RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Sunday night I was up late writing, and so on Monday I slept right up until the moment I was awakened, sometime around midday, by the blaring sound of a marching band in the street. I didn’t need to look out the window to know what was going on. The music was The Internationale. The date was May 1. In the small Norwegian town where I live, the May Day parade was passing by.

The New York Times commemorated the Communist holiday in its own way – with an essay by Vivian Gornick, now eighty-one, a card-carrying member of the old New York intellectual crowd and author of a 2011 biography of anarchist heroine Emma Goldman. The piece – entitled “When Communism Inspired Americans” – is the latest example of what has long since become a genre all its own: the fond look back at American Stalinism.

The essay isn’t Gornick’s first contribution to the genre. Her 1977 book The Romance of American Communism, a collection of interviews with old Party members, was described by Commentary reviewer Marion Magid as an “adoring account” that depicts their perfidy “as a romantic episode in American history.” In the book, Gornick portrayed these old Communists as “the golden children called to Marxism” and claimed that they “feared, hungered, and cared more” than other people and possessed a “wisdom passion alone can purchase.” Noting that most of Gornick’s interviewees were Jews, Magid quite rightly challenged the idea that there was any “wisdom” in their “slavish support of the Soviet Union throughout the long period of Stalinist treachery and the calculated destruction of Soviet Jewish life.”

Nor was there anything “golden” about their ability to keep their Communism intact despite (this is Magid’s list) “The Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Doctors’ Plot, the takeover in Czechoslovakia, the Slansky Trial, the murdered writers, the labor camps, and all the rest.” Not only did American Communists accept all these abominations, noted Magid, “they justified it, those wonderful couples, ‘hungry for justice,’ rushing off to protest meetings and ‘peace’ rallies and picket lines while supper cooled on the stove at home and bullets met their mark in the cellars of the Lubianka. To read this book along with, say, the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam is to become almost physically ill. The romance of Communism, indeed. It is an apology that is required—not an elegy.”

One can understand Magid’s disgust. Back when it was first published, The Romance of American Communism was part of a new wave of books, movies, articles, and other material that treated that subject with sympathy. In The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Public Life (1991), Guenter Lewy cited Gornick’s book, along with films like The Front and Lillian Hellman’s memoir Scoundrel Time (both 1976), as part of a “new attitude” and “revisionist history” that represented American Communists “as persecuted defenders of American democracy.” Lewy quoted historian William O’Neill: “One would not know from seeing such films as The Front or reading books like The Romance of American Communism…that the heroes in them were apologists for Stalin’s death machine.”

Recently, Kumail Nanjiani, the star of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” complained to Chelsea Handler on her Netflix talk show about the supposed negative image of Muslims in American popular culture. A Pakistani-American and Muslim, Nanjiani asked Handler what she sees in her head when she thinks of Muslims and Handler answered that she envisions “serious people” and “…not like …fun.” Nanjiani interjected “there’s a beard” as she was speaking and she agreed and repeated “beard”.

Handler’s answer, apparently, revealed the horrific bigotry of America and its culture — and Nanjiani explained what a big scandal it all represents. This is why, he told Handler, his wife wants to start a Tumblr called, ‘Muslims Having Fun.’ Because, you see, as Nanjiani whined, one never sees Muslims having fun in American popular culture.

Handler got very excited about all of this and subsequently tweeted out in moral indignation: “Why don’t we get to see any fun Muslims?”

Oh, the injustice of it all.

What Nanjiani won’t tell us, of course, and what Handler would never dare say, let alone fathom, is that maybe we see “serious-minded” Muslim men with beards, and we don’t regularly see any Muslims having fun, is because . . . well . . . it may all have something to do with Islam. There is a great value, you see, placed on the wearing of beards in Islamic texts (i.e. Sahih al-Bukhari 7:72:780) and Muslims are required to emulate the example of the Prophet, who is believed to have sported a beard.

In terms of having fun, if Nanjiani and Handler were even remotely interested in, or honest about, Islam, they would know that Islam mandates the polar opposite of the Declaration of Independence’s emphasis on the right of humans to pursue happiness. It is a fundamental difference between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition, which my book, United in Hate, argues is at the heart of Jihad’s war on the West.

Nanjiani and Handler might do well to focus on why Ayatollah Khomeini stated:

Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.

In my interview on the Nanjiani-Handler comedy fest with Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), he had this to say:

This episode reflects the general tendency of the Leftist intelligentsia to claim that people are suspicious of Islam or Muslims in the U.S. today because of the ‘media,’ which is supposedly ‘Islamophobic.’ The idea that the establishment media, which so assiduously covers for Islam by obscuring in any possible way the Islamic identity and motives of jihad murderers, is ‘Islamophobic’ is laughable, but it nonetheless prevails.

We don’t see Muslims having fun because, you see, ‘Islamophobes’ control the entertainment industry (which gave us, a few years back, the Canadian sitcom ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie,’ a forced exercise in Muslims Having Fun.

Reza Aslan has built a career complaining about Islamophobia. Throw a dart at a map of colleges and the odds were good that Aslan would be speaking at one of them about the rising threat of Islamophobia.

Earlier this year, Aslan, an Iranian Muslim, announced that he was going to change people’s minds about Islam and make them more tolerant, “through pop culture, through film and television.“

“Stories have the power to break through the walls that separate us into different ethnicities,” Aslan rhapsodized, “different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different religions.”

CNN gave Aslan a forum. Nearly every episode of “The Believer” that aired has made some religion that isn’t Islam look freaky, unpleasant and threatening. Instead of breaking through the walls, it has surveyed different non-Islamic religions only to sneer at them as strange and weird.

Instead of Islamophobia, it offers Non-Islam-ophobia.

“The Believer” kicked off with an episode featuring a sect of cannibals whom the show associated with Hinduism. Its last episode spread fear over the threat posed by Orthodox Jews. CNN’s “Believer” clips offer Reza Aslan explaining why he’s a Muslim sandwiched between a doomsday cult leader who calls himself “Jezus”, voodoo, scientology and a Mexican death cult.

Not even Al Jazeera would have been this blatant about its Islamic agenda.

Reza Aslan, CNN and “Believer” have already offended a whole range of religious groups. Hindus angrily denounced the misrepresentation of their religion. But the left has much less interest in Hinduphobia than it does in Islamophobia. Hindu protests outside CNN offices in five cities garnered almost no coverage from the same media that covers every single Islamic protest against Islamophobia.

The media doesn’t believe that all forms of religious bigotry are created equal.

Orthodox Jews condemned Aslan for his fearmongering aimed at Judaism. But the left is uninterested in criticizing anti-Semitism from Islamists. Especially those on its payroll.

“The Believer” has tried to smear Christians, Hindus and Jews. It has yet to profile Muslims. Despite Aslan’s interest in teaching Americans not to be Islamophobes, he seems to prefer pushing Christophobia, Judeophobia and Hinduphobia. But bigots can’t be expected to fight bigotry.

“The Believer” treats non-Islamic religions as a freakshow. The gimmick attracts viewers. See Reza Aslan eat brains, talk to a doomsday cult leader or act afraid of Jews in fedoras. Look at all those freaks!

But don’t expect to see Shiite Muslims cutting their children in the street for Ashura on “The Believer”.

Race hatred is soaring in the US and Donald Trump is to blame — that was the gist of a 7.30 report which went to air on March 14, two weeks after the perpetrator of one such attack was arrested. No Trump fan, he was a black, left-wing Muslim journalist. The ABC has not bothered to correct the record.
On March 14, 7.30 ran a fake-news piece whose intent was to stitch up President Donald Trump for inciting a wave of anti-Semitic bomb threats and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries in the US. Compere Leigh Sales intoned: “Some people blame Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric for unleashing people’s worst impulses, something Trump backers of course dispute.” You can view the report here.

The show’s US correspondent Conor Duffy then interviewed a conga-line of Democrat activists to ramp up the 7.30 narrative which amounted to ‘the disgusting Trump incites cemetery vandalism, race hate and bomb threats’.

On the ABC news website the same day, under the nakedly-propaganda banner “Trump’s America”, Duffy’s story included pictures of desecrated Jewish headstones and the header, “Shootings, bombings, desecrated cemeteries and racist graffiti — minority groups in the United States say the number of race hate crimes are spiking in President Donald Trump’s America.”

On the evening’s 7.30 report, Sales and Duffy proffered no evidence whatsoever connecting Trump to the anti-Semitic upsurge. As professional journalists, Sales and Duffy must already have been aware that black, Muslim anti-Trumper Juan M. Thompson, 31, had been arrested at least 10 days earlier and charged with making multiple bomb threats against synagogues. His motive was not anti-Semitism but to frame a white ex-girlfriend for the calls, as revenge because she’d ditched him. If neither knew by that stage about Thompson’s arrest, they are incompetent. If they did know, they are liars by omission. You can read the FBI charge sheet hre, and do notice the date — March 1, almost two weeks before 7.30‘s beatup.

As time passes, others parties are now named and charged over the wave of anti-Semitism. They include Andrew King, 54, a Jewish man in Schenectady, N.Y. King claimed on Day 21 of the Trump administration that someone defaced his home with three swastikas. He’s now in the slammer, convicted of having sprayed the swastikas himself and making false reports to police.

And last week US police charged Michael Ron Kadar, 18, an American-Israeli Jewish dual citizen living in Israel, with making 245 threats against Jewish institutions in Florida between January and March.[i] The youth, who may be mentally disturbed, allegedly earned $310,000 in the internet currency bitcoin from his worldwide on-line threats and extortions.

Antifa protesters loves them some violence. From punching people with cameras to rioting because you don’t like who is talking. A few times, apparently. So, leave it to the New York Times to run an op-ed that seems to argue that the rioters who disrupt speech of those they disagree with are the true guardians of free speech.

The recent student demonstrations at Auburn against Spencer’s visit — as well as protests on other campuses against Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos and others — should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship. Liberal free-speech advocates rush to point out that the views of these individuals must be heard first to be rejected. But this is not the case. Universities invite speakers not chiefly to present otherwise unavailable discoveries, but to present to the public views they have presented elsewhere. When those views invalidate the humanity of some people, they restrict speech as a public good.

In such cases there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public. In today’s age, we also have a simple solution that should appease all those concerned that students are insufficiently exposed to controversial views. It is called the internet, where all kinds of offensive expression flourish unfettered on a vast platform available to nearly all.

The great value and importance of freedom of expression, for higher education and for democracy, is hard to overestimate. But it has been regrettably easy for commentators to create a simple dichotomy between a younger generation’s oversensitivity and free speech as an absolute good that leads to the truth. We would do better to focus on a more sophisticated understanding, such as the one provided by Lyotard, of the necessary conditions for speech to be a common, public good. This requires the realization that in politics, the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing. CONTINUE AT SITE