Showing posts from January, 2015

Posts

The Imaginary Islamic Radical

The debate over Islamic terrorism has shifted so far from reality that it has now become an argument between the administration, which insists that there is nothing Islamic about ISIS, and critics who contend that a minority of Islamic extremists are the ones causing all the problems. But what makes an Islamic radical, extremist? Where is the line between ordinary Muslim practice and its extremist dark side? It can’t be beheading people in public. Saudi Arabia just did that and was praised for its progressiveness by the UN Secretary General, had flags flown at half-staff in the honor of its deceased tyrant in the UK and that same tyrant was honored by Obama, in preference to such minor events as the Paris Unity March and the Auschwitz commemoration. It can’t be terrorism either. Not when the US funds the PLO and three successive administrations invested massive amounts of political capital into turning the terrorist group into a state. While the US and the EU fund the Palestinian

The Temperature at Which Global Warming Freezes

The sky over New York City was a falling sheet of white. Trails of footprints, work boots, paw prints, sneakers and bird claws, told their own story of how the residents of city were getting through the blizzard to their daily errands. Shoppers lugged home milk as if cows were going extinct. Miniature snowmen decorated mailboxes and garbage trucks towing orange plows clattered down empty streets. Nowhere in the city was the blizzard more pronounced than in Central Park, designed a century ago to create a miniature forest in the heart of Manhattan. Even the tallest trees, taller than any others in the city, were layered with coats of snow and visibility had vanished into a cloud of  whiteness. And walking along a path in the Ramble, I heard a woman lecturing her children on the dangers of what else, but Global Warming. There is a madness to walking through a blizzard and discussing Global Warming. A theory according to which we should be sliding toward the tropics, awash i

The Hollywood Jihad Against American Sniper

American Sniper is the movie that should not have existed. Even though the book was a bestseller, nobody in Hollywood wanted the rights.  And why would they? The Iraq War already had an official narrative in Hollywood. It was bad and wrong. Its veterans were crippled, dysfunctional and dangerous. Before American Sniper, Warner Brothers had gone with anti-war flicks like Body of Lies and In the Valley of Elah. It had lost a fortune on Body of Lies; but losing money had never stopped Hollywood from making anti-war movies that no one wanted to watch. Even the Hurt Locker had opened with a quote from leftist terrorist supporter Chris Hedges. An Iraq War movie was supposed to be an anti-war movie. There was no other way to tell the story. Spielberg’s own interest in American Sniper was focused on “humanizing” the other side. When he left and Clint Eastwood, coming off a series of failed films, took the helm, it was assumed that American Sniper would briefly show up in theaters and t

Why the Left Refuses to Talk About Muslim Anti-Semitism

Even articles about Muslim Anti-Semitism rarely want to talk about Muslim Anti-Semitism. In the aftermath of the Kosher supermarket massacre in France, articles about the Muslim persecution of Jews in Europe nervously hover around the subject before swerving away to discuss the European far-right. An article about Muslim anti-Semitism in France inevitably becomes an article about the National Front, which is not actually shooting Jews in supermarkets. Broader European pieces obsessively focus on the Jobbik party in Hungary which for all its vileness has not actually killed any Jews. (The endless articles about Jobbik characterize it as a far-right European Christian party, but in fact it’s a pan-Turkic organization whose chairman had told a Turkish audience, “Islam is the last hope for humanity.” Its actual identity is based on a broad front of ethnic solidarity by identifying Hungarians as a Turkic people. Its anti-Semitism is anti-Zionist. Jobbik hates Jews because it identifies

Suppose Islam Had a Holocaust and No One Noticed

While Western newspapers were debating whether or not to reprint the Mohammed cartoons, in Nigeria as many as 2,000 people were massacred by the Islamic State in Nigeria, also known as Boko Haram, in what is being called the deadliest attack by the Muslim group to date. Survivors described the Islamic State setting up efficient killing teams and massacring everyone while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. "For five kilometers (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt," one survivor said. There’s a word for that. It’s genocide. The Islamic State in Nigeria had reportedly managed to kill 2,000 people last year. This year they did it in one week. But we don’t pay much attention to what happens in Nigeria unless there’s a hashtag. No one has yet thought up a clever hashtag for the murder of 2,000 people. #Bringbackourdead doesn’t really work. The Islamic State’s next target is Maiduguri, the largest city

The Importance of Blasphemy

  As a deeply religious person, I have no fondness for blasphemy. My religion and its holy books are sacred to me. And I understand perfectly well why a Muslim would not relish a cartoon of a naked Mohammed. But the debates over free dom of speech and the sensitivity of religious feelings also miss the point. Blasphemy is the price we pay for not having a theocracy. Muslims are not only outraged but baffled by the Mohammed cartoons because they come from a world in which Islamic law dominates their countries and  through its special place  proclaims the superiority of Islam to all other religions. Almost all Muslim countries are theocracies of one sort or another as a legacy of the Islamic conquests which Islamized them.  Egyptian President  Sisi’s  gesture of attending a Coptic mass was so revolutionary because it challenged the idea that Egyptian identity must be exclusively Islamic. And Egypt is far from the most hard  line  of Islamic countries in the Middle East, despite a brief t

Let's Laugh at Islam

 " Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand " Mark Twain Anyone who seriously believed after 9/11 that victory against the ongoing Islamic conquest would be accomplished by military force has by now been steadily disabused of that illusion after over a decade of political correctness, passivity and misguided campaigns to bring democracy to the Muslim world. The war against Islam is not going to be won with guns or bombs. Force is merely the final solution to settling conflicts but Islam's violence is for now only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger campaign to make the world into an Islamic domain. While we fight with police actions and holding elections, Islamists are seizing control of governments by force or by democratic elections. They are conquering African nations and staging civil wars in pacific ones. They are importing millions of Muslims to Europe and America as Europe's 'Palestinians' for a coming European Intifada. They are rewr

President Obie

In 1967, folk singer Arlo Guthrie played a song on a left-wing New York City radio station that was supposed to sum up the cultural difference between the culture and the counterculture. On one side of the moral equation in Alice’s Restaurant you had Officer Obie and the nameless army officers who were rulebound fascists and on the other side you had the easygoing hippies who believed in community, hanging out and letting things slide. Culture would drag you into court for littering with twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs as evidence while counterculture would shrug and invite you to dinner. Culture was bureaucratically and violently absurd. Counterculture was humanely lovingly absurd. That's still the image that the left likes to wear like an old pair of jeans. It's still just a bunch of easygoing fellows out to build community and take on Officer Obie’s senseless repressive rules. But then the counterculture became the culture and the left became Officer