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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Janice Fiamengo</title>
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		<title>The Black Book of the American Left, Volume II</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/janice-fiamengo/the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-ii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-ii</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 May 2014 04:56:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Black Book of the American Left]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Rare intellectual strengths characterize the second volume of David Horowitz’s collected writings.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bb45.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225737" alt="bb45" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bb45.gif" width="252" height="360" /></a><strong></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>[To order <i>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 &#8212; The Progressives</i>, <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/volume-ii/">click here</a>. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>We encourage our readers to visit our new website, <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com,</a>  which features David Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1 and 2 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.]</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://pjmedia.com/">PJ Media.</a></strong></p>
<p>The first volume of David Horowitz’s nine-volume <i>The Black Book of the American Left</i> focused on the author’s personal journey out of the leftist faith and its community of adherents — a courageous, disorienting rejection of all he had once believed — and into a reasoned and pragmatic conservatism that has been his creed ever since. Analyzing the various forms of delusion, bad faith, and pathological self-hatred that leftism inspires and demands, the essays in that volume chronicled Horowitz’s decades-long crusade to unmask progressive fantasies to reveal their devastating real-world consequences. In documenting the monumental failures of leftist regimes and the illogic of leftist ideology, Horowitz’s writings have made a vital contribution to the conservative movement in America.</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I9ISKIO/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=0802120679&amp;creativeASIN=1595547959&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20">second volume</a> of his oeuvre, Horowitz turns his attention to individual progressive, showcasing the destructive extremism and Communist roots of their so-called liberal beliefs (actually the opposite of “liberal” in both philosophy and political tactics) and revealing the deep anti-Americanism that has become a part of the Democratic agenda. Here, Horowitz documents the historical falsifications and distortions of purpose necessary to the left’s salvationist program. In essay after essay, his acute understanding of the leftist passions he once shared is arrestingly on display.</p>
<p>One of the particular strengths of Horowitz’s writing is his commitment to disabusing fellow conservatives and genuine liberals of false notions regarding leftists’ aims and beliefs. To this end, he is expert at revealing the obfuscatory rhetoric, deceptive use of terms, and outright falsehoods that are not only an occasional tactic but in fact an intrinsic feature of the progressive program. Thus Columbia University history professor Eric Foner, a founding member of Historians Against the War [in Iraq], can declare himself a “patriot” according to Paul Robeson’s definition that “The patriot is the person who is never satisfied with his country.”</p>
<p>Such a statement might seem to justify a stance of loyal opposition, and bolster Foner’s righteous self-image as a man of conscience. It takes a Horowitz to reveal, however, that Paul Robeson was a fanatical admirer of the Soviet Union and his attitude towards his own country was unrelentingly critical and destructive. Likewise, Professor Foner’s love of country has often been so bound up with corrosive dissatisfaction as to prevent him from taking its side when under attack. Only in the Alice-in-Wonderland progressive lexicon can a willingness — even eagerness — to see one’s country defeated by totalitarian foes be classed as a patriotic emotion.</p>
<p>As Horowitz demonstrates throughout this collection — chronicling in vivid detail the upside-down logic of so many leftist activists and intellectuals — such justifications are straight out of the Communist playbook, by which two generations of radicals “rationalized their disloyalty to America as a higher loyalty to the socialist revolution.” It is here that Horowitz’s familiarity with America’s Communist past enables him to puncture present-day progressive subterfuge. He shows how the Communist certainty that America’s future as a collectivist utopia was already determined has continued to galvanize modern progressives, for whom fanatical devotion to a future ideal, even if that means destroying a vibrant democratic nation, is indeed a higher loyalty.</p>
<p>As Horowitz reveals in his first-rate article on Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear weapons scientist who stole secrets about the U.S. nuclear program for China, and who was zealously proclaimed innocent by leftist journalist Bob Scheer, there is a significant “tolerance, sympathy, and even support for treason […] in the mainstream liberal culture.” Because leftism posits a future in which all imperfections will be abolished, the destruction of the present (imperfect) society is not only acceptable but <i>necessary</i>; and this is why, in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, a significant anti-war movement could arise that focused its anger on America rather than on Islamic extremism, and that envisioned peace as occurring through the <i>disappearance</i>, not the survival, of the United States. Horowitz’s ability to reveal the commitment to America’s destruction at the bottom of progressives’ benign-seeming and peace-proclaiming bafflegab is a particularly salient contribution to conservatism.</p>
<p>Equally crucial is his tracing of the continuities between the Old Left and the New Left. What has changed about the progressive faith since the collapse of the Soviet Union is not any diminishment of revolutionary commitment, but instead an increase of utopian fervor in proportion to the abandonment of specific social and economic blueprints for change. The ragtag collection of eco-radicals, queer and feminist militants, class warriors, anarchists, Maoists and the like who make up the anti-war and Occupy movements has become a purely nihilistic phenomenon dedicated to destroying capitalism, with no clear idea of the preferred system that would replace it. As an example, Horowitz profiles acclaimed Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, whose last book, <i>Age of Extremes</i>, provides a detailed defense of Communist ideals yet who has openly stated his continuing commitment to a project that, in his own words, “has demonstrably failed, and as I know now, was bound to fail.” What does it mean to remain committed to a system bound to fail? Through such a statement, Horowitz argues, Hobsbawm admits “the religious nature of radical beliefs” — in other words, the commitment to a world with no connection to reality.</p>
<p>Horowitz articulates the irrationality of such a commitment with salutary clarity: “So strong is the psychological need for the utopian illusion and its project of destruction, it does not matter to Hobsbawm that the noble future to which he devoted his life and talent did not work and could not have worked, or that when put into practice it created monstrous injustice.” The Left’s utopianism can countenance, and even long for, the defeat of America despite the fact (or because of the fact) that leftism can formulate no viable alternative. No wonder such beliefs are often impervious to reason.</p>
<p>In the individual profiles assembled in the volume, Horowitz documents in compelling detail the misrepresentations, aversion to reality, and vicious dishonesty that characterize many of the world’s most committed left intellectuals; and he shows, disturbingly, how their lies are allowed to pass as truth by a complicit media and academic culture. An incisive essay on Noam Chomsky, “Guru of the American Left,” picks apart the multiple distortions and shocking fabrications in <i>What Uncle Sam Really Wants</i>, Chomsky’s tendentious account of American foreign policy since the Second World War; Horowitz decisively rebuts Chomsky’s ludicrous claims concerning American pro-Nazism and U.S. support for murderous regimes. And yet Chomsky, who has justified al-Qaeda’s attacks by proclaiming the United States to be the greatest terrorist entity in the world, and who actually visited New Delhi and Islamabad after 9/11 to stir up hatred and encourage attacks on American soil, is widely lauded and influential, perhaps the most important public intellectual alive today.</p>
<p>Similarly effective and disquieting is Horowitz’s dissection of Howard Zinn’s <i>A People’s History of the United States</i>, a text used in many American history courses, which presents American national development as a sordid tale of racial evil and capitalist exploitation unparalleled in the world. Such a distorted screed can serve no educational purpose; rather, it is a tool of leftist indoctrination to guarantee that college students are taught to despise their leaders, feel ashamed of their country, and be unable to assess American achievement in comparison with that of other nations. Even more mendacious is the autobiography of Rigoberta Menchu, a much-lauded personal memoir of revolutionary struggle, which pleads the case of the Guatemalan poor and the moral necessity for Marxist revolution to redress it. As Horowitz shows, the book is a tissue of falsehoods to sway gullible western readers — especially university students, who have studied it by the thousands — to the Communist cause; media and academic collusion in the fraud has been widespread.</p>
<p>The intellectual strengths Horowitz brings to his project are, if not unique, certainly rare: a comprehensive grasp of leftist history, its movements, tactics, splinter groups, and ideological currents, combined with an analytical precision enabling him to expose, at the micro-level, the various falsehoods and murderous sleights of hand that characterize leftist arguments. Horowitz is devastatingly good both at illustrating the wide-scale destructiveness of leftist ideas and also at tracing the underhanded rhetorical stratagems in individual’s statements. His ability to clarify the layers of self-deceit and irrational hatred in platforms claiming to promote peace or concern for the poor is unvaryingly sharp. The moral urgency of his writing is articulated in bracingly clear, assured prose — shafts of truth that cut through the fog of leftist platitudes.</p>
<p>Horowitz’s own experience — both of the euphoria of leftist comradeship and of the horror of leftist betrayal — brings a human dimension to many of the essays. “The Secret Power of the Leftist Faith” explores the treatment of Christopher Hitchens by his leftist friends when he broke ranks over corruption within the Bill Clinton administration. The vituperative attacks he received, and his courage in enduring them, brought Horowitz to his defense as a (perhaps unwelcome) ally, with a cogent analysis of the ritual ex-communication reserved for dissidents from the leftist faith, “a phenomenon normal to religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean.”</p>
<p>Another memorable essay, “Guilt of the Son,” provides a riveting assessment of the self-chosen delusions of Robert Meeropol, who has spent his entire adult life defending the memory of his parents, the Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for passing American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Meeropol is a quiet young man whose childhood trauma is cause for sympathy, a fact that Horowitz acknowledges.  But the truth about the Rosenbergs’ actions — and about those who have defended them — matters far more than Meeropol’s personal psychodrama.  Tracing Meeropol’s public statements and writings over the years, Horowitz shows how Meeropol came to acquiesce in the murder of millions by doggedly defending his parents’ honor even when the question of their legal and moral guilt was decisively settled. He provides a masterly diagnosis of Meeropol’s all-too-typical double-thinking: “What matters is that they were self-declared enemies of the United States and its ruling class. This resistance makes them ‘progressives,’ servants of a worthy cause, and therefore above America’s capitalist morality and law.”</p>
<p>Noteworthy also is Horowitz’s dissenting but appreciative review of Ann Coulter’s <i>Treason</i>, one of the few occasions in this collection when Horowitz engages critically with a fellow conservative. Taking issue with exaggerations and over-claims that he sees as more characteristics of the totalitarian left than the responsible right, he provides a nuanced but uncompromising rejoinder to her sweeping denunciations.</p>
<p>Commitment to the truth of history is the keynote of this collection, a truth symptomatically abandoned by leftist sympathizers in favor of wishful thinking and disavowal of its murderous consequences. When Horowitz’s website <i>Discover the Networks</i> first went live, it was ridiculed for seeming to lump together fanatical Islamists and Marxist radicals, on the one hand, with the humane and “moderate” left-wingers, who share only <i>some</i> of the murderers’ beliefs and sympathies, on the other.</p>
<p>Responding to an angry indictment by friend Sherman Alexie, Horowitz concedes that some leftists have good qualities and intentions, but points out that such a sentimental truism provides “no way of explaining political conflicts and why some people line up consistently on one side of the arguments.” Unlike so many of his leftist opponents, Horowitz’s objective is not to claim that political differences negate the <i>humanity</i> of those on the other side of the ideological divide. Indeed, it is progressives’ very humanity — the human longing for personal and social salvation — that so compels Horowitz and about which he writes with such consistent acuity. His insight here is what leftists deny and deliberately misunderstand: “Compassionate and intelligent people often wind up supporting agendas that are neither.” Such is the simple yet profound truth at the heart of this important book.</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em><br />
<b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></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>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume One &#8212; My Life and Times</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-one-my-life-and-times-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-one-my-life-and-times-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2013 04:56:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[A political romance]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210998</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz’s new collection reveals why he’s the progressive faith’s greatest nemesis.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/tbb1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-211002" alt="tbb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/tbb1.jpg" width="300" height="454" /></a><i></i><strong>[To order <em>The Black Book of the American Left</em>, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=SZLFMGIYTBFM">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p><i>The Black Book of the American Left</i> is a compendium of writings and talks by the preeminent anti-leftist of our time, the man whose primary role in establishing the intellectual foundations of the American conservative cause is beyond dispute. As the author of many books on American politics, education reform, and personal reflection, as founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and publisher of <i>FrontPage Magazine</i>, and as creator of Discover the Networks.org, a database of leftist and Islamist individuals and organizations, David Horowitz has for many years spearheaded the movement to protect America against leftist totalitarianism. Part of his project has been to show the continuities between a now discredited Communism and the corrosive Communist offshoots—benign-seeming “progressivism” and “liberalism”—that shape so much of American political life.</p>
<p>In the Preface to the first volume of what is projected to be a nine-volume set, he notes that despite the wide range of subjects he has written about over the past thirty years, his abiding preoccupation has remained “one big thing: the nature, deeds, and fortunes of the political left.” His designation as the left’s “principal intellectual antagonist” seems entirely well founded, as no one has so tirelessly and effectively chronicled and dissected its fatal incoherence and unworkability.</p>
<p>Horowitz knows the left intimately, having grown up in a Communist family and been a committed Marxist intellectual, editor of the New Left magazine <i>Ramparts</i> as a young man. He refers to himself as “someone born into the left and condemned Ahab-like to pursue it.”  His “second thoughts” (a phrase he and long-time friend Peter Collier popularized through the notable 1987 conference of that name) came with the realization that leftism exerts such a powerful emotional hold that adherents are gripped by fanatical hatred of their enemies and devote themselves to the destruction, not the reform, of their country; they are unable to see its virtues or to acknowledge the abuses of the terror-supporting and totalitarian regimes they champion. “If I had a mission […],” he claims in a talk to promote a recent book, “it was about wrestling with the most powerful and pernicious of all human follies, which is the desire to stifle truth in the name of hope.”</p>
<p>As the above statement suggests, what makes Horowitz such an indispensable commentator on this capacious subject is his combination of intellectual force and verbal wit. Consider, for example, his explanation of the counter-intuitive—some would say oxymoronic—triumph of leftist ideology since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet regimes. Far from weakening the leftist cause, as was widely believed at the time (and as should, by rights, have occurred), “The massive defeat […] had the ironic, unforeseen effect of freeing [leftists] from the burden of defending” Marxist failures, thus enabling leftism “to emerge as a major force in American life.” Exactly so. On another occasion, he quips that the collapse of Communism benefited leftist ideologues in that it “rescued them from having to apologize for abetting regimes that had killed tens of millions and enslaved tens of millions more—<i>that had broken eggs with no omelet to show for it</i>.” Unlike some conservatives who are stymied by the noble-seeming rhetoric of left-wing utopianism, Horowitz is superbly able to illuminate its insidious cultural logic and perverse psychological mechanisms. This ability, joined to rigorous analytical logic and fastidious detail, makes him a worthy antagonist indeed; and his intellectual and rhetorical gifts are vividly on display in this volume.</p>
<p>The book is organized as the unfolding story of his journey out of the left, a journey which, given the nature of leftism as a faith that engages identity at the deepest emotional level and that viciously exiles those who succumb to doubt, is inextricably personal. <i>The Black Book</i> chronicles the initial, searching reservations exposed in “Left Illusions,” when Horowitz still considered himself a leftist but recognized that “the best intentions can lead to the worst results,” as well as more thoroughgoing statements of dissent, as in “Why I am No Longer a Leftist” and “A Political Romance,” when he had come to believe that “All of us [on the left] had treason in our hearts in the name of a future that would never come.” A good part of the first, personal, section of the book is haunted by his revulsion and personal shattering at the Black Panther murder of his friend Betty Van Patter, which he courageously exposed in “Black Murder, Inc.” and summed up in his statement that “in the name of revolutionary justice, the left defends revolutionary injustice; in the name of human liberation, the left creates a new world of oppression.” A significant period of soul-searching led him to understand, as he phrased it in “Think Twice Before You Bring the War Home,” the vast “difference between honest dissent and malevolent hate, between criticism of national policy and sabotage of the nation’s defenses.”</p>
<p>As is suggested by these nimble statements about the glaring contradictions and wilful blindness of the leftist worldview, Horowitz’s most original insight has been the impossible yet seemingly irresistible search for transcendence lying at the heart of leftism, a search that is responsible, in his view, for both its naively romantic, even gnostic, view of human nature and its murderous hatred of those who oppose it. His incisive analysis of the essentially religious longing of this putatively secular movement leads to some of the most poignant and devastating passages of critique as when, in “A Political Romance,” he diagnoses leftism as “a shield protecting us from the terror of our common human fate.” At a talk given at his alma mater Columbia University in 2009, this critique is expanded to reflect elegiacally on the frightening emptiness in the human condition: “Over this emptiness [that we die alone and are forgotten] human beings drape their mythic causes and impossible dreams, their hopes for an earthly redemption—for a change that will fill the emptiness by creating a world that is holy or just.” Here and throughout the book, Horowitz’s lyrical and humane insights effectively balance his more particularized attacks on leftist incompetence and cruelty.</p>
<p>Ultimately, of course, Horowitz’s rejection of the left was not only or mainly philosophical but was also grounded in the facts on the ground: in what became for him the overwhelming and undeniable evidence that Communism <i>always</i> failed, that leftists were <i>always</i> on the wrong side of history—outrageously so—and that Marxist regimes always immiserated the people they were supposed to be liberating; moreover, he saw how, in order to buttress their righteous fantasies, leftists repeatedly misrepresented and denied American successes, American tolerance and decency. What Horowitz came to see from his hard look at leftist regimes and, alternatively, at American conduct during one of the most difficult periods of its history was that “When America lost, so did humanity and the cause of freedom … [while] the left showed a lack of concern for the victims that was matched only by its continuing malice towards America.”</p>
<p>In the second, political, section of the volume, there is a good deal of cogent, useful analysis of the horrors and betrayals perpetrated by Communists in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Cuba, and of the lies and denials of American leftists about those regimes. “What finally turned us away from the left,” he sums up in “Political Cross-Dresser,” “was not only the evil it had done. It was its inability to look at its deeds and make a moral accounting, to steer an altered course that would keep it from contributing to similar tragedies in the future.” He has written tirelessly on this point to share his hard-earned insights.</p>
<p>What keeps Horowitz writing despite savage personal attacks and misrepresentations (the focus of the third section)—and despite the increasing rather than waning dominance of the left—is his belief in his life’s non-revolutionary but still significant meaning. While the radical dreamers “go on building towers to heaven,” he claims a “more modest” sense of mission, that of witnessing, of not forgetting: “I needed to warn whom I could and to protect whom I might, even if it was only one individual or two.”</p>
<p>Horowitz is not only against the left, of course; he is also <i>for</i> America and <i>for</i> American values of freedom, individual rights, Republicanism, and capitalist free enterprise. Stirring passages articulate his love for his country, figuring it as “bounty,” “a precious gift,” “a unique presence,” and “a fortress that stands between the free nations of the world and the dark, totalitarian forces that threaten to engulf them.” He also aptly describes the Republican experiment in contrast to the radical dream of perfection with reference to “our pragmatism and tolerance, our devotion to enterprises and pleasures that are bourgeois and mundane; and our hope that is reserved for individual lives and not for grandiose social collectives and schemes.”</p>
<p>One of the many virtues evident in his writing is his ability to make clear the larger principles underlying specific disagreements between left and right. Responding to journalist Hendrik Hertzberg in “The Left and the Constitution,” Horowitz not only shows the sleight of hand and authoritarian assumptions in Hertzberg’s attack on the Constitution but also lays out clearly the larger threat of leftist assaults on America’s history and institutions, that “Moral ambivalence about one’s country can lead to an uncertainty of resolve in defending it.”  Horowitz’s own defenses are exemplary in their ability to show how often leftist arguments are primarily about America-hating rather than about their ostensible subject.</p>
<p>More than anything,<i> The Black Book of the American Left</i> is a superlative record of a decades-long commitment by a writer who, in work of consistently high quality, has been unwearied in making the case against the lies of leftist make-believe.</p>
<p><i>Janice Fiamengo is an author, editor, and Professor of English at the University of Ottawa.</i></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><i><br />
</i></p>
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		<title>Shahina Siddiqui’s Muslim Contribution to Canada</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/shahina-siddiquis-muslim-contribution-to-canada/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=shahina-siddiquis-muslim-contribution-to-canada</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2013 04:15:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Shahina Siddiqui]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tolerance]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The Chair of Islamic History Month Canada is no exemplar of tolerance.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/siddiqui.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-209517" alt="siddiqui" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/siddiqui.jpg" width="306" height="172" /></a>Last week I <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/islamic-history-month-comes-to-manitoba-canada/">called</a> Manitoba’s announcement of Islamic History Month “an extraordinary act of dhimmitude.”</p>
<p>Of course, that’s not what the Chairwoman of Islamic History Month Canada, Shahina Siddiqui, calls it. She says that it is an opportunity for Muslims to “<a href="http://news.gov.mb.ca/news/index.html?item=19253">celebrate</a>, inform, educate and share with fellow Canadians the Muslim cultural heritage” in order to “help build a more inclusive, compassionate and multicultural Canada.”</p>
<p>Let’s put aside the fact that for some Canadians, the Muslim cultural heritage, with its appalling record of violence, hatred, bigotry, and barbarity, is something we’d rather not share (for evidence-based  confirmation of this description, consider the work of <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Understanding-Dhimmitude-Bat-Yeor/dp/1618613359/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507104&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=understanding+dhimmitude">Bat Ye’or</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Ishmaels-House-History-Muslim-Lands/dp/0771035691/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507175&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=in+ishmael%27s+house">Sir Martin Gilbert</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Lust-Knowing-Robert-Irwin/dp/0140289232/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507202&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=for+lust+of+knowing">Robert Irwin</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/American-Jihad-Terrorists-Living-Among/dp/0743234359/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507239&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=american+jihad">Steven Emerson</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Islamic-Imperialism-ebook/dp/B00EZ22C8M/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507267&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=islamic+imperialism">Efraim Karsh</a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-I-Am-Not-Muslim/dp/1591020115/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383505206&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=ibn+warraq+books">Ibn Warraq</a>). Let’s simply consider Ms. Siddiqui’s own record as an advocate for Islam.</p>
<p>In her personal history as a Muslim spokesperson, Siddiqui is a vivid illustration of a certain kind of Muslim contribution to Canada, of which I offer a few highlights.</p>
<p>Ms. Siddiqui is litigious. In 2004, she was responsible for a lengthy human rights complaint against <a href="http://www.vosizneias.com/19879/2008/08/31/winnipeg-canada-muslim-advocates-discrimination-allegations-against-bnai-brith-drags-on/">B’nai Brith Canada</a> for its hosting of an anti-terrorism conference for police, firefighters, and paramedics. Siddiqui lodged the complaint, which was investigated and ultimately dismissed by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, because she felt the B’nai Brith-sponsored event was biased against Muslims. She had not actually attended the workshop, which was given by an internationally respected counter-terrorism organization, but she had spoken to a couple of people who did attend—and felt that in focusing on <i>Muslim terrorism</i> (gasp!), the event promoted hatred.</p>
<p>Given that in our time, Muslims are a <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/04/lessons-from-the-fbi-most-wanted-terrorist-list">majority</a> of those who commit acts of terrorism and that they usually do so specifically in the name of Islam, it is hard to imagine how any legitimate counter-terrorism event could address terrorism without a sustained focus on Islam; nonetheless, Siddiqui took advantage of Canada’s hate speech legislation to hound B’nai Brith into a costly defence, and the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, to its everlasting shame, saw fit to pursue the complaint for <i>five years</i> before finally dismissing it for lack of evidence.</p>
<p>This is a Siddiqui <i>modus operandi</i>, it seems, labeling anti-terror activism as “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/film-s-screening-sparks-religious-controversy-1.600325">hate propaganda</a>” and seeking to censor it. In 2006, she led the charge against the Canadian premiere of <i>Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West</i>, a sober documentary film detailing, mostly through interviews with Islamists and secret tape recordings in mosques, the “<a href="http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0606/glick060606.php3">indoctrination to jihad</a>” taking place amongst Muslims worldwide. In an attempt to have criminal charges laid against the Jewish sponsors of the film, Siddiqui filed a complaint with the Winnipeg police hate crimes unit, stating that she wanted police “to be aware who the sponsors are and what they are doing.” It is not clear if Siddiqui actually <i>watched</i> the film before calling for the criminal prosecution of its sponsors.</p>
<p>Ms. Siddiqui has also made notable contributions to discussions of Islam. When Aqsa Parvez was killed by her father, Muhammad, and brother, Waqas, in 2007 because she <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-spencer/the-lonesome-death-of-aqsa-parvez/">rejected Islamic behavior codes</a>, Siddiqui was distressed by news coverage assuming it was an “Islamic thing” (though Muhammad Parvez himself <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/father-son-plead-guilty-to-aqsa-parvez-murder-1.905089">believed</a> it was). She <a href="http://www.issaservices.com/issa/pressrelease_prd.html">wrote</a> in her capacity as Executive Director of the Islamic Social Services Association that Parvez’s murder was no different from any other case of family violence in Canada, and she castigated an unsympathetic host culture for failing to “support” the Parvez family: “And herein lies the crux of the matter: How do you maintain pride in your roots if your values are demonized, ridiculed, and condemned? What, if any, recourse does a parent have when the values of their family are labeled as un-Canadian and unjust by members of society, from schools to service providers and the justice system?”</p>
<p>The implication that Aqsa’s father killed her because his “values” were “demonized” by non-Muslims does not address why so many Pakistani fathers <i>in Pakistan</i>—where presumably their Muslim values <i>are</i> affirmed—also kill their daughters in alarming numbers, but it does neatly make the case that non-Muslim Canadian society owes Muslim-Canadians (more public funding for Muslim social services, in this case) in order not to be held responsible for future violence.</p>
<p>Ms. Siddiqui also offered clarification on a more recent Muslim-Canadian controversy: the Toronto school cafeteria (Valley Park Middle School) that becomes a mosque-space closed to non-Muslims every Friday, and in which girls and boys are separated and menstruating girls placed at the back of the room. In an opinion <a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2011/07/12/secular_extremists_ignore_tradition_of_diversity.html">article</a> in the Toronto <i>Star</i>, Siddiqui dismissed objections to the mosque, which began operation in 2011, ascribing the opposition to “secular extremists and gender Nazis,” and claiming that the controversy “reflects to what depths we have sunk when it comes to fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims.” It seems that when it comes to “demonizing” those with different “values,” Ms. Siddiqui can slug it out with the best of them.</p>
<p>Siddiqui’s defensiveness about Islam is understandable, if regrettable. Many people, after all, would be more than willing to outlaw criticism of their own and to have “offensive” people punished by the state. Siddiqui has learned well how to work the Canadian system: file human rights complaints, accuse critics of hate crimes, and claim that her cultural practices have been viciously misrepresented. Her aggressive style of advocacy may, from a Muslim-supremacist point of view, make her the ideal person to head up Islamic History Month Canada.</p>
<p>But an exemplar of tolerance she is definitely not. Siddiqui’s attitude to the non-Muslim majority is suggested in an <a href="http://www.soundvision.com/info/socialservice/shahina.asp">interview</a> she gave to <i>Sound Vision</i>, an Islamic website (a tip of the hat <a href="http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.ca/2009/03/wonders-another-islamist-front.html">to Blazing Cat Fur</a> for alerting me to this source). In discussing why she established the Islamic Social Services Association, she explained the dilemma of many Muslim women in Canada as follows:</p>
<p>“Majority of the abused Muslim women, if you ask them, why didn’t they turn for help, all they needed to do was call 911, they’ll say that ‘I don’t want him to go to jail, I don’t want to end up in a shelter where my children and I will be exposed to an un-Islamic lifestyle.’ So there is a fear that if they go to mainstream social services, they won’t be able to preserve their faith and their children will be lost in mainstream society. So they’ll choose the lesser of two evils.”</p>
<p>It is surely telling that Siddiqui’s account of Muslim revulsion at non-Muslim society contains no hint of disapproval or objection. Is this a woman who advocates the <i>integration</i> of Muslims into Canadian society? On the contrary, Siddiqui seems to sympathize with an attitude that sees beating or even death at the hands of a violent husband as “a lesser evil” to mixing with non-Muslim society, where one’s “children will be lost.”</p>
<p>With such comments and actions as evidence, it’s hard to feel that Shahina Siddiqui models the Canadian qualities of “inclusion” and “compassion” that she identified in her Islamic History Month press release. On the contrary, her comments imply a conviction that Muslim culture is superior to Euro-Canadian culture and that Canadians must adapt to Muslim values and doctrines or be judged guilty of criminal hatred. Thanks for “sharing,” Ms. Siddiqui—but no thanks.</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>Islamic History Month Comes to Manitoba, Canada</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/islamic-history-month-comes-to-manitoba-canada/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamic-history-month-comes-to-manitoba-canada</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Oct 2013 04:25:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[canada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[history month]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Manitoba]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Is it really the only group worth recognizing? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/045-1008071838-canadian-muslim.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208925" alt="045-1008071838-canadian-muslim" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/045-1008071838-canadian-muslim-450x327.jpg" width="270" height="196" /></a>[What will it include?]</i></p>
<p>A few weeks ago, in an extraordinary act of dhimmitude, Manitoba became the first Canadian province to proclaim October as Islamic History Month, a month designed to recognize the province’s “<a href="http://news.gov.mb.ca/news/index.html?item=19253">flourishing</a> Muslim community.” Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Christine Melnick <a href="http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Manitoba-proclaims-October-as-Islamic-History-Month-228100031.html">gushed</a> that “In Manitoba we value and cherish our ethnic diversity, to which the Muslim community contributes so richly.”</p>
<p>Also present at the announcement was Shahina Siddiqui, the chairwoman of <a href="http://www.islamichistorymonth.com/ihmc2010/">Islamic History Month Canada</a> (IHMC), founded in 2007 by the notorious Canadian Islamic Congress, whose former President Mohamed <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=12573ab0-13ce-48c4-9e8e-5765b1a654d9">Elmasry</a> once refused to retract on public television his <a href="http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/transcript.htm">statement</a> that all Israelis over age 18 were legitimate targets for terrorist attacks, and who wasted hundreds of thousands of public dollars pursuing a human rights complaint against <i>Maclean</i>’s magazine for publishing articles critical of Islam. None of that aggressive Islamic supremacism was evident in the feel-good tropes trotted out by Siddiqui, who stated in the news release that she and her community “are pleased to celebrate, inform, educate, and share with fellow Canadians the Muslim cultural heritage” in order to build “a more inclusive, compassionate, and multicultural Canada.”</p>
<p>Anyone who has been paying attention to the news over the past few years may well question whether Muslim presence tends to contribute to “compassion” and “inclusivity.” Tell that to the <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3318/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2012">Christians being massacred</a> in Muslim lands across the Middle East or to the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/the-bleak-prospects-for-europes-jews/">European Jews</a> who find themselves, yet again, the target of slurs, vandalism, beatings, and murder because they are unfortunate enough to be living in areas with concentrations of Muslim immigrants. Islam just doesn’t seem to be a religion that produces a lot of compassion.</p>
<p>For those with negative perceptions of Islam, the Manitoba announcement will, if not lay our fears to rest, certainly indicate decisively that Manitoba has now ruled them out of bounds. The Manitoba provincial <a href="http://news.gov.mb.ca/news/index.html?item=19253">website</a> proclaims that Islamic History Month is intended to “recognize and celebrate the history and heritage of Muslims.”</p>
<p>One might be forgiven for not realizing that Muslims have made a significant enough contribution to Manitoba to deserve an entire month of celebration. Manitoba’s Muslims number around 9,000, less than 1% of Manitoba’s total population of just over 1.2 million people.</p>
<p>Like most parts of Canada, Manitoba has a relatively multicultural demographic, with many diverse groups who have made substantial contributions to the province’s history. Ukrainians, for example, first arrived in Manitoba in 1891 and constitute, according to the 2006 census, nearly 13% (167,175 people) of the present-day population. This Slavic group forms the backbone of modern Manitoba, having played a significant role in agricultural development as well as in the spheres of business, manufacturing, the trades and professions. As an <a href="http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/transactions/3/firstukrainians.shtml">item</a> on Manitoba history notes, “there are six members of Ukrainian origin sitting in the legislative assembly, one of whom is the speaker of the house, and [Ukrainian-Canadians] have been elected reeves, mayors, councillors, and aldermen in eighteen municipalities.”</p>
<p>Another distinct and vital part of the province are Manitoban Jews, who arrived even earlier than Ukrainians, in 1874. Although their numbers have never been large (they are now, at 16,500, only about 1.3% of the provincial population), and although anti-Semitism created many barriers during their first century in the province, Jews made enormous <a href="http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/special/ourcityourworld/the-jews-of-manitoba-or-the-centre-of-its-own-diaspora-154385665.html">contributions</a> as farmers, laborers, storekeepers, lawyers, judges, political leaders, teachers, and philanthropists. Neither of these groups is publicly recognized with its own Manitoban month. The fact is that there aren’t enough months in the year to properly acknowledge all the peoples who have made Manitoba what it is, and such attempts at recognition are bound to create bad blood.</p>
<p>In the case of Manitoba’s 9,000 Muslims, it isn’t clear why they deserve special acknowledgement; the announcement does not get past bromides about diversity. A few years ago, a dozen Muslim families in Winnipeg made <a href="http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/02/05/muslim-families-in-winnipeg-want-children-excused-from-certain-classes/">national headlines</a> for demanding that their children be excused from participating in two mandatory primary-level school programs: music (not part of their culture, they claimed) and physical co-education (not morally acceptable). The same Chair of IHMC, Shahina Siddiqui, then executive director of Islamic Social Services in Winnipeg, was quick to point out in interview that these are a minority of Manitoba’s Muslims. Some Muslims do have a problem with co-education at the higher school levels, she confirmed, and accommodation has been made for them. But there should be no problem with co-education “under the age of puberty.”</p>
<p>Come again? Why should accommodation be made at any time?</p>
<p>And here we get to the heart of the matter: the demand that Muslim cultural traditions and doctrines—even those that run directly counter to Canadian values such as gender equality—take precedence over Canadian laws. Rather than accepting and seeking to become a part of the society to which they have chosen to immigrate, Muslims such as these demand special accommodations and rights—for halal food, single-sex swimming times, special worship spaces, and so on.</p>
<p>And now their own month too.</p>
<p>Hovering behind the Immigration Minister’s embrace of Islamic History Month, of course, is the Muslim claim to special victim status. In an <a href="http://www.torontomuslims.com/NewsInfo/Articles/tabid/97/Article/137/let-me-tell-you-a-story-how-islamic-history-month-canada-came-to-be-and-what-it.aspx">article</a> entitled “How Islamic History Month Canada Came to Be and What It Means to You,” the President of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Wahida Valiante, complained in her first sentence that “Over the past decade, Muslims in Western societies have been pushed into the harsh spotlight of negative discourse. This trend has been particularly evident in academia, among mainstream media, and in prevailing political rhetoric; but has not escaped other segments of Canadian society, including the general public.”</p>
<p>Even if this assertion of negative coverage were true, <i>which it most definitively is not</i>, its sleight of hand is astounding—as if some dastardly external agent has brought Muslims unfairly into the spotlight. There is no hint that the repeated, horrific acts of violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam might have played some role in tarnishing the Islamic brand. In fact, it is the very silence of large segments of the mainstream media about Muslim violence that allows Valiante to make such ridiculous claims, not only that her people have received unjustified negative press but also that special compensation is now necessary to make amends for Islam’s bloody image.</p>
<p>What will Islamic History Month have to say about the Muslim heritage of child-rape, polygamy, honor killing, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, wife abuse, and anti-Semitism that Muslims seem to bring with them wherever their numbers reach sufficient levels (see Raymond Ibrahim’s analysis of the <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/islams-rule-of-numbers-and-the-london-beheading/">Rule of Numbers</a>). These matters, presumably, will not figure at all.</p>
<p>In fact, if dealt with honestly, it might take an entire month to highlight Muslim atrocities on the world stage—they are so numerous and so bloody. Perhaps Muslim immigrants worldwide could aim for one month in which they left their non-Muslim neighbors in peace? And maybe on even one day of that month, they might practice a little healthy self-criticism, asking themselves why Muslims so frequently commit violence in the name of their religion, perhaps even for that one day extend apologies to the host cultures that have taken them in, supported them financially, given them shelter and educational opportunities, and provided refuge from the dysfunctional and violent places they have left.</p>
<p>That’s probably too much to ask.</p>
<p>One can’t blame Muslims in Manitoba or elsewhere for pushing for an Islamic History Month: who doesn’t want one’s culture and religion officially sanctioned, even if the praise comes long before it can, by any reasonable measure, have been earned?</p>
<p>But what do non-Muslims get out of Islamic History Month? Do the members of Manitoba’s provincial legislature really believe Muslim contributions to the province so outstanding? I doubt most could name one not spoon-fed them by Ms. Siddiqui’s organization. Many provincial politicians probably believe they are doing a great thing in affirming Muslim culture, thus showcasing their own credentials as fighters against Islamophobia, that Muslim Brotherhood-manufactured thought crime applied to anyone who recoils at the record of the religion of peace.</p>
<p>And for any amongst the Manitoba ruling elite who might secretly feel uneasy about this record, Islamic History Month is surely a self-protective gesture, a special tribute by non-Muslims in the hope that they may be spared the Muslim “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/muslim-days-of-rage/">days of rage</a>” that are fast destroying many European cities. Will it work? Ask the Christians in Egypt, in Syria, in Gaza, in Pakistan, in Iraq—tiny oppressed minorities who constitute no numerical or political threat to the Islamic dominance of their societies. No mercy has been extended to them. Why should Islamic History Month guarantee inter-ethnic harmony? One thing is for sure: other Canadian provincial assemblies will be receiving visits from delegations eager to see Islamic History Month declared in their provinces too.</p>
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		<title>Victory in the No-Go Zone</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 04:11:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A new book by Gary McHale exposes race-based policing in Ontario, Canada.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/victory.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-208006" alt="victory" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/victory.jpg" width="226" height="316" /></a></p>
<p><i>“The officers mentioned here chose to watch crimes being committed and, in most cases, chose to arrest the victims of the crimes instead of the criminals. In my view, they have violated their own consciences, violated their oath before God, violated their duty to the community, and violated the very foundation of what a democracy is supposed to be … They made their choices and history should remember them accordingly.”</i></p>
<p>On February 28, 2006, a group of Native protestors from the Six Nations reserve occupied the Douglas Creek Estates housing development in the small non-Native community of Caledonia, Ontario. The protestors’ point was that the land had never been legally ceded by the Six Nations to the British Crown, and therefore could not legitimately be developed by Henco Industries.</p>
<p>Worried about the bad press they would likely receive if they forcibly removed and charged the protestors—who would be joined, over the next weeks and months, by armed Mohawk Warriors, union organizers, pro-Palestinian activists, and drug- and people-smugglers from across the continent—the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) failed to act on several court orders to remove them. Native land claims are a politically potent, guilt-laden issue in Canada, and the OPP did not want a repeat of a previous stand-off, some ten years earlier, in Ipperwash Provincial Park, where one of the protestors was accidentally killed by police.</p>
<p>By the time the OPP did make their move in Caledonia, nearly two months after the occupation began, the occupiers’ numbers and resolve had increased to such an extent that they were able to fight police off, in the process injuring three officers. From that point on, chaos came to Caledonia, with the highway dug up, hydro towers cut down, fires set on private property, a bridge burnt down, the power station firebombed, objects hurled onto a road from an overpass, numerous death threats issued, police officers assaulted and held hostage, and residents and reporters, including an elderly couple and an 86-year-old war veteran, harassed, swarmed, and beaten up. Set back on their heels, the police resorted to negotiating with the self-proclaimed peaceful protestors, trying to put a good spin on their inability to restore order. The provincial government under Premier Dalton McGuinty tried to buy peace by purchasing Douglas Creek Estates and authorizing the protestors to live there (at taxpayers’ expense), but the mayhem merely escalated as protestors fought amongst themselves and with the community.</p>
<p>Thus began for the non-Native residents of Caledonia a long ordeal, still not entirely resolved, during which they were subjected to daily inconvenience, humiliation, vandalism, blockades of their streets, frequent gunfire, sleep deprivation, and physical violence, with almost no charges laid and often with the police standing by and watching as the law was flouted by the Natives and their leftist allies. On some occasions, the police even assisted the protestors to set up their barricades. Mohawk and Palestinian flags began to appear around the occupied site, but non-Natives who sought to symbolically reclaim the territory with a Canadian flag were arrested “to prevent a breach of the peace.” Non-Natives who tried to prod the police into acting were called troublemakers or racists, and threatened with retaliatory arrest and lawfare. Sam Gaultieri, a resident of Caledonia, was beaten so badly by Native thugs who had invaded his property that he was left with permanent brain damage.</p>
<p>As the protest dragged on for months and then years, Caledonia became the face of the new normal of politically correct policing in Canada, under which Native lawbreakers can act with impunity while non-Natives cannot rely on the agents of the law to protect their homes, businesses, or their physical safety. The mainstream media either ignored the story or focused almost exclusively on Native grievances. Only Christie Blatchford, <i>National Post</i> journalist, believed it a story worth investigating fully; she published her account of the fiasco, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Helpless-Caledonias-Nightmare-Anarchy-Failed/dp/0385670397/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1380202670&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=christie+blatchford+helpless"><i>Helpless</i></a>, in 2010.</p>
<p>Gary McHale, who was living in Toronto in 2006, became involved in Caledonia out of a sense of Christian duty, the desire to see everyone’s rights protected under Canadian law. Recognizing that it was futile to expect police and their government masters to reform themselves, he began with a tiny group of associates (<a href="http://joincanace.wordpress.com/">Canadian Advocates for Charter Equality</a>) to develop strategies to expose the racist policing that was ongoing in Caledonia and to shame authorities into taking action.</p>
<p>By allowing himself to be arrested over and over again, by filming police complicity with Native law-breaking, by meticulously documenting police procedures designed to paralyze and silence law-abiding residents, by learning the law and defending himself against a 30-month frivolous prosecution for “Counselling Mischief Not Committed,” a prosecution intended to bankrupt him, by mastering the procedures of citizen’s arrest and citizen’s charges, and above all by refusing to allow frustration, despair, and anger to overcome his resolve or cloud his judgement—even when it meant enduring physical assault without retaliation, while the police watched—Gary McHale became a force to be reckoned with in Caledonia: the nemesis of Commissioner Julian Fantino, Chief of the Ontario Provincial Police, and an unlikely champion of the power of powerlessness.</p>
<p>McHale gave himself body and soul to the cause: he lived and breathed Caledonia for the next seven years, enduring significant hardship as a result. He was arrested nine times, was held in jail overnight without charge, had his named smeared repeatedly in the mainstream media, was harassed and beaten by Native protesters, lost his life savings, had to defend himself against a 7.1 million dollar lawsuit launched against him by the OPP, was charged with a made-up crime in order to keep him out of Caledonia, and experienced on a daily basis the world-turned-upside-down reality of a politically correct organization in which race determines who can commit crime with impunity and whose suffering is of no account.</p>
<p>McHale accepted the continual arrests, jailings, the hounding and humiliation out of a conviction that the system could not sustain its corrupt course indefinitely and that ultimately the spectacle of innocence abused would galvanize key people and turn the tide of public opinion. His Christian faith helped him to separate his anger over the injustice from feelings about individuals—and he writes now, over seven years into the ordeal, with a sense of satisfaction in what he has achieved and with hope for the future, as well as with a wonderful sense of humour.</p>
<p>His account of what happened, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Victory-No-Go-Zone-ebook/dp/B00FOVYIF8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1382137346&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=victory+in+the+no+go+zone"><i>Victory in the No-Go Zone</i></a>, is an astounding book—one that almost certainly would never have seen the light of day if not for Freedom Press Canada, a small conservative publishing house that addresses subjects others won’t touch. The accumulated evidence of police corruption and of the triumph of victim ideology over effective or just law enforcement is often staggering. One can hardly believe this is Canada. McHale tells the story with just the right mix of anger, insouciance, and righteous passion. He is brilliant in his analysis, a la Martin Luther King Jr., of the inverse logic that tars men as racist bigots when they call for equal treatment, and blames innocent citizens for “inciting” violence through peaceful demonstrations. His character as a man of God, and as someone who has thought through his own principles and convictions and believes in himself whatever the whole world tells him, colors every page and makes his book an inspiring document of perseverance and integrity.</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>English Studies, R.I.P.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/the-death-of-english-studies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-death-of-english-studies</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Oct 2013 04:20:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Gilmour]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[English Studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Feminism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Controversy over an instructor's remarks at the University of Toronto reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of academia.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/rollins-gilmour1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206059" alt="Rollins.Gilmour1.jpg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/rollins-gilmour1-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>The small world that is Canadian literary-academic culture underwent convulsions last week when a novelist named David Gilmour, a part-time English instructor at the University of Toronto, announced in an <a href="http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/gilmour-transcript">interview</a> that he doesn’t love women and Chinese writers enough to teach them in his fiction course, and that he prefers books by “very serious heterosexual guys.” He listed as his favourite “guy guys” Elmore Leonard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Henry Miller, and Philip Roth. The one exception was Virginia Woolf, but he didn’t teach her because of poor student response.</p>
<p>The furor over his words was predictable, and right on cue. Various outraged students and faculty members at the University of Toronto came forward to denounce Gilmour’s putative bigotry (in the world of the politically correct, “not loving” is little different from “hating”). An <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/university-of-toronto-students-protest-david-gilmour-1.1869668">anti-Gilmour protest</a> was held September 27<sup>th</sup> on the university grounds next to the statue of a former principal of U of T’s Victoria College, literary critic Northrop Frye; Frye’s statue was dressed up in a pink boa and tiara to demonstrate the gender daring of the protestors. The progressivist <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/27/david_gilmour_protest_and_angry_academics_at_u_of_t.html"><i>Toronto Star</i></a> newspaper wrote to Angela Esterhammer, current principal of Vic, asking “what action, if any, the college would take” against Gilmour, and reported as significant the fact that he would not be fired. The Twitter world burst with sizzling insights, with <a href="https://twitter.com/NatalieZed">Natalie Zed</a>, for instance, reminding her friends that “David Gilmour said this shit aloud. How many more just think and do what he does quietly?” A bookstore and library in Waterloo <a href="http://www.therecord.com/news-story/4130721-gilmour-event-in-waterloo-cancelled-after-controversial-remarks/">cancelled</a> their invitation to Gilmour for a speaking event, claiming that his “remarkably impolitic” statement was not one they could “afford to be associated with.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/27/david_gilmour_protest_and_angry_academics_at_u_of_t.html">President Esterhammer</a>, too, wasted no time in distancing herself from Gilmour, affirming that he “expressed his views about teaching literature in a careless and offensive manner,” stressing that he was not typical of Victoria College, which is widely lauded for the “range and diversity” of its course offerings, and pointing out that “Faculty members, students, alumni, and the administration of Victoria College have made clear that they do not share [his] views about novels by women or about other groups of literary works.” It’s good to know that no one is standing out from the assembly of the just. A friend of mine has suggested that Gilmour may have been deliberately inflammatory and attention-seeking rather than “careless” in the interview, though if so, he is certainly regretting his flamboyance now. But whether or not the bad-boy remarks were designed to bring Gilmour’s name into the spotlight, his colleagues have certainly stepped up with alacrity to play their mortified and righteous roles—and their theatrics show all too clearly what a farce the study of English has generally become, even (or especially) at one of Canada’s most prestigious universities.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most self-dramatizing hyperbole came from the acting head of the University of Toronto’s English department, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/26/david_gilmours_comments_reflect_sexism_in_literature_critics.html">Paul Stevens</a>, who wrote in a staff memo that he was “appalled and deeply upset” by Gilmour’s comments, which “constitute[d] a travesty of all we stand for.” Obviously unembarrassed by the overstatement, he also claimed to be “pursuing the matter further today”—whether to have Gilmour forced into gender sensitivity training or some other blasphemy sanction is not clear. His outrage was nearly matched by that of <a href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/09/26/david-gilmour-is-not-my-colleague-university-of-toronto-english-professor-takes-aim-at-giller-nominated-author/">Holger Syme</a>, Chair of the Department of English and Drama at U of T’s Mississauga campus, who wrote a <a href="http://www.dispositio.net/archives/1688">blog post</a> casting Gilmour out of the charmed circle of the intellectual elect: Gilmour “does not talk or think like a professor of literature,” he sniffed indignantly, because “Good teaching requires empathy—an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you.” Leaving aside the question of whether some “effort to understand” might be required to appreciate nineteenth-century Russian and French writers, one wonders whether Syme would have delivered himself of the same caustic putdown of a Canadian aboriginal scholar teaching only other Canadian aboriginal authors or a gay black man teaching only gay blacks.</p>
<p>Many other concerned U of T citizens joined the fray. <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/26/david_gilmours_comments_reflect_sexism_in_literature_critics.html">Gillian Jerome</a>, co-founder of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, asserted that Gilmour represents Canada’s “deeply sexist and racist culture.” <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/26/david_gilmours_comments_reflect_sexism_in_literature_critics.html">Anne Thériault</a> found it “almost exciting” that such blatant sexism had been expressed so that a discussion on academic misogyny could be pursued. A PhD student in the department, <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/university-of-toronto-students-protest-david-gilmour-1.1869668">Miriam Novick</a>, called for Victoria College to “seriously reconsider [Gilmour’s] continued employment.” Associate Chair of the English Department <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/09/26/david_gilmours_comments_reflect_sexism_in_literature_critics.html">Nick Mount</a> opined that it was “not fair to students” to advertise a course on “a variety of international authors” and then to present only “dead white guys.”</p>
<p>So what exactly are the feminists howling about? When such literary masters as Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and Anton Chekhov are dismissed by a professor of English as “dead white guys,” it’s clear that a blanket anti-male animus—of the sort only a feminist could love—has overtaken the ivory tower. Contrary to the self-righteous huffing and puffing of the advocates of gender justice, Gilmour’s off-hand statements highlighted not misogynist tyranny but the lockdown by academic feminism on even the most flippant and marginal deviations from the correct line. As <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/david-gilmour-an-agent-of-the-patriarchy-oh-please/article14570359/">Margaret Wente</a> remarked in the Saturday <i>Globe</i>, “… only in a world where people are manufacturing oppression would a middle-aged professor who happens to prefer Henry Miller to Alice Munro … be vilified as an agent of the patriarchy.” Merely to note the glaring contradiction in the condemnations is to see their hypocrisy: on any campus across North America, one can find courses galore that focus exclusively on women writers, Aboriginal writers, lesbian writers, and so on—with nary a white heterosexual male in sight; and no one censures them for lack of “range and diversity.” Whole programs such as Women’s Studies are devoted, in fact, to slandering white men, and almost no one in the university community raises an objection.</p>
<p>What the fracas does clearly reveal—through the uniformity of response to Gilmour and the intellectual shallowness of reactions—are the dying gasps of a once magnificent, now morally bankrupt and pusillanimous, academic enterprise.</p>
<p>The study of literature—which was, let it be said right away, largely the study of literature by white male authors—once saw itself as part of the search for universal truths through reflection on the masterworks of great authors. Though undoubtedly at times stuffy and hidebound, it was also serious and intellectually substantial, attracting great thinkers such as Lionel Trilling, F.R. Leavis, William Empson, Edmund Wilson, and University of Toronto’s Northrop Frye himself. Today’s academics seem, in comparison, of vastly diminished moral and mental stature, fussing in chorus about “diversity” as if it were the only possible value to be gained from reading, and exhibiting in their own remarks no significant diversity at all. It is remarkable that not a single one of these academics, despite the protection of tenure, came forward to defend Gilmour or at least to rebut his more hysterical detractors. Is there not one with courage and common sense?</p>
<p>And of all those so eager to damn him, not one could be bothered to rebut his statements on their own, <i>literary</i>, terms: to show why the male authors that he preferred were not, actually, better than the women authors he slighted; to offer counter-judgements about literary value; to confirm, in short, that great literature matters to literary scholars (only journalist <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/09/26/barbara-kay-david-gilmour-has-a-point/">Barbara Kay</a>—and, to a different end, <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/09/28/rex-murphy-imagination-has-no-gender-language-has-no-sex/">Rex Murphy</a>—dared to reflect on the gender of literary genius). It’s not only that academic cowardice and self-interest remain at an all-time high but also that interest in literature as literature, apart from its sociological import, long ago ceased to have any place in departments supposedly dedicated to its study. The titan <a href="http://northropfrye-thebushgarden.blogspot.ca/2009/02/conclusion-to-literary-history-of.html">Northrop Frye</a>—he of the statue decorated with a feather boa by the protestors, few of whom likely know his (now largely untaught) works—defined major writers by the capacity for their readers to “grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference.” It’s unlikely that such an idea would get a serious hearing at the University of Toronto today. Having lost faith in the discipline they are (over) paid to teach, literature instructors have enthusiastically embraced their roles as the guardians of progressive pieties about women and the Chinese.</p>
<p>This is not to suggest that Gilmour himself is any kind of resistance hero. He has long since apologized for his remarks and will almost certainly never make any such again.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Don’t Be That Feminist!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/dont-be-that-feminist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dont-be-that-feminist</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Aug 2013 04:35:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[don't be that girl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[men's rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[responsibility]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=199150</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Outrage greets a campaign that dares to imply that women and men can both be victims. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/posters.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-199152" alt="BRITAIN-ENTERTAINMENT-FILM-WORLD WAR Z" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/posters-450x239.jpg" width="360" height="191" /></a>Attending the opera in Ottawa a few months ago, I had the kind of experience that once galvanized women to speak out against the sexist put-downs that passed for humor in an earlier era. This time, however, the putative humor was at the expense of men.</p>
<p>“Please silence anything in your possession that may be annoying to those around you,” said our host, an affable radio personality with Canada’s public broadcaster, “That includes cell phones, other electronic devices, <i>your husband</i> …” An approving chuckle ran through the crowd.</p>
<p>How times have changed. Forty years ago, a few stalwart feminists might have walked out of the auditorium to express their (justified) annoyance at gender discrimination if the wife had been the annoying appendage to be silenced. Now the feminists in the audience made no noticeable protest.</p>
<p>So unquestioned is the anti-male animus of our time that the only pain considered worthy of attention or collective action is women’s pain.</p>
<p>The pervasiveness of feminist ideas about female innocence was vividly on display a few weeks ago in Edmonton, Alberta, when two rival poster campaigns garnered media attention. “<a href="http://www.edmontonpolice.ca/CommunityPolicing/PersonalPropertyCrimes/SexualAssault/Dontbethatguy.aspx">Don’t Be That Guy</a>,” an anti-rape campaign by a coalition of women’s groups in conjunction with the RCMP (the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), met with general approval in the mainstream media while outrage greeted “<a href="http://www.theprovince.com/news/That+Girl+parody+anti+rape+posters+offensive+says+professor/8640475/story.html">Don’t Be That Girl</a>,” an anti-false-charge campaign by Men’s Rights Edmonton (which one <a href="http://globalnews.ca/news/711198/mens-rights-group-defends-posters-claiming-women-lie-about-rape/">reporter</a> snidely dismissed as a “so-called men’s rights organization”). The difference in the posters’ reception tells us a good deal about the enormous social power of the woman as victim theme in Canada today.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?q=Don't+Be+That+Guy+images&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=rV76UaGOIoX84AOR14GgCQ&amp;ved=0CCwQsAQ&amp;biw=1301&amp;bih=612#facrc=_&amp;imgdii=_&amp;imgrc=zSKtes3CLcuBUM%3A%3Be8r26ElEEtfXsM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fbeaconnews.ca%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2011%252F10%252Foct13guy.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fbeaconnews.ca%252Fcalgary%252F2011%252F10%252Fdont-be-that-guy%252F%3B600%3B300">anti-rape posters</a> show various scenarios in which sexual assault can occur. A young woman is passed out on a bed, a man standing over her reaching for his pants’ zipper: the caption reads, “It’s not sex … when she’s passed out. Sex with someone unable to consent = sexual assault.” In another, a drunken woman is helped to a cab by a man, her body supported by his: the caption reads, “Just because you helped her home … doesn’t mean you get to help yourself.” In another, a young woman is laughing and drinking with friends at a bar, smiling invitingly at a young man, but “Just because she’s drinking … doesn’t mean she wants sex.” There are five other such scenarios, all involving white men and women (multicultural representation for once having been completely—deliberately?—neglected); one scenario involves two white men (“It’s not sex … if he changes his mind”). None of the pictures shows a man in a position to be sexually abused by a woman.</p>
<p>Despite the almost jocular wording in some of the posters, the insulting message is clear: young white men are so morally obtuse about sex and so prone to commit assault as to require a public finger wagging and calling-out: <i>Don’t be that guy!</i> Don’t be the guy who violates an unconscious or unwilling victim. The average white man is presumed to need elementary instruction in how to treat a woman.</p>
<p>As a sexual assault prevention strategy, the posters’ efficacy is dubious—would a hardened rapist reform after seeing them? It seems unlikely—but they are undoubtedly effective in libeling all men as potential abusers despite the fact that the vast majority of men (94-95% according to feminist statistics) bear no blame for sexual assault.</p>
<p>The poster campaign is unsettling for its insistence that no matter what a woman does—no matter how careless and irresponsible—she is always innocent. While every reasonable person would agree that an unconscious woman cannot consent to sex, the various drunken scenarios raise complex issues of accountability. One is not supposed to ask what a girl is doing getting herself so drunk that she needs assistance home (in fact, of course, part of the posters’ message is that such questioning is itself quasi-criminal—that encouraging women to take responsibility for their safety is misogynistic).</p>
<p>The “anti-rape culture” of these posters is about prohibiting all such questions. One is not supposed to ask how, if a girl is so drunk that she needs help getting home, she will not be too drunk to remember that she did not consent. One is not supposed to ask how her drunken memories of what happened to her will be more reliable than the defendant’s report of what happened. Her drinking doesn’t mean anything, according to these posters, other than greater-than-usual vulnerability and greater-than-usual exemption. And what of the young man who is probably also drinking too much: does he not receive any exemption from responsibility? Apparently not. Although the posters squarely target the “guy” in question—whose guilt is the whole point—the creators of the posters aren’t interested in his feelings and responses, and certainly not in his potential difficulty in ascertaining consent.</p>
<p>Thinking along these (unacceptable) lines, Men’s Rights Edmonton created “Don’t Be That Girl,” a poster campaign that uses one of the poster’s images but changes the wording to express men’s concern about false allegations of assault: “Just because you regret a one-night stand … doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual.” Highlighting the scenario of young women and men drinking at a bar, the posters focus on women who use alcohol as an excuse to be sexual without responsibility, or who turn an error in judgment into a criminal charge. Though criticized for making rape a “joke,” the poster strategy is serious and straightforward, and is not about rape at all—but about false charges. The point is that sexual assault is wrong, but so is the idea that all men are potential rapists and women always innocent victims.</p>
<p>All too predictably, “Don’t Be That Girl” caused an <a href="http://globalnews.ca/news/706030/dont-be-that-girl-posters-in-edmonton-spark-outrage/?utm_source=facebook-twitter&amp;utm_medium=link&amp;utm_campaign=community">uproar</a>. Edmonton mayoral candidate Don Iveson tweeted that the posters’ message was “morally indefensible, condemnable, and contemptible.” The Calgary Committee Against Sexual Abuse said the men’s campaign was “100% incorrect.” Twitter came alive with assertions that the posters proved the existence of a “rape culture” in Canada, and Anu Dugal, the Director of Violence Prevention at the Canadian Women’s Foundation, denounced the posters’ putative suggestion “that women are responsible for sexual assault.” Karen Smith, executive director of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton, claimed that assault victims “just don’t lie about that.” Even the <a href="http://globalnews.ca/news/711198/mens-rights-group-defends-posters-claiming-women-lie-about-rape/">police department joined in</a> the righteous chorus, with one officer, Acting Inspector Sean Armstrong, coming forward to dismiss the concerns of the men’s organization by noting that “after 4.5 years of working as a sexual assault detective, he had seen only one false report” out of numerous files.</p>
<p>One wonders about Inspector Armstrong’s certainty. His and the other responses make clear that under the reign of feminist orthodoxy—which reaches even, one is dismayed to note, deep into the police department, supposed to be an impartial organization that does not pre-judge cases—it is not enough to agree that sexual assault is wrong. One must also commit to the doctrine that <i>women never lie about it. </i></p>
<p>But we know that women do lie and that false claims of abuse, whether sexual or physical, are a reality. <a href="http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/false-rape-culture/dont-be-that-anti-rape-campaign/">Karen Straughan</a> cites the case of <a href="http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=18c_1242448918">Soner Yasa</a>, an Edmonton cab driver who was saved from a false allegation only by the camera in his taxi, which proved his accusers’ story to be a vindictive fabrication. In other cases, women have dodged criminal charges by claiming to be victims of abuse. One thinks immediately, to take the most egregious Canadian examples, of Karla Homolka, who participated with her husband in the sexual torture and murder of her sister and two girls whom she lured to their home; or Allyson McConnell, who drowned her two sons in the bathtub after her husband left her; or Nicole Doucet, who hired a contract killer to murder her husband. What these three have in common is that all claimed to have been victims of (unsubstantiated) abuse, and all received reduced sentences or, in Doucet’s case, no sentence at all <i>because of the credulity of justice system officials</i> <i>about female victimization</i>. The problem is not, as Anu Dugal of the Canadian Women’s Foundation claims, that Canadians tend to “<a href="http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=18c_1242448918">blame the [female] victim</a>”; on the contrary, Canadians are often afraid even to question her for fear of being accused, in the feminist lingo, of “re-victimizing.”</p>
<p>Acting Inspector Sean Armstrong’s proclaimed trust in women’s word about sexual assault is likely the outcome of years of feminist advocacy and training within the force, which insists that when assault of any kind is at issue, men are the perpetrators and women the ones who have been harmed. Whether Armstrong’s position reflects a genuine belief or an empty genuflection, it is disturbing to hear it coming from an officer of the law whose job it is to investigate crime rather than implement feminist rule. If I were a man getting a knock at the door over a false allegation, I would dread to have Armstrong, or anyone like him, investigate my case.</p>
<p>One of the points made by the “Don’t Be That Girl” campaign was simple and brilliant: both men and women commit crimes, and men are tired of being singled out for condemnation while women’s culpability is denied. There are many crimes and social problems that might be targeted by posters (fetal alcohol syndrome, home invasions, shoplifting) but groups other than white men never receive such defamatory attention.</p>
<p>Can you imagine “Don’t be that Muslim” in a campaign about Islamic jihad? Or “Don’t be that Aboriginal Mother” in a campaign about fetal alcohol syndrome? Or a poster campaign about <i>black</i> rapists? Critics would charge that an entire group of people was being unfairly targeted for the actions of a few—and in a manner more likely to induce public humiliation than behavioral change. The same is true of the image of white men promoted in “Don’t Be That Guy,” and yet men are not even allowed to say so without incurring further outrageous accusations.</p>
<p>It’s time for frank discussion and an end to the knee-jerk stigmatization of male sexuality.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Choosing Life in Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/choosing-life-in-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=choosing-life-in-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2013 04:13:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Choosing Life in Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hornik]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Testament]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[ David Hornik’s new book a must-read for anyone who cares about Israel.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=choosing+life+in+israel+david+hornik"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-197639" alt="life" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/life-450x275.jpg" width="315" height="193" /><i>Choosing Life in Israel</i></a>, published by Freedom Press International, is a collection of essays spanning the years 2004 to 2012 by the Israeli journalist David Hornik, now a regular columnist for <i>Frontpage Magazine</i> and <i>PJ Media</i>. The title neatly suggests the book’s two main points of emphasis, the first concerning how an American made the choice to live in Israel and how he was changed by the decision; the second having to do with what life in Israel is like and how it differs from life anywhere else in the world. A third point, more lightly touched upon but in a sense underpinning the whole of the book, relates to the people of Israel as God’s chosen ones, instructed by Him to “Choose life”—which they have done, abundantly, in the face of the world’s hatred. The volume is a skillful blend of political and personal reportage, beautifully and informatively written, and a must-read for anyone who cares about this beleaguered, valiant country.</p>
<p>The shorter first section of the book tells how as a young man, Hornik put aside his dream of writing poetry and short stories in upstate New York to join a people under siege and to make their struggle his own. He had felt an affinity for Israel and its plucky citizens from the time when, as a secular Jewish child of about six, he had been moved by the “brash, in-your-face élan” of a record of Israeli music given him by his father. Later, as an adult, Hornik found it impossible to read continually of the international betrayal of “his” people without throwing in his lot with theirs. Coming to Israel meant learning a new language, imbibing the vibrancy of Jewish religious life, adjusting to the reality of rocket attacks and suicide bombings, and surrendering his dedication to poetic “emotion recollected in tranquility” in order to engage in journalism of “political and moral urgencies.”  His love for his adopted country—for its joyousness and decency despite the “ambiance of terror” within which Israelis must live—and his sense of being “incorrigibly engaged with the world” provide the compelling keynotes of the collection.</p>
<p>The longer second section is primarily composed of political commentary, much of it inspired by immediate events, including Israeli military actions, terrorist atrocities, and international diplomatic visits.  The subjects that recur, presented from various angles and tones of voice ranging from the outraged to the resigned, include the failure of Israeli leaders to attain security for their citizens through realistic assessment of military necessity, the rise once more of Jew hatred across the world, and the extraordinary resilience of Israel despite such challenges. Hornik is particularly astute in his analysis of the Palestinian victim narrative and its many ardent sympathizers—the chorus of supplicants, appeasers, accommodationists, and utopians whose hope never wavers, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the Palestinians’ repeatedly expressed determination to wipe Israel from the map is merely a strategic or rhetorical expression.</p>
<p>Hornik’s discussion of the suicidal political calculations and denial mechanisms involved in such false hope is always compelling and cogent. I was particularly impressed by his definition of the obscene “death credit system” under which Israel has had to operate and which no other nation has ever been expected to endure: according to this system, “Israel absorbs blows, letting its citizens be picked off and murdered, until a particularly large and grisly attack gives it enough death credits that it believes the world … will tolerate its taking military action.” Even then, of course, it is subject to repeated, sometimes hysterical, criticism. Hornik is brilliant in showcasing, in nauseating detail, the vast disproportion in the international response to military action by Israel and to terror attacks by the Palestinians; no moral distinction is made between “oppressive” Israeli checkpoints and the deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians. Dead children in Sderot elicit “no cachet and romance … no ‘Save Sderot’ marches on campus, not a whiff of censure.” Hornik’s analysis of western elites’ obsession with Palestinian grievance—while “twenty years of genocide in Sudan may be quite tolerable [and] oppression in Tibet not even detectable”—is powerfully presented throughout.</p>
<p>Hornik’s writing has a pithy force that stems from the precise, understated attention he pays to these unsettling subjects: the lies told in the mainstream media about Palestinian innocence and Israeli belligerence, the moral double-standard to which Israel is held and to which many of its own politicians, intellectuals, and activists insist it hold itself, and the evident attraction of many intellectuals to terror and barbarism. Covering such matters as Yasser Arafat’s funeral, Columbia University’s disastrous hosting of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the much-revisited peace process, Hornik focuses on the ironies and hypocrisies that might defeat a less patient writer. Showcasing the reality behind the obfuscations of pundits and political rulers, he reveals a country, in his apt wording, “confronted more starkly than others with life and death, and making its choice.”</p>
<p>Individually, then, these articles offer perceptive, compulsively readable glimpses into Israeli life and politics. As a collection, however, this book is even more than the sum of its parts.  <i>Choosing Life in Israel</i> chronicles  the ongoing drama at the heart of Israel as month after month, year after year, the tiny country faces the barrage of rockets, calumny, and lies—and not only endures but thrives. The book is a testament to one writer’s determination to tell the truth and to keep on telling it; and to the against-the-odds triumph of an indomitable people.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Supreme Foolishness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/supreme-foolishness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=supreme-foolishness</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Mar 2013 04:15:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[canada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hate Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[homosexuality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rulling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Supreme Court]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[William Whatcott]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179974</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Canadian high court decision exposes Christians to contempt and protects Muslims from criticism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/supreme-foolishness/supreme_court-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-180010"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-180010" title="supreme_court" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/supreme_court.jpg" alt="" width="233" height="202" /></a>Coarse and rebarbative though his words undoubtedly were, William Whatcott was not far wrong when, in a flyer titled “Keep Homosexuality out of Saskatoon’s Public Schools,” he pinpointed the massive shift in law and public opinion that had taken place in Canada over the previous 30 years. “In 1968 it was illegal to engage in homosexual acts,” he wrote in one of four flyers he distributed in 2001 and 2002 to denounce the normalizing of homosexuality in schools and the mainstreaming of gay desire in the media, and “now it is almost becoming illegal to question [homosexuality].”</p>
<p>One of the most remarkable aspects of the judgment last week by Canada’s Supreme Court is the impression it conveys that it’s still 1968, that Canada is rampant with homophobia, with gay men and women living in the shadows, anxiously on the alert for the next Christian pamphlet that will unleash public humiliation and cruel reprisals. Is it irrelevant that six of the nine justices are senior citizens, four of them over seventy years of age? Do hellfire evangelicals wield such an enormous social influence that far-reaching measures by an enlightened Court are needed to protect sexual minorities? Canadian society has been a relatively welcoming place for gay men and lesbians for decades, with gay marriage legalized in 2005 and gay urban enclaves set up well before hate speech provisions existed. There is not complete acceptance of homosexuality in all quarters, but neither is there anything close to wide-scale discrimination. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court judges, in striking their phantom blow against prejudice, have handed down a decision that restricts the free expression of a religious minority and limits truth-based arguments on matters of pressing concern.</p>
<p>Much has already been written about the absurdities and inconsistencies of the Supreme Court decision, which affirms the constitutionality of Canada’s notorious hate speech laws and upholds Whatcott’s 2005 conviction, by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal, for hatred. A member of “Christian Truth Activists” and a former addict who became a biblically faithful Christian while in jail, Bill Whatcott campaigned to prevent the Saskatoon Public School Board from introducing discussion of homosexuality in Grades 3 and 4. His use of ugly words such as “sodomy,” “buggery,” and “filth” to describe homosexuality, and his apocalyptic-style warnings that “Our children will pay the price in disease, death, abuse and ultimately eternal judgment if we do not say no to the Sodomite desire to socialize [them]” convinced the Court that his flyers went well beyond merely offensive speech.</p>
<p>The judgment seems to assume that blunt and old-fashioned words—though laughable to many in Canadian society today— are more dangerous than sophisticated ones. (As <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/canadian-supreme-court-kills-last-hope-for-free-speech/">Bruce Bawer</a> astutely points out, Whatcott’s obsolete wording is more likely to have crystallized opposition to him than to have incited hatred in previously hate-free hearts or “silenced” the targets of his opprobrium, as the Court avers.) Rather than rehearse the entirety of the foolishness and illogicalities in the decision, I will make a few points about the preoccupation with “effect” as the determinant of unacceptable speech. In focusing not on the content of Whatcott’s expression—in which case the judges would have had to acknowledge the statements about God’s grace that soften his abrasive message—but instead on its presumed effect, the decision creates a legal nightmare that advances an unworkable concept of hate, exposes Christians to contempt, and insulates repugnant Muslim doctrines, simply because they are held by Muslims, from justifiable exposure and attack.</p>
<p>As a number of critics have already pointed out (see especially Andrew Coyne’s brilliant <a href="http://digital.nationalpost.com/epaper/viewer.aspx">article</a>), you can’t get a much vaguer or more hypothetical definition of hate speech than its “likely effect” as determined by a “reasonable person.” As any reasonable person can attest, a “likely effect” concerning something as subjective as hatred can never be known in advance. It might be that a targeted group is as likely to be vilified because of excessive praise as because of hateful censure: would the praise then, in its harmful effect, constitute hate speech too? More to the point in this case, might the Court’s prohibition of expressions of hatred towards homosexuality actually exacerbate such hatred by creating the (not unfounded) impression that homosexuals are granted special legal protections not available to heterosexual Canadians?</p>
<p>Even more confounding to logic is the Court’s related claim that “proof of actual harm” need not be established in relation to hate speech. “The seriousness of the harm to vulnerable groups,” the Court states, is so great that it needs no demonstration, being “part of the everyday knowledge and experience of Canadians.” In a culture in which storefronts sport the rainbow flag to declare their allegiance with gay people, Hollywood celebrates gay heroes (and condemns evangelicals), and thousands applaud Gay Pride Parades in every major Canadian city, it is not clear that homophobia is “part of the everyday knowledge and experience of Canadians.” The Court’s fundamental assumption about the self-evidence of prejudice and therefore of the harm of hateful speech is demonstrably false.</p>
<p>Given that the Supreme Court’s own reasoning defines hate speech by its likelihood to cause an identifiable group to be subject to prejudice and discrimination, one could reasonably conclude that the judgment is itself an example of hate speech directed at bible-believing Protestant evangelicals, a religious minority comprising about 8% of the Canadian population according to a recent <a href="http://canadianchristianity.com/nationalupdates/2007/071213state.html">report</a>. Is it not likely that many of the self-righteous and politically correct members of the chattering classes who read about the Supreme Court judgment in their Thursday newspapers experienced a satisfying frisson of disgust and smug horror against Christians? A main concern of the Court is that hate speech may cause people to “reconsider the social standing” of a vulnerable group. Many well-heeled secularists are already inclined to feel contempt for Christians who believe the Bible’s moral injunctions; now they have an enhanced reason to do so, and from a source far more respectable and influential than Whatcott’s crudely written flyers.</p>
<p>Given the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9762745/Christianity-close-to-extinction-in-Middle-East.html">massive increase in violence</a> against Christians in the Muslim Middle East over the past two years, is there not a well-founded fear that the Supreme Court’s decision will reduce Canadians’ indignation over the persecution of the same group presented in the Court decision as hateful and malignant? Such speculations are, admittedly, as vague as the Supreme Court’s own definition of hate speech. Still, there can be no doubt that the Court decision places a particular limitation on Christian discourse, suggesting that speaking the Bible’s truth is unacceptable and that restrictions on Christian freedom are necessary to protect others from harm. By implication, Christians like Whatcott are a menace to society, a belief that the Supreme Court decision defines as typical of hateful expression.</p>
<p>Finally and most grievously, in affirming that “even truthful statements may … expose a vulnerable group to hatred,” the Supreme Court ruling places an ill-advised limitation on fact-based criticism of minority groups, especially those groups whose ideology and cultural practices may be heinous enough that their mere recitation is likely to incense and repulse listeners. The Court’s overwhelming concern is “the need to protect the societal standing of vulnerable groups”—but what if the “vulnerable groups” have beliefs and practices deserving of censure? The Court would suggest that one should draw the line at sweeping and vehement denunciations. Referring to cases of anti-Semitism, the Court notes that hate speech typically creates the false impression that a certain group is responsible for social problems or seeks to undermine Western civilization.</p>
<p>But what if the group actually <em>does</em> seek to undermine Western civilization, as <a href="http://www.investigativeproject.org/document/id/20">Muslim Brotherhood strategy</a> states? According to the Court, it doesn’t matter if criticisms are true or not, for “to the extent that truthful statements are used in a manner or context that exposes a vulnerable group to hatred, their use risks the same potential harmful effects” as gutter-variety hate—and must be penalized. This is astounding. If truth is no defense against the charge of fomenting hatred, then we confront the collapse of all rational discourse in this country. The ruling comes at a time when there is a pressing need to speak about injurious Islamic practices such as honor killing, creeping Sharia enforcement, Jew hatred, and female genital mutilation—to say nothing about vicious <em>physical</em> as well as verbal attacks on homosexuals. What the Court clearly cannot imagine or accept is that there might be cases in which detestation of a culture’s practices is justified, even beneficial. Should not any group advocating a fascist program be exposed and denounced in vehement terms?</p>
<p>The Canadian Supreme Court’s overarching imperative to “protect the societal standing of vulnerable groups” makes the answer &#8220;No.&#8221; I am still shaking my head in disbelief.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Loving the Enemy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/loving-the-enemy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=loving-the-enemy</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Feb 2013 04:25:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jamie glazov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[janice fiemengo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United In Hate]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why the Left hates America.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/loving-the-enemy/uh-5/" rel="attachment wp-att-178840"><img class=" wp-image-178840 alignleft" title="uh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/uh2-450x299.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="209" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/">American Thinker</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Proclaiming himself a conciliator and a moderate with a vision of Americans &#8220;<a href="http://live.wsj.com/video/obama-americans-tand-with-each-other/5168C5D6-8689-4680-9A05-69F39461DC6D.html#%215168C5D6-8689-4680-9A05-69F39461DC6D">stand[ing] with each other</a>&#8221; and &#8220;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXe3DGNI_Ms">paying their fair share</a>,&#8221; President Barack Obama is in fact one of the most partisan presidents ever to occupy the White House. Fine-sounding words notwithstanding, he is a leftist ideologue and no-holds-barred political fighter whose practice has consistently been to demonize the American equivalents of the hated kulaks (farmers) and petit-bourgeoisie (<a id="_GPLITA_1" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.americanthinker.com/#">small business</a> owners) persecuted in the Soviet Union. Obama&#8217;s enemies include those &#8220;bitter&#8221; people who &#8220;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZWaxjiQyFk">cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren&#8217;t like them</a>&#8221; as well as the presumably benighted bigots who fail to realize that &#8220;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9e1V3IibOk">the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam</a>.&#8221; With his anti-American, neo-Marxist outlook shaped by mentors and heroes such as Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, and Jeremiah Wright, Obama is naturally inclined to be suspicious of freedom and to feel sympathy for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.</p>
<p>Reflex affinities such as Obama&#8217;s have a long, bloody history, and anyone wishing to understand the threat posed by the Obama administration to the fabric of America is well advised to place its policies and rhetoric in a comprehensive historical perspective. How is it that an educated person can be attracted to totalitarian ideologies and predisposed to reject the freedoms of the western world? This was, arguably, the central question of the twentieth century, and it has assumed a renewed urgency since 9/11, a time when leftists have applauded terror attacks on the United States and claimed that America&#8217;s enemies are in fact righteous victims. What is one to make of their seemingly sophisticated arguments justifying atrocity? Can such people really believe, to cite only a few examples, that the 9/11 hijackers were motivated by a longing for <a id="_GPLITA_0" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.americanthinker.com/#">social justice</a>? That the Palestinian leadership is committed to peace with Israel? That people are better off in Cuba, with the highest per capita imprisonment rate in the world, than in the United States?</p>
<p>Jamie Glazov responds to such questions in <em>United in Hate: The Left&#8217;s Romance with Tyranny and Terror</em> (2009), a brilliant investigation that not only extensively <a id="_GPLITA_3" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.americanthinker.com/#">documents</a> leftists&#8217; support for brutal regimes, but also diagnoses their worldview as a psycho-social syndrome of pathological dimensions. Leftist hatred, Glazov demonstrates, has less to do with specific political programs or economic systems than with a deep-rooted disenchantment with democratic freedoms and a corresponding &#8220;negative identification&#8221; with violence.</p>
<p>The objective evidence for leftists&#8217; love of tyrants is substantial, and Glazov presents it convincingly with a blend of facts, anecdotes, and analysis. We learn, for example, about the massive effort on the part of western Communists to repress, distort, and recast the horrors of Stalinist Russia, including the purges that killed millions and the forced famine in the Ukraine that brought the peasantry to its knees. <em>New York Times</em> reporter Walter Duranty turned the reality of Ukrainian starvation into a cheerful tale of abundance, lying so aggressively in favor of Stalin&#8217;s policies that when the <em>Manchester Guardian</em>&#8216;s Malcolm Muggeridge tried to report the truth-that peasant were dying <em>en masse</em>-he was mocked and derided, ultimately losing his <a id="_GPLITA_2" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.americanthinker.com/#">job</a>.</p>
<p>When leftists turned their attention to other bloody Communist regimes in Cuba, North Vietnam, China, and Nicaragua, many high-profile members of the western intelligentsia were eager to travel there to report on the miraculous gains that had supposedly been achieved. Susan Sontag wrote of Castro&#8217;s Cuba with fanatical admiration, denying the dictator&#8217;s atrocities and downplaying limitations on freedom, even going so far as to claim that &#8220;No Cuban writer has been or is in jail,&#8221; and that &#8220;the great majority of Cubans feel vastly freer today than they ever did before the revolution.&#8221; Making his pilgrimage to Hanoi in 1970, Noam Chomsky accepted as gospel all the nonsense his North Vietnamese hosts told him about the regime, as did Gunter Grass after a tour of a model Nicaraguan prison, which led him to enthuse that there was no room in the new regime for revenge-this in a <a id="_GPLITA_4" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.americanthinker.com/#">country</a> that had executed 8,000 political enemies and jailed 20,000 in the first three years of the revolution. (Hollywood&#8217;s Oliver Stone, with his <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">glorification of Stalin</a> and <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/oliver-stone-us-has-become-an-orwellian-state/5317244">denunciation</a> of the U.S. as &#8220;an Orwellian state,&#8221; is a current exemplar of this suicidal distemper.)</p>
<p>After the collapse of Communism, it has been <em>déjà vu</em> all over again with radical Islam. Immediately following the terrorist assault of 9/11, a jubilant chorus of university professors and progressives across North America refused to express horror for the attacks; instead, they blamed America, with Ward Churchill calling those who had died &#8220;little Eichmanns&#8221; and <em>Nation</em> columnist Katha Pollitt lecturing patriots who wanted to fly an American flag that it stood for &#8220;jingoism and vengeance and war.&#8221; Hundreds of so-called anti-war demonstrations were organized almost immediately to express solidarity with the Taliban regime that had harbored the attackers and to paint the United States as a warmonger. Since then, droves of leftist lawyers have worked to obtain release for the terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay and to strike down legislation intended to help the United States guard itself against future attacks. Even when Islamists testify in court that their terror quests are inspired by Koranic injunctions to kill infidels, leftists insist that they are (justly) resisting American oppression. Western feminists routinely defend Islamic misogyny-wife beating, honor killing, genital mutilation, the burqa-and will not admit that women live better lives in the western democracies. And leftist gays march in anti-Israel rallies, joining with Muslim queer-bashers to denounce the only country in the Middle East where homosexuals can live securely.</p>
<p>How to understand such blindness, such moral lunacy, such self-destructive fantasy? The heart of <em>United in Hate</em> is its analysis of the psychological mechanisms that drive the left&#8217;s embrace of terror and repression. This is the most fascinating aspect of the book, balancing its riveting survey of progressive misalliance. Glazov argues that underlying the progressive&#8217;s disdain for his own culture and his support for its enemies is a deep-rooted alienation from modern democratic life. Feeling that his society has somehow betrayed him by failing to supply him with meaning and purpose, the &#8220;believer,&#8221; as Glazov aptly dubs him, turns away from it with fury, magnifying its failings and projecting his longing for fulfillment onto a utopian order. Because he rejects the perilous satisfactions and anxieties of individual freedom, he &#8220;craves a fairy-tale world where no individuality exists, and where human estrangement is thus impossible.&#8221;</p>
<p>With his swollen sense of grievance, the believer identifies with all others supposedly wronged by his society and imagines those who attack his country to be attacking the same injustices that anger him. But his outrage on behalf of his country&#8217;s ostensible victims is really a displaced form of his own disillusionment and hunger for collective belonging. Guilt is often a powerful motivator also, for the believer is frequently a member of a privileged class and therefore feels shame &#8220;that he is not a genuine victim.&#8221; By identifying with the oppressed, he feels &#8220;a sense of atonement&#8221; for his high caste. As he agonizes over those his own society has putatively harmed, he minimizes or outright denies the suffering of those who are really victimized by the regimes he adulates; their pain and deaths do not count for him, for they stand in the way of the realization of utopia. His greatest longing is to subsume his identity into the totalitarian entity, to experience power and purpose through it. This deep-seated craving explains the two most disturbing facets of the believer&#8217;s behavior: his willingness to die for the cause-think of those leftists who wanted to serve as human shields for Saddam Hussein-and the fact that his greatest support for a totalitarian regime tends to occur when its (thrilling) violence is at its height.</p>
<p>Glazov&#8217;s emphasis on the pathological element of the believer&#8217;s mindset is effectively supported by his book&#8217;s roll call of blind allegiances and feverish denials. There is no other way to explain how people so fully formed by western culture and so uniquely equipped to appreciate all that it offers &#8212; elite intellectuals and rebel thinkers such as Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault &#8212; could actively seek its destruction. Their fanatical commitment is rightly approached as a mental disorder with a specific etiology and symptoms.</p>
<p>The question raised by the book is a disturbing and salutary one: how is one to counter such an illness, colluded in so widely by the intelligentsia and possessing a fascination for so many? Springing from needs and desires that seem to develop with particular vehemence in societies that are most free, the believer&#8217;s disorder is by its nature irrational, seemingly immune to proofs and argument. It reminds us of the vulnerability of democracy and the necessity for conservatives to counter leftist delusions with inspirational ideas, images, and stories of freedom. Despite our best efforts, it may take nothing less than a national catastrophe to awaken the general populace to the utopian peril. In the meanwhile, we have no choice but to pursue the truth as winsomely and tirelessly as we can, to confront leftist ideologues with the results of their utopian blueprints, and to write and read powerful books like <em>United in Hate</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note: See Jamie Glazov discuss <em>United in Hate</em> with interviewer Josh Brewster in the two part series below:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SNJg6w6CB0o" frameborder="0" width="425" height="325"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6sBPH589Feo" frameborder="0" width="425" height="325"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Fact-Busters and the “Mosque-Buster”</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/fact-busters-and-the-mosque-buster/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fact-busters-and-the-mosque-buster</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Feb 2013 04:32:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gavin Boby]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Law and Freedom Foundation in 2011]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mosques]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OTTAWA]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Gavin Boby is well worth hearing, but Canadian newsmakers don’t want you to know that.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/fact-busters-and-the-mosque-buster/boby/" rel="attachment wp-att-176934"><img class="wp-image-176934 alignleft" title="boby" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/boby-450x299.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="209" /></a>Gavin Boby is a British lawyer who established the Law and Freedom Foundation in 2011 to work with communities to resist Islamization, particularly the campaigns of harassment and dominance that mosques routinely bring in their wake. Dubbed the “mosque-buster” because of his success in defeating 16 of 17 mosque applications in British neighborhoods, Boby spoke in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto this past week about the principles underlying his <em>pro bono</em> work. When I heard him make his presentation in Ottawa on Monday, February 4, his measured, soft-spoken manner and fact-based analysis contrasted suggestively with the melodramatic denunciations and biased reporting that surrounded his appearance.</p>
<p>Only in a nation hobbled by political correctness of the most mind-boggling sort could a speaker proposing nothing more shocking than residents’ right to defend their neighborhoods be so vociferously denounced. The self-righteous outcries at Boby’s “<a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/faith-ethics/Editorial+Free+speech+religious+freedom+talk+mosque/7922160/story.html">fearmongering</a>” came not only from the predictable sources—in this case the Canadian arm of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN), fawningly reported on by the press despite its <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6176">close ties</a> to terrorist organizations—but also from self-proclaimed free-thinkers and mainstream journalists. When everyone involved declares their commitment to free speech while seeking to suppress, distort, and censor Boby’s message, one is left staggered by the House of Mirrors confusion passing for informed debate in this country.</p>
<p>A week before Boby’s scheduled appearance, an editorial appeared in the <em>Ottawa Citizen</em> by two conservative-leaning commentators, Fred Litwin, founder of Ottawa’s Free Thinking Film Society, and Salim Mansur, author of <em>Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism</em>. Emphasizing the necessity of distinguishing peaceful from violent forms of Islam, the authors identified Boby as one among a number of “misguided” activists who have apparently made “all Muslims and Islam their enemies.” While not explaining how one can distinguish good from bad Islam <em>in advance</em>—once a mosque has been built and radicalized, it’s too late to deny its permit—Litwin and Mansur charge that Boby’s work is “counter-productive” and imply that his effort to oppose extremism is itself a factor promoting extremism. This position—that merely advocating local, case-by-case legal action to oppose mosque construction is unacceptably intolerant—became the main tenor of the attacks on Boby in the days that followed, attacks that accused him of seeking to “<a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/faith-ethics/Editorial+Free+speech+religious+freedom+talk+mosque/7922160/story.html">marginalize entire communities</a>” and of engaging in “<a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Mosque+buster+draws+small+crowd+speech/7917733/story.html">the most dangerous form of conflict-generation</a>.” Concerns about the self-sequestering of Muslims and their well-documented aggression received only lip service at best from the anti-Boby pundits.</p>
<p>With even self-proclaimed anti-Islamists decrying the talk, it was not surprising to see CAIR-CAN labeling Boby an “anti-Muslim hate-monger” and calling for the Ottawa Public Library to cancel his appearance. Claiming that a tax-payer funded venue should not be used to legitimize Islamophobia, CAIR-CAN cited as proof of Boby’s bigotry his reputed statements that “Islam encourages pedophilia, sex abuse, and pimping.” <em>Has</em> Boby made such statements? And if he has, are they false? The<em> </em><a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Muslim+group+seeks+block+library+speech+mosquebuster+Gavin/7910612/story.html"><em>Ottawa Citizen</em></a> wouldn’t say; it also refrained from any comment on CAIR’s own highly illiberal and immoderate positions and associations. It did, however, see fit to investigate the grassroots organization responsible for bringing Boby to Ottawa: <a href="http://actforcanada.ca/">ACT! For Canada</a>. Modeled on Brigitte Gabriel’s <a href="http://www.actforamerica.org/welcome/">Act! For America</a>, it was established by Valerie Price, who maintains its website. The <em>Citizen</em> was not impressed. Noting ACT’s claim to defend Canadian “national security” and “democratic values,” the article focused with disapproval on the fact that ACT’s website “is given over almost entirely to discussion of Islam and terrorism” (yes, these are the threats to security and democracy that concern the organization) and that its presentation was “highly inflammatory.” The single example of “inflammatory” material was the website’s claim that Hitler’s <em>Mein Kampf</em> is a bestseller in the Muslim world—which <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/03/mein-kampf-becomes-bestseller-in-turkey.html">it is</a>. But truth is no defense against the findings of the thought police: the implication of the article was that ACT! For Canada is a Muslim-hating organization bringing in a Muslim-hating speaker.</p>
<p>Members of ACT (and I am one of them) consoled themselves that so much negative press could lead to wide dissemination of Boby’s message and prompt a good turnout on a very cold (-20 Celsius) Ottawa evening; or perhaps it might keep controversy-averse Canadians away. On Monday night, there was a modest turnout (about 80 people) and limited protest: a small group of dissenters gave interviews in the library lobby but did not seek to disrupt the talk—nor to attend it.</p>
<p>Boby himself did not disappoint. He spoke in lucid and quietly impassioned terms of his advocacy, asserting that it is based not in hatred for Muslims but in love for the British tradition of decency, restraint, and public order that he wished to preserve for future generations. He used reliable studies and poll results to show why mosques are different in kind from churches, synagogues, or other places of worship, being not centers of religious contemplation only but command centers of jihadist recruitment where believers are indoctrinated to support and commit violence against non-believers. A 2011 <a href="http://www.meforum.org/2931/american-mosques">study</a> by Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi found that 81% of 100 American mosques randomly surveyed contained materials promoting “moderate” (30%) or “severe” (51%) violence, while only 19% of the mosques contained no material promoting violence. (As Boby pondered, what would constitute “moderate violence?”) Perhaps even more significantly, Muslims attending the pro-violence mosques vastly outnumbered those attending the non-violent mosques. The researchers found that non-violent mosques had a mean attendance of only 15 worshipers; on the other hand, violence-promoting mosques, whether falling in the “severe” or “moderate” category, had a mean attendance of 178 worshipers. It is Muslims themselves, Boby concluded from such statistics, who have defined what form of Islam they find authentic.</p>
<p>Boby spoke of the stages of intimidation and neighborhood control that typically follow the establishment of a mosque. At the beginning, there is the relatively non-serious headache of parking problems, the so-called “parking jihad”: residents find their driveways blocked and every space on the street taken up by mosque attenders’ cars. The problems become more severe with time, including verbal harassment (“You can’t dress like that; this is a Muslim area”); attacks on dog owners; the grooming of teenage girls for sexual exploitation; vandalism of non-Muslim homes; and vaguely-threatening visits by Muslim men to non-Muslim home-owners to encourage them to sell up. The most extreme result—seen in some British areas as well as throughout European cities—is the establishment of Islamic-controlled no-go areas where the national law has ceased to operate—complaints to police at any of the stages tend to be worse than useless—and where Sharia compliance is forced on all. The consequences are particularly harsh for Jews, homosexuals, and women who refuse the veil.</p>
<p>Mosques tend to be built in poor neighborhoods where residents—often pensioners, widows, and blue-collar workers—lack the financial resources or cultural confidence to protest. They are rightfully suspicious that their concerns will be dismissed by local councilors as racist. They don’t know how planning applications work and they have been made to feel that any criticism of Muslim ideology or behavior is unacceptable, possibly even criminal. Boby points out that he is merely helping them to use the legal channels created precisely to foster citizen involvement in town planning. Contrary to so many reports on his work, he does not wish nor does he have the power to stop all mosques or to prohibit Muslims from worshipping.</p>
<p>If there are errors in Boby’s evidence or reasoning, none of his detractors could find them, resorting instead to tactics of emotional accusation and misrepresentation. Dissenters at his Ottawa talk asked why he targeted Muslims when there were bad apples in every religion, ignoring his thorough explanation of the special case presented by mosques. Others wondered whether he was appropriately supportive of the “moderates” attempting to renew Islam, ignoring his evidence that mosque-attending Muslims favor the firebrand variety. No matter how patiently Boby set out his proofs—often in the form of devout Muslims’ own horrifying statements of belief—the politically correct charged <em>him</em> with extremism.</p>
<p>Lazy and ideologically slanted representation also dominated press coverage after the event, the exception being the conservative-oriented SUN News Network, which gave fair coverage. An <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2013/02/04/ottawa-gavin-boby-anti-mosque-muslim.html">article</a> by the notoriously left-wing Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) referred repeatedly to Boby’s position that “mosques should not be built in non-Muslim areas,” never mentioning why residents might legitimately fear mosques and leaving readers to construe that Boby’s stance (always presented as a lunatic lone crusade) was based on racism. The <em>Ottawa Citizen</em>’s <a href="http://www.canada.com/news/Mosque+buster+draws+small+crowd+speech/7917733/story.html">report</a> was just slightly more informative, referring to Boby’s resistance to “what he sees as Islam’s anti-democratic direction.” No evidence for “what he sees” was included, making it seem like a far-out personal opinion. A pious <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/faith-ethics/Editorial+Free+speech+religious+freedom+talk+mosque/7922160/story.html">editorial</a> in the <em>Ottawa Citizen</em> following Boby’s talk downplayed his representation of the British situation and asserted that even if some problems do exist, “there are laws” to deal with them.</p>
<p>The overall message of such reporters was clear: there was nothing to learn from Boby, nothing to fear from Islam. As the <em>Ottawa Citizen</em> reporter put it in the first line of his <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Mosque+buster+draws+small+crowd+speech/7917733/story.html">account</a>, “Despite the advance controversy … the city greeted the speech with a collective shrug.” The real shrug, of course, was the reporter’s own when he decided to rely on his politically correct talking points rather than report the substance of Boby’s sober and informative presentation. Many such journalists are determined not to hear what they don’t like—and to prevent others from hearing it as well. They are protected from the outside world by the hard shell of politically correct ignorance: no noise annoys an oyster.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Yearning for the Days of Protest</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/yearning-for-the-days-of-protest/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=yearning-for-the-days-of-protest</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:40:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Campus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Feminism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Toronto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Warren Farrell]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Leftist degeneracy at the University of Toronto.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/yearning-for-the-days-of-protest/warren_farrell_uoft/" rel="attachment wp-att-169309"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169309" title="warren_farrell_uoft" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/warren_farrell_uoft-450x335.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="201" /></a>In a recent article in <a href="http://www.academicmatters.ca/2012/11/the-quiet-campus-the-anatomy-of-dissent-at-canadian-universities/"><em>Academic Matters</em></a>, Canada’s national journal of higher education, Professor Ken Coates expresses regret that the culture of political activism that transformed universities in the 1960s and 70s has died out. Although pleased that “radical, creative and outspoken commentators” still “use the campus as a pulpit,” he is saddened that “preoccupation with practicalities … has transformed Canadian universities into calm, largely dissent-free places.” At the article’s end, he stresses that “it is more than nostalgia that brings one to yearn for days of activism and protest.”</p>
<p>If Coates were merely an aging hippie grumbling about his lost youth on a personal website, his mischaracterization of the current situation on Canadian campuses would provide no cause for comment. But Coates is an influential university administrator and research fellow, the former Dean of Arts and Science at the University of Saskatchewan, Founding Vice-President (Academic) at the University of Northern British Columbia, and now a prestigious Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Waterloo. He is also the author, with Bill Morrison, of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Campus-Confidential-startling-Canadian-universities/dp/1552776506/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355162057&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=ken+coates+campus+confidential"><em>Campus Confidential: 100 Startling Things You Don’t Know About Canadian Universities</em></a> (2011).</p>
<p>In that book, he and his co-author frankly address some of the grim realities of the 21<sup>st</sup>-century university classroom, including a majority of students who lack the skills needed to flourish at the post-secondary level and who are neither interested in nor intellectually equipped for the subjects their professors are expected to teach them.</p>
<p>But in the book one also finds a lament for the tumultuous decade of dissent. The authors miss the days when students and faculty “protested against the war in Vietnam, fought against racial discrimination [and] had as much sex and drugs as possible.” Now, they note ruefully, “Save for some battles over Israeli issues, Canadian universities are pretty staid places.”</p>
<p>The tone of regret over declining radicalism in a book chronicling plunging standards and widespread student incompetence suggests a philosophical incoherence that is far from unusual amongst academic commentators such as Coates. He is certainly not the only university leader to profess a commitment to academic “excellence” while also extolling, in his words, “<a href="http://www.academicmatters.ca/2012/11/the-quiet-campus-the-anatomy-of-dissent-at-canadian-universities/">exciting debates about social change, cultural revolutions, and transformative action</a>.” Having been formed by the post-1960s liberal university and possessing the comfortably left-leaning credentials that aided his rise through the ranks in the Canadian university system, he cannot see a correlation between the sharp decline in academic standards and the student radicalism he idealizes.</p>
<p>As was recognized by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impoverished/dp/1451683200/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355173574&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=allan+bloom+closing">Allan Bloom</a>, an appalled witness to the ‘60s campus revolts at Cornell, the decision by university administrators to give in to activist thugs, allowing course content and requirements to be dictated by criminals with guns, effectively destroyed the foundation on which the university had rested. Having lost confidence that something precious could be gained from the study of the Western intellectual tradition, academics were left to embrace nothing more substantial than ever-shifting social goals such as combating elitism and racism. Ultimately, such goals have led to the “victimology” and anti-intellectualism documented in sobering detail by Bruce Bawer in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Victims-Revolution-Identity-Studies-Closing/dp/0061807370/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355161113&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=bruce+bawer+the+victims%27+revolution"><em>The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind</em></a> (2012).</p>
<p>Even in its non-violent form, campus radicalism was never benign. Much of what Coates eulogizes was anarchic and pointlessly destructive: not only the mind-numbing drugs but also the proliferating sit-ins and protests that provided excuses to skip class in order to make a big noise about issues such as sexism and the Vietnam War on which the vast majority of students were laughably ill-informed.</p>
<p>And Coates is dead wrong to think that such mindless and malignant activism has passed from the scene.</p>
<p>Just a few weeks ago at the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest and most prestigious university, a group of approximately seventy students sought to shut down a talk by Warren Farrell, a leading men’s rights author who has written unorthodox accounts of gender relations with such red-flag-to-feminist-bull titles as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Male-Power-Warren-Farrell/dp/0425181448/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355161820&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=warren+farrell+books"><em>The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex</em></a> (1993) and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Women-Cant-Hear-What-Dont/dp/1585420611/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1355161820&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=warren+farrell+books"><em>Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say: Destroying Myths, Creating Love</em></a> (2000).  His November 16<sup>th</sup> talk addressed the marginalization of boys in our contemporary culture, who now fall behind their female peers in education and social development.</p>
<p>For Farrell’s detractors, the suggestion that boys and young men might deserve sympathetic attention is anathema, prompting one protestor to tell a young man attempting to attend the event, “You are fucking scum.” The vast majority of the protestors had undoubtedly not read Farrell’s work; if they had, they might have debated him rationally after his presentation. But Women’s Studies and the other so-called academic disciplines that have proliferated in the name of social justice do not encourage thoughtful, civil debate. Based on group grievance, their ideology rejects reason and civility as tools of the oppressors, encouraging the <a href="http://lybio.net/warren-farrell-protest-at-the-university-of-toronto/nonprofits-activism/">hysteria</a> seen at the venue.</p>
<p>In what has become a staple strategy of leftist campus protest, the anti-Farrell demonstrators defaced and ripped down posters advertising his talk, sought to block access to the building in which he was speaking (even at some points blocking the exit routes from the building) and engaged in sustained verbal abuse of those attempting to attend. They shouted slogans and obscenities and, among other offensive gestures, gave the <em>Heil Hitler</em> salute to the police officers, some of them women, tasked with trying to keep public order. <a href="http://www.academicmatters.ca/2012/11/the-quiet-campus-the-anatomy-of-dissent-at-canadian-universities/">Bruce Bawer</a> provides a cogent analysis of the anti-male prejudice that now underlies much of what is taught in Women’s Studies classrooms as a context for the demonstrators’ behavior, arguing that professors have turned their students into “mindless mouthpieces for a party line and, in at least a couple of cases, into terrifying fountains of sanctimonious rage.”</p>
<p>Bawer’s analysis is acute, and no impartial viewer of the YouTube link can, I think, dispute his assessment. Another frame within which to understand the incident is Ken Coates’ tribute to the university as a place of “transformative action.” The transformation of individuals into zealots is, of course, what every revolutionary movement requires. But I’m not convinced that these girls and their patriarchy-averse male allies really do, in their everyday lives, seethe with murderous rage against men. Many probably have kind fathers, gentle brothers, and close male friends whom they recognize as fellow human beings. I suspect that on a different night, they might have shouted just as crudely, and behaved with the same level of intolerance and fanaticism, to denounce market capitalism, European imperialism, Israeli terrorism, Christian bigotry, the Conservative government’s war on the poor, the North American military-industrial complex, the putative purveyors of Islamophobia, or any number of similar “evils” that could provide occasion for their defiance and easy martyrdom.</p>
<p>The issue is that the natural angry energy of young people is channeled in such ugly and destructive ways precisely because they have been taught by innumerable Professor Coateses that only through such anger are they really experiencing university life as it should be lived, only through such extremity proving themselves the kinds of students “<a href="http://www.academicmatters.ca/2012/11/the-quiet-campus-the-anatomy-of-dissent-at-canadian-universities/">who have learned about injustice and inhumanity</a>.” The suggestion, though never stated overtly, is that there is even something a little wrong with students who are content merely to study, to immerse themselves in their books and lectures. The post-1960s university experience has become more about performance and self-display than about book learning, more about passionate feeling than thinking. Unseemly behavior for the appropriate causes is expected and even approved by university officials, most of whom share Coates’s left-liberal sentiments: witness the demonstrators’ gentle treatment by police, who laid no charges, and the lack of any condemnation, or even notice, of the protestors’ actions by university officials or the mainstream media.</p>
<p>Many more such incidents could be listed to give the lie to Coates’ characterization of the Canadian university scene as quiet, and countless from American campuses also. The fact is that radicalism of various stripes is still very much alive on campus, much of it condoned by the administration, and none of it essential—in fact, most directly counter-productive—to the sustained intellectual investigation and mastery of complex concepts that university life should promote and protect.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is time to make universities a politics-free zone, denuded of controversial speakers and their attendant protesters. Alternatively, the university could uphold freedom of expression and ensure that students who attack those with whom they disagree, and who deny others the right of assembly, are appropriately disciplined. But until university administrators are clear that intellectual pursuit must take precedence over activism, and that there is nothing innately beneficial and much that is deleterious about marches and sit-ins and shouting fests, the deterioration of university culture is almost certain to continue.</p>
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		<title>The Democrats and Big Money</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-democrats-and-big-money/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-democrats-and-big-money</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:45:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Money]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[the new leviathan]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Democrats’ professed moral scruples about corporate money have never prevented them from using it.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-democrats-and-big-money/georgesoros/" rel="attachment wp-att-168802"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-168802" title="GeorgeSoros" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/GeorgeSoros.jpg" alt="" width="257" height="183" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s and Jacob Laksin&#8217;s <em>The New Leviathan</em>, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>According to a recent report in the magazine <em><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/84205.html">Politico</a></em>, high-ranking Democrats are now energetically wooing big-money donors in the wake of President Obama’s re-election. It appears that the moral reservations expressed not so long ago by some Democratic leaders have ebbed, and that plans are already underway to consolidate their funding infrastructure for the future.</p>
<p>Even in the mercurial world of politics, the pronounced softening on big money is a notable reversal. In January 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled that political action committees (known as super PACs) could accept unlimited donations to fund advertising campaigns, President Obama went immediately on the <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/21/obama-criticizes-campaign-finance-ruling/">offensive</a>, castigating the Court’s decision as a threat to democracy.</p>
<p>Positioning himself as the defender of “<a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/21/obama-criticizes-campaign-finance-ruling/">average Americans</a>” against (Republican) big money, he described the Supreme Court’s “devastating” decision as a “major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power  every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” Obama’s angry lament played into a tried and effective Democratic strategy:  whatever their personal wealth and elite connections—and Obama certainly has both, if not to the extent of super-rich politicians like Senator John Kerry and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—Democrats have always declared themselves to be on the side of ordinary working Americans and against the unscrupulous rich.</p>
<p>Like much in the Democratic playbook, Obama’s self-righteous complaint about the rising tide of big money in politics told a certain truth, but it did not tell the whole truth, and the story of Democrats’ moral posturing about money illuminates the hypocrisy and deception at the heart of the party’s most cherished self-image.</p>
<p>It is true that in 2010, Republican super PACs outspent their Democratic rivals to help shift the balance of power in Congress—with big wins. Divided over tactics, the Democratic response was at first slow. By the end of 2011, according to <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/02/07/146526097/for-obama-the-superpac-rubber-has-met-the-road">Scott Neuman</a> of NPR, pro-Democratic groups had amassed nearly $20 million, not enough to compete with the $50 million of pro-Republican groups. It was this significant imbalance that led the Obama team in early 2012 to reverse course publicly, <a href="http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-02-07/news/31035801_1_super-pac-super-pac-president-obama">encouraging donors to contribute</a> to the super PACs, especially Priorities USA Action, that were supporting Obama’s re-election campaign. Questioned about the apparent inconsistency, the team insisted that Republicans had forced their hand and that they could not be expected to “<a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/120207/obama-reverses-stance-super-pacs">unilaterally disarm</a>” while the enemy enjoyed such an advantage.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.politico.com/arena/archive/obama-super-pac---hypocritical-or-common-sense.html">Bill Burton</a>, the former Obama aide who helped found Priorities USA Action, framed the Democratic embrace of super PACs as a reluctant defensive manoeuvre. Writing on Politico’s “The Arena” forum on February 13, 2012, he commented that rather than watch helplessly “as the candidates we care about and the values we cherish come under wave after wave of assault backed by billionaires in the oil industry,” Democrats were forced to “play by the rules as they are, not as we wish they were.” Obama too, in an <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/02/07/matt-lauer-lets-obama-claim-he-didnt-run-negative-ad-campaign-">interview</a> with NBC’s Matt Lauer, claimed that he would love to “take some of the big money out of politics,” but simply couldn’t do so in the present electoral landscape.</p>
<p>Throughout 2012, the Democrats saw their super PAC arsenal grow, particularly in October when billionaire George Soros <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/soros-gives-1-million-to-democratic-super-pac/">donated 1.5 million</a> to Democratic super PACs. His donation encouraged others in the closing weeks of the campaign, and by the time of the election, Democratic super PACs were drawing nearly even with Republican groups. The <em>New York Times</em> reports that the conservative advantage in outside spending <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html">shrank to about 10 percent</a> by the day of the election.</p>
<p>All signs indicate that Democratic super PACs are now an entrenched adjunct of the party. According to <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/84205.html">Kenneth P. Vogel and Tarini Parti at <em>Politico</em></a>, the fresh-from-victory Democrats are already preparing for the 2014 and 2016 campaigns. A recent three-day conference of the Democracy Alliance, a George Soros-founded network of deep-pocketed liberals and representatives of outside groups, heard presentations from Nancy Pelosi and Obama campaign officials, who thanked them for past campaign contributions. The question facing Democrats now, it seems, is not whether to solicit super PAC support but how to solicit it most effectively.</p>
<p>Not all present at the Democracy Alliance conference were comfortable with the new direction being taken by an organization that once focused on grassroots activism rather than political advertising. Regardless, the Democratic narrative of higher morality and unwilling (but necessary) accommodation to Republican tactics continues to be broadcast. <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/soros-gives-1-million-to-democratic-super-pac/">George Soros</a> has himself declared that his about-face on super PACs came because he couldn’t stomach the Romney campaign’s “openly soliciting the money of the rich to starve the state of the money it needs to provide social services.” Democracy Alliance chairman <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/84205.html">Rob McKay</a> alleged that he and others remain committed to campaign finance reform, aiming to use big money to “limit the effect of money on our political system” in the future.</p>
<p>At the same time, according to Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge 21<sup>st</sup> Century, “there is now a sense that we need to compete with super PACS,” and that an increasing number of progressives are comfortable fighting Republicans on their own ground.  One new donor interviewed by <em>Politico</em> called super PACs “a reality that I wish would go away” but recognized the necessity of engaging Republicans “on their own terms.”</p>
<p>What all the pious justifications elide, however, is that at the very time that President Obama was lamenting the crippling of democracy by Republican super PACs and then ruefully conceding that his team would fight fire with fire, big money on the left was already playing a decisive role in the American political process—all the more decisive, in fact, because it was so skilfully hidden from public view, cloaked by innocent-seeming philanthropic and social justice mandates. As David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin have shown in their extensively documented <a href="http://www.amazon.com/New-Leviathan-Left-Wing-Money-Machine-Threatens/dp/0307716457/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1354987667&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+new+leviathan+how+the+left-wing">The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future</a> (2012), a large and wealthy cross-section of tax-exempt foundations and advocacy groups work in concert with overtly political organizations to influence the outcome of elections; they do so not by campaigning directly for candidates but by working on a variety of cultural, legal, and educational fronts to reshape public policy and mainstream opinion.</p>
<p>Such foundations pursue the neo-Marxist strategy of transforming the culture from the ground up in order to win and maintain power. Claiming to be politically non-aligned by virtue of the fact that they do not lobby for a specific candidate or party—and able to maintain tax-exempt status and donor anonymity for that reason—they nonetheless work to bring about profound political change in American life, targeting everything from national defence to immigration law and social mores. Financed by such high-flyer billionaires as Bill and Melinda Gates, the foundations pack a fiscal wallop that dwarfs the resources available on the conservative side for similar lobbying.</p>
<p>In fact, as Horowitz and Laksin discovered by examining the foundations’ yearly financial statements, left-wing spending outweighs conservative spending by an astonishing ten to one factor. In 2009, progressive funds totaled a hefty 104.56 billion dollars. A single left-leaning philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, had an endowment of over 33 billion, which alone is three times the total of funds accessible to the 75 viable conservative groups. On individual issues, the left swamps its opponents; 117 progressive organizations devoted more than 50% of their programs to supporting open borders and the extension of citizens’ rights to illegal immigrants, with a total of 306.1 million dollars at their disposal. They are opposed by only nine conservative organizations that address immigration, with a comparatively small financial base of 13.8 million.</p>
<p>It seems that when liberals speak of having to play by the big-money rules of conservatives, they conveniently overlook the fact that an avalanche of their own money, far “bigger” than their opponents can command, has been at work for years entrenching left-wing ideas in the culture by stealth, moving ideas from the radical fringes to the centre by dint of insistent repetition and aggressive advocacy. It is worth asking which strategy is more transparent: one in which outside groups fund political advertising campaigns that clearly and unambiguously declare their support for or opposition to a particular candidate or policy? Or one that wages an undeclared war on rival ideas and assumptions through a blizzard of media campaigns, lawsuits, and public school initiatives? If big money has an unfair advantage with voters when they choose their congressional representative, how much more of an unfair advantage does big money have with school children when they are taught about the evil of oil pipelines or the necessity of unions?</p>
<p>The question, then, is this. Which situation is more harmful to democracy: one in which hyperbolic and emotionally-charged political ads clamour for viewers’ attention, or one in which foundation-funded left-wing lawyers obtain the release of terrorists from Guantanamo and charity money funds Occupy Wall Street thuggery? However one answers the question, it is risible to suggest that the big money is all on the conservative side, or that the lofty moral principles are all on the other.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Sometimes a Bang, Sometimes a Whimper</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/sometimes-a-bang-sometimes-a-whimper/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sometimes-a-bang-sometimes-a-whimper</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2012 04:43:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Civilizations die]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Goldman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[decline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[David Goldman explains how the United States can escape the general decline of the West.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/sometimes-a-bang-sometimes-a-whimper/how-4/" rel="attachment wp-att-167689"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167689" title="how" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/how.jpg" alt="" width="240" height="180" /></a>David Goldman calls <em>How Civilizations Die</em> “an apology for conventional thinking,” and it is easy to see why—if one understands “conventional” to mean conservative. A religious Jew and strong supporter of Israel, Goldman is hawkish on U.S. foreign policy and believes in the centrality of religious faith to the health of cultures. In other respects, however, he departs from mainstream conservative opinion. He tends to stress the weakness rather than triumphalist strength of Islamic societies, while acknowledging that this fact makes them <em>more</em> rather than less dangerous. He is dismissive of the widely-held conservative belief that exporting democracy is the best way for the United States to build stability in the Middle East; we won the Cold War, he asserts, by ruining the Soviet Union, not by persuading the Soviets to emulate us. And he provides a surprising history of anti-Semitism in Europe, which he reads as a form of neo-pagan national idolatry.</p>
<p>With a myriad of such fascinating and sometimes counter-intuitive arguments, <em>How Civilizations Die</em> explores the unconscious death wish that has infected most of Europe and, with different manifestations, the Islamic world. Goldman asks if America’s unique experiment in freedom can survive the coming collapse of the Western world, or if the election of Barack Obama, with all the socialist-leaning somnolence his administration has delivered, signaled an unstoppable suicidal spiral. And if America <em>can</em> escape the fate of Europe, how can it protect itself against the enmity of its dying enemies? At this turning point in history, with America facing four more years of leadership by an anti-American president, Goldman’s predictions and warnings deserve a wide hearing.</p>
<p>Goldman’s main subject is demographic collapse, the dramatically decreasing birthrate and consequent aging populations not only of Europe but also, in contrast to received opinion, of much of the Muslim world. He points to the astounding fact that “Iran’s fertility has fallen by almost six children per woman, Turkey’s has fallen by five children per woman, Pakistan’s by more than three children per woman, and Egypt’s and Indonesia&#8217;s by four.” As a result, he argues, many of the largest Muslim countries “may well catch up with Europe’s geriatric crisis in a generation and a half.”</p>
<p>A shrinking population is not, as some analysts have led us to expect, good news. On the contrary, without enough young people to maintain production levels and support the burgeoning elderly population, the decreasing birthrate poses a threat to world stability worse even than the apocalyptic scenarios of dire environmentalists. As radicalized Muslims witness the decay of their societies, as is occurring now in Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, they will turn to violence with ever-greater frequency. Social collapse is already abundantly evident in Iran, for example, where levels of drug abuse and prostitution exceed levels anywhere in the West despite the harsh crackdowns of the Iranian regime, and where a scapegoating rage at Jews and America is on the upsurge. Former great powers such as Spain and Italy are dying too, but more resignedly and calmly, with only occasional eruptions of protest.</p>
<p>Calling population decline “the decisive issue of the 21st century,” Goldman is most interested in the question of why some societies—like some individuals—give up on reproduction, essentially losing the will to live. The malaise affecting both Europe and the Muslim Middle East is ultimately, he argues, a spiritual one, and only a “theopolitics” that recognizes the need for meaning is equipped to diagnose it. People survive when their lives are buttressed by a “meaning that transcends death,” whether through a religious belief in personal immortality or through the confident longevity of their culture. When sources of meaning wither, people “embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war … they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation.” Religious faith is widely known to correlate with fertility, but not all faiths have the same impact. Some survive and even thrive amidst the challenges of modernity while others are destroyed by it.</p>
<p>Goldman’s argument about the relative strengths of different forms of religious faith and their role in the maintenance of population and democratic vitality is the most provocative aspect of his book, a subject not particularly amenable to proofs or logical argument, but deeply evocative as Goldman handles it. Hopeful that America’s fate may be different from the rest of Europe—at present it has avoided the demographic illness affecting nearly every other industrialized democracy—Goldman stresses that “Only its unique religious history and culture explains America’s apparent exemption from the life and death cycle of nations and only Islam’s very different theology explains the Muslim world’s extreme vulnerability to the demographic effects of modernization.”</p>
<p>In the Judeo-Christian understanding, God is a being who loves humanity—even sinful and erring humanity—and creates an ordered world that we can know and harness for productive ends. This is a very different conception from the capricious and transcendent God of Islam, who cannot love because such would imply weakness or incompleteness. Muslims can be sure of heavenly reward only through dying to protect Islam from its enemies. Under Islam, human beings submit as a collectivity to Allah’s absolute power; in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in contrast, individuals have inalienable rights granted by a God who limits His own power in covenants with them. The latter emphasis tends to produce, as it has in both Israel and America, societies valuing individual initiative, curiosity, self-determination, and rational endeavor. Both Judaism and American evangelicalism are well suited to political freedom because of their understanding of the individual worth of each person. Goldman believes that those who downplay the exceptional nature of American democracy fail to understand the degree to which it was nourished by its Judeo-Christian foundation.</p>
<p>The uniqueness of the American situation does not mean that other nations cannot similarly thrive, but it does mean, in Goldman’s view, that the truism that all peoples desire freedom may well be mistaken. Freedom brings with it, among many difficulties, abuses such as blasphemy, sexual impurity, and pornography that traditional societies often do not wish to tolerate. Additionally, the ideal of serving the good of the whole society rather than one’s clan or tribe is unimaginable in many of these cultures. Perhaps it is a form of chauvinism, Goldman proposes, to think that the American model can or will be eagerly implemented by all peoples; such has been a costly misapprehension fueling the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Goldman proposes that America’s legitimate self-interest demands it form alliances primarily with those who share its “common loves.” Those nations committed to the sanctity of the individual are the ones that have a chance of flourishing and with whom the U.S. should make common cause: Christians in the global south and Israel are good examples of peoples with a “moral claim on American friendship.”</p>
<p>But America under President Barack Obama has made the mistake of thinking it good to liquidate American power and influence—astounding for a President to propose—and to placate and appease, rather than contain or defeat, hostile Islamist powers. The Obama administration’s policy of “reset” has had the effect, Goldman argues, of “encouraging some of America’s worst enemies” while rebuking Israel, its one stalwart and like-minded democratic friend in the Middle East. Why would a President be prepared to risk American security in such a manner? Only a misguided man identifying deeply with Islam, the religion of his father, and against the Jewish state. In the final section on America’s role in the world, Goldman’s conservative <em>bona fides</em> are on full display in his conviction that it is better to be respected than liked, and that some issues cannot be negotiated. America must deter Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, by force if necessary. Although America may need to compromise on many issues, it must not “abandon alliances with nations founded on the principles that define [its] unique character as a people.” Most of all, it must not follow Europe into its twilight through a debilitating loss of will.</p>
<p>It is difficult to summarize or assess this book adequately because it covers so much territory: broadscale social theory, demographic analysis, sweeping historical argument, and foreign policy recommendations. Such remarkable breadth is its strength and, occasionally, its weakness. It is a strength for the sheer interest and provocativeness of Goldman’s many arguments, a weakness only because many are asserted rather than patiently developed as they deserve. His chapter explaining “Why Christianity Died in Europe,” for example, covers a subject big enough to be a book in itself. It seems—to this non-expert reader—fresh and bold, but a more detailed marshalling of facts and authorities would be required to convince the serious reader. Some readers will undoubtedly want a more comprehensive accounting of Muslim population trends and perhaps a fuller acknowledgement of the vagaries of prediction. Others may find the foreign policy blueprint too impressionistic. In these respects, <em>How Civilizations Die</em> is like the proverbial dinner guest one suspects Goldman himself might be: engaging minute by minute, brilliant, well informed, full of arresting anecdotes and memorable turns of phrase, but perhaps too quick and confident to be entirely convincing, too often assuming a reader who thinks like he does and knows as much. Regardless, one would certainly invite him back, and one looks forward eagerly to further books by Goldman in the near future.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Deadly Delusions</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/deadly-delusions/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=deadly-delusions</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Nov 2012 04:42:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[destruction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[radicals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[utopianism]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A bracing new book by David Horowitz explores the murderous underbelly of utopianism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/deadly-delusions/radicals45-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-165763"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-165763" title="radicals45" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/radicals45-297x350.jpg" alt="" width="297" height="350" /></a><strong>Reprinted from  <a href="http://pjmedia.com/">PJMedia</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>To order <em>Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion</em>, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In the work of David Horowitz, personal history and political analysis are often conjoined. Horowitz’s memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684840057/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0684840057&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pajamasmedia-20"><em>Radical Son</em></a> told how as a Marxist intellectual and activist, he came to reject the revolutionary violence of progressivist ideology along with the utopian longings and commitments that inspired it. In works such as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594030820/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1594030820&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20"><em>Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties</em></a> (with Peter Collier) and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1890626562/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1890626562&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20"><em>Left Illusions</em></a>, he exposed with first-hand passion the self-deceptions and cultural chaos generated by such utopian faiths. A significant segment of his work, including <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596985259/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1596985259&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20"><em>The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America</em></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0096EQFHS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0096EQFHS&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20"><em>Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom</em></a>, has investigated the corruption of American universities by radical politics; and even here, there is a personal element as he remembers the scrupulous professors, models of disinterested intellectual engagement, who taught him as an undergraduate at Columbia. His recent <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008SLUH5G/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B008SLUH5G&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20">A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next</a> </em>is exemplary in its blending of personal and broadly philosophical discussion of the spiritual roots of totalitarianism.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596988126/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1596988126&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20"><em>Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion</em></a><em> </em>continues this work of political reflection sharpened by autobiographical insight. It collects portraits of contemporary left-wing intellectuals, writers, and activists, all but one of whom embraced anti-American propaganda and its justification of violence, including journalist Christopher Hitchens, who worked for years at the rabidly anti-American paper <em>The Nation</em>, feted academic Cornell West, who has fawningly promoted the murderous Nation of Islam, and Saul Alinsky, who has embraced nihilistic destruction in the name of “the people.”</p>
<p>Each chapter focuses on the manner in which intelligent people accommodate the evident contradictions and brutal repressions of the ideologies to which they profess allegiance, and the personal deformations, moral compromises, and unacknowledged trauma that such allegiances often exacerbate. Red-diaper baby Bettina Aptheker, for example, endured bouts of self-hatred and Communist-inspired paranoia that never led to any thoroughgoing repudiation of the extreme causes to which she dedicated her life, and she has remained publicly unrepentant about her defense of Black Panther murders and other far-left atrocities. Becoming a radical feminist professor at UC Santa Cruz, she built a comfortable life preaching the moral equivalency between the United States and the totalitarian foes that seek its destruction. Professor Cornel West is also a successful far-left and anti-American academic, living well off books and talks that vent grievance-filled rage and obscene encomia to murderers. He has been able to elide the fact that the Nation of Islam executed his hero Malcolm X, such repression allowing him to declare his solidarity with “the fiery passion for racial justice and deep love for black people” of its leader Louis Farrakhan, who orchestrated the murder. The intensity of his hatred for white America leaves him unable to see anything good in his country or anything bad in his black brethren.</p>
<p>The degree of intimacy in the portraits varies, depending on the subject’s own capacity for honest self-reflection. One has little sense of psychological complexity in West’s glib self-aggrandizement, perhaps because there is none to be found or because he is someone for whom Horowitz has little personal knowledge and sympathy. More personally revealing is the portrait of Susan Lydon, product of the hippy counterculture who became famous for a widely cited feminist essay called “The Politics of Orgasm.” Lydon wrote a confessional account of her decades-long struggle with addiction and self-hatred, a struggle that led her far away from the self-destructive radicalism of her youth. Hers is the story of an individual who turned away from a damaging mindset and ultimately found some measure of personal peace.</p>
<p>As its title suggests, however, this is mainly a book about people who maintained their radical faith, recasting reality to fit their beliefs. Horowitz recounts attending a film and talk at a Santa Monica bookstore by released convict Linda Evans, of the Weather Underground, who had served less than half of a forty-year sentence for possession of explosives and terrorist organizing. Now she was attempting to generate sympathy for fellow criminals still in jail who needed public support. Horowitz is fascinated by the sanitized account she provided of the reasons for her allies’ incarceration as well as the warped vision that led her to label as “political prisoners” every person behind bars in America. How can one go on believing, in the midst of so much deliberate and often pointless violence (associates of Evans killed a young black police officer during a botched Brinks robbery), in the righteousness of one’s cause and the innocence of one’s fellow killers? As Horowitz shows, the remarkable upside-down logic is endemic to the hard left, in which nearly any level of violence is justifiable so long as it seeks to destabilize an evil America, seen as unparalleled in its malignancy.</p>
<p>Horowitz’s chapter on “Pardoned Bombers,” about Evans, Kathy Boudin, and Susan Rosenberg, all Weather Underground alumni, is a gripping story of violence, decades-long unrepentance on the part of the trio, and the collusion of journalists, politicians, left-wing do-gooders, and members of the intelligentsia such as Noam Chomsky to whitewash their crimes and massage public opinion. The three women, who sought for years to bring about so-called racial justice through bombing campaigns and armed struggle, continue to proclaim the rightness of their aims. Horowitz’s detailed analysis of Rosenberg’s self-pitying book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005IUOQ8Y/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B005IUOQ8Y&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20">An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country</a></em> details its failures of empathy and outright lies in a way the mainstream media, unaware of or unconcerned about the truth, has never done.</p>
<p>The final chapter of <em>Radicals</em> provides a detailed close reading of the political theory of Saul Alinsky, a man who idolized Al Capone, Fidel Castro, and rebel angel Lucifer, and who dedicated himself wholeheartedly to destroying his country. Horowitz’s reading shows clearly that the radical’s commitment to an unrealizable higher purpose — the earthly salvation of mankind — not only excuses but also mandates disregard for law and personal morality. Alinsky’s hatred of law-abiding liberals stemmed from the fact, as he stated, that they allowed conscience and principles, neither of which he believed in, to limit their work for fundamental change: “They do not ‘care enough’ for people to be ‘corrupted’ for them,” he charged, putting “corrupted” in quotation marks to show that he didn’t believe in such a scruple. Convinced that the overthrow of the American order was an end that justified any means, he advocated the infiltration of the Democratic Party by closet revolutionaries to radicalize it from within. That Barack Obama spent years working with Alinskyites in Chicago and even teaching Alinskyan methods during his tenure as a community organizer highlights the degree to which an anti-American radicalism is now inside the White House. This chapter is essential reading for anyone who wonders why Obama’s activist connections matter to the future of America.</p>
<p>The book’s <em>tour de force</em> is undoubtedly the chapter on “The Two Christophers,” an in-depth analysis of Christopher Hitchens’s memoir <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/044654034X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=044654034X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20"><em>Hitch-22</em></a>, interleaved with memories of Horowitz’s personal relationship with him. The reading is masterly in teasing out the blind-spots, half-truths, and evasions that fill this account by a one-time Marxist radical who was able to go only so far in repudiating his leftist dreams. In a superb reading designed to show that “Loyalty to bad commitments leads to moral incoherence,” Horowitz pores over the memoir to find both the overt contradictions of Hitchens’ self-congratulation — his pleasure in having marched in opposition to the Vietnam War, his hatred of Israel and Ronald Reagan, his love for defenders of totalitarianism — and also those moments in the text where the confessing self, in detailing his formative influences, crises, and political sea-changes, reveals more than he intends. Such moments come in verbal evasions, especially a crippling refusal to examine the human misery caused by the causes he supported and to explore the psychological roots of his residual salvationist fervor.</p>
<p>One is struck through this book by the depth and human forthrightness of Horowitz as man and as political commentator. Always incisive, elegant, and wise, his penetrating analyses of the perils of radicalism are tempered by sadness as much as anger, and leavened by the cautious belief — bedrock of all his writing — that human beings can rethink misguided commitments in the light of evidence and reasoned argument. Though exasperatedly impressed by the fact of “how little we human beings are able to learn collectively from our experience, how slowly we do learn, and how quickly we forget,” he has kept on writing in the tempered hope that readers’ nascent second thoughts can grow into a principled refusal of violence.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Dying By Entitlements</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/dying-by-entitlements/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dying-by-entitlements</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Oct 2012 04:10:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[after america]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[paperback]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[STEYN]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Mark Steyn’s prescient analysis of American malaise, "After America," now available in paperback.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/dying-by-entitlements/after-america/" rel="attachment wp-att-148543"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-148543" title="after america" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/after-america-231x350.jpg" alt="" width="231" height="350" /></a><strong></strong></p>
<p>Mark Steyn has done a spate of interviews recently on the occasion of the paperback release of his 2011 bestseller <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/After-America-Get-Ready-Armageddon/dp/1596983272/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1349966346&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=after+america+get+ready+for+armageddon+paperback">After America: Get Ready For Armageddon</a></em>. A few weeks ago, he remarked to Canadian television host <a href="http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/1850113466001">Michael Coren</a> that, contrary to those who claimed his predictions about American collapse were alarmist, he now finds that, in the wake of American credit downgrades and the murder of the American ambassador in Benghazi, his warnings were actually rather moderate. In hundreds of pages of outraging and depressing detail, Steyn shows how the United States of America has mortgaged its future, put ideological conformity above all other values—whether of knowledge, prosperity, national security, or cultural survival—and is declining into a state of moral lassitude that heralds catastrophe.</p>
<p>Such decline is not only an American story, as Steyn’s title indicates. The whole world will be affected by the loss of American influence, as aggressive yet unstable regimes step into the breach. When Britain ceased to be the dominant power following World War II, the transition of leadership to the United States was all but seamless, but that will not be the case when nations shaped by illiberal values assert their dominance. And unlike the gradual unraveling of countries such as France and Italy, the American collapse could well be swift and brutal. As the only great nation in the world founded on an idea, the United States is unlikely to stay together once that idea has died. With its strength sapped by intrusive bureaucracy, economic torpor, and loss of moral purpose, it could in a short time begin to break up. The ensuing leadership vacuum will, Steyn predicts, be disastrous for the world, producing not a new world order but world disorder, “a fractious planet of hostile forces.”</p>
<p>How did things come to such a pass? Simply put, America stopped being a nation founded on the ideals of freedom, self-reliance, and local government, with the self-confidence that came with those. Almost imperceptibly at times—and in dramatic, contentious lurches at others (the New Deal, ObamaCare)—it shifted towards collectivism, cradle-to-grave security, and control of its subjects’ lives; the shift has resulted in a precipitous decline in personal responsibility and productivity. Within a decade, as Steyn calculates, it will be “spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on its military,” and many in leadership positions will be glad to have it so, believing the exercise of power in the world to be a bad thing. But domestic spending in the name of “compassion” is not only unsustainable but fundamentally unreal, as Steyn points out: “There’s nothing virtuous about ‘caring,’ ‘compassionate’ ‘progressives’ demonstrating how caring and compassionate and progressive they are by spending money yet to be earned by generations yet to be born.” And the spending is not even the main issue—though certainly a pressing one—but is rather a symptom of a more profound societal sickness.</p>
<p>As such a summary suggests, <em>After America</em> is a disquieting book, an angry lament for a once-proud nation on a course to disaster. And no one is better equipped to write it than Steyn, syndicated journalist and well-known conservative commentator whose earlier book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596985275/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;pf_rd_s=center-2&amp;pf_rd_r=031T6QHXW6N6A620XP9Q&amp;pf_rd_t=101&amp;pf_rd_p=1389517282&amp;pf_rd_i=507846">America Alone</a></em>, chronicled the problems of Western Europe and the increasing isolation of the United States. An articulate nay-sayer both admired and reviled for his willingness to explore unpopular subjects, he became the subject of a human rights complaint for his writing in <em>Maclean’s</em>, a Canadian magazine, about the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism. Although he was not found guilty, the incident illustrated the West’s current peril, in which Islamists use the tools of rights protection against those who seek to safeguard and exercise rights, and it consolidated Steyn’s credentials as a defender of free speech. What he has to say in <em>After America</em> has been said by others before him, but his version of the story is particularly robust and riveting.</p>
<p>The title notwithstanding, <em>After America</em> is most valuable not for its predictions about the imminent future but for its magisterial account of what has gone so wrong—and so suddenly—with America. After the extraordinary technological advances of the first half of the twentieth century, invention and innovation have now been largely replaced by government regulation. Almost all that remains of the American can-do spirit is “a memory of faded grandeur” in a country that no longer aims for the moon, literally, or has the will to secure its borders, prevent crime, or prosecute war against its enemies. In a dramatic symbol of its loss of purpose, it cannot even rebuild the World Trade Centre in a timely manner. In its dithering and defeatism, the once exceptional nation is following in Europe’s footsteps, for “The story of the western world since 1945,” Steyn laments, is that “invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people voted to dump freedom.” In return for comfort, such people have been happy to relinquish their right to make their own decisions and to speak their minds on controversial issues. The more their government has grown, the more inexorable and irresistible has become its power and the more taken-for-granted the belief that individuals cannot manage their own lives. As Steyn explains:</p>
<p>Government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. That’s why the Democrats spent the first year of a brutal recession trying to ram ObamaCare down the throats of a nation that didn’t want it. Because the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make small government all but impossible ever again. In most of the rest of the western world, it’s led to a kind of two-party one-party state: right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. All such ‘technocratic’ societies slide left, into statism and stasis.</p>
<p>It follows logically that the more people become dependent on government, whether through government jobs, government contracts, or government handouts, the less they will be inclined to vote to reduce its size.</p>
<p>Once in place, moreover, big government enforces a monopoly on ideas and seeks not only to marginalize but even to medicalize dissent. When Juan Williams was fired from National Public Radio for admitting that he felt nervous when Muslims in fundamentalist garb boarded an airplane, NPR executive Vivian Schiller suggested he should see a psychiatrist. In universities, in newsrooms, on government committees, many forms of diversity are touted except the only one that really matters: diversity of ideas. Moreover, the diversity mantra has become a thin cover for the mediocrity of intellect that now cripples America’s young people. Public schooling is largely about feeling good, while college education in the humanities and social sciences provides “a leisurely half-decade immersion in the manners and mores of American conformism.” Steyn’s analysis of Michelle Obama’s undergraduate thesis offers a sobering example of the diminishment of elite education since the 1970s: as he shows, her major project was a record of imprecisely expressed grievance, navel-gazing, and self-righteousness.</p>
<p>Steyn is particularly effective in emphasizing the moral impact of burgeoning government and its culture of dependence. Though conservatives are often damned for their supposed selfishness, he points out that government largesse itself tends to produce selfishness and anarchic violence, as the protests in Greece revealed. Far from enabling citizens to live well, as its proponents claim, welfare produces instead a lack of purpose and reduced life-satisfaction. As Steyn phrases it with his characteristic wit and concision, “Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically.”</p>
<p>The only hope for America’s survival, Steyn contends, is to drastically reduce the size of government and return decision-making power to individuals at the local level. The United States is still different enough from Europe that this may be possible: it is the one place in the world where, after the 2008 economic collapse, crowds of citizens took to the streets demanding not that government do more for them—continue entitlements, borrow even more heavily—but that it get out of the way. According to Steyn, that’s the America that has a fighting chance, the one that stands for economic dynamism and individuality. It now faces the choice to live free or die of the nanny state.</p>
<p>Steyn’s feisty intelligence and panache are everywhere on display in this extraordinarily readable book. His riff on President Obama’s self-satisfied address to the German people on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall had me gasping with laughter, as did his response to a media pundit’s claim that Tea Party opposition to ObamaCare was merely an expression of redneck bigotry. His dissection of how political correctness enabled Nidal Hasan to kill thirteen men and women at Fort Hood—and how the mainstream media immediately attempted to deny he was motivated by Islam—is a masterly feat of analysis, the outrage perfectly calibrated with wit. One can only feel grateful that there exist political writers with Steyn’s ability, chutzpah, energy, and courage. Unfortunately, purveyors of serious warnings are rarely welcomed, and their difficult advice is almost never followed.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Cultures of Honor</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/cultures-of-honor/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cultures-of-honor</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Sep 2012 04:45:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barbara Kay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Honor crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[memoir]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Punjabi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unworthy Creature]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A new book exposes the dark reality of honor crime. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/unworthy.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-145174" title="unworthy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/unworthy.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="240" /></a><strong>Review of Aruna Papp and Barbara Kay, <em>Unworthy Creature: A Punjabi Daughter’s Memoir on Honour, Shame and Love</em>. St. Catharines: Freedom Press, 2012.</strong></p>
<p>One of the ironies of our age is that the North American women who successfully lobbied over the past 30 years to change the public perception of marriage, sexual assault, and abortion should have shown themselves so pusillanimous and divided over the suffering of non-Western women. When I was a university student keen to understand feminism, I learned early on that white women should stay silent when the subject was violence against women in such regions as South Asia, where women are subject to strict codes of honor punishable by beatings or murder. It was racist, I was told, to point the finger at non-Western cultures for women’s abuse; all patriarchies subjugated women, none more so than the North American version, and whites who criticized other cultures were exhibiting a long-standing colonial arrogance.</p>
<p>Two women have refused this feminist orthodoxy to co-author <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unworthy-Creature-Punjabi-Daughters-Memoir/dp/0981276768/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1348149837&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=unworthy+creature">Unworthy Creature: A Punjabi Daughter’s Memoir on Honour, Shame, and Love</a></em>. Barbara Kay, the supporting author, is an acclaimed <em>National Post</em> opinion writer and public speaker who came to know Aruna Papp after Papp wrote to congratulate her for one of her columns. In the column, Kay had distinguished honor-based violence from normative domestic violence, and Papp was struck by her discernment and clarity. Eventually the two women decided to collaborate to write Papp’s story.</p>
<p>The oldest daughter of Seventh-Day Adventist parents in the Punjab, Aruna grew up in a culture saturated with the honor-based values and customs. There was never a time when she did not know that boys were more valued than girls, that a girl’s only hope in life was to fulfill the role assigned to her—as daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, mother, or widow—and that to fail in her role, through disobedience or sexual “pollution,” was to risk harsh physical punishment and ostracism.</p>
<p>For Aruna, this meant accepting a life in which beatings by her revered father were eventually replaced by beatings at the hands of the man to whom her parents married her. It meant witnessing a girl burned to death for rebellious behaviour and noting the failure of family members or neighbours to condemn her killing. It meant seeing a female baby that had been thrown onto a trash heap and being told it was nothing to cry about. It meant suffering from feelings of profound worthlessness. Raped by a male relative while she was a young girl, Aruna said nothing because she knew she would be killed if the “shameful” fact (her shame, that is) were revealed. On her wedding night, she was terrified that her husband would discover her secret and send her back to her father, who would be forced to kill her to purify the family name. Thinking of her own death, she felt no anger, only sadness for her papa. “I loved my father so much that the thought of his humiliation sickened me. I hoped I would have the opportunity to tell him that I loved him and that I was not angry with him for ending my life.”</p>
<p>How this abused and nearly-illiterate young woman found the strength to defy family strictures and make a new life for herself in Canada as an immigrant services director, independent-minded activist, teacher, and author is the story that Papp has told in this riveting memoir. From the moment of her arrival at the airport in Montreal, where only a screaming fit prevented her and her husband and children from being sent back to India, to her grit in pursuing university education despite language and educational deficiencies, Papp was determined to allow no Canadian opportunity to pass her by.</p>
<p>In the midst of domestic turmoil, she became involved by chance in social services work for which she developed passion and expertise. Here she also encountered the crippling dogma of multicultural feminism, with its cut-throat animosities and hierarchies of oppression. Her articulation of the contradictions of progressivist theory is forthright and cogent:</p>
<blockquote><p>Feminism made me question my whole upbringing, encouraged me to be judgmental about the patriarchy, and challenged my loyalty to the men in my life. Feminism told me to be strong and forthright and autonomous. But at the same time multiculturalism, an equally prominent philosophy that Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau had decreed would be Canada’s guiding principle for a just society, seemed to be telling me that judging the behaviour of people from cultures other than western Christian ones was patronizing and elitist. Multiculturalism seemed to be telling me I should continue to live exactly as I always had, because inequality of value between men and women was part of my culture, and all cultures were deemed to be of equal value.</p></blockquote>
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		<title>The Leftist Leviathan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-leftist-leviathan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-leftist-leviathan</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-leftist-leviathan/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Sep 2012 04:45:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[money machine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the new leviathan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=145023</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin expose the new reality of American politics.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/new1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-145057" title="new" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/new1.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="378" /></a><strong>Visit <a href="http://pjmedia.com/">Pajamas Media</a>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productattribute.html?productId=6495"><em>The New Leviathan</em></a>, by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, overturns conventional wisdom about money and power in American politics, attacking the well-known myth that conservative lobby groups wield unparalleled clout. The myth holds that the relatively small “grass-roots” organizations on the side of the Democratic Party, putatively the party of the “the people,” are dwarfed by pro-Republican organizations speaking for Wall Street and the corporate elite. Allowing Democrats to claim moral legitimacy, this David-and-Goliath story has held sway for a long time, regardless of the massive wealth and old-money connections of many individual Democratic politicians: presidential nominee John Kerry’s jaw-dropping opulence went almost unmentioned by the mainstream media, as did the fact that Wall Street leaders raised 100 million dollars to support Barack Obama’s populist “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” White House bid.</p>
<p>Subtitled “How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future,” Horowitz and Laksin’s new book demonstrates the reality behind the myth in this impressively documented study of the left-wing money machine. As they substantiate with riveting detail, a plethora of left-wing organizations, philanthropies, unions, and think tanks, the majority tax-exempt and government-funded, now make up a unique power bloc that in the past decade has undergone explosive growth. At a time when soft funding for political parties has been curtailed, this network now effectively controls Democratic candidates and the party agenda, having amassed a war chest far exceeding both the money in conservative coffers and that held by the Democratic Party itself.</p>
<p>The aim of this network, as the authors show with many examples, is not only to influence elections through indirect means such as Media Matters, which continuously campaigns against conservative ideas, but also to transform the fabric of American society through education initiatives, community organizing projects, lawsuits, harassment campaigns, and tireless attacks on conservative figures. Its over-riding purpose, following the Marcusean strategy of revolution by stealth, is to move radical ideas “from the political margins to the political mainstream” until they become official Democratic policy as well as an accepted part of public debate. Ideas that were once thought risibly extreme—that Islamists bent on America’s destruction are actually victims of American aggression, that unlimited access to abortion is a woman’s right—become respectable through repetition. Although the various Democrat-friendly foundations claim to seek an expanded democracy, many of them are hard-left rather than liberal-democratic in their orientation, and represent a dangerously determined alliance bent on fomenting class division, hobbling the capitalist system, and weakening American power.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article,<a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-leftist-leviathan/"> click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Bad Faith of Andrew Delbanco</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-bad-faith-of-leftist-intellectuals-today/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-bad-faith-of-leftist-intellectuals-today</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-bad-faith-of-leftist-intellectuals-today/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Aug 2012 04:38:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Delbanco]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gender studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Victims’ Revolution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142149</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A professor's attack on Bruce Bawer in the New York Times showcases leftist smear tactics.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Andrew-Delbanco.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-142287" title="Andrew-Delbanco" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Andrew-Delbanco.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="237" /></a>A conservative complaint against Left-liberal intellectuals, commentators, and journalists is that in their zeal to discredit those with whom they disagree, they tend to dismiss, belittle, and misrepresent conservative ideas rather than engage fairly with their substance.</p>
<p>I recently reviewed Bruce Bawer’s <em><a href="Leftist%20Lines%20of%20Attack,%20FP.doc">The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind</a></em> for <em>Front Page Magazine</em>, commending it as an important analysis of the virulently anti-American gobbledygook that passes for high-level scholarship at American universities today. Bawer shows how the brand of theory that focuses on ethnic and gender experience (Women’s Studies, Chicano Studies, and so on) teaches young people to see themselves as victims and to hate America for its putatively oppressive history. In preparing my review, I had read Professor Andrew Delbanco’s <a href="http://www.google.ca/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/books/review/the-victims-revolution-by-bruce-bawer.html%3Fpagewanted%3Dall&amp;sa=U&amp;ei=D0o-UO3wHYTzyAHs-IDwDQ&amp;ved=0CBYQFjAB&amp;usg=AFQjCNFJfZNCoL4_dkmi3nNJeAesA2_vvQ">damning assessment</a> of the book in the <em>New York Times</em> and quoted from it briefly in my concluding paragraph.</p>
<p>Delbanco’s review has remained in my thoughts for its glib disingenuousness. It struck me as an exemplary instance of the leftist refusal to treat conservative ideas responsibly. From the progressivist rectitude of his opening compliment on Bawer’s contribution to gay studies (could he not have found a less stereotypical word than “sensitive” to praise it?) to the distancing quotation marks he uses for “radical Islam” in mentioning Bawer’s political work, Delbanco’s review is a showcase of leftist rhetorical maneuvers and a dishonest document from first to last, deserving of a more detailed analysis than I was able to give it previously.</p>
<p>Delbanco’s attack on <em>The Victims’ Revolution</em> has two essential planks: that Bawer’s is an “intemperate” “caricature” rather than an informed and informative analysis, and that it is “out of date,” a “rear-guard action against an enemy who has largely ceded the field.” In the course of the review, he also accuses Bawer of various other intellectual failings, in particular lack of “balance” and accuracy.</p>
<p>These are serious charges, serious enough to dissuade a reader from taking time to look into the book. What is remarkable about Delbanco’s review is not only that the charges are demonstrably false but also that Delbanco does not even attempt to substantiate them. Employing instead the time-honored tactics of leftist attack, he is content to malign the book falsely rather than to demonstrate specifically where and how its argument is incorrect.</p>
<p>On this score, it is telling that Delbanco never takes issue with Bawer’s account of the intellectual vacuity and misleading anti-Americanism at the heart of contemporary academic theory; nor does he argue with a single one of Bawer’s claims about its leading figures, strategies, or effects. Instead, he simply ignores the whole lot—every documented pronouncement, conference paper, academic discussion, interview response, course title, and reference text—dismissing it all as a “caricature” with only “a modicum of truth” by a writer “overwrought by his own outrage.” If Bawer had written a different sort of piece—perhaps, say, an impressionistic short article, heavy on personal opinion and light on evidence—such a reviewer response might be fair. If Bawer had confined his analysis to the work of a few fringe radicals or had quoted only from marginal and largely discredited texts, then Delbanco’s dismissive summation would be justified.</p>
<p>But it is not. Although one would never guess it from Delbanco’s account, <em>The Victims’ Revolution</em> is a detailed chronicle in which the exact words of Identity Studies theorists are extensively quoted and analyzed. Bawer has focused on the central figures in the field—heavyweight academic stars Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., among others—those whose works appear, and are admiringly studied, on course lists across North America and are quoted by nearly every PhD student in the humanities who wants to show off his or her theoretical savvy. How can a work be a “caricature” when it quotes for hundreds of pages from the avowed leaders of the field? Such a slur by Delbanco is an attempt to distract his readers from the fact that he is unable, by any legitimate means, to defend such faux scholarship.</p>
<p>Delbanco pursues his diatribe with an equally serious and similarly unsubstantiated charge. He claims that Bawer, as an American who has lived in Norway for many years, does not really know the field he writes about, that he jetted back on a brief visit as an academic tourist, and took away an erroneous impression from the “few conferences” he attended. According to Delbanco, the type of theory Bawer so despises has now largely faded from the scene. &#8220;Many of my younger colleagues,” Delbanco assures the reader, “are returning to close readings of literary classics” and carrying out a “synthesis of the old political history … with the newer social history.” Who are these younger scholars returning to solid, traditional methods? In which acclaimed new books have the identity radicals been debunked? If it is the case that the tide has turned, it would be cause for rejoicing indeed, and for a decisive rejection of Bawer’s thesis. But Delbanco fails to cite a single example of the academic return to sanity. It would have been simple enough to mention one or two titles or names (though these would not, admittedly, have been adequate to make his case for the irrelevance of Bawer’s concerns); but he fails to provide even these few. Taking his page from the Leftist playbook, he chose a personal discrediting of Bawer rather than a genuine counter-argument.</p>
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		<title>The Victims’ Revolution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-victims%e2%80%99-revolution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-victims%25e2%2580%2599-revolution</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/janice-fiamengo/the-victims%e2%80%99-revolution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Aug 2012 04:20:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[identity studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal mind]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=141581</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer's new book sheds disturbing light on the rise of "Identity Studies" and the closing of the liberal mind.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-141591" title="victims" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/victims.jpg" alt="" width="264" height="400" /></a>In <em>Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom</em> (2009), Bruce Bawer told a grim tale of the surrender of parts of Europe to radical Islam. He showed how through a combination of multicultural orthodoxy and not-unfounded fear, politicians and members of the liberal intelligentsia have given in to the demands of Jihadists, sacrificing freedom of expression and other civil liberties to mollify Muslim sensitivities. The book amasses many disturbing examples, which Bawer dissects cogently. Now, in his new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Victims-Revolution-Identity-ebook/dp/B007HBGOX2"><em>The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind</em></a>, Bawer has chosen what seems a less terrifying story, concerned not with riots, death threats, and medieval-style executions, but with the oft-impenetrable verbal pyrotechnics of academia.</p>
<p>Although much of the so-called scholarship he examines is indeed frivolous, Bawer’s study is a serious one, an extension of his political concerns into the academic arena. <em>The Victims’ Revolution</em> examines the toxic core—Identity Studies—from which the poisons of political correctness have leached into the body politic. It is not an entirely new subject, of course. Compelling exposés of the Leftist takeover of the academy have been published by such fine critics as <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productattribute.html?productId=5122">David Horowitz</a>, Stanley Fish, and Richard L. Cravatts, but Bawer’s intensive focus on the partisan ideological content of Identity Studies is unprecedented and necessary. One of Bawer’s most important insights is his clarification of how academic discourse can be at once almost entirely divorced from the reality of which it pretends to speak while also devastatingly real in its consequences.</p>
<p>Bawer’s central thesis is that to understand the moral and political confusion at the heart of Western life today, in which many voices are eager to denounce the most open, tolerant, and vibrant civilization ever created and to romanticize violence and thuggery as a cure, one must look first to our schools, and especially to higher education. For the past 30 years, there has been brewing in humanities classrooms a murky stew of sexual rebellion, hatred of democratic capitalism, and contempt for the institutions and traditions of American society. As Bawer shows, young people since the 1980s have undergone an intensive indoctrination to despise their country. In particular, women, people of color, and homosexuals have been trained to see themselves not as individuals with a stake in America’s collective future but as members of victim groups with the right to far-reaching compensation for their perceived injuries, which are dwelt upon to the exclusion of all else in courses that combine self-help therapy with Marxist and other revolutionary dogmas.</p>
<p>In these courses, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed, the West and the (victimized) rest, and logic is turned on its head. Students in Women’s Studies are taught that there is no material difference between women’s treatment in the United States and their treatment in, say, Pakistan, where honor killings are common. In fact, such students are trained not to consider the women of Pakistan at all, except in relation to American imperialism, for to pronounce on Muslim women’s oppression is to declare oneself an Islamophobe. Black and Chicano Studies teach that the only authentic form of minority identity is grounded in grievance and defiance. The United States is portrayed as one of the most cruel and racist societies in the world. Such structures of thought and feeling, Bawer argues, have seriously affected the ability of young Americans to fairly assess their country’s achievements and to make appropriate decisions about its future.</p>
<p>How did such a state of affairs arise? In each chapter, which focuses on a different form of Identity Studies, Bawer traces the process by which the legitimate scholarly and social aims of various liberation movements, some such as Black Studies with an impressive pedigree, were fatally weakened by power politics and the rarefied conditions of academic life. During the period these programs were being established, an ideological battle was fought between the assimilationists, who wanted their concerns to be integrated into the disciplines and to employ traditional evidence-based scholarship, and the radical separatists, who saw no valid distinction between political advocacy and scholarship, and who wanted to forge a revolutionary coalition on the Left. The conflict was decided in favor of the radical separatists even as the more moderate assimilationists were increasingly winning over the general public. In time, the radicals’ fondness for extreme political positions became an orthodoxy, coupled with an all-but-unreadable writing style.</p>
<p>As a result of this history, tenured radicals now pursue their careers amidst manifold contradictions. While enjoying unprecedented liberty, prosperity, and security in their own lives, they persist in seeing themselves as heroic victims at war with a brutal enemy, believing that tactics of name-calling and evidence-tampering are justified in their circumstances. They talk of ‘otherness’ as a vital good that should not be surrendered, with no sense that what they regard as co-optation by bourgeois hegemony—going about one’s normal life without engaging in radical protest—is something that women and minorities around the world, often targeted for violence, can only dream of. And while priding themselves on their rebellion, they are deeply conformist in the narrow range of theories and arguments they employ.</p>
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