As a woman in the United States, I do see a partly unintentional cultural war on my gender everywhere I turn. However, this isn’t one orchestrated by the Romney campaign. It’s one that’s deeply embedded in our culture and fueled by the media itself, the entity which often claims to champion “women’s rights.” I can’t walk through Target anymore without being bombarded with sleek magazine covers of airbrushed women who represent our cultural expression of beauty. Magazines and television shows subliminally say to women that we are not beautiful if we don’t meet the impossible standards set by our culture. They say, “You’re not pretty enough, buy this makeup,” or “you’re not thin enough, lose 20 pounds.” In short, they’re saying “you’re not perfect enough.”

I’m sick of hearing from Cosmopolitan that I’m not beautiful or thin enough. It’s insulting and degrading. Sure, the media also places standards upon men, but they are far less restrictive. In magazines and television everywhere, women face an onslaught of superficially-based warfare.

While there has been significant pushback against the plethora of airbrushing and superficial standards for women in our culture today, it’s still present. The long term effects of these standards still weigh heavily upon women. We are told by the shiny magazine covers that we must be perfect, thin, and beautiful to be “accepted” in society. As women everywhere try to achieve these standards, we constantly come short because we are seeking something we will never achieve. The “perfect” body, face, etc. is an impossible-to-attain social construct. As a result, thousands of women struggle daily with body issues, low self-esteem, and even eating disorders. Additionally, when the image of female perfection is so superficial, women are often not taken seriously because our worth is appearance-based.

In short, “beauty” is synonymous with “ability.” I can say for a fact that it is much easier to succeed as a woman if you are considered attractive. It should not be that way. This is a symbolic statement that says women should be judged based on appearance, not merit or character. America is supposed to be a meritocracy, not a nation where image is somehow a golden ticket for success.

iving as a conservative woman in the United States is even more difficult. While the National Organization for Women (NOW) will charge into battle for liberal women like Sandra Fluke or causes like abortion and birth control, they remain silent in the face of blatant attacks on conservative women. Recently, a video emerged of union members hitting a piñata with South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s face on it because of her unease with the labor movement. NOW and other feminist groups had nothing to say on the issue. Talk about being warriors for women’s rights, huh? Then, a sexually explicit photoshopped image of conservative pundit S.E. Cupp appeared in Hustler Magazine, bashing her for her “dumb ideas” such as defunding Planned Parenthood. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt responded to the wave of complaints by defending the article and saying, “that’s satire.” Again, from feminist organizations: nothing. At least several liberal women such as Sandra Fluke have come out in S.E. Cupp’s defense. Conservative women like S.E. Cupp, Nikki Haley, and myself do not receive a defense from feminist organizations (not that we need it anyway) simply because of our political stances. It is an example of another liberal double standard. NOW and other liberal women’s groups are liberal ideologues who are pursuing a liberal agenda under the guise of gender equality.

For liberal women’s groups, the answer to the “War on Women” is taking legislative and political action to support Planned Parenthood, extend abortion, increase the distribution of birth control, etc. Once again, if that’s their weapon of choice, I don’t plan on carrying anytime soon. However, for all women, not just conservative women, there is another solution to the cultural assault on women’s images and the lack of a liberal defense. We need to be the women who are so often neglected in the media: real women. We need to be women of character who hold family values while still fighting for respect from the media. We need to be examples for our sisters, friends, and children. Gender should not determine our place in society.

Culture changes slowly, but it does change. That change begins with us. Our place should be determined not based upon the media’s impossible standards or a liberal feminist ideology. It should depend on merit. I am beautiful, but not because the media tells me I am. I’m beautiful because I value myself no matter who tells me otherwise. I’m a woman, I’m conservative, and I will not take this anymore.

The media has covered a smorgasbord of articles ranging from birth control to women to gay marriage in 2012. Leftists have denounced the GOP’s supposed “War on Women” in recent months for their opposition to the birth control mandate and support of personhood laws in a growing number of states. Meanwhile, liberal groups throughout the county decried George Zimmerman’s “racial motives” for shooting Trayvon Martin before he got his day in court. Zimmerman might very well be guilty as sin but what happened to innocent until proven guilty? Then, in a “surprise” (and by surprise I mean, no surprise at all), President Obama came out in support of gay marriage just after North Carolina banned the practice and Gallup reported that just over 50% of Americans support the practice. How convenient.

Strangely, most of the biggest news stories in the US in the months leading up to the 2012 election have been social, not economic, issues. The Obama administration’s focus on these issues is not one of genuine concern. Rather, it is nothing but a political ploy. First, social issues tend to be the most contentious. Supporters and opponents of gay marriage, abortion, contraception, etc. tend to be far apart on the political spectrum and the interests groups are generally well-ensconced in their own opinions. Bringing up these issues ignites the numbed passions of Obama supporters, many of whom have resorted to lukewarm support in the face of the President’s less-than-stellar record. This is a far cry from the passionate obsession of the Obama Zombies during the 2008 election. The Administration is looking for any way to re-ignite theses passions and get their supporters to the polls.

Additionally, the focus on social issues places the spotlight back on the Obama Administration, a spotlight that has been solely focused on the GOP contenders in the last several months. Obama is unable to run on his actual record, considering his history of economic failures. Therefore, the President and his supporters have turned the spotlight on issues which can actually garner some support from his liberal allies (all while ostracizing the right of course). It’s as if Obama woke up last week, looked at his record, and said, “Hmmm rising unemployment, falling poll numbers…OH LOOK GAY MARRIAGE…I can use that.” These social issues are merely a distraction from Obama’s abysmal record. They are also a way to refocus the spotlight on the President and sooth his inflated ego.

What this political maneuver shows is the president’s complete lack of accountability. He’s unable to answer for his faults or stand up for his decisions, even when they have failed. When all else fails and Obama cannot ignore the glaring shortcomings of his administration, he simply blames his predecessor. The economy, partisanship, turbulent world situation…all Bush. (Note: Ignore the fact that the average unemployment rate under George W. Bush was about 5%) Joe Biden took this on last week, blaming Bush for our turbulent relations with Iran. There is certainly a high degree of character deficiency in the White House right now. The President and his blind supporters are unable to take responsibility for anything, evidence of political and personal weakness. It’s tough to stand by your decisions honestly and answer for your failures. Yet, for the President of the United States, it is part of his job description. The President is not supposed to “Pass the Buck.” Unfortunately for us, our current Commander-in-Chief is more than willing to “Pass the Buck…Over there.” Oh look, a political distraction!

For starters, I admire the transparency of the label’s pitchmen, HispanicLatino founder Jesse Treviño, and Texas Representative Richard Peña Raymond (D-Laredo) .  They have no qualms with stating that “HispanicLatino” was born out of a need to carve out a new ethno-political identity for those who traditionally identified themselves as “Hispanic” or “Latino” (more on the difference here).  According to Treviño and Peña Raymond, there is an ongoing war on Hispanics/Latinos, which can only be solved via the creation of a new artificial ethnoracial umbrella.

Never mind that, according to the most recent Pew Hispanic poll, the labels are rejected by a majority of people who would much rather identify by their country of national origin.  Read through the entire poll findings, and you will find that they demolish every one of the premises thay underlie the supposed need for an all-encompassing label.

No wonder, then, that Al Punto anchor Jorge Ramos (who never passes up an opportunity to advance racial grievance in furtherance of the immigration agenda) struggled to keep a straight face during the segment.  When faced with the reality of the Pew poll, Treviño and Peña Raymond had no other choice than to be transparent about the aims of the “HispanicLatino” label.  Ramos went to the Pew poll so many times, that I half expected him to reprise Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s instant classic “…it’s not selling very well“.

If you follow the Pew link and go deeper into the poll, you’ll find that left to their own devices…Hispanics, Latinos, or “ethnic identity to be named later” are just like any of the many ethnic groups that came into this country before them.  The great truth behind the Pew poll is that Hispanics/Latinos have largely resisted the Institutional Left’s attempts to herd them into the uniquely American Hispanic/Latino construct.  Individual Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, Cubans, et. al are free to assimilate into the mainstream when they do not get sucked into the “Latino” identity, and the Left knows it (as do media institutions that depend on a steady influx of non-English-speaking, non-assimilated individuals for survival).

HispanicLatino is, ultimately, nothing more than yet another naked attempt at herding individuals from all over Latin America into a single monoblock identity for the purposes of political manipulation.  As such, it should be laughed out of the room.

This article is cross-posted at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail), and a Spanish-language version is available here.

Let me state up front that I don’t think the filmmakers meant anything by the “Christo” character.  I do think they stumbled haplessly on a hornet’s nest of anti-Semitic tropes – and thereby hangs a tale that matters.

Act of Valor is a moving, gripping film, all the more so for being enacted by real Navy SEALs.  (Full disclosure: this reviewer is a 20-year Navy veteran, and while definitely not a SEAL was privileged to work with some.)  The one major flaw I found with the production, per se, was the rather annoying sound track, which could have dispensed with the hackneyed crescendos at suspenseful moments.  What the SEALs do needs no audience-cues or embellishment.

And they do incredible things.  The movie conveys well the deceptive simplicity of their narrowly-scoped tactical operations.  Naval Special Warfare is the unique funnel through which attack submarines, amphibious assault ships, and special-purpose aircraft are brought to bear on strange, one-off combat problems for which they weren’t necessarily designed.  The whole Navy – indeed, all the special ops capabilities the United States has – makes up a big bag of tricks for the SEALs to reach into.

Yet when the SEALs are on-scene conducting their operations, doing what no one else can, it all depends on them.  Training and expertise are indispensable, naturally.  But the on-scene surprises, the multi-vector firefights, the heart-rending collateral damage, the fallen comrades – that’s where the valor comes in.

It doesn’t come in with a trumpet fanfare.  The SEALs are effective in the movie because they evince valor so realistically.  They are terse, focused, making every yell and profanity count – which is what highly-trained men sound like in combat.  Valor isn’t something you emote your way through or sit around thinking about.  It’s just what’s left when all the props have fallen away.  And it requires a context if it is to matter and be detectable: a life saved, a mission accomplished, a job not given up on, a shipmate not left behind.

That, it turns out, is the poignant weakness at the heart of Act of Valor’s premise.  The ambiguous real-world context of the war on terror is the greatest narrative disability of all.   The film’s story, with so much gripping tactical realism, seems to be built on a strategic hallucination: that it’s Chechen underworld gangsters who are likely to be masterminding a terrorist insertion into the United States.

Hezbollah is all over Latin America; Hamas is showing up there; Iran’s paramilitary Qods force is reported to be operating out of Venezuela; Hezbollah and Somali Islamists have already sneaked illegally across our border from Mexico; the great majority of drug criminals in Latin America are Latin American – yet the production team for Act of Valor decided to make the villains in the movie Chechens, and make the Chechen drug smuggler a Jew.  Why in the name of Jumping Jehoshaphat did they do that?

The Jewish character’s name is Mikhail Troykavitch, but his nom de narcotics in Latin America is “Christo.”  This seems a little studied, but perhaps is merely a coincidence.  (If you’re not getting it, all Western names containing the syllable “Christ” in any form map back to the name of Jesus Christ.  The “Christ” comes from the Greek christos, meaning “anointed.”)  I say let’s assume nothing about a Jewish criminal naming himself “Christ” and move on.

Other reviewers have pointed out Christo’s rather cartoonish hooked nose and eyeglasses, so we need not belabor that.  I was struck forcibly, however, by a disclosure early on about Christo’s Chechen associate, Shabal – the terrorist who blows up children while assassinating the US ambassador in the Philippines, and then plots to put suicide bombers with high-tech explosive vests in cities in the United States.  Shabal, we are told, was connected with the 2004 massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan, in southern Russia.

The insertion of a Jewish character into this mix begins to rise to a remarkable level of haplessness with the Beslan tie-in.  Perhaps the filmmakers were unaware that there is a well-worn theme among some factions in Russian politics of Jewish complicity in the Beslan massacre.   (A relatively printable fulmination represented at a Pravda forum here; more colorful ones can be found in Russian.) The baseless allegation is periodically inflamed by reports that alternately suggest Israel is sympathetic to the plight of Chechnya, and in league with the hated, Russian-approved government there.

The flames are fanned further, however, by 9/11 Truthers who believe a Russian Jew, Boris Berezovsky, was connected with the 9/11 attacks.  The same Berezovsky, who had business interests in Chechnya in the 1990s, is also quoted all over the net by the conspiracy-minded as boasting that he “caused the war in Chechnya.”  Those of fevered imagination can’t decide whether the Jews are abetting Chechen terrorism or allying themselves with Moscow, but in any case, you can’t make a criminal a Chechen Jew and give him an underworld buddy who blows up kids and had a hand in the Beslan massacre, and not open up a big, sweaty bottle of single-malt anti-Semitism.

“But, good grief,” you might say.  “Can’t anybody ever make a Jew a bad guy?  What, screenwriters are supposed to look under every rock for exotic anti-Semitic tropes they might be inadvertently evoking?  Seriously, we have to be that careful?”

And the proper response, the pointed, relevant response is: Why shouldn’t we have to?  Look at Act of Valor itself.  About whom were the screenwriters at least that careful?  Consider the interview on Christo’s yacht, in which the SEAL senior chief is interrogating the drug smuggler.  Note what the senior chief says out loud, and what he doesn’t.  He barks at Christo, “But you’re a Jew!” – by which he is suggesting that it’s odd for Christo to be in league with a terrorist like Shabal, whose goals are presumably hostile to Jews.

Then the senior chief asks Christo, “You know what he is?”  Well, we all assume we know what Shabal is, having seen him in a video near the beginning of the movie, calling on Allah while waving an automatic weapon.  But the SEAL doesn’t say it.  He doesn’t say “Muslim radical,” he doesn’t say “Islamic terrorist,” he doesn’t say “Islamist” – he doesn’t fill in the blank at all.  The question hangs there, answered in every viewer’s mind but not on the screen.

In the real world, meanwhile, the transnational terrorists who keep popping up far abroad, especially in the Western hemisphere, are Arabs, Pakistanis, and Somalis.  But Act of Valor gives us Chechens and Filipinos.  (There is a brief interlude at an airfield in Somalia, but no Somalis in the terror gang we follow in the story.)

This political correctness wouldn’t be as noticeable if the filmmakers did not seem to have taken the long way around the barn to shoehorn a Jew into the story.  The contrast can’t help standing out, and it is right to point it out.  It would be wrong to accept it without cavil.

It is almost as if the filmmakers were consciously determined not to appear to give a Jewish character kid-glove treatment – as if to say: “Fears about negative depictions of Jews are outdated and overblown.  Jews are just like anyone else; we can make some of them villains.  The evils of the past don’t mean we have to whitewash the present.”

But, of course, the world hasn’t changed that much.  If it had, we could make Lebanese-Arab Hezbollah Muslims or Yemeni-Arab Islamist jihadists into our main screen villains for a movie, without self-consciousness.  The truth is that this world is pretty much as it has ever been, and a political recognition of that – an unspoken one would be fine – is what is missing from Act of Valor, because it is missing from America’s official, public dialogue on the war on terror.  The breathtaking nature of the SEALs and what they do makes the movie a thrilling ride.   But the story comes off as thin, not because the SEALs’ missions don’t matter, but because there is no strategic-level narrative, no “Why We Fight,” tying them together.

Our enemies in World War II were basically living caricatures, armed with tanks and aircraft carriers.  Writing a narrative in which they were the enemy wasn’t difficult.  It was harder to write our narrative in the Cold War, but even then it was easier than it is today to define what the problem was, and how to bring the nation-state to bear in solving it.

Today’s war is a war without a narrative: a war in which there is only an endless series of “battles,” which we cannot afford to lose but which don’t bring us any closer to winning.  We don’t have an actionable concept of what winning would look like, and we certainly have no strategy to get there.

In a sense, the SEALs are the perfect force to follow in a movie about a war like this one.  A number of reviewers have complained about the shallowness of the plot; some even consider it to be laughable, no more than a cheap device to get a particular SEAL team from one operation to the next.  But the joke is on them, because that is pretty much how a war looks from the perspective of a SEAL team.  One of the most realistic aspects of the movie is precisely the narrow immediacy of the pretexts for moving the SEALs around.

SEALs don’t run extended joint-force campaigns, they don’t take and hold territory, and they don’t hand the president enduring, decisive political victories.  For those activities – the kind that form a coherent narrative – you must, to paraphrase T.R. Fehrenbach, put your young men in the mud and give them enduring, decisive political objectives.  But that is not the war on terror as it has been waged for the last four years.  Act of Valor has a plot like a police-procedural TV show because that’s what the war on terror has become.

The war was losing strategic steam by the end of the Bush presidency, and has settled into a tactical police-action posture under Obama.  The throw-away “Chechen-Jewish-drug-smuggler” character has about it the whiff of a Law & Order episode; it comes off as a quasi-random composite, of the kind writers can just make up when the narrative is as open-ended as the face of human crime.

Wars against well-defined enemies preclude such literary license, which is quite clear if we imagine writing a story like this about World War II.  The Nazis were Germans; there was no getting around it.  Today, we have worked hard not to define an enemy; we have no enduring, decisive political objective; and we have no positive strategy.  So we end up with as much literary license as we can handle, and no end in sight to the conflict.

Seen in that light, it is perhaps even more remarkable that Act of Valor is so compelling.  I admit to not even registering the thespian inadequacies of the SEALs, because – as many readers can probably also say – they looked real to my eyes.  The actors in G.I. Jane looked like actors playing SEALs; the SEALs in Act of Valor are authentic.

I saw one review in which the writer supposed that the SEALs “don’t really talk that way,” but I’m not sure what he meant: the SEALs talked as military men talk.  SEALs tend to be very intelligent, well-read, and understated, with a somewhat mordant sense of humor and a natural, unforced patriotism and warrior’s honor.  That came through in the movie.  To ask for something else is to miss the point.

When one of the SEALs is killed after throwing himself on a grenade, the scene is depicted accurately, without gratuitous gore, and the other SEALs react, but continue their mission.  At his funeral, the team’s wounded SEALs make a powerful visual, gathered around the casket, but equally powerful is the quiet dignity and courage of the assembled family members.  The SEALs would have it no other way.

Critical reviewers have denigrated the voice-over by the SEAL chief (NCO, E-7) whose narration frames the movie.  They suggest that the narration and its content – which is focused on the heritage passed between generations of fighting men – are simplistic or hackneyed.  It didn’t strike me that way.  The SEAL’s voice, with its Midwestern accent and unpracticed cadence, sounded familiar and authentic to me.  It sounded like the voice of a sailor.

Tethering the story to the SEALs’ family lives cements the film’s message.  The silly, tortured ambiguities of politics and the war on terror are mostly offstage.  The reality that grounds these men is captured in the face of the SEAL lieutenant’s baby boy in the final seconds of the movie.   Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard:  in a war without a narrative, there is still valor.

We sleep soundly in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.   (Attributed by George Orwell to Winston Churchill)

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Let’s make a movie with no real plot in the classic sense, no growth in the characters, no mental or emotional breakdowns. A movie where nobody ever questions his own morality in defending his country. A movie where, when a compadre is killed in battle, the others just carry on the fight, instead of crouching over the body and erupting into hysterical melodrama.

One where, in a supreme coup of “patriotism,” the director hires actors who are actually current or former military personnel, from the very same kind of unit portrayed in the film. How little, patriotic hearts must go pitter-pat at such indulgence!

By all means, let’s show the unenlightened booboisie, the American people, a movie comprising one victorious battle after another, even though we all know the overarching campaign is a lost cause. Never mind the inarguable facts; show the popcorn munchers a movie where the men are always willing to make “sacrifices,” and where the United States is always the good guy who will ultimately triumph, no matter how bad things may look.

Even when there’s a setback, by all means, show us only soldiers who suck it up and do it better next time — and without the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that constitutes drama in the minds of sophisticated New York film crickets. No doubts, no introspection, no existential angst; how is that realistic? How does that show the inevitable bestialization of the warmongers?

A movie with no “boy meets girl” or even “boy meets boy” love story, and where alternative lifestyles simply don’t exist! A movie where men are men (as if gender can ever truly be deterministic), and men don’t discover their feminine side or the inherent inequality of traditional marriage. Heck, a movie where wives refuse to cry until after their husbands or boyfriends have left, because they don’t want to “burden their men” with worry when they’re about to go on a deadly mission.

Yeah, a movie like that. How nice. Just lousy, damned propaganda; rah-rah, flag-waving Americanism. How disgusting. It’s nothing but anti-art; what kind of a brainwashed, mind-melded moron would want to see that garbage? What’s the real point… to bump up military-recruitment stats? Make it seem that war can ever be noble? To “lift morale,” for cripes’ sake? What a low and vulgar consciousness that bespeaks. Who could possibly imagine the brilliant lights of cinema paying even the slightest attention to such “all-American” bubblegum like that.

What film critic could possibly praise trash like — trash like — I forget, what’s the name of that filthy piece of propaganda we’re talking about?

Oh yeah: Films like They Were Expendable (1945), about those crazy, new, fast, maneuverable, and barely armored PT boats, which took on Japanese cruisers and destroyers in the Philippines during World War II. The movie starred, and was partially directed by, Lt. Commander Robert Montgomery (who actually commanded a PT boat during the war) and John Wayne — two conservative Republicans — along with liberal Democrat Donna Reed. It’s considered a classic film today.

~

The war against radical Islamism has never been “Barack H. Obama’s war,” despite the fact that he is the current Commander in Chief — and despite the fact that, as he brags at the drop of a hijab, he is the man who “got” Osama bin Laden. (Oh, sure, the CIA and the SEALs were the ones who actually tracked bin Laden for years, infiltrated into the wilds of Pakistan, hunted him down, entered his compound, took out his bodyguards, and pulled the trigger to send him to the boiling pitch of Jahannam… acting on orders under a program initiated by George W. Bush. But Obama signed the order! Clearly, he deserves the lion’s share of the credit.) But that war was never Obama’s war.

No, the war against radical Islamism has always been seen as Bush’s war… hence good liberals see it as unalloyed evil, folly, and madness. Any movie extolling the virtues of its warriors is, by definition, propaganda.

Inexplicably, liberals have never affixed that libelous label to the heroes of Roosevelt’s war. After all, that’s totally different.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

Back in July, at a conference of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul, Clinton pledged that the US would take action against “religious intolerance” in America.

It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on that.  Clinton said, in her remarks, “No country, including my own, has a monopoly on truth or a secret formula for ethnic and religious harmony.”  But if any country comes close to having such a monopoly, it is, in fact, the United States.  One of the core principles of our founding was religious freedom; the purpose of guaranteeing it was, explicitly, to discourage religious strife; and to fulfill that purpose, the drafters of the Constitution prohibited Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

The US has not avoided religious enmity entirely, but we have kept the law and the government on the side of enforcing a peaceful, quiescent environment for the practice of religion, to a greater extent than any other nation that has ever existed.  This environment has existed side by side with robust and sometimes disgusting criticisms of other people’s religions, which we have always allowed as free speech.

And it is worth taking another moment to remember why we determined to allow such free speech.  We didn’t do it because it is “good,” in any positive sense, for people to say vile things about each other’s beliefs.  It may be perfectly good, or at least not repulsive, for people to say reasonably critical things about religious beliefs.  But whether it’s ridiculous allegations about Jews, absurd accusations against Catholics, or today’s fresh-milled 20-something atheists calling Christians “Christofascists,” the point of free speech was never to encourage idiocies of this kind on the theory that we need more of them.

The point of free speech is to keep the government out of the business of deciding whether they’re “bad” or “good.”  Government is incompetent to decide such questions, and they should therefore not be within its scope of authority.  Precisely because government has civic authority, its involvement in classifying critical speech should be somewhere between severely limited and non-existent.  The step from government having an opinion to government repressing intellectual freedom is perilously short.  Government can’t wave a magic wand to kindly and gently fix people’s thoughts; it has only the hammer of force and punishment, and that means making every unapproved thought into a “nail.”  The American Founders understood this about government, and insisted therefore on keeping its powers limited, constitutionally explicit, and federally divided.

 So when Hillary Clinton promises the following, she is on wholly un-American, anti-liberal ground (emphasis added):

In the United States … we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.

OK, so the US government is going to use peer pressure and shaming on us.  (The tools, by the way, of “worker soviets” in the sanguinary workers’ paradises of the last century.)

What exactly is it that we abhor?  Elizabeth Kendal has an excellent summary at her Religious Liberty Monitoring website of the history behind the UN push to “combat religious intolerance,” and it is worth talking the time to understand how a number of terms – Islamophobia, “defamation” of religion, and “incitement” against religion – have been conflated over the last decade.  Getting forms of intellectual discretion wrapped up in “what we abhor” is an ongoing project in the misnamed effort to “combat religious intolerance.”

But another entry point is the definition of “Islamophobia” cited by the typical Islamophobia watchdog.  The definition was produced by a British think tank, The Runnymede Trust, in the 1990s, and was consciously constructed as an analogue to definitions of Judeophobia or anti-Semitism.  These are its basic elements:

1)  Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
2)  Islam is seen as separate and “other.” It does not have values in common with other cultures, is not affected by them and does not influence them.
3)  Islam is seen as inferior to the West. It is seen as barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
4)  Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, threatening, supportive of terrorism and engaged in a “clash of civilizations.”
5)  Islam is seen as a political ideology and is used for political or military advantage.
6)  Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.
7)  Hostility towards Islam is used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society.
Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

Most of these elements are susceptible of extremely ambiguous interpretation.  Credentialed academics like Samuel Huntington and Victor Davis Hanson would be indicted by some of them.  And in almost any case you can think of, deciding that these criteria correctly classify the actions of non-Muslims is a matter not of objective judgment but of partisan opinion.

Regarding #6, for example, both non-Muslims and Muslims are likely to reject some criticisms from each other out of hand – because our beliefs about some things are fundamentally different.  There are Muslim leaders, after all, who constantly reject Western criticisms of sharia out of hand.  And there are Muslim leaders who don’t.  There is no valid reason why any Westerner should be charged with “Islamophobia” for ignoring or rejecting criticisms of Western practices by Muslims.

Consider the practice of veiling women.  When an imam criticizes Western society for failing to veil women, I have no heartburn whatsoever in rejecting that criticism as invalid and inapplicable to my life and my society.  How absurd to suggest that I am being “Islamophobic” by doing this.

I recognize, of course, that many Muslim women don’t wear a veil, and many clerics are fine with that.  Muslims don’t do the same things in every part of the world.  And I prefer civic approaches in the West that seek to live with the practice of veiling where it is important to some citizens.  I disagree with the veil being imposed on women, but 99% of the time, the issue isn’t one that affects me directly or requires me to register an official political opinion.

But the fundamental issue here is the status of women.  Declaring it to be a “phobia” when people adhere to their original opinions about that is something no government should be in the business of doing.

At what point would a government decide that it was not Islamophobia when a person “rejected out of hand” criticisms of the West made by “Islam”?  Where would the line be drawn?  Can I reject, for example, Islam’s criticism that the West doesn’t accept Mohammed as a prophet of God?  Or does this criterion indicate that I am allowed to reject it, but only after giving some positive display of having considered it without “prejudice”?  And if so, how will that work, exactly?  Will I carry a card with me, certifying that I was observed by a competent authority to give due consideration to the criticisms of my society made by Islamic leaders?

This is not a laughing matter; the 20th century was a vast, vicious playground for exactly such measures of control over the intellectual lives of peoples and societies.  The criticism we should be leveling here is not against “Islam” or “Muslims,” it is against our own government, and the factions of our own, Western/American political spectrum that conceive of government as a method of administering anti-phobia measures.

The idea of government, for too many in America, has gone wildly off-track.  Hillary Clinton’s acknowledgment that the Obama administration can’t make black-letter laws against free expression about Islam, but that it will use peer pressure and shaming to try to shape and discourage the people’s expression, is a perfect example of the corruption of the governmental idea in our once-constitutional nation.  Our basic problem in this regard is not Islam; our problem is the growing failure of our governments at all levels to adhere to America’s own standard of individual liberty and limited government.  We chose that standard not because criticism of others is necessarily or absolutely “good,” but because intellectual liberty itself is.

Judaism and Christianity are, along with Western philosophy, the progenitors of that idea of liberty.  The positive, absolute good of liberty is what we must proclaim and defend.  And in our nation, on our terms, Islam has the opportunity to thrive as Judaism and Christianity have, by being consistent with it.  It cannot be the other way around.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The teacher, whose name has been withheld (I think it is “Ms. Grinch”), received a blizzard of complaints from parents of students enrolled at George W. Miller Elementary School in Nanuet, New York. The New York Post quotes one parent as saying:

If her brothers told her [there was no Santa], they would be punished. So I can’t imagine what should happen to the teacher.

Another said, “It’s outrageous that a teacher would strip a child of their innocence and try and demystify something.”

The demystification occurred during a geography lesson, when students—mostly 7- and 8-year-olds—told the teacher they knew where on the map the North Pole was because that’s where Santa lives. She countered by asserting that the presents under their trees were put out by the kiddies’ parents, not St. Nick.

The comparatively minor episode is just the latest in a misguided campaign mounted by well-intentioned buttinskys to take the child out of childhood. The most famous of these self-styled crusaders is First Lady Michelle Obama, who, between junk food attacks, finds time to preach about the dangers of such national menaces as school bake sales.

But Mrs. Obama is hardly alone in her efforts to save children from themselves, nor is she the first. For over a decade our nation’s schools have worked overtime to shape and direct—rather than educate—our children. So much time is devoted to molding these young charges into future contributors to society that there is scarcely time to teach them anything. A California elementary school teacher, writing at Eutopia (the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation), lamented:

There is no kindergarten. It has gone the way of the little red wagon and mud pies. The time when children learned how to go to school, how to use a tricycle, or wait their turn on the swing is gone. These were important skills—vital to success in the grades to come. We do not have time to teach them now. We have worksheets that need completing. We have take-home books to copy and homework packets to staple. We have accountability.

Getting back to Ms. Grinch, one of the people who reacted to the teacher’s reality sandwich was 69-year-old Mary Blair, whose grandmother was Virginia O’Hanlon (the Virginia). Blair told the Post:

My grandmother was a teacher for years, and I don’t think she ever had a problem answering that [Santa question].

The most real things in the world are things that you don’t see or touch, and they are the things that mean the most—love, kindness and generosity.

Amen to that, Mary.

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A story out of sunny California has left me wondering whether that scenario or ones like it have played out in zip codes like my own, where gay marriage is now the law of the land.

Homosexuals want to be treated equally in the world of couples—that much I get. Where the confusion sets in is when a lesbian is anointed her high school’s homecoming king.

The Blaze reports that Rebeca Arellano, a senior at Patrick Henry High School in San Diego, and her girlfriend Haileigh Adams “could be the first lesbian homecoming royal couple in the country if Adams—one of two female students nominated for homecoming queen—is crowned as well.”

(For fans of equal opportunity oddity, the article also supplies word that Francis Shervinski, a freshman at Columbia College in Chicago, was crowned his school’s “homecoming queen” several months back.)

A video clip from the ABC News affiliate in San Diego includes well-wishing occupants of a passing car shouting at Arellano and Adams, “You guys are an amazing couple!” (That one—the generic usage of guys to refer to individuals of either sex and even inanimate objects—I understand.)

The problem here is one of forcing an agenda, which is not how positive and constructive social change is affected. Gay advocates could say—probably have said—that events like this coronation advance the cause of gay rights in the same way that Rosa Parks’ refusal to vacate her seat on a bus advanced the cause of civil rights. Nothing could be further from the truth. The crowning of a female as “king” or a male as “queen” (putting aside the historical connotations of the second term) is a deliberate obfuscation of gender (a term I am using here in its sole grammatical sense) in the interests of cuteness. Those who support it would claim it is “opening eyes”—but I would say, if so to what?

Should we be looking forward to a time when Arellano and Adams marry and become Mr. and Mrs. Rebeca Arellano? What is achieved by the confusion resulting from that sort of convention? Natural human language is hard-wired to avoid ambiguity wherever possible. Circumventing that tendency is a way of building walls, not tearing them down.

While many applaud the strides that the gay community has made in recent years, there are at least as many who do not and who, moreover, don’t feel comfortable with these changes. Some cite religious reasons for their discomfiture. To call these people barbaric or homophobic (which I still insist means “afraid of being the same”) is a demonstration of the worst kind of intolerance coming from a group that seeks tolerance in others.

As has been written about repeatedly in this space, the views of gay advocates and of the people who oppose their lifestyle are both protected by the First Amendment. Neither side has a prior claim to constitutional protections. If gays want to win over hearts and minds, they need to exercise patience and diligence. They would also be well counseled to avoid cutesy stunts.

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I’m guessing you didn’t know the White House even had an Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, let alone a Facebook page dedicated to this worthy cause with 3,859 followers.

But it does. And last Saturday the administration sent officials associated with that initiative to Hunter College here in Manhattan, to meet with local parents, teachers, students, and community leaders at a bullying prevention summit. The stated purpose of the conclave was “to address the safety of Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Muslim American students.”

To be honest, I didn’t know there were any Pacific Islanders living in the Big Apple. Since the Census Bureau fixes the percentage of Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders at 0% for 2010, I would imagine their numbers are relatively small. I also wouldn’t think that Asian Americans are that much at risk unless it’s of having other test takers copy their answers. Forgive my racial insensitivity, but the vast majority of my sons’ classmates and friends at the brainiac high schools they went to were Asian, and they placed extremely well when it came time for college applications.

And what of Muslim Americans? I recall hearing fears expressed after 9/11 that Muslims in this country were likely to be targeted, but those fears were never realized. Sure, there were random offenses, but no massive hate-fueled campaign against the American Muslim community, no rash of attacks on mosques.

Yet, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Education, Muslim American students and their pan-Asian counterparts are likely targets of bullying. In a statement, Thomas Mariadason, an attorney at the Manhattan-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said:

Post 9/11, bias-based bullying toward religious and immigrant communities has been a consistent issue, and it continues to be under reported.

We’ve seen the egregious effects bias-based harassment has on students when there is a failure to intervene, from the violence at South Philadelphia High School in 2009 to reports we received in years past from the former Lafayette High School in Brooklyn. The problem persists, and it is a critical time for the White House to address these issues.

The incident in South Philadelphia Mariadason refers to involved some two dozen Vietnamese students who were jumped and beaten by black students. The motivations for the attacks were never scrutinized. The number of victims varied between 7 and 13 depending on the account; all were treated at an area hospital for scrapes and bruises and released.

The event precipitated a response within the school—50 Asian immigrants led a boycott—and the community at large. A year later, the Notebook, a Philadelphia public school blog, which had done extensive reporting on the incident initially, wrote:

[T]here’s no doubt South Philadelphia High School is a very different school. A new principal, an energized student base, emerging partnerships, a commitment to addressing school violence—all have resulted in striking progress. The violence and chaos of last year is largely gone, and students report a changed attitude from staff members, some of whom had participated in the harassment by mocking their accents and refusing to take seriously their reports of racial bias.

In brief, the incident was one-off. Corrective action was taken, and everyone has since moved on—except Thomas Mariadason. His mention of Lafayette High School in Brooklyn is doubly ludicrous since the hates crimes alluded to are close to a decade old and the school hasn’t existed since December of 2006. It’s a pretty safe bet that closing a school down will end any racial animus within its student body.

That still doesn’t answer the question of whether American Muslim students are likely targets of bullying on account of their race. But this does (h/t Creeping Sharia). It is a table from the FBI’s most recently published Hate Crime Statistics Report (dated 2009). The table, headed “Incidents, Offenses, Victims, and Known Offenders by Bias Motivation,” reveals that there were 132 victims of anti-Islamic crime in 2009. It also shows that there were 1,132 victims of anti-Jewish crime for the same year. Since Jews outnumber Muslims in the U.S. by only about 3 to 1, the Muslims still come out ahead. If they want to avoid persecution, all they need to do is be careful that their salaams don’t sound too much shaloms.

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"Don't tread on Olive Garden

Darden’s determination that its patrons leave happy is not limited to the youngest among them. If you are a grownup and plan a visit to Olive Garden, you can rest assured that your enjoyment of your meal will not be infringed upon by the sight (obscenity alert!) of the Stars and Stripes.

It was touch-and-go for a while, however, at the OG in Oxford, Alabama. Some thoughtless idiots from the local Kiwanis club brought along a copy of Old Glory, which they planned to display during their annual banquet. The nerve!

Luckily, the management sprang into action and informed 80-year-old Marti Warren, who had organized the event, that the American flag would not be permitted to be displayed in the restaurant—the Kiwanis banner either. Warren told local television station WBRC-TV, “I was so angry. I felt like I had been slapped in the face.”

But Darden defended its policy in a statement reading “like all Americans we have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the American flag and everything it symbolizes.” At the same time, the statement noted:

To be fair to everyone and avoid disrupting the dining experience for all other guests, [the Oxford Olive Garden] is unable to accommodate flags or banners of any type in the dining room.

The problem is that this particular OG lacks a private dining area where the sight of the flag could be safely shielded from the eyes of America haters trying to enjoy their pasta dinner.

When all was said and done, club members were forced to close their eyes and picture the flag waving in the wind as they said the pledge of allegiance. God bless America, no?

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The lawsuit was brought by Abdul Awkal, who is on death row for killing his estranged wife and brother-in-law. In documents filed in federal court, Awkal’s attorney claims that the state is infringing on his client’s First Amendment religious freedoms by failing to serve meats butchered in a manner consistent with the Koran, even though kosher meals are currently made available to Jewish prisoners.

The Koran also prohibits Muslims from eating pork, but the word pork never appeared in the lawsuit.

Now Ohio may be facing a second suit, this one brought by the state’s pork producers and processors. Dick Isler, executive director of the Ohio Pork Producers Council, is quoted by the Associated Press as stating:

We really think it’s not in the best interest, frankly, of the whole prison system. It seems like we’re letting a small group make the rules when it really isn’t in the best interest of the rest of prisoners.

Isler goes on to argue that pork is inexpensive and nutritious. Then again, what would he say? In the interests of fairness, it should be noted that Ohio initially removed pork from its prison menus in 2009 based on cost: The system had been maintaining its own pig farm and processing facility as a source of meat for its prisons, which state officials deemed too costly to maintain.

Last year, pork producers lobbied the state legislature, fighting to get pork reinstated on the menu. The system began serving pork rib patties once a week, at a cost of about $27,000 per week.

As to the current dilemma, David Singleton, Awkal’s attorney, points out that if the prison could offer Muslim inmates pre-packaged meals similar to the ones given to Jewish inmates, as the lawsuit demands, it wouldn’t be necessary to ban pork.

A spokeswoman for the prison countered that removing pork ensures that inmates’ religious practices aren’t jeopardized by the meat’s coming into contact with other foods during preparation.

In banning pork from its prisons, Ohio becomes the sixth state after Arizona, California, Florida, Maryland, and Massachusetts to take that action.

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Cuckovich, who teaches health at William C. Wood High School in Vacaville, California, claims that this standard rote response to a sneeze is disrespectful and disruptive.

You might expect that Cuckovich would be hiding under his desk now that his invidious policy has gone public. Quite the contrary, Cuckovich told reporters with Fresno station KFSN-TV:

When you sneezed in the old days, they thought you were dispelling evil spirits out of your body. So they were saying, ‘god bless you’ for getting rid of evil spirits. But today, I said what you‘re doing doesn’t really make any sense anymore.

But punishing students for saying it does make sense? Parents of students at the school believe Cuckovich is overstepping his authority. Some commentators also suspect the teacher is harboring a hidden agenda. Notes Billy Hallowell at The Blaze:

Interestingly, a Twitter account registered to a “Steve Cuckovich,” with a bio that reads, “High school teacher, father of three w/two grandkids and one on the way,” sent two tweets to leftist intellectual Cornel West’s Twitter account.

But whether it is the reference to God that Cuckovitch finds objectionable or the use of archaisms, he is well advised to stop saying goodbye when he parts company with someone. The expression, which dates to circa 1565, is a contraction of “God be with ye.”

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There is no doubt, as we discussed this morning, that the decision by Elmhurst College in suburban Chicago to include a question (even voluntary) on it’s incoming freshman registration is severely misguided.

The problems with such a decision are numerous:

1. It violates the principles of the original Christian mission of the school. This is being laughed off of course as it has been with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but it is true nonetheless.

2. It draws uneven comparisons with legitimate “minority” status that might be helpful for the college to be aware of. How many times must African Americans draw attention to the obvious that genetically disposed skin color is not comparable to the issue of desiring to sleep with someone–whatever the orientation may be.

3. It further divides a school over an issue that should be relatively invisible to the issue of learning. It further separates students one from another based on random allocations of answers on the registration.

Elmhurst is hearing today from Alumni and donors over it’s poorly thought through silliness.

Let’s hope they listen!

According to the International Islamic News Agency, in the next few months, the US will host a meeting with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to coordinate implementing UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 on “combating defamation of religions.” (H/t: JihadWatch, Next 2 Cents) The report indicates the meeting will look at the following:

…how to prevent stereotypes depicting religions and their followers; as well as disseminating religious tolerance, which has been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council last March, in agreement with Western countries. The resolution was adopted after lengthy discussions held between the OIC and countries in which the phenomenon of Islamophobia is in the rise.

The U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had announced the intention of the U.S. State Department to organize a coordination meeting during her participation in the meeting which she co-chaired with the OIC Secretary General, Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in Istanbul on 15 July 2011. The meeting issued a joint statement emphasizing the dire need for the implementation of resolution 16/18. … the two sides, in addition to other European parties, will hold a number of specialized meetings of experts in law and religion in order to finalize the legal aspect on how to better implement the UN resolution.

The sources said that the upcoming meetings aim at developing a legal basis for the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution which help in enacting domestic laws for the countries involved in the issue, as well as formulating international laws preventing inciting hatred resulting from the continued defamation of religions.

It is natural to mentally connect the timing of this with the Anders Breivik attack in Norway, and there may be something to that.  I suspect it may be related as well to the prospect of the execrable “Durban III” conference at the UN headquarters in New York in September.  The Durban conference series — started in Durban, South Africa and nominally about racism and discrimination – has been dedicated to the crassest anti-Semitism and the propagation of lies about Israel.  But it has also had a persistent side interest in “defamation of religion.”  The US will not have a delegation at the Durban III conference because of its anti-Semitic, anti-Israel character, but Hillary Clinton may well be attempting to generate momentum for a separate, US-led effort to address “religious defamation.”

A number of commentators have warned that Resolution 16/18 is a pretext for shutting down critical, independent examination of Islam and Islamism – and with good reason, considering the case of Austrian Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.  This case provides a peep into how national laws against defaming religion would work in the West.  Ned May had a good summary of the outcome of her case at Big Peace earlier this year (emphasis added):

On February 15, 2011, the Austrian anti-jihad activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of hate speech in a Vienna courtroom. The original charge against her was “incitement to hatred”. On the second day of her trial, the judge decided to add a second charge, “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion.” The latter count is the one on which Elisabeth was convicted.

That means what it sounds like.  Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted by an Austrian court for “denigrating the religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion.”  If you do any research at all about her, you discover that the background of her work is a lot of seminars and writings in which she simply adduces facts and discusses them.  There are no drawings of Mohammed or burned Qurans or provocative videos lampooning Islam lurking in her closet.

Even if there were, most Americans would agree that there are no circumstances under which these should be punishable offenses.  Christianity is relentlessly denigrated, after all, frequently in the most offensive terms, in the nominally “Christian” nations – including Austria – and no one is prosecuted for it.  Intellectual freedom means, precisely, that people can criticize religions, and the form of such criticism is subject – and properly so – to very few limitations of law (e.g., libel laws that apply to any forms of “speech,” enforced on general principles and not on guidelines specific to commentary on religion).

The Sabaditsch-Wolff case illustrates perfectly why special limitations on criticism of religion are unacceptable.  They are impossible to enforce reasonably.  What “some people may be offended by” is not a sound basis of law and punishment:  some people are offended by provocative depictions of Mohammed, and consider it reasonable to be so, whereas others are offended to the point of homicidal rage by the assertion that Mohammed was not God’s prophet and the doctrinal tenets of Islam are invalid.  Yet one cannot be a believing Christian or Orthodox Jew without agreeing with the latter assertions.

Does holding one religious belief inherently constitute denigrating another religious belief?  Pakistani jihadists who murder and torture Christian converts would say so.  Do we agree?  And what about atheists, who use their intellectual freedom to assert that the context of who is or isn’t God’s prophet doesn’t even exist?  They would seem to be engaged in denigrating religion 24/7 – are they to be punished under law?

This is not merely a matter of people agreeing to remain silent about religion and each other’s beliefs – although that would be unacceptable enough.  Colleges would have to close religious studies departments under a regime of such intellectual repression.  Media outlets would find it virtually impossible to cover religious topics.  Why could they not be punished for “denigrating” the Branch Davidians by implying that they were child abusers?  Indeed, the New York Times, the UK Guardian, and Norway’s Dagbladet could all be prosecuted for implying that Christianity is what caused Anders Breivik to blow up a government building and shoot dozens of people on Utoya Island.  In the entertainment realm, the Law & Order franchise would quickly find itself in court for its frequent insinuations against Christianity and its sometimes condescending depiction of Judaism.

But the problem will become worse than the impossibility of observing a rule of silence.  A case is already in court in the United States in which a police officer was demoted by the Tulsa police department after he declined to attend a Muslim-sponsored event.  It’s not enough to keep your opinions to yourself: to retain your civil-employment rank, you must make active demonstrations on command.

In a brief filed in response to the police officer’s subsequent lawsuit, the city of Tulsa alleges that he has an “anti-Islamic agenda” – which it deduces not from his professional actions but from his choice of legal counsel.  “Brandi” at zTruth points out that Officer Fields and his legal counsel are concerned with political Islamism and not the religion of Islam, and thinks Tulsa should know better; but the significant point is that the city’s brief reverts so reflexively to the religious-bias argument in defending a lawsuit over an employment action.  Fields, the subordinate in this situation, is not alleged to have mistreated any of his fellow officers or members of the public; he simply declined to attend an event.

(*Update*: a reader at my home blog points out that besides declining himself to attend the event sponsored by an Islamic organization, Officer Fields declined to order officers under his command to do so.  That is correct, and for
completeness in relating the story, I should have added that.  It does not change the issue, however.  If anything, it makes Fields’ position more solid.  Imagine a police department ordering an officer to attend a Christian-sponsored event, and ordering him to require his subordinate officers to.  Can’t imagine that holding up in court as a department policy?  Exactly.)

Imagine a police officer being ordered to attend an event sponsored by a Christian organization, and being punished afterward for declining to do so.  Imagine a police department being honored by a Jewish organization, and a Muslim police officer declining to attend the ceremony.  Would the Muslim officer be punished for his choice?  Of course not.  In either case, the officer(s) declining to attend might very well have an anti-Christian or anti-Jewish agenda.  Some people do.  But their choices to not attend events would not be considered punishable, or indeed actionable in any way.

The outcome of the Paul Fields case in Tulsa is still unknown, but it will be informative.  If you have never given much thought to what might constitute “denigration of a religion,” you will want to do so soon.  Hillary Clinton will be hosting a gathering of people who already know what their ideas are regarding that question, and are prepared to forge ahead with laws against it.  In that regard, there are two more interesting points to make.

One is that the head of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, is an unapologetic Islamist and Ottomanist.  However Hillary Clinton may see the role of the OIC, he sees it this way.  Ihsanoglu became secretary-general of the OIC in 2004, and it is on his watch that the OIC has launched its campaign to end “Islamophobia” by imposing laws against denigrating and defaming religion.  Ihsanoglu’s effort and motives have been reported one way in the West, and another way in the Islamic world.

But what constitutes “Islamophobia,” or constitutes denigration of Islam, remains sketchy. In the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff – a Westerner-on-Westerner situation – the facts in evidence were that someone other than Sabaditsch-Wolff used the word “pedophile” in relation to Mohammed, and Sabaditsch-Wolff then engaged in a discussion of whether that word was appropriate or not, given that Mohammed had married a 6-year-old and consummated the marriage when his bride was nine.  That combination of facts got her convicted of denigrating religion in Austrian court.

What other information do we have that can nail down what constitutes Islamophobia or denigration of Islam?  Anjem Choudary and the UK’s Muslims Against Crusades have an answer.  This is quite a long video – over an hour – but the first 15 minutes suffice to clarify what they consider Islamophobia and denigration of Islam: that is, resistance to the imposition of sharia.  They recorded this “news conference” on 29 July 2011, just as their henchmen began to post notices around several areas of Britain proclaiming that the neighborhoods were now being administered under sharia law.  Resistance may not be futile – but in the view of Choudary and his faction, it is Islamophobic, and it is what constitutes denigrating Islam.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Statements made by the student, repeated by Joe Mirabella of the Huffington Post/Change.org were knowingly false, libelous, and have likely brought him into the very short term reality of litigation. (Mirabella and Change.org could also easily find themselves attached to the same litigation, for their roles.)

Crowther has gone a few steps further however in continuing to foment anger towards and disruption of the charities’ ability to do the charitable work they do by leaving a petition published (even though its objective was met), and now making additional blatantly false statements about fictional associations between the “Charity Give Back Group” and other organizations he finds objectionable.

In yesterday’s Christian Post, Crowther claimed CGBG had a formal association with a ministry that advocated “killing gays.”

This is a libelous, inflammatory, and heinous accusation at best. But at worst a statement intended and designed to purposefully mislead readers with the intention of causing severe harm to the Charity Give Back Group–which returns a portion of a constituent’s online purchases to a legitimate 501(c)3 of the consumer’s choice.

Based on such purposeful, dishonest, and calculated falsehoods, additional retailers are being bombarded by angry, radical, activists to discriminate against Christian charities.

Crowther’s goal seeks the complete destruction of The Charity Give Back Group by seeking the cancellation of individual retailers who participate in the program. But he is using slanderous libel, false assumptions, and fictional associations to paint the picture he needs to rile up his handful of activists.

Thus far very few retailers have made the decision in favor of Crowther’s hateful activists. Many more continue to be bombarded by them.

Ironically at least two have also made the decision to return to participation in CGBG program once it was discovered that executives were being more or less left out of the loop in the decision making process to drop CGBG.

It does not make any sense for corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Gap/Banana Republic, AT&T and others to yield to a handful of angry activists, when they all risk losing the future business of the entire Catholic and Evangelical populations of a 90% (self-identified) “Christian” nation.

The retailers are being played… like a really bad joke, by the angry activists… and they have the right to know.

As to the retailers specifically, doesn’t it make the most sense to not take sides in cultural or public policy debates? Isn’t that what government and bodies of faith are there to do? Your corporations are there to sell products and services… so do that, to everyone, equally.

Don’t pick and choose, because 13,000 names on a petition and list of angry radicals will be dwarfed by millions of faith-based, God-fearing moms, who choose to spend money in your stores, and on your web-sites.

And as to Mr. Crowther… keep checking your mailbox!

This isn’t really a surprise is it?

Well, maybe Harvard doing a study that came to some relevantly accurate conclusions is a surprise. But the outcome of the study itself?

And when you think about it, exactly why does it happen?

Very simply put. It’s all about the freedom, money, and reliance…

If what America stands for on “Independence Day” is being independent of other power’s oppression, tyranny, and control of the lives of the individual then July 4th is about the most Republican or Free Market holiday ever to come along.

Democrats on my show this morning took great exception to me implying that Democrats don’t wrap themselves in the flag (or show other forms of patriotism) because they don’t really like the ideals of the original concepts of America’s founders. If the progressives that are led by President Barack Obama are any indication, then what he sees America as is far different than a rebel republic throwing off dependency.

In Obama’s world – it’s more like a great big hug of uber-Government wet kisses. I detail much of this in my new book: “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change.”

In Obama’s world – the best America can be, is apologized for, overseas, for months on end, as he began his term. (Is that patriotic?)

Is it a sign of “love for one’s country” to far more often than not see the worst in her?

July 4th parades – of which I’ve normally missed most of my 40-something years on this planet – are filled with red, white and blue, fire trucks, first responders (which here in the NYC can be very moving).

They also include that one moment, where a flat bed truck will be carrying several men (fewer each year) who are aged, some unable to stand who charged Normandy, survived Guadal Canal, or chased Nazi’s out of France.

When that truck appears all the pomp turns into cheers of respect, long loud seasons of applause, and usually with me nary a dry eye.

Then behind them are the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf War and War on Terror vets that fall in, usually walking behind the vehicle carrying the WWII’ers.

Never has any nation on earth spent more resources to bring freedom to more people than all of the rest of the world’s historic militaries combined.

If kids going to July 4th parades tend to come away from them resonating with more original ideas of the founders, if they walk away with a deeper appreciation of the sacrifice it has required to keep us free, and those ideas, and that appreciation are by extension more championed by Republicans, then the study got it dead on.

I wonder if the fact that this study was produced by Harvard would have any impact on the President’s willingness to lend any credence to it?

Heh… who am I kidding, whoops… almost forgot – time to go pick up my welfare check.

I’m Kevin McCullough and that’s how I “Binge Think”
Peddler of Compassion: “Cares Project 2011″
Author: No He Can’t

However, there are several other companies and individuals who continue to file applications in an attempt to trademark SEAL Team 6 and other variations of the name.  In examining the USPTO database, such companies and individuals filing applications include Metrogames, Justice is Done, AAAA World Inc., RESCO Instruments, The Outdoor Recreation Group (and this one), John Brokaw, and Jon Narmi–even a German company is trying to cash in.  There are others as well, but you get the picture.

It is not coincidental that all of the application file dates range from early May 2011 until present–obviously a direct link.  Additionally, Disney was met with public scorn and the Navy did strong arm Disney to protect its rights:

Navy spokeswoman Amanda Greenberg said the Navy already had rights to the SEAL trademark but recently submitted two new applications for trademarks of “Navy SEALs” and “SEAL Team.”

“The Navy is fully committed to protecting its trademark rights as it pertains to this matter and is currently examining all legal options,” she said.

Disney/ABC spokesman Kevin Brockman said the company pulled the plug on its bid “in deference to the Navy’s application.”

It is fair to ask, in light of the outcome with Disney, how will the Navy handle these companies and individuals who continue to file trademark apps using Navy SEAL Team 6 and will the public rebuke these companies and individuals by boycotting these products that display the TEAM 6 name?

The situation here is actually worse than it looks.  It would be bad enough if the problem were only that a bunch of Germans through it was inappropriate to cheer over bin Laden’s death.  That’s the least of our worries.  I had the same thought myself; but I don’t propose doing anything about it other than expressing my opinion.

The real problem is that the German judge’s complaint against Merkel, while calling it “tacky and undignified” for her to be “glad” about bin Laden’s death, invoked Germany’s criminal code specifically by claiming that Merkel was “rewarding and approving of a crime” in her statement about it.

Rewarding a crime is one thing – although it is first necessary for a competent authority to determine that a crime has occurred.  No such determination has been made in the case of the slaying of bin Laden.  Rewarding a crime in a material sense may, however, be sensibly deemed criminal.

But approving of a crime, in the terms implied by the judge’s complaint? – that is, expressing approval, as an unrelated third party, about its outcome?  That’s a crime under the German criminal code, and the judge in question interprets it to cover what Merkel said about bin Laden’s killing.

If such a law could be enforced in the US, it would put half the faculty of our universities in prison.  It would also apply to anyone who has ever said aloud that a revenge killing constituted justice.  If you were glad Jack Ruby took out Lee Harvey Oswald, this law has you in its sights.  Socialists and radical groups across the fruited plain could be rounded up and incarcerated for their practice of loudly approving the criminal acts committed by their favorite figures from radical history.  Activists who campaign to decriminalize things – e.g., pot – and who express approval of those engaged in civil disobedience would run afoul of this law.

Even if the killing of bin Laden had been judged a crime by a competent authority, the idea that approving his killing is a criminal act, as opposed to merely an impolitic one, represents an unbridgeable divide between the American concept of freedom and whatever it is they’ve got going in Germany these days.

Germans should be free to attack Merkel as vociferously as seems good to them, for the political nature of her comments.  More power to them.  Rant and rave.  Call her names.  Take whacks at her and her party through the political process.  Elect someone else.  All fair game in the melee of politics.

But criminalizing speech in the manner indicated here is the exact opposite of protecting intellectual freedom.  The whole point of intellectual freedom – freedom of thought, religion, speech, the press – is that we don’t all agree, from one case to another, on what constitutes crime or justice, much less on what is tacky or undignified.  Criminalizing abstract, verbal disagreements over these things is characteristic of leftist utopias – but it is also one of the chief features shared by leftist utopias and Islamism.

There is no difference in principle between the idea that Merkel is made a criminal by approving of the killing of bin Laden, and the idea that speaking “disrespectfully” about Mohammed is punishable by imprisonment, forfeiture of property, or death.

Over the last few decades, prescient analysts – many of whom are themselves Europeans from the classical-liberal tradition – have warned that the trend of European law and jurisprudence is dangerous to intellectual freedom.  Until a few years ago, those critics’ principal concern was the encroachment of Western-style “political correctness.”  But increasingly, the reasons for invoking restrictive European laws have to do with public speech about Muslims or Islam.   Laws like Germany’s, and judicial ideas like those of the judge who filed the complaint against Angela Merkel, are preparing Europeans, intellectually and morally, to take up life as dhimmis.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Me, I would have been perfectly fine with the code name “Chaim,” which happens to be my Hebrew name, as long as the result of the mission was the same. If you agree that this is much ado about nothing, then you’ll be delighted to learn that the Senate Indian Affairs Committee will be taking this grievous matter up in a hearing on racist Native American stereotypes. Your tax dollars at work!

Loretta Tuell, the committee’s chief (whoops, make that “lead”) counsel, said in a statement:

The hearing was scheduled well before the Osama bin Laden operation became news, but the concerns over the linking of the name of Geronimo, one of the greatest Native American heroes, with the most hated enemies of the United States is an example of the kinds of issues we intended to address at Thursday’s hearing.

These inappropriate uses of Native American icons and cultures are prevalent throughout our society, and the impacts to Native and non-Native children are devastating. We intend to open the forum to talk about them.

Debbie Reese, another American Indian, takes the lunacy a step further, writing on the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog:

A Native frame of reference is one that is inundated with appropriation and misrepresentation of who we were, and who we are today. There are research studies that point to the negative effects of this sort of imagery on the self-esteem and self-efficacy of Native children. There are other studies that point to the high rates of suicide, and, to the high drop-out rates of our children.

If your (non-Native) point of view is Geronimo as the courageous leader, then you probably think the use of his name honors him and links him to the courage of  the Navy SEALS who carried out the operation. … If your point of view is Geronimo as the blood-thirsty savage, then you probably think that Geronimo was a terrorist.

So, American Indian children drop out of school and kill themselves because of low self-esteem brought on by stereotypes? I’d love to see those “research studies.” If these kids are that thin-skinned, what they really need is a marathon viewing of South Park. That’ll get their heads on straight.

As to the code name, it was applied to the mission, not the individual. And as for Loretta and Debbie’s hero, they do understand that Geronimo spent the last part of his storied military career fighting us “white men” and died a U.S. prisoner of war?

By the way, on second thought, I retract my comments about the appropriateness of “Chaim” as a code name, but not because it offends my Jewish sensibilities. It is because the word is Hebrew for life—not the best application for a mission to take out a mass murderer. Besides, what possible good could come of giving a mission a fierce Jewish code name, unless the goal was to get bin Laden to die laughing?

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“Hey, do you know why engineers at NASA drink Sprite?”

When I sighed and admitted I did not, he said, “Because they can’t get seven up.”

Today that quip might not make sense to many of you reading this. Of course, it will when I put it in context and you find out that the date was January 29, 1986 – the day after the Challenger blew up with seven astronauts on board and fell from the sky.

Shocked? Outraged? Well save a little of your anger for me. I laughed.

It wasn’t one of those deep, belly laughs that errupt during a particularly good stand-up routine or a stifled squeak you might let slip at an off color joke. Rather it was the wry, resigned type of laugh you hear when somebody breaks the tension of an uncomfortable, stunning moment when you just don’t know what else to say. The joke was something which used to be more common: dark humor.

But in today’s politically charged climate, such things are becoming darned near a capital offense. We saw this in action this week when Gilbert Gottfried lost his job as the voice of the Aflac duck after tweeting some ill timed jokes relating to the tsunami in Japan. Shortly thereafter, Haley Barbour’s press secretary had to resign after e-mailing the following comment:

“Otis Redding posthumously received a gold record for his single, (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay. (Not a big hit in Japan right now.) “

Even rapper 50 Cent – not exactly known as a paragon of good taste and demure social commentary – found himself having to offer a half-hearted apology on Twitter after rattling off a couple of tsunami jokes.

What’s happening to us? Are we really that easily put off our feed? When faced with unspeakable tragedy such as we’ve witnessed recently, do we really prefer to gnash our teeth, rend our clothes and wander around in a daze? There are some people – including yours truly – who find relief from such horrors in dark humor and a “what the heck are ya gonna do?” sort of attitude.

I didn’t find the Otis Redding joke particularly funny, but it also wasn’t some sort of slander against the Japanese. It’s disappointing that Barbour felt compelled to toss his press sec. under the bus so quickly to avoid damage to his presidential aspirations. And for the record, I’ve never found Gottfried particularly funny. His voice grates on my nerves and his stand-up acts are repetitive and irritating. But he’s a comedian, and one who is known for not being particularly careful in terms of political correctness. Aflac knew that when they hired him, or they should have.

Obviously there are lines which polite society shouldn’t cross, particularly when the “jokes” are personal attacks against a specific individual. But even then we seem to be pretty selective about who deserves protection. Remember when New York Giants player Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himslef in the thigh when he brought an illegal handgun into a bar? The guy was in the hospital with a fairly serious injury but the yucks were certainly going around the country within 24 hours.

Both my regular readers and my friends who know me personally are well aware that I have a rather caustic, wry sense of humor. It’s just how I operate. We’re all wired differently. During the last major stock market crash, when everyone’s 401Ks were turning into 201Ks, one of my friends commented on how, during the crash of the Great Depression, there were Wall Street investors throwing themselves out of windows in New York City.

I said, “Certainly gives a new meaning to ‘It’s raining men,’ doesn’t it?”

So sue me.

Everyone deals with stress, shock and horror in their own way. And for some people that involves dark humor. The cries to break out the pitchforks whenever somebody makes a joke that we may not find particularly funny is just another example of political correctness run off the rails.

The basis for this ruling is Britain’s set of Sexual Orientation Regulations, which make it an offense to “discriminate on the grounds that someone is heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.” By the definition implied in this ruling, it is “discrimination” to be unwilling to affirmatively endorse someone else’s beliefs or behavior, even in one’s own home where only third parties are present.

This interpretation of the law is idiotic on its face.  But it was handed down by the British High Court.  The next obvious step is ruling that parents must endorse homosexuality to their own children.

Think not?  This extended treatment of the court’s ruling shows that it contains every precept that would be necessary to intervene between parents and their natural children.  Besides affirming that government authorities “can require positive attitudes to be demonstrated towards homosexuality,” and that the Sexual Orientation Regulations take precedence over the right against religious discrimination, the court opined as follows:

Article 9 [of the European Human Rights Act] only provides a ‘qualified’ right to manifest religious belief and … this will be particularly so where a person in whose care a child is placed wishes to manifest a belief that is inimical to the interests of children.

This passage echoes language used by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, which, in a brief on the case, “suggested to the Court that a child should not, in their own words, be ‘infected’ with Christian moral beliefs.”

I am 100% certain that when the Sexual Orientation Regulations were being debated early in the decade (they were implemented in 2003), opponents theorized that things just like this could happen – and advocates of the regulations swore that that was ridiculous: such ideas were the wild imaginings of fevered minds.  As always, the naysayers who warned of special-interest encroachment on individual liberty were correct.

If the British High Court deems Christian beliefs on homosexuality “inimical to the interests of children,” it will justify intervening between parents and their natural children, just as governments do the world over when child welfare is at issue.  If this kind of ruling isn’t what Parliament had in mind, back when it was considering the Sexual Orientation Regulations, now would be a good time to do something about that.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions” and as The Optimistic Conservative.  She writes a weekly column for Patheos.

Confused? Me, too. Another Black History Month is upon us, and with it another scandal. Last year, a fusillade of angry protests rang out over NBC’s audacious decision to honor black American culture by serving collard greens and black-eyed peas in its cafeteria. This year, cries of racism are still flying over U.C. Irvine’s outrageous plan to serve chicken and waffles on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. Not to worry, though. The Aramark Corporation, which runs the university’s dining hall, has mandated that the kitchen staff undergo “sensitivity training” so they’ll know better in the future.

Of course, unless someone explains to them what they should be serving as representative black cooking, it’s hard to imagine they won’t commit the same politically incorrect faux pas next time. After all, the cretin who planned the NBC commissary menu last year was herself black, and even she wasn’t aware that serving soul food was an insult.

I recommend honoring Black History Month by serving the dishes detailed in the first paragraph. The first three were designed by Marcus Samuelsson when he was chef at the upscale Scandinavian restaurant Aquavit. Samuelsson, in case the name fails to ring a bell, was born in Ethiopia to black parents, who named him Kassahun Tsegie. (His name was later changed by the Swedish geologist who adopted him and his sister.) The second two recipes were signature dishes of the late Patrick Clark, who was executive chef of The Odeon and Café Luxembourg here in New York. Clark, too, was of color.

None of these dishes can be dismissed as “talking down” to blacks. Neither, it could be argued, can the food at Sylvia’s, the institution in Harlem, which has at least as many white people as blacks lining up on Sunday for their specialty. Which happens to be chicken and waffles.

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I’m not disputing that American habits have changed or that this had led to additional obesity. But anytime a government agency (two agencies in this case) start talking about the “environment” as if America were their own personal Habitrail, I get nervous about what’s coming next.

Sure enough part 6 of the document is titled Helping Americans Make Healthy Choices. A subsection headlined A Call to Action is full of worrisome language like this:

Although individual behavior change is critical, a truly effective and sustainable improvement in the Nation’s health will require a multi-sector approach that applies the Social-Ecological Model to improve the food and physical activity environment. This type of approach empha-sizes the development of coordinated partnerships, programs, and policies to support healthy eating and active living. Interventions should extend well beyond providing traditional education to individuals and families about healthy choices, and should help build skills, reshape the environment, and re-establish social norms to facilitate individuals’ healthy choices.

Again, when the government starts talking about reshaping “the environment” as if we’re all just rats in their maze, I get irritable. The thing is, if they’re so eager to change things, why can’t it be something like–I dunno–illegitimacy or abortion rates. There’s really no reason why you couldn’t make the same sort of interventionist argument about these issues. Can you imagine a government report that read:

Contributing to the Epidemic:
An Abortogenic Environment

This would be followed by a recommendation to place more ultrasound machines in inner-city locales to help “re-establish social norms.” Yeah, I can’t imagine that happening either and if it ever did, the hyper-sonic caterwauling from the left would reduce entire areas of Capitol Hill to rubble.

It’s only progressive causes (smoking, obesity, compact fluorescent light bulbs) that get this treatment, along with millions of tax dollars for more annoying PSA ads. But hey, I’ll play along. If you want to ensure people in every neighborhood have the chance to burn off calories after a big meal, just have Congress mandate these outside every fast food joint:

What Phillips picks up on, however, is the wording used by the Guardian’s author to describe a similar theme park in Buenos Aires:

Exact details are scant, but the Buenos Aires park offers its re-enactments of the creation of mankind, the birth of Christ, the resurrection and the last supper eight times a day. With a cast of extras in the costumes of Romans and early Palestinians, the park advertises itself as ‘a place where everyone can learn about the origins of spirituality.’

Early Palestinians?  A friend pointed out yesterday that the article doesn’t mention the word “Jew” or “Hebrew” even once, in spite of the fact that its topic is theme parks that reenact the main narrative of the Bible.

Phillips identifies this false depiction of historical reality as the product of a campaign by Arab Christians in Jerusalem to invent a “Palestinian” history and claim Jesus for Arabs rather than Jews.  And there is certainly such a campaign underway.  The effort is much broader than a few Arab Christian theologians, however.  Its main thrust is claiming Jesus, as a Palestinian Arab, for Islam.  (Islam already calls Jesus a prophet: the second greatest after Mohammed.  The Palestinian refinement is to claim him explicitly as a non-Jewish, Palestinian Arab.)

The Jerusalem Post’s Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has a number of useful links here, here, and here, documenting the Palestinian Muslim effort to invent a history for “Palestinians,” erase the historical reality of Jews in Israel, and – among other absurd claims – call Jesus the first “tortured Palestinian.”

This is not by any means a fringe development.  Yasser Arafat, speaking to Arab reporters at the UN in 1982, said this:

Jesus Christ was the first Palestinian fedayeen who carried his sword along the path on which the Palestinian today carry their cross.

The Bible, of course, calls Jesus a Jew – specifically a descendant of Abraham’s son Isaac, and of Jacob, Judah (ancestor of one of the twelve tribes), and King David; a genealogy outlined in the Old Testament and repeated in the first chapter of the gospel of Matthew.  The Roman administrators of Judea and Samaria in the time of Jesus Christ dealt with the occupants politically as “the Jews,” acknowledging in particular the religious authority of the Judaic high priest and the Sanhedrin. Phillips points out Jewish traditions in which Jesus participated; the gospels list his observances of, and encounters with, Jewish law.

Rome did not refer to the region as “Palestine” until more than a century later; there was no such thing as an entity called “Palestine” peopled by the ancestors of today’s “Palestinian” Arabs.  In fact, the narrative of a historical “Palestinian” claim to the territory of today’s Israel is a modern fiction.

But in the US, we’ve had little exposure to this explicit effort to build a fictional narrative – and in particular, to its theological aspect.  I am unconvinced, moreover, that this narrative has won over very many MSM journalists in Europe.  The connections documented here are undoubtedly relevant, but I think something more insidious is at work.  In the case of a writer like Giles Tremlett (author of the Guardian piece), I judge that the dynamic in question can be described in well-understood terms: political correctness has turned him into a useful idiot.

Tremlett probably couldn’t give a valid definition of theological “supersessionism” if put on the spot.  If you asked him whether revisionist theological theories should govern our understanding of history, he would want badly to say “No,” because that’s the obvious answer for the properly skeptical empiricist.  He certainly wouldn’t state the fictional Palestinian narrative, wholesale, as his argument for anything.

But he understands instinctively that a categorical “No” would preempt a whole revisionist industry in the “victimized world.”  So he would almost certainly decline to answer the question, reverting, as if a switch had been flipped, to the modern Palestinian victim narrative instead.  That narrative, with its emotional tug, gives the Palestinian Arabs carte blanche to make up whatever stories they want.  And it compels political correctness as a sign of allegiance from the sympathetic.

The effect of this dynamic is to induce people to say very foolish things.  Politically correct speech prefers internal correctness over reason, as, for example, when an American confusedly refers to a black Englishman as an “African-American,” because he can’t say “black.”  The man in question may be a third-generation Englishman who’s an accountant in Birmingham and is fed up with voting for those Labour twits, but what matters in the American’s indoctrinated mind is the narrative of political correctness: skin color = African origin = victimization => officious solicitude, euphemism, and ellipsis.

The solicitude and euphemism are bad enough, but it’s the ellipsis that gets us in the end.  It’s the facts and reality that we are induced to leave out of our discourse – induced by a willingness to suspend disbelief and to avoid whatever anyone insists is an offense to someone –  that increase our vulnerability to evil developments.  The case of the Christian theme parks is illustrative:  it’s not sufficient to merely refrain from explicitly retailing the “Jesus was a Palestinian” narrative.  Not telling the lie explicitly isn’t enough.  We have to affirm the truth.  It’s necessary to affirm that Jesus was a Jew, and the Jewish people were the ones governed by the Herods and occupied by Rome during Jesus’ lifetime.

The peculiar Western decision to deprivilege our own historical record – indeed, to deconstruct our entire civilizational narrative, and offer an unmerited credulity to any competing narrative that campaigns to supplant it – has softened us up for this.  Having done this consciously, on principle, colors our view of all theory and knowledge.  It weakens our perception of the link between knowing the truth, acting on it, and living successfully.  We have come to believe, oddly, that we can do the latter indefinitely while treating the former as if it doesn’t matter.

And so a competing narrative that rejects everything the West is about – our intertwined roots in Judaic law and culture, in philosophical empiricism and honest investigation, and in the “covenant of grace” conferred by Jesus Christ – is able to gain a foothold through our intellectual self-abnegation.  It’s essential to understand the dynamic here:  it’s not that Westerners, in droves, are explicitly embracing the fictional Palestinian narrative, and certainly not because of its power or intellectual coherence.  It’s that the narrative is quietly backing in, under the banner of the Palestinian victim meme, where we have left a void in our minds.

We can reverse this trend immediately, simply by beginning to think and recover history.  But until enough of us do, we have become the people who, believing in nothing, will fall for anything.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

This past weekend, the woman billed by her employer  as Mexico’s “Hottest Reporter” entered the locker room of the New York Jets football team to conduct an interview. She was wearing the totally demure outfit pictured above. Shockingly, the locker room full of testosterone-laden men noticed that she’s more than a bit attractive and catcalls, whistling and leering ensued. Enter the usual suspects: the media and “womens groups“, like the Association for Women in Sports Media. And the ever annoying and always wrong Joy Behar.

I’m infuriated that this incident happened. I’m not infuriated by the alleged incident itself; I’m super ticked that the inanity required me to read about sporty thingies. And to watch Joy Behar, a woman who could turn me into a misogynist merely by opening her pie hole. In this particular interview, Sainz implies that she was going to let it go, as she should have, until the media and women’s groups stepped in. Naturally; never let a catcall go to waste! Always use it as a way to further enshrine women as poor little victims.

However, subsequent interviews with Sainz show that she didn’t need much prodding to whine and complain. Via aolnews.com:

Yes, she wears low-cut shirts, tight jeans and has photos on her employer’s website showing her in a bikini. But that has nothing to do with being a professional sports reporter for Mexico’s TV Azteca, she said today.

“It’s my style,” the 32-year-old television journalist told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” She’s not trying to elicit leers, she said. “It is my style for all my life.”

And she has no plans to change.

“I’m not trying to provoke anything,” she told Meredith Vieira on NBC’s “Today” show this morning. “I don’t think I need to change. They are going to change.“

Was it boorish and crass behavior on the part of the New York Jets? Sure. But, who ever claimed that professional football players are the epitome of chivalry? You think one would know that, having worked in the sporty field for years. Secondly, it’s not unexpected at all. On this, the science is settled: men like – and like to look at – hot chicks. I’m pretty sure that’s why she’s featured in a bikini on her website.

Moreover, how is it equality if you require other people – and the workplace itself – to change so that you can do the job? Equality is doing the job as is. She also tweeted that she wanted to die of embarrassment. Listen, I’m a broad and that’s a lie. If I entered a locker room, full of a bunch of athletic men in their prime, wearing a shirt and jeans so tight that you could practically see my ovaries, I’d die of embarrassment if there were NO catcalls or whistles.

I know. As a conservative woman that must be part of my Stockholm Syndrome, right? Or perhaps it’s because unlike my liberal counterparts’ embracing of a perpetual victim hood, I, instead, embrace all aspects of  my gender. I have no problem looking pretty while opening a can of whoop ass when doing my job. See, I”m not a simpleton and can multi-task!  I also know that if one appreciates how a woman looks, it certainly doesn’t preclude them from also appreciating her talents, her work nor anything else. Well, at least it shouldn’t. Evidently, that isn’t supposed to be possible and men are supposed to politely avert their eyes when confronted with a nice rack and shapely arse.

Sainz seems to understand that in her statement below, but apparently the sweet siren call of grievance mongering is too seductive to ignore:

Pressed on the issue of how she dresses, and whether the bikini photos and the plunging necklines invite unwanted attention, Sainz said she chooses clothing that she considers attractive. “All [women] like to be attractive,” she said. “In Mexico, I’m very well known for my image and my work.”

That’s it in a nutshell. She chooses to look attractive. She wants to look attractive. Being attractive is, in fact, part of her image and it is actively pursed by her employer and Sainz herself. Yet, we are to be outrageously outraged – when men find her attractive? Here’s an estrogen-insider secret for all the politically correct, totally aghast at human nature people; most women want to feel pretty and they want to hear you say it. Hence, her clothing that accentuates all her, um, “positives”. It doesn’t make men evil and it doesn’t somehow magically remove the woman’s ability to do her job.

Teachable Moment: If you truly don’t want to be ogled and whistled at, don’t, you know, go into a male locker room sporting a camel toe.

—–

Originally posted at NewsReal.

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“For my fellow Arabs I have the following special message: Learn from the example of the Prophet Mohammed, your greatest historical personality. After a state of war with the Meccan unbelievers that lasted for many years, he acceded, in the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, to demands that his closest companions considered utterly humiliating. Yet peace turned out to be a most effective weapon against the unbelievers.”

Says the author:

He’s referring to a treaty in the year 628 that established a 10-year truce between the Prophet Muhammad and Meccan leaders and was viewed by Muslims at the time as a defeat. But Muhammad used that period to consolidate his ranks and re-arm, eventually leading to his conquest of Mecca. Imam Rauf seems to be saying that Muslims should understand Sadat’s olive branch in the same way, as a short-term respite leading to ultimate conquest.

Also interesting is Rauf’s view of Israel:

“In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. . . . In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.”

On the Iranian revolution, in a letter written in 1979:

“The revolution in Iran was inspired by the very principles of individual rights and freedom that Americans ardently believe in.”

The piece juxtaposes this with the Rauf’s widely reported advice to Obama in 2009 (after the Green Revolution protests) to:

“…say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution—to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.”

WSJ points out that Vilayet-i-faquih “means Guardianship of the Jurist, which in practice means that all power resides with the mullahs.”

Queried for comment, Rauf responded as follows:

“It is amusing that journalists are combing through letters-to-the-editor that I wrote more than 30 years ago, when I was a young man, for clues to my evolution. As I re-read those letters now, I see that they express the same concerns—a desire for peaceful solutions in Israel, and for a humane understanding of Iran—that I have maintained, and worked hard on, in the years since those letters were published.”

Rauf is absolutely, 100% entitled to his opinions, just as the rest of us are.  He is not, however, entitled to have his opinions whitewashed, by the media or by himself, nor is he entitled to hold them without incurring public opposition.

I disagree with him on every particular here:  I do not regard it as a good thing for Muslims to see the Israeli-Egyptian accord as an “effective weapon against the unbelievers”; I do not agree that peace means Israel losing her status as a Jewish state, and her Jews becoming a minority in an Arab state; I do not agree that the Iranian revolution was inspired by the American idea of rights and freedom; and I do not agree that Vilayet-i-faquih is a predicate for the “rule of law” as Americans or other Westerners understand it.

Rauf repudiates none of those assertions, just as he has declined to criticize the terrorist organization Hamas. If he were a freckled blond from Ottumwa named Joe Smith, I’d disagree with him and regard his positions as wrong and potentially dangerous, should too many of my fellow Americans adopt them.

Rauf is no more entitled to the assumption that his opinions have changed than is any other public figure who has made his name in the intellectual realm:  as a cleric, academic, philosopher, political leader. If his opinions have changed, he could simply say so – as many others have done.  People switch from Democrat to Republican and from socialist to libertarian.  People become Christians, or reject their Christian upbringing as adults.  People convert to Islam, and away from it.  People start out embracing Marxism and end up quoting Hayek and Friedman.  When they do any of these things, they acknowledge their changes of mind and heart.

Nothing about Rauf’s opinions – at least what we know of them – should prevent him from founding an Islamic center and putting a mosque in it.  But to insist that the public has no equity in the location or political prominence of such an enterprise, and that the public is wrong to care what Rauf’s opinions are, given those factors in the case of the Park 51 center, is to assert an idea of the public interest that is decidedly out of character for the American polity.  It is abstractly and extremely ideological, to suggest that the people are not allowed to care about the implications of their community’s public face.  We don’t apply that principle in other cases.  We are, rather, pragmatic and generally in favor of compromise, with the understanding that no one – most certainly not majorities of Americans across demographics – starts out ineligible to have his views taken into account.

Update: The WSJ post contains no author attribution; this post is updated to reflect the officially posted version.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

The defense of Prop. 8 could have been argued on more than one premise.  One would have been the point I return to often:  that proclaiming a “right” to same-sex marriage is actually redefining marriage, and the Constitution doesn’t say anywhere that the people aren’t authorized to supervise and determine the outcome of that process.  (As originalists would point out, the 9th and 10th amendments explicitly reserve authority of exactly that sort to the states and the people.)

But the defense team chose instead to focus on the issue of traditional marriage as the optimum organization for child rearing.  This has been emotionally problematic for a lot of people who oppose redefining marriage, but who don’t harbor an animus against the individuals who are raising children in various situations other than traditional marriage.  What many of them see is that there is no value – but much harm – in the state intervening to strike attitudes about these things, in effect trying to shape social choices rather than merely recognize them.

Ed Morrissey wrote about this not long ago, positing that perhaps we should simply dispense with the state recognizing marriage.  But if we think that through, what we come up against is the underlying reason why the Prop. 8 defense team argued its case on the basis of child rearing.  Traditional male-female marriage is not just normal – it’s been the indisputable norm throughout history; no society has ever called same-sex unions “marriage” – it’s the only form of social connection that produces children and rears them to adulthood entirely without the policy intervention of the state.

Every other organization to rear children involves the state in one way or another.  Same-sex couples can’t conceive and bear their own children without opposite-sex cooperation.  The cases in which this assistance does not involve any practice regulated or overseen by the state are exceedingly rare.  Even when state-regulated services aren’t used up-front, lawsuits can still be brought if any one of the parties is unhappy with the outcome.  The state assumes a government interest, whether the issue is breach of contract or birth-parent rights.

Adoptions are regulated a priori by the state.  Divorce entails state intervention between parents and children whenever custody, visitation, and child support are at issue.  Single motherhood is a pattern that, regardless of income level, has encouraged the state to develop and enforce policies on child-rearing, whether the issue is day care, health insurance, or youth programs to counteract the ill effects of zero fatherhood.  Welfare mothers, of course, receive the ministrations of the state authorities on principle.

Only the traditional male-female family can produce its own children and rear them without recourse to state policies, or to the state guarantees that have been instituted to act as surrogates for the self-sustaining “nuclear family.”

Because this is human nature’s core grouping, and history has proven it to be the most economically powerful and flexible one, it has been natural for the state to recognize it over the centuries.  The state didn’t set it up; the state recognizes its prior claims.  One of its principal features, for the state’s purposes, is that it is the situation for children in which they are not assumed to need rescue or preemptive surveillance by the state.  The state’s presumption today is still in favor of the nuclear traditional family rearing its natural children.

The most basic thing this means is that it is assumed that married birth parents will keep and rear their own children.  There are no other choices on a state form that anyone’s going to ask married birth parents to check.  The social importance of birth parenthood within traditional marriage is still extremely powerful, when it comes to whether we agree the state has any right to intervene, or to sit around and think up what-if policies.

That is why there even is such a thing as an “anchor baby.”  Because we assume the prior, unalienable rights of birth parents, and we assume they trump other things, whether social or legal.  We do this for a few very basic reasons, premised on our most enduring social assumptions. But according to the plaintiffs against Prop. 8, the state should see no difference – none that affects its policies or society’s interests – between one form of parenthood versus another.

The effect of this will not be to privilege state-brokered parenthood to the same level as birth parenthood.  That’s not even possible.  It will instead be to subject birth parenthood to the same presumption of state authority as state-brokered parenthood, even within traditional marriages that are intact.  And if parental rights are conferred at the discretion of the state, rather than preexisting and binding the state, then in this smackdown, it’s Anchor Baby who will eventually be lying in an artistic heap on the mat, and Same-Sex who will be walking the victory lap with his arms aloft.

As always, women and minorities – and children – will be hardest hit.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Here’s my bottom-line problem with the concatenation of events and trends surrounding the Ground Zero mosque: I see privilege being accorded to Islam, as against situations in which the civil authorities have de-privileged Christianity and Judaism. The reflexive animus against America’s traditional major religions will be recognizable, in what I describe below, to every conservative. Yet in a situation where a very large group of Americans objects to the placement of a particular mosque, government authorities not only don’t privilege the objectors, they castigate them as bigots and override their concerns.

We can stipulate at the outset that none of the situations here is exactly analogous. The situation involving synagogues is not even in Manhattan; it’s in Brighton Beach. But in each case, the reflexes of the civil authorities have responded very differently, and the difference is telling.

There are two relevant tales of Christian developments near Ground Zero. One involves a Greek Orthodox church, St. Nicholas’, which was crushed by the collapse of WTC Tower Two on 9/11. St. Nicholas’ Church was across the street from the World Trade Center.  In 2008, a deal was announced with the New York Port Authority to rebuild the church two blocks from its original site. But civil authorities objected to the church’s plans for a larger structure, with a dome and spire in the Greek Orthodox tradition. Their express concern was that the church not be taller than the World Trade Center Memorial.

There is no apparent concern about the Park 51 Islamic center being taller than the WTC Memorial (it is). It will not be built as a wholly new structure, of course.  But on the other hand, the commercial skyscraper planned by the Port Authority will be a new structure, and it will tower over the WTC Memorial. The principles at work appear to be as follows: new commercial structures may be taller than the Memorial. An Islamic group may occupy a building that is taller than the Memorial and devote it to a religious purpose. But a Christian structure may not be built taller than the Memorial.

We must note about St. Nicholas’ that the 2008 deal with the Port Authority entailed a contribution of $20 million from the Authority toward the new building. Certainly, public funding properly gives the Authority some leverage over the structure. St. Nicholas’ hasn’t been singled out for special public benefits, however; it was the only church that was destroyed by the 9/11 attack. Rebuilding it was simply proposed for public funding as part of the overall plan for the 9/11 site.

The Port Authority planned to build a platform and foundation for the church, because under the 2008 deal it was to sit on top of a garage and security screening area. In March 2009, Authority officials refused to allow the church to review the plans for the garage and screening area. At that point, talks regarding the church’s rebuilding ground to a halt.

The other Christian development is the ongoing question about the fate of the “Ground Zero cross.” This remnant of the WTC was found in the rubble after the 9/11 attack and stood at the site until it was moved to nearby St. Peter’s Church in October 2006, to clear the way for renovations. Atheist organizations, which began objecting to the display of the cross in 2002, oppose its planned incorporation in the WTC Memorial. Although the Port Authority reportedly intends to display the cross at the Memorial, the possibility of a lawsuit by opponents can’t be excluded.

Interestingly, there has been no attempt by the MSM or leading politicians to denigrate as bigots the atheists who object to the cross. Nor has the Port Authority’s dilatory approach to rebuilding St. Nicholas’ Church earned it any contumely from them for acting in questionable faith regarding a religious group.

Authorities in Brooklyn are similarly unscathed from an ongoing confrontation with two Brighton Beach synagogues over the noise from a public park’s amphitheater and concert series. Oh, there’s a conflict of interests, there’s passion on both sides, and a lot of people know about it and have strong opinions. But two thing stand out:  one, that the ubiquitous Mayor Bloomberg had no qualms about being utterly dismissive of the synagogues’ concerns, and two, that this is probably because there’s no punishment from the MSM and the political elite for being high-handed and insensitive with Brighton Beach’s Jewish congregations.

The short story, summarized here, is that the Sea Breeze Jewish Center and Temple Beth Abraham have been accommodating the noise from concerts in nearby Asser Levy Park for some years; but now Brooklyn’s borough president wants to enlarge the amphitheater and increase the concert-noise encroachment dramatically. Concerned for their ability to hold services, the synagogues asked for reconsideration of this plan. Receiving only dismissive responses, they sued to have a local ordinance enforced, which prohibits excessive noise within 500 feet of a religious structure.

Bloomberg, displaying his exquisite sensitivity to freedom of religion, is on record with this advice to the synagogues:

“Maybe they could adjust their services slightly earlier. We just have to start being a little more tolerant of each other.”

To which one might respond: Well, yes, Mayor, indeed we do. Perhaps the noise concerns of congregations that have been holding services at the same time for years deserve at least as much consideration as the commercial interests of the amphitheater expansion’s sponsors.

It’s the reflexiveness of the opposite reaction that jumps out at me, particularly coming from the same Mayor Bloomberg who got so choked up about the Cordoba Initiative’s unalienable right to make an Islamic center of the old Burlington factory on Park.

It also set me thinking about the issue of noise, and where Bloomberg would be likely to come down if it became an issue for the Park 51 center. There’s every possibility that it will, as far as I can tell.  The center will house a mosque, and mosques broadcast the call to prayer five times a day. This practice has become contentious in a number of American cities; in the Bronx, a masjid stirred vigorous community opposition last fall when it applied for an amplified sound permit for the purpose. The specific reason for requesting the permit was, apparently, that the call already broadcast outside the mosque was not considered loud enough to attract the attention of the faithful, and needed to be louder.

During the years I lived in Norfolk, Virginia, I lived not far from a masjid and I recall that in the 1980s, the calls to prayer were barely audible outside of about a block’s radius. By the 1990s, they were being amplified, and could be somewhat annoying on a temperate evening when you wanted to have the windows open. I don’t know if anyone ever formally objected to the noise.  From a quarter mile away, I found it a bearable irritant.  But I can understand why people closer to it might have found it objectionable – as I can understand why residents of the Bronx would, who have no alternative to hearing the adhan five times a day.

Perhaps the Park 51 center will agree not to broadcast the call to prayer outside its walls. I don’t know.  I do know that locals who would object to hearing it, and who would object to hearing it at Ground Zero because it’s Ground Zero, would not inherently be acting from bigotry.  I am, frankly, deeply offended at the implication that it could only be an act of bigotry to resist the establishment of a mosque at a particular site.  Mosques the world over bring loudspeakers, and very often crowds of the faithful praying five times a day in rows outside of them. If we say that Christians or Jews must not view that as noise pollution or as an unseemly usurpation of certain public spaces, then how do we also justify not calling atheists bigots when they are offended by Christian symbols?

And if we say that the religious arrangements of Jews don’t deserve the same respect from civil authorities as someone else’s plans for secular entertainment – then on what basis are we more solicitous of the religious arrangements of Muslims?

The reflexive tendencies of at least some of our political leaders – and agencies of our governments – seem to amount, if not to a suicide pact, at least to an Islam-promotion pact.  I do not believe that this is evidence of some dark conspiracy, so don’t run off and say I do.  But what I see is the same law interpreted to mean that Christianity is an encroachment on public life, and Judaism a hindrance to it, while Islam must win battles with the public over our shared living space, lest we all be bigots.

That is wrong.  A test of our true political and legal “impartiality” appears to be looming, with the intention of Florida-based evangelist Bill Keller to establish a Christian center near the Park 51 Islamic Center. (Keller’s website for the center is here.)  According to Keller, the location of the center will be announced in December, suggesting that it has not been confirmed yet.  It will be extremely informative to watch the progress of this effort and see if Keller is accorded the same support and affirmation from the local authorities that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has had.  Whatever any of us thinks of Keller’s theology, he, his religion, and his Christian center are entitled to equal treatment.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Every so often, there will be some new outrage over the FDA’s policy on receiving blood donations from gay or bisexual men. Their policy is in place to prevent tainted blood donations, something that makes sense to most normal people. But still, some gay rights activists will occasionally realize that gays can’t donate, and they completely lose their minds. Gays only comprise about 1-3% of the American population, but we should apparently put all Americans at risk of receiving tainted blood transfusions so that the tiny minority of gays can feel good about themselves. It’s political correctness at its finest! Who cares if some innocent person gets AIDS and dies? The gays will feel useful, so it’s worth it!

A poster at Feministing is really upset about this “unfair discrimination”. In fact, the way she phrases it, the FDA and the CDC both colluded together in a massive conspiracy to excuse their anti-gay agenda with phony, fake statistics.

So look, FDA– and for that matter the CDC whose published statistics the FDA is using, but yet do not appear to cross-reference other demographic and behavioral risk factors to actually provide a nuanced picture of total risk for infection– get off your homophobic high-horse and stop hiding behind statistics that could blatantly be avoided by asking more than one lousy question that basically amounts to: “Are you gay?”

Well, let’s look at the FDA’s anti-gay conspiracy-theory phony statistics. Men who have had sex with men have an HIV prevalence 60 times higher than the general population, and the HIV prevalence in potential donors with history of male sex with males is 200 times higher than first time blood donors and 2000 times higher than repeat blood donors. Men who have had sex with men are also the largest group of blood donors to be found HIV positive. The FDA acknowledges that they are usually able to catch tainted blood donations, but that there would still be a small but definite increased risk if the policy on homosexual blood donations were reversed. Even if it was only one donation out of a million, there are over 20 million blood transfusions every year. And on top of the risk of infecting people with HIV/AIDS, homosexual men are also at an increased risk for Hepatitis B and C, as well as Human Herpes Virus-8, which can cause cancer.

But apparently, we should assume that all of these statistics aren’t true because a Feministing poster named Heather said so without giving any evidence to back up her point. Are we going to take that kind of a risk just to satisfy some sick idea about political correctness?

Whether PC femisogynist gay rights activists want to admit it or not, the truth is that tainted blood transfusions are still a risk. In 2002, two people contracted HIV through tainted blood transfusions. And this year, a VA hospital may have infected up to 1,800 veterans with HIV and hepatitis. There are several famous examples of other people who got AIDS from tainted blood, such as tennis great Arthur Ashe, teenager Ryan White, and Kimberly Bergalis. And while certainly not all tainted blood transfusions come from blood donated from gay men, the point is that tainted blood transfusions do happen. The likelihood is extremely rare, but it does happen. Being careful about who is allowed to donate blood minimizes the risk, but it is still there. Therefore, considering how gay and bisexual men are at such higher risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, it seems reasonable — to a reasonable person, anyways — to ban gay and bisexual men from donating blood. It’s an unnecessary risk to take.

This is continually made out to be an issue of discrimination when its actually an issue of public safety. Blood donations save lives, millions of lives, but it carries risk. You’re going on nothing more than someone’s word that they are healthy and safe to donate. It’s simply too great a risk to take. A tainted donor suffers nothing if they infect someone. Only the person who gets the tainted donation suffers. The only person who benefits from the added risk of high-risk blood donations are the people who get that warm, squishy feeling from satisfying the gods of political correctness, no matter what the cost. And the idea that someone would be OK with increasing the risk of HIV/AIDS just out of political correctness is despicable.

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Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.

Proposition 8 was the citizen-initiative state constitutional amendment overturning the state Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage (SSM) and restoring the traditional definition of marriage to America’s biggest (and most debt-ridden) state. The amendment passed 52.24% to 47.76% in 2008, despite the massive, Obama-driven, liberal-Democratic vote.

The state Supreme Court reluctantly upheld the proposition, which led to an immediate federal lawsuit, Kristin M. Perry v. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Alas, I predict that Judge Walker will find for the plaintiff, striking down Prop. 8 (again) and once more shoving SSM down the throats of Californios.

George Will will be beside himself with glee. It’s not that he supports SSM; I’m sure he doesn’t. But he’s absolutely fanatical against citizen initiatives; he considers them an abomination. Imagine, direct democracy!

He is disgusted and appalled at the very idea that citizens should be allowed to determine the laws they live under, instead of letting their betters rule for their own good. If Judge Walker rules against Prop. 8, Will will write a column praising the decision.

By contrast, Patterico — who supports SSM — will be bitter and angry… because he believes citizens should be allowed to set their own defintion of marriage much more than he believes in same-sex marriage. The difference is simple: Patterico is a staunch proponent of government by the consent of the governed — while George Will calls himself an unreconstructed Tory, by which I assume he means he is a monarchist at heart.

The only question I have is whether Walker will stay his ruling until the Ninth Circus can review it, or whether he will order the state immediately to begin issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples… hoping that even if the Ninth or the Supreme Court ultimately overturns his decision, so many lesbians and gay men will have already married that SSM will be a fait accompli, the courts having finally forced the policy upon the state even without final support from the Supremes.

On that narrow question, I make no prediction.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

UPDATE: I wrote this post before reading Patterico’s own post, which also predicts that Judge Walker will strike down Proposition 8. Two great thoughts with but a single mind between them. (Oh, wait; that would make us both halfwits, wouldn’t it?)

UPDATE II: Yup.

But it’s still a profoundly sad thing to see Our Mum doddering into oblivion, suffering old-age dementia, political Alzheimer’s, whatever metaphorical tag we want to put on it, as the 2010 Pageant of the Absurd rambles on.  I’m not talking here about David Cameron’s impolitic communications in Turkey – the truckling reference to Gaza as a “prison camp” – but about the less-reported visit of Arab-Israeli members of the Knesset to a committee of the House of Commons on Wednesday, 28 July.

At the hearing held in their honor, the Israeli Arabs reportedly “launched a blistering attack on the Jewish state and its Parliament,” with one informing members of the Commons’ “Palestine Solidarity Campaign” that “Israel is much worse than the apartheid regime in South Africa. There were no ethnic cleansing policies there, but there are those policies in Israel.”

Yada-yada.  You can read the rest at the link.  The visit and the charges made amount to the usual boilerplate, but Parliament’s handling of the event was appalling, by the very standards which that once-admirable body long pioneered and exemplified.  It turns out that public attendees who were expected, in advance, to be critical of the agenda advocated in this hearing were denied access to it.

Here is the story of one blogger who was removed by the police – not because he behaved improperly or had any history of doing so, but before he was even in the hearing chamber at Westminster, and because he was known to blog from a pro-Israel standpoint.

Here is the story of another pro-Israel blogger denied access to the same hearing.

This report recounts that a third individual, who was admitted to the hearing, spoke in support of Israel and was afterwards “surrounded and intimidated in an incident witnessed and recorded by the police.”

This kind of thing can’t be spun as the misinterpretation of another culture’s charming customs.  This is our culture.  And this is our culture under the quasi-pharmaceutical influence of a wildly radical “political correctness” – a PC so extreme that it sets the police on anyone who is merely suspected of not being in agreement with it.

There is nothing Western, rational, reasonable, liberal, or empirical about ejecting skeptics from political hearings.  There is no prized, quintessential Western tradition in which this is acceptable or makes sense.  Parliament failed, in this case, to live up to Western standards of political discourse and public transparency.  This is a matter for regret and anger, and the blame for it cannot rationally fall on the culture and traditions of the West.  They neither prompt nor excuse such actions.  In fact, the Western liberal tradition requires, as evidence of bona fides, that political deeds and words endure critical public scrutiny.

No, this is a matter of one the West’s iconic, centuries-old institutions behaving in a decidedly un-Western, illiberal, non-transparent and culturally foreign manner.  No special circumstance like civil war, dueling aspirants to the monarchy, or societal upheaval excuses this lapse in peaceful transparency.  We could debate how much of a dividing line there is between this and collectivist-Marxist repressions of political liberty.  But given the topic of the hearing in question, it would be fatuous to a degree of idiocy to dismiss the concept of dhimmitude from critical examination.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Jay Tea over at Wizbang has posted a story on the Gulf crisis, and chronicles the missteps of this administration:

I’ve Got A Little List…

Posted by Jay Tea

It seems everyone’s reading “Avertible Catastrophe,” the Financial Post’s amazingly analysis of the BP oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico. As I read it, I started putting together a list of the identifiable errors and mistakes the Obama administration made. And as I made that list, I noticed that they had hit so many of the classic categories of blunders that it could almost serve as a textbook example of how NOT to do things. Link

Jay’s “list” includes the “crisis advantage” the Obama administration is using to advance their disastrous agenda:

“The Obama administration has indeed seized on this crisis as an opportunity to push its own agenda. It’s trying like hell to impose a ban on all offshore drilling in the Gulf, which will throw thousands and thousands out of work and seriously bone the US economy. It shook down BP into forfeiting its legal protection under existing liability laws and giving up a $20 billion “compensation” fund to be administered by Obama’s hand-picked crony, with no oversight whatsoever (and legally arranged to come ahead of other BP creditors should they file bankruptcy). It’s using it as a cudgel to beat up on the entire oil industry. It’s making serious hay in denouncing and blaming “Big Business” and the Republicans for destroying the Gulf Coast.”

Please read Jay’s entire post here

With the projection that the relief wells won’t get online until the end of August, (and the hurricane season approaching , is the President prepared to continue with his “go it alone” attitude that will magnify the enormous cost to the environment and the Gulf Coast economy to advance his political agenda? How much longer can the Gulf states put up with the obstruction from the federal government to clean up and contain this disaster? President Obama certainly was not personally responsible for the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and we can accept the fact that his expertise is limited in stopping the flow from a mile below. But, the question must be asked, is the President using all of the resources available to mankind to maximize the containment, or is he playing political games at the expense of billions in permanent damage to our economy and most likely our ecosystem* throughout the entire region?

Perhaps we should seriously consider Jay’s list.

*(edited–thanks tlynch001)

First poor Pluto was booted from planet-dom for what I can only assume was size-ism. Now, it has been discovered that science itself is racist. I wonder if we’ll have to change the phrase “the science is settled” to “the racist science is settled”? Good thing we have the NAACP to keep us abreast of such things, as they did recently with a Hallmark graduation card. Let’s see what the objectionable card says. And by objectionable, I, of course, mean not objectionable in the slightest:

The Hallmark card reads, “Hey world, we are officially putting you on notice,” before playfully touting the ambitious future of the new graduate.

Characters known as “Hoops” and “Yoyo” banter on: “And you black holes, you are so ominous. Watch your back.”

Yet, here is what the NAACP insanely objects to:

But members of the Los Angeles NAACP say the message sounds like “black whore” in the card’s audio recording. That’s how they hear it, and they say it’s racist,  KABC-TV in Los Angeles reported.

“That was very demeaning to African-American women when it made reference to African-American women as whores, and at the end it says ‘watch your back,’” said Leon Jenkins of the Los Angeles NAACP.

No, really. They even shamelessly said it on camera!

Via Hot Air:

May as well have slapped the words “on RACIST notice” on the front of the dastardly card. And featured a picture of a burning cross! You know who I blame? Of course you do. George Bush. Probably global warming, too.

Sheesh, evil Hallmark ™, how dare you nefariously make a card celebrating the ‘take on the world” attitude that many graduates have? And try to tie it in to science-y things like the universe and black holes? Oh, the horror. I’m also fairly certain that these Hoops and Yoyo characters are both male, thus, this card is also totally sexist. Hello, misogyny!

Silly me; I didn’t realize that Post-Racial actually meant making absolutely everything, even the most innocuous, about race. I really do need to brush up on my Newspeak to Sane translations. Or, you know, people should just stop making stuff up and stop inventing racism out of whole cloth. End the insanity and focus on content of character and not the content, or imagined content, of audio cards.

How can we ever truly be Post-Racial when not racist at all things like this are constantly twisted around so as to be racist? Now they are even feigning deafness, apparently, in order to hear racist things where none actually are. Sort of like Maureen Dowd and the time that she imagined the word “boy” at the end of Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” comment to President Obama.

The only people who see race and color absolutely everywhere are the people who have something to gain from race-baiting. Power. They cannot move past it and they cannot ever be “Post-Racial”, because being race baiters is a way that they hold power and push their agenda. Like feminists, whom I call Femisogynists, they rely on victimizing others and they have indoctrinated others into being victims. Those who see only color and who actively seek to pin a racial element to everything, are the ones who need to examine why they do so.

NAACP, you “acted stupidly”. You should probably give yourselves ones of those Teachable Moments ™ on this. I’ll give you a hint: Start with The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

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(Originally posted at NewsReal)

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Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics jumped right in as a contestant in the race to see who can be the most revolting, all in the name of multiculturalism and their misguided idea of tolerance. They released a policy update on Female Genital Mutilation, in which they first changed the term to Female Genital Cutting and, further, gave credence to the idea of allowing doctors to provide a “clitoral nick” instead.

Obviously, this didn’t sit well with sane people everywhere and, as such, the AAP was forced to retract that policy update and issue a new update. While I am thankful that they retracted the original vile update and it was clearly the right thing to do, the underlying reasons for the original update itself are highly troubling and can’t be swept away as easily as the policy was.

Firstly, the new update leaves the less offensive ‘cutting’ in place of ‘mutilation’. Guess who can’t handle the truth, as always? In the delusional minds of those on the left, particularly the elitist left, everything is semantics. Truth does not matter, as long as the Newspeak is deemed less offensive and allows them to pat themselves on their smug backs for being multicultural Citizens of the World ™.

Inoffensive, redefined words are more important to them than the actual offensive, and, frankly, evil acts themselves. Of course, evil isn’t a word that is allowed to be used either, which is exactly why the sickening idea of “just a little nick” entered their semblance of minds to begin with. It didn’t just happen here in America, either. The global left all have the same (alleged) thought processes; The Royal Australian New Zealand College of Obstetricians is considering ‘nicking’ as well.

RANZCOG secretary Gino Pecoraro said the policy would be discussed at next month’s Women’s Health Committee meeting.

”We will need to start to think about [its introduction] but we would have to speak to community leaders from Australia,” Dr Pecoraro said.

“If a nick could meet the cultural needs of a particular woman, then it might save her from going through what can really be drastic surgery…”

The cultural needs? The need to mutilate a girl’s sexual organs? The need to commit a barbaric act? That right there is the danger that we all still face. The reason “nicking” was even discussed as an option, is due to the left’s embracing of moral relativism, in particularly meta-ethical relativism. An article at Salon, actually highlighted that and the extent of the danger that meta-ethical relativism, and the left’s own latent racist tendencies, brings.

As a nation of immigrants, we (in some ways like France, with its tensions over the burqa) continue to see tested the limits of liberties we hold dear; we continue to negotiate the tricky territory of embracing peoples while — in this case, rightly — rejecting their practices. And our doctors, evidently, are being asked to do exactly that in their own examining rooms. How can doctors address FGM in a way that makes sense to patients (why boys but not girls?) and educates without alienating, thus possibly helping protect that daughter from future harm? The above scenario with the Somali mother was a real one: It led to a comparable, and also rejected, “nicking” proposal in Seattle in 1996. So here we are again, revisiting the question at a national level, with doctors apparently still trying to figure out the most effective way to help protect the girls they encounter. What can we learn, this time around, about how to help them?

Yeah, no. There is no tricky territory to negotiate. Some things are black and white. Some things are right or wrong. Some things are good or evil. The elitist left, enshrined in their ivory towers, choose to be apologists for evil behavior so that they can tout themselves as culturally enlightened and Better Than You. They explain away all wrongs perpetrated by others by trying to rationalize irrational and insane behavior. Partly, due to their worshipping at the shrine of multiculturalism and partly due to their own bigoted beliefs.

Their constant talk of “brown people”, a phrase which they use that seems to encompass all but their own Ivory Tower dwelling selves, is another underlying factor. Not only do they truly believe that they are Smarter Than You and more enlightened than we hapless rubes, but they also truly believe that they are better than all those pesky “brown people”, particularly non-westerners. To them, of course non-ivory, non-westerners are far less advanced and can’t be expected to act in a civilized manner. Their barbarism is excused with a figurative pat on the head and a “bless their hearts.”

This attitude is not only bigoted, it is a great danger. It is the “soft bigotry of low expectations” taken to an unprecedented, and deadly level. The result of this line of thought is that not only are barbaric acts like FGM condoned, but terrorism is also not only tolerated, but excused. We see this all the time in their constant excuse-making for terrorists. Excuse me, man-made disaster causers, as the Newspeak-y left would like us to call them.

This bigotry and this meta-ethical relativism is one of the largest dangers the world faces. The world must realize that apologizing for evil, violent acts is not embracing diversity. It’s not “seeing both sides” nor being culturally aware. It is embracing insanity and condoning evil. Those who condone such barbarism and persist in delusional moral equivalency, like we are seeing now on a different scale with Israel and the flotilla, are actually complicit in it’s perpetuation.

It must end. Never Again, indeed.

—–

Follow Lori  on Twitter and read more of her NewsReal posts here.

I myself would choose to discuss that question without suggesting that conservatives, in particular, have failed embarrassingly to recognize its validity.  Some have presented their conclusions on the matter without taking us through the whole argument, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t thought it through.

On the question of the mosque itself, however, I don’t think any treatment of the topic can be complete without reference to the meaning behind the name of the “initiative” that intends to establish it – the Cordoba Initiative – or to the plan to name the mosque Cordoba House.  My first question on hearing this a couple of weeks ago was whether Americans are completely ignorant of history.

Cordoba was, of course, the seat of the caliphate established in what is now modern Spain after the Islamic invasion from North Africa in the 8th century A.D.  The medieval occupation of Spain – “al-Andalus” – is considered by Islamic theorists to have been an inevitable step in the manifest destiny of Islam, and its eventual reversal through the lengthy European “Reconquista” a tragic but temporary triumph of the infidels.  The great mosque at Cordoba was built on the foundation of a Christian cathedral, and when Europeans retook Cordoba in the 13th century they turned the magnificent mosque back into a cathedral.

There is no question that the opulence and beauty of the mosque were the products of Muslim builders and artists.  But there is also no question that the mosque at Cordoba represents a history of conquest and reconquest that, from the perspective of Islamists, is at an unfinished stage as of today.  The caliphate of Cordoba was the geographic high point of Umayyad Muslim rule – that is, of the original caliphate that succeeded Mohammed – on European territory.  It represents a glory that Islamists intend to restore.  Its eventual loss to the Europeans represents, equally, an evil reversal, imposed by infidels, that requires redress.

“Cordoba,” in Islamic symbolic terms, means Islamic rule in the West.  It does not mean “coexistence,” unless coexistence is interpreted as referring to Islamic rule.  Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs cites the article (original in Arabic) published by Iraqi-American Khudhayr Taher on 18 May, in which Taher explains the following:

We must note that a hostile and provocative name [Cordoba] has been chosen for this mosque…Choosing the name ‘Cordoba House’ for the mosque to be constructed in New York was not coincidental or random and innocent. It bears within it significance and dreams of expansion and invasion [into the territory] of the other, [while] striving to change his religion and to subjugate him…

It used to not even be a stretch for reasonably well educated Westerners to recognize the place of Spain and Cordoba in the history of the West and Islam.  Many of today’s younger adults, however, have learned nothing about the Mediterranean before 1492 except that the Muslim period in Spain was a flowering of science, art, and culture.  There was a great deal to admire in the accomplishments of the Muslim Cordobans, but they did, in fact, invade and conquer Spain, sell its inhabitants into slavery, provide a base for slaver raids into other parts of Europe, and rule by the sword in much of the caliphate.

“Cordoba” is not a name that evokes peaceful coexistence of Islam and the West.  Perhaps a contest should be held to come up with a name that does; I don’t know that I can think of one offhand.  That shouldn’t surprise us.  Our own lifetimes all began less than a century on from the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the entity that shifted over the centuries of its existence from fighting against Europe to buffering it from the restive tribes and sheikdoms in its hinterland.  Most of us today don’t have much of a cultural memory of Islamic invasion; the peoples of Southeast Europe would be the exception.  But the rest of us have grown so accustomed to the absolute character of the Pax Americana that we tend to dismiss, out of our privileged disconnectedness from history, the implications that the peoples of other times and places would have recognized – with greater wisdom – as meaningful.

A mosque at Ground Zero is something intelligent people can dispute honestly and in good faith.  But honesty is essential, and it would be dishonest to dismiss the implications of proposing to name it Cordoba House.  Let’s propose naming it instead Tours House, after the Battle of Tours and the defeat of the Umayyad Muslim forces there in 732; or Lepanto House, after the naval battle in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1571, in which the Western forces broke the maritime power of the Ottoman Empire; or Vienna House, after the battle of 1683 in which the Western armies broke the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman invaders.

Heck, let’s tell the mosque’s backers they can have a mosque there but its name will be Baghdad Bob House.  If these seem like bad ideas because they send the wrong signal – well, exactly.  So does “Cordoba House.” We should not passively accept that name out of fear of being ridiculed or second-guessed, any more than we should accept a mosque at all for such a reason.

The building of mosques in America does raise more and more civic questions for us, as the evidence mounts that some of them are centers for cultivating jihadism and facilitating the logistic end of terrorism.  But that’s not because conservatives are hidebound and reactionary in their thinking, it’s because of what goes on in the mosques. It’s a legitimate question, what form our affirmation that most Muslims are not Islamist radicals needs to take.  And it’s legitimate as well to argue that it need not take the form of agreeing to a prominent mosque at Ground Zero named Cordoba House.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

"There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad."

She brought suit against the Air Force in 2006. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on her case in 2008, issuing an opinion that has so far received little media attention. The ruling’s Solomonic proposition is that, while the 1993 law passed by Congress is the law of the land, the military’s application of it requires a demonstration of more than mere homosexual practice on the part of a servicemember. To justify dismissal, according to the Ninth Circuit, the military must show that in an individual case, homosexual behavior creates a problem for unit cohesion or military discipline. (As commentators point out, this ruling, among its other oddities, has effect for the U.S. military only in the Western states overseen by the Ninth Circuit Court.)

The Obama administration declined to appeal that verdict in 2009. And I believe most servicemembers would regret Major Witt’s dismissal anyway. Nothing about her case suggests she had a deleterious impact on cohesion or discipline. She was a highly decorated and, by all accounts, highly professional and well-liked flight nurse. Dismissing airmen like Margaret Witt is not what Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) is “about.”

But the Ninth Circuit ruling makes very clear what repealing DADT will be “about,” and that is judicial inquiry into the institutional reasoning behind military policy and decisions. The Ninth Circuit ruling requires something the federal law itself does not: a demonstration of damage to unit cohesion or discipline. The law assumes the potential for such damage, and is preemptive in intent. The appeals court ruling effectively rejects that premise. Its approach to the Witt case makes clear that it will choose, at its discretion, to disregard the intent of law and focus instead on individual circumstances, and even on forms of evidence for which there may be no legal definition (e.g., “damage to military unit cohesion”).

This is a useful perspective from which to address the other lawsuit I mentioned. Although unrelated to the military, at least at present, it’s a suit about government facilities and “discrimination” against gays by a religious group. As laid out by retired federal judge Michael McConnell, in an interview here, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez is about a state university law school (Berkeley’s Hastings School) not allowing a student organization to operate on campus because it affirms traditional marriage. The basis for the school’s defense is that letting private organizations use its facilities amounts to subsidizing them at taxpayer expense.

 The school has assumed, in effect, the position that its student organizations must design their purposes and beliefs in such a way that no one could be excluded from membership because of disagreeing with them. A Washington Post editorial from April, when the case’s appeal was argued before the Supreme Court, detected the obvious flaw in that reasoning, as did the questioner in a much-cited interview of Hastings’s Dean Leo Martinez (linked at the McConnell interview). By the school’s reasoning, Jews could not have a group on campus that did not admit radical Islamists, nor could blacks have a group that did not admit white-supremacist skinheads.

We may hope that the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiff this summer. But the central thesis of the defense – that religious association and speech have to be restricted on government facilities to avoid subsidizing “discrimination” – may or may not be ruled on explicitly. It will depend on what the justices view as the basic question of law in this case. If the Supreme Court upholds the Ninth Circuit’s ruling for the defense, however, Judge McConnell affirms without hesitation that the ruling would have broad implications for religion and government, including the military chaplaincy and servicemembers’ religious groups. The collision of religious freedom with anti-discrimination policy in the precincts of government is not inevitable, but it is closer today than ever before.

Fair-minded people of goodwill have insisted that institutional endorsement of homosexuality by the military – the outcome repealing DADT will produce – isn’t going to infringe on the religious freedom of others. But CLS v. Martinez makes it clear that there are decision-makers willing to prohibit religious association and speech on government facilities, for precisely the reasons that would be adduced in the military’s case. Of perhaps more importance, there are multiple levels of judicial appeal, in at least some federal jurisdictions, where such prohibitions have lately been upheld.

Just as Major Margaret Witt tugs at our consciences as a victim of DADT, so should soldiers who rely on the ministry of their faith while in uniform. Tim Dalrymple, who interviewed Michael McConnell for “patheos,” has another recent interview with Michael Yon on the topic of soldiers and their religious faith. Yon’s own words make the case eloquently, and I urge you to read the interview and make up your own mind. My military experience validates his statements in every particular.

The Yon interview reminded me, moreover, of a remarkably moving document Ronald Reagan read to a Baptist convention in 1984. It was the report of a U.S. Sixth Fleet chaplain, Rabbi (Lieutenant Commander) Arnold Resnicoff, who along with his Catholic counterpart was one of the first men on the scene after the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. The whole report is gripping, but this brief passage in particular has remained with me:

I remember the first time I jumped in a foxhole, the first time the shells actually fell within the U.S. area. Looking around at the others in there with me, I made the remark that we probably had the only interfaith foxholes in Beirut. The Druze, the Muslims, Christians, all had theirs. The Jewish forces in the Israeli Army had theirs. But we were together. I made the comment then that perhaps if the world had more interfaith foxholes, there might be less of a need for foxholes altogether.

How perfectly that observation captures the blessing of American tolerance: unity from respecting multiple faiths, not from delegitimizing one or more of them. I could willingly occupy a foxhole with Margaret Witt, and I bet she would have no objection to occupying one with me, in spite of my faith. We, and most others in uniform, can do much better than the letter of the law in that regard. Indeed, law that litigates religious belief, and policy that takes an attitude on it, cannot unite us in foxholes.

Law that seeks to make windows into our souls is a divider, not a uniter. A DADT policy that gave the military more institutional discretion to keep people like Margaret Witt in uniform, but that did not open the door to a whole new category for litigating not just personnel management decisions but religious beliefs, would be ideal. Unfortunately, because of the state of federal law and grievance politics today, repealing DADT will open that door. And in the end, the defensive policies to which repeal drives the military will leave commanders with less discretion than they have today. A military of political litmus tests, in which commanders are always looking over their shoulders for fear of hostile and suspicious legal review, will not be a military that functions as America needs it to.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

They’ve recently gone so far as to condone genital mutilation. They have defended child rape in the case of Roman Polanski.  They are silent on Iran gaining a seat on the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women. Why? Because it’s never actually about people to them. It’s all agenda-driven, always.

The latest instance, specifically Amanda Marcotte’s defense of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recent decision to embrace genital mutilation is beyond infuriating. It is twisted, sickening and disturbing beyond belief. How can anyone in their right mind defend such an inhumane thing? Granted, “right mind” is the operative term there, but still.

The AAP, like the UN, started referring to female genital mutilation as merely “cutting” because mutilation sounds icky and may be offensive and insensitive to other cultures. Boo hoo. I’m sorry you are offended that sane people define the acts of clitoridectomy and excision as what they are: mutilation. Now, the AAP has gone one further and said a “little nick” is a nice compromise. No big whoop! Sacrifice girls and allow a misogynistic practice to occur, all in the name of appeasement. I don’t think the girls who are barbarically maimed feel very appeased, do you?

Not so, says Marcotte! Marcotte used the standard and oh-so-lame talking point of “but what about US? We are meany pants and awful too!”  Leftists/Progressives always say “but what about US?” in an attempt to act as apologists, due to their religious fervor and zealotry for the nebulously defined “multi-culturalism.” They invent an example of a perceived American wrong, one that is usually both idiotic and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. And, you know, cuckoo pants.

As Jenn Q. Public pointed out in her article, Marcotte had this to say, in defense of the AAP’s decision:

And it’s not like Western culture is so free of blatantly misogynist traditions, either.  Part of me wishes that we had a two minute nicking at the doctor instead of the entire painfully misogynist wedding tradition that persists in the name of tradition.

See, pointing out true evil doesn’t fit the “progressive” meme. Instead, subjugation and misogyny must be invented out of whole cloth regarding things like marriage, but the very real—and often deadly—subjugation of women under Islamic law must be tolerated and ignored. The hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance have reached epic levels.

Oh, just a little two minute nicking, says Marcotte. It’s not like it’s as awful as getting married and sharing your life with a loving partner! I can maybe see where Marcotte is coming from, personally. As self-loathing as she is, she must feel that marriage is a horrid punishment—for the man. I’d have more to say in response to Marcotte, but it makes me feel a little cheap because it’s so easy to refute the intellectually defenseless.

The left’s lack of intellectual prowess, as well as their absolute hypocrisy was also on display in regards to the child rapist known as Roman Polanski. Here is what the founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation said about that:

“My personal thoughts are let the guy go,” said Peg Yorkin, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “It’s bad a person was raped. But that was so many years ago. The guy has been through so much in his life. It’s crazy to arrest him now. Let it go.”

Just let it go, will you? He makes super cool movies and he’s all arty and stuff. And like the intellectual giant, Whoopi Goldberg said, it wasn’t like it was “rape-rape.” The Hollywood Left all gathered around Polanski, even circulating a petition demanding his release. France’s Society of Film Directors said his arrest would have “disastrous consequences for the freedom of expression.”

The freedom to express pedophilia?  Drugging and raping (yes, “rape-rape”) a 13-year-old CHILD. Who repeatedly said no. Over and over. Who was scared out of her mind, yet this “man” Polanski, continued to use and abuse her in various ways. Over and over again until he “freely expressed” his own sick enjoyment, for which he felt no remorse. He didn’t even believe he had done anything wrong. And neither does the Left, apparently.

How enlightened and cultured they are. The rape of a child is perfectly acceptable, so long as you dig the rapist’s art and his liberal thought. I suppose you all figured “Well, at least he tried not to get her pregnant. What’s a little sodomy? At least that way she wouldn’t be “punished with a baby.” Sheesh! Relax, you uncultured wingnuts! Plus, it’s not like he disagrees with Obama or wants to stop illegal immigration!”

Most recently, their silence was telling on Iran gaining a seat on the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women. From Leftist camps, there was either silence or there was attempted down-playing of Iran’s horrific record towards women. Others, again, tried to equate women in Iran being stoned to death or lashed for immodest dress with being pro-life here.  No, really.

These are all just the latest examples that clearly show what some of us have always known.  To the Left, the truth does not matter. What matters is their dangerously naive agenda. Their need to further that agenda, along with the narratives that they have set in stone, trumps all. They will also, even in the face of overwhelming facts and reason, keep repeating the lies. Eventually, they hope, the lies will be perceived as reality.

They care more about pushing politically correct “tolerance” and “diversity” memes, including in the form of appeasement, in order to further their identity politics agenda. They care more about that than they care about actual people, particularly women. I’ve said this before, but it’s something we must remember:

This is the difficulty we face, as people who do have moral compasses. We face an opponent who has none.

—-

(Cross-posted from NewsReal)

The horror.  Apple decided that that was “defamatory.”  I deduced originally that this was code for “our lawyers would freak and Waxman would retaliate as only he can”; but there’s also the possibility that selling derogatory app content about Soviet farming regulations could tend to discourage purchases of the iStalin app.

Now comes word from Allahpundit that Apple killed a just-created app, iSlam Muhammad, for reasons the company’s representative “could not discuss” over the phone with the content creator, a comedian and filmmaker.  Referring to this app as “KoranThumper” seems appropriate, given that it was modeled on an app called BibleThumper that remains available as of 6:15 PM PDT today (20 May) on the iTunes commercial site.  (Threatening to behead Steve Jobs over BibleThumper is, in the end, not What Jesus Would Do.  One of the many crucial differences between him and Mohammed.)

Apple gets it coming and going, of course.  The company pulled its popular app iMussolini earlier this year, although it appears that there was a legitimate issue with coyrighted material behind the challenge in Italian court.  It’s not clear whether the objections of Holocaust survivors would have gotten the app pulled on the basis of offensiveness.

They would surely have done so if the iHitler app, proposed to Apple by the same Italian app designer, had seen the light of day. Apple rejected the concept outright, however, according to Italian tech media.  (Admin note:  if you use an online translator for this Italian-language news item, it will probably mistranslate the key verb bocciare, which occurs in the third-person singular in the summary – boccia – as the noun “ball.”  The verb means “reject,” and what the text actually says is that Apple’s approval team rejected the proposed app before it got to the App store.  It doesn’t say “the team approved prior to the ball.”  One of the many delights of online translators.)

So Ari David can congratulate himself that Apple recoiled from an app criticizing Henry Waxman with the same promptitude accorded its rejection of the iHitler app, intervening before anything could even get recorded.  As others have pointed out, however, Apple continues to sell the Che for iPhone app.  If you’re in the mood for laughing at credulous fools who imagine themselves to be striking blows for Totally Blow-Worthy Stuff, this interview of the (yet again Italian) creator of Che for iPhone is priceless.  His i-app posse was reportedly inspired by the Steven Soderbergh movie – information he may have actually communicated with a straight face.

Apple does seem to be an unerring windsock in the siroccos of political correctness.  Che – check.  BibleThumper – check, check.  Mussolini – court case!  Separate column.  Hitler – NOT.  Criticism of Henry Waxman – NOT EVEN.  KoranThumper – “Can’t discuss that with you at this time.”

But it’s interesting to note that we go orange and horizontal in some winds too.  Does anyone think it’s actually a travesty for civil liberties that there isn’t an iHitler app?  Certainly the civil right exists for us to have one.  Apple could have made a lot of money with iHitler – it would probably have outsold iMussolini and undoubtedly would have cleaned iStalin’s clock – but we all know why Apple rejected the app.  Most of us would have.  And for most of us, enforcing the right of some people to buy an iHitler app if they want one isn’t worth whatever it would take to make one available (a hostile takeover of Apple?  Extorting Jobs somehow to sell off the iPhone division?  Creating unauthorized software with pirated code and selling it through China?).

There are forms of censorship we care little about and live with unconcernedly.  Apple doesn’t always pick the ones we agree are tolerable.  We ought to be concerned when censorship – including selective censorship by a private company – is being imposed because of the fear of retaliation, even though theoretically nothing has changed in terms of our rights under the law.  The Apple decisions about KoranThumper and the David campaign app fall into that category, and the rejection of iHitler overlaps with it.

But our motivation to do something about it depends – always – on what is being censored, who is censoring it, and what there is to do.

If people want to draw Mohammed, they should draw Mohammed.  Some enterprising folks might want to “gig” Apple for KoranThumper by displaying their drawings on Macs, iPhones, and iPads across America, and leaving plenty of photographic evidence on the web.  Others with less free time might just swear off Apple products.

But for my money, banning the burqa will be one of the biggest useful steps taken in the West in a long time, if France can close that deal.  It’s a deal that will require courage when the backlash begins; whether the French have that courage or not will be one of the key tests of this young century.

Meanwhile, the real payoff, in A.D. 2010, would come from inducing regime-change in Iran.  Symmetric political warfare – e.g., having confrontations with Islam in civic venues in the West – hasn’t been working for us.  The question is what, if anything, will motivate us to go asymmetric in defense of our civilization.  It’s when we do that that we will see results.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Ari David and Tony Katz just want to have fun (at Tea Party May 2009)

Apple came back to him with the judgment that the information he wanted to include about Waxman was “defamatory,” and therefore Apple couldn’t accept his business.

But read the story for yourselves.  (Read it if only for the idiotic farming regulations California farmers are already living with, which Waxman wants to impose on the rest of America’s farmers.)

Read it also, however, for the posture assumed by Apple.  Nothing in the proposed app’s content could reasonably be called defamatory.  Some of it is clearly opinion (e.g., the farm regulations are “Soviet-style”).  But when did charging a politician with wanting to “strangle family farms with Soviet-style regulation” become defamatory?  It’s partisan political speech, yes.  But that doesn’t make it defamatory.

Truth about Henry Waxman is..."Defamatory!"

Gateway Pundit, breaking the story, asked if Apple is going to ban conservatives from using their products next.  I suspect there is more here than merely reflexive partisanship at Apple, however.  What I smell is the fear of (a) lawsuit and (b) regulatory retaliation by Waxman.

This is a lovely teachable moment, because it highlights what an overly regulatory, overly litigious state can do to you.  It doesn’t have to come out in the open and make laws against you and your opinions.  All it needs is the category of regulation that might get someone you want to do business with in trouble.  (The lawyers will take care of the rest.)  And it needs unaccountable agencies through which to act.  There are probably three dozen agencies, just at the federal level, that could be used to torture Apple in the back room, far away from any media coverage or recourse with the public.

Does Henry Waxman, who’s been in Congress since January 1975 and chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have ways to sic the Feds on Apple?  You bet he does.

That’s our America in 2010, folks.  If we want to change it, we couldn’t start with a better move than replacing Henry Waxman with Ari David.  In the meantime, decorating Apple’s face with egg will go a long way.  Pass it on.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

The Left often pays lips service to, while actually doing nothing about, the  military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Yet, in regards to radical Islam, that is exactly what the left wants us to do. Don’t ask.  And, dear Allah, never tell!

Instead, they prefer to demagogue American citizens, while “bitterly clinging” to their insane politically correct worship of diversity and tolerance.  It’s funny how those who deride religion constantly, are actually zealots in their own right. They worship at the altar of Better Than You ™ multiculturalism.

It has never been more apparent than it is now. In just the past couple of months alone, examples of this attitude have uncovered that what was once perhaps just dangerous naivety, is now the purposeful ignoring of what should be basic knowledge. All in order to appease, accommodate and appear culturally sensitive. The fact that the very people for whom they are apologists want to, you know, kill them is somehow lost on them.

They have yet to realize, or are choosing to ignore in their moral vacuum, the fact that political correctness is no longer just incredibly annoying. It’s now deadly. The politically correct culture has been hurl-worthy to me for years, but it has recently reached gastric lows. First, there was the absurd narrative being pushed about the Fort Hood terrorist. Oh, he was “bullied” and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – via osmosis, apparently, as he was never once deployed.

Flash forward to the attempted Times Square car bomb and the delusional narratives were even worse. Not only was the first thought of our alleged leaders and the mainstream media an attempt to demonize the new fall guy “someone upset about health care”, but even after the attempted bomber’s name and history was known, they were more concerned with being “culturally sensitive” than the actual bomb attempt itself.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says New York City “will not tolerate any bias” following the arrest of a U.S. citizen from Pakistan in the Times Square car bombing attempt.

Bloomberg said Tuesday that also applies to potential backlash against Muslim New Yorkers.

Like I said then, it’s rather telling that the only time the words Muslim or Islam ever appear is when the rest of us are being accused of being racist, bigoted half wits. Don’t ask! And don’t tell. That must explain the administration’s silence on two other recent developments. Firstly, Iran being appointed to the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women. I wrote the following when it was announced and, to my knowledge, they all still remain silent:

The United States Ambassador, Susan Rice, appointed by President Obama, was silent and did not even attend the vote. In fact, she wasn’t even in the building. Apparently, the administration believes that Iran will help shatter that glass ceiling with stray rocks, used as they stone women to death for being raped. A week later, and they remain mum. Not one word of denouncement from President Obama, who is too busy demonizing one of our own American states and and ignoring devastating floods. Too bad we can’t call ourselves “Los Women”. Maybe he’d give a hoot then. Ambassador Rice also refuses to comment, which is the status quo with her, evidently. The State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton, she of “not staying at home baking cookies” because that would be demeaning fame, is silent.

Not long after that affront to sane human beings everywhere, the American Academy of Pediatrics went one further in the “who can be the most vile in their attempts to appease” game. They decided that female genital mutilation should now just be called cutting (not as offensive sounding, you see) and that perhaps it would be okay to just allow doctors to perform a ritual “nicking”.  What’s a little nicking and all? As long as we can all get along and everyone feels nice and appeased. Well, except for the girls you are sacrificing and who are being barbarically maimed.

What is worse is that the left doesn’t just look the other way; they have actually become apologists for barbaric behavior under the guise of tolerance. They explain away all wrongs perpetrated by others by trying to equate them in some way, usually invented out of whole cloth, with some delusionally perceived American wrong or Christian wrong.

Phyllis Chesler recently published an article entitled Worldwide Trends in Honor Killings. When the American Academy of Pediatrics released their “nicking” opinion, I said that it was the same as saying “well, don’t actually behead your wife in an honor killing. Just slit her throat a little.” Turns out, that actually is how the left thinks, as Chesler explains:

Former National Organization for Women (NOW) president Kim Gandy compared the battered and beheaded Aasiya Hassan[9] to the battered (but still living) pop star Rihanna and further questioned whether Hassan’s murder was an honor killing:

Is a Muslim man in Buffalo more likely to kill his wife than a Catholic man in Buffalo? A Jewish man in Buffalo? I don’t know the answer to that, but I know that there is plenty of violence to go around—and that the long and sordid history of oppressing women in the name of religion surely includes Islam, but is not limited to Islam.[10]

At the time of the Hassan beheading, a coalition of domestic violence workers sent an (unpublished) letter to the Erie County district attorney’s office and to some media stating that this was not an honor killing, that honor killings had nothing to do with Islam, and that sensationalizing Muslim domestic violence was not only racist but also served to render invisible the much larger incidence of both domestic violence and domestic femicide.

Misogyny apologizing again, under the guise of tolerance. Only now, that apologist position may end up being complicit in murders. Don’t ask! And don’t tell!

The Left’s default position is that other cultures, no matter how barbaric, must be revered and honored. But American traditions, must be eradicated and are the true root of all evil. Anyone who doesn’t do the same, must be a redneck-y rube. And a racist, of course.

My hometown in New Jersey, for instance, no longer has an Easter Egg Hunt. It is now called Spring Celebration with Bunny.  A town that is lily white and primarily Christian and Jewish. In all my 39 years, I’ve yet to come across a person of the Jewish faith who was offended by Easter bunnies or Christmas for that matter. And, even if offended, they’d never threaten to set off a bomb in the town or commit acts of violent intimidation as seen in this video after the assault on Lars Vilks. But, I suppose my “rich life experiences” don’t count, since I’m plain old Caucasian and all.

Finally, most recently our own Attorney General, Eric Holder, could not even bring himself to utter the word Islam when being questioned about the Faisal Shahzad investigation.

See, it’s not about truth or even common sense. It’s about furthering an agenda, always. That agenda relies on identity politics and is more important to them than actual human beings.

Apologizing for evil, violent acts is not embracing diversity. It’s embracing insanity. It’s not just condoning barbarism; it is complicit in it’s perpetuation.

So, I am asking. And I am telling. Because, as George Washington said, “If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

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(cross-posted from NewsReal, RedState)