RUTHFULLY YOURS

Missing in more ways that one On Sunday, at the great Paris rally, the whole world was Charlie. By Tuesday, the veneer of solidarity was exposed as tissue thin. It began dissolving as soon as the real, remaining Charlie Hebdo put out its post-massacre issue featuring a Muhammad cover that, as The New York Times put it, “reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities.”

Again? Already? Had not 4 million marchers and 44 foreign leaders just turned out on the streets of France to declare “No” to intimidation, and pledging solidarity, indeed identification with (“Je suis Charlie”), a satirical weekly specializing in the most outrageous and often tasteless portrayals of Muhammad?

And yet, within 48 hours, the new Charlie Hebdo issue featuring the image of Muhammad — albeit a sorrowful, indeed sympathetic Muhammad — sparked new protests, denunciations and threats of violence, which in turn evinced another round of doubt and self-flagellation in the West about the propriety and limits of free expression. Hopeless.

ISIS continues to gain substantial ground in Syria, despite nearly 800 airstrikes in the American-led campaign to break its grip there.
At least one-third of the country’s territory is now under ISIS influence, with recent gains in rural areas that can serve as a conduit to major cities that the so-called Islamic State hopes to eventually claim as part of its caliphate. Meanwhile, the Islamic extremist group does not appear to have suffered any major ground losses since the strikes began. The result is a net ground gain for ISIS, according to information compiled by two groups with on-the-ground sources.
In Syria, ISIS “has not any lost any key terrain,” Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War who studies the Syrian conflict, explained to The Daily Beast.
Even U.S. military officials privately conceded to The Daily Beast that ISIS has gained ground in some areas, even as the Pentagon claims its seized territory elsewhere, largely around the northern city of Kobani. That’s been the focus of the U.S.-led campaign, and ISIS has not been able to take the town, despite its best efforts.
Other than that, they are short on specifics.

Full Disclosure: I never write to shows, as I know they probably pay scant attention. They make the big bucks. Why should they listen to a groundling occasional viewer?

But I was goaded beyond tolerance by Mr. Jon Stewart’s latest jibe against Israel.

His slur concerning the Paris march — that those who assembled were hardly (I paraphrase, so annoyed that I could not bear to listen a moment longer to this once-funny Jewish comedian) paragons of free speech was initially well taken.

Stewart mocked the march for free speech in Paris by indicating that the heads of state attending included despots and those hypocritically against free speech in their own domestic domains. Can’t argue with that. Representatives of Turkey and Jordan, African despotisms and Middle Eastern caliphates, were in attendance, all clutching the arms of the likes of Germany’s Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, leftist tete of la bellicose France. Stewart attacked Egypt by just muttering its name, hesitating in well-oiled comic timing, and reaping a huge rolling thunder of audience accommodation. I mean, laughs. Laffs.

So, just as President Obama is giving a big speech on cyber-security, the jihackists of the Islamic State manage to take over the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the Pentagon’s Central Command. The juxtaposition would be too cheap and heavy-handed for any discerning playwright or novelist, but these days reality is less fussy: It’s Mohammed’s world, we just live in it.

Hacking into the Pentagon’s social media accounts isn’t the same as hacking into the Pentagon’s classified databases. But as a thumb in the eye to the Great Satan it has a certain style.

And it’s not irrelevant to the central question facing the still freeish world after the 17 dead in Paris last week.

There are those of us who think the issue is Islam – not all of Islam or at any rate not all Muslims, but a strain of Islam, and the one that’s making all the running in the Muslim world today.

And there are those who say pay no attention to all the fellows howling “Allahu Akbar” and hooting about avenging the Prophet: There’s no Islam to see here.

The Joy of Yurts and Jam-Jar Glassware

In Part Two of our series on Melbourne University’s Sustainable Society Institute we visit the enchanted isle of Entropia, the eco-aware settlement where bad poets and oboe players celebrate the death of capitalism with lentil casseroles, home-made port, free love and no small amount of green-haloed self-regard.

Futurology is a mainstay in the writing about global warming, not just forecasting but the more difficult art of time-travel.

We’ve had a vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, discovering in 2004 that our own Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, was killed by a warming-caused disease in 2039. Then we had Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes writing last July that global warming in 2023 would kill our puppies and kittens, our ‘faithful and trusted companions”. And three months ago, the scienc-y World Meteorological Organisation lined up real-life TV weather presenters who pretended to be reporting in 2050 about tornados hitting Berlin, a 50-day heat wave in Tokyo and so on.

Closer to home, we have Dr Sam Alexander, research fellow of the Melbourne University’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) and lecturer with the university’s Office for Environmental Programs. Last year he wrote a book Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation about someone looking back from a post-apocalyptic year 2099. It is published ($21.99 in paperback) by the Simplicity Institute, of which he co-founded and is a co-director.

Pegida’s worries about the Islamization of Germany concern the seeming intolerance and religious fanaticism that have grown hand-in-hand with the arrival of the Muslim populations unwilling to adapt to Western values.

The terror attacks in France Had “nothing to do with Islam.” — German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

By decrying Pegida’s views as “xenophobic,” narrow minded” and even “inhuman,” Germany’s ruling establishment shows how deeply out of touch it is with the worries of a large segment of the population.

Perhaps the people in the East just want to avoid the situation that the Western part of the country is in. Having gone through decades of Communist dictatorship, perhaps they are less inclined to trust that their political leaders have the people’s best interests in mind with their policies.

Every Monday evening since last October, thousands of citizens have marched through the city of Dresden as well as other German cities to protest the Islamization of their country. They belong to an organization, established only three months ago, called Pegida, the German abbreviation for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West.”

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by PolitiChicks.com Editor-in-Chief Ann-Marie Murrell and joined by Becca Keating, Author of Impact Your World, Shari Goodman, Chapter Leader of Calabasas-West Valley ACT!, and Steve Amundson, president of the Counter Jihad Coalition.

The guests discussed Islamic Infiltration in American Schools, unveiling the reasons why even our children aren’t exempt from stealth Jihad. The discussion was preceded by a focus on Jihad in Paris, in which the guests analyzed the Islamic teachings that inspired the Charlie Hebdo massacre — and the denial about them.

The tentacles of anti-Jewish fervor are seemingly everywhere. Not even the American Church is immune from the sickness of anti-Semitism, and tracing the networks can be a fascinating exercise. They are so diverse, and so unequally yoked in various ways. But they are all linked by a dislike of Jews and Israel.

I live in a small town in the American South. A few years ago, I stopped at a convenience store and noticed on the counter a tabloid newspaper. I picked up a copy and when I got home, realized it was a white-supremacist rag, liberally sprinkled with anti-Jewish propaganda. In fact, it felt a lot like classic, medieval anti-Semitism, which never really went out of style.

So it is that I spend much of my time now researching the decline of Israel support, specifically within American Evangelicalism, once a stronghold of support for the Jewish state.

From visits to captured Palestinian weaponry and propaganda literature displayed in Israel, to sitting in on evangelical leadership conferences that feature anti-Israel speakers, watching the erosion of support for Israel is jarring.

A friend sent me a link recently to a blog, “Mondoweiss,” which claims to be

“a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.”

Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical magazine with a strong record of satirizing many religious figures, and for years Islam’s prophet Muhammad has been included among the subjects of the satirical cartoons. For the folks working there, death threats from people claiming to be Muslims were not unusual, and a firebomb destroyed its old offices in November 2011, the day after the magazine had announced that it had selected Muhammad as its editor-in-chief.

On January 7, 2015 two gunmen, brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, went into the magazine’s offices and gunned down eleven people, including a police officer. The gunmen then killed another police officer outside the offices. It seemed that within minutes of the massacre, pundits and members of the media went into overdrive trying to keep Islam out of the picture; we were assured that the “religion of peace” had nothing to do with this. This was in spite of the facts that the two gunmen were Muslims yelling Allahu Akbar, and were heard shouting in French, “We have killed Charlie Hebdo. We have avenged the Prophet Mohammad.”

For the nation’s theaters to demand that Jews produce anti-Israel work in their own theater is insulting.

This month Washington DC’s Theater J will open the second half of its 2014-2015 season with Aaron Posner’s new play, “Life Sucks.” For the first time in 18 years the company, one of the nation’s leading Jewish theaters, will be without its longtime artistic director, Ari Roth. Roth’s firing last month caused a firestorm of controversy in the American nonprofit theater community. Acting artistic director Shirley Serotsky will guide Theater J into a period of new leadership under a cloud of condemnation over Roth’s contentious and very public termination. The reaction to that termination betrayed a troubling double standard over theater’s responsibility to tell stories from diverse perspectives. The result was a bizarre and unique demand that Jewish theater producers program plays critical of Israel.

On December 22, artistic directors from many of the nation’s leading theater companies penned an angry letter to the board of the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, which oversees Theater J. Although the Center stated that Roth was fired for insubordination after going public with internal disputes, the signers of the open letter called the firing blatantly political. They say Roth was fired because his proposed work ran counter to DCJCC’s positions on Israel.