RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

A few days after September 11 I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren’t covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge.
The quote itself, like the latest Grassian screed, does not matter. Grass, like Gandhi and King, was one of the favorite go-to guys for the left’s sticky sheets of paper. When you want to write a suicide note, then you reach for a line from Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson, but when you want to write a national or civilizational suicide note, there’s always Gunter Grass.

As a writer, Gunter Grass is a blacksmith, hammering together graceless and shapeless lumps that aren’t good for much except hitting people over the head. Take his latest masterpiece which has for a brief shining moment gotten people outside Germany and Sweden to mention his name in conversation. You don’t have to know German to recognize that, “Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte” is not exactly Die Lorelei. In a fitting irony the author of the Tin Drum has a tin ear.

Like Die Lorelei’s protagonist, Gunter Grass writes about being filled with unnameable emotions, but instead of seeing water nymphs combing their hair while ship captains ram their boats into the rocks, Grass is attempting to impress audiences with his bold struggle against Jewish accusations of bigotry to forewarn us about the threat of the Jewish state.

Netanyahu does not look much like a Rhine Maiden, but there is something about the Jewish state that drives European leftists to crash their ships against the rocks more reliably than any water nymph. No sooner does Israel buy a German submarine, than Gunter Grass leaves off staring at the Rhine Maidens to write a screed denouncing the Jews and their submarines.

Grass is a worse poet than Hitler was a painter and in an asymmetrical competition, the Fuhrer would have to edge out Gunter. But as writers they are both equally bad. “Was Gesagt Werden Muss” is a sort of compressed Mein Kampf, chronicling Gunter Grass’ own Kampf in a more concise form. It reeks of the same stylistic inadequacies, the stench of self-righteousness mingled with self-pity. Like Hitler’s postcard paintings, it is exactly the sort of tacky art that a Nazi would make.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3007/germany-koran

Salafists also believe that democracy, because it is a man-made form of government, must be destroyed.. According to Die Welt, the Salafists have launched a “frontal assault” against people of other faiths and “unbelievers”. Many Islamists believe Islamic Sharia law is a divine ordinance that is to replace all other legal systems. The number of Islamic radicals in German is surging. Islam is giving them respectability.

Islamic radicals in Germany have launched an unprecedented nationwide campaign to distribute 25 million copies of the Koran, translated into the German language, with the goal of placing one Koran into every household in Germany, free of charge.

The mass proselytization campaign — called Project “Read!” — is being organized by dozens of Islamic Salafist groups located in cities and towns throughout Germany, as well as in Austria and in Switzerland.

Thoughts on Things You Cannot Say Posted By Roger Kimball

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/04/10/thoughts-on-things-you-cannot-say/

I am not going to comment directly on l’affaire Derb, the case of my friend John Derbyshire, who was ostracized [1] from the pages of National Review for writing a column elsewhere [2] that expressed unacceptable opinions about race. I would, however, like to register my admiration for what Mark Steyn had to say about the incident, in particular what he has to say about the condition of free speech in the public square. “The Left,” Mark notes:

is pretty clear about its objectives on everything from climate change to immigration to gay marriage: Rather than win the debate, they’d just as soon shut it down. They’ve had great success in shrinking the bounds of public discourse, and rendering whole areas of public policy all but undiscussable. In such a climate, my default position is that I’d rather put up with whatever racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic/whateverphobic excess everybody’s got the vapors about this week than accept ever tighter constraints on “acceptable” opinion.

Indeed. As I wrote to another friend, it used to be that if someone expressed an opinion you didn’t like, the proper response was to endeavor to refute it. What happened to that ambition? Mark, I fear, is correct: “The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities.”

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/19515-Diversity-Vs-Understanding.html Diversity Vs Understanding I grew up in my working class neighborhood with friends of different races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and sexual orientations. Although there were stereotypes and jokes that, in retrospect, are embarrassing, we all talked openly and understood each other. That bred mutual respect and defense of each’s rights to fair treatment based […]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/mexican-town-celebrates-easter-with-burning-of-the-jews/

Mexican town celebrates Easter with ‘burning of the Jews’

A small Chiapas town ends its Holy Week observance by parading Jewish effigies through the streets, then setting them on fire The 2006 film ‘Borat’ depicted an absurd ‘Running of the Jew’ ceremony. In Mexico, a newspaper is reporting on a genuine ‘Burning of the Jews’ event.
The world is full of charming Easter traditions, but this isn’t one of them.

A newspaper in Mexico is detailing Sunday’s “burning of the Jews,” an annual tradition in Coita, a small town in the state of Chiapas. As part of the custom, locals spend the middle of their Holy Week making Jewish effigies — a reference to Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus before his crucifixion.

The fake Jews are then displayed for three days in different parts of the town, serving as an example of poor conduct.

They’re ultimately paraded through the streets on Easter Sunday, with local children assigned to stand in front of them and collect money for flammable materials.

One Day in the Life of a Conservative in Hollywood — on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Tom Dreesen, Dwight Schultz and Sonja Schmidt share their personal experiences in the leftist Gulag.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/11/one-day-in-the-life-of-a-conservative-in-hollywood-on-the-glazov-gang/

Let a Hundred Breitbarts Bloom by Max P. Friedman

Republished because original was distorted in transmission.

The sudden and tragic death of conservative fireball Andrew Breitbart has started a national discussion among conservatives as to who he was and what he wanted to accomplish in the future, as well as what as what he had accomplished in his short political/journalistic life.

However, a few talk show hosts actually asked a very important question, i.e. “Who is going to succeed him?”

The opinion, of some, was that no one could replace him, that he occupied an unique place in time and American history, and that the patriots’ clean-up of the media movement has suffered an irreplaceable loss.

Not so! We have lost a lot of good conservatives in the past few years, including Tony Blankley, one of the best conservative commentators around. The other “Tony”, Tony Snow, as not only a good writer, but also a good presidential press secretary who knew how the mainstream media played their biased news games, and beat them at it.

Each gentleman, like Breitbart, was unique in their own way, with their own special talents, styles, and knowledge. The republic did not collapse with their loss, and it won’t now. Breitbart’s successors at Big Journalism and related sites, are doing a very good job carrying on his work, but we need to address the valid question of who will succeed him in general.

No one is going to replace an unique individual unless we have human cloning down to an art.

What will happen is going to be a combination f the rise of the Tea Party and Mao tse-tung’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” campaign of the 1950’s.

With the rise of the Tea Party, new people stepped forward to lead small groups, with some of them going on to become national leaders of this movement. You probably had never heard of them before, and you couldn’t recall their names right now. Not important.

The Moderate U.S. Establishment Position? That the Muslim Brotherhood Might Be Moderate URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/04/09/the-moderate-u-s-establishment-muslim-brotherhood-moderate/ The Washington Post continues to talk relatively sensibly about Middle East developments. And yet its latest editorial also shows the type of contortions necessary to avoid facing the awful truth of the situation in the region. The editorial concludes: […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295600/largesse-losers-thomas-sowell

How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?

Why should being in a professional sport exempt anyone from prosecution for advocating deliberate violence? Recent revelations of such advocacy of violence by an NFL coach should lead to his banishment for life by the NFL, and criminal prosecution by the authorities. If you are serious about reducing violence, you have to be serious about punishing those who advocate it.

Have you noticed that what modest economic improvements we have seen occurred during the much-lamented “gridlock” in Washington? Nor is this unusual. If you check back through history, doing nothing has a far better track record than politicians’ intervening in the economy.

With all the talk about people paying their “fair share” of income taxes, why do nearly half the people in this country pay no income taxes at all? Is that their “fair share”? Or is creating more recipients of government handouts, at no cost to themselves, simply a strategy to gain more votes?

John Derbyshire Learns What We Cannot Talk About Posted By Bruce Thornton

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/10/john-derbyshire-learns-what-we-cannot-talk-about/

Wittgenstein once wrote, “What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” Ex-National Review writer John Derbyshire has just learned the modern American version of this truth. What we Americans cannot talk about is race (except, of course, in the anodyne terms established by political correctness), and woe betide anyone who refuses to pass over this topic in silence.

Derbyshire got in trouble over a piece he posted on the webzine Taki’s Magazine called “The Talk: Nonblack Version. “The talk” is what many professional blacks call the coming-of-age conversation they have with their kids, the main theme of which seems to be the persistence of racism in American society. Derbyshire’s version focuses on some matters of fact, such as the disproportionate numbers of black criminals, and others of speculation, such as black intelligence inferiority. It was the latter, of course, that got Derbyshire fired by National Review, which called such ideas “nasty and indefensible.”