‘I will only take on targets that won’t kill me, but steer clear of those who just might?’
A great piece by
Nick Cohen in the London Spectator.
As there is much, much more in this vein coming, I offer you 10 truths that ought to be self-evident.
- A religion is not a race. Sometimes, not always, it is a system of
violent beliefs that claims the right to subjugate others – most notably
its ‘own’ coerced adherents.
- Undoubtedly there are white racists and Hindu nationalists who treat
religion as a race and hate Muslims because they are Muslims. Their
existence ought to present no problem to principled people, who should
fight, criticise and satirise them with the same force and for the same
reasons they fight religious obscurantism.
- Criticism of religion – including bawdy irreverent criticism— is a defence against oppressive power.
- In our time, the most oppressive religious movements are variants on
radical Islam. That may change. You only have to look at Hindu
fundamentalism in India or anti-Muslim Buddhist fundamentalism in Burma
to see how. But for the present we must fight the enemies in front of
us. What other choice do we have?
- It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to satirise radical Islamists and their
beliefs – the main targets of radical Islamists include other Muslims as
well as Christians, Jews, Yazidis and secularists.
- Even if in your confused liberal mind you think that it is, no one
has the right to stop satire or criticism because they are offended.
- No one has the right to kill those who offend them.
- If they claim that right, they are the most deserving targets of satire and criticism imaginable.
- And if you do not then satirise and criticise them because you are frightened of ending up like Charlie Hebdo’s
dead journalists, or of taking a whipping in a PC backlash, how can you
in conscience satirise left or right wing politicians you despise, or
the evangelical Christians, Jewish fundamentalists, Catholic
reactionaries, Russian orthodox Putinists you deplore?
- Are you not saying, if only when you are by yourself and think no
one is listening: ‘I will only take on targets that won’t kill me, but
steer clear of those who just might?’
Read it all. (There's much more).
Labels: Charlie Hebdo, Europe, France, Islamic terrorism, Islamophobia, liberal media bias, liberal media censorship, Paris, satire
Greta Van Susteren: Obama WH Called Me to Push Reporter to Not Cover Benghazi
Greta Van Susteren admitted Friday on Off the Record that she was called by
the Obama White House and told to push a FOX reporter to not cover
Benghazi.
Let's go to the videotape.
Wow. But sure wish this had come out sooner.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Benghazigate, Greta van Sustern, Hillary Clinton, liberal media censorship
What does it take to be blocked on Twitter by a liberal American journalist?
What does it take to be blocked on Twitter by a liberal American journalist? Apparently, not much. Tom Gara is the
corporate news editor at the Wall Street Journal. Look what happens to someone who tries to argue with him on Twitter.
For the record, Tzippy Yarom is also a journalist (writes for Mishpacha) and is my cousin.
And you thought that the Wall Street Journal was at least less Leftist than those other legacy newspapers....
Labels: liberal media bias, liberal media censorship, Twitter
What the Times and the Post have ignored in April
Leo Rennert has a (partial) list of
items ignored by the
New York Times and the
Washington Post over the past month.
April 1-Hamas official urges Palestinian women to blow themselves up "for the sake of Jerusalem."
April 2-PA arrests woman for criticizing Abbas on Facebook, cracks down on journalists.
April 3-Palestinian revisionism - Moses was a Muslim who led Muslims in exodus from Egypt.
April 3-Medieval blood libel of Jews gaining in popularity in Jordan.
...
April 19-Egypt's Grand Mufti prays at Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, triggers firestorm for legitimizing Israel.
April 19-Barghouti, who led second intifada, confesses Arafat gave OK.
April 19-Arabs stab young Jews in Jerusalem on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
April 20-Hamas' No. 2 says won't honor any peace treaty with Israel.
April 21-Two Palestinians, with arsenal of weapons, explosives nabbed in West Bank.
April 23-Abbas' PA TV airs poem for children, "Our enemy Zion is Satan with a tail."
April 24-Abbas blocks websites that criticize him.
There's much more.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: liberal media censorship, mainstream media, New York Times, Washington Post
The New York Times censors reality
On Friday, the
New York Times published an editorial in which
they came out against the United States or Israel striking Iran.
There should be no illusions. Iran’s nuclear ambitions are real and dangerous. But there is no proof that it has made the decision to move from producing fuel to building a bomb. American officials say that reports of a missile with a 6,000-mile range are premature and wildly exaggerated.
The costs of an Israeli military strike — with or without American support — would be huge. It would likely only set Iran’s nuclear program back for a few years. It would unite Iranians around their government at a time when it is fast losing popular support. It would also shatter the international coalition for sanctions and direct more anger against Israel and the United States.
But the
Times left out a little something from their news coverage in order to make their editorial appear a bit more plausible. On Friday, Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni once again called Israel a '
cancerous tumor' and promised to eliminate it.
"The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed," Teheran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Friday.
Khamenei addressed thousands of worshipers attending a Tehran University prayer service marking the Fajr celebration.
The Iranian Revolution brought freedom and dignity to Iranian people and "destroyed the anti-Islamic regime, and brought Islamic regime instead… Dictatorship was changed to democracy," he said.
Here's how
The Times reported that story:
American and European officials said Friday that a mission by international nuclear inspectors to Tehran this week had failed to address their key concerns, indicating that Iran’s leaders believe they can resist pressure to open up the nation’s nuclear program.
The assessment came as Iran’s supreme leader lashed out at the United States, vowing to retaliate against oil sanctions and threats of military action and warning that any attack “would be 10 times worse for the interests of the United States” than it would be for Iran.
Here's the closest
The Times came to discussing Khameni's threat against Israel:
The ayatollah also issued an unusually blunt warning that Iran would support militant groups opposing Israel, an action that some analysts said could be held up by Israel as a casus belli.
Commentary's
Jonathan Tobin called
The Times on their omission (Hat Tip:
Captain H. via
Small Dead Animals and
National Review).
However, there was something missing from the Times report of Khamenei’s speech that was reported elsewhere. Other accounts noted that in addition to threatening the United States, Khamenei said this: “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.” While we don’t know how or why a mention of this element of the speech managed to get excised from the account in the Times, it’s a question worth pondering.
Any discussion of the nature of the Iranian nuclear threat that ignores the regime’s murderous intentions toward Israel is clearly incomplete.
Indeed, it is. There aren't all that many people left in this World who still remember the Holocaust, but all the Jews I know who are old enough to have lived through it make one thing perfectly clear: When someone threatens to kill you, take him seriously.
Labels: Iranian nuclear threat, liberal media censorship, New York Times
The Obama administration chooses its coverage
The Obama administration is
preventing the Boston Herald, the city's right-leaning major daily, from covering President Obama's Boston fundraiser on Wednesday.
The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news “fairly.”
“I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich wrote in response to a Herald request for full access to the presidential visit.
“My point about the op-ed was not that you ran it but that it was the full front page, which excluded any coverage of the visit of a sitting US President to Boston. I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits,” Lehrich wrote.
That incident happened in March.
Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed White House-press relations at right-leaning Instapundit.com, said a pattern appears to be developing.
“It’s all about control,” Reynolds said. “At some point this will blow back on them. Most presidents behave in a more refined fashion. Experience has shown that acting presidential is good politics and to their advantage.”
I wonder who will be in the press pool to cover Prime Minister Netanyahu's meeting with President Obama on Friday.
Thank God for the internet and bloggers.
Labels: Barack Obama, Boston Herald, liberal media censorship
Three Jewish children
Caroline Glick decries the world's callousness toward the murders of
three Jewish children.
In a rare move, the Prime Minister’s Office released photos of the Fogel family’s blood-drenched corpses.
They are shown as they were found by security forces.
There was Hadas, dead on her parents’ bed, next to her dead father Udi.
There was Elad, lying on a small throw rug wearing socks. His little hands were clenched into fists. What was a four-year-old to do against two grown men with knives? He clenched his fists. So did his big brother.
Maybe the Prime Minister’s Office thought the pictures would shock the world. Maybe Binyamin Netanyahu thought the massacre of three little children would move someone to rethink their hatred of Israel.
That was the theme of his address to the nation Saturday night.
Netanyahu directed most of his words to the hostile world. He spoke to the leaders who rush to condemn Israel at the UN Security Council every time we assert our right to this land by permitting Jews to build homes. He demanded that they condemn the murder of Jewish children with the same enthusiasm and speed.
He shouldn’t have bothered.
The government released the photos on Saturday night. Within hours, the social activism website My Israel posted a short video of the photographs on YouTube along with the names and ages of the victims.
Within two hours YouTube removed the video.
What was Netanyahu thinking? Didn’t he get the memo that photos of murdered Jewish children are unacceptable? If they’re published, someone might start thinking about the nature of Palestinian society.
Someone might consider the fact that in the Palestinian Authority, anti-Jewish propaganda is so ubiquitous and so murderous that killing the Fogel babies was an act of heroism. The baby killers knew that by murdering Udi, Ruth, Hadas, Yoav and Elad they would enter the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. They can expect to have a sports stadium or school in Ramallah or Hebron built for them by the Palestinian Authority and underwritten by American or European taxpayers.
And indeed, the murder of the Fogel children and their parents was greeted with jubilation in Gaza.
Carnivals were held in the streets as Hamas members handed out sweets.
Obviously YouTube managers are not interested in being held responsible for someone noticing that genocidal Jew hatred defines Palestinian society – and the Arab world as a whole. But they really have no reason to be concerned. Even if they had allowed the video to be posted for more than an hour, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
The enlightened peoples of Europe, and growing numbers of Americans, have no interest in hearing or seeing anything that depicts Jews as good people, or even just as regular people. It is not that the cultured, intellectual A-listers in Europe and America share the Palestinians’ genocidal hatred of the Jewish people.
Caroline goes on to describe why Prime Minister Netanyahu was fooling himself if he thought that releasing the gruesome pictures would change anything.
Read the whole thing.
As many of you know already, that video is
up on this site, and has gotten hundreds of hits.
Late last night, I got an email from a woman in England who said that she wanted to watch the video and spread it, but that when she clicked on it on my site, she got a message that it had been removed. So I clicked on it and it worked (on my site it's embedded from My Israel, but I have it downloaded to my laptop, and can put it up independently so long as Blogger doesn't stop me). I wrote her back and told her that apparently her ISP was so sensitive to the possibility that she would see it, that they have blocked clicking through to My Israel. This reminded me of the way the Nazis and other anti-Semitic regimes started their pogroms against the Jews by banning ritual slaughter (shechita). They're so pure and refined (we call them Yfei HaNefesh here) that they can't hurt animals, but they will murder human beings solely for being Jewish.
For the record, I directed this woman to another site where the video is embedded (which happens to be in England, by the way, and where as of last night it had over 4,000 hits and 200 comments which I did not read). I have not heard from her yet whether that was successful. I told her that if all else failed, I would send her the file, but since it's a big file, she should try to get it on her own first.
If anyone else is having trouble accessing the video, please email me - I know of two other sites where it's up.
Labels: Fogel family massacre, Itamar, liberal media censorship
