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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; bond</title>
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		<title>&#8216;Skyfall&#8217; Returns to &#8216;Bond&#8217; Roots</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dr-joseph-a-yeager/skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:30:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Joseph A. Yeager]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[New movie is a gift to Brits who still love Queen and country. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dr-joseph-a-yeager/skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots/skyfall_11_h/" rel="attachment wp-att-165689"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-165689" title="Skyfall_11_h" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Skyfall_11_h-450x321.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="225" /></a>Quantum of Solace, the 22nd film in the venerable James Bond series, was arguably the most innovative of them all. Rejecting the ethos that defined Bond’s universe from Ian Fleming&#8217;s Casino Royale, published in 1953, to its cinematic incarnation in 2006, Quantum of Solace presented a bleak, manichean view of geopolitics wherein a greedy West, with willing assistance from a shadowy organization called Quantum, plundered an innocent and helpless third world. There were bows to Marxism, broadsides against capitalism, and shots across the bridge of the CIA.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say Quantum of Solace wore its cynical politics on its sleeve. A red sleeve.</p>
<p>But the ideology of the politics was less innovative than their mere introduction.</p>
<p>Bond films had always been notable for their apolitical tone. Born in 1962, the very apogee of the Cold War, Bond films nevertheless largely steered clear of political shoals. Yes, James Bond, the &#8220;Queen&#8217;s loyal terrier,&#8221; was basically patriotic and the Soviet Union was sometimes obliquely depicted as inimical, but by the standards of the age, politics were conspicuously muted.</p>
<p>That all changed with Quantum of Solace. And it changed in a postcolonial, postmodern manner that would not have pleased founding producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, let alone Ian Fleming, the man who authored it all.</p>
<p>Longstanding Bond observers surely wondered, had current producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, under the influence of Paul Haggis and Marc Forster, permanently turned James Bond against queen and country? (Historian <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2008/11/quantum-of-anti-imperialism.html">Juan Cole</a> gleefully suggested something to that effect.)</p>
<p>But Skyfall, the follow-up to Quantum of Solace, answers the query with a thunderous no.</p>
<p>Skyfall’s plot, for the film’s first half, is murky and nebulous. We learn that villains of some sort have acquired a list of Western agents embedded in terrorist organizations around the globe. We see those agents exposed, to mortal effect, on Youtube. And we witness a bomb blast at MI6 headquarters. But as they used to say in old England, what was it all in aid of?</p>
<p>The shroud is lifted after agent 007 and his MI6 cohort capture arch-foe Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) and extradite him to the UK. Under interrogation, Silva relates his past as an MI6 agent in Hong Kong where, under orders from intelligence chief M (Judi Dench), he was hung out to dry, captured by the Chinese and tortured forte et dure. Silva attempted suicide by crushing a cyanide capsule lodged in a tooth, but the poison, rather than kill its consumer, merely scarred and disfigured him, physically and mentally.</p>
<p>Silva then, unhinged by the experience, has himself become a cyberterrorist bent on murdering M and destroying the organization she controls. From this point on, Skyfall offers a chiseled, linear and straightforward quest for revenge by Silva, coupled to James Bond’s exhaustive and frenzied efforts to thwart and destroy the malign shade of missions past.</p>
<p>Director Sam Mendes realizes the tale at a very high level. While Skyfall drags slightly in the middle, the tension and suspense mount exponentially and resolve in a slam-bang ending that is equal parts action and tragedy. The post-climax coda is a bittersweet and valedictory brew tinctured with optimistic revivification. It all packs a whipsawing wallop of conflicting emotions calculated to leave the audience with a certain sense of pride and good cheer.</p>
<p>Skyfall is a beautifully crafted film. Its cinematography, in contrast to that of Quantum of Solace, leans to the beautiful and the picturesque. Aerial shots of Shanghai at night are breathtaking and contrast powerfully with the stark Scottish landscape where the final pitched battle occurs.</p>
<p>The editing is old school. Contra Quantum of Solace, scenes unfold in a leisurely manner and cameras linger. Even the action sequences, jolting as they are, nevertheless do not disorient through rapid-fire, chaotic edits, as they did in Skyfall’s predecessor.</p>
<p>Acting in Skyfall is top-class. Daniel Craig, already the last word in Bondian toughness, manages to ratchet up his hard-bitten masculinity yet another notch.</p>
<p>Bardem’s Silva will go down in Bond lore as the creepiest villain in series history to date. Silva is an entirely different personality from No County for Old Men’s legendary Anton Chiguhr, but inspires a similar unease and dread.</p>
<p>The criminally underutilized Berenice Marlohe, in the role of distressed dame Severine, delivers a quirkily spellbinding performance. Her giddily terrified interchange with Bond in a Macao casino may be the highlight of the film.</p>
<p>Dame Judi Dench, in her final—and most extensive—turn as M, departs on a note that will draw attention from Oscar voters. She is careworn and fragile, yet also pugnacious and determined. It is an appealing and highly sympathetic performance that sets the audience up for heartbreak rarely realized so powerfully in action and adventure films.</p>
<p>But Skyfall’s unmistakable rejection of the astigmatic pathos and the pernicious self-loathing found in Quantum of Solace is what defines this film.</p>
<p>Skyfall is unabashedly patriotic. Bond, confronted by a mocking Silva, cockily tosses his love of country in the villain’s face. Union Jacks fly. The English bulldog, the four-legged twin of Winston Churchill and talismanic symbol of British tenacity, features prominently. Hence, a ceramic bulldog improbably survives the explosion in M’s MI6 office. M wills the bulldog to Bond. When Bond unwrapped M’s symbolic bequest, the audience in my west Texas theatre erupted in cheers and applause. One can only imagine the response in England itself.</p>
<p>Skyfall venerates tradition and it honors the aged. Bond is twice labeled old-fashioned and on both occasions accepts the jibe as a badge of pride. Judi Dench, the septuagenarian warhorse, is every bit as heroic as Bond himself. What’s more, she pairs with an equally elderly Kincade (Albert Finney) at Bond’s childhood home (named Skyfall), as silver tigers pitched against Silva and his battalion of young cyber-savages. The homage to a generation rapidly disappearing is as touching as it is unthinkable had Quantum of Solace been the template for future Bond films.</p>
<p>Skyfall is an archaizing, historically literate Bond film. The Reformation is mentioned in the context of Bond’s childhood estate of Skyfall. Winston Churchill is referenced when MI6, hoping to avoid another attack from Silva, relocates to the ancient subterranean passages of London. M quotes verses from Tennyson. Adele’s portentous title track could have been written for Shirley Bassey or Nancy Sinatra. Bond pulls his 1964 Aston Martin out of mothballs to spirit M away to Skyfall. He shaves—and is shaved—with a straight razor. The new Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) states that sometimes the old ways are better. Bond’s most technologically sophisticated gadget is a radio transmitter. A monocle and a trilby would not have gone amiss.</p>
<p>This film, much like Fleming’s novels published in austere, post-war Great Britain, is powerful medicine for British spirits at low ebb. Skyfall suggests that Great Britain’s past should not be scorned and reviled. On the contrary, there is much in the nation’s history and traditional culture that should be admired and even revived. For a people steeped in the rituals of masochistic flagellation, Skyfall is a corrective absolution. It is a gift to the people of the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>The 23<sup>rd</sup> instantiation of cinematic James Bond leaves the series with a new roster of dramatis personae. In addition to the above-mentioned Harris in the role of Moneypenny, Ralph Fiennes moves into Dench’s seat as M, and Ben Whishaw revives the role of Q made famous by Desmond Llewellyn. James Bond is thus recharged, rearmed and poised to extend his astonishing half-century run. It’s not out of the question that he could outlive the nation that gave him birth. Then again, the new, old James Bond offers hints for how to revive and prolong Britannia. It is up to the Brits to listen.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>A Man Alone</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/andrew-klavan/a-man-alone/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-man-alone</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:03:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Jesse Lee Peterson versus the “black experience.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/jesse.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-51533" title="jesse" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/jesse.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="333" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.city-journal.org">City Journal</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>In December 2001, the Toyota Motor Corporation held a public meeting at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with racial activist Jesse Jackson. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss Toyota’s “Twenty-First Century Diversity Strategy,” a ten-year program worth some $7.8 billion in contracts for minority-owned businesses. At even a casual glance, the program seemed a capitulation to Jackson, who had threatened to call for a black boycott of the carmaker over some ads that he deemed racist. Toyota’s denials that it had given in to racial extortion rang unconvincing.</p>
<p>Also in attendance that day was another black minister named Jesse—the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson. Peterson is the staunchly conservative head of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, or BOND, which is dedicated to “rebuilding the family by rebuilding the man”—educating males, mostly black males, about personal strength and responsibility. Peterson is also Jackson’s sworn nemesis and calls him, among other things, a “racist demagogue” and a “problem profiteer.” For two years prior to the Toyota meeting, he’d been holding rallies declaring Martin Luther King, Jr. Day a “National Day of Repudiation of Jesse Jackson.” So when it came time for the Q&amp;A, Peterson asked Toyota’s reps if BOND could apply for its grants without joining Jackson’s Trade Bureau at an entry fee of up to $2,500.</p>
<p>“All hell broke loose in the room,” Peterson writes in his book <em>Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America</em>. “Several blacks got up and started screaming obscenities at me.” Jesse Jackson denounced “some parasites who want to pick up apples from trees they didn’t shake.” When Peterson tried to leave the meeting, he claims that Jesse’s son Jonathan confronted him and shoved him in the chest, while others surrounded him, shouting obscenities.</p>
<p>Peterson sued, claiming that Jesse Jackson threatened him and that Jonathan assaulted him. The jury split 6–6 on the assault charge, and it was settled out of court. A lengthy 6–6 split on the other charges ended when, according to the <em>Los Angeles Times</em>, three jurors, still professing to believe Peterson, surrendered to the argument that he hadn’t proved his claims. Though Jesse Jackson had to admit under oath that his Trade Bureau played a role in distributing the Toyota grants—and though he acknowledged the “parasites” remark—he and his son walked away largely unscathed.</p>
<p>I couldn’t help but think of Jesse Jackson when I visited Peterson at BOND recently. I couldn’t help but think of Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, with its monumental marble headquarters in Chicago and branches in major cities around the country. BOND’s offices, by contrast, are in a shabby storefront sitting amid furniture stores, gas stations, and billboards in a flat and dispiriting stretch of L.A.’s Mid-City West section. Whereas Rainbow/PUSH reportedly receives double-digit millions in corporate grants and sponsorships, BOND gets by on about half a million dollars a year in mostly private donations (though some money comes in from Toyota since the 2001 brouhaha). Its Home for Boys, a gabled house in a pleasantly leafy residential neighborhood nearby, can hold eight residents at a time, with some sharing rooms. That, along with BOND’s After-School Character Building Program, which takes on ten to 12 kids for six to nine weeks, represents an effort no larger than, say, a church Sunday school: about 70 boys have graduated from both programs so far. BOND chapters begun in Flint and Lansing, Michigan, have had to close down for lack of funds.</p>
<p>But if BOND is austere, it nonetheless provides Peterson with a platform from which to speak his indomitable piece. The building includes a rudimentary chapel—a cross, a podium, maybe 30 office chairs—where he preaches to a small congregation every Sunday (the sermons are later posted on his website and YouTube). There’s also an admirably equipped studio from which he puts on a radio and Internet call-in show five mornings a week. As BOND’s president and CEO, he makes regular TV appearances with Fox News stalwarts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity (who serves on BOND’s advisory board). He also writes a no-holds-barred column on the popular conservative Christian website WorldNetDaily, and he makes occasionally raucous speaking appearances, including a recent debate at Yale University in which he denounced affirmative action, to predictable hisses from the Yale Political Union.</p>
<p>Still, the contrast between Jesse Jackson’s wealth and fame and Jesse Lee Peterson’s relatively modest circumstances seems an object lesson in the fate of competing narratives and identities. The great social thinker Shelby Steele has written that to “be black” in America requires the wearing of a mask. Either you are a “challenger,” like Jackson, who essentially tells whites: “I judge you racist until you do something—such as giving me money—to prove otherwise.” Or you are a “bargainer,” like Barack Obama, who says, “I will not use racism against you, if you will not use race against me.”</p>
<p>But Jesse Lee Peterson will not “be black” in that sense at all. “The ‘Black Experience’ is a myth used to control people,” he has written. His approach to the problems facing America’s entrenched black underclass is profoundly personal. And his comparatively marginal place in the culture raises the possibility that, for a public black in America, to be a man only is to be a man alone.</p>
<p>Most black Americans are suffering not because of racism but the lack of moral character,” Peterson tells me. We are sitting in his office in BOND’s cramped second story. It’s a threadbare space: cheap desk, cheap chairs, some books on cheap shelves, some photos of friends and BOND graduates hanging on the off-white walls or propped against them. “About 50 years ago, the government came in under Lyndon B. Johnson, and it said to black people, ‘We’re gonna take care of you. You can’t make it because of racism. But you can’t have a father in the home, you can’t have a man in your home.’ ” He’s alluding to welfare systems that subsidized single mothers and thus discouraged marriage. “And many black people decided to go with that, and they took the fathers out, and the government became the daddy of the family. And the so-called civil rights leaders became the head of the people . . . and they have managed to brainwash, dumb down, and demoralize the people for their own personal gain.”</p>
<p>Like many outspoken conservatives, Peterson is only noticed by the mainstream media when he makes statements that are, I suspect, purposely calibrated to shock and annoy them: “Thank God for slavery” (because it brought blacks out of Africa to America) and “Barack Obama hates white people.” Like many black conservatives, he is subject to continual name-calling and racial slurs. One man even pulled a gun on him when he recognized him in a restaurant, Peterson says, and others have threatened violence against the radio stations that run his show. But in appearance and behavior, at least, he doesn’t fit the firebrand mold. He’s a slender man of average height with a relaxed, quiet aspect. A cleft palate, not repaired until he was in his teens, left him with a slight speech impediment, and he has developed a careful manner of speaking, not ferocious at all, not even in the pulpit. He is self-effacing and humorous and notes his own lapses in grammar and eloquence by telling me simply and without apology, “I didn’t get a great education.” He is scrupulously direct and thorough when answering questions, and his worldview is strikingly coherent and precise.</p>
<p>Like Steele—who provides both a blurb and a frontispiece quotation for Peterson’s autobiography, <em>From Rage to Responsibility</em>—Peterson decries the transformation of the civil rights movement from a principled appeal to the American creed to a politicized shakedown of guilt-ridden whites. He condemns the government subsidies of single motherhood that have helped set loose a plague of black illegitimacy and its attendant plagues of generational poverty and crime. (See “<a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_2_heralds.html">Heralds of a Brighter Black Future</a>,” Spring 2005.) And he bemoans the black culture of dependency on government support that even welfare workers privately call “welfare psychosis.”</p>
<p>But Peterson is no metropolitan academic. Despite his quiet demeanor and delivery, his message is charged with that old-time religion. Where Steele views the last 40 years of civil rights activism as a complex and poisonous blend of white guilt, black opportunism, and government incompetence and corruption, Peterson sees an intentional power grab by an anti-American Left, a self-interested attempt to destroy the nation by destroying manhood and marriage, part of the ongoing and eternal struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. “You cannot control a moral people,” he tells me. “You have to keep them immoral in order to control them.”</p>
<p>When Peterson starts talking, the words <em>I don’t agree with everything he says, but</em> . . . leap screaming into your mind. Even conservative commentator Dennis Prager, who serves on BOND’s advisory board and calls Peterson “one of the handful of great men anyone is privileged to meet in a lifetime,” makes a similar disclaimer in his foreword to the autobiography. It’s a gesture of mental self-defense, I think, against a preacher who seems very peacefully and yet relentlessly to say what has become, in the current American narratives of race and gender, virtually unsayable.</p>
<p>Take Peterson’s vision of restoring the lost black family, which is unflinchingly religious and traditional. “There is a spiritual order to life that was ordained by God,” he tells me. “And that order is God in Christ, Christ in man, man over woman, woman over children. And it’s not an ego trip, it’s just a spiritual order, that men are subject to Christ and women are subject to men.”</p>
<p>At this point on the interview tape, you can hear me start to stammer hilariously. <em>I don’t agree with everything he says, but</em>. . . . And yet, at the same time I’m stammering, several thoughts crowd in on me. First, Peterson’s traditionalism is only an echo of Paul’s advice to married couples in Ephesians, not to mention John Milton’s deathless description of Adam and Eve: “He for God only; she for God in him.” Second, his words are spoken in answer to a community where I’ve repeatedly heard black women describe black men as “weak” and black men describe black women as “mean.” Third (and I can’t wait to drop this comment at my wife’s next dinner party), the happiest middle-class white families I know are still fashioned on some version of Peterson’s principle—the husband as head of the household—as long as that leadership is understood, as Peterson understands it, to be subject to an overarching moral order of love, gentleness, and grace.</p>
<p>“What men don’t understand is that they represent God in the family, in the home, and . . . they’re supposed to love what’s right more than anything else,” Peterson tells me. “And when they love that, then God dwells in them and works through them to guide them in the right way so that they can guide their families.”</p>
<p>Peterson’s program for restoring this paradigm is fashioned from his personal experience—almost, in fact, a universalization of his autobiography. Born in 1949 in the sleepy little town of Comer Hill, Alabama, he grew up on the former plantation where his great-grandparents had labored as slaves. His father would not acknowledge him, and his mother had moved north to start a family with another man. Peterson was raised by his grandmother and frequently disciplined by his grandfather, who managed the old farm for its white owners. But despite the fact that his great-grandfather had been murdered by a white mob, and despite the Jim Crow world in which they lived, “Not once did I hear them blame white folks or say that it was because we were black,” he tells me. “They understood that it was wrong, but they understood that it was a <em>moral</em> issue, it was a <em>spiritual</em> issue. And so they taught us not to hate.”</p>
<p>It was not racism that troubled the young Peterson as much as what he calls a “hunger for father.” He writes in his autobiography: “I used to yearn, to literally ache in my gut, for him to come into my life and make himself known to me, and claim me as his son.” Peterson did come to know his father in his early teens and drew deep satisfaction from occasional visits to him in East Chicago, Indiana, where he had a family and owned a laundry business. At 16, Peterson moved in with his mother and stepfather in the nearby city of Gary and there came to learn of her deep resentment of the man who denied impregnating her. “Her anger at him kept her from loving me,” Peterson writes.</p>
<p>On graduating high school, Peterson moved to Los Angeles and was soon adrift in the sixties counterculture. After a series of odd jobs, he learned how to play the welfare system. Merely by claiming to be a drug addict, he was able to cadge $300 a month in government handouts, plus rent and food stamps. He stopped working altogether, turned to full-time drug use and sex, and “descended into a pit of irresponsibility and laziness. It nearly destroyed me.” Peterson and his friends in South Central L.A. would frequently gather around the radio to listen to Louis Farrakhan. The fiery Nation of Islam preacher “made me feel good to be black” and “caused me to hate the white people around me.” Through most of his thirties, Peterson writes, “I was a sullen, furious, and racist black man.”</p>
<p>It was another radio preacher who changed Peterson’s direction: Roy Masters, a British convert from Judaism, who advocated praying to God for self-knowledge and listening quietly for God’s response. Such prayers led Peterson to confront his anger, not against whites, but against his own parents, so that he came to understand himself outside the context of his skin color. He visited his mother and forgave her for her anger. She cried. He visited his father and forgave him for his neglect. The older man was grateful. For Peterson, the experience was liberating and set him on the path of ordination and a successful, directed life.</p>
<p>It is, in its general outlines, an archetypal black American life story—the same arc from poverty and prejudice to drift and personal degradation to revelation and reclamation that defines, say, <em>The Autobiography of Malcolm X</em> or <em>Manchild in the Promised Land</em>. What distinguishes Peterson’s story, what distinguishes Peterson, is the ferociously un-racial, nearly anti-racial terms in which he came to understand his salvation. Having nearly lost himself in the narrative of being an angry black man in a racist America, he now seeks to reclaim angry black men by having them reproduce his personal narrative of purely individual forgiveness, liberation, and faith. With emotional, educational, and career counseling of the young men who come to BOND, “we are putting the fathers back by showing them how to overcome anger,” he says. “They have to first forgive their fathers for not being there to guide them and to fill that emptiness that they feel within themselves. They have to forgive their mothers for being angry at the fathers and turning the children away from the fathers. . . . And then they have to stop resenting themselves. And when they can forgive, then you feel good within yourself and you can move on with life.”</p>
<p>It seems clear why such a program would have less mass appeal than Jesse Jackson’s I’m-black-you’re-racist-give-me-something-or-else approach. Identity politics is easy; forgiveness is hard. The kind of personal forgiveness that Peterson preaches is more difficult, too, than the straighten-up-and-do-right Christianity of many more popular white ministers, like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen, because it requires an inner revolution rather than outward restraint.</p>
<p>And for now, at least, the evidence of BOND’s effectiveness is purely anecdotal. Some of the graduates of the program are working for BOND—to all appearances, happily and effectively. There are a few testimonials on the website, and there are those smiling pictures of graduates and participants in Peterson’s office. “One or two didn’t make it,” he tells me. “But most do.”</p>
<p>Six young men, aged 16 to 30, are currently living in BOND’s nearby Home for Boys. The place looks exactly like what any parent would expect a well-tended home filled with males to look like. The bedrooms are a bit rough-and-tumble in the folded-clothes department but clean underneath. There are the requisite big-screen TV and X-Box in the front room, a pleasant kitchen and a usable washer-dryer toward the back, and a patio with a barbecue outside. Run by a live-in manager and his assistant, the Home is a place for young men to learn how to find work, save money, and pay bills. While most of the residents were at school or work when I visited, 30-year-old Mensah Watts was there doing the laundry on his day off from one of his two full-time jobs: maintenance worker at UCLA and clerk at a CVS drugstore. He hopes to become a writer and is working on a fantasy novel and a memoir in his rare off hours. He credits Peterson with his reclamation from anger and rebellion. For all that, however, there is no tracking system for BOND graduates and no statistics with which to gauge the program’s success.</p>
<p>Statistics for failed approaches, on the other hand, are plentiful. After 40 years of the racially based politics that Peterson condemns—40 years of activists crying bias, of billions of dollars in race-sensitive government programs—the black illegitimacy rate, with its high correlation to poverty levels, has more than tripled, to over 70 percent; the black homicide rate is more than seven times higher than the combined white and Hispanic rate; and blacks’ average SAT scores are 200 points below whites’. Whether we agree with everything the minister says or not, it’s worth wondering if Shelby Steele isn’t right when he says of Peterson’s life story that it “does what the entire field of American sociology fails to do. It makes the point that traditional values are <em>transformative</em> in themselves and, therefore, the best antidotes to social dysfunction.”</p>
<p><strong><em>Andrew Klavan is a </em>City Journal<em> contributing editor and the author of such best-selling novels as </em>Don’t Say a Word<em> and </em>Empire of Lies<em>. His new thriller for young adults, </em>The Long Way Home<em>, will be out in February.</em></strong></p>
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		<title>Hating Valentine’s</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/hating-valentine%e2%80%99s/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hating-valentine%25e2%2580%2599s</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/hating-valentine%e2%80%99s/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:14:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why jihadists and the radical Left both revile the day of love.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/valentines.gif"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-49991" title="valentine's" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/valentines.gif" alt="" width="450" height="381" /></a></p>
<p>This Sunday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another. If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left are not the places you should be spending most, if any, of your time. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo jihadists and “progressives” when it comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the territory on which <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">the contemporary romance</a> between the radical Left and Islamic fanaticism is formed.</p>
<p>The train is never late: every time Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world reacts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to quash the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine&#8217;s every year &#8212; and the celebration of the day itself is literally <em>outlawed</em> in Islamist states. The Saudis, for instance, ruthlessly punish the slightest hint of celebrating Valentine’s Day. Just a few days ago, the Kingdom and its religious “morality” police officially issued a stern warning that anyone caught <em>even thinking</em> about Valentine’s Day will suffer some of the most painful penalties of Sharia Law.</p>
<p>This is typical of the Saudis of course. As <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/1563/hating-valentines-day">Daniel Pipes has reported</a>, the Saudi regime takes a firm stand against Valentine’s every year, and the Saudi religious police monitor stores selling roses and other gifts. They have even arrested women for wearing red on that day. This time around, the narrative is no different: the Saudis have announced that, starting the week of Valentine’s and until February 15, it will <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/02/11/saudi-arabia-takes-action-to-safeguard-islams-primacy-in-the-kingdom/#more-31609">be illegal for a merchant to sell any item that is red</a>, or that in any way hints of being connected to Valentine’s Day.</p>
<p>As Claude Cartaginese <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/02/11/saudi-arabia-takes-action-to-safeguard-islams-primacy-in-the-kingdom/#more-31609">reports at Newsreal Blog</a>, any merchant found selling such items as red roses, red clothing of any kind (especially dresses), toys, heart-shaped products, candy, greeting cards or any items wrapped in red, must destroy them or face the wrath of Saudi justice.</p>
<p>Christian overseas workers living in the Kingdom from the Philippines and other countries <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/02/11/saudi-arabia-takes-action-to-safeguard-islams-primacy-in-the-kingdom/#more-31609">are taking extra precautions</a>, heeding the Saudis’ warning to them specifically to avoid greeting anyone with the words “Happy Valentine’s Day” or exchanging any gift that reeks of romance. A spokesman for a Philippine workers group <a href="http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/02/11/saudi-arabia-takes-action-to-safeguard-islams-primacy-in-the-kingdom/#more-31609">commented</a>: “We are urging fellow Filipinos in the Middle East, especially lovers, just to celebrate their Valentine’s Day secretly and with utmost care.”</p>
<p>The Iranian despots, meanwhile, are trying to make sure the Saudis don’t outdo them in suffocating Valentine’s Day. Iran’s “morality” police order shops to remove heart-and-flower decorations and images of couples embracing on this day &#8212; and anytime around this day. In Pakistan, the student wing of the fundamentalist Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami has called for a complete ban on Valentine’s Day celebrations. Khalid Waqas Chamkani, a leader in the party, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2749667.stm">calls it a “shameful day.”</a></p>
<p>Typical of this whole pathology in the Islamic world was a development witnessed back on February 10, 2006, when activists of the radical Kashmiri Islamic group Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the Community) <a href="http://www.expressindia.com/news/fullstory.php?newsid=62679">went on a rampage</a> in Srinagar, the main city of the Indian portion of Kashmir. Some two dozen black-veiled Muslim women stormed gift and stationery shops, burning Valentine’s Day cards and posters showing couples together.</p>
<p>In the West, meanwhile leftist feminists are not to be outdone by their jihadi allies in reviling &#8212; and trying to kill &#8212; Valentine’s Day. Throughout all Women’s Studies Programs on American campuses, for instance, you will find the demonization of Valentine’s Day, since, as the disciples of Andrea Dworkin angrily explain, the day is a manifestation of how capitalist and homophobic patriarchs brainwash and oppress women and push them into spheres of powerlessness. As a person who spent more than a decade in academia, I was privileged to witness this grotesque attack and “deconstruction” of Valentine’s Day at close range. Feminist icons like Jane Fonda, meanwhile, help lead the attack on Valentine’s Day in society at large. As David Horowitz <a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=15430">has documented</a>, Fonda has led the campaign to transform this special day into “V-Day” (“Violence against Women Day”) &#8212; which is, when it all comes down to it, a day of hate, featuring a mass indictment of men.</p>
<p>So what exactly is transpiring here? What explains this hatred of Valentine’s Day by leftist feminists and jihadis? And how and why does it serve as the sacred bond that brings the radical Left and Islam into its current feast of solidarity?</p>
<p>The core issue at the foundation of this phenomenon is that Islam and the radical Left both revile the notion of private love, a non-tangible and divine entity that draws individuals to each other and, therefore, distracts them from submitting themselves to a <em>secular </em>deity.</p>
<p>The highest objective of both Islam and the radical Left is clear: to shatter the sacred intimacy that a man and a woman can share with one another, for such a bond is inaccessible to <em>the order.</em> History, therefore, demonstrates how Islam, like Communism, wages a ferocious war on any kind of private and unregulated love. In the case of Islam, the reality is epitomized in its monstrous structures of gender apartheid and the terror that keeps it in place. Indeed, <a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=852">female sexuality and freedom are demonized</a> and, therefore, forced veiling, forced marriage, <a href="../2009/10/02/female-genital-mutilation-islam-and-leftist-silence-by-jamie-glazov/">female genital mutilation</a>, honor killings and other misogynist monstrosities become mandatory parts of the sadistic paradigm.</p>
<p>The puritanical nature of totalist systems (whether Fascist, Communist, or Islamist) is another manifestation of this phenomenon. In Stalinist Russia, sexual pleasure was portrayed as unsocialist and counter-revolutionary. More recent Communist societies have also waged war on sexuality &#8212; a war that Islam, as we know, wages with similar ferocity. These totalist structures cannot survive in environments filled with self-interested, pleasure-seeking individuals who prioritize devotion to other individual human beings <em>over the collective and the state</em>. Because the leftist believer viscerally hates the notion and reality of personal love and “the couple,” he champions the enforcement of totalitarian puritanism by the despotic regimes he worships.</p>
<p>The famous twentieth-century novels of dystopia, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s <em>We</em>, George Orwell’s <em>1984</em>, and Aldous Huxley’s <em>Brave New World</em>,<em> </em>all powerfully depict totalitarian society’s assault on the realm of personal love in its violent attempt to dehumanize human beings and completely subject them to its rule. In Zamyatin’s <em>We</em>, the earliest of the three novels, the despotic regime keeps human beings in line by giving them license for <em>regulated</em> sexual promiscuity, while private love is illegal. The hero breaks the rules with a woman who seduces him &#8212; not only into forbidden love but also into a counterrevolutionary struggle. In the end, the totality forces the hero, like the rest of the world&#8217;s population, to undergo the Great Operation, which annihilates the part of the brain that gives life to passion and imagination, and therefore spawns the potential for love. In Orwell’s <em>1984</em>, the main character ends up being tortured and broken at the Ministry of Truth for having engaged in the outlawed behavior of unregulated love. In Huxley’s <em>Brave New World</em>, promiscuity is encouraged &#8212; everyone has sex with everyone else under regime rules, but no one is allowed to make a deep and independent private connection.</p>
<p>Yet as these novels demonstrate, no tyranny’s attempt to turn human beings into obedient robots can fully succeed. There is always someone who has doubts, who is uncomfortable, and who questions the secular deity &#8212; even though it would be safer for him to conform like everyone else. The desire that thus overcomes the instinct for self-preservation is erotic passion. And that is why love presents such a threat to the totalitarian order: it dares to serve itself. It is a force more powerful than the all-pervading fear that a totalitarian order needs to impose in order to survive. Leftist and Muslim social engineers, therefore, in their twisted and human-hating imaginations, believe that the road toward earthly redemption (under a classless society or Sharia) stands a chance <em>only</em> if private love and affection is purged from the human condition.</p>
<p>This is exactly why, forty years ago, as Peter Collier and David Horowitz document in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/DESTRUCTIVE-GENERATION-Second-Thoughts-About/dp/0684826410/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265950493&amp;sr=1-1">Destructive Generation</a>,</em> the Weather Underground not only waged war against American society through violence and mayhem, but also waged war <em>on private love within its own ranks.</em> Bill Ayers, one of the leading terrorists in the group, argued in a speech defending the campaign: “Any notion that people can have responsibility for one person, that they can have that ‘out’ &#8212; we have to destroy that notion in order to build a collective; we have to destroy all ‘outs,’ to destroy the notion that people can lean on one person and not be responsible to the entire collective.”</p>
<p>Thus, the Weather Underground destroyed any signs of monogamy within its ranks and forced couples, some of whom had been together for years, to admit their “political error” and split apart. Like their icon Margaret Mead, they fought the notions of romantic love, jealousy, and other “oppressive” manifestations of one-on-one intimacy and commitment. This was followed by forced group sex and “national orgies,” whose main objective was to crush the spirit of individualism. This constituted an eerie replay of the sexual promiscuity that was encouraged (while private love was forbidden) in <em>We</em>, <em>1984</em>,<em> </em>and <em>Brave New World.</em></p>
<p>Thus, it becomes completely understandable why leftist believers were so inspired by the tyrannies in the Soviet  Union, Communist China, Communist North Vietnam and many other countries. As sociologist Paul Hollander has documented in his classic <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Political-Pilgrims-Western-Intellectuals-Society/dp/1560009543/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1265950825&amp;sr=1-1">Political Pilgrims</a>,</em> fellow travelers were especially enthralled with the desexualized dress that the Maoist regime imposed on its citizens. This at once satisfied the leftist’s desire for enforced sameness and the imperative of erasing attractions between private citizens. The Maoists’ unisex clothing finds its parallel in fundamentalist Islam’s mandate for shapeless coverings to be worn by both males and females. The collective “uniform” symbolizes submission to a higher entity and frustrates individual expression, mutual physical attraction, and private connection and affection. And so, once again, the Western leftist remains not only uncritical, but completely supportive of &#8212; and enthralled in &#8212; this form of totalitarian puritanism.</p>
<p>This is precisely why leftist feminists today do not condemn the forced veiling of women in the Islamic world; <em>because they support all that forced veiling engenders</em>. It should be no surprise, therefore, that Naomi Wolf finds <a href="http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36177">the burqa “sexy.”</a> And it should be no surprise that Oslo Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Unni Wikan, found a solution for the high incidence of Muslims raping Norwegian women: the rapists must not be punished, but <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20646">Norwegian women must be veiling themselves.</a></p>
<p>Valentine’s Day is a “shameful day” for the Muslim world and for the radical Left. It is shameful because private love is considered obscene, since it threatens the highest of values: the need for a totalitarian order to attract the complete and undivided attention, allegiance and veneration of every citizen. Love serves as the most lethal threat to the tyrants seeking to build Sharia and a classless utopia on earth, and so these tyrants yearn for the annihilation of every ingredient in man that smacks of anything that it means to be human.</p>
<p>And so perhaps it is precisely on this Valentine’s Day that we are reminded of the hope that we can realistically have in our battle with the ugly and pernicious <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Unholy-Alliance-Radical-Islam-American/dp/089526076X">unholy alliance</a> that seeks to destroy our civilization. On this day, we are reminded that we have a weapon, the most powerful arsenal on the face of the earth, in front of which despots and terrorists quiver and shake, and sprint from in horror into the shadows of darkness, desperately avoiding its piercing light. That arsenal is love. And no Maoist Red Guard or Saudi fascist cop ever stamped it out &#8212; no matter how much they beat and tortured their victims. And no al-Qaeda jihadist in Pakistan or Feminazi on any American campus will ever succeed in suffocating it, no matter how ferociously they lust to disinfect man of who and what he is.</p>
<p>Love will prevail.</p>
<p>Happy Valentine’s Day to all of our Frontpage readers.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><strong>To get the whole story on Islam&#8217;s and the radical Left&#8217;s war on private love, read Jamie Glazov’s new book, <em><a onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602');" href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.</a></em></strong></p>
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