Am I supposed to feel guilty because I eat salads and fruits?
The Silent Scream of the Asparagus
This sounds like a joke but isn't. What it does demonstrate is another way the rights you take for granted can be made subject to a bureaucrat's whim.
What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.
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ts majority view holds that it would if the genetic modification caused plants to "lose their independence"--for example by interfering with their capacity to reproduce.
So much for breeding seedless Clementines or grafting hybrid wine grapes.
Belmont Club on the Plant Rights
Swiss lawyers are elaborating the doctrine of vegetable rights.
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Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out." In short, they are arguing that plants have inherent rights which humans can't transgress. It sounds ridiculous.
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who is really being "empowered" by the Swiss committee's decision? Is it plants? No. It is bureaucrats. The point of vegetable rights isn't to give plants dignity but to transfer yet more individual human freedoms to activists and government officials.
Deciding that individuals had power over themselves and the things around them was central to the development of human freedom -- and human rights
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The point of legally empowering vegetables is not to give standing to a stalk of celery who might suddenly decide to appear in court, but to empower the bureaucrats and activist lawyers who will appear on their behalf. Today we already have spokesmen for Gaia. Tomorrow the lawyers from Brussels will be lawyers for brussels sprouts.
Bruce Bawer collects all too many examples of how Westerners are acquiescing to 'creeping sharia' in An Anatomy of Surrender.
Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.
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Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic.
From the BBC to the lack of coverage of the astounding result in the 2007 Pew poll of American Muslims aged 18-29 that showed 20% of them supported suicide bombing to the 'affectionate' reporting of a Brooklyn Iman, Reda Shata, by a New York Times reporter who focused on sympathetic personal details, only mentioning
in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing.
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Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled.
What are you doing to preserve and pass on the freedoms given you?
Whatever you feel about homosexual rights ( and isn't every person due full respect as a human being/) , if you value the right to free speech and freedom of religion, you have to be disturbed by the recent decision of the New Mexico Human Rights Commission (HRC) .
A lesbian couple went to an evangelical Christian husband and wife photographic team to hire them to take their wedding photographs. They refused to photograph the same-sex ceremony for reasons of religious conscience. The New Mexico HRC
fined them $6600. Fortunately hat decision is being appealed
Mr. and Mrs. Huguenin was represented by Jordan Lorence, senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), who argued that photography was a form of artistic expression, thus forcing the couple to photograph the wedding was a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment.
"It was a very short order [with] absolutely no reference to the First Amendment defenses that we raised," Mr. Lorence told the Washington Times. "I find this a stunning disregard for the First Amendment issues in this case."
"This is compelled speech; this is forcing a photographer to advance a message with her artistic skills that she would not do absent government coercion," Mr. Lorence said.
Would it be so hard for the lesbian couple to tolerate and respect their views and just go somewhere else?
Aren't we all obligated to do so in this rich, variegated society of so many different peoples, practice tolerance.
via Kathy Shadie
I found this extraordinary and demoralizing but not surprising. Remember this the next time you order UNESCO cards or send your kids out to collect funds for the same.
U.N. Organization Destroyed Thousands of Books
For more than two decades, 250 historians and specialists labored to produce the first six volumes of the General History of Latin America, an exhaustive work financed by UNESCO, the United Nations organization created to preserve global culture and heritage.
Then, over the course of two years, UNESCO paid to destroy many of those books and nearly 100,000 others by turning them to pulp, according to an external audit.
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Mexico's ambassador, Homero Aridjis, said at the organization's executive council meeting this past week: "This is not only a blow to the culture and knowledge of entire populations and nations, it contradicts the mandate entrusted to UNESCO."
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The director general of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura, said it was "completely incomprehensible and inappropriate" that some of the organization's "most important and successful collections" were ordered destroyed, including histories of humanity and Africa, and surveys of ancient monuments.
When the book warehouses were moved from Paris to Brussels, UNESCO officials ordered the books pulped so they wouldn't have to pay to move them.
Just think how many schools around the world would have been ecstatic to receive these books.
The circus that's going on in Canada would be amusing but for the fact the Canadian right to free speech is being imperiled by kangaroo courts known as Human Rights Commissions where truth is no defense and due process rights don't exist.
Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League aptly summed up one notorious case, in which, "a Christian printer is ordered to produce business cards and letterhead for an organization that promotes pro-pedophilia essays, is fined $5,000 for having refused to do so and is left with $40,000 in legal bills for daring to defend himself."
One man who ran a small restaurant was brought up on charges of human rights abuses because he dared ask a guy who was smoking a marijuana cigarette on his doorstep to move away.
Two transexuals are suing a prominent physician because he refused to perform labiaplasty on them on the grounds that he operates on biological females and doesn't have any experience in labiaplasty on men.
Doesn't this seem crazy to you? You may be wondering what human rights have these people violated. Join the crowd.
The columnist Mark Steyn was caught up in the madness being called up before two on the CHRCs. Yesterday the Ontario HRC dropped its investigation against Steyn and Maclean's magazine for printing an except of Steyn's book, America Alone, but not before saying they were guilty of Islamophobia, in what Steyn called a drive by conviction. Freedom of speech and the presumption of innocence? Nah.
One man in particular is using those commissions as his private star chamber. Richard Warman has made a profitable business by suing hapless Canadians for thought crimes, achieving a 100% conviction rate, and pocketing tens of thousands of tax-freedollars in awards from the Canadian human rights commissions where he used to be employed for his 'pain and suffering'. Apparently, he has full access to the HRC investigations and he's perfectly free to use the HRC computers or to hijack the wireless network of a private citizen to pose hate messages on a white supremacist site that apparently wasn't hateful enough. He is so litigious that the province of British Columbia had to pass a special law to stop him from suing libraries who carried books he didn't approve of.
Now, Warman is suing the Canadian bloggers who have been on his case and reported his nefarious shenanigans to the world, no doubt hoping for private settlements offline. Not a chance with these folks
Kate McMillan of small dead animals had the effrontery of linking to allegedly libelous statements of Kathy Shadie who writes at five feet of fury and that's just what she's been, allowing Warman no quarter and no cover for the nasty business he's been engaged in and the nasty piece of work he is. When a Canadian senator, Anne Cools, announced her intention to intervene before the Supreme Court on the question of gay marriage, Warman posted a under pseudonym ( on Richard Lemire's Freedom site already under investigation because of a complaint Warman filed) that Senator Cools was a "n**ger "and a "c**t". This revelation seems to be what sparked the lawsuits against Kate, Kathy, Free Dominion, the National Post and Ezra Levant who has posted all the details of the suit.
Steyn wrote yesterday about Global Warman
It's not possible to take a stand against the Canadian Human Rights Commission without also talking a stand against Richard Warman. He has been the plaintiff on half the Section 13 cases in its entire history and on all the Section 13 cases since 2002. There are 30 million Canadians yet only one of them uses this law, over and over and over again.
Make no mistake. Warman is attempting to censor the free speech of Canadian bloggers by intimidation.
To defend themselves, the bloggers can expect to pay hefty legal fees. Just the threat that some crazy person like Warman will sue them and you can expect other bloggers to begin, if they haven't already, to censor themselves. It's called the chilling effect. If Warman is successful, if the HRCs are successful, we all lose. Not only will Canadians say or write what they think, the pattern will be attempted here in the USA. Free speech has to be defended and it has its costs.
Please consider, especially if you are a blogger, donating to their defense funds. Each of them has a button on the site that you can click to donate even a small amount to show support. Be part of the defense of free speech.
UPDATE:
From blazing cat fur who calls such donations "Save the Canadian Blog Children Fund"
" Free speech is your God-Given Right, it should be theirs too"
These are the British Muslims, now on trial for their conspiracy to detonate liquid explosives on transatlantic passenger flights, "all in the name of Islam."
Airline terror plotters planned bigger 9/11
Their plans were allegedly so advanced that they had drawn up details of specific flights to be targeted and bought the components needed to make hydrogen peroxide bombs disguised as soft drinks such as Lucozade and Oasis.
But they were arrested before they were able to make "a violent and deadly statement of intent that would have truly global impact", a jury was told.
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The alleged bombers had drawn up plans to attack seven Boeing 777, 767 and 763 aircraft, each carrying between 241 and 285 passengers and crew, operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada, said Mr Wright.
The next time you have to dump your coffee and want to complain about the new restrictions on carrying liquids on airplanes, remember them and why the restrictions were imposed.
Let's not forget that In Britain, terrorism by Muslim fanatics has been renamed "anti-Islamic activity.
The head of MI5 has warned that 4000 Muslim fanatics are on the loose. Terror attacks, he said, are part of a deliberate campaign by Al Qaeda. Thankfully, they caught these eight.
After years of working as a psychiatrist at one of Britain's prisons, observing closely the destructive behavior and environments that brought him his clients, Theodore Dalrymple analyzed the underclass:
"not poor... by the standards of human history" but trapped in "a special wretchedness" from which it cannot emerge.
"Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass" (Theodore Dalrymple)
Long term poverty, he concludes, is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values.
"The combination of relativism and antipathy to traditional culture has played a large part in creating the underclass, thus turning Britain from a class to a caste society. ... Henceforth what they had and what they did was as good as anything, because all cultures and all cultural artifacts are equal. Aspiration was therefore pointless: and thus they have been immobilized in their poverty -- material, mental, and spiritual -- as completely as the damned in Dante's Inferno. Having in large part created this underclass, the British intelligentsia, guilty about its own allegedly undemocratic antecedents, feels obliged to flatter it by imitation and has persuaded the rest of the middle class to do likewise."
The searing account of British youth in Time magazine, Britain's Mean Streets, is getting a lot of attention across the pond by ordinary people defenseless in their encounters with 'youths' and despairing of the reluctance of the police to do anything to protect them.
the increase in nasty teenage crime that really has Britain spooked. Violent offenses by British under-18s rose 37% in the three years to 2006. Last September, 29-year-old Gavin Waterhouse died from an assault by two boys. It was recorded on a cell phone by a 15-year-old girl. In January, three teenagers from northwestern England were convicted of kicking to death 47-year-old Garry Newlove after he tried to stop them vandalizing his car. In the wake of their trial, the Sun newspaper declared "the most important issue now facing Britain" to be "the scourge of feral youngsters."
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All that is true. But it is also true that for what Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children's Society, calls a "significant minority" of British children, unhappiness — and the criminality, excessive drinking and drug-taking and promiscuity that is its expression — really have created a crisis. Says Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company, an organization working with some of London's poorest young: "If I was sitting in government, I'd be really worried — not about terrorist bombs but about this.
What accounts for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British society? Dalrymple offered this explanation in an interview with Front Page magazine following the publication of his book :
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"Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses" (Theodore Dalrymple)
One reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British, if not the whole of Western, society, is the avoidance of boredom. For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men - that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring.
George Weigel writes in The West and the Rest
What's right about the West, about this unique civilizational enterprise formed by the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome — biblical religion, rationality, and the idea of a law-governed polity?
1. Openness
2. Freedom
3. Knowledge
4. Generosity
5. Beauty
6. Humor
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In addition to ending the slave trade, abolishing slavery, and enfranchising women, the West has produced virtually every major humanitarian initiative in modern history, from the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders, from the green revolution to the eradication of river blindness, from care for the mentally and physically handicapped to the abrogation of forced marriage.
Raymond Ibrahim writes Islam's 'Public Enemy #1' is a Coptic priest Zakaria Botros who appears
frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat (i.e., “Life TV”). There, he addresses controversial topics of theological significance — free from the censorship imposed by Islamic authorities or self-imposed through fear of the zealous mobs who fulminated against the infamous cartoons of Mohammed. Botros’s excurses on little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition have become a thorn in the side of Islamic leaders throughout the Middle East.
Botros has famously made 10 demands of Islam that serve to highlight the radical demands Islam makes of non-Muslims. The result: mass conversions to Christianity, albeit many clandestine ones. One Islamic cleric on Al Jazeera estimated that 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity annually. This is an extraordinary number considering that each convert faces ostracism, persecution and even death for apostasy.
The ultimate reason for Botros’s success is that — unlike his Western counterparts who criticize Islam from a political standpoint — his primary interest is the salvation of souls. He often begins and concludes his programs by stating that he loves all Muslims as fellow humans and wants to steer them away from falsehood to Truth. To that end, he doesn’t just expose troubling aspects of Islam. Before concluding every program, he quotes pertinent biblical verses and invites all his viewers to come to Christ.
Botros’s motive is not to incite the West against Islam, promote “Israeli interests,” or “demonize” Muslims, but to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia to the spirituality of Christianity. Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.
Another writer on the big untold story in the Middle East, looks at country by country to say Muslims converting to Christianity in record numbers .
The Egyptian Bible Society told me they used to sell about 3,000 copies of the Jesus film a year in the early 1990s. But in 2005 they sold 600,000 copies, plus 750,000 copies of the Bible on tape (in Arabic) and about a half million copies of the Arabic New Testament.
Spengler, brilliant as always writes on The mustard seed in global strategy
A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam
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Magdi Allam tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy's newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of "moderate Islam" in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be "moderate".
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Magdi Allam presents an existential threat to Muslim life, whereas other prominent dissidents, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offer only an annoyance.
Allam hails Benedict XVI as the leader of the West.
The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West. None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehends this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address.
The way out Spengler wrote after the Pope's Regensberg address, the way out is conversion.
"Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity." Today's Europeans stem from the melting-pot of the barbarian invasions that replaced the vanishing population of the Roman Empire. The genius of the Catholic Church was to absorb them. If Benedict XVI can convert this new wave of invaders from North Africa and the Middle East, history will place him on a par with his great namesake, the founder of the monastic order the bears his name
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The global agenda has changed, not through the machinations of statesmen or the word-mincing of public intellectuals, but through the soul of a single man. Benedict's Regensburg challenge to Islam now demarcates the encounter between the West and the Muslim world, and nothing will be the same.
UPDATE: Intentional Disciples questions the 6 million figure cited above and calls it an urban legend, but she does point to the work of Independent Christianity which I had never heard of, yet composes 20% of all Christians in the world. She calls it an explosive global movement that most Catholics don't know exists.
It is these evangelizers - almost all of whom are lay - living in Muslim communities, loving their neighbors, teaching school, healing the sick, founding and running businesses, planting thousands of evangelizing small Christian communities in hundreds of different language groups and situations, writing books, making radio broadcasts, building relationships, trust, and credibility with Muslims they actually know personally - who have been used by God to turn the tide. Fr. Zacahrias is one rather loud horn in a vast symphony orchestra - and he isn't even first chair.
Remember that study that Dudley Woodbury did about why Muslims become Christian? Of the 5 primary reasons that 750 MBBs gave - the central theme was love. God's love reflected consistently in the lives of Christians they knew. Being exposed to the love of Christ through the gospels.
Not media, Not TV. Not apologetics. Love. From tens of thousands of expat missionaries and hundreds of thousands of national Christians who are "Great commission" Christians.
"Having been condemned to death, I have reflected a long time on the value of life" wrote Magdi Allam, a Muslim and deputy director of Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper, when he wrote about threats to his life after he condemned Palestinian suicide bombers in 2003.
On the vigil of Easter, Magdi Allam was baptised by Pope Benedict XVI himself and took a new baptismal name Christian on what he later called, "the most beautiful day of my life."
He wrote in an article appeared in the Corriere della Sera that
the witness of Catholics, who “gradually became a point of reference in regard to the certainty of truth and the solidity of values,” played an important role in his conversion.
His most decisive influence he said was Benedict XVI
“who I admired and, as a Muslim, defended for his mastery in setting down the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization, and to whom I fully adhere as a Christian to inspire me with new light in the fulfillment of the mission God has reserved for me.”
I had always admired Pope John Paul II as a great and holy man, I marveled at his courage and later at his visit to prison to forgive his assassin, but from a certain distance. When Cardinal Ratzinger spoke to the Sacred College of Cardinals assembled in Rome for the funeral of John Paul II, I was electrified.
Let us dwell on only two points. The first is the journey towards “the maturity of Christ” as it is said in the Italian text, simplifying it a bit. More precisely, according to the Greek text, we should speak of the “measure of the fullness of Christ”, to which we are called to reach in order to be true adults in the faith. We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today!
How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. .... Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.
I was that small boat of thought, tossed around 'by every wind of teaching' , motivated mainly by my ego and desires until inspired by Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict XVI , I began my journey towards an 'adult and mature faith'. The whole journey is too long to be recounted here and now, except its conclusion; I have come home to the Catholic faith and the Mother Church: I have I felt so whole.
No where near as brave as Christian Allam, I am humbled by his journey to conversion that he recounts here.
my mind was freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimates lies and deception, violent death that leads to murder and suicide, the blind submission to tyranny, I was able to adhere to the authentic religion of truth, of life and of freedom.
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My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.
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It is thanks to members of Catholic religious orders that I acquired a profoundly and essentially an ethical conception of life, in which the person created in the image and likeness of God is called to undertake a mission that inserts itself in the framework of a universal and eternal design directed toward the interior resurrection of individuals on this earth and the whole of humanity on the day of judgment, which is founded on faith in God and the primacy of values, which is based on the sense of individual responsibility and on the sense of duty toward the collective. It is in virtue of a Christian education and of the sharing of the experience of life with Catholic religious that I cultivated a profound faith in the transcendent dimension and also sought the certainty of truth in absolute and universal values.
I too want to fight against the dictatorship of relativism and its softer cousin, the culture of whatever - wherever and whenever I can. I too want to stand behind the Pope who offers the only strong and muscular defense of faith and reason as the basis for authentic religion and the culture of life as the basis of civilization. I too want to uphold reason and the sacredness of life against the tide of nihilism and extremism that threatens to engulf us. So, in my small way, I will do so.
These past three days of the Triduum, I have been drenched in music and beauty with friends and fellow worshipers and filled with gratitude and immense joy. I feel reborn, even Exultent and can only point to the beautiful Easter chant I found via the Anchoress.
On December 1, 2006, one of the eeriest autopsies in the annals of crime was conducted at the Royal London Hospital. Three British pathologists, covered from head to toe in white protective suits, stood around a radioactive corpse that had been sealed in plastic for nearly a week. The victim was Alexander Litvinenko, a 44-year-old ex-KGB officer who had defected from Russia to England in November 2000 and had drawn on his experience to denounce the government of the newly installed President Putin. What the pathologists found is still a state secret.
The Specter That Haunts the Death of Litvinenko by Edward Jay Epstein.
Litvinvenko was not poisoned with thallium as originally thought but by polonium-210, one of the world's rarest and most tightly controlled radioactive isotopes. Polonium-210 is a critical component in early-stage nuclear bombs.
Most likely Litvinenko came into contact with a polonium-210 smuggling operation.
What it obscured is the elephant-in-the-room that haunts the case: the fact that a crucial component for building an early-stage nuke was smuggled into London in 2006. Was it brought in merely as a murder weapon or as part of a transaction on the international arms market?
Ali Eteraz has the best response to Harvard's decision to ban men from a gym for several hours a week to accommodate Muslim women who can not exercise comfortably in their presence.
If the university had simply said that the gym was closed in those hours to accommodate “women that do not feel comfortable working out in front of men” — that would be OK. This new classification would include women who might have been raped, assaulted, molested, or had other emotional issues that made it difficult for them to work out in male dominated spaces.
Muslims play a dangerous and stupid game when they start demanding things based on their Islam. Even the most conservative reading of classical Sharia reveals that Eunuchs were allowed to wander freely through the harem. In other words, a known homosexual man who has never had sex with a woman and never will, can make a powerful case under Sharia that he cannot be excluded from the gym hours.
Michael Graham has the funniest
In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.
At Harvard, that’s called progress.
Mark Steyn has the last word.
In Minneapolis last year, the airport licensing authority, faced with a mainly Muslim crew of cab drivers refusing to carry the blind, persons with six-packs of Bud, slatternly women, etc, proposed instituting two types of taxis with differently colored lights, one of which would indicate the driver was prepared to carry members of identity groups that offend Islam. Forty years ago, advocating separate drinking fountains made you a racist. Today, advocating separate taxi cabs or separate swimming sessions makes you a multiculturalist.
Harvard should be ashamed if only for the sloppy thinking that led to this embarrassment.
If you haven't been keeping track of the soft sharia that's creeping up in Canada, then you must read Kathy Shaidle's article on Free Speech vs. Muslim Sensibilities.
You will not believe the kangaroo courts, ostensibly set up to "protect human rights", but which operate to intimidate those who don't accept the ideology of multiculturalism and don't believe that the right not to be offended trumps the right of free speech, the right to practice one's religion and the right of due process.
Sean Murphy of the Catholic Civil Rights League aptly summed up one notorious case, in which, "a Christian printer is ordered to produce business cards and letterhead for an organization that promotes pro-pedophilia essays, is fined $5,000 for having refused to do so and is left with $40,000 in legal bills for daring to defend himself."
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Most Canadians don't realize that these Commissions and tribunals aren't "real" courts. They operate outside the criminal justice system in an Orwellian world of their own. To the CHRCs, traditional rules of evidence don't apply. Truth is no defense. Commissioners can confiscate a defendant's computer without a warrant. Defendants can be forced to apologize to their accusers, even though the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that even convicted murderers cannot be obliged to apologize to their victim's family; that, the Court ruled, would be, "cruel and unusual punishment."
Incredibly, the CHRCs boast a Stalinist 100 percent conviction rate: no one has ever been found "not guilty." Columnist David Warren's chilling description of CHRC tribunals is impossible to improve upon:
"They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgments on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, 'the process is the punishment' in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing. (...)
"That's why you go to an HRC: because your case is not good enough to stand up in a legitimate court of law. And because you don't want to invest your own time and money, but would rather the taxpayer provide officers to do the paperwork, and pick up the tab. Instead, you want a slam-dunk way in which you can victimize someone you don't like, by playing the victim yourself, without any financial or legal consequences, except to him. 'Human rights' commissions were designed to provide just this service, for the use of persons who are both litigious, and lazy."
Two people caught up in the madness that are Canada's Human Right Commissions are Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, yes that Mark Steyn.
Ezra Levant printed the Mohammed cartoons in his magazine the Western Standard.
An excerpt from Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" was reprinted in Canada's largest weekly magazine, Maclean's.
There are existing laws against defamation, death threats and libel that work perfectly well. Neither Steyn nor Levant said or did anything that would make them liable in a court of law. What the Human Right Commissions are attempting to regulate is not a crime but political thought and expression that may offend an individual or a group.
Ezra Levant was smart enough to have his interrogation sessions videotaped which he then put up on YouTube where they were seen by over half a million people and promptly became a hero to me and many, many others for his eloquent defense which can be seen here
Ezra Levant's Opening Statement
Ezra Levant, I don't answer to the state.
His website, ezralevant.com, keeps us informed of the fast-moving events in this case and in another threatened lawsuit by one Richard Warman and the support he has received.
the former investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, who quit the commission in 2004 to become the commission’s biggest customer. Approximately half of all complaints filed under the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s section 13 “idea crimes” provision have been filed by Warman. The CHRC has a 100% conviction rate under that section, and besides ordering the poor shleps Warman complains about to pay fines to the government, they’re often ordered to pay thousands of dollars to Warman himself, too, for his “hurt feelings”. Unlike the paycheque he got when he used to work there, the cash he gets from commission fines is tax free.
Warman and his friends at the CHRC aren’t hitting me with a human rights complaint – not yet, anyways. But he is threatening me with the most bizarre defamation lawsuit I think I’ve ever encountered.
A new website Free Mark Steyn keeps track of the Steyn and Levant cases and the furious debate in Canada and in the blogosphere.
I rarely write about politics with one great exception, the alarming danger I see in the encroachment of the rights - freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right to vote, the rule of law, the equality of all men and women before the law - that have been passed on to us by the generations before us. I believe we hold those rights in trust and are bound to pass them on to future generations intact. Those rights recognized in our Constitution and Bill of Rights do not belong to Americans alone but to everyone; they are universal human rights.
When those hard-won rights are being lost little by little under the guise of multiculturalism and tolerance of 'whatever', I am greatly alarmed. Mark Steyn writes So what would it take to alarm you?
Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you'd suggested such things on Sept. 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn't seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It's hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book "alarmist" accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada's Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith.
The war against Islamic jihadism now being fought around the globe is about more than terrorism, fearful and horrific as that is, it is also about the oppression of women.
If you have any doubt watch the video below but not with any children present because it is so graphic. Weep for the millions of Muslims who are denied the basic rights we take for granted.
As home-grown terrorists are acquitted, a new report says a lack of national identity as made Britain vulnerable.
The report, published through the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, declared Britain’s security to be at risk and its vulnerability to be down to a “loss of confidence in our own identity, values, constitution and institutions”.
Blaming multicultural Britain, the report concluded with a classic soundbite: “We look like a soft touch. We are indeed a soft touch, from within and without.
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The public could be forgiven for being confused. What is the reality of Britain’s efforts to combat terrorism: impressive or rubbish? Soft or tough?
The RUSI report and the case of Raja and his codefendants reflect two important strands in Britain’s engagement with terror: the strength of our security apparatus and the nation’s cultural identity.
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But for Prins the detection and conviction of extremists is the end point of a more important part of the fight against terrorism: disseminating a vision of British values so the various communities that live here do not become radicalised.
Hearts and minds. It's all about Hearts and Minds.
Why the West is Best by Ibn Warraq
The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind. It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in Africa, where rival tribes sold black prisoners into slavery. The West has secured freedoms for women and racial and other minorities to an extent unimaginable 60 years ago. The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing.
In short, the glory of the West, as philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, is that life here is an open book. Under Islam, the book is closed
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A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.
Whenever I write about the Archbishop's remarks on sharia, I can't help but recall that disgusting saying, "When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it." The Archbishop, Spengler points out,
acknowledged the fact of coercion of women in his February 7 address, but insisted that because it belonged to "custom" rather than "religious law", he preferred to change the subject:
Spengler on the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks on sharia being "unavoidable", Europe in the house of war.
Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.
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Europe may not have war, but it already has violence: its political authorities cringe and scurry and evade and lie in the face of actual or threatened violence by its Muslim communities. If its duly-constituted governments abandon their monopoly of violence to self-appointed religious leaders, the likelihood is that a river of blood will flow, just as Powell warned in 1968.
It only took a generation.
There are the four million Dutch who describe themselves as Roman Catholics but the young people are far more familiar with Islam than Christianity.
The Christian Ramadan
The Catholic charity Vastenaktie, which collects for the Third World across the Netherlands during the Lent period, is concerned that the Christian festival has become less important for the Dutch over the last generation.
"The image of the Catholic Lent must be polished. The fact that we use a Muslim term is related to the fact that Ramadan is a better-known concept among young people than Lent," said Vastenaktie Director, Martin Van der Kuil.
What he wishes on us is an abomination. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent
What Rowan Williams wishes upon us is an abomination and I write here as a modern Muslim woman. He lectures the nation on the benefits of sharia law – made by bearded men, for men – and wants the alternative legal system to be accommodated within our democracy in the spirit of inclusion and cohesion.
Pray tell me sir, how do separate and impenetrable courts and schools and extreme female segregation promote commonalities and deep bonds between citizens of these small isles?
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He passes round what he believes to be the benign libation of tolerance. It is laced with arsenic.
He would not want his own girls and women, I am sure, to "choose" to be governed by these laws he breezily endorses. And he is naive to the point of folly if he imagines it is possible to pick and choose the bits that are relatively nice to the girls or ones that seem to dictate honourable financial transactions.
Look around the Islamic world where sharia rules and, in every single country, these ordinances reduce our human value to less than half that is accorded a male; homosexuals are imprisoned or killed, children have no free voice or autonomy, authoritarianism rules and infantilises populations.
On the heels of her statement comes this one from the Association of Chief Police Officers in Britain. Up to 17,000 women in Britain are being subjected to 'honour' related violence, including murder each year.
the number of girls falling victim to forced marriages, kidnappings, sexual assaults, beatings and even murder by relatives intent on upholding the "honour" of their family is up to 35 times higher than official figures suggest.
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Commander Steve Allen, head of ACPO's honour-based violence unit, says the true toll of people falling victim to brutal ancient customs is "massively unreported" and far worse than is traditionally accepted.
They really do believe they will establish a world wide caliphate.
From Schmoozing with Terrorists.
A deputy commander of Fatah's al Aqsa Martyrs Bridade, Nasser Abu Azziz, explained to Klein that when sharia law is imposed in Western countries, "these sick people [homosexuals] will be treated in a very tough way," explaining that the Islamic leadership will "prevent social and physical diseases like homosexuality." All the terrorists whom Klein interviewed agreed that homosexuality would not be tolerated in the US once Islam rules.
And homosexuality is not all they condemn. The failure of western women to conform to Islamic standards of dress will reap harsh responses including, if necessary, torture. Sheik Hamad, a Hamas cleric, said those women who refuse to cover themselves in conformity with Islamic values would be punished either by imprisonment, whipping or stoning.
Say what you will about the Archbishop of Canterbury's idiotic comment that sharia law seems unavoidable in Britain, he finally got some people to stand up and support the institutions of their own country.
Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, said,
"There can be no exceptions to the laws of our land which have been so painfully honed by the struggle for democracy and human rights."
Writing in this newspaper, Lord Carey condemns multiculturalism as "disastrous", blames it for creating Islamic ghettos and says that Dr Williams's support for sharia law will "inevitably lead to further demands from the Muslim community"
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, said
the Government's promotion of multiculturalism had destroyed the unity that used to hold society together.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the shadow minister for community cohesion, said
setting up rival systems of law would alienate sections of society and may lead to legal apartheid.
Ruth Gledhill in the Times Online wrote
A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a 'no-go area' for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: 'The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes. There can be many reasons. The women are sent for assessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don't you people write about this?'
My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. 'You must write about this,' she begged.
'I can't,' I said. 'Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.'
She shook her head. 'I can't be identified,' she said. 'I would be killed. And so would the women.'
The London Telegraph editorialized
In his effort to find an accommodation with other religions, in particular Islam, Dr Williams appears to be willing to give up on values which define his own. In fact, it is hard to understand why the leader of the Church of England should be so willing to "accommodate" the values of sharia law at all. Sharia law is abhorrent not just to most Christians, but to anyone who is committed to human rights - a group that includes many Muslims. In the countries where it operates, sharia law is brutal, cruel, discriminatory, and viciously oppressive of women, whose testimony is worth only half that of a man, and who are disadvantaged, relative to men, in marriage law, in disputes on the custody of children in divorce cases, and in inheritance law.
Still, there's a long way to go. Let's not forget that Her Majesty's government has renamed Islamic terrorism as "anti -Islamic activity" so as to avoid inflaming Muslims.
To which Mark Steyn replied
Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. "There is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief," she told her audience. "Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic."
Well, yes, one sort of sees what she means. Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be "anti-Islamic" — in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during the Blitz was an "anti-German activity." But I don't recall even Neville Chamberlain explaining, as if to a five-year old, that there is nothing German about the wish to terrorize and invade, and that this is entirely at odds with the core German values of sitting around eating huge sausages in beer gardens while wearing lederhosen.
The Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman personally supports barring white candidates from running for office in certain constituencies so that more black and Asian (meaning Muslim) MPs can be elected.
Quarter of Brits think Churchill was myth while a majority think Sherlock Holmes was real.
What are they teaching them in school.
Another chilling warning from Bruce Bawer who writes from Oslo First They Came for the Gays.
Once an oasis of tolerance, Europe is slowly but surely succumbing to Islamization.
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It’s very clear what’s going on here – and where it’s all headed. Europe is on its way down the road of Islamization, and it’s reached a point along that road at which gay people’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is being directly challenged, both by knife-wielding bullies on the street and by taxpayer-funded thugs whose organizations already enjoy quasi-governmental authority. Sharia law may still be an alien concept to some Westerners, but it’s staring gay Europeans right in the face – and pointing toward a chilling future for all free people. Pim Fortuyn saw all this coming years ago; most of today’s European leaders still refuse to see it even though it’s right before their eyes.
The soft sharia is spreading.
Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, if you are the polygamous sort with multiple wives, you can apply for and get multiple benefits. A Muslim man with four spouses could receive 10,000 pounds a year in income support alone.
Meanwhile a study in Britain says that whole communities are involved in assisting and covering up honor killings with informal networks of taxi drivers, councillors and even police officers tracking down and returning who try to escape.
Women have been raped, abused and even killed for forming "inappropriate" relationships or merely for wanting to go to university.
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The report found that...women may be attacked for nothing more than listening to western music ..... Local authorities are not acting because of "political correctness" and a fear of being accused of racism.
Many Muslim women training to become doctors are refusing to comply with hygiene rules to stop the spread of deadly superbugs by rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands before entering surgery because they say it is against their religion to be bare below their elbow.
Born in Pakistan, the Bishop of Rochester warned of 'no'go' areas where people of a different race or faith face physical attack said
attempts are being made to give Britain an increasingly Islamic character by introducing the call to prayer and wider use of sharia law, a legal system based on the Koran.
The bishop was warned that he would not "live long" and would be "sorted out" if he continued to criticise Islam.
"The irony is that I had similar threats when I was a bishop in Pakistan, but I never thought I would have them here,"
When the global economy depends on communication and more and more the Internet, When news that damaged undersea cables disrupt businesses and personal use across a vast swath of Mideast countries, we begin to see how much the global economy depends on the Internet.
The biggest impact comes from the outages across India, with the companies that serve the East Coast of the United States and Britain badly hit.
Submarine cables carry the bulk of international telecommunications traffic. These cables can be damaged by earthquake, accident or terrorism.
Who protects and repairs the networks of underwater cables and communication satellites? The Belmont Club writes
unheralded and unnoticed the USN and USAF maintain the "freedom of navigation" not only of the ocean waves but of the ether. It is behind their shield that the world economy literally lives. The cars people drive, the fuel that propels them, the food they eat, the conversations they have, the television signals they receive, all travel the broad highways of sea and sky that men unsung defend.
Italy is in a funk, a malaise, a bad humor. A country that fascinates and infuriates Italians and tourists alike, a country that claims to have mastered the art of living has the least happy people in Western Europe.
In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment.
“It’s a country that has lost a little of its will for the future,” said Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome and a possible future center-left prime minister. “There is more fear than hope.”
The first populist movement in decades is growing, led by a stand-up comic Beppe Grillo who's become a blogger with the tenth most-inked blog in the world. Using the Internet, he encourages like-minded others to organize meet-ups across the country to choose candidates to stand against the Parliament that is hated for its financial corruption, inaction, ineffectiveness, excess, not to mention the 24 convicted criminals who are members.
This deep well of distrust for politics and politicians manifests most strongly in the younger generation who know how much better things work elsewhere.
Doubt clouds the family itself: 70 percent of Italians between 20 and 30 still live at home, condemning the young to an extended and underproductive adolescence. Many of the brightest, like the poorest a century ago, leave Italy.
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The divorce rate has risen. Large families are a thing of the past. Italy has one of Europe’s lowest birth rates, the fewest children under 15 and the greatest number of people over 85, apart from Sweden. Unemployment is low, at 6 percent. But 21 percent of the population between 15 and 24 did not work in 2006. And the old are not letting go.
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“The generational problem is the Italian problem,” said Mario Adinolfi, 36, a blogger and an aspiring lawmaker. “In every country young people hope. Here in Italy there is no hope anymore. Your mom keeps you home nice and softly, and you stay there and you don’t fight. And if you don’t fight, it is impossible to take power from anybody.”
We don’t have a Google,” he added. “We can’t imagine in Italy that a 30-year-old opens a business in a garage.”
Says Beppe Sevenigni, a columnist for Corriere della Sera, says change has to come first from the Italians themselves.
The malaise is: ‘I can see all that, but there is nothing I can do to change it,’
To change your ways means changing your individual ways: refusing certain compromises, to start paying your taxes, don’t ask for favors when you are looking for a job, not to cheat when your child is trying to reach admission to university.”
That’s the tricky part,
We have reached a point where hoping for some kind of white knight coming in saying, ‘We’ll sort you out,’ is over.
We Italians have our destiny in our hands more than ever before.
Can a popular movement change the government and the culture as well? No wonder there's more fear than hope for the future.
Rapid acceleration in human evolution described
In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin.
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Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria. In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults. In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax more dry.
Study finds people on different continents are increasingly different from each other.
Rapid population growth has been coupled with vast changes in cultures and ecology, creating new opportunities for adaptation.
At the same time, many people from New Agers to Sri Aurbindo to Teilhard de Chardin to Ken Wilber see a quickening in spiritual evolution.
Simultaneously, there is a devolution going on in many parts of the world where Islamic fundamentalism of the Wahhabi sort holds sway, intent on bringing back the eighth century.
Doris Lessing's Nobel Lecture On not winning the Nobel Prize
What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging.
via Rainy Day
She compares the thirst for books and reading that she found in Zimbabwe where everyone begs for books and some learn to read from the labels on jam jars and a privileged school in North London where a lot of boys never read at all and the library is only half-used.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
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Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and owe respect to our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning, but it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the working men's libraries, institutes, colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.
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We are a jaded lot, we in our world – our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house – a treasure – of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come on it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
It's hard to believe some of these stories out of England and its National Health Service.
Nurses Told to Turn Muslims' Beds to Mecca
OVERWORKED nurses have been ordered to stop all medical work five times every day to move Muslim patients’ beds so they face towards Mecca.
The lengthy procedure, which also includes providing fresh bathing water, is creating turmoil among overstretched staff on bustling NHS wards.
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But despite the havoc, Mid- Yorkshire NHS Trust says the rule must be instigated whenever possible to ensure Muslim patients have “a more comfortable stay in hospital”.
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It comes on the back of the introduction in some NHS hospitals last year of Burka-style gowns for Muslim patients who did not wish medical staff to see their face while operating or caring for them.
Would an advertisement of a tattooed skinhead urinating into a china teacup encourage you to visit London?
"It's fun, it's supposed to show how cosmopolitan London is. Yes, I really think it says London is cosmopolitan," insisted a spokeswoman for Eurostar about the ad designed to attract Belgians to hop on the new high-speed train to the English capital.
Personally, I think it explains why record numbers are emigrating from Britain, 207,000 Britons left last year .
I think this is rather good news.
US thwarts 19 terrorist attacks against America since 9/11.
Especially since Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 10,009 deadly terror attacks since that same date, mainly against other Muslims.
Michael Yon, embedded with the troops for the past three years posts this photograph and calls it Thanks and Praise as men and women, both Christian and Muslim, place a cross atop St. John's Church in Bagdad, a church that had been bombed and burned in 2004 but has since been restored with the cross, the crowning touch.
The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.
Iraqpundit welcomes the recent changes in Baghdad and writes.
Frankly, I don't understand why so many mock us for wanting a future for Iraq. Is your hatred for George Bush so great that you prefer to see millions of civilians suffer just to prove him wrong?
It really comes down to this: you are determined to see Iraq become a permanent hellhole because you hate Bush. And we are determined to see Iraq become a success, because we want to live.
Sometimes, it takes a fresh eye to see America as it was and is. French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his speech before a joint session of Congress did just that.
Fathers took their sons to see the vast cemeteries where, under thousands of white crosses so far from home, thousands of young American soldiers lay who had fallen not to defend their own freedom but the freedom of all others, not to defend their own families, their own homeland, but to defend humanity as a whole.
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And as they listened to their fathers, watched movies, read history books and the letters of soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy and Provence, as they visited the cemeteries where the star-spangled banner flies, the children of my generation understood that these young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children.
To those 20-year-old heroes who gave us everything, to the families of those who never returned, to the children who mourned fathers they barely got a chance to know, I want to express France's eternal gratitude.
Now and in the years to come, I hope and trust the Iraqis will feel the same way towards the treasure of American blood and money expended there.
Charles McCarry is one of my favorite writers and his espionage novels are extraordinary. If you haven't read any of them, you're in for a treat. The Boston Globe calls him "the best writer of intelligence and political novels in the world."
Many had gone out of print until brought back and republished by the Overlook Press. Wrote one reviewer of the Tears of Autumn in 2005
I approached this handsome new edition of Charles McCarry's masterpiece, "The Tears of Autumn," with trepidation. The novel was first published in 1974, and it has been more than 20 years since I last read it. I had only a hazy memory that (1) it was beautifully written, (2) it offered a plausible theory of the Kennedy assassination and (3) it was a classic. My concern was that, given a new reading, the novel might not hold up, but my fear was groundless. "The Tears of Autumn" is beautifully written, its conspiracy theory still intrigues and it most assuredly is a classic.
I've reread many of them several times over in the past two decades and everyone is a classic in my opinion. I write about him today because of the death of Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In a talk before the New York Public Library, McCarry tells an extraordinary story about the head man of a Japanese village who had never met an American and invited McCarry who was hiking with his wife in the Japan Alps to have lunch with him.
The story which I've printed verbatim is below the fold, so you have to click to read it. I found it at Jonathan Delacour's Consequences.
Robert Birnbaum interviews McCarry here. And below are some of McCarry's books to get you started.
"Tears of Autumn" (Charles McCarry)
"The Secret Lovers: A Paul Christopher Novel (Paul Christopher Novels)" (Charles McCarry)
"The Last Supper" (Charles McCarry)
"Second Sight: A Paul Christopher Novel" (Charles McCarry)
"Old Boys" (Charles McCarry)
"Christopher's Ghosts" (Charles McCarry)
Charles McCarry in an essay called A Strip of Exposed Film (based on a talk given at the New York Public Library and published in Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel). .
Charles McCarry had been climbing in the Japan Alps when he and his wife were invited to visit the head man of a village called Nodaira.
His name was Toyomi Yamagishi. The same twenty families had been living in this very remote village since the twelfth century; the first road had been built only thirty years earlier. Before that everything that went into the village and came out of the village went in or came out on the back of a human being.
The visit took place at ten in the morning, “the usual Japanese hour for such affairs. They all sat around the kotatsu, a table with a blanket draped over it and a charcoal brazier underneath, “so that your lower body was warm enough and you warmed your upper body by drinking whiskey and sake at ten in the morning.” After they had eaten and been served green tea, Yamagishi began to speak.
He spoke in a recitative style, somewhat like the narration of a Noh play or a Bunraku puppet theater performance, except that he was speaking modern Japanese so that we could understand what he was saying.
He said he had invited us to his house because he had never met an American and had wanted to ever since World War II. We chatted a little about the history of the village and about the life that he and the other villagers had led before the war. He said it had been a life of ceaseless toil. As a child he had only rarely seen the faces of his parents because they worked every day from dark to dark, leaving the hut before he woke and returning after he was asleep. He had had no children of his own because he wanted to avoid this sadness in his own life. I remarked that I had grown up on a farm and knew how hard that life could be. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you do not know. Human beings are not beasts of burden in America.”
Yamagishi then told us about his life during the war. He had been drafted in 1944, at the age of forty, and sent to Osaka to guard the emperor’s forest. Then the Americans took Saipan and the B-29s came. “The Americans burned the forest with incendiary bombs, so it was not necessary to guard it any longer,” he said. “I became a firefighter. The Americans would drop incendiary bombs to set the city on fire, and when we went to fight the fires they would wait until we were very busy and then they would come over with other B-29s and drop antipersonnel bombs and kill the firemen. I thought, ‘The Americans are very clever.’ Then, after the whole city had been destroyed, a single B-29 flew over Osaka and dropped not bombs but hundreds of little parachutes. When these parachutes landed we saw that a gift was tied to each—a mirror, a harmonica, a fountain pen. The Japanese people had lost nearly everything in the bombing and they were very glad to have these gifts from the Americans. They ran to get them, and when they touched them they exploded in their hands, blowing off fingers and blinding people. I thought, ‘The Americans are not only clever; they are ruthless. We have lost the war.’”
Yamagishi said, “Your ships came and shelled us. The bombers kept on also, every day. I was assigned to train people to fight the Americans when they invaded. We showed women and children how to make spears from bamboo. Every Japanese was prepared to die defending the homeland. Then the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The emperor’s voice came over loudspeakers in the streets. He told us we must surrender. No one had ever heard his voice before, and to us it was the voice of God. But our commanding officer said, ‘No! We must kill the Americans! He is no true emperor if he tells the Japanese to surrender.’ Nevertheless we obeyed the emperor, and I came back to this village. All the younger sons of every family—all twenty families—had been killed in the war. Only old men and women were left to do the work. I thought we would starve to death. But as you see, we did not.
“Now,” the old Japanese said, “I will tell you why I invited you here. It is because I have something to say to you, and to all Americans.” He was out of breath and his face was full of color from the whiskey he had drunk, and I thought, “Well, here it comes.”
Yamagishi said, “Thank you. Thank you for defeating Japan. If you Americans had not done so, this village would be as it always was. The militarists would never have let us have democracy. But the Americans built the road; my nephews and nieces have cars and television sets, and they see their children every day. And because they have eaten American things like milk and vegetables and fruit, instead of the millet and pickles we had to eat, they are tall and beautiful like Americans instead of short and homely like me and my wife.” He bowed and said, “Thank you.” I realized, to my surprise, and in spite of everything I believed about the morality of bombing civilians, that the U.S. Air Force had won Yamagishi’s heart and mind by pitilessly destroying Osaka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In one of my novels a political idealist asks Paul Christopher what he believes in. Christopher replies, “I believe in consequences.” In the novel, as in politics and in life itself, you can’t know what the consequences of any act will be until you come to the end.
Ralph Peters believes that too many of us know too little history and so believe whatever's comfortable. We've lived in safety and comfort too long to grasp what war means and instead believe in myths.
How many of the 12 Myths about 21st Century War he writes about do you believe because you never really thought it through?
Myth No. 1 War doesn't change anything.
On over 100 campuses across the country, a large roster of speakers are talking about matters that are not being addressed in women's studies programs or in Saudi-subsidized Middle Eastern studies departments.
Kathryn Lopez interviewed David Horowitz on how he is getting students to listen to the counter-curriculum
I begin my speeches by explaining the poster we have created which shows a Muslim woman having her head blown off by a Taliban soldier for sexual improprieties. I refer to the 130 million Muslim women who have had their genitals sliced off without anesthetic to conform to some barbaric Muslim custom. I recall the 200,000 moderate Muslims slaughtered by Islamo-fascists in Algeria calling themselves “al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” The room gets pretty silent after that.
Nonie Darwish, an Arab-American author and feminist as well as a vociferous critic of radical Islam, spoke at Wellesley College last week and got the "Mean Girl Treatment according to Phyllis Chesler.
The radical Muslims on American campuses are getting more belligerent, far more militant,” author and lecturer Nonie Darwish tells me. “They have perfected their intimidation and disruption techniques.”
And more of the same at Berkeley according to Zombietime.
Nonie Darwish writes herself of the Berkeley incident
I felt that even in America I am being silenced. My response was: “Who will speak for women who are stoned and for Muslims terrorized in radical Muslim countries? It is sad that I left oppressive Sharia Muslim culture, where I had no freedom of speech, only to find myself silenced in America, by groups who claim they are for free speech.”
Let's hope David Warren is correct when writes in Confrontational
Attempts to disrupt the events have thus far largely played into the organizers' hands. For they are trying to get attention, and disruptions help. And since the protesters from various campus radical cells do a good job of illustrating the very points the organizers are making -- trying to silence people by intimidation -- people can see the main point in action.
Let's hope the organizers are right when they say
By the end of the week millions of people will have heard our message that we will no longer turn a blind eye to the violence directed against women, gays, and 'infidels’ in Islamo-Fascist regimes. This homicidal intolerance, and the conspiracy of silence that protects it on America’s campuses, will no longer be accepted.”
So the President of Columbia Lee Bollinger in defending his decision to give a platform and a forum to President Ahmadinejad says he would have invited Adolf Hitler and subjected him to the same 'sharp challenges' he plans to give to the Iranian president. In the same week, we're watching Ken Burns's documentary on the second world war and seeing just what it really cost us and our Allies to defeat the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
Just what is in the waters of academia these days? Ahmadinejad, the president of a terrorist state that calls for death to America, has American blood on his hands through the arming of terrorists in Iraq, executes homosexuals, oppresses women imprisoning them if they venture outside in public without a burka, allows stoning of women, denies the Holocaust happened, calls for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, and is busy making nuclear bombs in open defiance of U.N. resolutions, is welcomed at Columbia.
Before a woman is stoned in Iran, she is half-buried.
Shrinkwrapped writes
The Iranian propaganda operatives in Tehran, one can be sure, are gleeful over Mr. Bollinger's blunder. They know that no matter how tough the questions Mr. Bollinger asks Mr. Ahmadinejad — whether they palaver about Israel, ground zero, human rights, or Madisonian principles like free speech — the Iranian is the victor merely by being received on Morningside Heights. They know that Mr. Bollinger will not permit protesters to rush the stage and physically drive a speaker from campus the way the university permitted students to do when Jim Gilchrist of the Minutemen attempted to speak there.
Where do you draw the line? Roger Kimball says it best.
By providing a madman like Ahmadinejad with a platform at Columbia University, President Bollinger has in effect welcomed him into the community of candid reasoners. He has granted him a patent of legitimacy that no amount of "dialogue and reason" can dissipate. In this case, "listening" is indeed tantamount to an endorsement. It reduces free speech to a species of political capitulation and renders dialogue indistinguishable from a suicide pact.
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The spectacle of these left-wing academics repudiating men like Larry Summers and Donald Rumsfeld even as they abase themselves scrambling to find excuses for welcoming a fanatic like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the halls of a great American University is disgusting. I think again of Bagehot's observation that "History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it." Are we really willing to let ourselves--our ideals, our way of life--be carelessly traduced by a rancid leftism so enfeebled that it can no longer distinguish between free speech and suicide? We are even now in the process of answer that question. How we answer it will determine a lot more than the issue of who gets to speak on American college campuses.
John O Sullivan, Social acid has burnt the heart of Britain
It didn't happen overnight. Breaking down a strong culture of civic self-control takes time and several social acids.
The first such acid was the cultural liberalism generally associated with the 1960s: the attempt to free people from irksome traditional moral customs and the laws that reflected them.
Anthony Jay has recently described how the "media liberalism" of the BBC - an institution founded in part to promote social virtues and British institutions - increasingly undermined them all: from military valour to the monarchy.
Assuredly, this revolution had its worthwhile side, especially for the educated and prosperous. Britain today is a freer and more relaxed society with less supervision from maiden aunts and aldermen than in 1955.
Combined with a welfare state that picked up the tab, however, cultural liberalism promoted social irresponsibility - more voluntary workless, more divorces, children with fewer opportunities because they live in homes without two parents, a growing underclass, a society that is cruder, more disordered, less gentle.
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Except for the Thatcher years, however, the British establishment, from a blend of multiculturalism and Europeanism, drained all pride and meaning out of Britishness. No one, not even the Scots, wants to assimilate to a nullity.
The result is a fractured, distrustful and disorderly society. And because a diverse society lacks agreed values and standards, governments regulate the behaviour of all, including the law-abiding, to maintain social peace.
Thus, we have far more officials supervising us than in the 1950s, but they are anti-smoking social workers and ethnic diversity officers rather than park wardens.
I find this so appalling, I can't imagine the mind-set that that thinks promoting incestuous pedophilia as healthy sex education is an appropriate role for a government.
German Government Publication Promotes Incestuous Pedophila
Booklets from a subsidiary of the German government's Ministry for Family Affairs encourage parents to sexually massage their children as young as 1 to 3 years of age. Two 40-page booklets entitled "Love, Body and Playing Doctor" by the German Federal Health Education Center (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung - BZgA) are aimed at parents - the first addressing children from 1-3 and the other children from 4-6 years of age.
"Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex," reads the booklet regarding 1-3 year olds. The authors rationalize, "The child touches all parts of their father's body, sometimes arousing him. The father should do the same."
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According to the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita, the BZgA booklet is an obligatory read in nine German regions. It is used for training nursery, kindergarten and elementary school teachers. Ironically it is recommended by many organizations officially fighting pedophilia, such as the German Kunderschutzbund. BZgA sends out millions of copies of the booklet every year.
For older children, the Department of Family teaches 9 year-olds to put condoms on a banana. By age 10, education in homosexuality is required. In Berlin, teachers are told to "homosexualize" classes in biology, German, English, history, Latin, and psychology according to Gerald Augustinus, a native Austrian who has translated parts of the books into English so we can see just how depraved such education is.
Since homeschooling is illegal in Germany, there is no way parents who desire a period of innocence for their children can take refuge. How quickly an entire moral order has been upended.
Gil Bailie describes it thus
In rapid succession, the declension began: from understanding to tolerance, from tolerance to moral indifference, from indifference to celebration, from celebration to intolerance for any moral objections, from intolerance to legal threats, and finally to teaching seven and eight year-olds the moral and social indistinguishability of homosexual coupling and heterosexual nuptiality.
When Britain, a First World country, loses a democratically-elected politician because he fears for his life, we are entering a wholly new era. Britain is now an Iraq, a Zimbabwe.
Paul Weston writes about The Big Story That Isn't.
Mohammad Sarwar, a member of Parliament from Glasgow, Britain's first Muslim MP, is being driven from office following threats to his life and that of his children by other Muslims.
The offense? He pressed the government to seek extradition from Pakistan of the killers of a young 15-year-old Scottish boy Kriss Donald who was tortured in an especially brutal way, than killed.
Our national heart has ceased to beat. Our national soul is hovering indecisively above the operating table. The crash team have been called, but the politically inclined hospital switchboard have told them there is no problem, that everything is under control.
Carlin Romano explores why government and media are so mealy-mouthed when it comes to naming terrorists for what they are.
He asks why not employ the tool of moral judgment forcefully expressed by calling them "savages, scum and uncivilized losers"?
If We Don't Call Them Names, the Terrorists Win
What might we argue in favor of calling terrorists names?
Let's mention just one key goal: the education of the world's Muslim youth. Instead of hearing moral praise and encouragement for terrorism from jihadists, which then gets mixed in their minds with the nonjudgmental, tactical talk of Western officials and media, they'd have to absorb a steady stream of insults of terrorists' intelligence, morality, decency, and reasoning. Young Muslims would have to get used to hearing jihadist heroes described as savages, scum, and uncivilized losers, along with the reasons why. It would intellectually force them, far more than they are forced today, to choose between two visions of the world.
We should not minimize the thirst for respect among terrorists and their potential sympathizers. When we treat terrorists only as tactical foes, as though we're too jaded for moral talk, we raise the self-respect of terrorists and their appeal to young people...Perhaps officials around the free world, under a portfolio titled "Terrorism Is Not Great," could start stockpiling verbal weapons that penetrate the enemy more sharply than, "They're dangerous and we must fight them."