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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Bruce Bawer</title>
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		<title>Islamizing Britain’s Schools</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/islamizing-britains-schools/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamizing-britains-schools</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/islamizing-britains-schools/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2014 04:35:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Britain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[schools]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secular]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UK]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222369</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The media blows the lid off a scheme by extremists to hijack U.K. schools. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Panorama-British-Schools-Islamic-Rules.WnA_.avi_000083800.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222370" alt="Panorama - British Schools, Islamic Rules.WnA.avi_000083800" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Panorama-British-Schools-Islamic-Rules.WnA_.avi_000083800-450x322.jpg" width="360" height="258" /></a>“Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.“ </span></p>
<p>– Jesuit aphorism</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Real Muslims understand the critical importance of teaching the young. The critical importance, that is, of teaching them the “right” things and not teaching them the “wrong” things. The most important single element of stealth Islamization is the effort to convert Western schools from centers of secular education into hubs of Islamic indoctrination. Fortunately, there are plenty of dhimmi teachers and school administrators eager to help out, convinced that they’re serving the interests of multicultural peace and harmony. These days, for some reason, this form of dhimmitude seems to be most prevalent – and to take its acutest form – in England.  </span></p>
<p>Take, for example, Lynn Small, headmistress of a state elementary school in Huntington, England, who last November wrote a <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2511841/Children-8-racist-miss-Islam-trip-Schools-threatening-letter-parents-met-outrage.html">letter</a> to parents of fourth- and sixth-grade students warning that if they didn’t let their children attend an “Explore Islam” workshop at Staffordshire University, a “Racial Discrimination” note would be placed in the kids’ permanent records. Fortunately, parents kicked up a fuss, and the media took notice, and Small backtracked – kind of – while still insisting that since some of the school’s “pupils and teachers…belong to the Islam faith,” it was only “right for the children to understand and appreciate their faith as well as their own.”</p>
<p>Obviously, Small realized she’d miscalculated. Slightly. Apparently there were no repercussions for her. She <a href="http://www.littletongreen.staffs.sch.uk/Contact+Us">still</a> has her job, and there’s no indication that school authorities even put a note in her permanent record chiding her for making Stalinist-type threats against parents. No, her heart was plainly in the right place, as far as the British educational establishment is concerned – she just went about things the wrong way, confronting parents directly instead of taking a more crafty approach.</p>
<p>In any event, Small, it turns out, is decidedly small-time. In the last couple of weeks, investigations by the <i>Telegraph </i>and <i>Daily Mail </i>have uncovered something far more serious than Small’s little workshop: namely, a long-term, broad-based conspiracy to Islamize schools in the city of Birmingham. The conspiracy is so widespread, and involves so many high-level people in the school system and the Muslim community, that – well, put it this way: if you were to suggest to a typical European multiculturalist that any such plot were brewing anywhere in the Western world, you’d be mocked and reviled, accused of racism, paranoia, and sheer unadulterated foolishness.</p>
<p>Yet the facts are there. As <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10700041/Muslim-extremists-and-a-worrying-lesson-for-us-all.html">revealed</a> in a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10716855/Government-intervenes-at-school-taken-over-by-Muslim-radicals.html">series</a> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10732434/Teachers-assaulted-and-marginalised-in-Islamising-plot.html">of</a> <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2587304/Birmingham-state-school-probed-amid-claims-70-000-spent-playground-speakers-call-pupils-Islamic-prayers.html">articles</a>, there’s “an organised group of Muslim teachers, education consultants, school governors and activists” who are involved in what they themselves call a “Trojan Horse” campaign to further an “Islamising agenda” by “remov[ing] secular head teachers and install[ing] Islamic practices in Birmingham state schools.” The participants’ ongoing discussions of this campaign have taken place on a private online message board, whose contents have been seen by the <i>Telegraph</i>. Among the conspirators’ short-term objectives is to install Muslim worship in the schools; their explicit long-term goal, as they have made clear in postings on the message board, is the total Islamization of Britain.</p>
<p>The key figure in this scheme is Razwan Faraz, a deputy head teacher at a Birmingham school who, in the days before the <i>Telegraph </i>exposé, had made something of a name for himself by vociferously denying that any such effort was underway. Faraz has another claim to fame, as it happens: his brother, Ahmed Faraz, was the owner of a shop in Birmingham, since closed by police, that “distributed extremist literature to many involved in terror plots, including one of the 7/7 bombers.” Ahmed was himself jailed in 2011 “for multiple terror-related offences.” Razwan assailed his brother’s incarceration as “an attack on free speech.”</p>
<p>Among Faraz’s collaborators are a number of Muslims in positions of local power. Many belong to the Muslim Parents Association and/or the al-Hijrah Trust, groups that work actively, and openly, to increase the Islamic influence in British schools. A leading member of the conspiracy, Tahir Alam, is a senior figure at the Muslim Council of Britain and is vice-chair of the Association of Muslim Schools – and that’s not all. If parents’ complaints about the efforts to Islamize their kids’ schools have been ignored repeatedly, it may be at least in part because Alam is also an official school inspector for Ofsted (the government agency responsible for such matters) as well as a<b> </b>“specialist in school governance” for the Birmingham city council (whose leader, a fellow named Sir Albert Bore, has rejected the “Trojan Horse” charges as “defamatory” and insists that Birmingham schools are doing just fine).</p>
<p>The conspirators appear to be a patient lot. About a newly appointed Muslim school head, one participant in the message board wrote: “Please don’t pressurise her to start the Islamising agenda first. That will be a lot easier when she is respected as leader. She has to establish herself with minimum controversy for the first six months, and lead the people to believe in her before they believe in her policies.”</p>
<p>The results of these people’s efforts speak for themselves. At one school, Park View, which has been praised by Prime Minister David Cameron for its purported “educational excellence, a senior teacher who publicly eulogized terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki is now in the running to become head teacher. “Extremist preachers” have addressed school assemblies; girls have been pressured to cover their hair; £70,000 was spent on loudspeakers to summon students to Friday prayer. “It felt like a faith school. Islam permeated everything,” one source “close to the investigation” told the <i>Telegraph</i>. “All the citizenship teaching was about being a good Muslim.” All this, mind you, at a nominally secular state school.</p>
<p>Then there’s Oldknow, a primary school where an excellent, non-Muslim head teacher was driven out “by a concerted campaign to remove her and Islamise her school.” Oldknow now has Muslim prayers every Friday and has organized at least three taxpayer-funded school trips to Mecca. Arabic classes are compulsory for all pupils. The school even has its own madrassah. Teachers engage in “blatant belittling of Christianity.” Sources spoke about teachers who introduce religion into “every lesson” and whose insistence that music is sinful has led some children to refuse to take music classes. Last December, the school’s traditional Christmas tree and pantomime were cancelled because they were adjudged “un-Islamic,” and a teacher gave a talk at which he led students in a chant: “Do we believe in Christmas? No! Do we give out Christmas cards? No! The seven days of Christmas, they [Christians] can’t even count!”</p>
<p>Things aren’t as far along yet at another school, Springfield, where the non-Muslim head teacher, according to his colleagues, is “under ‘non-stop attack’ by radical members of the governing body” and has received anonymous death threats and had his tires slashed. Meanwhile, at a fourth school, Anderton Park, where the governing body recently voted to “Islamize” collective worship, “the lives of successive non-Muslim head teachers have been made a ‘misery’ by radical religious governors and parents determined to stop the teaching of PE and music, regarded as sinful by hardline Muslims.” At Anderdon Park, there were also several “assaults on staff” (no details provided).</p>
<p>In response to the accounts of the “Trojan Horse” conspiracy laid out in the <i>Telegraph</i> and <i>Daily Mail</i>, Alam complained that he was – what else? – the target of an Islamophobic witch hunt. For his part, Michael White, a former teacher at Park View, had blistering words for the British government and for the Birmingham city council, saying that both were so “afraid to upset communities” that they chose “to sweep things under the carpet.” (Note that even White felt a need to avoid spelling out which “communities” the authorities were loath to offend.)</p>
<p>Birmingham, of course, isn’t the only locality in Britain where children are being subjected to Islamic indoctrination in the guise of education. The other day the <i>Daily Mail</i> <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592441/Fury-fanatic-trained-7-7-bomber-sets-Islamic-PRIMARY-SCHOOL-Britain.html">reported</a> that one Sajeel Shahid, who has trained terrorists – including “the ringleader of the 7/7 terrorist bombings” and four persons who tried to blow up a Kent shopping center and a London nightclub – has for several years been running the Ad-Deen Primary School, a Muslim institution in Essex, whose pupils are between three and eleven years old. Because he ran the school under a pseudonym, inspectors didn’t see anything fishy about the version of Islam being taught to his charges, and accordingly gave the school passing grades. Of course they did: the only difference between the version of Islam taught at approved Islamic schools and the version preached by Islamic terrorists is the terrorism itself.</p>
<p>British parents owe a debt of gratitude to the <i>Telegraph</i> and <i>Daily Mail</i> for uncovering these repulsive stories – and owe no debt at all to their spineless elected officials, both national and local, or to school authorities, who, if it were up to them, would presumably have been content to see Islam overrun the country’s classrooms, all the while ridiculing the very concept of stealth Islamization as hysterical bigotry.</p>
<p>Then there’s the <i>Guardian</i>, the proud flagship of the British left. On March 7, over a week before the <i>Telegraph</i> began to report the results of its investigation, the <i>Guardian</i>, which had come into possession of a letter outlining the Trojan Horse conspirators’ activities, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/07/alleged-plot-birmingham-schools-islamic-principles">summed up</a> the whole business in an article whose headline led with the word “alleged,” whose subhead focused on Alam’s characterization of the charges as “a malicious fabrication and completely untrue,” and whose final sentences were devoted to a condemnation of the “alleged plot” by longtime Islamic activist Inayat Bunglawala, whom the <i>Guardian</i> carefully identified as “chair of Muslims4UK, a group which aims to promote active Muslim engagement in British society.”</p>
<p>Unlike the <i>Telegraph, </i>however, the <i>Guardian </i>apparently didn’t proceed to investigate the charges. Instead, it dutifully noted that the police and school officials were looking into them. And that was that. Perusing the <i>Guardian</i>‘s coverage, one cannot avoid the conclusion that its chief concern was to cast doubt on the allegations and to underscore that, whether they were true or not, mainstream Muslim leaders like Bunglawala are, of course, utterly opposed to such shady subterfuges. There was no mention that Bunglawala, this supposed stalwart of “Muslim engagement in British society,” had in fact called Osama bin Laden a “freedom fighter” and Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman “courageous”; no mention that he’d passionately campaigned to get Yusuf al-Qaradawi a British visa; no mention that, in addition to being head of Muslims4UK, he’s the longtime media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, the same group of which Alam is a leading member. In short, Bungalawala’s brand of “engagement in British society” is not really significantly different from that of the Birmingham conspirators. By pretending that there exists appreciable ideological distance between the likes of Bunglawala and Birmingham’s Trojan Horses, the <i>Guardian</i> isn’t just misleading its readers – it’s participating itself in the whole nefarious ruse to which these creeps are committed. But what else is new?</p>
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		<title>War Over Wilders</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/war-over-wilders-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=war-over-wilders-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/war-over-wilders-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2014 04:34:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Geert Wilders']]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moroccans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[netherlands]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222294</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Dutch continue to rage over Geert’s “fewer Moroccans” line. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/geert.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222308" alt="USA NETHERLANDS GEERT WILDERS" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/geert.jpg" width="322" height="202" /></a>On March 19, addressing supporters in The Hague after a local election, Geert Wilders, head of the Freedom Party (PVV), asked if they wanted more or less of the European Union. “Less!” they shouted. Did they want more or less of the Labor Party? “Less!” they repeated. Then he asked, “Do you want, in this city and in the Netherlands, more or fewer Moroccans?”</p>
<p>That last line caused a firestorm. Major politicians compared Wilders to Hitler. Prime Minister Mark Rutte demanded he apologize. The Freedom Party’s leader in the European Parliament, Laurence Stassen, quit the party, as did many local and regional officials. (Commentator Tom-Jan Meeus maintained in <i>NRC</i> <i>Handelsblad</i> that Wilders “has lost his closest allies, his best member of parliament and his European assembly member.”) The Labor Party announced that it wouldn’t support any Freedom Party motion in Parliament. Hundreds of police complaints were reportedly filed against Wilders, and police, according to Soeren Kern, made it easier to file them “by providing pre-filled ‘Wilders forms’ and offering to come to people’s homes if they intend to press criminal charges, rather than having them come to the police station, as is the normal procedure.” A Facebook <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ikdoeaangiftetegenwilders">page</a> for people filing police complaints against Wilders gathered nearly 100,000 “likes.” The new U.S. ambassador, Timothy Broas, stated that Wilders’s remarks were at odds with Dutch and American values. The Freedom Party fell in the polls from the largest to the third largest Dutch party. “Schools,” wrote Kern, “began to issue guidelines to instruct pupils on how to deal with Wilders.” In Amsterdam, 5,000 people demonstrated against Wilders and the mayor led a chant of “We are all Moroccans!” Dutch TV aired “a church service against Wilders.” An actor named Thijs Römer, in a reference to the murderer of Fortuyn, Volkert van der Graaf, <a href="http://nos.nl/artikel/625896-ophef-over-minder-marokkanen.html">tweeted</a>: “Volkert, where are you when your country needs you?”</p>
<p>Wilders refused to apologize. “I haven’t said anything wrong, only what most people think.” He hadn’t been calling, he insisted, for wholesale deportation: he’d been talking about restricting immigration, supporting voluntary repatriation, and sending criminals with dual nationality back to Morocco. Period.</p>
<p>There are a number of things to be said about Wilders’s comment. First of all, yes, it was unwise. He came off sounding like a bigot. I don’t think he’s a bigot. But that doesn’t matter. In the Netherlands, every single member of the political, media, and academic establishment is constantly waiting for Wilders to say something that they can seize upon and point to as purported evidence of his bigotry. He gave them fuel. That was unfortunate.</p>
<p>Then again, Pim Fortuyn and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were a lot more careful about how they expressed themselves in these matters – and, in the long run, it didn’t make much difference. Their enemies still found ways to demonize them – still found a word here, a word there, to grasp onto and wave in the air as examples of their vile intolerance. When you’ve got enemies who act like this, you’re sunk. Pim ended up dead. Ayaan ended up being driven out of the country (which, of course, turned out to be the best thing that happened to her).</p>
<p>At the other end of the spectrum, Theo van Gogh was deliberately outrageous, calling Muslims “goat fuckers” and the like. But then, he was a prominent writer and broadcaster and filmmaker, not a politician, and if such rhetoric didn’t get him frozen out of the public square, it was partly because he was irreverent about pretty much everybody and everything – that was his image, that was his shtick. He was a professional polemicist, able to get away with using language for which other media figures would lose their jobs, because most people understood that being over-the-top was part of his act – that, far from being a bigot, he was a guy who didn’t like seeing Western freedoms threatened, and the rights of women and Jews and gays and others trampled, by the bullying adherents of a totalitarian faith.</p>
<p>In any event, he ended up getting killed, too.</p>
<p>What about Wilders, then? As a politician, he can’t afford to express himself in the colorful way van Gogh did. But on March 19 he went over the line, in the view of many, and he paid for it. That’s politics. Especially in the age of Facebook and Twitter.</p>
<p>But let’s never forget this. As of this coming November, Wilders will have been living under constant armed protection, deprived of his freedom, for ten years – thanks to threats made on his life by the likes of Mohammed Bouyeri, the Moroccan murderer of Theo van Gogh. He’s been put on trial, in his own purportedly democratic country, for speaking his mind about Islam. Because of his views on Islam, he’s been banned from entering certain other Western countries, despite his position as an elected member of the Dutch parliament. He’s been sued for a large sum of money by a radical imam who claimed his feelings were hurt by Wilder’s film <i>Fitna, </i>about Islam’s systematic abuse of women. He’s even been the subject of an extradition request by the Kingdom of Jordan, which wanted to try him for the capital crime of blasphemy under sharia law.</p>
<p>Is it so difficult to understand that Wilders, who may be under more daily pressure than any man in Europe, can’t, at every moment, when speaking about people who have been seriously dedicated for years to bringing about his death, keep himself from slipping into rhetoric that’s less than perfectly sensitive?</p>
<p>As it happens, only a day or so before Wilders’s “fewer Moroccans” line made international headlines, a Dutch Muslim rapper named Hozny released a <a href="http://www.geenstijl.nl/mt/archieven/2014/03/lekker_nummertje_wel.html">music video</a> showing “a man representing Dutch politician Geert Wilders” being “abducted by armed men and brought to Hozny, who makes him kneel in front of an Islamic flag.” At the end of the song, which includes the line “You are only alive because Allah allows it,” Wilders is executed.</p>
<p>Unlike Wilders’s “fewer Moroccans” line, this video has not gained worldwide attention. Obviously it wasn’t as offensive.</p>
<p>Hard facts: not all that long ago, the Netherlands was a well-nigh idyllic little country. Now it’s a nightmare in the making. Almost everyone acknowledges this now. But why is it a nightmare in the making? Be careful answering that question, or you’ll be sorry. Yes, a majority of young Dutch Moroccans have police records – but if you speak this raw truth flat-out, without cloaking it in the usual euphemisms and qualifications and reassurances, you’ll be branded a bigot. Yes, many Dutch Muslims have gone to Syria to be jihadists, and a poll last year of Dutch Muslims showed that almost three-quarters of them regard such people as heroes – but, again, if you choose to communicate this fact to others, you’d damn well better be exceedingly careful how you go about doing it. Put your foot even slightly wrong, and suddenly you won’t be a good guy criticizing the bad guys – you’ll be a racist. And the second you misstep, the armies will be lining up to condemn you and to demonstrate their own virtue by dropping the relevant, important, and thoroughly grim facts about the subject at hand down the memory hole and proclaiming inanely: “We are all Moroccans!”</p>
<p>“We are all Moroccans!” This sort of nonsense is now commonplace. Recently, in Sweden, after some guy was accused of pulling off a Muslim woman’s head covering, non-Muslim women across the country expressed support for the alleged victim by tweeting pictures of themselves in veils: look at us, we love Islam! Three years ago, in Norway, after one lunatic slaughtered dozens of Labor Party youth members purportedly because he opposed Muslim immigration, politicians and royals rushed to mosques to declare their solidarity with Muslims: look, we’re not Islamophobes, like that mass murderer! Now, a Dutch politician makes a less than ideally formulated comment about Moroccans and thousands of his countrymen waste no time lining up to say: “We are all Moroccans!” It’s the ultimate multicultural compulsion: to prove that one isn’t racist – and assert that someone else is.  And thereby replace the real, tough, uncomfortable issue with a fake issue, a non-issue, a BS issue, that provides the multiculturalist with a delicious <i>frisson</i> of self-righteousness.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://gatesofvienna.net/2014/03/to-the-last-gasp-i-will-always-let-my-voice-be-heard/%20'">speech</a> on March 22, Wilders explained in detail what he had meant by the “fewer Moroccans” line. His party platform calls for “a three-stage approach” to the Islamic immigration issue: “limiting immigration from Islamic countries, including Morocco”; “promoting re-emigration” to Muslim countries; and “deporting criminal Moroccans by revoking their Dutch passports, if they have dual nationality – and most have – and sending them back to the country of their other nationality.” In answer to the question “why did I refer to Moroccans in particular?”, Wilders said he’d done so “because Moroccans are at the top of the list of over-representation in crime and welfare dependence. Moroccan youths younger than 23, more than 60% of them are known to the police and the judicial system. Moroccans are 22 times more frequently guilty of violent crime such as mugging and robbery. They are seven times more likely to be on welfare. These are facts that I haven’t made up, but these are facts that I have to make known or I might just as well <i>not</i> have gone into politics. I went into politics to state things like this, and to propose solutions.”</p>
<p>And that’s the bottom line. Your typical high-level European politician – say, oh, Jens Stoltenberg, the recently dethroned prime minister of Norway who was just named head of NATO (an organization for whose founding values he has never shown particular enthusiasm) – plainly went into politics not to face up to hard truths or put his life on the line for freedom, but so that he could eventually end up as, well, head of NATO, or as a jet-setting big shot at the UN or EU or World Bank. Yes, Wilders stumbled with his line about “fewer Moroccans,” but on a European landscape crowded with empty-suit politicians who don’t really stand for anything except for their own careers, whose approach to Islam and immigration is to recite facile multicultural mantras, and whose only real qualification for anything is that they never, ever offend (precisely because they strenuously skirt the topics that matter the most), Wilders is the real thing: a brave, selfless man determined to steer the ship of state through turbulent waters safely into port. The Dutch would be fools to throw him overboard.</p>
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		<title>EU Offers False Hope for Ukraine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/eu-offers-false-hope-for-ukraine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=eu-offers-false-hope-for-ukraine</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Feb 2014 05:40:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why trade one corrupt tyranny for another? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/uk.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219717" alt="uk" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/uk-450x313.jpg" width="288" height="200" /></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s in Europe, and it&#8217;s huge – after Russia and the top five EU members, it has Europe&#8217;s largest population, and twice as many inhabitants as all the Scandiavian countries put together – but Ukraine isn&#8217;t a nation we often think of in the West, except when, as in recent days, it&#8217;s in the midst of a crisis. It has spent most of its history being conquered and brutalized by its more powerful neighbors, and in the last century underwent one savage chapter after another: 1.5 million people died in the civil war that ended with its absorption into the USSR; millions more died in Stalin&#8217;s deliberately engineered famine in 1932-33; during World War II, Hitler slaughtered an additional three million in what was intended to be the first stage of a program of exterminating two-thirds of the country&#8217;s population and enslaving the rest.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Today, unsurprisingly, Ukraine is a basket case of a country, riddled with corruption and living in the shadows of its historic horrors. It&#8217;s also a linguistically and philosophically divided land, torn between a western chunk whose people speak Ukrainian and identify with Europe and an eastern chunk whose people speak Russian and still feel an attachment to their massive neighbor to the east. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Viktor Yahukovych, the corrupt, autocratic president who disappeared last weekend in the face of mounting public unrest, is a Russiophile whose fatal error was his decision to strengthen bonds with Moscow (which coveted Ukraine as a key ally in a new Eurasian Union) and to turn down a free-trade agreement with the EU; most of the rioters who sent him packing are Europe-oriented types, the majority of whom are eager to see Ukraine become a Western-style democracy free of Putin&#8217;s influence, but some of whom, it should be noted, are neo-Nazis who look westward to Germany for the least attractive of reasons. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Most of the Ukrainians who favor European ties also want to see their country join the EU – which, in their eyes, as one Swedish newspaper put it the other day, is “above all&#8230;a symbol of a society free of corruption.” Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister who was sprung from prison on Saturday after Yahukovych took it on the lam – and whose own years in office (ending in 2010) were far from corruption-free – told the Kiev crowds shortly after her release that she&#8217;s “sure that Ukraine will be a member of the European Union in the near future and this will change everything.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Change everything! What is it that makes presumably liberty-loving Eastern European politicians talk about the EU as if it were a magic freedom elixir, a miracle cure for former victims of tyranny? </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I suppose part of the explanation is that these politicians travel to the great cities of Western Europe and take in the relative freedom, the relative prosperity, and the relative lack of corruption and thuggery, and assume that all this has something to do with the EU. And part of it, naturally, is the ceaseless stream of pro-EU propaganda poured out by the Western European media and, not least, by the Western European politicians whom the likes of Tymoshenko consort with when they visit the West. Yet how odd that the superstate&#8217;s economic woes haven&#8217;t put a dent in the magic for people like Tymoshenko. How odd that even the merest glimpse of the way things work in Brussels – where corruption is, needless to say, very much alive and well, even though it doubtless falls far short of Ukrainian levels – doesn&#8217;t give them pause. And how odd that when they witness the arrogance that&#8217;s characteristic of virtually all Brussels bigwigs – their habit of responding to any reasonable criticism of the EU not with cogent arguments but with vicious ad</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">hominem</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">attacks</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">they don&#8217;t immediately recognize that they&#8217;re observing tyrants in the making, the sort of folks that you&#8217;d think they&#8217;d had more than enough of over the centuries, thank you very much.</span></p>
<p>Take European Council president Herman van Rompuy, that colorless, Politburo-style mediocrity, who in a 2011 speech blithely ignored the essentially undemocratic nature of the EU, describing it – outrageously – as “the fatherland, or the motherland of democracy.” Or take European Commission president José Manuel Durrão Barroso, who started his political career as a Maoist, and who in 2012 <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100056661/the-eu-is-an-antidote-to-democratic-governments-argues-president-barroso/">argued</a> that the EU&#8217;s democracy deficit isn&#8217;t a bug but a feature:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Governments are not always right. If governments were always right we would not have the situation that we have today. Decisions taken by the most democratic institutions in the world are very often wrong.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Or take halfwit EU Foreign Affairs honcho Catherine Ashton, whose 2011 <i>Guardian </i>article lecturing Hosni Mubarak on the need for democracy in Egypt was widely (and rightly) ridiculed as the work of someone who, as Brendan O&#8217;Neill neatly <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100075008/baroness-ashton-lectures-egypt-on-democracy-what-does-she-know-about-it/">put it</a> in the <i>Telegraph,</i></p>
<blockquote><p>“has never once bothered the ballot box, never once ventured into the rowdy arena of public opinion to win the masses&#8217; backing, and who was elevated to her current position as the European Union&#8217;s high representative for foreign affairs through backroom wheeling and dealing.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Noting Ashton&#8217;s enthusiasm, in her <i>Guardian </i>piece, for what she called “deep democracy,” O&#8217;Neill explained that “she doesn&#8217;t mean deep as in profound – she means bureaucracy, the grey and unaccountable sphere that she haunts, the removed realm of experts and unelected high representatives” – a phenomenon Ashton contrasted (favorably, of course) with mere “surface democracy,” the undesirable, old-fashioned sort of system in which elected officials actually seek (horrors!) to honor their constituents&#8217; wishes.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even a cursory look at the careers and pronouncements of these unelected demigods, these self-regarding technocratic hacks, is to recognize them as people who itch to rule an empire and who are, quite simply, outraged at anyone who dares to stand in their way for a moment. Given the transparency of their lust for monolithic power – a power, moreover, utterly liberated from any notion whatsoever of responsibility to an electorate – it&#8217;s baffling that so many observers can actually take the EU seriously as a formula for European peace rather than for European autocracy. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What Europe has in Barroso, Ashton, &amp; co., after all, is a pack of men and women who have done their level best to impoverish real political debate, to blunt its impact, and to make it seem obsolescent, counterproductive, and in every way undesirable. Former Czech president and staunch EU critic Václav Klaus asked in his 2011 book </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Europe: The Shattering of Illusions</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“Do we have real politics in Europe today – the political conflict of opinions – or have real politics been in fact eliminated by reducing the weight and importance of the nation states and by the self-confessed apolitical ways of Brussels?” </span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which is another way of saying that Brussels isn&#8217;t a city of politicians who have different political philosophies and who come together to debate ideas and hammer out compromises; it&#8217;s a city of technocrats who share an ideology and who work together as a team to translate that ideology into policy – never mind what the rabble think. (Or, as Klaus put it even more bluntly: “the European Union is no longer the symbol of democracy it pretends to be.”)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Klaus has coined the term “Europeism.” It&#8217;s a useful word, because it places the unreflecting, reality-defying enthusiasm for Europe in the category it belongs to, along with other, earlier European-isms. Among much else, Europeism views the free market as uncivilized and anarchic, places collective rights above individual rights, and strives, as Klaus excellently puts it, “for a homogenized, &#8216;decaffeinated&#8217; world (with no flavour, aroma, and smell).” Europeists, he writes,</span></p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;do not believe in spontaneous, unregulated and uncontrolled human activity. They trust the chosen ones (not the elected ones), they trust themselves or those who are chosen by themselves. They believe in a vertically structured and hierarchized human society (in the Huxleyian Alpha-Pluses and in Epsilons serving them). They want to mastermind, plan, regulate, administer the others, because some (they themselves) do know and others do not. They do not want to rely on spontaneity of human behavior and on the outcomes resulting from this spontaneity because they think that rationalistic human design is always better than an unplanned result of interactions between free citizens, constructed and commanded by nobody. Even though we thought that after the collapse of communism all this was a matter of the past, it is not so. It is around us again. Europeism is a new utopism and, I add, it is an extremely naive and romantic utopism.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Above all, writes Klaus, Europeism “is based on the idea that states, more precisely the nation states, represent the Evil – because they were once the cause of wars among other things – while the supranational, continental and global entities represent the Good, because they – according to eurocrats – eliminate all forms of nationalist bickering once and for all.” This understanding of things, he adds, “is obviously childish, yet it is generally accepted in Europe.” Yes, it&#8217;s accepted because millions of today&#8217;s Europeans have been brainwashed into thinking that national feeling – patriotism – was the root of all of the worst things that happened to the continent in the twentieth century. No, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">ideology </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">was the root – ideology in the form of Nazism, fascism, and Communism. And Europeism – which, by the way, has multiculturalism and fanatical environmentalism built into it – is the twenty-first-century heir of those wretched systems of thought.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which brings us back to the latest developments in Ukraine. Tymoshenko&#8217;s speech on Saturday night was followed on Sunday by the news that the EU – notwithstanding its own massive financial difficulties – is now ready to hand over bushels of cash to the newly Europe-friendly government in Kiev. To be sure, some EU nations, cognizant of the expenses such a move would impose on them, are hesitant to welcome Ukraine into the EU fold too quickly; but the powers that be in Brussels are plainly drooling over the prospect of landing this big fish – if not as an immediate new member, then as an obedient client state and keen member-in-waiting. Olli Rehn, the EU&#8217;s Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner, appeared to be summing up the sentiments in the Brussels corridors of power when he said the following on Sunday: “From a European point of view it is important that we provide a clear European perspective for the Ukrainian people who have shown their commitment to European values.” The word </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">European</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> three times in one sentence – that&#8217;s EU rhetoric at its most Europeist! But the fundamental point is this: as Reuters helpfully </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/02/23/ukraine-crisis-future-idINL6N0LS09V20140223">explained</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, “&#8217;European perspective&#8217; is EU-speak for a membership prospect.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So there we are. Note to Ukrainians: accepting the EU&#8217;s money is one thing. Go for it. But why this longing, on the part of Tymoshenko or anyone else in your country, to board the Superstate Express? Set aside, if you wish, the economic downside of the whole project, the looming disaster that is the eurozone, and just ask yourselves this: after spending most of your history taking orders from far-off imperial capitals, most of the twentieth century living under the nightmare of Communism, and most of the greater part of the generation that followed under the gravitational pull of post-Soviet Kremlin despotism, why be so desperate to subordinate yourselves to yet another set of haughty, high-handed foreign rulers? Why slip away from being under one thumb only to voluntarily place yourself under another? </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ukraine, here&#8217;s one simple piece of unsolicited advice: vote for sovereignty. Vote for freedom. Take the money and run. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stay out of the EU.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Harvard&#8217;s Rebel Without a Clue</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:35:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Sandra Y.L. Korn]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Meet Sandra Korn.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Sandra_Korn.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219390" alt="Sandra_Korn" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Sandra_Korn.jpg" width="339" height="265" /></a>It reads like parody, but it&#8217;s not. Appearing the other day in the <i>Harvard Crimson, </i>the <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2014/2/18/academic-freedom-justice/?page=single">article</a> was headlined “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom: Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.” Its author, a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y.L. Korn, argued that the concept of academic freedom should be replaced by one of academic justice. “When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression,” she proposed, “it should ensure that this research does not continue.” To a large extent, of course, the American academy is already under the thumb of the left-wing Thought Police; Ms. Korn only wants to complete the job. She&#8217;d like to see an academy in which, she explains, somebody like Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield – a conservative who would never be hired nowadays, but whose job is secure thanks to tenure – would be given the boot, the better to purify the sweet air of Harvard Yard.</p>
<p>Who is Sandra Y.L. Korn? The contributor&#8217;s note identifies her as a member of the class of 2014, a <i>Crimson </i>editorial writer and columnist, and “a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House.” “Concentrator” is apparently Harvardese for “major.” Ms. Korn&#8217;s college education consists, then, of courses in Women&#8217;s Studies and in “History of Science,” which, according to Harvard&#8217;s website, “offers students the possibility of studying the history and social relations of science” but “does not require students to take science courses.” (Which, of course, is ridiculous: how can you begin to understand what science is without actually studying a science?) Ms. Korn, I also discovered, is working on a thesis about “how biologists have tried over and over again to explain gender difference by invoking &#8216;science.&#8217;” In other words, she&#8217;s learned about science – without really learning any science – in order to discredit “science,” a word she puts in scare quotes. (Her project is, note well, entirely consistent with Women&#8217;s Studies dogma, which teaches that science is “masculinist.”)</p>
<p>Ms. Korn, I further discovered, is not only a prolific columnist – writing regularly for both the <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/writer/1206810/SANDRA%20_Y.L.%20_KORN/# ">Crimson</a> and the <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/author/sandra-korn/">Harvard Political Review</a> – but an active member of Occupy Harvard, the Progressive Jewish Allliance, the Student Labor Action Movement, and BAGELS, “Harvard&#8217;s group for bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgendered Jews.” In her columns, she&#8217;s paid <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/features/memoirs-project/the-politics-of-power-this-side-of-glory-and-the-black-panther-party/">tribute</a> to the Black Panthers, <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/occupation-with-no-end/">celebrated</a> the Occupy movement, and <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/world/kim-jong-ils-death/">chided</a> those who cheered Kim Jong-Il&#8217;s death. She&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/6/rotc-policy-students-harvard/">opposed</a> allowing ROTC back onto the Harvard campus, one reason being that “[i]nternational students&#8230;from countries not allied with the United States” might object to their presence. She&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2013/4/9/ed-ex-not-democratic/">criticized</a> Harvard&#8217;s plans to distribute lecture courses on the Internet as the latest development in “a long history of imperialism in which U.S. elites have told an increasingly globalized world that what they thought was best.” She&#8217;s <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/world/when-people-are-occupied-2/">written</a> that “[w]hile violent resistance through Hamas is not right,” it&#8217;s “not incomprehensible,” given that “non-violent resistance cannot make the international community pay attention to the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.” And she&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/2/1/antisemitism-false-accusations/">dismissed</a> as “Islamophobia” any statement of the objective fact that anti-Semitism is a core element of contemporary Palestinian identity.</p>
<p>Speaking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, summer before last Ms. Korn went on a free ten-day trip to Israel courtesy of Taglit-Birthright Israel, then wrote a column <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/7/6/israel-trip-sylk/">savaging</a> the “right-wing rhetoric” she was fed – by which she meant that, for example, her tour guides displayed an unapologetic pride in Israel and were honest about the systematic inculcation of anti-Semitism in Palestinian schools. While in Israel, she wrote an <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/7/16/harvard-postcard-jaffa/%20">article</a> lamenting that the country – which some of her family members admired half a century or so ago as “a workers’ nation, a socialist utopia” – has now “adopted capitalism with fervor,” an action which she plainly deplores.  She is, indeed, no fan of capitalism. More than once, she&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/2/4/harvard-students-investment-graduates/">ranted</a> about the fact that many Harvard graduates get jobs in finance. In one <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/165724/harvard-wall-street-recruiting-ivies# ">column</a> (reprinted by <i>The Nation, </i>where she was an intern) she savaged Harvard’s Office of Career Services for steering students toward Wall Street, and wondered aloud whether they do so in order “to guarantee wealthy alumni donors.” She concluded her piece by underscoring the need to “destroy&#8230;the well-paved road between the Ivy League schools and Wall Street.” When she went to England last summer to do “research” at Trinity Colllege, Cambridge, she found stuff to <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/series/summer-postcards-2013/article/2013/8/14/Korn-postcard-the-high-table/">complain</a> about there, too: “Why do the fellows here dine in the same hall as undergraduates but on a raised platform apart from them?”</p>
<p>In the wake of the 2011 Mumbai bombings, Ms. Korn was outraged – not at the terrorists, but at <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/harvard/swamys-freedom-of-speech/">Subramanian Swamy</a>, an Indian politician and Harvard economics lecturer who responded to the atrocities with an article about how “Muslims of India are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.” Ms. Korn and some of her confederates jumped into action, agitating for Harvard to – as she put it – “discontinue its association with an offensive figure.” The action succeeded; Swamy was banished. A month later, Ms. Korn and a fellow Women&#8217;s Studies major <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/9/16/911-global-afghanistan-harvard/%20">slammed</a> President Obama&#8217;s speech on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 as too America-centric. “As an international student from a Muslim country and an American student from a suburb of New York,” they wrote, “we believe that discussions and events commemorating 9/11&#8230;must place the attacks within a global context.” Why remember the 3,000 people killed in the Twin Towers, they asked, and not “the nearly 250,000 deaths which followed”? And why no tribute to the Muslim victims of “bias crimes” in the U.S. since 9/11?  “[B]y urging all Americans to take emotional ownership over the event,” Korn and her co-author argued, “we cast a U.S.-centric and nationalist stance on 9/11 that dehumanizes and delegitimizes the perceived &#8216;other&#8217;—and allows us to emotionally detach from wars taking place abroad.”</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, Ms. Korn was also <a href="http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/on-the-celebration-of-death/">displeased</a> by the patriotic displays after bin Laden&#8217;s death. That night, “hundreds of excited Harvard students gathered outside my window in Matthews. Chanting &#8216;U-S-A! U-S-A!&#8217; and singing &#8216;God Bless America&#8217; and &#8216;Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,&#8217; these joyous, debatably sober, vuvuzela-carrying Harvard students celebrated the death of America’s most-hated enemy: Osama bin Laden.” Ms. Korn said that while she “dislike[s] attacks on American soil just as much as the next person,” she “hesitate[s] to label humans as &#8216;evil.&#8217;” Beside, celebrations of bin Laden&#8217;s death only “reaffirm negative prejudices about Americans held by those involved with terrorist groups,” “confirm that Americans are unfeeling and inconsiderate,” and do “nothing to earn America the respect of the Afghani people.”</p>
<p>Who, then, is this fierce critic of American empire, this enemy of capitalism, this scourge of Wall Street? Well, as it turns out, she&#8217;s <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sandra-korn/19/561/">from</a> the affluent suburb of Basking Ridge, New Jersey, where she grew up in a house at 61 Darren Drive that was <a href="http://www.bergendispatch.com/property/somerset/property.aspx?id=1802%7C11702%7C10">purchased</a> in 1998 for $800,000. (If you check it out on Google Maps, it looks like the very image of the American dream: a peaceful paradise of large, pretty houses separated from the quiet street by broad, manicured lawns dotted with shade trees.) Her parents are Elizabeth A. Korn, a pediatric endocrinologist, and William D. Korn, whose own Harvard degrees are in economics and business administration and whose <a href="http://www.kornintellect.com/experience.html%20">website</a> describes him – the father of this proud 99-percenter – as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>Bill Korn is a veteran technology executive with more than 30 years of experience managing fast growth businesses. As Chief Financial Officer for seven companies he has raised over $250 million of capital, including debt and equity financing. Bill has completed seven acquisitions, including negotiating terms, arranging financing, performing due diligence and integrating teams. He has successfully created many successful partnerships and joint ventures.</p></blockquote>
<p>The bio goes on for several more paragraphs, providing details of his years at IBM and other corporations and his involvement in the National Association of Corporate Directors and the New Jersey Economic Growth Council.</p>
<p>Sandra Korn is, then, the child of two parents who, taken together – to judge by their CVs – personify pretty much everything she&#8217;s rebelling against. She&#8217;s a product of precisely the kind of upper-class American suburban life for which she has professed an ardent class contempt. And she&#8217;s about to collect an immensely valuable diploma after utterly squandering a magnificent, world-class opportunity to actually learn something. Instead of grasping this opportunity, she&#8217;s spent the last four years marinating in her own ideology by writing articles, participating in activism, and taking “courses” that are about nothing more than Being Ideologues Together. There&#8217;s no sign that she&#8217;s been educated at all, in any sense of the term – no sign that she&#8217;s learned anything of significance about, say, history or economics, no sign that she&#8217;s developed any understanding of the way the world works, no sign that she grasps the concept of challenging one&#8217;s own assumptions by taking in unfamiliar facts and grappling with ideas different from one&#8217;s own. She mentions her professors in her columns only to upbraid them. (Several of her profs, for example, have urged her to work on not saying “you know” and “like” in every sentence – which she <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2013/4/23/harvard-lean-in/">rejects</a> as an effort to make her speech patterns more masculinist.) She gives every indication, in fact, of having arrived at Harvard believing that she already knew everything she needed to know and of having viewed her presence on campus as a chance not to obtain a first-rate education but to roil the waters in a very big pond.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t mean to come down like a ton of bricks on one lone college kid. I focus on Ms. Korn because she&#8217;s one of the most prominent voices at what is by far America&#8217;s most prominent university, and because she&#8217;s a highly representative figure whose views are standard issue for a great many privileged young Americans today. And at the very heart of what makes her representative is the fact that she hasn&#8217;t got an original thought in her head – and doesn&#8217;t even realize it. She&#8217;s swallowed an ideology whole and learned to spit it back. Her unoriginality, her predictability, are matched only by her colossal self-assurance; she&#8217;s clearly never entertained any serious doubt that she belongs to her generation&#8217;s intellectual <i>crème de la crème. </i>For all her rage against America&#8217;s cruel classism, she never questions, in any of her many articles, the elite status she herself enjoys, perhaps only because her father is a well-to-do Harvard alum.</p>
<p>To the extent that this young woman represents the next generation of the American elite, America is doomed – period. The one sign of hope that stands out in her articles is the anecdote about hundreds of students congregating under her dorm window to sing “God Bless America.” Were there really hundreds? If so, hurrah. I wouldn&#8217;t have dared hope there were more than a handful of Harvard students who had it in them to put on such a display; given the way things work at such universities nowadays, I would&#8217;ve imagined that the admissions office did a far more effective job of screening out applicants capable of such behavior. But even though Harvard students like this do apparently exist, perhaps even in the hundreds, the fact remains that it&#8217;s the Sandra Korns – with their contempt for freedom, their love of totalitarian-style “social justice,” and their determination to purge the ideologically impure – who define such institutions in our time, and who, simply because the word “Harvard” or “Yale” or “Princeton” is printed on their diplomas, are almost certainly destined for highly influential careers in America&#8217;s corridors of power. Yes, the singers of “God Bless America” may go on to Wall Street and make millions, but the Sandra Korns will go on to places like the <i>New York Times </i>and proceed to bend the culture to their will. And if that&#8217;s not terribly depressing news, what is?</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Life and Death in Northern Europe</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/life-and-death-in-northern-europe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=life-and-death-in-northern-europe</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Feb 2014 05:16:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218962</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dying for the greater good. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/mar.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-219025" alt="mar" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/mar.jpg" width="275" height="183" /></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A couple of recent news stories shed a disturbing light on the contemporary northern European mind – or, at least, on one alarmingly common variation on it.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Earlier this month, the Copenhagen Zoo announced plans to “euthanize” a healthy two-year-old giraffe named Marius. The reason: he was superfluous – a “surplus” giraffe – because “his genes were well represented among the captive giraffe population in European zoos.” Animal lovers around the world reacted with outrage, and several zoos, including one in Yorkshire, said they would be delighted to give Marius a home. A billionaire offered half a million euros for Marius, whom he planned to keep in his garden in Beverly Hills. But the offers were rebuffed. On February 9, while eating rye bread, “a favorite snack,” Marius was tranquilized, killed with a shotgun, autopsied, and fed to lions – all in front of zoogoers, including both adults and children.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The man behind this act of extermination was Bengt Holst, the Copenhagen Zoo&#8217;s scientific director. In reply to the protests, he stood firm, dismissing the international outcry as “totally out of proportion.” Declared Holst: “A giraffe is not a pet; it’s not like a dog or cat that becomes part of the family.” (Why give it a name, then?) He insisted that the “euthanasia” of Marius was necessary “to ensure a healthy population.” Why couldn&#8217;t he just have sent Marius to another zoo? Because, Holst insisted, the likely genetic similarity between Marius and other giraffes on the premises would have raised the possibility of inbreeding. As for Yorkshire, “Marius&#8217; older brother lives there and the park&#8217;s space could be better used by a &#8216;genetically more valuable giraffe.&#8217;”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But if they were worried about inbreeding, why not just give Marius contraceptives? Nope: that might have caused renal problems or other side effects. Why not neuter him, then? No, said Holst, “if we just sterilize him, he will take up space” that (again) could be better given to “genetically more valuable giraffes.” Besides, neutering Marius would have lowered his quality of life. “Our most important objective,” said Holst, “is to ensure that the animals have the best life they can for as long as they live, whether that’s 20 years or two years. Breeding and parenting are especially important behaviors for a giraffe’s well-being. We didn’t want to interfere with that.” But what about the billionaire in Beverly Hills? Why not let Marius live with him? Again, no: giraffes, said Holst, are “social animals,” and it&#8217;s not fair to them to keep them in isolation. “As long as they are with us,” Holst told a reporter, “we want them to have a good life, with as much natural behavior as possible.” As for the decision to turn Marius&#8217;s death, autopsy, and consumption by lions into a spectacle for small children, Holst said it was a good idea “because zoos have an obligation &#8216;not to make nature into a Disney World.&#8217;”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Holst received public backup from Leslie Dickie, executive director of the Amsterdam-based European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, who, noting that much of the outcry over the killing of Marius had come from America, attributed these reactions to “ a misunderstanding about what is &#8216;normal in Danish culture&#8217;” and complained that people who were getting worked up about Marius&#8217;s fate had “perhaps lost sight of the bigger picture.” Dickie made the point that “the Copenhagen Zoo wouldn&#8217;t send Marius to an institution with &#8216;lesser standards of welfare&#8217;” and that putting Marius into a situation where he wouldn&#8217;t be able to breed “would violate the EAZA&#8217;s standard of &#8216;providing a behavioral repertoire as natural as possible&#8217; for animals in captivity.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well, well. The first thing that needs to be emphasized here is that Holst and Dickie are not isolated oddballs. Holst&#8217;s actions were dictated by an ideology that is widespread, especially in northern Europe, and that does not just apply to zoo animals. What we are dealing with here, to put it briefly, is people who are certain that they are noble and good. They believe in the cycle of life. They believe in quality of life. They just don&#8217;t happen to believe in the individual life. In fact, they view the individual life as getting in the way of things they value more – breeding programs, the ecosystem, and so on. They regard people who focus on the individual life as childlike sentimentalists who don&#8217;t grasp that every individual life is only part of a larger design, a “bigger picture,” and should be extinguished the moment it becomes burdensome or inconvenient. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s misguided to suggest that there exists a certain continuity between this way of thinking and that which made possible the horrors of the Final Solution. It is a barbaric way of thinking – and yet in the cultural-elite circles in northern Europe it is considered enlightened and humane. It&#8217;s “scientific.” It&#8217;s unsentimental. It&#8217;s free of American – of Disney-ish – sappiness.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To be sure, Holst would probably protest that he </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">does </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">care about the individual life. After all, he killed Marius partly because he didn&#8217;t want him to live a less than ideal life. Better to die than experience renal problems or other side effects. Better to die than endure “lesser standards of welfare.” Better to die, you see, than not experience parenthood. Better to die than be without the company of other giraffes. This is the PETA mentality: in the minds of such people, there are any number of good reasons to snuff out a life. For some of us, this looks very much like a love of death. Holst doesn&#8217;t want to “interfere” with giraffe “behaviors,” but he has no problem “interfering” with life itself.  Indeed, the fact that he didn&#8217;t hesitate to kill Marius in the face of international opposition suggests that he considers himself something of a crusader for his ideology of death (and the fact that another Danish zoo was, until this weekend, reportedly considering the possibility of executing its own baby giraffe, also named Marius, confirms that Holst is, indeed, far from alone). Meanwhile, the condemnation of Holst&#8217;s actions by American and Canadian zoo officials – including Jack Hanna of the Columbus Zoo and of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Late Show with David Letterman </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">fame, who said he would have paid for Marius with his own money – underscored the gulf between North American and European zookeeping philosophies. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reading Holst&#8217;s comments, I am reminded of a vet we had years ago here in Norway. My partner made the mistake of asking her about the possibility of having our (indoor) cats declawed. Thoroughly appalled by the question, she favored us with a livid harangue about how savage it was to do such a thing to cats – it was a slap in the face of nature and would cause a major diminishment in their quality of life. Then, a couple of years later, when one of our cats needed to have some teeth pulled, the same vet casually asked if we&#8217;d prefer to save the money and have him put to sleep instead. (To these people, there is no logical inconsistency here: exterminating an animal is fine; it&#8217;s reducing their quality of life that is an unforgivable offense.) Still later, when the same cat was suffering from a life-threatening disorder, the vet – another one this time – declared that it was his job to be the “voice of the animal,” because the animal “doesn&#8217;t have a voice of its own,” and proceeded to inform us that the “voice of the animal” decreed that “the animal” should be put to death. No, our cat was not in pain. But as far as the vet was concerned, the time had come; death was the only item on the menu, and to say no to it, to try to fight it off, indeed to do anything other than hasten it, invite it in, was unseemly, presumptuous, selfish, sentimental; it was to tilt at windmills, to fail to bow to the way of all flesh, to place what we wanted as human beings ahead of what nature was demanding of us.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This philosophy made no sense to me. How could this readiness to throw in the towel, to discard a life, could be called, in any sense, the “voice of the animal”? Don&#8217;t most people who are suffering with some deadly disease want to live as long as they possibly can – even if it involves a degree of pain or discomfort? Can a vet be so sure that cats are any different? In any case, isn&#8217;t being a doctor supposed to be about being on the side of life? No, not anymore. Now, increasingly, especially in places like Denmark and Norway, the doctor isn&#8217;t a soldier in the army of life but a servant of the circle of life whose job it is, when he or she thinks the time has come, to usher Death into the room, take his coat and hat, work by his side, and follow his orders. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which brings us to another recent news story from northern Europe. As it happens, there are three jurisdictions in the world that permit euthanasia (as opposed to physician-assisted suicide), and, perhaps not coincidentally, they&#8217;re the three Benelux countries – Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. (A fourth may soon join them: Quebec&#8217;s assembly will vote on a euthanasia bill modeled on the Benelux laws by the end of this month.) In Luxembourg, euthanasia is available only to those over eighteen; in the Netherlands, it can be performed on persons as young as twelve. Last week the Belgian Senate voted overwhelmingly to join the Netherlands in permitting the euthanasia of children. “We are talking about children that are really at the end of their life. It’s not that they have months or years to go. Their life will end anyway,” said a leading Brussels pediatrician who supported the move. Yes, their life will end anyway. Why fight? Yes, some Belgian pediatricians opposed the measure, as did Brussels&#8217;s archbishop, who warned of “a risk of very serious consequences in the long term for society and the meaning we give to life, death and the freedom of human beings.” Well, you can say that again. Manifestly, these euthanasia advocates are motivated by the same attitude toward life and death that propels Bengt Holst.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Two years ago, the Norwegian newspaper </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">profiled 62-year-old Arne Sveen, who had cancer and had refused medical treatment because he felt it was wrong to “spend enormous sums prolonging fatally ill people&#8217;s lives by a few months.” </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">gave every indication of celebrating his decision: Sveen, one gathered, was a model citizen whom everyone else in Norway would do well to emulate. The article quoted a doctor who had evidently moved beyond old-fashioned medical ethics. “What is death, really?” she said. “A natural end to life or an evil that should be fought?” She plainly believed it to be the former. “Is it worth expending energy, effort, and money,” she asked, “on treatment that will never cure, [but that will] just put off death for a brief period?” In Norway, the article informed us, the death panels – for, yes, that&#8217;s what they are – will generally approve treatments costing up to somewhere in the range of $65,000 to $115,000 if they&#8217;re expected to give patients another “good” year. Of course, health-care officials would prefer that everyone started thinking like Arne Sveen: live a healthy, robust life while you can, but once you threaten to become a burden on society, be prepared to check out. The message is clear: fighting for your life isn&#8217;t heroic – it&#8217;s indecent and selfish. Norway has more important things to do with your tax money (such as enrich African dictators and terrorist-linked Muslim groups) than to prolong your life.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">All of which leads me to a letter that arrived the other day in our household. It concerned my partner&#8217;s grandmother, whom neither of us ever knew; she died in 1966 and is buried in a cemetery in a small village near the northernmost tip of Norway. The letter was from the local parish council of the Church of Norway that is responsible for that cemetery. It announced, in the taut, formal – indeed, dehumanized – prose that is typical of business correspondence in northern Europe, that unless we deposited 500 kroner (slightly under $100) into the parish council&#8217;s bank account by February 15, the tombstone and plantings would be removed. Delicately omitted from the letter was the fact that the remains themselves would also be removed, or perhaps buried deeper in the ground in a small container, so as to free up the grave for re-use. This, as you may or may not know, is standard practice throughout much of Western Europe – and while it&#8217;s not a new practice but an old one (dating back to medieval times), it says something about attitudes toward life and death in this supposedly super-civilized corner of the world, I think, that it remains the norm.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yes, I understand the issue of lack of space, but there&#8217;s nowhere on earth where this is less of a problem than at the northernmost tip of Norway, so this isn&#8217;t about that. What it&#8217;s about, it seems to me, is what the Danish slaughter of Marius the giraffe, the Belgian eagerness to institute childhood euthanasia, and the Norwegian enthusiasm for cancer patients who refuse to burden the system are also about: namely, a well-nigh fetishistic preoccupation with the quality of life and the cycle of life that coexists, perversely, with a chillingly insufficient sense of the value – the preciousness – of the individual life (and, as a corollary, of the sacredness of the remains of the dead). Whatever name you want to give to this unsettling mentality, there is unquestionably more and more of it going around, with northern Europe quite clearly in the vanguard – although, as is the case with so much else that afflicts Europe these days, America is hardly immune to its ravages.</span></p>
<p><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">.  </b></p>
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		<title>Switzerland Draws a Line on Immigration</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2014 05:42:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218965</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And the EU goes on the warpath.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/switz.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219028" alt="-" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/switz-450x253.jpg" width="270" height="152" /></a>Switzerland is a small, prosperous country which during World War II managed not to become part of the Nazi empire and during the postwar era has succeeded in staying out of the EU. Nonetheless, like other European countries whose citizens have voted to stay out of the EU, Switzerland – in exchange for participation in free trade with EU members – has signed treaties that subject its citizens to EU regulations. Among those treaties is a seven-year-old agreement that grants most EU citizens the right to live and work in Switzerland.</p>
<p>In a referendum on February 14, however, the Swiss electorate voted by a slim majority for a proposal by the Swiss People&#8217;s Party (SVP) that will invalidate that treaty. The <i>Washington Post</i>&#8216;s Anthony Faiola, in his report on the vote, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/swiss-vote-to-limit-foreign-workers-captures-growing-european-fears-about-immigration/2014/02/10/e0dfd354-9254-11e3-b3f7-f5107432ca45_story.html%20">provided</a> a fine example of the way in which the left-wing media routinely reduce real-life concerns to obnoxious caricatures, all the while acting as if the people they&#8217;re condescendingly mocking are the ones purveying the caricatures: the Swiss vote, he wrote, was the result of the mischievous efforts of “right-wing populists” who worry that their “idyllic Swiss lifestyle” is “being trampled by hordes of foreign newcomers.” Faiola went on to compare Swiss voters to “the paramilitaries of the Golden Dawn” in Greece and the “anti-immigrant, anti-Roma and anti-Semitic” members of the radical-right Jobbik Party in Hungary. The <i>New York Times </i>took a similar <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/world/europe/swiss-immigration-vote-raises-alarm-across-europe.html?_r=0%20%20%20">approach</a>: “Far-right parties with anti-immigrant platforms in France, the Netherlands and Norway have gained strength in recent years,” wrote Melissa Eddy and Stephen Castle (the Norway reference obviously being to the center-right Progress Party, which is closer to the American political center than any other party in Norway).</p>
<p>Never mind the reality: Switzerland – where about a quarter of the legal residents were born abroad and 37 percent of residents are foreign-born or have two foreign-born parents – is one of the two countries in the world with the highest percentage of immigrants. (The other is Austria.) The SVP – the same party that sponsored the 2009 law banning minarets – said during the run-up to the plebiscite that the 80,000 EU citizens who are now moving to Switzerland every year (a number equal to 1% of the country&#8217;s population) amounts to approximately “ten times the initial predictions back in 2007,” <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland/10627452/Switzerland-votes-to-re-introduce-curbs-on-immigration.html">reported</a> the <i>Telegraph</i>.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t take much imagination to recognize what a massive burden this flood of immigrants represents – and what a social and culural transformation it entails. As the <i>Telegraph </i>itself seems to acknowledge, the schools, hospitals, public-transport system, and housing market in Switzerland have been “struggling to cope” with the influx. This sort of rapid, dramatic metamorphosis is enough to pose a risk to any country&#8217;s social, cultural, and economic stability. Add to this the fact that citizens of Romania and Bulgaria (including innumerable gypsies who, frankly, aren&#8217;t looking for honest work but for pockets to pick, houses to plunder, and public property to trash) are now free to settle anywhere they want in the EU – or in countries, like Switzerland and Norway, which have open-border arrangements with the EU. Under such circumstances, the action by Swiss voters isn&#8217;t just eminently understandable; it is, quite simply, the responsible thing to do.</p>
<p>Yet such facts on the ground, however compelling, matter little in Brussels. What matters there is the open-borders ideology – and the consolidation and expansion of EU power. The Swiss vote, warned the <i>Telegraph, </i>was “likely to cause anger” among Eurocrats. Faiola noted<i> </i>that the vote had “brought threats of retaliation Monday from leaders across the continent.” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier sniffed that “Switzerland must realise that cherry picking with the EU is not a long-term strategy.” Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn vowed that the Swiss would face “consequences”: “You can&#8217;t have privileged access to the European internal market and on the other hand, dilute free circulation.” You would&#8217;ve thought that EU-Swiss relations have benefited only the Swiss all these years – that they&#8217;re the ungrateful beneficiaries of EU largesse. On the contrary, Switzerland contributes some $600 million a year to the EU budget and dutifully subjects itself to countless EU controls and directives, even though its voters long ago told the EU to take a hike.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not enough for the EU masters. They can&#8217;t stand that a rich country like Switzerland (Norway, too) isn&#8217;t fully within its grasp. And for Bern to withdraw itself from the EU&#8217;s clutches in the matter of immigration is more than the power-hungry men and women in Brussels can stand. “The message is clear today: free movement of people is a sacred right for the EU,” <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304104504579374541319660538?mg=reno64-wsj&amp;url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304104504579374541319660538.html%20">said</a> European Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde-Hansen.</p>
<p>Yes, “sacred.” How interesting to learn that <i>this, </i>of all things, is what&#8217;s “a sacred right for the EU.” We know, after all, that freedom of expression doesn&#8217;t make the cut: in 2006, the European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy (i.e. Flunky in Charge of EU-Arab Relations) told journalists that self-censorship for the sake of “mutual respect and understanding” between cultures was “a vital part of the fight against racism and xenophobia” and that freedom of expression doesn&#8217;t mean “the freedom to insult or offend”; in 2007, the EU made “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” punishable by up to three years behind bars; the EU&#8217;s 2007 Lisbon Treaty provides for automatic arrest and extradition of persons accused of racism and xenophobia.”</p>
<p>So, no, freedom of speech isn&#8217;t “sacred” in the EU. What&#8217;s “sacred” is the right of busloads of gypsies to cross into Switzerland and start gathering up goodies. What person in his right mind wants to belong to a congregation for which <i>this</i> is what&#8217;s holy? Good for Switzerland&#8217;s voters. More power to them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>A Gay-Rights Cave-In at Sochi?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/a-gay-rights-cave-in-at-sochi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-gay-rights-cave-in-at-sochi</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Feb 2014 05:58:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nigeria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Olympics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218686</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What happened to all that outrage?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/images2.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-218687" alt="images" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/images2.jpg" width="256" height="197" /></a>Over the last few months, while well-intentioned people around the Western world were protesting antigay actions by Russia, conditions for gay people in much of Africa were going from terrible to even worse. Last month, the president of Nigeria signed a law prescribing 14 years behind bars for individuals in same-sex marriages and up to ten years for members of gay organizations, and since then dozens of people have been arrested and gay-rights activists have gone into hiding. In the northern (which is to say Muslim) city of Bauchi, a gay man was whipped 20 times in a courtroom – a disappointment to the crowd outside, which wanted him to be stoned to death in accordance with sharia law. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, gays in Uganda are waiting to see if their president signs a bill that would imprison gays for life and punish gay-rights supporters with up to seven years in jail. Ivory Coast, which by African standards is relatively moderate on these issues, was nonetheless the site of antigay rallies in late January that culminated in a violent mob raid on a gay-rights group&#8217;s headquarters. On January 19, in an apparent effort to stem what seems to be a growing tide of antigay hysteria across the continent, famous Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina came out of the closet – making him, according to reports, the first high-profile black African ever to publicly identify as gay. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Scary stuff. Yet how many gay Americans, activist or otherwise, have gotten worked up about the human-rights situation for gay people in most of Africa? How many even know about it? Damn few. Instead, in recent months, the focus has been on Russia, with more than a few prominent Western gays worrying aloud that the Sochi Olympics would end up being the same kind of PR coup for the gay-hating Putin – in whose country it&#8217;s now effectively illegal for gay-rights activists to organize or speak out publicly – that the 1936 Berlin Olympics were for the the Jew-hating Hitler. Putin, wrote actor Stephen Fry last August in an ardent open letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron, “is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews.” Consequently, “an absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 on Sochi is simply essential&#8230;.At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.” Countless other Western luminaries concurred.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Now, I&#8217;m not suggesting that Putin&#8217;s antigay campaign, which has led to arrests, beatings, and murders, isn&#8217;t utterly despicable and deserving of the severest censure – it most surely is. But witnessing the massive, months-long display of Western fury over the treatment of gays in Russia, one couldn&#8217;t help noticing the contrast between this explosion of righteous anger and the almost total silence in the West about gays in Uganda, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone (where they&#8217;re subject to life imprisonment) and Mauritania, Sudan, and northern Nigeria (where they face the death penalty).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fry, to his credit, is actually one of the few prominent gays in the West who has paid attention to gays in Africa: last October, on a BBC program about the persecution of gays worldwide, Fry talked to a Ugandan girl who&#8217;d been raped at age 14 to “cure” her of lesbianism. But Fry is the exception that proves the rule. Why do almost all other Western gay-rights activists all but ignore the savagely antigay policies of Africa&#8217;s despotic regimes? At least part of the explanation seems clear. The despots are black – and, in many cases, Muslim as well – and the activists in question are almost invariably good little multiculturalists who know the rules: first, the white-skinned man must never, ever presume to give moral lectures to the dark-skinned man; second, Islam is above criticism.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And so we had the anti-Putin protests. Which were admissible under the guidelines of political correctness, because Russia is part of the West – sort of, anyway. And which, as I say, were a thoroughly legitimate response to a very real human-rights outrage. But now that the Winter Olympics are underway, there&#8217;s another question to be asked: namely, where have all those protesters gone? Where are the rallies? Where are the rainbow banners? Where are the defiant declarations from the winners&#8217; podium, now that it really matters?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“Leading up to the Olympics in Sochi,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/theedge/2014/02/10/274723954/so-far-at-the-games-a-low-key-response-to-russias-anti-gay-law">recalled</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> NPR on Monday, “a dominant storyline was Russia&#8217;s anti-gay propaganda law and what it might mean for athletes and other visitors. Would athletes protest in any way? Would Russian LGBT activists try to demonstrate against the propaganda law at the Olympics? The answers (so far, at least) are: barely, and not really.” A gay Olympics veteran told NPR that for a competitor to think about making any kind of protest at the end of his or her event “distracts you from your focus, and they don&#8217;t need to do that.” So much for what, a few short weeks ago, was being presented as the great human-rights crusade of our time.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The story was the same in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sydney Morning Herald. </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“Gay athletes in Sochi have so far been content to let their results do the talking – which suits the Australian Olympic Committee fine,” it </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.smh.com.au/sport/winter-olympics/competition-not-protests-over-gay-law-top-of-the-agenda-in-sochi-20140210-32czl.html">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on Monday. “By all means speak out,” said an AOC official, “but we don&#8217;t want any protests on the medal podium or on the field of play because that will disrupt the Games.” Gay athletes, he insisted, should “put gay rights at the back of their mind” and not let “gay rights get in the way of the job they have to do.” Gay Olympians agreed. “I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s a good idea to make protests here,” said an Austrian ski-jumper. “I know Russia will go and make the right steps in the future and we should give them time.” Didn&#8217;t Martin Luther King, Jr., say something like that?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">SMH </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">seemed to think that the Austrian ski-jumper had the right attitude, so, interestingly enough, did the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Guardian, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">which</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/feb/09/sochi-2014-patriotism-protest-russians-olympics">observed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on Sunday that the start of the games had marked a turn in “the tide of public opinion” (not just on the gay-rights front but on the lousy-security front, the disastrous-hotel-room front, and so on), resulting in “something of a backlash against the backlash.” The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Guardian</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, apparently, was more than okay with that. While noting</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">that gay-rights activists had been detained by cops in Red Square during the opening ceremonies, the British left&#8217;s flagship daily seemed to make a point of mentioning this incident in passing and of treating it dismissively – as if it were a minor bit of unpleasantness that certainly shouldn&#8217;t be allowed to spoil anybody&#8217;s fun. The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Guardian</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s report concluded with this bemusing statement: “These Olympics may not be rainbow-coloured, but they are not all black and white either.” Huh? Meaning what? That the fearless, speaking-truth-to-power </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Guardian </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">has suddenly decided it&#8217;s not a good idea, after all, to let an overweening concern about human rights blunt one&#8217;s ability to get excited about curling and luge?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Exactly what&#8217;s going on here? In the last few days, reading these and other peculiarly docile pieces in various left-leaning Western media – media which, until recently, could be fairly described as having been on the warpath over Putin&#8217;s assault on gays – one wondered whether some of that good old-fashioned Soviet-era Western-progressive “understanding” of Kremlin brutality had, all these years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, finally kicked back into gear. No, Russia is no longer officially Communist – but under Putin it&#8217;s close enough, perhaps, to set off the old acceptance, among leftist journalists and gay-left activists alike, of the need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. As for the American gay activists, at least one explanation for their apparent withdrawal from the Russia issue suggested itself: they needed to get back to the important work of harassing bakers who won&#8217;t make gay wedding cakes and photographers who won&#8217;t take pictures of gay weddings. With such solemn responsibilities, who has the time to stay focused on Putin&#8217;s crackdown on freedom – let alone care about gays in Africa who are being terrorized by cops and pummeled to pieces by sharia-crazed mobs?</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Heading Toward the EU Exit?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/heading-toward-the-eu-exit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=heading-toward-the-eu-exit</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2014 05:35:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Britain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[european union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eurosceptics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[exit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[netherlands]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.K.]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218581</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Promising news from both Britain and the Netherlands.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/z.hashemi20111224155640827.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218615" alt="z.hashemi20111224155640827" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/z.hashemi20111224155640827.jpg" width="270" height="180" /></a>On the European Union front, things are getting more and more promising. For years now, a majority of Brits have favored their country&#8217;s withdrawal from the EU, compelling Prime Minister David Cameron to promise a renegotation of the terms of UK membership and a referendum on the question of withdrawal after next year&#8217;s general election. In recent days, the Telegraph has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/10621168/Tell-us-why-you-support-Ukip.html" target="_blank">noted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that the rise in voter support for the UK Independence Party – which favors a quick EU exit – may well become “the political story of 2014”; meanwhile <em>Le Monde</em> </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2014/01/30/le-parti-europhobe-ukip-utilise-l-immigration-pour-bousculer-le-jeu-politique-anglais_4356821_3214.html" target="_blank">described</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the UKIP as having “the wind in its sails” (while characterizing its supporters, in a news story no less, as “irrational”). Observers suggest that the UKIP, in May elections to the European Parliament, may well win more votes than the Tories.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One sure measure of the UKIP&#8217;s success is that EU stalwarts are now taking it seriously – and making it an object of their usual brand of disinformation and demonization. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has referred to EU opponents as “brainless people who call themselves eurosceptics,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/457893/Ukip-s-a-threat-to-European-peace-say-the-Germans" target="_blank">warned</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the other day that when those Eurosceptics form parties “while Europe is in a crisis,” it “doesn’t make our work any easier.” (There&#8217;s a man who understands how democracy works!) The EU, insisted Steinmeier, has kept European countries from going to war with each other since 1945 – the usual baseless claim, which is now pretty much the only legitimate-sounding argument that pro-EU politicians have left. (After all, they can&#8217;t say, “Dissolving the EU would hurt my career.”)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, who has made no secret of her desire to see the EU become the United States of Europe, is so perturbed by Cameron&#8217;s actions that she </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10562740/David-Cameron-lying-to-British-voters-about-the-EU-and-immigration-Viviane-Reding-claims.html" target="_blank">accused</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> him recently of promoting “populist myths,” aligning with “populist movements,” and making “populist speech[es]” – the standard European-elite way of slamming politicians who actually listen to their constituents. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2556397/Britons-ignorant-EU-referendum-Top-official-says-debate-Europe-distorted-people-not-make-informed-decision.html" target="_blank">Speaking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in London on Monday, Reding loftily informed British voters that they&#8217;re too ill-informed about the EU to make a wise decision about EU membership: “The fact is that very often, I see a completely distorted truth being presented and then how do you want people to take an informed decision? They simply cannot.” (Why, by the way, is Reding such a fervent EU supporter? Could it have anything to do with the fact that she&#8217;s from Luxembourg, a country two-thirds the size of Rhode Island and with a population slightly larger than Fresno&#8217;s – meaning that without the EU, her political career would be toast?)</span></p>
<p>Euroskeptics aren&#8217;t just being maligned by a few European politicians. On the contrary, the superstate itself, in defiance of its own rules, is systematically – and clandestinely – targeting its critics. As the Telegraph <a title="" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9845442/EU-to-set-up-euro-election-troll-patrol-to-tackle-Eurosceptic-surge.html" target="_blank">reported</a> the other day, secret EU documents describe a planned “propaganda blitz” designed to counter Euroskepticism in the run-up to the EU elections. Millions of taxpayer dollars willl be spent to identify and monitor anti-EU blogs and other media and to post pro-EU comments – undercover, of course – to balance out the criticism with the message “that the answer to existing challenges&#8230; is &#8216;more Europe&#8217; not &#8216;less Europe.&#8217;”</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With shenanigans like this afoot, it&#8217;s no wonder that it&#8217;s not just Britain that may be headed toward the exit. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders&#8217;s Freedom Party – which, like the UKIP, has been steadily growing in public support in recent months – did something interesting: it commissioned a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.pvv.nl/images/Rapport_NExit_full_ENG.pdf" target="_blank">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by Capital Economics, a macroeconomics research firm in Britain, to determine what kind of economic impact the Netherlands would experience if it left the EU. The report, released on February 6, came to an unambiguous conclusion. Among the main points: eliminating EU overregulation in the Netherlands would “reduce the cost of doing business in the Netherlands by a minimum of €20 billion annually by 2035”; post-EU revisions in Dutch immigration policy would “reduce public expenditure by a minimum of €7.5 billion annually” by 2035; extra-European exports would climb; and macroeconomic cycles would be managed more effectively, resulting in €309 billion in added national income by 2035. Yes, there would be costs, but they&#8217;d be “modest and manageable.” Nor would banking stability or sovereign debt be imperiled.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In short, Dutch withdrawal from the EU (dubbed “NExit”) would represent “a long-term benefit to the Dutch economy and, more than likely, a short-term help in easing the Netherlands out of its current economic ills.” The Freedom Party succinctly summed up the impact NExit would have on Dutch households: “the Dutch economy will be 10 per cent bigger by 2024&#8230;.The average annual benefit is almost 10,000 euros per household over the next two decades.” Wilders himself commented that, at a time when the Dutch economy is stagnating, the report “shows that leaving the EU is our way out of the crisis.” Freed from Brussels, “the Dutch will be able to cut taxes and reduce VAT and excise duties. The Dutch will no longer have to ship their tax money to Greece and will be able to stop paying welfare benefits to Romanians and Bulgarians.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The report has had its critics. Mathijs Bouman, a classical liberal economist, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.z24.nl/ondernemen/mathijs-bouman-vreemde-veronderstellingen-in-wilders-eu-rapport-432536" target="_blank">finds</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it thorough and professional but strongly disputed many of its assumptions and conclusions. Then again, he&#8217;s a staunch champion of both the EU and the euro, so his response is hardly surprising. Yernaz Ramautarsing, the one-man anti-leftist juggernaut at the University of Amsterdam whom I </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-dutch-academy-vs-the-heretic/" target="_blank">wrote</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> about here in December and met with in Amsterdam earlier this month, told me that while the report “will not convince opponents,” it will “force them to be more concrete about their plans for Europe.” Yernaz&#8217;s concern is that while the EU is anti-capitalist and anti-individual rights, so are most members of national parliaments across Europe. The Freedom Party supports free markets at the EU level, Yernaz said, but it “fails to protect free markets on a national level.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fair enough. Still, I can&#8217;t help taking immense pleasure at these anti-EU developments in both Britain and the Netherlands – because it seems crystal clear to me that the absolute and total demise of the corruption-ridden, regulation-happy, power-hungry EU is the necessary first step toward a Europe in which politicians who actually heed voters&#8217; opinions aren&#8217;t reflexively smeared as low-life populists, in which sensible immigration policies aren&#8217;t routinely condemned from the bully pulpit in Brussels as unutterably racist, and in which the continent, from Cyprus to the Shetlands, isn&#8217;t ruled by remote, arrogant technocrats who view individual liberty as an antiquated concept and the democratic process as a hindrance to progress. </span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Doublethink in Norway</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/doublethink-in-norway/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=doublethink-in-norway</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/doublethink-in-norway/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 05:35:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamization]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Orwell]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218384</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's all about sharia law...except that it's not.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/norsk-flagg-islam.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218385" alt="norsk-flagg-islam" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/norsk-flagg-islam.jpg" width="271" height="208" /></a>These people! Over and over, they mock the idea that there exist such things as stealth Islamization and the appeasement thereof, and viciously demonize as bigots, racists, and Islamophobes those who speak frankly of such matters. And over and over, they engage in that very appeasement themselves.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Case in point: Norway. Let&#8217;s start by going back to 2009, when Siv Jensen, head of the Progress Party, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/Advarer-mot-muslimske--ghettoer-i-Oslo-5564982.html">used</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the term </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">snikislamisering – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“stealth Islamization” – in a speech at her party&#8217;s annual convention. Noting that even ambulance crews, firefighters, and police officers didn&#8217;t dare to enter certain parts of the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden, where sharia law has largely supplanted Swedish law, Jensen warned that there were already unsettling signs of similar developments in Oslo. As examples of stealth Islamization, she cited, among other things, the aggressive clamoring for the accommodation of hijab in the public square and demands for </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">halal</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> food in prisons. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The media and political establishment, of course, reacted with outrage. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/article2942062.ece">Pronouncing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it “quite simply untrue that any kind of Islamization of Norwegian society is underway,” Per Kristian Foss, a leading Conservative politician, compared Jensen&#8217;s attitude toward Islam to pre-World War II anti-Semitism. The editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">agreed: in an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/leder/article2942825.ece">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> headlined “Stealth Accusations,” they</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">accused her of “openly appeal[ing] to xenophobia and to the notion that minorities are taking power.” In the view of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s editors, the very idea of stealth Islamization was manifestly absurd.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cut to two years later. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people – and members of the cultural elite quckly grabbed the opportunity to pile on to the Progress Party and others who&#8217;d warned against Islam, saying that they&#8217;d helped create the mass murderer. Pushed against the wall, Jensen nonetheless </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.tv2.no/nyheter/innenriks/siv-jensen-vil-fremdeles-snakke-om-snikislamisering-3561457.html">vowed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that she would continue to use the term “stealth Islamization.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fast forward two more years. The September elections resulted in a Conservative-Progress Party coalition government – and worldwide scare headlines proclaiming that a bigoted, racist, Islamophobic party was about to become a partner in Norway&#8217;s government. Consequently, the Progress Party&#8217;s second-in-command, Ketil Solvik-Olsen, sought to publicly </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/norsk-politikk/artikkel.php?artid=10135127">distance</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the party from the expression “stealth Islamization,” a term he described as “unfortunate.” When the party&#8217;s top man in Oslo, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/Tybring-Gjedde-mener-snikislamisering-er-et-godt-og-aktuelt-ord-7314538.html">insisted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the term&#8217;s continuing usefulness (adding that he was opposed to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">every </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">kind of Islamization, “stealth or not stealth”), he was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1003/subcat1017/thread285605/">assailed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from almost every direction for using rhetoric that was “polarizing” and “anti-Muslim.” Among those who abhorred the term, it was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/valg-2013/artikkel.php?artid=10143778">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, were leaders of the Christian People&#8217;s Party, the home of Norway&#8217;s religious right, who view Muslims as fellow “people of faith” deserving of their support and protection.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">During all these years, while these controversies over the term “stealth Islamization” raged, stealth Islamization itself has proceeded apace. Recently, the Agriculture Minister, Sylvi Listhaug, a member of the Progress Party, expressed concern about the increasing tendency of Norwegian public institutions, such as day-care centers and hospitals, to remove pork from their menus. “We&#8217;ve been eating pork i Norway for years,” she said. “It would be totally wrong to stop because Muslims have come to Norway.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Enter, again, the sage editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten. </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/leder/Listhaugs-forfeilede-kamp-for-svinekjott-7454129.html">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the other day, they said that in places like prisons, pork was being given less priority “for practical reasons.” Which “practical reasons”? One might have expected that the editors would go on to acknowledge what those “reasons” were – especially given that immediately after mentioning the existence of those “practical reasons,” they asked directly: “What is this really about?”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the ensuing text contained no mention whatsoever of Muslims or Islam. Rather, the editors insisted that what&#8217;s important in the face of mass immigration is not the role of pork in Norwegian culture but “universal human values” such as equal rights and freedom of speech. (Although after the Danish cartoon crisis, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">was quick to insist on the importance of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">limiting </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">free speech in order to avoid offending immigrants.) Also, the editors emphasized that everyday Norwegian traditions, including eating habits, “are in constant flux,” as exemplified by twenty-first-century Norwegians&#8217; enthusiasm for such non-Scandinavian fare as pizza and tacos. Plus, they added, health authorities say pork isn&#8217;t that good for you anyway. And why, the editors asked, is the anti-regulatory Progress Party sticking its nose into the formulation of prison and day-care-center menus, anyway?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That, then, according to the editors of Norway&#8217;s newspaper of record, is what this story is “really about”: universal values, changing tastes, health considerations, and freedom of choice. Now, surely they know that what it&#8217;s </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">really </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“really about” is the Islamic teaching that pork is </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">haram – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and the Islamic compulsion to try to force infidels into living by Koranic restrictions as well. In short, stealth Islamization. And the editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">must know that their readers know that, too. So what to make of this editorial? Exactly what is the editors&#8217; rationale here? How do their minds work? I mean, it&#8217;s not just that </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s editors avoided the Islamic elephant in the room (that&#8217;s something we&#8217;ve seen hundreds of times); the relatively fresh twist here here is that they&#8217;re declaring, in effect, that there&#8217;s an elephant in the room – and then offering a list of pretty much everything that </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">isn&#8217;t </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">the elephant in the room.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I suggest that the answer may be this: that every editorial and op-ed like this in </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is yet another effort in a long-term campaign not just to encourage the appeasement of Islamization but, beyond that, to create a society in which pretty much everybody appeases Islamization </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">all the while denying</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, to others and even to themselves, that they&#8217;re doing anything of the kind. A society, in other words, that has reached a stage of pure Orwellianism by fully internalizing the process of doublethink, which, just to remind you, was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter1.3.html">described</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> as follows in the third chapter of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">1984:</i></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is there a single word of this passage that does not apply perfectly to what is going on in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">editorial? In the minds of that paper&#8217;s editors, the impulse to appease would seem to have become utterly reflexive – along with the ability to deny effectively, even to themselves, in precisely the way Orwell outlines, that they&#8217;re acting on such an impulse.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No question about it: Orwell was the prophet of our times. But did he ever imagine that Orwellianism would begin to take serious root in the West not as an outgrowth of European fascism and Communism but as a cowardly response to the religion of Muhammed? </span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Jerry Seinfeld, the Racist?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/jerry-seinfeld-the-racist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jerry-seinfeld-the-racist</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:29:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerry Seinfeld]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Male]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[An anti-PC thought-criminal is on the loose! ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218377" alt="121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top-450x336.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>How refreshing the sound of a top-flight celebrity fearlessly shrugging off the idiocy of political correctness! The other day, on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">CBS This Morning, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">an interviewer</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">pointed out to Jerry Seinfeld that most of the guests he&#8217;s had on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">his online series on which he has automotive tête-à-têtes with fellow practitioners of the stand-up art (and the occasional just-plain-funny person), have been white males. “Oh, this really pisses me off,” replied a bracingly honest Seinfeld, who plainly saw where his fatuous interlocutor was headed. After a bit of back and forth, the comic spelled out just how he feels about the application of this kind of absurd bean-counting to matters of entertainment: “People think it&#8217;s the census or something. Its got to represent the actual pie chart of America. Who cares?&#8230;I have no interest in gender or race&#8230;.It&#8217;s anti-comedy&#8230;It&#8217;s PC nonsense.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The attacks on Seinfeld for these purportedly insensitive remarks began materializing almost at once. A contributor to the Gawker website, who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://gawker.com/who-cares-about-diversity-in-comedy-says-jerry-seinf-1515412052">sneeringly</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> called Seinfeld a “maker of comedy for and about white people,” represented him as having indicated that he “isn&#8217;t interested in trying to include non-white anything in his work” and that in his view “any comedian who is not a white male is also not funny.” Having read the entire Gawker article, I strongly suspect that this characterization of Seinfeld, far from being deliberately deceitful, was in fact an honest reflection of the author&#8217;s utter inability to grasp the concept of colorblindedness. Charging Seinfeld with “downplaying the work” of all nonwhite comics, the man from Gawker made a point of demonstrating his own PC purity: comedy, he proclaimed, “should represent the entire pie chart of America, and the glorious, multicolored diversity pie should be thrown directly at Jerry Seinfeld&#8217;s face.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The funnyman also came under fire for a Canadian woman named Maya Roy, who, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/maya-roy/seinfeld-diversity-comments_b_4733365.html">writing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the Huffington Post under the headline “Seinfeld&#8217;s Racist Comments Make Him the Joke,” accused him of “whitewashing New York” in his 1990s sitcom – only to chide him, in her next breath, for featuring on various episodes of that show “heavily accented Chinese food delivery boys” and an “inept Pakistani entrepreneur, Babu Bhatt,” among others. To nonwhite viewers like herself, railed Roy, these nonwhite characters “only existed to make &#8216;whitey&#8217; feel superior.” She contrasted the nonwhites on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Seinfeld </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">with Indian-Canadian comic Russell Peters and Korean-American comic Margaret Cho, both of whom, exulted Roy, “use humour to mock racists and homophobes, and make life just a little more bearable for the rest of us.” (Yes, indeed, they are moral scolds, which is surely part of the reason why I, for one, find both of them excruciatingly unfunny.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Half a century ago, an America in which people don&#8217;t have an interest in gender or race was Martin Luther King&#8217;s dream – the vision around which Americans of every color, eager to see their country live out the meaning of its creed, rallied enthusiastically. Today that kind of thinking is condemned as bigotry. Today a sitcom that doesn&#8217;t seek to mirror the population pie chart risks being called out for racism or sexism. Today a show that permits itself to include black or Chinese or Pakistani characters who, far from being role models and pillars of virtue prove to be every bit as hapless, goofy, mendacious, and/or self-absorbed as the white characters is by definition guilty of hate speech. Today, according to the PC sentries at the gates of American culture, comedy should exist not to amuse us by (among other things) treating received opinions with indifference and even irreverence but, on the contrary, to promote The Proper Values, as determined by, well, people like Maya Roy and the man from Gawker. Its focus should be on chiding the evil souls who harbor prejudice and providing comfort and affirmation to the virtuous innocents who are the objects of that prejudice. In other words, comedy, in this age of victimhood, of group identity, and of ubiquitous therapy, should succor the victims, go out of its way to affirm the unconditionally positive contribution of minority groups (especially those favored by multicultural dogma) to the wonderful mosaic of American society; it should serve, without exception, a psychically healthful, wholesome, and therapeutic purpose, while of course never doing anything that might stand the remotest chance of hurting or offending those who have already (in the PC view) been hurt or offended too mightily.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Time Magazine – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">yes, it still exists – piled onto Seinfeld after his comments on CBS, running a piece in which one Lily Rothman (a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.lilyrothman.com/">self-identified</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> playwright and backpacker who studied at Yale and the Columbia School of Journalism) did her share of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://entertainment.time.com/2014/02/04/jerry-seinfeld-diversity/">tsk-tsking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> about “the homogeneity of [the] guests” on Jerry&#8217;s webseries – guests, mind you, who have ranged from Jay Leno to Howard Stern, from Carl Reiner to Colin Quinn. Ms. Rothman&#8217;s inability to view these performers as a remarkably diverse crew only serves as a salutary reminder that for some people, melanin would appear to be the only</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">measure of difference. Color, in short, is all. It&#8217;s this kind of illiberal thinking that once was recognized as a genuinely serious threat to true liberal values, and that today, in the corridors of American cultural power – including those at </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Time – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is, perversely, the very essence of what goes by the name of liberalism. Ms. Rothman concluded her harangue by expressing the hope that “public pressure” would force Seinfeld to enhance his show&#8217;s “diversity.” Not so many years ago such a sentiment would have been widely recognized as ignoble, despicable – indeed, totalitarian. No more.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If anything is striking about this incident, it&#8217;s not the attacks on Seinfeld – who only a few months ago, by the way, said on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">that his “Mount Rushmore” of stand-ups would consist of Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, and Don Rickles (two blacks, two whites). No, the attacks are just the usual multicultural claptrap. What was striking – and gratifying, and heartening – were Seinfeld&#8217;s original remarks about “PC nonsense” – which, considering that they came from a man who is still the top-earning comedian in the U.S., raised expectations that the growing impatience of influential cultural figures with the poisonous influence of political correctness may yet help bring an end to the madness.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Three Cheers for &#8216;Lilyhammer&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/three-cheers-for-lilyhammer/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=three-cheers-for-lilyhammer</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Feb 2014 05:40:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lilyhammer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netflix]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politically correct]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A frank, funny – and courageously critical – look at social-democratic Norway.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lilyhammer-510cd1aa91eda.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217888" alt="lilyhammer-510cd1aa91eda" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lilyhammer-510cd1aa91eda.jpg" width="291" height="195" /></a>It&#8217;s only a slight exaggeration to say that half of the comedy you see on Norwegian TV is anodyne whimsy about Norwegian dialects and the other half is P.C. mockery of the U.S. and/or of that most pro-American of all Norwegian political parties, the classical-liberal Progress Party. The very funny Norwegian-produced series </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">then, most of whose humor derives from parody of Norwegian social democracy – historically an almost </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">verboten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">comic target – as well as of the country&#8217;s manners and mores, is a remarkable departure. Our hero is New York mobster Frank Tagliano (played admirably by Steven van Zandt of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Sopranos </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and Bruce Springsteen&#8217;s E Street Band), who, after turning state&#8217;s evidence, asks the Witness Protection Program to relocate him in Lillehammer, Norway, because he remembers watching the 1994 Winter Olympics on TV and being impressed by the “clean air, fresh white snow, gorgeous broads&#8230;and best of all, nobody&#8217;s gonna be looking for me there.” The fact that most Norwegians actually can laugh at cutting satire at the expense of their own society was proven by the show&#8217;s massive domestic success: a fifth of the country&#8217;s population watched the first season when it debuted in early 2012. It also performed well internationally on Netflix, on which its second season is now available.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Frank&#8217;s life in Norway – where he goes by the name Giovanni (Johnny) Henriksen – amounts to a veritable introductory course in Norwegian culture and customs. He learns, for example, about </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">dugnad</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the “voluntary” sanitary and maintenance work that people who (for example) work in apartment buildings are more or less compelled to do for the common good. He discovers that thanks to Norway&#8217;s anal-retentive driving laws, his New York license isn&#8217;t valid and that it&#8217;ll take two months of tests – driving a stick-shift, no less – for him to get a Norwegian one (“All I want to do is drive a car, not the space shuttle”). He experiences the nightmare that is NAV, the maddeningly remote, rule-ridden Norwegian welfare and job-placement system, where he&#8217;s condescended to and discouraged in his efforts to open a nightclub. He&#8217;s introduced to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">hjemmebrent </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(moonshine), which, thanks to the staggeringly high prices at the government liquor monopoly, is far more widespread a phenomenon in Norway than in the U.S. Concerned about nocturnal vandals who&#8217;ve spray-painted his nightclub&#8217;s door, he hears about the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">natteraverne </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(“night ravens”), who, to his dismay, turn out not to be vigilantes but, rather, a gaggle of docile do-gooders, one of them a small, frail elderly woman, who walk the streets at night looking for troublemakers to engage in “dialogue.” (“Juvenile delinquents,” he sneers at one of these altruists, “are shaking in their boots tonight with you and grandma on the loose.”) He even spends a few days in a Norwegian prison, which he finds surprisingly cushy (“I should have been arrested a lot sooner!”) and where he and other inmates – and guards – are taught to play the recorder by a hippie lady. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the second season, Frank continues his education in Norwegian culture. Expanding his empire, he buys the local </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">asylmottak, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">or refugee center – where would-be immigrants, mostly from the Muslim world, live while awaiting the government&#8217;s decisions on their asylum applications. When his girlfriend gives birth to a twin daughter and son, he&#8217;s thrust into the company of a local </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">barnehage </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(day-care center) manager, who, to Frank&#8217;s visible distaste, puts on a Marxism-inspired puppet show for infants and toddlers about an imaginary country called “Muriburiland,” a socialist utopia where, he sings, there&#8217;s perfect solidarity and no such thing as profit. When the liquor supply at Frank&#8217;s nightclub runs low, he discovers to his surprise that the guy who smuggles booze for him is </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">sykemeldt –</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that, in other words, he&#8217;s gone on sick leave, that open-ended, well-nigh sacred official exemption from all responsibilities that is a cornerstone of Norwegian society. (“Are you crazy?” Frank counters, demanding that the guy get back to work. “There&#8217;s no Obamacare for a bootlegger!”) From beginning to end, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is brilliantly observed, gratifyingly gutsy, and consistently on-target satire that captures the textures and rhythms of Norwegian life with unerring wit and insight.</span></p>
<p>Watching this series, one keeps expecting that at some point or other the authors are going to slip up, or give in, and present something from a P.C. perspective, a temptation which has proven to be the ruination of virtually every Norwegian cultural artefact of our time. But it never happens. At every turn, Frank&#8217;s own can-do, take-charge, individualistic American (and mafioso) assumptions about the way the world works are challenged by Norwegian passivity, fatalism, groupthink – not to mention the ubiquitous, by-the-book statism. But he challenges Norway back – urging his phlegmatic new friends to make something out of themselves, to stop having “dialogue” about problems and actually do something, to snap out of their docile stupor and refuse to take crap. When a wolf kills somebody&#8217;s pet sheep, he urges the locals to follow him into the woods to wreak revenge: “Why are we sitting around talking when we should be killing this f&#8212;ing thing?” When a friend&#8217;s twelve-year-old son, Jonas, is smacked around by another boy and Frank hears the kids&#8217; teacher urging “dialogue,” he takes Jonas aside and explains how to fill a mitten with rocks. And after a male Muslim classmate in his orientation course for immigrants refuses to shake the female teacher&#8217;s hand (that would be <i>haram</i>), no one reacts except Frank, who slams the guy against a men&#8217;s room wall and says: “Hey, towelhead, listen, you might wrap your women like mummies back in Taliban country, but here we treat our broads with respect. <i>Comprende?</i>” Frank&#8217;s worldview – his pro-Americanism, his fierce anti-Communism, his admiration for Ronald Reagan, his contempt for welfare spongers – emerges in comic contexts but, in what may be a first for Norwegian television (or any Norwegian media today), these attitudes are presented not as ridiculous or reprehensible but as thoroughly reasonable.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">For a viewer familiar with the Norwegian media, it can seem almost beyond belief that this show was created by two Norwegians, Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin. (Most of the episodes are co-written by one or both of them, with van Zandt himself collaborating on the second-season scripts.) Repeatedly, they do things that go far beyond anything I&#8217;ve ever seen a Norwegian television show dare to do. Having a sympathetic character call a Muslim a “towelhead”? Inconceivable. (Frank&#8217;s comment when he sees Muslims out skating? “Al Qaeda on ice.”) No less edgy, in Norway, than the Islam material – which, among other things, offers American viewers a pretty clear picture of the degree to which that religion has made inroads into Scandinavian society – are the hints that at least some Norwegian men these days are, shall we say, more than a bit too</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">domesticated for their own good. When Frank&#8217;s girlfriend gets pregnant, the midwife turns out to be a rather wimpy male, while one of our protagonist&#8217;s new buddies is a pathetically browbeaten house hubby who&#8217;s taking several months of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">pappaperm </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(paternity leave) and whose disclosure that he&#8217;s had a vasectomy reveals that he is, indeed, both literally and figuratively castrated.   </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s no mystery why so many Norwegians love this show. Frank does things that many of them would surely love to do, and expresses views that they may well share but that they&#8217;ve probably never articulated, except perhaps over family dinner. After all, when you&#8217;re anxious about ever-rising crime rates but are at the mercy of public officials (and not a few fellow citizens) who are more worried about offending criminals than protecting victims, what could appeal to you more than a program in which the hero, wearing the uniform of a bleeding-heart </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">natteraver</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">,</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">no less, beats up a street punk who&#8217;s hit an old lady and, in reply to the incredulous brat&#8217;s question – “What kind of night ravens are you?” – growls back: “The kind you don&#8217;t want to f&#8211;k with”? In a country where a large percentage of the people are sick of seeing their tax money thrown at sub-Saharan dictators and perturbed by the rise of Islam in their own backyard, what could be more gratifying than a show whose leading character, appalled by the draft text of a kid&#8217;s May 17 (Constitution Day) speech, which oozes the usual Norwegian socialist-missionary sentiments about the need to remember Africa&#8217;s poor, rewrites it into a critique of backward immigrants who come to Norway just to commit street crimes and go on the dole?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Not that Frank, an immigrant himself, after all, is anti-immigrant </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">per se: </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">in one second-season episode, he meets a Somali man whose application for asylum in Norway has been rejected – but who, it turns out, is a terrific cook who would be a major asset to Frank&#8217;s nightclub. The show vividly contrasts the way in which this man is treated by the Norwegian immigration authorities – who, seemingly indifferent to questions of professional aptitude or excellence of character, don&#8217;t give a damn that he&#8217;s a decent, hardworking guy with a highly marketable skill who could contribute to Norway rather than sucking on its teat – with his treatment by Frank, who, upon meeting the man, recognizes immediately an opportunity to help someone else out while doing himself a good turn at the same time. Naturally, Frank finds a way to arrange for the Somali chef to stay in Norway and work for him – thus winning his instant affection and loyalty. The whole episode amounts to a beautiful fable about how much better things could be in Norway if the government approached immigration issues in a more commonsensically human and less robotically bureaucratic manner. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of course, Frank isn&#8217;t just a true-blue individualistic American – he&#8217;s a gangster who&#8217;s used to greasing palms and breaking legs to get his way, and part of his frustration with Norway is that all too many of the functionaries he runs across just aren&#8217;t corrupt like their counterparts back in New York (although virtually all of them prove to be corruptible). But the most important thing about Frank&#8217;s status as a mafioso, for Norwegian viewers, is that it makes </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">revolutionary in a very special way. Meaning what? Simply this: in Norway, as in other social-democratic countries, the lesson drawn from American gangster movies like </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Godfather </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">has long been that the U.S. is a country of cutthroat, kill-or-be-killed capitalism in which it&#8217;s impossible to be successful without being a crook. For Scandinavian social democrats, the very existence of the Mafia is viewed as definitive proof of the essentially corrupt nature of America (never mind that the Cosa Nostra is a Sicilian import); indeed, the don, the capo, is the American writ large. Repeatedly, and, it seems, deliberately, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> overturns this notion, suggesting that far more than America, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Norway </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is a country in which you have to operate outside the law if you want to make it big. As </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">demonstrates, the barriers put up by the Norwegian system to aspiring entrepreneurs are many and formidable; for bar owners like Frank, the road is an especially tough one, not least because they&#8217;re obliged to buy liquor from the government at retail prices and are therefore stuck with minuscule profit margins – unless, of course, like Frank, they manage to arrange alternative means of acquiring alcoholic beverages in bulk.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It took me a while to figure out precisely what was so touching for me about </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer.</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> It&#8217;s this: despite the reflexive anti-Americanism of the Norwegian media establishment, professoriate, political elite, state bureaucrats, NGO operatives, and certain public-sector types (such as that day-care utopianist), who warn routinely against the increasing introduction into Norway of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">amerikanske tilstander </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(American conditions), Norway, like many of its Western European neighbors, is in fact a highly Americanized society – and most ordinary Norwegians happen to like it that way. In one second-season episode, the day-care Commie rants in a familiar way about Americanization, to which a young sweet-faced pedagogue says, quite simply, “I like America.” It&#8217;s a strangely moving declaration, and it&#8217;s faithful to the reality of everyday Norwegian life. Norwegians </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">like </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">America. Most of the music, movies, and TV shows that make up their lives comes from America. From earliest childhood, they have an attachment to America whose intensity is beyond measuring. (I need only look to my four-year-old Norwegian nephew, whose entire world is currently centered on the movie </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cars </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and its sequels, spinoffs, and merchandising.) </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is a product of that attachment. And it&#8217;s more: though it becomes clear early in the series that the show is an homage to American crime drama (with plentiful, and wonderfully witty, allusions to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Godfather, Goodfellas, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and other such films), one eventually realizes that in addition to being a brilliantly observed, gratifyingly gutsy, consistently on-target satire that captures the textures and rhythms of Norwegian life with unerring wit, it&#8217;s also a salute to America  – a grateful acknowledgment of the huge place that American cultural products have in Norwegian lives, and a thumbs-up to American optimism and ambition, to the American impatience with institutions and suspicion of government, and to the American respect for people who contribute to society and do things their own way. This series is, beyond question, the work of people who have done it their own way – and in doing so have at once paid a splendid tribute to America&#8217;s culture and made a splendid contribution to Norway&#8217;s. </span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>An American Tragedy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/an-american-tragedy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-american-tragedy</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Jan 2014 05:49:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Blackwater]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Civilian Warriors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[contractor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Erik Prince]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A personal account of the rise and fall of Blackwater.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ht_civilian_warriors_ll_131115_4x3t_384.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217300" alt="ht_civilian_warriors_ll_131115_4x3t_384" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ht_civilian_warriors_ll_131115_4x3t_384.jpg" width="269" height="202" /></a>In his fascinating new memoir, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Civilian Warriors, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Erik Prince – founder of Blackwater, the security firm that became world-famous for its pivotal role in the “war on terror” – tackles head-on the claim, often voiced by critics of his company, that the involvement of private military contractors (PMCs) in an American war is a radical and morally questionable departure from national tradition. On the contrary, argues Prince, Christopher Columbus, like Prince himself, was a PMC – an Italian who led his own military force under contract to Spain. Prince takes us to Lafayette Square, near the White House, where statues pay tribute to four Revolutionary War heroes – Kosciuszko, Steuben, Lafayette, and Rochambeau – all PMCs. Prince notes that John Smith, founder of Jamestown, and the Plymouth Company, of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Mayflower </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">fame, would today also be classified as PMCs – as would Miles Standish, “a military contractor hired by the Pilgrims to lead the defense of the colony.” George Washington himself, Prince reminds us, “volunteered to personally fund a military force to battle the British if the Continental Congress failed to create a standing army.” During both the Revolution and the War of 1812, American privateers were officially authorized to attack British vessels; during the Civil War, Lincoln hired the Pinkerton Agency to set up an domestic intelligence network; before U.S. entry into World War I, American aviators belonging to the Lafayette Escadrille fought alongside French flyers; before Pearl Harbor, retired U.S. Army captain Chaire Chennault formed a private air force to help defend China from the Japanese. When Blackwater contractors first went to Afghanistan in 2002, then, “we became part of a deeply rooted American tradition: private business supplying logistical, intelligence, and military support services that the government can&#8217;t provide on its own.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That wasn&#8217;t how Blackwater&#8217;s critics saw it, of course. To Jeremy Scahill, author of a vicious 2007 book about the firm, Blackwater was “the frightening new face of the U.S. war machine.” For its enemies, no rhetoric about Blackwater was over the top: it was the very embodiment of malevolence and secretiveness, a shadowy and coldly destructive force that operated beyond the law and beyond all civilized considerations, routinely carrying out with utter impunity the dark designs of its evil masters in the Bush White House.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The company Prince recalls in this book (he sold it in 2010, and it now goes by the name Academi) cannot be recognized in the fevered descriptions that filled the media a decade ago. As he tells it, the founding of Blackwater is a classic American story: Prince, the son of a Michigan auto-parts manufacturer whose hard work and enterprising spirit took him from rags to riches, was a patriotic kid who became a Navy SEAL but who – recoiling at the military&#8217;s bureaucratic inefficiency and recognizing that base closings under Clinton had created a need for a world-class private military training center – left the Navy, bought a few square miles of North Carolina swampland, and built the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, which opened in 1998. The timing was perfect: after Columbine, in 1999, cops from around the U.S. went to Blackwater&#8217;s training center to learn how to respond to school shootings; after the USS Cole attack, in 2000, thousands of sailors were sent there to prepare for terrorist attacks. Then came 9/11, after which Blackwater grew quickly from a domestic training facility into a provider of security, intelligence, and other services in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. His dad&#8217;s “Big Three” clients had been GM, Ford, and Chrysler; Prince&#8217;s were the CIA and the Departments of Defense and State.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One reason why Blackwater grew so fast was that it was a privately held company whose owner&#8217;s can-do, no-nonsense approach and contempt for sclerotic bureaucracy were hard-wired into its day-to-day operations. Major operations could be arranged quickly, and with a minimum of fuss or paperwork, by means of a single phone call to the boss himself. Another reason why the firm grew so fast was that its clients soon learned that it was eminently reliable – it delivered on what it promised. Over the years, Blackwater carried out some fifty thousand security missions, many of them in the most dangerous imaginable circumstances, and while many of its men did lose their lives, not a single one of the people they had been hired to protect was ever so much as seriously injured. It is a remarkable record. When Benizir Bhutto was planning to return to Pakistan from exile in 2007, she wanted Blackwater to provide her security, but the request was vetoed by President Musharraf, who felt that using a private firm would be an insult to the Pakistani military. Bhutto, of course, ended up being assassinated; it&#8217;s hard not to believe that if she&#8217;d been in Blackwater&#8217;s care she&#8217;d still be alive today. And what about Benghazi? Prince himself recently told </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">National</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Review</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that he knows Blackwater could&#8217;ve saved Ambassador Christopher Stephens.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But Blackwater wasn&#8217;t there to save Stephens – or anyone – because Blackwater had already been destroyed. Its enemies in Afghanistan and Iran could not take it down with all the firepower at their disposal, but its enemies on the home front ended up annihilating it with a tsunami of bad press. Why did they hate it so much? Part of the answer is that Blackwater provided the ideal target for politicians and others on the left who despised the war but who knew that they couldn&#8217;t get away with criticizing American troops. Blackwater&#8217;s men were Americans, and they were putting their lives on the line in a war zone, but because they weren&#8217;t members of the uniformed military, they could freely be derided as mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, murderers for hire. Disgracefully, many higher-ups in the Departments of Defense and State, who knew very well that Blackwater was doing nothing other than following their own orders and keeping them safe, and who should&#8217;ve therefore been quick to defend the firm from unfair charges, found it convenient to let the company serve as a lightning rod, taking all the flak that otherwise might be directed at them. Prince, for his part, was obliged to sit silently by while politicians and the media spread lies, because confidentiality agreements barred him from revealing information that would have proven their accusations false.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The picture that emerges in this book, then, is one of a company that not only did its job splendidly but routinely pitched in during emergencies for which its services had never been formally contracted (and for which it never asked to be compensated) – but that was brought down by cynical and dishonorable politicians, journalists, government officials, and military bureaucrats who were not fit to polish most Blackwater contractors&#8217; boots. Prince&#8217;s accounts of his critics&#8217; opportunism and mendacity are countered by stirring stories of his own men&#8217;s selfless heroism – stories which go a long way toward convincing the reader that the firm was indeed, at bottom, far less about profit than about old-fashioned service to country. One such story concerns Poland&#8217;s ambassador to Iraq, Edward Pietrzyk, who, along with his Polish security team, was riding in a convoy in Baghdad when three terrorist bombs destroyed their vehicles and wounded them all seriously. Blackwater, which had no official responsibility in the matter, sent in helicopters at once and rushed the victims to safety. In his statement about the incident, Poland&#8217;s foreign minister didn&#8217;t mince words: Blackwater&#8217;s men had “undoubtedly saved the lives” of Pietryzk and his team. Although Prince&#8217;s contractors were ineligible for U.S. military medals, the Blackwater men who risked their lives to save Pietryzk were awarded Silver Stars by the Polish government – the first time it had accorded such an honor to non-Poles since World War II.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The history of Blackwater is a twenty-first-century American story of the first importance, rich in cautionary lessons about the times in which we live. It is a story about the best of America being torn down by the worst of America, about the relentless punishment of the noble and competent by the petty and incompetent, about the chilling power and treachery of the mainstream media, about the defeat of the entrepreneurial spirit by that decadent, dehumanizing, and destructive thing, big-government (and military) bureaucracy, and about the truly lethal nature of the pernicious poison that is left-wing anti-American ideology. What a sad commentary it is on the political developments of the post-9/11 era that Erik Prince now lives in Abu Dhabi and says that, despite his deep concern in recent years about America&#8217;s inept diplomacy, its betrayal of its allies, and the unrestrained growth of its government, he intends, “for now” at least, to remain a U.S. citizen. Like Blackwater itself, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Civilian Warriors </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is an act of service to the country that Prince loved and served admirably – and that showed its gratitude by kicking him in the teeth.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Lying about Norway&#8217;s Progress Party</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/lying-about-norways-progress-party/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lying-about-norways-progress-party</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Jan 2014 05:20:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[appointment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George Tsunis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mccain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progress Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217284</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's insulting ambassadorial appointment to Norway. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/81955ab4-1d01-46c0-82e1-37b988a7a89d_tsunis.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217285" alt="81955ab4-1d01-46c0-82e1-37b988a7a89d_tsunis" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/81955ab4-1d01-46c0-82e1-37b988a7a89d_tsunis-426x350.png" width="298" height="245" /></a>The date: January 16. The place: the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations are interviewing the three individuals who have been appointed by President Obama as his new ambassadors to Norway, Iceland, and Hungary. All three, in the opening statements and in their answers to questions, roll out Fun Facts about the countries to which they are to be posted. Some of these facts are read off of crib notes; others are obviously the result of recent cramming for this occasion. It very quickly becomes clear that, despite their palpably strenuous efforts to project expertise, none of these three appointees really knows anything about the countries that they are talking about. At times, indeed, they sound frighteningly reminiscent of that Miss South Carolina contestant in the Miss Teen USA pageant a few years back, who, when asked why many Americans can&#8217;t locate the U.S. on a world map, produced many of the right kinds of words but strung them together in a way that make no grammatical sense and conveyed nothing resembling a fact or opinion. Easily the worst of the three appointees facing the Senate committee is George Tsunis, the CEO of the company that owns the Hilton, Marriott, and Intercontinental hotel chains, and the prospective ambassador to Norway, a country in which, he admits, he has never set foot.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To be sure, Tsunis&#8217;s appearance starts out promisingly enough. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York gives him an effusive introduction, describing him as a good friend who, out of his extraordinary patriotism, has agreed to serve his country in the role of ambassador, a position to which he is eminently suited and to which he will bring a range of extraordinary talents. Yet from the moment Tsunis opens his mouth he starts putting his foot in it. He refers to an unspecified “former president” of Norway – a position that does not, in fact, exist, since Norway is a kingdom, not a republic. In answer to one senator&#8217;s question, Tsunis starts spouting out data about Norway, but utterly fails to shape it into anything resembling a sensible answer to the actual question. At around the one-hour mark in </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/nomination-01-16-2014">this video</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, his questioner rescues him from his own incoherent babble, to which Tsunis replies: “Thank you for that save.” The “save,” however, proves to be in vain, because a few moments later, in answer to another question, Tsunis again begins to make absolutely no sense, and when he trails off with the enigmatic words “it&#8217;s important that we continue&#8230;interesting&#8230;,” his interlocutor is obliged to rescue him once again.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the best, or worst, it turns out, is yet to come. Now it is Senator John McCain&#8217;s turn to pose a question or two. “Mr. Tsunis, following last year&#8217;s parliamentary elections,” says McCain, “Norway&#8217;s Conservative Party now head a center-right coalition, as you know, that includes an anti-immigration party called the Progress Party. What do you think the appeal of the Progress Party was to Norwegian voters?” Tsunis, calling this “a seminal question” (“seminal” being in his view, apparently, a fancy word for “important”), explains that in “open,” “transparent,” and “democratic” societies like Norway “you get some fringe elements that have a microphone, that spew their hatred. And, although I will tell you Norway has been very quick to denounce them. We&#8217;re going to continue to work with Norway to make sure – ” At which point McCain interrupts Tsunis to point out that the Norwegian government has not denounced the Progress Party, because that party, far from being a “fringe” phenomenon, is, in fact – </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">as McCain mentioned in his question – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">a part of the government. (Indeed, the head of the Progress Party, Siv Jensen, is Norway&#8217;s Finance Minister, and another party member is Minister of Justice.) In response to McCain&#8217;s correction, Tsunis says: “I stand corrected. The – uh, I stand corrected. I would like to leave my answer at…it’s a very, very open society and that most Norwegians, the overwhelming amount of Norwegians, and the overwhelming amount of people in parliament, don’t feel the same way.” After which McCain says, his words dripping with sarcasm: “I have no more questions for this incredibly highly qualified group of nominees.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yes, I know: subpar ambassadors, nominated to their posts solely because they have donated large sums of money to an incumbent&#8217;s election campaign, are an old story, and the practice is not confined to either party. But the kind of incompetence demonstrated by </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">tsuris –</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> sorry, Tsunis – seems particularly characteristic of this presidency, reflective of Obama&#8217;s by-now familiar readiness to insult and offend our staunchest allies while bowing and scraping to our enemies. But what Tsunis proved during that hearing was not just that he is incompetent but that he has no hesitation to demonize people about whom he knows nothing. He hears the words “anti-immigration” and, like a schoolchild venturing a total guess on  a multiple-choice test, spits back an answer that he presumably figures is likely to be in the right ballpark, to wit: “anti-immigration equals bad.” A more honest and responsible-minded candidate would have admitted that he didn&#8217;t know the first thing about the Progress Party. But not Tsunis, who chose instead to fake his way through the whole show, lying and guessing and making things up and talking out the clock with empty words. It&#8217;s not just incredibly ignorant; it&#8217;s disgracefully, inexcusably irresponsible.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There&#8217;s yet another significant factor here, however. One imagines that Tsunis has spent at least a few hours in recent weeks reading material about Norway provided to him by the administration and being briefed by people who actually know something about the subject. It seems probable that the recent Norwegian elections, and the name of the Progress Party, have come up somewhere along the line, and that Tsunis, while somehow forgetting that the party is part of the current governing coalition, managed to remember that, in the eyes of his friends at the White House and State Department, it is basically a gang of hate-spewing bigots. And the fact is that while it is profoundly inappropriate, of course, for any American diplomat, let alone an ambassador to Norway, to publicly characterize the Progress Party in the kind of terms used by Tsunis, Tsunis&#8217;s answer to McCain&#8217;s question was actually an almost perfect summation of the received view of the Progress Party among the Democratic establishment in the United States.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Witness, for example, an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/world/europe/anti-immigrant-party-norway.html?hp&amp;_r=0">article</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that appeared in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">on January 24, in which Steven Erlenger professed to explain what the Progress Party is all about and to account for its electoral success. The clear, if unspoken, premise of the article was that Norway&#8217;s socialist establishment is the embodiment of all good democratic values, while the Progress Party represents an at least quasi-fascist challenge thereto. Erlanger, to his credit, did provide a brief quotation or two from an actual Progress Party member, but his chief source of “information” about the party was Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a social anthropologist at the University of Oslo. What Erlenger did not tell his readers was that Hylland Eriksen not only is one of the Progress Party&#8217;s fiercest enemies but also, after the July 22, 2011, terrorist attacks by Anders Behring Breivik, was one of the leaders of a cynical, well-nigh totalitarian campaign to link Breivik&#8217;s acts to the Progress Party and to all domestic critics of Islam – and thereby crush the party and silence the critics.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Part of the record of this nefarious effort is contained in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s own archives: only six days after Breivik&#8217;s atrocities, the Gray Lady ran an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/Gaarder-Eriksen.html">op-e</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">d, co-authored by Hylland Eriksen and notorious </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article1411153.ece">anti-Semitic</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> novelist Jostein Gaarder, in which they sought to convince American readers that Breivik was a product of the Progress Party and of various Islam critics, including yours truly. A month to the day after the terrorist acts, on August 22, 2011, Hylland Eriksen and three co-authors called in an </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article4205167.ece">op-ed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for tighter limits on free speech in Norway. “Certain hateful utterances,” they argued, “are legally and morally unacceptable&#8230;.Neither freedom of speech or the right to express oneself are absolute in any existing human society&#8230;.it is not a human right to express oneself in public.” Hylland Eriksen and his colleagues mocked “free speech absolutism,” rejected the United States (“the country in the world that goes the furthest in protecting the right to expression”) as a “role model,” complained that “the limits to hateful speech” had been “stretched very far” in Norway in recent years, and argued that this lack of speech restrictions had been a key factor in Breivik&#8217;s formation. In short, the undemocratic tendencies on the Norwegian political scene in recent years have not been headquartered in the Progress Party – they have been headquartered on the left, highly placed politicians, academics, journalists, and cultural figures who, in the wake of a national tragedy, did their best to crush freedom of speech and destroy their ideological adversaries.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The other day, then, when George Tsunis casually smeared the Progress Party in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it was perhaps not entirely a product of ignorance. Bring up Norway in private conversation in progressive circles in the United States and it will not be long before you hear precisely the kind of defamatory language about the Progress Party that Tsunis served up during that hearing – and that Hylland Eriksen, before him, proffered in his mischievous </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">op-eds. Chatting about Norway with Democrats in the U.S., or reading about the subject in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">or </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Post, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">you would never know that the Progress Party is actually the closest party in Norway to the U.S. political center; that it is by far the most pro-American and pro-Israeli of major Norwegian political parties; and that, yes, it is the only party in Norway that speaks in a remotely frank and responsible way about the dangers inherent in Islam. Yet, thanks in large part to credulous and left-leaning American reporters and editors who are prepared to believe anything that a Thomas Hylland Eriksen tells them, the Progress Party has been consistently disparaged and demeaned, libeled and lied about in the U.S. media and throughout the American left. In the final analysis, George Tsunis&#8217;s sorry display in Washington last week was only a footnote to this long, despicable record of slander.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Saving Islam from Its Victims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/saving-islam-from-its-victims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=saving-islam-from-its-victims</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jan 2014 05:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Do Muslim Women Need Saving?]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gender apartheid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lila Abu-Lughod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216864</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Lila Abu-Lughod doesn't want you to care about the oppression of Muslim women.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/sharia.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-217013" alt="sharia" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/sharia.jpg" width="300" height="208" /></a>Lila Abu-Lughod received her Ph.D. from Harvard, has taught at Williams, Princeton, and NYU, and now boasts the title of Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, where she teaches anthropology and Women&#8217;s Studies and is considered an expert on the Arab world. Born and raised in the United States, she&#8217;s the daughter of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, whose buddy Edward Said once described him as “Palestine&#8217;s foremost academic and intellectual.” She&#8217;s also the author of a book, <i>Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, </i>which was published last year by Harvard University Press, and which I first became aware of via an excerpt in the <i>Daily Beast </i>and a <a href="http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/01/do-muslim-women-need-saving/">piece</a> by Abu-Lughod, also entitled “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?”, that appeared in <i>Time </i>Magazine.</p>
<p>The thrust of both these articles is that we in the West who think Muslim women are oppressed have been misinformed. Yes, Abu-Lughod acknowledges, Islamic culture has its demerits – but hey, so does every culture. Also, she argues, women in the Islamic world are a varied crew, ranging from prime ministers to peasants, so there are plenty who don&#8217;t fit the West&#8217;s stereotypes. What to say about these rhetorical ploys except that they could be used to challenge <i>any </i>criticism of just about anything or anyone? (You could defend Nazi Germany against charges of anti-Semitism in precisely the same way that Abu-Lughod defends Islam against charges of oppressing women: “Admittedly, Hitler was horrible, but which national leader has ever been beyond criticism? True, some Jews suffered under Hitler, but anti-Semitism has been a very serious problem in many societies.”)</p>
<p>Then there&#8217;s this, from Abu-Lughod&#8217;s <i>Time </i>piece:</p>
<blockquote><p>A language of rights cannot really capture the complications of lives actually lived. If we were to consider the quandaries of a young woman in rural Egypt as she tries to make choices about who to marry or how she will make a good life for her children in trying circumstances, perhaps we would realize that we all work within constraints. It does not do justice to anyone to view her life only in terms of rights or that loaded term, freedom. These are not the terms in which we understand our own lives, born into families we did not choose, finding our way into what might fulfill us in life, constrained by failing economies, subject to the consumer capitalism, and making moral mistakes we must live with.</p></blockquote>
<p>To rescue Islam, in short, Abu-Lughod is prepared to jettison the very concepts of “rights” and “freedom.” (Yet while she&#8217;s uncomfortable with these supposedly overgeneralizing and “loaded” terms, she has no trouble invoking “consumer capitalism.”) Then there&#8217;s this: “Representing Muslim women as abused makes us forget the violence and oppression in our own midst.” Um, no, it doesn&#8217;t. (Note that this argument is kind of a twist on Matthew 7:3: “Why art thou paying any attention whatsoever to the beam in the Muslim world&#8217;s eye, when thou shouldst instead be entirely preoccupied with the mote in the eye of the West?”) And this: “Ultimately, saving Muslim women allows us to ignore the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated and creates a polarization that places feminism only on the side of the West.” In other words, she&#8217;s more interested in rescuing multiculturalism than in rescuing women.</p>
<p>In both her <i>Daily Beast </i>and <i>Time </i>articles, Abu-Lughod foregrounds her credentials: she&#8217;s an anthropologist who&#8217;s been intimately acquainted with the Arab world, and especially the lives of Arab women, for twenty years. This being the case, she surely knows very well about the systematic inequality of women under Islam, about Muslim patriarchy, and about forced marriage. She knows how common domestic violence is in Muslim homes. She knows, in short, that every day millions of Muslim women endure suffering rooted in the Koran and in Muslim tradition. But instead of using her knowledge to try to help improve those women&#8217;s lives, she uses her rhetorical skills to dance around the truth – dodging, deflecting, doing whatever it takes to uphold the stunningly callous and patently dishonest proposition that Muslim women don&#8217;t need saving.</p>
<p>I was curious to see how Abu-Lughod managed to keep this dance going at book length, and so I secured a copy of <i>Do Muslim Women Need Saving? </i>It proved to be a masterpiece of sheer disingenuousness. Are innumerable girls in the Muslim world denied education altogether, while countless others attend windowless, prison-like madrasses where they learn about nothing but the Koran? Never mind: Abu-Lughod is here to tell us that “education for girls and Islam are not at odds.” Do men across the Muslim world exercise unconditional power over the women in their lives, forcing their daughters to marry and ordering the execution of their wives? Never mind: Abu-Lughod is here to assure us that “it is not so easy to talk about &#8216;patriarchy&#8217; or to put one&#8217;s finger on how power works.”</p>
<p>She draws our attention to a number of books with titles like <i>A True Story of Life behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia; Sold: One Woman&#8217;s True Account of Modern Slavery; My Forbidden Face; Without Mercy; Buried Alive; </i>and <i>Married by Force.  </i>They tell true stories about veiling, forced marriage, and so on. Abu-Lughod is out to bury them. Think that their authors are acting out of compassion for oppressed Muslim women? Think again: Abu-Lughod is here to explain that these authors are “self-righteous,” “smugly superior” do-gooders who, by representing Muslim women as powerless, are being condescending, treating them “as mute garbage bags,” representing them as human pawns without “agency.” Far from having noble motives, these authors are just out to make a buck, to “accrue moral capital,” and to make a name for themselves as “beacon[s] of humanitarianism.” Forget the horrific stories these books tell about women&#8217;s lives under Islam: Abu-Lughod mocks them all for following the same “script.” (Even Hirsi Ali&#8217;s own life story, as told in her memoir <i>Infidel,</i> she charges, is “made to follow the script.”) The stories, Abu-Lughod charges, are “sordid,” “pornographic,” “sensational.” Well, yes, because the reality they describe is sordid, pornographic, and sensational; yet what appalls Abu-Lughod isn&#8217;t the reality but these authors&#8217; determination to expose it.</p>
<p>In contrast to those “sensational” authors, Abu-Lughod wants us to see her – with her appreciation for the complexities of Muslim society, and her ability to recognize the ways in which Muslim women, while perhaps looking oppressed when viewed through Western eyes, are in fact highly empowered – as the one who&#8217;s <i>truly </i>concerned about, and respectful for, Muslim women. She is, she assures us, too well informed “to be satisfied with sweeping generalizations about cultures, religions, or regions.” She is “more drawn to the detail and empathy of the novelist than to the bold strokes of the polemicist.”</p>
<p>Well, I can&#8217;t argue with that: no question about it, this woman is in the business of fiction. Make the most straightforward statement of fact about Islam&#8217;s oppression of women and she&#8217;ll point out that Islam isn&#8217;t the only religion that&#8217;s “built on the premise that people do not fully control what happens to them.” As for secularism, what&#8217;s so great about it? After all, it “has not brought women&#8217;s freedom or equality in the West.” Besides, what do words like “freedom” and “oppression” really mean, anyway? Everyday life “is rarely a case of being free or oppressed, choosing or being forced.” And while we&#8217;re at it, forget the idea of universal rights: “Can there be a liberation that is Islamic? Does the idea of liberation&#8230;capture the goals for which all women strive? Are emancipation, equality, and rights part of a universal language or just a particular dialect?” To drive the point home, Abu-Lughod tells us about her Palestinian aunt who&#8217;s oppressed not by Islam but by – guess who? – <i>Israel, </i>and whose love for the Koran is the only thing that keeps her going. So there! In the lives of women like her aunt, “terms like oppression, choice, and freedom” are “blunt instruments for capturing the dynamics and quality of their lives.</p>
<p>What about honor killing? Abu-Lughod&#8217;s criticism isn&#8217;t directed at the practice itself but at “the unsavory politics of [the Western] conception of honor crimes,” which fails to appreciate the profound “moral code” of communities that pride themselves on their “commitment to honor.” Even to use the term “honor killing,” she says, is to stigmatize such communities while embracing “a comforting phantasm that empowers the West and those who identify with it.” She&#8217;s drawn up a whole list of reasons why talking about honor crimes is a bad thing:</p>
<blockquote><p>First, it simplifies morality and distorts the kinds of relations between men and women that exist in societies where honor is a central value. Second, defining honor crimes as a unique cultural form too neatly divides civilized from uncivilized societies, the West and the rest. Third, the obsession with honor crimes erases completely the modern state institutions and techniques of governance that are integral to both the incidence of violence and the category by which they are understood. Finally, thinking about honor crimes seems to be a sort of “antipolitics machine” that blinds us to the existence of social transformations and political conflict.</p></blockquote>
<p>As consistently as she defends Islam, Abu-Lughod slams the West. Might learning about Islam help us to understand 9/11? Nonsense! Real understanding lies in a study of the history of Western colonialism and American imperialism. Also, why don&#8217;t we Westerners grasp that women throwing off their burkas in Afghanistan would be like “wear[ing] shorts to the Metropolitan Opera”? Quoth Abu-Lughod: “If we think that U.S. women live in a world of choice regarding clothing, we might also remind ourselves of the expression, &#8216;the tyranny of fashion.&#8217;” (Let&#8217;s not forget that tragic story about the U.S. fashion police who wouldn&#8217;t let girls flee a burning school because they weren&#8217;t wearing Vera Wang.)</p>
<p>One way in which Abu-Lughod trivializes the oppression of Muslim women is by accusing Westerners of “trivializ[ing] gender issues in the United States and Europe.” It was Christians, not Muslims, she reminds us, who burned women as witches in colonial Salem. She even claims that frat-house gang-rapes are considered “acceptable” in the U.S. (Huh?) Why, she asks, haven&#8217;t any of the would-be saviors of Muslim women “taken up the cause of oppressed Jewish women, or questioned proud proof of the continuity of Judaism that is pinned on genetic markers passed down from father to son among the priestly group known as Cohens?” (No, I have no idea what she&#8217;s talking about either.)</p>
<p>This was a tough book to get through. I had to keep putting it down. The world-class dishonesty, the willingness to deny the real suffering of women and girls in order to prop up the poisonous religion that&#8217;s responsible for that suffering – and to impugn the motives of noble people who <i>do </i>care – made me livid. Columbia University should be ashamed to employ this brazen propagandist; Harvard University Press should be disgusted with itself for publishing her repulsive book.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Jews in Space</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/the-top-seven-jewish-purveyors-of-israel-hatred/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-top-seven-jewish-purveyors-of-israel-hatred</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2014 05:24:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216477</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Seven of the worst Jewish purveyors of Israel hatred. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Professor-Richard-Falk.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216491" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Professor-Richard-Falk.jpg" alt="Professor-Richard-Falk" width="315" height="210" /></a>At the end of his 1981 movie <i>A History of the World, Part I, </i>Mel Brooks added three funny fake “trailers” for non-existent movies, one of them being <i>Jews in Space. </i>The trailer showed a Star of David-shaped spacecraft, crewed by bearded guys in yarmulkes and prayer shawls, winning an interstellar holy war. In titling this piece “Jews in Space,” I&#8217;m not referring to <i>that </i>kind of Jew in space – I&#8217;m talking about a category of Jews who seem to be so hostile to their own people and their own heritage that they&#8217;ve entirely escaped the gravitational pull of basic common sense, decency, and fact and spun out into the orbit of rabid anti-Israeli and pro-Islamic radicalism. I&#8217;m not going to use the term “self-hating Jew.” After all, who&#8217;s to say who&#8217;s a self-hating Jew and who isn&#8217;t? I don&#8217;t know these people&#8217;s hearts. By the same token, however, I can&#8217;t help it if many other observers, after examining these individuals&#8217; records, have decided that they are, indeed, self-hating Jews of the first water – odious wretches who&#8217;ve broken faith with everything their forefathers believed in and stood for. But hey, just to repeat, <i>I&#8217;m </i>not going to call them that. Anyhow, here they are:</p>
<p><b>1. Richard Falk, U.S. jurist.</b> Falk should have been forever disqualified from holding <i>any</i> responsible position when, after meeting Khomeini in 1979, he mocked claims that the ayatollah was fanatical or reactionary. Later appointed UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine (his term ends this year), he&#8217;s repeatedly compared Israel to Nazi Germany, saying that it exhibits “genocidal tendencies” and warning of a forthcoming “Palestinian holocaust.” To Falk, the Boston Marathon bombings were an understandable act of “resistance” to U.S. imperialist hegemony and Americans&#8217; outraged reactions were rooted in “Islamophobia.” In 2011, Falk blurbed a book by fellow Jew-in-space Gilad Atzmon that was so virulently anti-Semitic that even notorious Israel-bashers distanced themselves from it (“Why would anyone blurb a book like this?” Andrew Sullivan asked); last year, in retaliation for UN Watch&#8217;s assiduous reporting on his vile record, Falk vindictively urged an investigation into that valiant NGO. As if all this weren&#8217;t enough, Falk is a 9/11 Truther whose call for a study of U.S. officials&#8217; alleged involvement in the annihilation of the Twin Towers moved even morally lethargic UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to label his charges “preposterous.” Not once, but several times apiece, the U.S., Britain, and Canada have all demanded that the UN fire Falk. But there he stays.</p>
<p><b>2. Roger Cohen, British-born <i>New York Times </i>columnist</b>. A series of staggeringly fatuous columns<i> </i>Cohen wrote in 2009 about a two-week visit to Iran cemented his reputation as “American journalism&#8217;s most prominent Iranian apologist” (to quote the <i>Weekly Standard </i>&#8216;s Michael Goldfarb). Notwithstanding Ahmadinejad&#8217;s rants about wiping Israel off the map, Cohen praised Iran as the Middle East&#8217;s most democratic state, other than Israel, and insisted that viewing it as totalitarian was a “grotesque caricature.” Jeffrey Goldberg (<i>Atlantic Monthly</i>) has called him “credulous”; Michael Rubin (<i>National</i> <i>Review</i>) has described him as a “useful idiot.” When he spoke in 2009 at an L.A. synagogue, an audience of Iranian Jews responded with derisive laughter to his naivete about the true intentions of Hamas and Hezbollah. One congregant lamented: “He didn’t understand the geopolitical situation, and he doesn’t know what he is talking about.” The synagogue&#8217;s rabbi later wrote that “for someone who covered the disintegration of the Balkans into ferocious slaughter he seems oddly unaware of how tenacious and potent is ideology.”</p>
<p><b>3. Ronnie Kasrils, South African politician.</b> After spending over a quarter-century as an anti-apartheid guerilla fighter, Kasrils, the African National Congress&#8217;s highest-ranking white leader as well as a longtime member of the South African Communist Party Politburo, joined the post-apartheid RSA government – serving for several years as Minister of Intelligence – and began advocating zealously for the Palestinian cause. Among his goals: to convince his fellow South African Jews that the suffering inflicted by Israel upon Palestinians is “far worse than anything our people faced during the most dreadful days of apartheid.” To Kasrils, Israelis are “baby killers” and “Nazis,” and Israel&#8217;s security fence is totally unjustifiable – this from a man who during the Cold War (when he was trained by the KGB and Stasi and counted both Che Guevara and Fidel Castro as chums) accepted the Kremlin line that the Berlin Wall was necessary to keep West Germany from destroying the GDR. And what does Kasrils have to say about Islamic terrorists? “We feel sorrow for those who died under rocket fire in Israel,” he has written. “But we do not blame Hizbullah or Palestinian resistance any more than we blamed South Africa liberation forces when civilians died.”</p>
<p><b>4. Sarah Schulman</b>, <b>U.S. writer. </b>Schulman, a lesbian novelist and playwright who teaches at the City University of New York, is the leading promoter of the insipid concept of “pinkwashing” – the claim, which in the last couple of years has gained traction in the American and European academy with alarming speed, that Israel markets its liberal gay-rights record as a way of distracting from an illiberal policy of oppressing innocent Palestinians. Schulman, who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors and whose psychopathology I&#8217;ve pondered at this site <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/bruce-bawer/the-self-destructive-insanity-of-pro-palestinian-gay-activists/">more</a> <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/sarah-schulman-palestinian-activist/">than</a> <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/cunys-despicable-anti-pinkwashing-conference/">once</a>, has marched with members of Hamas (no big deal, she says, pointing out that she&#8217;s also “marched in the same gay pride parade with gay Republicans for decades”) and has responded to expressions of concern about the treatment of women and gays in Muslim societies by saying: “right now, that is not my job.” Is she really as thoroughly, spectacularly ignorant about Islam as she seems to be, or is she simply in full-scale, ideologically driven denial? Given that she&#8217;s equally thick-headed, ill-educated, and utterly in thrall to hard-left orthodoxies, it&#8217;s hard to say.</p>
<p><b>5. Dror Feiler, Swedish-Israeli artist. </b>Raised in Israel&#8217;s only Communist kibbutz, Feiler has lived in Sweden since 1973. The head of several pro-Palestinian groups and an organizer of the Gaza “Freedom Flotillas,” he&#8217;s worked alongside Hamas leaders, compared Israeli leaders to Slobodan Milosevic, and said that “people who are occupied have the right to resist,” even violently. At a 2010 rally in Turkey, Feiler stood by in silence while another speaker decried “the filth that is Israel” and the crowd shouted “death to Israel.” “Snow White and the Madness of Truth,” a 2004 art installation by Feiler and his wife, Gunilla, memorialized Hanadi Jaradat, a Palestinian suicide bomber who killed 21 people in Haifa. Israeli ambassador Zvi Mazel was so furious that he vandalized the artwork, making headlines worldwide. Feiler denied that “Snow White” glorified terrorism, but added: “Although I do not justify the suicide attackers, I can definitely understand them. They have nothing to live for, so they look for something to die for.”</p>
<p><b>6. Anna Baltzer, U.S. activist. </b>Applauded by an ally as “the It-Girl of Anti-Zionism,” Baltzer heads the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (an International Solidarity Movement front), sits on the boards of several other such groups, and tours the U.S. telling audiences – often in churches – how evil Israel is and extolling Palestinians&#8217; “armed struggle against illegal occupation.” Frequently accused of fabricating accounts of Israeli misdeeds and of claiming to have witnessed events that are, in fact, mere hearsay, Baltzer continued to promote the tale of the Jenin massacre long after it had been discredited; the details of another of her stories, about a pregnant Palestinian who purportedly lost twin babies because she was held up at an Israeli checkpoint, have changed repeatedly. Baltzer sells herself to audiences as the grandchild of “Polish Holocaust survivors” – a detail, notes Steven Stotsky of CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), that&#8217;s plainly intended “to establish her supposed moral authenticity.” Yet she turns out to be riotously inauthentic: her claim to have been a Fulbright scholar has been disproven; and researcher <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2335">Lee Kaplan</a> has discovered that she&#8217;s used “at least three aliases.” Her legal surname is Piller, her mother&#8217;s maiden name; her father, a German gentile, is named Lambrecht. And her grandparents? Yes, they were of Polish ethnicity, but grew up in Belgium, whence they fled when the Nazis invaded: not quite the picture conjured up by the words “Polish Holocaust survivors.” As for the name Baltzer, Anna invented it, a family friend told Siegel, so her grandmother – an ardent Zionist who died in 2011 – “would not know what Anna was really doing to harm and defame the Jewish people and Israel for Arab anti-Semites abroad.” <b> </b></p>
<p><b>7. Max Blumenthal, U.S. writer.</b> In the space of just a few years, Blumenthal, the son of Clinton <i>consiglieri</i> Sidney Blumenthal (who coined the term “permanent campaign”), has made a name for himself as an anti-Israel attack dog.  Andrew Breitbart considered him “unscrupulous”; the blogger Allahpundit has called him a “smear merchant”; Joel B. Pollak dubs him “Hezbollah&#8217;s Hanoi Jane.” Blumenthal&#8217;s 2013 book <i>Goliath </i>slams Israel as a nightmare tyranny awash in Islamophobia, mob violence, and Orthodox Jewish fanaticism; meanwhile, visiting Arab countries, he sings their praises – asserting on Lebanese TV, for example, that owing to U.S. media censorship of anti-Israel views, “no mainstream American television program&#8230;would allow me to speak as freely as I’m speaking to you right now.” His <i>oeuvre </i>is littered with disproven claims and disavowed quotes; as CAMERA puts it, he “doesn&#8217;t seem to care too much about the facts.” In August 2013, Breitbart&#8217;s William Bigelow said he “not only should be shunned, but reviled” and called him “possibly the most self-hating Jew on the planet.” Hey, he said it, not me.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Romanticizing a Revolutionary</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/romanticizing-a-revolutionary/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=romanticizing-a-revolutionary</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 05:12:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[amiri baraka]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The death of Amiri Baraka.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/amiri.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-215130" alt="amiri" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/amiri.jpg" width="294" height="223" /></a>The headline of his <i>New York Times </i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/arts/amiri-baraka-polarizing-poet-and-playwright-dies-at-79.html?_r=0%20">obituary</a> described him as a “Polarizing Poet and Playwright,” and the obit itself began by describing him as a figure “of pulsating rage, whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others.” The Associated Press called him a “militant man of letters and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture.” The <i>Washington Post </i><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/amiri-baraka-poet-and-firebrand-dies-at-79/2014/01/09/930897d2-796e-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html">celebrated</a> “his protean place in American culture.” His legacy, according to NPR&#8217;s <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/01/09/261101520/amiri-baraka-poet-and-co-founder-of-black-arts-movement-dies-at-79%20">headline</a>, was “Both Offensive And Achingly Beautiful.” The people at <i>Poetry Magazine, </i>the legendary journal founded in 1912, <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/01/amiri-baraka-dies-at-79/%20">pronounced</a> themselves “deeply saddened to report” his death; the Academy of American Poetry <a href="http://www.poets.org/%20">was</a> “sad” over his loss. Over the years, the death notices informed us, he had taught at such places as Yale and Columbia and received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, from PEN, and from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Warren Beatty respected him enough to give him a small symbolic role in his movie <i>Bulworth. </i></p>
<p>Who was this literary master? His name was Amiri Baraka, and he died last Thursday at age 79. When I was a graduate student in the English Department at Stony Brook University, Baraka (who had been born Le Roi Jones) was the star of the Africana Studies Department, directly across the quad. (At his death, he was an emeritus professor there.) I never met him, but when I took an undergraduate course in modern American poetry, his work was on the syllabus. It was without question the worst stuff we read that term; in fact it was the worst stuff in that whole edition of the <i>Norton Anthology of Modern American Poetry</i>. I was so astonished at the sheer awfulness of his poems, in fact, that I typed one of them up, banged out three others of the same ilk off the top of my head, and passed them around to a few of my dorm friends, asking if they could tell which three I&#8217;d made up and which one I&#8217;d copied out of the <i>Norton. </i>None of them could. But the joke, it turned out, was on me. What I later learned was that Baraka wasn&#8217;t going for literary excellence: as he explained in a 1980 <a href="http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/baraka/interviews.htm%20">interview</a>, his poems weren&#8217;t intended mainly to be read by other people in books; he created them so he&#8217;d have texts to declaim at public readings. (Even then, appparently, he was making a good deal of money giving public readings – much of that money, one presumes, drawn from university treasuries.)</p>
<p>Another thing I didn&#8217;t realize at the time was that Baraka&#8217;s lousy poems in the <i>Norton </i>were actually among his most appealing productions. Later, reading other material by him, I discovered that, in addition to being aesthestically barren, his work was also viciously brutal, morally repulsive, and full of chilling contempt for whites, Jews, and gays, among others. To be sure, he went through a number of phases. As I wrote in my book <i>The Victims&#8217; Revolution, </i>he was “at first a communist, Castroite, and fringe Beat poet, then (after Malcolm X&#8217;s murder) a black nationalist revolutionary, and later a Marxist (specifically a Maoist) and Pan-Africanist.” At some point he converted to Islam. But no matter what political or cultural label he wore at any given time, his work was nearly always marked by hatred and violence. On several occasions, his life was violent, too. His rap sheet, as I noted in my book, included “arrests in the 1960s for possessing firearms and disturbing the peace, in the 1970s for domestic violence, in 1989 for assaulting a police officer, and in 1990 for inciting a riot.”</p>
<p>In 1965 Baraka founded the Black Arts Movement – which, like the academic discipline of Black Studies, was a product of Black Power ideology. His poem “Black Art” served as something of a manifesto for the movement (whose other members included Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni), and outlined the kind of literature he wanted to see black people produce:</p>
<blockquote><p>                        &#8230;We want poems<br />
like fists beating ni-gers out of Jocks<br />
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies<br />
of the owner-jews. […] we want &#8220;poems that kill.&#8221;<br />
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot<br />
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys<br />
and take their weapons leaving them dead<br />
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.  […]<br />
We want a black poem. And a<br />
Black World.</p></blockquote>
<p>Some of Baraka&#8217;s poetry (to quote my book again) “reads like a parody by Howard Stern or a young Eddie Murphy of mindless black radical hate: &#8216;Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers&#8217; throats.&#8217;” Nor is this sort of language just confined to his poems. In one 1965 essay, he wrote that “[m]ost American white men are trained to be fags,” that black men should want to rape white women as a way of taking from white men everything they have, and that white women know that only when they&#8217;re raped by black men will they “get cleanly, viciously popped.” Somehow he forgot to insult Jews in that one; but he more than made up for the omission in a number of other places, for example in this excerpt from a prose poem:</p>
<blockquote><p>Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew. I got something for you now though. I got something for you, like you dig, I got. I got this thing, goes pulsating through black everything universal meaning. I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured&#8230;.So come for the rent, jewboys, or come ask me for a book, or sit in the courts handing down your judgments, still I got something for you, gonna give it to my brothers, so they&#8217;ll know what your whole story is, then one day, jewboys, we all, even my wig wearing mother gonna put it on you all at once.</p></blockquote>
<p>We live in a time when a white biographer can be <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/a-jazzmans-sour-notes-on-race/">labeled</a> a racist for not turning the black subject of his book into a plaster saint; when a white professor can be labeled a racist for correcting the spelling and grammar on his black students&#8217; papers; and when a black TV host can <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/thinking-about-racism-2/">pronounce</a> that it&#8217;s racist to use the term “Obamacare.” To read Baraka&#8217;s work is to see <i>real </i>racism, abhorrent, hideous, and repellent. Indeed his work is a rainbow flag of prejudice: obsessively anti-white; poisonously anti-Semitic; ferociously antigay; not to mention dripping with contempt for women and uniformly hostile to American society. Instead of denouncing and shunning this vile bigot, however, people in positions of cultural power routinely treated Baraka with respect throughout his career. Over the years, moreover, there were many claims (echoed in several of his obituaries) that he had eventually repudiated his own prejudices, or at the very least had come to regret his anti-Semitism. Indeed, in 1980 the <i>Village Voice</i> published a Baraka essay entitled “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite.” And in 1991 a former professor of mine who edited <i>The Amiri Baraka/Le Roi Jones Reader </i>wrote in his introduction to that volume that Baraka, in 1974, had “dramatically revers[ed]” course by “reject[ing] black nationalism as racist.” The fact, however, is that long after his supposed reversal, Baraka was still a foaming-at-the-mouth Jew-hater. Indeed, the most famous example of Jew-hatred in his entire body of work was published in 2002, in his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which became notorious for these lines about 9/11:</p>
<blockquote><p>Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed<br />
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers<br />
To stay home that day<br />
Why did Sharon stay away?</p></blockquote>
<p>At the time “Somebody Blew Up America” was published, Baraka was serving as the poet laureate of New Jersey. So loud was the outcry over the above-quoted lines that when it turned out that he couldn&#8217;t legally be fired from the laureateship, the state legislature abolished the position outright. (What I don&#8217;t think I knew until I was reading through the obits the other day was that the school board in Baraka&#8217;s hometown, Newark, took such offense at this action that it named Baraka “Laureate of Newark Schools.”)</p>
<p>Largely lost in all the attention that given to those four lines of Baraka&#8217;s 9/11 poem was the fact that <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/10/03/somebody-blew-up-america/%20">the whole poem</a> was extremely offensive. And derivative, as well: “Somebody Blew Up America” was a list poem <i>cum </i>hate poem <i>cum </i>diatribe of the sort that Baraka&#8217;s old pal Allen Ginsberg had churned out on a regular basis. Perhaps Ginsberg&#8217;s best-known work in this subgenre, “<a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/america.html">America</a>,” which appeared way back in 1956, was a harangue about America; Baraka, in his post-9/11 poem, also ranted about America, and about Jews as well, of course, but the principal target of his bombast was white people, whom he portrayed throughout as the bad guys of the human race:</p>
<blockquote><p>Who got fat from plantations Who genocided Indians Tried to waste the Black nation<br />
Who live on Wall Street The first plantation Who cut your nuts off Who rape your ma<br />
Who lynched your pa<br />
Who got the tar, who got the feathers Who had the match, who set the fires Who killed and<br />
hired Who say they God &amp; still be the Devil&#8230;<br />
Who? Who? Who?</p></blockquote>
<p>Throughout the poem, the answer to Baraka&#8217;s endlessly repeated question – “Who? Who? Who?” – was whites, whites, whites. (To be sure, the poem also slandered prominent black Americans whom Baraka regarded as Uncle Toms, namely Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice: “Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for Who doo doo come out the Colon’s mouth / Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza.”)</p>
<p>The <i>Times </i>obituary sanitized all this odiousness and vulgarity in the usual way: by tidily sweeping it all under the label “polarizing.” Critics, as the <i>Times</i>&#8216;s Margalit Fox put it, were “divided” on Baraka: “He was described variously as an indomitable champion of the disenfranchised&#8230;or as a gadfly whose finest hour had come and gone by the end of the 1960s.” (Gadfly? How about hatemonger?) And again: “Over six decades, Mr. Baraka’s writings&#8230;were periodically accused of being anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic, racist, isolationist and dangerously militant. But his champions and detractors agreed that at his finest he was a powerful voice on the printed page, a riveting orator in person and an enduring presence&#8230;whom&#8230;it was seldom possible to ignore.” Re-read those sentences: you could say exactly the same thing about Hitler. Ms. Fox did quote a 2002 comment by Stanley Crouch, the veteran black critic, to the effect that Baraka’s work since the late 1960s had been “an incoherent mix of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, black nationalism, anarchy and ad hominem attacks” – truer words were never spoken – but she was careful to balance this honest appraisal with effusive, and absurd, praise from critic Arnold Rampersad, who placed Baraka in the same league as Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston – an insult to all four of those writers.</p>
<p>Bottom line: Amiri Baraka was no artist. There&#8217;s a lot of staggeringly bad stuff out there these days that goes by the name of poetry, but very few poets in our time have risen as high as Baraka did on so little talent. Perusing his <i>oeuvre, </i>one cannot help thinking of the many American poets and playwrights far better than he who languished in relative obscurity while he was being lavished with praise. (At Stony Brook alone, two of my professors were poets who were infinitely more gifted than he was.) The repulsive fact is that the American cultural establishment rewarded Baraka generously – appointing him to coveted academic positions, presenting him with major awards, and, in the end, according him respectful and prominent obituary attention – for no other reason than that he was a leading Black Power revolutionary who spent his life advocating for that very establishment&#8217;s destruction. None of the universities he ever worked for, and none of the organizations that loaded him down with prizes, would ever have had anything to do with a white person who, even once in their lives, had written about blacks the way that Baraka wrote about whites a thousand times; but those universities and organizations were ready not only to overlook but to reward his hatred for whites (and for Jews, and for gays) because it was proffered – grotesquely – as the justifiable reaction of a victim to his victimizers. This romanticization of the rude, raw rhetoric of revolt is the abiding cultural sickness of the last half-century, and few – if any – profited from it more than Amiri Baraka did.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>&#8216;Labor Negotiations&#8217;: Goodyear Union Kidnaps Bosses</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2014 05:35:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214858</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to compassionate, socialist France. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214859" alt="ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q-450x305.jpg" width="315" height="214" /></a>This weekend, when management-labor negotiations broke down at a tire factory, employees kidnapped their bosses. Where, you ask, did this happen? In the Central African Republic? Somalia? Burkina Faso? No – in Amiens, France. Turns out it&#8217;s become something of a Gallic custom.</p>
<p>It started this way: Goodyear decided last year that it wanted to wash its hands of the plant; when the French government tried to get another U.S. firm, Titan, to take it over, the company head, Maurice Taylor, Jr., checked it out, found the union confrontational and the workers unproductive loafers, and asked: “How stupid do you think we are?” Unable to find a buyer, Goodyear decided to shutter the operation – but in exchange for letting it do so, workers demanded “severance packages of 80,000 euros, or about $110,000, plus €2,500 for each year worked.” When Goodyear balked, the kidnapping commenced.</p>
<p>Welcome to <i>la belle République</i>, A.D. 2014.</p>
<p>But first a flashback to 2007. About an hour and twenty minutes into <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hHnSlZsVRI"><i>Sicko</i></a><i>, </i>his paean to socialized medicine that was released that year, Michael Moore sits at a table at what looks like a swank Paris bistro with a group of expatriate Americans – young, upscale professional types – who sing the praises of the French health-care system. As they regale him with stories about all the services they get for nothing, or next to nothing, he feigns astonishment. It&#8217;s not just the free first-class medical care. The day care, they tell him, is also terrific – and also virtually free. One of the Americans gushes that because she lives in France she can count on her kids receiving “a certain level of care, a certain education. College, I don&#8217;t have to worry about” because “you get a college education for free.” The French freebies seem well-nigh unlimited: for heaven&#8217;s sake, when you have a baby, the government will even send somebody over to cook and do your laundry for you.</p>
<p>What a country. Everything&#8217;s free! Nobody pays! There&#8217;s a thirty-five-hour work week, five weeks minimum paid vacation, and employment laws that provide almost total job security for everybody, competent or not. What could go wrong? If any of Moore&#8217;s worldly, well-heeled, presumably well educated interlocutors sees any potential problem with this system, there&#8217;s certainly no hint of it in the movie. Yes, one of them does hint that the government would cut back on the largesse if it could get away with it. But it <i>can&#8217;t </i>get away with it: as she explains, “one of the things that keep everything running here” – one of the things, she means, that keep the gravy flowing – “is that the government is afraid of the people, afraid of protests&#8230;.In France, that&#8217;s what people do.” And why, pray tell, would the government want to rein all this in? That question goes unanswered – indeed, unasked.</p>
<p>Seven years after Moore&#8217;s film, the <i>poulets</i> have<i> </i>come home to roost. Indeed, during the last year or so, even publications that one might have expected to join Moore in celebrating the French welfare state&#8217;s munificence have run stunningly frank accounts of its dire consequences. In November 2012, <i>The Economist </i>served up a <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2012/11/fran%C3%A7ois-hollande">piece</a> entitled “Battling French Decline.” Last January, under the headline “France is in free fall,” CNN <a href="http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/09/france-economy-crisis/">reported</a> on the country&#8217;s “shocking deterioration in competitiveness,” noting that its workforce boasts “the lowest number of working hours in the developed world” and the highest social expenditures (“42 euros for every 100 euros in total expenses go to social charges, versus 34 euros in Germany, 26 in the UK, and 20 in the US”). Last June, in a piece <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-decline-in-france-the-failed-leadership-of-hollande-a-903732-druck.html">headlined</a> “Bonjour Tristesse: The Economic and Political Decline of France,” <i>Der Spiegel </i>described the Hexagon as being “in the grip of a crisis”: “The mood hanging over the country is depressed&#8230;.It feels as if the French model had reached an end stage.” In August, the <i>New York Times </i>asked: “can the Socialist government&#8230;pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?” And in July, predictably enough, the <i>Times</i>&#8216;s house numbskull, Roger Cohen, put an idiotically positive spin on all the bad news under the headline “France’s Glorious Malaise.” Cohen&#8217;s argument, if you can call it that, was that “French malaise, moroseness and melancholy” is “a perennial state” – “a fierce form of realism,” “a bitter wisdom,” a “badge of honor.”  Yes, he admitted, France is saddled with an unaffordable welfare state, but, hey, it&#8217;s also got “superb medicine, good education, immense beauty, the only wine worth drinking,” and so on. “Better,” he concluded, “to be miserable than a hypocrite, nauseated than naive — and far better to be morose than a fool.” Well, if he knows about anything, it&#8217;s about being a fool.</p>
<p>Then came the November-December issue of the <i>National Interest. </i>In a long essay entitled “The Decline and Fall of France,” economist Milton Ezrati stated flatly that “France&#8217;s economy&#8230;is in profound decline,” and provided the data: “More than one thousand factories have closed in France since 2009….Government in France now constitutes some 57 percent of the entire economy&#8230;.France’s share of global exports has fallen from 7 percent in 1999 to only 3 percent today&#8230;.employers in France pay the government the equivalent of almost 64 percent of their payrolls&#8230;.some 54 percent of the working-age population holds themselves outside the workforce, compared with 42 percent in Germany and 32 percent in the United States.” France, concluded Ezrati, “is beginning to resemble a less developed economy.” (Of course, a major factor in this decline – but one that hardly any of these accounts so much as mentions – is the presence within the French borders of some five to ten million Muslims, a high percentage of whom are social clients.)</p>
<p>Even after all these tales of gloom and doom, however, a <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/fall-france-225368">piece</a> published last week in the just-relaunched <i>Newsweek </i>counted as a head-turner. Under the headline “The Fall of France,” Janine di Giovanni recalled Louis XIV&#8217;s persecution of the Huguenots, “the worker bees of France,” hundreds of thousands of whom fled the realm for safer climes. Today&#8217;s France, like the Sun King&#8217;s, is suffering a “brain drain”: now that productive Frenchmen – those who actually earn a decent living by the sweat of their brow – are taxed at rates upward of 70 percent, “there has been a frantic bolt for the border by the very people who create economic growth – business leaders, innovators, creative thinkers, and top executives. They are all leaving France to develop their talents elsewhere.” Two years ago, part-time <i>Parisienne</i> Claire Berlinski <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_diarist-france.html">observed</a> in <i>City Journal </i>that while “France can no longer pay for its comfortable way of life,” Paris still felt “like a city whose troubles are far away.” No more, says di Giovanni: “the past two years have seen a steady, noticeable decline in France. There is a grayness that the heavy hand of socialism casts.” Di Giovanni, herself a British expat living in the City of Light, has been at the receiving end of a lot of the government goody bags that were acclaimed by Michael Moore&#8217;s American-expat pals, but she, unlike them, recognizes some of those perks as “pure waste”: for example, after she gave birth, the government – without even asking her if she wanted it – sprung for twice-a-week physical-therapy sessions so she could lose her baby fat. Di Giovanni summed up the whole sad situation by quoting a corporate lawyer: “France is dying a slow death. Socialism is killing it.”</p>
<p>Last fall, a cousin of mine who lives in Paris drew my attention to a story that perfectly demonstrates just how France is doing itself in. Monoprix, a big supermarket chain, wanted to extend its opening hours and do business on Sunday as well. It would&#8217;ve been good for the economy – and for the chain&#8217;s employees, who backed the idea. But France&#8217;s largest union, the extremely powerful General Confederation of Labor (CGT), threatened Monoprix with an 80,000-euro fine for every worker affected. So that was the end of that.</p>
<p>So it goes in France these days. While protecting even the most unproductive employees by making it almost impossible to fire anyone, the government punishes entrepreneurs brutally. “You&#8217;d have to be crazy to start a business here now,” my cousin lamented recently. The self-employed are drained dry: “you almost pay more to the state than what you can gross in a year,” he told me. In order to be able to declare and pay taxes on his hard-earned freelance income, he was obliged to cough up a hefty fee – around seven thousand euros the first year, ten thousand the second – for the right to identify himself as a “microenterprise.”</p>
<p>“No one in France,” wrote Berlinski two years ago, “seems to have grasped the connection between the country’s army of ceaselessly striking civil servants and the prospect of economic doom.” Well, some of them plainly grasp it now. But all too many, it appears, are – like those American expats in <i>Sicko </i>– still in heavy denial, enjoying their free ride while clinging to the illusion that it&#8217;ll go on forever. Moore, with his socialist magical thinking, was doubtless sure when he made that stupid film that if only Americans kicked up more of a fuss, as the French do, they could live like kings – getting not only free health care, but free <i>everything –</i> while not necessarily doing much of anything to pay their way. Now, however, as Ezrati notes, France, far from being able to cure everyone&#8217;s ills without cost, is itself increasingly being described as the “sick man of Europe” (which, Ezrati adds, is “quite a distinction at a moment when Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy share the hospital ward”). As it turns out, Moore was absolutely right to single out France as a splendid example for Americans. He just didn&#8217;t realize it was a <i>cautionary </i>example.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obsessing Over the &#8216;Other&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/obsessing-over-the-other/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obsessing-over-the-other</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/obsessing-over-the-other/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 05:01:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denmark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nazis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214513</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The left's preoccupation with a bogus dichotomy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/border.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214525" alt="border" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/border-450x270.jpg" width="315" height="189" /></a>Now that it&#8217;s 2014, the gates of the U.K. are wide open for immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, way over at the other end of the European Union. Some Brits are concerned: will the newcomers flood the labor market? Or the welfare offices? Or both?</p>
<p>For Britain&#8217;s leftist establishment, however, the question is a different one. As the <i>Guardian </i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/poll/2014/jan/01/romania-bulgaria-migrants-welcome-britain-poll">put it</a> the other day: “Now that Romanian and Bulgarian citizens are able to move to the UK to seek work, an alliance of Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrats has warned that politicians&#8217; anti-Roma rhetoric is already inflaming community tensions. Has this debate helped those planning to migrate to the UK feel welcome?”</p>
<p>To make them feel welcome or not to make them feel welcome: <i>this </i>is the question? For many on the European left, yep, it most assuredly is. “Are we welcoming enough?” “Will they have a good impression of us?” We&#8217;re dealing here with people who feel what may be fairly described as a compulsion to act like store greeters – only instead of hovering in the doorway of a Walmart they&#8217;re standing, figuratively speaking, at the airport arrivals gate, welcoming all and sundry to the sceptred isle. Indeed, on New Year&#8217;s Day, at least two of these dimwits were <i>literally </i>out there welcoming the newcomers to dear old Blighty: Home Affairs Committee chairman Keith Vaz, a Labour MP, and Mark Reckless (ha!), a Tory MP, actually dragged themselves to Luton Airport to shake the hands of arriving Bulgarians and Romanians and buy them coffee. Embarrassing.</p>
<p>Exactly what species of psychological disorder are these people suffering from? Why are they so terribly anxious lest newcomers fail to feel sufficiently “welcomed”? Why is that even a concept? I moved from one country to another many years ago, and then from that country to another country, and in neither case did it occur to me to think about whether I was being made to feel welcome or not. I was just one more person going through customs. Nor did I want or expect to be “welcomed”: what would that entail, anyway? All I wanted was to be left alone to find my way.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not enough for some of these European leftists, for whom such movements of population are shot through with profound ideological significance. For these folks, it&#8217;s almost as if their own countries are nothing more than empty vessels waiting to be filled – and given meaning – by new arrivals from distant shores. It&#8217;s as if they view themselves as little more than welcome mats on which immigrants are welcome to wipe their shoes. Or as servants waiting for their masters to arrive. Or as a godless people awaiting a messiah.</p>
<p>These folks talk a lot about the “Other” – a pivotal notion in postmodern academic folderol. At the heart of their self-definition – at the heart of what makes them, in their own eyes, good people – is that they&#8217;re prepared to embrace all “Others” without distinction or qualification. Simply knowing that other people are “Others” is enough to make them open their arms wide. And the more “Other” those others are, the better.</p>
<p>But this isn&#8217;t all: their twisted mentality comes with an important corollary. Since they view all of this stuff through a black-and-white, “us vs. them” lens, when they hear <i>anybody</i> express <i>any</i> concern about <i>any </i>aspect of immigration, they immediately attribute that concern to pure xenophobia – in other words, to a blanket hatred of the “Other.” Now, my own observations have convinced me that only a vanishingly tiny minority of Europeans actually consider “Others” by definition a bad thing; at the same time, they know enough about certain “Others” to know that it&#8217;s wise to be wary.</p>
<p>Too many people on the left, however, are utterly blind to these elementary rational distinctions. And so we have articles like <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/31/romanian-bulgarian-migration-politicians">one</a> that the <i>Guardian </i>ran the other day, in which Paul Quinn, a social “researcher” at Brussels Free University, explained the misgivings of many Britons about the forthcoming influx of Bulgarians and Romanians as symptoms of a psychopathology: our brains, he lectured, are “hardwired” to suspect and stigmatize people who are different from us but who don&#8217;t actually represent any threat to us whatsoever. Implicit in his argument was that people like himself and his right-thinking <i>Guardian </i>readers – who are busy fretting about whether the newcomers from Sofia and Bucharest are being made to feel welcome – are more evolved than those prehistoric <i>Daily Telegraph </i>types, and have therefore overcome their hardwiring.  So condescending was Quinn toward Brits who are concerned about this new wave of immigration that it didn&#8217;t occur to him that they might actually have done some reading and reflecting on the topic. No: his article was a perfect illustration of the fact that people like him regard people like them as mouth-breathing morons who operate on sheer herd instinct.</p>
<p>Then there&#8217;s Queen Margrethe of Denmark. In her New Year&#8217;s speech, Margrethe <a href="http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE2171416/laes-dronning-margrethes-nytaarstale-2013/">brought up</a> the mass rescue of the Danish Jews during the Nazi occupation, and observed – quite correctly – that on that occasion “Danish society showed its strength,” with gentiles from all walks of life risking their own safety to help their Jewish neighbors to escape to Sweden. But then she dared to suggest a similarity between those heroic actions and what she described as Danes&#8217; obligation to “recognize and respect” the fact that today their country is composed of “different people with different cultures and languages.”</p>
<p>In the past, Margrethe has been excellent on these issues, but this speech, alas, was a painfully typical example of muddy leftist pseudo-thinking about the “Other.” The facts are these: seven decades ago, the Nazis marched into Denmark and told the gentiles there that they were brothers – fellow Aryans – and that the relatively few Jews among them were the “Other” who needed to be gotten rid of. The gentile Danes knew better. The Jews were their neighbors. They were Danes. Morally, the <i>Nazis</i>,<i> </i>with their evil ideology, were the true “Other” – not an ethnic but an ideological “Other” that it would be self-destructive folly to welcome into Denmark with open arms.</p>
<p>Today, there are quite a number of ethnic “Others” in Denmark who are grateful to live in a free country, who contribute to it, and who – far from being seen as “Others” at all – should in fact be treasured. Among them is the brave young Danish-Palestinian <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/danish-muslim-apostate-faces-hate-speech-charges/">poet</a> Yahya Hassan, whose blunt criticisms of Islam have made him a bestseller and have exposed him to death threats. But there are also more than a few ideological “Others” in that country (some of whom have been responsible for those death threats) whom Margrethe – following the errant logic of today&#8217;s left – would appear to be comparing to the wartime Danish Jews. Alas, the correct parallel is to the invaders who, seven decades ago, goose-stepped into her kingdom from the south.</p>
<p>On New Year&#8217;s Day, the <i>New York Times </i>served up another helping of this benighted brand of leftist logic about the “Other.” It took the form of an op-ed, headlined “European United, in Hating Europe,” by Andrea Mammone, an Italian historian at the University of London. (The title was telling: for Mammone, as for so many of his ilk, “Europe” isn&#8217;t the people of Europe but the supranational institutions that have been imposed on them.) How, Mammone wondered aloud, can European voters support “far-right” types like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders? For Mammone, European voters&#8217; concern about the Islamization of Europe isn&#8217;t worth serious discussion: in his view, these voters are little better than mindless robots who – unknowingly imitating earlier generations of Europeans – are simply acting on a visceral need for “an &#8216;other&#8217; to oppose, exclude, resist, restrict or oppress.” In other words, they&#8217;re the ideological heirs of the Nazis.</p>
<p>All this leftist balderdash about the “Other” is, of course, rhetorically very useful. Instead of defending their own positions on these issues with logical, fact-based arguments (which, in many cases, is an outright impossibility), these leftists respond to their opponents by purporting to diagnose them – thus neatly leaving the impression, in the minds of impressionable and ignorant readers, that it&#8217;s those opponents who are factually and logically challenged. In reality, however, it&#8217;s the leftists who, by employing this slick dodge, neatly skirt the obligation to mount legitimate arguments for their own views. And what they manage to disguise, by doing this, is that it&#8217;s not the critics of Islam and immigration who are fixated on the “Other” – it&#8217;s these leftists themselves, whose one-note, nuance-free ideology makes even the most alarming and malignant manifestations of the “Other” hopelessly irresistible to them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Red Star over Scandinavia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/red-star-over-scandinavia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=red-star-over-scandinavia</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 31 Dec 2013 05:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[communists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nordic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scandanavia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214241</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Communists in the Nordic news media, then and now.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/pl1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214246" alt="pl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/pl1-354x350.jpg" width="283" height="280" /></a>The brightest light in the Norwegian media firmament – and one of the brightest, for that matter, in the European media generally – is the independent news and opinion website <a href="http://www.document.no/">document.no</a>, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. Founded by journalist Hans Rustad, it&#8217;s a consistently excellent site, addressing Islam, immigration, and related issues with thoroughgoing intelligence and responsibility. (Indeed, one can only wish that the country&#8217;s major newspapers were half as serious, and half as well written, as the typical piece on document.no.) Not unimportantly, it&#8217;s also an elegant site, which features reproductions of great paintings and recordings of classical music – the point presumably being to remind us exactly what we&#8217;re talking about when we talk about preserving our civilization in the face of barbarism.</p>
<p>The success of document.no has baffled and rankled Norway&#8217;s mainstream media, which have repeatedly depicted it as radical and Islamophobic. After the July 2011 atrocities in Oslo and Utøya, many prominent leftists took the opportunity to link document.no to the murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, who&#8217;d been an avid reader of the site and had posted a number of comments on it before carrying out the actions that would make him world-famous.</p>
<p>But document.no has endured, and thrived – and the media have been compelled to acknowledge, however grudgingly, its considerable influence. Recently, <i>Aftenposten,</i> Norway&#8217;s excuse for a newspaper of record, hosted a <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/webtv/Rustad---Du-er-nodt-til-a-vare-kritisk-til-innvandring-7414046.html%20">video debate</a> between Rustad and Helge Øgrim, a veteran journalist who&#8217;s now editor of <i>Journalisten, </i>the official journal of the Norwegian journalists&#8217; union. The debate wasn&#8217;t about Islam or immigration but about document.no itself: is it a valuable source of reliable news and legitimate commentary, and thus a positive force in Norwegian society, or a dangerous mouthpiece for ugly, racist views? Øgrim, sitting right there next to Rustad, chose not to call it racist, but instead – taking a tack often employed by leftists when confronted with arguments they can&#8217;t answer – maintained that its focus was too narrow and its views too predictable, and that it was thus a boring experience.</p>
<p>The Rustad-Øgrim debate wasn&#8217;t just a conversation between two journalists; it was a confrontation between the new media and the old. Indeed, to look at Øgrim&#8217;s résumé is to get a glimpse of just what Norway&#8217;s old media really consists of – and, therefore, of just how much Rustad has been up against in his effort to report widely suppressed news developments and to publish alternative viewpoints. For Øgrim, as it happens, is the very personification of Norway&#8217;s old media. He&#8217;s been the editor-in-chief of <i>Dagbladet </i>and the U.S. correspondent for the major Norwegian wire service, NTB<i>.</i> Not irrelevantly, he also spent many years on the central committee of the AKP, a Maoist party that held an iron grip on much of the Norwegian elite during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The AKP, founded in 1973 and finally folded into the Rødt (Red) Party in 2007, was created by Stalinists who found the post-Stalin USSR insufficiently rigorous in its Communism.</p>
<p>Øgrim&#8217;s career is not atypical. To use a Norwegian expression that&#8217;s particularly apt in this case, Communism has run like a red thread through mainstream Norwegian journalism of the last half century. The first head of AKP, Sigurd Allern, later became Norway&#8217;s first professor of journalism, at the University of Oslo. (He still holds that position.) Other former heads of AKP include Pål Steigen, who has since held many high-level cultural offices, including a stint as an editor at Cappellen, a major publishing house; Kjersti Ericsson, who&#8217;s now a professor of criminology at the University of Oslo; and Hilde Haugsgjerd, who until recently was the editor-in-chief of <i>Aftenposten. </i>Øgrim himself, I might mention, is a member of an old-media dynasty that&#8217;s also a red-diaper dynasty: his father was the longtime program director of NRK television; his cousin Tron was a high-profile Communist journalist.</p>
<p>Norway isn&#8217;t alone in having its journalistic community dominated by Communists. The situation has long been much the same in Denmark, although much of the history of this phenomenon has been systematically covered up. The protagonist in this story is Bent Jensen, head of Denmark&#8217;s Center for Cold War Research, who has been <a href="http://www.b.dk/nationalt/pet-forhindrer-afsloering-af-kgb-folk?fb_action_ids=10152067357169242%20">fighting</a> an uphill battle to expose the degree to which Denmark, and especially Danish journalism, was infiltrated by Soviet agents during the Cold War. The history of Jensen&#8217;s struggle, in a nutshell, is this: in 2006, after a report by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) on Cold War Communist infiltration was deemed unsatisfactory, the Danish Parliament allocated money so that Jensen could research the subject independently and provide a fuller report; in 2009, Minister of Justice Brian Mikkelsen promised him unrestricted access to all the documents that the PET had been allowed to see. But the promises turned out to mean nothing. Jensen, who considers Soviet Communism to have been every bit as perfidious as Nazism and wants the world to understand why, has been stonewalled at every turn.</p>
<p>Why? Plainly, according to reports, high-up figures in the government don&#8217;t want him to be in a position to name names. PET head Jacob Scharf, a former Social Democratic youth official, and Justice Minister Morten Bødskov, also a Social Democrat, have been described as using their power to keep documents about still-living left-wing politicians and journalists out of Jensen&#8217;s hands. (Bødskov reportedly tried to keep Jensen, a serious and objective scholar, from being given this assignment in the first place.) PET claims that allowing Jensen to see certain materials would damage national security and harm PET&#8217;s collaboration with its NATO counterparts. It seems clear, however, that even more important than those considerations is the determination of leftists to cover up their own parties&#8217; strong Cold War ties to the USSR.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s known that among the PET&#8217;s archival items to which Jensen has been denied access is a list of left-wing journalists and politicians who were either KGB agents or naïve Soviet tools – and that among the names on that list is that of Torben Krogh, former editor-in-chief of the national newspaper <i>Information </i>who, reportedly, helped out the KGB by promoting Soviet views. News photographer Jacob Holdt, known for a photo series entitled “American Pictures” that was unflattering to the U.S., was also suspected by PET of working for the Soviets.</p>
<p>Among others whom PET had its eyes on during the Cold War was Jørgen Dragsdahl, a well-known far-left journalist who, PET concluded, was either an out-and-out KGB agent or some thing very close to that. When the national newspaper <i>Ekstra Bladet </i>reported on this in 1992, Dragsdahl sued and won. In a 2007 <a href="http://www.b.dk/nationalt/koldkrigsfejde-mellem-historie-professor-og-journalist-syder-paa-6.-aar%20">interview</a> with <i>Jyllands-Posten, </i>Bent Jensen stated that PET archives contained proof that Dragsdahl had been working for the KGB, and Dragsdahl sued again. He won, but Jensen appealed, and just two months ago – after a trial during which Dragdahl&#8217;s lawyer depicted Jensen as an “inquisitor” – the appeals court finally exonerated Jensen, ruling that he had “sufficient factual foundation for his statements.”</p>
<p>So much for Norway and Denmark. As for the other Scandinavian country, Sweden, meet Olof Frånstedt, who was <a href="http://www.b.dk/kultur/ny-bog-svenske-socialdemokrater-dyrkede-kontakter-til-sovjet-under-den-kolde-krig%20">head</a> of the Swedish intelligence service, Säpo, in the 1960s and 70s. He&#8217;s just published a book, <i>The Spy Hunter, </i>in which he writes about the Soviet ties of many leading Social Democrats. A major topic in his book is the so-called IB Affair. IB (Informations Bureauet) was a secret intelligence group which, operating with the support of Säpo, monitored the Soviet, Maoist, and Palestine connections of Sweden&#8217;s radical left. In 1973, however, journalists Peter Bratt and Jan Guillou – who is also one of the country&#8217;s most successful novelists – wrote articles revealing IB&#8217;s existence. A media scandal ensued – and what outraged the media was not that many high-ranking Swedes had Communist links, but that such a thing as IB existed at all. As a result of Bratt&#8217;s and Guillou&#8217;s efforts, IB was closed down. Only many years later, in 2009, did the newspaper <i>Expressen </i>reveal that Guillou himself had been a KGB agent, and had been paid by the Kremlin for writing Soviet-friendly articles.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a measure of just how things work in Scandinavia that this revelation did little or no harm to Guillou&#8217;s reputation. As with Øgrim, and as with Dragsdahl, his career has been kept going thanks to a sympathetic media establishment that has chosen to let the sordid news of his treason slide out of public consciousness after only the most perfunctory coverage. Which, needless to say, is another way of stating that the far left, even all these years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, still runs the show in the Scandinavian media. And this, in turn, only underscores just how remarkable an accomplishment <a href="http://document.no" target="_blank">document.no</a> really is.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Five Signs of Hope (Maybe) for Europe</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/five-signs-of-hope-maybe-for-europe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=five-signs-of-hope-maybe-for-europe</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Dec 2013 05:30:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Britian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213979</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Some good news for the new year.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Prince-Charles.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-213983" alt="Prince-Charles" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Prince-Charles.jpg" width="350" height="301" /></a>Every now and then readers of this site, while thanking me for my coverage of the Islamization of Europe, have kindly asked if it&#8217;s possible for me to provide an occasional break from the endlessly depressing accounts of jihad and appeasement and dhimmitude and, quite simply, report on some good news for a change.</p>
<p>Point taken. Here, in recognition of the hopeful message of Christmas and the New Year&#8217;s promise, is a year-end dose of tidings of – well, not great joy, but at least possible positive turnarounds on various fronts.</p>
<p>1.<i> BRITAIN: Walking back a dhimmi policy</i></p>
<p>The Marks and Spencer story. This one went through the whole cycle (from proud corporate declaration of spineless dhimmitude to meek apology therefor) with incredible – and gratifying – rapidity.</p>
<p>Just a couple of days before Christmas, a customer of the posh London retailer told the <i>Telegraph </i>that a Muslim clerk had refused, albeit politely, to ring up her bottle of champagne because the item offended the clerk&#8217;s religious convictions. Confronted with this story, a spokesperson for M&amp;S affirmed that, indeed, out of respect for Islam, the store had a policy of allowing Muslim workers to refuse to serve customers purchasing (for example) alcohol and pork, and to pass these <i>haram </i>customers on to other, less discriminating employees.</p>
<p>Result: a huge public outcry, including a Facebook page promoting an M&amp;S boycott. Within hours, M&amp;S was not only apologizing for its wrongheaded policy but (amusingly) insisting that, in fact, it had no such policy at all, and that in the champagne incident the store&#8217;s <i>actual </i>policy had not been properly followed.</p>
<p>2.<i> FRANCE: Walking back a dhimmi report</i></p>
<p>Here&#8217;s another example of outraged reactions to dhimmitude having a real effect. Earlier this month, <i>Le Figaro </i>revealed the contents of a new report – commissioned by France&#8217;s socialist prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault – which recommended a veritable blizzard of revolutionary acts by the government, from renaming streets and squares after immigrants to prohibiting the mention of transgressors&#8217; ethnicity in the news media. Among much else, school curricula would be dramatically transformed to make them radically multicultural. Accepting the report on November 13, Ayrault promised that the recommendations would be acted upon <i>tout de suite. </i></p>
<p>Then the protests started pouring in. “It will no longer be up to immigrants to adopt French culture,” charged Jean-Francois Cope, head of the opposition UMP party, “but up to France to abandon its culture, its values, its history to adapt to the culture of others.” Geoffrey Didier, also of UMP, called the report “a crime against republican assimilation and another step in the communitarian strategy of the Socialist Party.” And National Front leader Marine Le Pen denounced it as “a “declaration of war on the French who are calling for an end to the policy of mass immigration and the reaffirmation of our republican laws and values.” The nationwide outrage led one commentator to describe Ayrault as having “shot himself in the foot.” Confronted with the reaction, Ayrault did a snappy about-face, saying meekly: “Just because I get a report doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s government policy.”</p>
<p>3.<i> BRITAIN: A Prince who May or May Not Be Snapping out of It</i></p>
<p>Over the years, Prince Charles&#8217;s gushing praise of Islam, his enthusiastic participation in Islamic ceremonies, and his occasional references to his own purportedly serious study of the religion have fed speculation that he was either a secret Muslim or was well on his way to becoming one. (A 1997 article in the <i>Middle</i> <i>East</i> <i>Quarterly, </i>entitled “Prince Charles of Arabia,” carefully sifted through the evidence for this proposition.) As recently as 2010, Charles gave a speech extolling Islamic “spiritual principles” as environment-friendly.</p>
<p>How surprising it was, then, to hear the Prince of Wales saying in a speech earlier this month that “we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are, increasingly, being deliberately attacked by fundamentalist Islamist militants.” Underscoring that he had been trying for twenty years “to build bridges between Islam and  Christianity,” he lamented that “we have now reached a crisis where the bridges are rapidly being deliberately destroyed by those with a vested interest in doing so, and this is achieved through intimidation, false accusation and organised persecution, including to Christian communities in the Middle East at the present time.” Refreshingly, he made no apparent attempt to draw a false moral equivalency, to put the crisis down to the usual “interreligious tensions”: no, Charles actually said that Muslims were persecuting Christians, and condemned it outright.</p>
<p>This doesn&#8217;t mean he&#8217;s now a hero of the counterjihad resistance, but it&#8217;s something.</p>
<p>4.<i> NETHERLANDS: A King who May or May Not Be Snapping out of It</i></p>
<p>I&#8217;ve never, to say the least, been a fan of Willem-Alexander, who ascended to the Dutch throne this year upon the abdication of his mother. Beatrix was a notorious appeaser of Islam (opting, for example, to skip Theo van Gogh&#8217;s funeral and instead visit a Muslim community center), and in this respect Willem-Alexander didn&#8217;t seem to have fallen far from the Orange tree. Like Prince Charles, he&#8217;s publicly declared himself a student of Islam. Some years back, moreover, violating his own constitutional obligation to keep mum about politics, he responded to public statements by an elected Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders, by basically suggesting he clam up.</p>
<p>In short, I haven&#8217;t been inclined to expect much from this monarch. But all things are relative, and Dutch writer Joost Niemoller <a href="http://joostniemoller.nl/2013/12/kersttoespraak-koning-tegen-moslimwoorden-van-haat/%20">argued</a> the other day that Willem-Alexander&#8217;s Christmas speech to his subjects revealed a sovereign who&#8217;s savvier than his mom about Islam. Now, I&#8217;ve read the speech, and don&#8217;t quite see it, but then again I&#8217;m not Dutch, and I haven&#8217;t made a study of Beatrix&#8217;s work in this genre, so I have to take Niemoller seriously when he says that the new king&#8217;s statements, however circumspect and coded, mark a real and promising departure. Whereas Beatrix delivered increasingly “militant” Christmas messages, which eventually became little more than party propaganda for the socialist D66 party, the king&#8217;s speech, maintained Niemoller, actually celebrated the message of Christmas – and thus the culture of the West – in a way that was decidedly non-multicultural. When he lamented the hatred that exists in the world, that&#8217;s passed down through the generations, and that leads to violence and terror, he didn&#8217;t speak the word Islam, but, Niemoller asserted, there could be no doubt that the king was “speaking about jihad.”</p>
<p>I want to believe Niemoller, but is his claim credible? I suppose we&#8217;ll know soon enough.</p>
<p>5.<i> BRITAIN: A Prime Minister who May or May Not Be Snapping out of It</i></p>
<p>Like Charles and Willem-Alexander, British prime minister David Cameron has never been anyone&#8217;s idea of a counterjihadist. As recently as October, he announced the establishment of a new British Islamic Market Index and the introduction of the first Islamic bond, or <i>sukuk</i>, to be issued by a non-Muslim nation. Thanks to the UK&#8217;s accommodation of sharia banking law, Cameron bragged, London is now “the biggest center for Islamic finance outside the Islamic world.”</p>
<p>But now? There&#8217;s no evidence that Cameron has had a Damascan road experience, but something is arguably going on. In October, for example, even as he was celebrating those new developments in Anglo-Islamic banking, a task force he&#8217;d set up recommended new state powers to limit the spread of what it identified as violent extremist Islamism. To be sure, in familiar fashion, the panel was at pains to distinguish this radical phenomenon from what it called traditional Islam; but the important, even striking, part was its acknowledgment that there <i>is </i>a link between Islam and violence – and that it can be legitimate, in at least some cases, to describe Islam not as a benign religion but as a dangerous ideology. It&#8217;s not everything, but it&#8217;s a step – and it puts Britain way ahead of the FBI, State Department, and U.S. military when it comes to calling a spade a spade.</p>
<p>There have been other positive signs from the Cameron camp. Earlier this month, after Universities UK gave the go-ahead for universities to segregate men and women in lecture audiences at Muslim speakers&#8217; request, Education Secretary Michael Gove accused Universities UK of “pandering to extremism,” and Cameron, following up on Gove, firmly condemned the policy – whereupon Universities UK quickly reversed itself. Then, a couple of days ago, came the news that Cameron&#8217;s Home Secretary, Theresa May, was stripping jihadists who&#8217;d gone to fight in Syria of their UK citizenship. Yes, it&#8217;s nothing more than a common-sense move, but common sense is precisely what&#8217;s been missing from Britain&#8217;s Islam policy for a long time.</p>
<p>In short: no, these aren&#8217;t earthshaking developments by any measure. But with counterjihad, as with jihad, every little bit counts.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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