Following another recent jihadist effort (thankfully thwarted) to destroy a Christian church in France, the essayist Fjordman commented:
“The differences between the Middle East and Europe are growing smaller every day.”
Following another jihadist attack (thankfully, only jihadists were killed) on a Texas gathering of courageous artists and other defenders of free speech, it seems that the differences between Europe and the US are getting smaller every day.
Diana West has performed yeoman’s work in exposing the Soviet-FDR connection in American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. She has aired out America’s dirty laundry and hung it out to dry. Neocons and other strange creatures attacked her for contradicting their over half-century-old meme that FDR was a blameless dupe of Joseph Stalin and that there were no real Soviet agents and fellow travelers in FDR’s administration.
Such were the number of attacks and the personalities making them that she had to write another book to counter all the lies, misconceptions, academic pufferies, character assassinations, and misrepresentations about her and American Betrayal in those attacks, in a second book, The Rebuttal: Defending ‘American Betrayal From the Book Burners. I followed this ongoing exchange between West and her detractors from Day One. It was similar to watching Cyrano de Bergerac take on a hundred cutthroat swordsmen. I can hear her muttering now, about the caliber of her attackers: “I have been robbed. There are no hundred here!”
On the evening of May 7 at the Luxe Hotel in Los Angeles, Dr. Mary Grabar, who taught college English for 20 years and has been writing about education for the last 10 years, will discuss [2] the influence of 1960s radical Bill Ayers and his comrades, and offer strategies for fighting it.
Mary Grabar was born in Slovenia but her parents took her and fled the communist regime to Rochester, New York. She went on to teach in colleges and universities in Georgia for 20 years, earning a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia in 2002.
Today she is a dissident to the reigning political correctness on our college campuses. She came to conservatism after witnessing the deliberate destruction of our literary heritage and our respect for the West and for the United States by radical professors in her graduate seminars. In 2011 she founded the Dissident Prof Education Project [3], Inc., dedicated to “resisting the re-education of America.”
I recently posed to Ms. Grabar some questions about her book and the upcoming presentation.
This year is the centenary of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the occasion for revisiting that momentous discovery by paying tribute to one of the most famous scientists of modern times. Steven Gimbel’s brief book is a welcome contribution to that event, placing Einstein in his “space and times,” as his subtitle has it. “It was relativity,” he declares, “that made Einstein Einstein”—that gave the scientist the authority (the standing, a jurist might say) to pronounce on public affairs. Sixty years after his death, Einstein still enjoys that authority. The current issue of an English journal, in a discussion of the war against ISIS, quotes at length (and critically) a 1947 article by Einstein on the Cold War. And as I write, a Washington Post article on the Middle East peace process cites Einstein on the futility of repeated experiments, concluding, “This applies to Gaza.”
“It’s safe to say that no Dutchman has impacted American politics and foreign policy as much as Wilders since Peter Schagen announced the purchase of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians in 1626,” David Francis wrote at Foreign Policy the day after the jihadist assault on Garland.”
After two Muslim lawmakers tried to block world-renowned activist Geert Wilders from entering the country, he defiantly vowed his warnings about the existential threat Islam poses to Western civilization would never cease.
“I know one thing,” Wilders told the audience April 29 at a Capitol Hill reception co-sponsored by Reps. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).
“They are very ineffective because I’m here,” he said to laughter and applause.
“It’s really risky to tell the truth about Islam,” said Wilders who has had round-the-clock bodyguards protecting him for more than a decade.
A frightening reminder [2] of just how risky telling the truth about Islam can be was delivered Sunday to Wilders and 300 attendees at an art competition featuring works depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
Depicting the founder of Islam in any medium is strictly forbidden and deemed blasphemous in Islam. Muslims have a history of killing and maiming those who commit what their religion deems to be blasphemy, especially when it comes to the founder of their faith.
Baltimore is the latest American city to become a stage for the farce that is our national racial discourse. The swift, politicized indictment of 6 police officers for the death of Freddie Gray––which brought down, for now, the curtain on this performance by abandoning all the canons of procedural justice–– is a fitting end to this sorry spectacle.
The winners of this shameful display are obvious, as they always are after these riots. Local thieves, gangsters, and thugs; bourgeois white “anarchists” out on a lark; junior-high posers indulging adult-sanctioned destruction; well-heeled black politicians fanning the flames and leveraging the violence for career advancement; race-baiting vultures like Al Sharpton, and the sensationalist national media all benefitted. Most important, the false narrative of a national conspiracy of racist cops itching to murder innocent black men was yet again perpetuated by race hustlers and their progressive enablers.
The losers are the local black businessmen, the law-abiding black residents, the blacks trapped in ghetto hellholes, and the principle of social order as the necessary foundation for individual autonomy and advancement. Worst of all, black Americans have been betrayed by yet another spectacle that reinforces every racist stereotype blacks fought against during the decades of Jim Crow.
Controversial, intolerant and provocative. Mainstream media outlets broke out these three words to describe the “Draw the Prophet” contest, the American Freedom Defense Initiative and Pamela Geller.
While the police were still checking cars for explosives and attendees waited to be released, CNN called AFDI, rather than the terrorists who attacked a cartoon contest, “intolerant.” Time dubbed the group “controversial.” The Washington Post called the contest, “provocative.”
Many media outlets relied on the expert opinion of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a multi-million dollar mail order scam [2] disguised as a civil rights group, which had listed AFDI as a hate group. Also listed as hate groups were a number of single author blogs, including mine, a brand of gun oil and a bar sign [2].
Schoolchildren in Tower Hamlets grow up under the shadow of non-violent but extremist ideology, funded by the British government. Meanwhile, the British media and politicians are busy debating the causes of radicalization.
“Non-violent” but extremist Islamic movements seek to offer their own networks as alternatives to the jihadists.
In February, three London schoolgirls flew to Istanbul, from where they travelled by road to Syria to join the Islamic State. British police have confirmed that at least 700 Britons have now joined the terrorist group as fighters. Over the past year alone, 22 British women, most under the age of 20, are believed to have travelled to Syria to become “jihadi brides.”
These three London schoolgirls, who lived in the borough of Tower Hamlets, were not the first from there to travel to Syria. They were not even the first Islamic State recruits from their school — nor, it seems, will they be the last.
Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina.
Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?
When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of “us against them” that was more popular.
That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a “legacy of slavery” in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.
The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.
A review of: Charles Murray in his new book By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,
The constitutional government of these United States of America is sick beyond the curative, or even palliative, powers of the ordinary process of legislation, elections, and the appointing of constitutional judges. Perhaps the only solution left to us is civil disobedience, to throw sand in the gears of the regulatory state. [See related episode of PJTV’s Trifecta in video below.]
So says Charles Murray in his new book By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, scheduled for release May 12. His remedy: create a “Madison Fund,” from private donations, to vigorously defend small businesses and individuals against the unconstitutional regulations that strangle our economy and our liberty. By flooding the zone, Murray hopes to cripple the ability of the regulatory state to fight a multi-front war against we, the people.
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