarriage have been sabotaged — and now the American people can at last see the wages of that disaster on national TV.

In response to the general public disapproval that focused on the violent demonstrations, anti-Trump protestors recently have announced that they will ban Mexican flags from their future rallies. They probably will not, but why did they even play-act that they would? Are illegal-immigration activists suddenly turned off by Mexico and appreciative of the United States? Be that as it may, it would surely be a good thing if immigrants to the U.S. and their supporters stopped attacking the icons of the country that they have chosen to reside in.

For that matter, why suddenly during the past six months did 16 Republican primary candidates begin talking about enforcing immigration laws, avoid the very mention of “comprehensive immigration reform,” and promise to finish the southern border fence? While they all deplored Trump’s mean-spirited rhetoric, they all more or less channeled his themes. Until the approach of the Trump battering ram, outrageous developments like the neo-Confederate concept of sanctuary cities being exempt from federal law were off limits to serious criticism — even from the Republican congressional establishment.

Trump dismissively characterized Judge Gonzalo Curiel as a “Mexican” (the absence of hyphenation could be charitably interpreted as following the slang convention in which Americans are routinely called “Irish,” “Swedish,” “Greek,” or “Portuguese,” with these words used simply as abbreviated identifiers rather than as pejoratives). Trump’s point was that Curiel could not grant Trump a fair trial, given Trump’s well-publicized closed-borders advocacy.

Most of America was understandably outraged: Trump had belittled a sitting federal judge. Trump had impugned his Mexican ancestry. Trump had offered a dangerous vision of jurisprudence in which ethnic ancestry necessarily manifests itself in chauvinism and prejudice against the Other.

Trump was certainly crude, but on closer analysis of his disparagements he had blundered into at least a few legitimate issues. Was it not the Left that had always made Trump’s point about ethnicity being inseparable from ideology (most infamously Justice Sotomayor in her ruminations about how a “wise Latina” would reach better conclusions than intrinsically less capable white males, and how ethnic heritage necessarily must affect the vantage point of jurists — racialist themes Sotomayor returned to this week in her Utah v. Strieff dissent, which has been characterized as a “Black Lives Matter” manifesto)? Had not Barack Obama himself apologized (“Yeah, he’s a white guy . . . sorry.”) for nominating a white male judge to the Supreme Court, as if Merrick Garland’s appearance were something logically inseparable from his thought?

In Initially Airbrushing Orlando Jihadist’s Calls, DOJ Followed Obama-Clinton U.N. Resolution against Negative Speech about Islam By Andrew C. McCarthy

Before reversing itself this afternoon amid rebukes from commentators and Republican leaders, the Obama Justice Department undertook to bleach the Islam out of Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen’s statements about his Islamist mass-murder attack — specifically, his pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State terror network and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the effect of which was to claim an Islamic doctrinal justification for the killing of 49 people, and the wounding of 53 others.

Even the White House appeared to be distancing itself from Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s original decision to release an edited version of one of Mateen’s 911 calls to the public. Obama, after all, had earlier conceded Mateen’spledge of allegiance.

Still, the Justice Department’s action was predictable. The purging of the transcript was a straightforward application of the Obama administration’s counter-constitutional U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, which purports to mandate the suppression of speech that could cast Islam in a bad light — regardless of whether the speech is accurate or the negative impression it creates is justified.

Lynch had said the Justice Department would edit out Mateen’s effort to fit his atrocity in the Islamic State framework. This purge was rationalized by the attorney general as a refusal to abet the spread of Mateen’s propaganda.

In fact, it was a promotion of the administration’s own propaganda — much like the whitewashing of references to Islam in instructional materials used to train American law-enforcement, military, intelligence agents.

From his first days in office, President Obama has forged a collaborative relationship with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The OIC is the largest United Nations bloc. It includes 56 nations with significant Muslim populations plus the Palestinian Authority (which these Muslim nations regard as a fellow sovereign). Throughout her four years as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was Obama’s point-person in the administration’s collusion with the OIC.

Among the most significant “achievements” of this partnership — and, from a constitutional perspective, the most appalling one — has been the adoption of Resolution 16/18. In blatant violation of the First Amendment, this provision calls on Western governments to outlaw any speech that “constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence” toward religion, on the rationale that such speech could provoke “religious hatred.”

Is Mass Incarceration Destroying American Communities? Putting criminals in prison makes America’s streets safer. By Heather Mac Donald

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is adapted from Heather Mac Donald’s new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

Often accompanying the spurious claim that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because of the war on drugs. An even more audacious argument is that incarceration itself causes crime in black neighborhoods, and therefore constitutes an unjust and disproportionate burden on them because blacks have the highest prison rate. This idea has gained wide currency in the academic world and in anti-incarceration think tanks. Professor Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School (whom we met as in “expert witness” in earlier chapters) offered a representative version of the theory in a 2003 law review article coauthored with two public-health researchers. Sending black males to prison “weakens the general social control of children and especially adolescents,” Fagan writes. Incarceration increases the number of single-parent households. With adult males missing from their neighborhoods, boys will be more likely to get involved in crime, since they lack proper supervision. The net result: “Incarceration begets more incarceration [in] a vicious cycle.”

A few questions present themselves. How many convicts were living in a stable relationship with the mother (or one of the mothers) of their children before being sent upstate? (Forget even asking about their marriage rate.) What kind of positive guidance for young people comes from men who are committing enough crimes to end up in prison, rather than on probation (an exceedingly high threshold)? Further, if Fagan is right that keeping criminals out of prison and on the streets preserves a community’s social capital, inner cities should have thrived during the 1960s and early 1970s, when prison resources contracted sharply. In fact, New York’s poorest neighborhoods — the subject of Fagan’s analysis — turned around only in the 1990s, when the prison population reached its zenith.

Fagan, like many other criminologists, conflates the effects of prison and crime. Neighborhoods with high incarceration rates suffer disproportionate burdens, he claims. Firms are reluctant to locate in areas where many ex-convicts live, so there are fewer job opportunities. Police pay closer attention to high-incarceration zones, increasing the chance that any given criminal within them will wind up arrested. Thus, incarceration “provides a steady supply of offenders for more incarceration.”

But if business owners think twice about setting up shop in those communities, it’s because they fear crime, not a high concentration of ex-convicts. It’s unlikely that prospective employers even know the population of ex-cons in a neighborhood; what they are aware of is its crime rates. And an employer who hesitates to hire an ex-con is almost certainly reacting to his criminal record even if he has been given community probation instead of prison. Likewise, if the police give extra scrutiny to neighborhoods with many ex-convicts, it’s because ex-cons commit a lot of crime. Finally, putting more criminals on probation rather than sending them to prison — as Fagan and others advocate — would only increase law-enforcement surveillance of high-crime neighborhoods.

Paul Ryan’s Treason The GOP must represent its voters. Daniel Greenfield

In an awkward interview with the Huffington Post, House Speaker Paul Ryan threatened to sue Donald Trump if he were to ban Muslim immigration or build a border wall with Mexico. Considering the current track record of suing Obama over abuses of power, this is little more than a confession of impotence.

And yet it’s deeply troubling that a top Republican is willing to go to such lengths to fight for Muslim migration or for that matter illegal immigration in general.

Paul Ryan insists that he will continue to “speak up in defense of our principles, in defense of not just our party’s principles, but our country’s principles”, but it’s telling that these principles seem to involve illegal immigration and Muslim migration.

Since when are either of these representative of our party’s principles or our country’s principles?

And yet they are indeed core principles for Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan had complained that a Muslim ban was, “not reflective of our principles not just as a party but as a country.” Like Obama, Ryan speaks of “our principles” without actually referencing specifics. While a constitutional conservative, speaks in terms of the Constitution, Ryan uses the “values” language of the left which references no laws, only general sentiments attributed to no specific law or document.

Though Paul Ryan claims that he wants to maintain the traditional separation of powers, and quotes the exact basis for it, he seems reluctant to do so when he claims that a Muslim ban would be wrong. Ryan knows quite well that his opposition to a Muslim migration ban is not based on the law. Like his support for illegal alien amnesty, it is based on the values construct of the left and not on the Constitution.

Obama’s ISIS Lies Exposed The Radical-in-Chief’s rosy fairy tales are contradicted by his own CIA director — and the undeniable facts. Ari Lieberman

Orlando’s Pulse nightclub terror attack will go down in U.S. history as the single largest case of mass slaughter ever conducted by a lone gunman in the nation’s 240-year history. Barack Obama’s shameful but predictable response to the carnage can best be characterized as deceitful spin involving a two-part strategy of obfuscation.

The first part involves deflection. Divert America’s attention from the main culprit – Islamic terrorism – to forwarding dual strawman/red herring arguments designed to confuse and mislead. By doing so, he hoped to draw America’s attention away from his own flawed foreign and domestic policies which enabled the ISIS-inspired Muslim terrorist to commit mass slaughter.

Obama cleverly but disingenuously framed the issue as a gun control matter, cynically exploiting the tragedy to advance his agenda for further eroding Second Amendment rights. In his eyes, it was the AR-15 sporting rifle (which turned out not to be the gun that was actually employed) and the National Rifle Association that bore direct responsibility for the killings. He then referred to the carnage as a “hate crime” directed against the gay community, completely glossing over the central role played by a malevolent political ideology that seeks to dominate and impose Sharia law on the West.

In fact, Omar Mateen never expressed anti-gay animus during his 911 rants to police though he did express disdain for U.S. foreign policies and unambiguously professed his Islamic leanings and allegiance to the Islamic State. Moreover, he scouted other locations, having no nexus with the LGBT community, before finally settling on the Pulse nightclub to execute his diabolical plans. Perhaps he did so because he was familiar with the club’s layout, having been there on multiple prior occasions as a patron. Or perhaps he viewed it a soft target in which he could easily inflict mass carnage. No one will know for certain why he chose Pulse but Obama has already set the agenda and charted a course for its trajectory. That trajectory places Americans on a thought process that deliberately diverts attention away from the main causes and culprits.

Memorial Day 2 weeks later: A day for the dead, but what about the survivors? Dr. Robin McFee

We are going to take care of the troops, first, last and all the time’ – George Marshall, 1940

Really?! General Marshall must be spinning in his grave.

You might be wondering why an article about Memorial Day is nearly 2 weeks after the actual day of commemoration, and why I will use it to talk about veterans. Simply put, if we want to honor the dead, let’s take care of the men and women in uniform they died for. I can picture the ghosts of deceased military – brave men and women who died in battle – floating above, and crying for their battlefield buddies who survived, because too many of these veterans sleep under bridges, and pan-handle on our street corners. Whether because of undiagnosed or undertreated psychiatric disorders – battlefield related or not – or economic reasons, too many of our former servicemen and women are marginalized. That needs to stop.

To be sure many community charities are trying to fill the gaps, and provide outreach to struggling vets. But it is a patchwork of efforts – sincere, sometimes effective, but not comprehensive enough.

Most countries have some form of commemoration for those who wore the uniform, especially those who died for their nation. Not that the media are doing much to honor the dead. But Memorial Day should also put into specific relief a sobering notion that we have active duty who can die in the next battle, and veterans who will die – not from an enemy’s bullet but on a street, homeless, hungry, alone, or sick and waiting for promised medical care from a system designed to provide for the military continues to fail.

On behalf of a grateful nation…but are we?

I shudder to think homelessness, untreated illness, or vets abandoned after being wounded is our nation’s expression of “gratitude,” or commemorating the sacrifice of survivors. Not exactly the stuff of a grateful nation.

The security of a nation rests upon the shoulders of men and women in uniform – and that security comes with a price…including blood. Memorial Day reminds us of that ultimate sacrifice made for our country. Veteran’s Day celebrates those who served, and by extension, those still in uniform; a day often overlooked by society beyond being a great time to buy a car. Neither Veteran’s Day nor Memorial Day seems sufficient. Critically important infrastructure changes are needed to provide for those who serve.

Often tempted to opine if the military voted Democrat instead of mostly Republican, would the administration treat our people in uniform better? Like maybe as well as the entitlement folks? Truth be told, neither party has distinguished itself in the service of our military’s needs.