I'll have more to say about the elections in the days ahead, but for
now let me offer a whole-hearted good riddance to Ed Miliband, the now
departed Labour leader who, in a desperate last-minute pander, offered
to "outlaw Islamophobia".
That was the British political establishment's contribution to a rough
couple of weeks for free speech, culminating in the attempted mass
murder in Garland, Texas.
That's what it was, by the way - although you might have difficulty telling that from the news coverage. The Washington Post offered the celebrated headline "Event Organizer Offers No Apology After Thwarted Attack In Texas", while the Associated Press went with "Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths".
The media "narrative" of the last week is that some Zionist temptress
was walking down the street in Garland in a too short skirt and hoisted
it to reveal her Mohammed thong - oops, my apologies, her Prophet
Mohammed thong (PBUH) - and thereby inflamed two otherwise law-abiding
ISIS supporters peacefully minding their own business.
It'll be a long time before you see "Washington Post Offers No
Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack" or "AP Says It Has No
Regrets After Blaming The Victim". The respectable class in the American
media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence
Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means
to that end - although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry
Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists' reaction to Charlie Hebdo,
that the "narrative" wouldn't change very much if the jihad boys had
got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others
were all piled up in the Garland morgue.
If the American press were not so lazy and parochial, they would
understand that this was the third Islamic attack on free speech this
year - first, Charlie Hebdo in Paris; second, the Lars Vilks event in Copenhagen; and now Texas. The difference in the corpse count is easily explained by a look at the video of the Paris gunmen, or the bullet holes they put in the police car.
The French and Texan attackers supposedly had the same kind of weapons,
although one should always treat American media reports with a high
degree of skepticism when it comes to early identification of "assault
weapons" and "AK47s". Nonetheless, from this reconstruction,
it seems clear that the key distinction between the two attacks is that
in Paris they knew how to use their firepower and in Garland they
didn't. So a very cool 60-year-old local cop with nothing but his
service pistol advanced under fire and took down two guys whose heavier
firepower managed only to put a bullet in an unarmed security guard's
foot.
The Charlie Hebdo killers had received effective training
overseas - as thousands of ISIS recruits with western passports are
getting right now. What if the Garland gunmen had been as good as the
Paris gunmen? Surely that would be a more interesting question for the
somnolent American media than whether some lippy Jewess was asking for
it.
...
In Copenhagen, in Paris, in Garland, what's more important than the
cartoons and the attacks is the reaction of all the polite, respectable
people in society, which for a decade now has told those who do not
accept the messy, fractious liberties of free peoples that we don't
really believe in them, either, and we're happy to give them up -
quietly, furtively, incrementally, remorselessly - in hopes of a quiet
life. Because a small Danish newspaper found itself abandoned and alone,
Charlie Hebdo jumped in to support them. Because the Charlie Hebdo
artists and writers died abandoned and alone, Pamela Geller jumped in
to support them. By refusing to share the risk, we are increasing the
risk. It's not Pamela Geller who emboldens Islamic fanatics, it's all
the nice types - the ones Salman Rushdie calls the But Brigade. You've
heard them a zillion times this last week: "Of course, I'm personally,
passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But..."
And the minute you hear the "but", none of the build-up to it
matters. A couple of days before Garland, Canadian Liberal MP (and
former Justice Minister) Irwin Cotler announced his plan to restore
Section 13 - the "hate speech" law under which Maclean's and I
were dragged before the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission and which, as
a result of my case, was repealed by the Parliament of Canada. At the
time Mr Cotler was fairly torn on the issue. We talked about it briefly
at a free-speech event in Ottawa at which he chanced to be present, and
he made vaguely supportive murmurings - as he did when we ran into each
other a couple of years later in Boston. Mr Cotler is Jewish and, even
as European "hate" laws prove utterly useless against the metastasizing
open Jew-hate on the Continent, he thinks we should give 'em one more
try. He's more sophisticated than your average But boy, so he uses a three-syllable word.
President Obama may have sent his spokespeople to walk back his (andtheir) earlier comments about the murders of four Jews in a Paris Kosher supermarket being 'random,' but Mark Steyn isn't buying the walkback and neither should you.
For over a decade, I have been writing about the metastasizing
Jew-hate in Europe, and I have noted, aside from the physical attacks,
the casual acceptance of anti-Jewish slurs at the highest levels in
Continental society. But I find, say, the Holocaust gags favored by
Gretta Duiseberg, the wife of the then head of the European Central
Bank, far less disturbing than the absurd pretzel-twist logic deployed
by the Obama Administration to deny reality. It is creepy and profoundly
unsettling. Like Simon Peter denying the condemned King of the Jews,
the most powerful government in the western world thrice denied those
four dead Jews in that Paris supermarket.
German court rules firebombing of synagogue is a "protest". Belgian teacher tells Jewish student: 'we should put you all on freight wagons'. European Jewish population continues to plummet. British Vicar blames JOOOOOOOS for 9/11... Anti-Jewish attacks in UK at highest levels ever recorded... Teacher quits French school citing antisemitism.
Jewish social life in Europe now takes place behind razor-wire and
security guards, and newspapers placidly report polls showing that 58
per cent of British Jews believe Jews have no future in Europe. It is
utterly disgraceful that the government of one of the few western
nations relatively untouched by the new mass Jew-hate should devote so
much energy to insisting that there's nothing to see here.
But lies beget lies. The Obama Administration insists that the
Islamic State is not Islamic, Islamic terrorism is nothing to do with
Islam, there's no Islam to see here, no way, no how. You can't hold the
line at one lie, and tell the truth on everything else. The lie on Islam
infects everything else. If they're just "violent extremists" in
general, they have to be violent and extremist in general - or
"randomly", as the President would say.
I'm a free-speech absolutist and therefore have a high tolerance for "hate". But that's why free speech is important
- so one can address these subjects honestly. Islam is an incubator of
Jew-hate. It's unfortunate, but it is a fact. For example, Jordan is a
"moderate" Muslim country. What does "moderate" actually mean in this
context? Well, it means the Hashemites send their princes to Sandhurst
and marry them off to hotties. But other than that? Ninety-seven per
cent of Jordanians have an "unfavorable" opinion of Jews.
The cover of this week's Charlie Hebdo (right) shows Mohammed
shedding a tear and holding up a "Je suis Charlie" sign under the
headline "Tout est pardonné" - all is forgiven. The illustration is
unclear: Is Mohammed forgiving the secular leftie blasphemers? Or are
the secular lefties forgiving Mohammed and his murderous believers? The Commentator devotes an editorial to the subject, and finds it "a strange cover" symbolic of "western confusion". On the other hand, Paul Berman in The Tablet thinks "uncertainty lends majesty".
When skilled persons who have never shied away from clarity produce a
work whose meaning is unclear, then it is reasonable to assume the
unclearness is itself the meaning. The surviving staff at Charlie Hebdo
have undergone a week of surreal hellishness, in which their senior
colleagues have been murdered for publishing images of Mohammed, and the
world is professing its solidarity and egging them on to prove that nothing has changed. In other words, they're expected to produce new images of Mohammed, which may well get them murdered, too.
...
So, for all the viral hashtags and Helen Mirren wearing a pencil
brooch to the Golden Globes and George Clooney declaring "Je suis
Charlie", what's left of the staff at Charlie Hebdo nevertheless
got the message: You're still on your own. We'll send you a supportive
Tweet, but that's it. Murderous-rage-wise, we'd rather you remained the
focus. Hey, but we're all really looking forward to next week's
controversial cover!
I prefer the fellows who just state upfront that Charlie Hebdo
was asking for it to Dame Helen and untold millions all waving pencils,
and none of 'em with any lead in 'em. Imagine being at the editorial
meeting with the empty chairs, and understanding, even as millions
around the world profess to be your new best friend, that you're still
the lonesomest guy in town.
They did a Mohammed cover because they had to. But it certainly has
an uncharacteristic passivity. And it feels like one for the road.
I am sure that many of you have already seen the picture above, which is pretty much the sum total of American and Western efforts to rescue 276 girls who have been kidnapped to be sold into slavery by Boko Haram, an Islamic terror organization in Nigeria.
Secondly, Charlie seems unaware of what's going on in schools around
the world. In that post about Boko Haram from last year, I also wrote this:
Up north, in the crucible of liberal social democracy,City Hall in Copenhagen held hearings earlier this year about the bullying of Jews in heavily Muslim public schools. Seventeen-year-old Moran Jacob testified:
'In eighth grade, his teacher told him to say that he was Palestinian
and that his mother was Russian. "I had to lie about who I was," he
recalls. But it didn't work. They knew. Eventually, a group of his
classmates ganged up on him and stabbed him in the leg. "You can't go
here anymore," his teacher said. "I have scars," he told the hearing.
"Not on my body, but on my soul . . ."
'"Jews have learned to keep a low profile," Max Mayer, president of
the Danish Zionist Federation, told the hearing. "To not exist in the
city…" And they teach their sons to do the same: wear the skullcap at
school, but take it off when you leave. This, Mayer said, has become
standard practice for Danish Jews: "Don't see us, don't notice us."'
This is liberal, multicultural Europe in the 21st century. As part
of his thanks for raising the subject, young Moran Jacob was
subsequently set upon by "Arabic kids" on Strøget, the main pedestrian
street in Copenhagen, and forced to move away from the neighborhood in
which he's lived all his life. He's now considering leaving Denmark...
Listen to how cowed the school principals sound in the Copenhagen
story and then figure the chances of anyone addressing the issue
honestly. Boko haram, indeed.
To the people who drove that Jewish boy out of his school, arguing
that the Holocaust never happened is not a dazzling virtuoso display of
Oxbridge-level intellectual gymnastics but just business as usual.
...
The California schools superintendent who wanted his Eighth Graders
to turn in essays arguing that the Holocaust didn't happen is called
Mohammad Z Islam. That's why they got the assignment, not because they
wanted to turn themselves into the Oxford Union. As Laura Rosen Cohen
pointed out, there are all kinds of lively topics Mr Cooke might propose
for our schools: Did Mohammed exist? What's the deal with his
nine-year-old bride? But in the real world even mild questioning of
whether Islam is a "religion of peace" is beyond the pale, and across
the Continent the Holocaust is disappearing from school curricula.
That's the problem. There's no point winning an Oxford debate if the other side win everything else.
Mark Steyn writes that Abe Foxman is right that anti-Semitism is worse than ever. But Foxman is blind to the elephant in the room that's the cause of that anti-Semitism (Hat Tip: Alex G).
I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse, a city the size of
Jacksonville, Florida, where in recent years one synagogue has been
firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into
it, a third burgled and "Dirty Jews" scrawled on the ark housing the
Torah, where a kosher butcher's was strafed with gunfire, and a Jewish
sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails, and three Jewish
children murdered outside their grade school, I would like Foxman to go
to Toulouse and tell any Jew he finds there (they are advised by their
rabbis not to wear identifying marks of their faith) that it's all the
work of "anti-government people".
I would like him to go to Malmö - once the first Christian city in
Norway and soon to be the first Muslim city in Sweden - and tell such
Jews as he can find (they are abandoning the city) that the desecration
of Jewish cemeteries and the ugly reinforced steel doors at the Jewish
kindergarten and the rocket-proof glass in the windows of the synagogue
are all the fault of "neo-Nazis". Sweden is renowned for its neo-Nazis,
isn't it? Doubtless they were the reason why a year or two back at the
Davis Cup the Israeli tennis players had to play their match behind
closed doors, in a Baltiska Hallen stadium without a single spectator.
For had they opened the doors, the seats would have filled up with
Swedish "nationalists" and Swedish "neo-fascists" and all hell would
have broken loose.
I would like Abe Foxman to go to Tower Hamlets in London's East End,
where on Holocaust Memorial Day a couple of years ago a visiting New
Yorker had to be taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel after
a Jewish tour group was pelted with stones by a group jeering "If you
go any further, you'll die." I would like Foxman to tell those Jews that
their attackers were an "anti-immigration" group.
I would like him to go to Villiers-le-Bel, where a Jewish girl was
brutally attacked by a gang shouting "Jews must die!", or to Odense,
where the headmaster says his school can no longer take Jewish pupils
for security reasons, and tell them it's the fault of Danish
"nationalists" and French "neo-Nazis".
But I don't suppose Abe Foxman will go anywhere outside his bubble,
will he? Is it really too much to expect him somewhere in that long
laundry list of antiquated irrelevances to utter the "M" word? As Laura
Rosen Cohen writes of this contemptible nothing of a man:
Shame on you, Abraham Foxman. Shame on you. These Jews are a danger to the Jewish people.
Their denial is so thick and so amoral that it is difficult sometimes
to find the words to express my utter disgust and contempt.
By fighting the last war against the German Nazis over and over in
their heads, they endanger living Jews. But they will never learn. It's so cozy to be a professional Jew, fighting the ghosts of
WW2 over and over and never facing the real threats to the Jewish
people.
Jewish groups missed the threat 80 years ago, too. But why wouldn't
they? There'd always been anti-Semitism in Europe: You can't buy
property here, you can't stand for parliament there, and everywhere
always a certain sliver of people who just don't want to be around Jews.
But it didn't turn genocidal until the 1930s, and, after a millennium
of low-level Jew hate, you can understand why nobody saw it coming.
But the violent, murderous phase of the new Jew-hatred is already
here - in the emergency ward of the Royal London Hospital; in the
corpse-strewn schoolyard of Toulouse; in the synagogue in Brussels set
alight by Molotov cocktails; in a pleasant Jewish home in Antwerp, where
burning rags were pushed through the mail flap; at the RER train
station in Auber, where a commuter was savagely assaulted by a mob
taunting, "Palestine will kill the Jews"; in the suburban home where a
young Frenchman was tortured to death over three weeks while his family
listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the
Koran; in the stairwell of the apartment house where a Paris
disc-jockey had his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face
ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, "I have killed my Jew!"
Those "anti-government people" get around, don't they? The groups who
perpetrate this violence come from a minority community - larger than
the Jews but not yet larger than everyone else. They are telling you
what they will do when they have the numbers to do it.
No, this is not a post about ugly women, nor is it a post (exclusively) about female dogs. It's not even a post about women who keep man's best fried as a pet. Rather - as you might have deduced from the graphic - it's a post about a very funny Mark Steyn column that makes light of the Obama campaign's efforts to find clubs with which to beat up on Mitt Romney (Hat Tip: Rick Moran).
For those coming late to the feud, the Democrats started it, assiduously promoting accounts of a 1983 Romney vacation to Canada in which the family pooch Seamus rode on the roof of the car. Axelrod and the boys thought they could have some sport with this, and their poodles in the media eagerly played along. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins alone has referred to it dozens of times.
And then Jim Treacher, the sharp-eyed wag of the Daily Caller, uncovered this passage from Chapter Two of Obama’s bestselling but apparently largely unread memoir Dreams from My Father, in which the author recalls childhood meals with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro....
...
Jeremy Funk, communications director of “Americans United for Change,” is still bulk-e-mailing links to the dogsagainstromney.com video “Should We Have a President Who Isn’t Even Qualified to Adopt a Pet?” Confronted by the revelation that his preferred candidate only swings by the Humane Society for the all-you-can-eat buffet, he huffs that this is “false equivalence.” “A six-year-old with no choice in the matter” is not the same as a grown man choosing to place his dog on the roof of his vehicle. My Canadian compatriot Kate McMillan, a dog breeder, advised Mr. Funk to “try this experiment–sit a normal, American 6 year old down at a plate and tell him it’s dog meat. Watch what happens.”
For their next exploding cigar, the Democrats chose polygamy. Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, remarked that Romney was unlikely to appeal to women because his father was “born on a polygamy commune.” Eighty-six percent of women, noted Governor Schweitzer with a keenly forensic demographic eye, are “not great fans of polygamy.” You can understand the 86 percent’s ickiness at the whole freaky-weirdy idea of a president descended from someone who had multiple wives. Eww.
Just for the record, Romney’s father was not a polygamist; Romney’s grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.
Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama’s father was a polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney’s great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his line not to be a polygamist. So, given the “gender gap,” maybe those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than Governor Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.
Just when I thought nothing else could come out that would shock me about the brutality of this attack.... Make sure to read Steyn's last line.
And out in the wider world there was a marked reluctance to cover the story.
And, if not exactly shocking, that was a useful reminder of how things have changed even in a few years. On 9/11, footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets and handing out candy turned up on the world’s TV screens, and that rancid old queen Arafat immediately went into damage-control mode and hastily arranged for himself to be filmed giving blood. This time round there was no need for damage-control, because there was no damage: The western media simply averted their eyes from their Palestinian house pets’ unfortunate effusions. The Israeli Government released raw footage from the murders, but YouTube yanked the video within two hours. The hip new “social media” are developing almost as exquisitely refined a sense of discretion as the old Social Register.
A decade ago, the revelation that French ambassador to Britain Daniel Bernard referred to Israel as “that shi**y little country,” was shocking. Now it is standard fare.
Today the delegitimization of Israel is all but universal: Indeed, these days Palestinian leaders pay more lip service to the “two-state solution” than Europeans. On Israel’s national day, prominent Britons of Jewish background write to The Guardian to deplore the existence of the Jewish state. And “Israeli Apartheid Week” is multiculti Toronto’s gift to the world.
Demonstrating his uncanny ability to miss the point, the head of the Canadian Jewish Congress tweeted today:
Anonymity breeds ugliness online.
You would think even this sad, irrelevant fool might have noticed that the striking feature of today’s “ugliness” is how non-anonymous it is. Year on year, the world is more cheerfully upfront about its anti-Semitism. Maybe he could ask John Galliano, or Julian Assange.
Read the whole thing - especially his shocking postscript. He's spot-on as always.
You may recall that on Friday morning, I ripped US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as Exhibit A in why the Obama administration has messed up Egypt. Friday night, Mark Steyn went after him on Megyn Kelly's show on Fox News.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
