RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the current tensions with the Islamic World, pundits bandy about received wisdom that in fact is often ignorance. Here are a few examples.

1) The solution of radical Islam must come from within Islam.

Perhaps it could. It would be nice to see the advice of General Sisi of Egypt [1] take root among the Islamic street. It would have been nice had the Arab Spring resulted in constitutional republics from North Africa to Syria. It would be nice if an all-Muslim force took on and defeated the Islamic State. It would be nice if Iran suddenly stopped stonings and Saudi Arabia ceased public whippings. It would be nice if Muslims dropped the death penalty for apostates.

Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that any of these scenarios is soon likely. Nor is there much historical support for autocracies and totalitarian belief systems collapsing entirely from within. Hitler was popular enough among Germans until the disaster of Stalingrad [2]. The Soviet Union only imploded under the pressures of the Cold War [3]. Mussolini was a popular dictator — until Italy’s losses in World War II eroded his support. The Japanese emperor only was willing to end the rule of his militarists when Tokyo went up in flames and the U.S. threatened more Hiroshimas. Only the collapse of the Soviet Union and its bloc pulled the plug on the global terrorism of the 1980s.

In her valediction to a decade and a half of syndicated journalism, Diana West expresses [1] her disappointment that there has been little or no progress over the years in advancing the debate about Islam and the specter of national decline. In some respects, the situation has deteriorated dramatically. “Indeed, now the U.S. faces the world without a defended border, with increasingly cheapened citizenship and no lawful immigration policy.” The same is true to varying degrees of other western nations as well. Her summation hits home for many of us: “It is hard to watch the world falling apart.”

The name of the game today is denial of the undeniable all across the spectrum of the major issues that afflict us. Denial that temperatures have been stable for the last eighteen years and that the diminution of sunspot activity heralds an age of global cooling rather than warming, as John Casey, president of the Space and Science Research Corporation, has decisively established in his recently published Dark Winter [2]. Denial that Israel is the only democratic, morally legitimate state in the Middle East and that the Palestinian narrative of historical and cadastral residence is demonstrably false [3]. Denial that Islam is a totalitarian entity and a religion of war that has set its sights on the ruination of western societies; and denial of the fact that Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization, for all its flaws, marks the high point of human political, social, cultural and scientific development.

The Algerian example shows that deploying a few thousand French troops is hardly sufficient to win this war.

While the French Pied-Noirs in Algeria in 1962 still had a place to be “repatriated” to, for the indigenous Europeans who want to escape Islam, there is simply so safe haven any more.

Fear is already ruling Europe.

Last week, the authorities in Belgium were able to prevent a major terror attack about to be committed by Belgian jihadis who had returned from Syria. The Belgians were lucky, and apparently they know it. “It takes 24 police officers to shadow one single jihadi who has returned from Syria,” Belgian officials say. “We simply do not have the manpower to keep an eye on all of them.” There are at least 101 returned Syria fighters in Belgium, meaning that a small army of almost 2,500 policemen is needed to follow them all.

The demonstration gathered nearly four million people, but seeing in it a mobilization against terrorism, jihad and anti-Semitism would be a mistake.

The Ambassador of Saudi Arabia attended, shortly after his nation had just finished flogging the young blogger Raif Badawi with the first 50 lashes of his 1000 lash sentence. Badawi is being flayed alive — “very severely,” the lashing order said. He has 950 lashes to go.

Mahmoud Abbas, the President of Palestinian unity government, which includes Hamas and supports jihadist terrorism as well as genocide, was at the forefront — smiling. Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, was originally not invited. He came anyhow. He was told not to speak. He spoke anyhow. As a sign of disapproval, French officials left before his speech.

Although six Jews were among the seventeen victims, the anti-Semitic dimension of the attacks was barely spoken about.

The words “Islam” and “jihadist” were not mentioned. President François Hollande said, against all evidence, “Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with Islam.”

Few Muslims came. They stated their only concern: “Avoid stigmatization of the Muslim community!”

Anyone who watches television and sees what is happening in many Muslim countries has to be doubting that Islam is peaceful.

Several polls show that more than 70% of the French think Islam is incompatible with democracy and Western civilization. Those polls predate the attacks.

The French demonstration of “unity” on Sunday, January 11, may have attracted nearly four million marchers and shown a facade of unity, but behind this facade, rising tensions are approaching the breaking point.[1]

Government members immediately called for fighting “terrorism” and for “national unity.” Mainstream media called for defending “free speech.” Signs saying “I am Charlie” [“Je Suis Charlie”] began to appear the next day and quickly multiplied. TV channels showed the sign on their screens. Newspapers and magazines put it on their front page.

After the terrorist attack against the kosher supermarket, signs saying “I am a Jew” appeared, too, but were much less numerous. Although six Jews were among the seventeen victims, the anti-Semitic dimension of the attacks was barely spoken about.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2015/01/going-under-in-europe/

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary.
In one of those grisly juxtapositions that are so characteristic of life under the aspect of postmodernity, my first reading of “Wagner and the Jews” was interrupted by the breaking news of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and its aftermath, a second massacre in a Paris kosher supermarket. The smoke had hardly cleared before a prominent British newspaper was publishing a story that started off like this: “More than half of British Jewish people fear Jews have no future in the UK, according to a new study which also reveals that anti-Semitic sentiments are more prevalent than widely believed.” Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, had already informed the world that “every French Jew I know has either already left or is working out how to leave.” Europe, it would seem, is well on the way to becoming—to use a term favored by Richard Wagner’s most prominent admirer—Judenfrei.

Hence the uncanny timeliness of “Wagner and the Jews,” in which Nathan Shields takes a searching and persuasive look at the ways in which Wagner’s operas embody his anti-Semitic obsessions. The human capacity for self-deception is and will always be infinite, but I cannot imagine that any lover of Wagner’s music who reads Shields’ essay with an open mind will thereafter find it possible to erect a cordon sanitaire separating the composer’s operas from his ideas. They are consubstantial, as he meant them to be, and those who think otherwise are ignoring the self-evident assertions of their creator, who believed his work to be the New Testament of a religion of art, a “counter-creation” (as Shields explains it) that contained no place for “the Jews or their God”:

The Starry Messenger Van Gogh failed as an art dealer, dropped out of divinity school and was deemed too zealous to be a missionary. At 27, he took his brother’s advice and became a painter.

“Vincent van Gogh understood his art as nothing less than a lifeline for his immortal soul, the elusive reason for his existence. The continued prominence of his work as a touchstone of cultural achievement may, in part, offer redemption for his struggles. His life is unquestionably art history’s most compelling story of misunderstood genius, and whether told in a book that is too fat or too thin, too speculative or too terse, his story will always be worth reading.”

When he posed for his renowned self-portraits, Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) adopted a variety of guises, thoughtfully assessing the effects of life’s unfolding events on his character. He might wear the straw hat in which he worked, or an overcoat for a day in the city, or a bandage over his wounded ear. But when we see his piercing blue eyes and sober visage staring out from the canvas, we feel sure that this is Vincent, a singular personality who takes his own measure and yearns to find his place in the scheme of things. “My existence is not without reason,” the artist once wrote to his brother Theo. “There is something inside me, what can it be?”

British painter and writer Julian Bell answers that question forcefully in the subtitle of “Van Gogh: A Power Seething,” an impressively concise biography that offers a solid introduction to the troubled artist’s life, paintings and emotional travails. Imagining the interior of Van Gogh’s psyche, Mr. Bell invites us to picture “a frantic internal bubbling, driven by a heat from below, liable to boil and spill beyond the container of personal identity.” Add an ear and a razor to that scenario and there can be little doubt what happens next.

The National Front leader says ‘we are the only ones to solve the problem’ of the country’s Islamist threat.

Nanterre, France

Following last week’s terror attacks in Paris on journalists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and on a kosher supermarket, many Western leaders have been reluctant to say the motive was at all religious. French President François Hollande said Charlie Hebdo had been targeted by “obscurantism,” whatever that is. And White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Tuesday spent a painful five minutes explaining the Obama administration’s aversion to using the term “radical Islam.”

That’s not a problem for Marine Le Pen, who is never obscure.

“It’s clear Islamic fundamentalism,” says the leader of the National Front, France’s far-right political party that has been gaining in the polls. “Now all the eyes are open,” she adds, referring to a general French awakening to the Islamist threat. And “we are the only ones to solve the problem,” by which she means the National Front.

Once a political outlier, Ms. Le Pen has been gaining prominence as France’s problems—a moribund economy and its un-assimilated Muslim-immigrant population—have become more acute and seemingly beyond cure by the traditional political class. Now, in the aftermath of the home-grown Islamist slaughter in Paris, Ms. Le Pen is betting that she is the French politician most likely to benefit from her countrymen’s shock and disbelief over the threat in their midst.

While Jordan occupied Jerusalem 1949-1967 Arab/Muslims routinely smashed, defaced and desecrated all Jewish shrines, cemeteries. Ancient Jewish gravestones were made into latrines…..After Israel liberated its capital Jerusalem in 1967 Israel meticulously restored all sacred sites of all faiths. rsk

Raymond Ibrahim reported:

A man was kneeling in prayer before the statue of the revered Madonna, with the photograph of a loved one in hand, in the small chapel of St. Barnabas in Perugia (Italy), when he was attacked by five “immigrants.”

The first thing they did was rip the photo from his hands.

Next they unleashed their hatred against the image of the Virgin Mary. They broke the statue to pieces and then urinated on it.

Don Scarda, pastor of St. Barnabas, said the event was led by five “foreigners.” By the time police arrived at the chapel, the unidentified attackers had already fled.

The incident has caused a stir among locals. Some have lambasted Pope Francis who is accused of appeasing immigrants—mostly Muslims—to wild extremes. Earlier he had said that “Migrants, through their own humanity, cultural values, expand the sense of human brotherhood.”

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reflects on a week that has seen a nation realise it can put aside its differences at the graveside.

It is surely fitting that the best comment on the extra-ordinary days we have lived since the Charlie Hebdo shootings has been made in, what else, a cartoon.

Staring at a crystal ball, a crone predicts: “You’re going to be assassinated by terrorists…the bells of Notre Dame will be rung in your honour; there will be a procession led by Hollande, Valls, Sarkozy, Merkel, Cameron, even Netanyahu… there will be tricolours everywhere and people will sing the Marseillaise…both the Nasdaq and the Académie Française will proclaim ‘Je Suis Charlie’ and the Pope will pray for you…”

Opposite the fortune-teller, Charb, Tignous, Cabu and Wolinski, the cartoonists murdered in the attack and known for their militant atheism and iconoclastic contempt of political pieties, are so contorted with laughter that they can’t sit straight; crying and howling with glee at such a joke.

The Fallacy of Workable Tyranny

I was asked to watch and rate the first episode of an up-and-coming series for Amazon Instant Video, which was an hour long, and to provide remarks. Here is an expanded version of my assessment of the episode, or what I would have said had there not been a word count limit set by Amazon.

Please help us improve Amazon Instant Video by rating the video and audio quality of The Man in the High Castle Episode 1: The Man in the High Castle.

I read The Man in the High Castle (or Tower) when it was first published decades ago, or a little after 1962, when I was still in high school. Interesting alternate history fiction. The production values of High Castle are in the same league as those of Fatherland, which differs significantly from the novel by Robert Harris; with House of Cards, a species of “contemporaneous” alternate history fiction, and which differs radically from both the novel by Michael Dobbs and the British TV version; and with V for Vendetta, which differs so radically from the original graphic novel that to describe the differences here would merit a separate column.

The Amazon presentation of High Castle is being adapted by Ridley Scott of Blade Runner fame.

The salient point about Amazon’s High Castle, however, is that it stretches credibility about what would have happened had Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany won WWII, carved up the U.S., and militarily occupied the continent. The Japanese were savagely brutal in their conquests, as were the Nazis. Remember, for example, what the Japanese did to Nanking, China, and what happened to British, Indian, and Canadian men and women and their Chinese dependents after the surrenders of Hong Kong and Singapore. (Atrocities were the byword of all Japanese conquests, much as it is ISIS’s today in Syria and Iraq.) This perspective is buttressed by recent revelations of the Japanese atrocities committed against American and Philippine POWs.