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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; elite</title>
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		<title>It’s Time to Beat the Jew-Haters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/its-time-to-beat-the-jew-haters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=its-time-to-beat-the-jew-haters</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/its-time-to-beat-the-jew-haters/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:55:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Death of Klinghoffer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Met]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[opera]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243761</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The rise of elite anti-Semitism -- and how the Jewish community should respond. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Klinghoffer-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243764" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Klinghoffer-1-450x337.jpg" alt="Klinghoffer-1" width="324" height="243" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Its-time-to-beat-the-Jew-haters-379700">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>The decision by the most prestigious opera house in America to produce an opera that mainstreams Jew-hatred and anti-Jewish terrorism is a great victory for elitist anti-Semitism. In the world of elite anti-Semitism, Jews are told that truth is but a narrative. Jewish history and rights have no more merit – indeed less merit – than the lies of Jew-haters. And if Jews dare to object to the propagation of lies against them, they open themselves to the easy accusation that they seek to stifle free speech.</p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The goal of elitist anti-Semitism is to erode the right of Jews to have and promote Jewish rights and interests. This is done by demonizing those who defend Jewish rights and advance Jewish interests, while elevating and romanticizing the lives and largely false narratives of those who seek to destroy Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Met’s singular contribution to the cause of elitist anti-Semitism is the prestige its production of The Death of Klinghoffer confers on the cause.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Another dam has been breached. Another safe zone has become a no-go zone.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On the other hand, at the end of the day, as bad as elitist anti-Semitism is, over the past decade or so, American Jews have developed tools to deal with it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In the weeks that preceded the opera’s opening last Monday night, much – although not all – of the Jewish community in New York was able to unify in opposing it. Politicians and luminaries joined with more than a thousand protesters on opening night to express their revulsion at the opera.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And the Met has already paid a price for its elevation of anti-Semitism to high art.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Far from living up to its reputation as a leader in the arts, on Monday, due to the massive protest against the production, the Met lost its artistic credibility. The crowd that gave the opera a standing ovation didn’t do so because they had just experienced a musical masterpiece. They stood and cheered because they were happy the Met elevated murderous, Jew-hating terrorists, whom they support.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of the novel aspects of the opposition to the production was an action taken Monday by the Zionist Organization of America. Hours before the opera began, the ZOA issued a press release demanding that major Jewish donors to the Met, including the Michael Bloomberg LP company, the Annenberg Foundation, the Neubauer Family Foundation and the Toll Brothers Foundation, account for their decision not to revoke their multimillion dollar support for the opera house.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The ZOA’s move is important because as Jews see more and more public support for the denial of Jewish rights and interests, it will become increasingly important to call to account those backing institutions that advance this growing trend toward Jewish disenfranchisement.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The ZOA’s move was important as well because it points us in a useful direction for dealing with a second and increasingly prominent form of anti-Semitism in the US and Canada. That form is violent anti-Semitism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Increasingly, anti-Semites in the US are adopting brownshirt tactics to violently advance their goal of removing Jews from the public square and intimidating others into boycotting Israel and those who support it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Take just a few examples in recent weeks. In late September, several hundred anti-Semitic rioters at the Port of Oakland prevented longshoremen from unloading cargo from the Israeli cargo ship Zim Shanghai. According to media reports, there were 50 policemen from the Oakland police force on the scene, but their presence did not stop the rioters or enable the longshoremen to offload the cargo.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">None of the anti-Semites were arrested. Zim Shanghai was forced to leave the port with its cargo and sail on to Los Angeles.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The group that organized the assault on the Zim ship calls itself Block the Boat for Gaza. It operates through its Facebook page where it openly organizes violent assaults on Israeli shipping. Another assault is planned, according to its Facebook page, for October 25.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">A previous assault in August, during Operation Protective Edge, also took place with police presence and nonintervention. The Zim Piraeus was forced as well to pull anchor with its cargo and sail on to Los Angeles.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Block the Boat for Gaza is supported by another group called Arab Resource and Organizing Center.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On October 8, the Brooklyn Nets played an exhibition game against Maccabi Tel Aviv at the Barclay Center in downtown Brooklyn. The event was a benefit for Friends of the IDF. Twelve IDF soldiers wounded during Operation Protective Edge were guests at the event.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">About a hundred anti-Semitic rioters organized outside the event. They were members of variety of organizations reportedly including Jewish Voices for Peace, Adalah – New York, and the Direct Action for Palestine.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After the event, a number of the rioters accosted Leonard Petlakh, the director of a local Jewish community center, as he was leaving the arena with his two young sons. According to The Forward, they shouted, “Free Palestine,” and, “Your people are murderers.” And then one of them punched him in the face, breaking his nose.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The assailant was arrested. But strangely, he was not charged with committing a hate crime despite the clear anti-Semitic character of his crime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On October 5, hours after the end of Yom Kippur, swastikas were painted on the walls of AEPi Jewish fraternity at Emory University near Atlanta.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Swastikas were also painted at the Yale University campus. In July, mailboxes of AEPi members at University of Oregon were defaced with swastikas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In August, a Jewish student at Temple University was assaulted by a member of Students for Justice for Palestine.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In a video filmed at the national convention of AEPi and posted on YouTube two weeks ago, members of AEPi from campuses around the US and Canada shared the stories of anti-Semitic assaults they and their friends suffer regularly on their campuses. The attacks described included, among other things, violent assaults.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gideon Rafal, the president of AEPi at University of Arizona, described how he was assaulted while trying to prevent a group of 20 Jew-hating thugs from forcing their way into his fraternity house.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rafal said he was struck from behind and lost consciousness.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The injuries he sustained during the assault included a skull fracture, bleeding in the brain, a concussion and a lower back fracture. He says that he was hospitalized for three weeks, spending 10 days in the intensive care unit.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rafal did not say who the assailants were or what legal measures were taken against them or what organization if any, they were associated with.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Other students described threats against Jewish students manning a table for Birthright Israel programs at Loyola University in Chicago, and the assault of a Jewish female student at University of California at Santa Cruz.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Shane, a student at University of Calgary, described how he, his mother and sister were violently assaulted for counter-protesting at an anti-Israel protest. The group that sponsored the anti-Israel protest and whose members attacked him and his family is an official campus organization.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Shane said he fears for his life as he walks through campus.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In recent years it has become apparent that university campuses have become breeding grounds for anti-Semitism. The incidents described by the Jewish students who attended the AEPi convention indicate that the anti-Israel propaganda taught in the classrooms is increasingly being translated into anti-Jewish violence outside of them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The major American Jewish organizations were incompetent to contend with anti-Israel incitement as it became a major force in university classrooms some 15 years ago. Jewish students found themselves with few communal resources to rely on when they suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves at the front lines of the anti-Semitic battle against Jewish rights.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">New groups like Stand with Us and Hasbara Fellowships were formed to fill the vacuum. CAMERA, ZOA and other major groups have in recent years invested massive efforts into empowering students to stand up to this incitement.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But today, as anti-Semites on and off campus increasingly resort to brownshirt tactics, the American Jewish community again finds itself without the means to contend with a new challenge.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this brings us back to the ZOA’s naming the names of Jewish philanthropists still supporting the Met.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The organizations involved in intimidating Jews and assaulting Jews on and off campus who support Israel are not interested in dialogue. Groups that organize to prevent the conduct of normal commercial relations between Israel and the US are not concerned with whether or not they are considered mainstream. The goal of these groups is to intimidate and terrorize the American and Canadian publics into silence as they make it impossible for Israel and its supporters to have a place in the public square.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Educational efforts are of little value in contending with thugs. But this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be done. Groups like Block the Boat for Gaza, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, Adalah, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and Direct Action for Palestine need to be investigated.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Where does their money come from? Who are their leaders? What are their ties to terrorist groups? What are their ties to organized labor? What are their ties to politicians? What is their tax status and what do their tax returns say? If members of various groups are intimidating Jewish students then there should be restraining orders against them. Criminal complaints should be filed against them. Their tax-exempt status should be challenged.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Jewish students should be demanding that Students for Justice in Palestine be expelled from their campuses along with other hate groups, like Jewish Voices for Peace. Jewish alumni should be organizing to withhold all donations from universities that permit anti-Semitic groups to operate on campus. And Jewish lawyers should be filing lawsuits against universities and other institutions that enable the operation of anti-Semitic groups on their premises.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If Jewish students complain that they feel threatened on campus, then lawsuits should filed against the universities for engendering a threatening atmosphere against them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Politicians who support or, when asked, fail to condemn these groups, individuals and their actions as racist and bigoted should be called out for their behavior. Police departments like the Oakland police department that do nothing to stop rioters from preventing the lawful, unfettered operation of a major US port should be subjected to public and legal scrutiny.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The challenge of anti-Semitism in North America is growing and mutating by the day. Jews in America and Canada need to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Reasonably, American Jews have no interest in aping the hateful tactics of anti-Semites to fight them. But an aggressive campaign of legal, political, social and financial opposition to those who seek to demonize Jews and deny Jews civil rights as Jews as well as those who enable them can go a long way toward making members of these hate groups and their supporters rue the day they decided to go after the Jews.</span></p>
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		<title>Doublethink in Norway</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/doublethink-in-norway/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=doublethink-in-norway</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/doublethink-in-norway/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 05:35:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[multicultural]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Orwell]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218384</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's all about sharia law...except that it's not.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/norsk-flagg-islam.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218385" alt="norsk-flagg-islam" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/norsk-flagg-islam.jpg" width="271" height="208" /></a>These people! Over and over, they mock the idea that there exist such things as stealth Islamization and the appeasement thereof, and viciously demonize as bigots, racists, and Islamophobes those who speak frankly of such matters. And over and over, they engage in that very appeasement themselves.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Case in point: Norway. Let&#8217;s start by going back to 2009, when Siv Jensen, head of the Progress Party, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/Advarer-mot-muslimske--ghettoer-i-Oslo-5564982.html">used</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the term </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">snikislamisering – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“stealth Islamization” – in a speech at her party&#8217;s annual convention. Noting that even ambulance crews, firefighters, and police officers didn&#8217;t dare to enter certain parts of the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden, where sharia law has largely supplanted Swedish law, Jensen warned that there were already unsettling signs of similar developments in Oslo. As examples of stealth Islamization, she cited, among other things, the aggressive clamoring for the accommodation of hijab in the public square and demands for </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">halal</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> food in prisons. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The media and political establishment, of course, reacted with outrage. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/article2942062.ece">Pronouncing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it “quite simply untrue that any kind of Islamization of Norwegian society is underway,” Per Kristian Foss, a leading Conservative politician, compared Jensen&#8217;s attitude toward Islam to pre-World War II anti-Semitism. The editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">agreed: in an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/leder/article2942825.ece">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> headlined “Stealth Accusations,” they</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">accused her of “openly appeal[ing] to xenophobia and to the notion that minorities are taking power.” In the view of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s editors, the very idea of stealth Islamization was manifestly absurd.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cut to two years later. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people – and members of the cultural elite quckly grabbed the opportunity to pile on to the Progress Party and others who&#8217;d warned against Islam, saying that they&#8217;d helped create the mass murderer. Pushed against the wall, Jensen nonetheless </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.tv2.no/nyheter/innenriks/siv-jensen-vil-fremdeles-snakke-om-snikislamisering-3561457.html">vowed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that she would continue to use the term “stealth Islamization.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fast forward two more years. The September elections resulted in a Conservative-Progress Party coalition government – and worldwide scare headlines proclaiming that a bigoted, racist, Islamophobic party was about to become a partner in Norway&#8217;s government. Consequently, the Progress Party&#8217;s second-in-command, Ketil Solvik-Olsen, sought to publicly </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/norsk-politikk/artikkel.php?artid=10135127">distance</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the party from the expression “stealth Islamization,” a term he described as “unfortunate.” When the party&#8217;s top man in Oslo, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/Tybring-Gjedde-mener-snikislamisering-er-et-godt-og-aktuelt-ord-7314538.html">insisted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the term&#8217;s continuing usefulness (adding that he was opposed to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">every </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">kind of Islamization, “stealth or not stealth”), he was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1003/subcat1017/thread285605/">assailed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from almost every direction for using rhetoric that was “polarizing” and “anti-Muslim.” Among those who abhorred the term, it was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/valg-2013/artikkel.php?artid=10143778">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, were leaders of the Christian People&#8217;s Party, the home of Norway&#8217;s religious right, who view Muslims as fellow “people of faith” deserving of their support and protection.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">During all these years, while these controversies over the term “stealth Islamization” raged, stealth Islamization itself has proceeded apace. Recently, the Agriculture Minister, Sylvi Listhaug, a member of the Progress Party, expressed concern about the increasing tendency of Norwegian public institutions, such as day-care centers and hospitals, to remove pork from their menus. “We&#8217;ve been eating pork i Norway for years,” she said. “It would be totally wrong to stop because Muslims have come to Norway.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Enter, again, the sage editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten. </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/leder/Listhaugs-forfeilede-kamp-for-svinekjott-7454129.html">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the other day, they said that in places like prisons, pork was being given less priority “for practical reasons.” Which “practical reasons”? One might have expected that the editors would go on to acknowledge what those “reasons” were – especially given that immediately after mentioning the existence of those “practical reasons,” they asked directly: “What is this really about?”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the ensuing text contained no mention whatsoever of Muslims or Islam. Rather, the editors insisted that what&#8217;s important in the face of mass immigration is not the role of pork in Norwegian culture but “universal human values” such as equal rights and freedom of speech. (Although after the Danish cartoon crisis, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">was quick to insist on the importance of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">limiting </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">free speech in order to avoid offending immigrants.) Also, the editors emphasized that everyday Norwegian traditions, including eating habits, “are in constant flux,” as exemplified by twenty-first-century Norwegians&#8217; enthusiasm for such non-Scandinavian fare as pizza and tacos. Plus, they added, health authorities say pork isn&#8217;t that good for you anyway. And why, the editors asked, is the anti-regulatory Progress Party sticking its nose into the formulation of prison and day-care-center menus, anyway?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That, then, according to the editors of Norway&#8217;s newspaper of record, is what this story is “really about”: universal values, changing tastes, health considerations, and freedom of choice. Now, surely they know that what it&#8217;s </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">really </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“really about” is the Islamic teaching that pork is </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">haram – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and the Islamic compulsion to try to force infidels into living by Koranic restrictions as well. In short, stealth Islamization. And the editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">must know that their readers know that, too. So what to make of this editorial? Exactly what is the editors&#8217; rationale here? How do their minds work? I mean, it&#8217;s not just that </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s editors avoided the Islamic elephant in the room (that&#8217;s something we&#8217;ve seen hundreds of times); the relatively fresh twist here here is that they&#8217;re declaring, in effect, that there&#8217;s an elephant in the room – and then offering a list of pretty much everything that </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">isn&#8217;t </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">the elephant in the room.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I suggest that the answer may be this: that every editorial and op-ed like this in </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is yet another effort in a long-term campaign not just to encourage the appeasement of Islamization but, beyond that, to create a society in which pretty much everybody appeases Islamization </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">all the while denying</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, to others and even to themselves, that they&#8217;re doing anything of the kind. A society, in other words, that has reached a stage of pure Orwellianism by fully internalizing the process of doublethink, which, just to remind you, was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter1.3.html">described</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> as follows in the third chapter of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">1984:</i></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is there a single word of this passage that does not apply perfectly to what is going on in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">editorial? In the minds of that paper&#8217;s editors, the impulse to appease would seem to have become utterly reflexive – along with the ability to deny effectively, even to themselves, in precisely the way Orwell outlines, that they&#8217;re acting on such an impulse.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No question about it: Orwell was the prophet of our times. But did he ever imagine that Orwellianism would begin to take serious root in the West not as an outgrowth of European fascism and Communism but as a cowardly response to the religion of Muhammed? </span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Shepherds and Sheep</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/shepherds-and-sheep/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=shepherds-and-sheep</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Feb 2013 04:05:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179337</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Being led to the slaughter by the intellectual elite. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/shepherds-and-sheep/sheep/" rel="attachment wp-att-179338"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-179338" title="sheep" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/sheep.jpg" alt="" width="268" height="201" /></a>John Stuart Mill&#8217;s classic essay &#8220;On Liberty&#8221; gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people&#8217;s decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing &#8220;that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging.&#8221;</p>
<p>Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that &#8220;people make a lot of mistakes.&#8221; Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging.</p>
<p>What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left.</p>
<p>Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.</p>
<p>Yes, we all make mistakes. But do governments not make bigger and more catastrophic mistakes?</p>
<p>Think about the First World War, from which nations on both sides ended up worse off than before, after an unprecedented carnage that killed substantial fractions of whole younger generations and left millions starving amid the rubble of war.</p>
<p>Think about the Holocaust, and about other government slaughters of even more millions of innocent men, women and children under Communist governments in the Soviet Union and China.</p>
<p>Even in the United States, government policies in the 1930s led to crops being plowed under, thousands of little pigs being slaughtered and buried, and milk being poured down sewers, at a time when many Americans were suffering from hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition.</p>
<p>The Great Depression of the 1930s, in which millions of people were plunged into poverty in even the most prosperous nations, was needlessly prolonged by government policies now recognized in retrospect as foolish and irresponsible.</p>
<p>One of the key differences between mistakes that we make in our own lives and mistakes made by governments is that bad consequences force us to correct our own mistakes.</p>
<p>But government officials cannot admit to making a mistake without jeopardizing their whole careers.</p>
<p>Can you imagine a President of the United States saying to the mothers of America, &#8220;I am sorry your sons were killed in a war I never should have gotten us into&#8221;?</p>
<p>What is even more relevant to Professor Sunstein&#8217;s desire to have our betters tell us how to live our lives, is that so many oppressive and even catastrophic government policies were cheered on by the intelligentsia.</p>
<p>Back in the 1930s, for example, totalitarianism was considered to be &#8220;the wave of the future&#8221; by much of the intelligentsia, not only in the totalitarian countries themselves but in democratic nations as well.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union was being praised to the skies by such literary luminaries as George Bernard Shaw in Britain and Edmund Wilson in America, while literally millions of people were being systematically starved to death by Stalin and masses of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.</p>
<p>Even Hitler and Mussolini had their supporters or apologists among intellectuals in the Western democracies, including at one time Lincoln Steffens and W.E.B. Du Bois.</p>
<p>An even larger array of the intellectual elite in the 1930s opposed the efforts of Western democracies to respond to Hitler&#8217;s massive military buildup with offsetting military defense buildups to deter Hitler or to defend themselves if deterrence failed.</p>
<p>&#8220;Disarmament&#8221; was the mantra of the day among the intelligentsia, often garnished with the suggestion that the Western democracies should &#8220;set an example&#8221; for other nations — as if Nazi Germany or imperial Japan was likely to follow their example.</p>
<p>Too many among today&#8217;s intellectual elite see themselves as our shepherds and us as their sheep. Tragically, too many of us are apparently willing to be sheep, in exchange for being taken care of, being relieved of the burdens of adult responsibility and being supplied with &#8220;free&#8221; stuff paid for by others.</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>The Legacy of Intervention</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/the-legacy-of-intervention/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-legacy-of-intervention</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:14:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why leftists, especially intellectuals, are the least likely to suspect that they are ignorant of the things with which they meddle. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/mortgage-rates.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122785" title="mortgage-rates" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/mortgage-rates.gif" alt="" width="375" height="289" /></a></p>
<p>The same presumptions of superior wisdom and virtue behind the interventionism of Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the domestic economy also led them to be interventionists in other countries.</p>
<p>Theodore Roosevelt was so determined that the United States should intervene against Spain&#8217;s suppression of an uprising in Cuba that he quit his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to organize his own private military force — called &#8220;Rough Riders&#8221; — to fight in what became the Spanish-American war.</p>
<p>The spark that set off this war was an explosion that destroyed an American battleship anchored in Havana harbor. There was no proof that Spain had anything to do with it, and a study decades later suggested that the explosion originated inside the ship itself.</p>
<p>But Roosevelt and others were hot for intervention before the explosion, which simply gave them the excuse they needed to go to war against Spain, seizing Puerto Rico and the Philippines.</p>
<p>Although it was a Republican administration that did this, Democrat Woodrow Wilson justified it. Progressive principles of imposing superior wisdom and virtue on others were invoked.</p>
<p>Wilson saw the indigenous peoples brought under American control as beneficiaries of progress. He said, &#8220;they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice.&#8221;</p>
<p>If that sounds racist, it is perfectly consistent with President Wilson&#8217;s policies at home. The Wilson administration introduced racial segregation in Washington government agencies where it did not exist when Wilson took office.</p>
<p>Woodrow Wilson also invited various dignitaries to the White House to watch a showing of the film &#8220;The Birth of a Nation,&#8221; which glorified the Ku Klux Klan — and which Wilson praised.</p>
<p>All of this was consistent with the Progressive era in general, when supposedly &#8220;scientific&#8221; theories of racial superiority and inferiority were at their zenith. Theodore Roosevelt was the exception, rather than the rule, among Progressives when he did not agree with these theories.</p>
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		<title>Reflections on the Revolution in America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/victor-davis-hanson/reflections-on-the-revolution-in-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reflections-on-the-revolution-in-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:01:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Victor Davis Hanson]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to the efforts of the liberal well-to-do class -- who are immune from the dictates they impose on others.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/obama9.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54982" title="obama9" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/obama9.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="254" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Visit <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/">Pajamas</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>America’s Extreme Make-over</strong></p>
<p>These are exciting though scary revolutionary times, akin to the constant acrimony in the fourth-century BC polis, mid-nineteenth century revolutionary Europe, or — perhaps in a geriatric replay — the 1960s. This is an era when the fundamental assumptions of the individual and the state are now being redefined, albeit in a weird, high-tech, globalized landscape.</p>
<p><strong>Radical But Well Off</strong></p>
<p>A word of caution: we are not talking about <em>hoi polloi</em> versus <em>hoi oligoi</em>, or the commune on the barricades fighting the estate owners. No, not this time around.</p>
<p>Instead, the present attempt to remake America is the effort of the liberal well-to-do — highly educated at mostly private universities, nursed on three decades of postmodern education, either with inherited wealth or earning top salaries, lifestyles of privilege indistinguishable from those they decry as selfish, and immune from the dictates they impose on others.</p>
<p>Such are basically the profiles of the Obama cabinet and sub-cabinet, the pillars of liberalism in the Congress and state legislatures, the public intellectuals in the universities and foundations, the arts crowd, and the Hollywood elite. Let us be clear about that.</p>
<p><strong>The Distant Poor</strong></p>
<p>They are all battling on behalf of “them,” the poorer half of America, currently in need of some sort of housing, education, food, or legal subsidy, whom the above mentioned elite, in the way they live, send their children to school, socialize, and vacation so studiously avoid.  (The <em>New York Times</em> owners are likely to follow the cut-throat business practices of Wall Street, live in the most refined areas of New York, and assume privileges indistinguishable from other CEOs; the difference is that they so visibly care about those they never see or seek out).</p>
<p>Note well the term “poor.” These are not Dickensian or Joads poor, but largely Americans who by the standards of the 1940s would be considered lucky. Partly because of globalized Chinese consumer goods, and partly redistributive practices of a half-century, our current “underclass” has access to clothes, electronics, entertainment, apartments, cell phones, transportation, etc., undreamed of by the middle class of the recent past. I live in one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest counties in a bankrupt state; and those I see poor are not like those I saw 40 years ago in the same locale.</p>
<p><strong>To continue reading this article, <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/reflections-on-the-revolution-in-america/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Tea Parties in American History &#8211; RealClearPolitics</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:14:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Are this year&#38;apos;s &#8220;tea parties&#8221; really tea parties? What could today&#38;apos;s protesters have in common with the &#8220;Indians&#8221; who dumped 90,000 pounds of tea in Boston harbor in 1773? Quite a bit, actually. What do today&#38;apos;s tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement &#8220;is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Are this year&amp;apos;s &#8220;tea parties&#8221; really tea parties? What could today&amp;apos;s protesters have in common with the &#8220;Indians&#8221; who dumped 90,000 pounds of tea in Boston harbor in 1773? Quite a bit, actually.</p>
<p>What do today&amp;apos;s tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement &#8220;is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective.&#8221; Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that the government seems to be a closed circle, run by an elite in both parties. These elites, combined with a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, use government power to serve their own ends, and not the public good.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/17/party_like_its_1773.html">RealClearPolitics &#8211; Party Like It&#8217;s 1773?</a>.</p>
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		<title>An Ex-Islamist Needs U.S. Support &#8211; WSJ.com</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:02:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48530</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hanevy Ould Dahah, who is now being held in Mauritania&#8217;s Dar Naim prison, is an unlikely dissident. Half-Arab and half-African, he was marked as a child to become a cleric, memorizing the Quran by age nine and studying at ultra-conservative academies. Some of his former classmates now lead Mauritania&#8217;s Salafist movement; Hanevy might have been [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Hanevy Ould Dahah, who is now being held in Mauritania&#8217;s Dar Naim prison, is an unlikely dissident. Half-Arab and half-African, he was marked as a child to become a cleric, memorizing the Quran by age nine and studying at ultra-conservative academies. Some of his former classmates now lead Mauritania&#8217;s Salafist movement; Hanevy might have been one of them.</p>
<p>I met Hanevy, now 34, for the first time last year, and I asked him about why he broke with the Islamists as an 18-year-old. He expressed disgust with the government&#8217;s and elite society&#8217;s tolerance of slavery. He also recounted the horror of witnessing a massacre of black Africans, a minority in Mauritania. The corrosive impact of his country&#8217;s dictatorship and religious extremism, he explained, stunted society. Instead of a radical cleric, he became a reformer committed to secular democracy.</p>
<p>In 2007, Hanevy seized upon a unique opportunity. The fall of a 20-year dictatorship and presidential elections suggested that the time was ripe for new democratic experiments. He launched Taqadoumy.com (Arabic for &#8220;progressive&#8221;), a news portal in Arabic, French and English featuring investigative journalism unparalleled in the Arab world.</p>
<p>Despite limited resources, Hanevy recruited a team of reporters and was soon running the country&#8217;s most-read news site—the local equivalent of the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post. Taqadoumy fearlessly exposed scandals and corruption, attracting thousands of readers with photos and documents providing hard evidence for sensational scoops.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703906204575027462093163750-lMyQjAxMTAwMDAwMjEwNDIyWj.html">An Ex-Islamist Needs U.S. Support &#8211; WSJ.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Affirmative Action A La Française</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/theodore-dalrymple/affirmative-action-a-la-francaise-by-theodore-dalrymple/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=affirmative-action-a-la-francaise-by-theodore-dalrymple</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:02:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Theodore Dalrymple]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46180</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A politically correct assault threatens France’s elite academic institution.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46235" title="Sark" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Sark.jpg" alt="Sark" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>Stalinist-style social engineering is not quite dead. Indeed, it flourishes. In France, a controversy has broken out about the admission policies to the grandes ecoles, the elite tertiary educational establishments such as the Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration that, since Napoleon’s time, have provided France with much of its business, government and cultural elite.</p>
<p>Admission to one of the grandes ecoles more or less guarantees the student a prosperous subsequent career. Entry is by competitive examination; and it has long been a proud boast of France that such entry is by ability rather than by social connection or political prominence, for talented young people from poor homes are given a state subsidy that allows them to attend. The openness of the grandes ecoles to talent from wherever in society it comes is taken as one of the great achievements of the French Revolution.</p>
<p>But the purely formal nature of equality of opportunity that the grandes ecoles exemplifies has recently come under attack led by no less a personage than the President of the Republic who, though nominally conservative, argues like any left-wing demagogue.</p>
<p>The students at the grandes ecoles are in fact overwhelmingly from the comfortable middle or upper-middle classes. They do not represent the French population in the demographic sense at all; a child from the 16th arrondissement of Paris is far more likely to pass the entry examination than a child from the concrete wasteland that surrounds Paris. M. Sarkozy, taking populist advantage of this unsurprising fact like any unscrupulous politician, is supporting a proposal that 30 per cent of students should be taken, ex officio as it were, from poor backgrounds.</p>
<p>One way to achieve this ‘target’ is to change the nature of the entrance examination, which emphasises, among other things such as science and mathematics, modern languages (essentially English) and a knowledge of general culture such as history and literature.</p>
<p>Middle and upper-middle class children are at an unfair advantage, according to M. Sarkozy and other supporters of the proposal, because their parents are much more likely to be able to send them abroad for linguistic holidays than are poor parents. (My observation of my French nephews and nieces leads me to doubt whether such linguistic holidays are quite as advantageous as they are supposed to be.) So it would only be fair and socially just to suppress mastery of modern languages as a criterion for entry to the grandes ecoles.</p>
<p>What is true of languages is even truer of general culture, for it is obvious that children of cultivated parents have an enormous advantage over others: and cultivated parents tend to be of higher social class also. Therefore, the requirement that students should have general culture should also be suppressed.</p>
<p>This kind of reasoning was subject to the mockery of a historian, Sebastien Fach, in the pages of Le Monde, which are not generally known for their light satirical touch. Imagine, said Mr. Fach, the time a few years hence when social reformers have had their way, and the French national soccer team is no longer selected only from the best players in the best professional teams in the league, who are demographically unrepresentative of the population as a whole. Think of all the other people who play football in France: can they not run and do all the other things that the best professional players can do? Why should they be excluded from representing their nation? Why not women, children, the aged? A truly democratic team.</p>
<p>Mr. Fach rightly points out that while it would be quick and easy to lower the standards of the grandes ecoles, it would be slow and difficult to improve the standards of the secondary schools serving children from poor homes, and thereby giving them a better chance of admission to the grandes ecoles. Like any good politician, Mr Sarkozy opts for the line of least resistance, the soft option.</p>
<p>By far the most interesting fact to emerge from the debate is that the proportion of children from relatively poor homes attending the grandes ecoles declined precipitously in the first half century of France’s existence as a full welfare state: from 29 per cent in 1950 to 9 per cent in mid 1990s.</p>
<p>Of course, it is possible that, during this period, the proportion of children from relatively poor homes in the population as a whole also declined, although it is unlikely to have declined by two thirds, as the proportion of children from poor homes attending the grandes ecoles has done; one still say, therefore that at the very least the welfare state, one of whose justifications was the need to equalise opportunities, has failed signally to do so. If anything, the reverse. One might, if one were inclined to conspiracy theories, construe the welfare state as the means by which the middle class ensures that their children face no competition from clever children of the lower class.</p>
<p>The heart of the problem lies in the unassailability of the term ‘equality of opportunity,’ and the unthinking assent it commands. I was once asked on Dutch TV whether I was in favour of it, the interviewer assuming that I must be so in spite of all my other appalling opinions; and when I said that I was not, and indeed that I thought it was a truly hideous notion, his eyes opened with surprise. I thought he was going to slip off his chair.</p>
<p>Only under conditions reminiscent of those of Brave New World could there be equality of opportunity. But, of course, the very unattainability of equality of opportunity (in any sense other than that of an absence of formal, legal impediments to social advance) is precisely what recommends it as an ideal to politicians such as President Sarkozy, and indeed to most other western politicians, virtually irrespective of their putative political stripe. The fact that, reform notwithstanding, there are always differences in outcomes for different groups or classes of human beings in any society means that there is always scope, in the name of equality of opportunity, for further interference and control by politicians and bureaucrats. Not permanent revolution (to change the communist metaphor from Stalinism to Trotskyism), but permanent reform is the modern western politico-bureaucratic class’s route to lasting power and control.</p>
<p>Why anyone should want lasting power and control is to me a mystery: I suppose it must be the answer to a deep and insatiable inner emptiness.</p>
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		<title>Debunking Anti-Anti-Islamist Myths</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/tony-blankley/debunking-anti-anti-islamist-myths-tony-blankley/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=debunking-anti-anti-islamist-myths-tony-blankley</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:00:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tony Blankley]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46049</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The politically correct classes see no evil on radical Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46051" title="hasan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/hasan.jpg" alt="hasan" width="460" height="296" /></p>
<p>Anti-anti-Islamic radicalism is growing amongst Western elites. In the aftermath of the Fort Hood Islamist terror attack on our troops by United States Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and the Christmas day airline Islamist terror attack attempt, it is becoming ever more obvious that there is a widening gap between public common sense and governing class idiocy when it comes to spotting Islamist danger in our midst — and doing something about it.</p>
<p>Against all evidence, it has become an <em>idee fixe</em> in the collective mind of European and American governments, academe, journalism and foreign policy establishments that radical Muslims in the West are the victims of Western bigotry and cultural hostility — rather than, primarily, the other way around. Dangerously, these attitudes continue to shape both the premises and procedures of government policies even after nine years of post-Sept. 11 evidence to the contrary. The slaughtered American troops at Fort Hood are just among the early few in what will surely become whole legions of the dead victims of political correctness — if the public does not soon succeed at overruling the Western governing elite&#8217;s unconscionable moral blindness to the malign danger in our midst.</p>
<p>This willful refusal to look Islamist/Western reality straight-on is epitomized by a series of recent articles that mostly sneer at even a discussion of the threat. As one of the constantly named authors of recent books (along with Mark Steyn, Oriana Fallaci, Bernard Lewis, Bruce Bawer, Bat Ye&#8217;or and Christopher Caldwell) that are alleged to be guilty of seeing evidence of an Islamist cultural (as well as terrorist) threat to the West, I thought it might be time to respond.</p>
<p>Among other articles that criticize me and the other named authors are: &#8220;A Eurabian Civil War&#8221; by British Independent columnist Johann Hari; &#8220;Why Fears of a Muslim Takeover Are All Wrong&#8221; in Newsweek by William Underhill; &#8220;Eurabian Follies&#8221; in Foreign Policy magazine by former French Foreign Ministry official Justin Vaisse; and &#8220;&#8216;Eurabia&#8217; Debunked&#8221; in Commentary Magazine online, by (the always polite and thoughtful — an exception to the rule) Max Boot.</p>
<p>My contribution to the oeuvre of radical Islamist alarmism was my 2005 book, &#8220;The West&#8217;s Last Chance,&#8221; which, by the way, predicted the terrorist attack in London, Muslim riots in Paris, worldwide violent Muslim reaction to blasphemous Western artistic representations and the emergence of growing acquiescence to Sharia law in the West.</p>
<p>It is hard to know whether the authors (and the majority elite opinion they represent) don&#8217;t get it, or don&#8217;t want to get it. For example, on the question of whether Europe could become increasingly culturally dominated by Islam as the 21st century unfolds, all the articles question the demographic projections (which, in my and some other books, are official United Nations data.).</p>
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<p>The authors make the triumphant case that it will be generations, if then, before Islam is a majority in Europe. (Which is also what I conclude in my book).</p>
<p>What they choose to ignore is the already obviously powerful impact of even very small numbers of determined people in a host country riddled with guilt and political correctness. The dead at Fort Hood are testament to radical Islam&#8217;s success already at inducing the U.S. Army to treat an obviously dangerous Muslim officer preferentially. His conduct — if by a Christian, Jew or atheist —surely would have been stopped well before the slaughters started.</p>
<p>More dangerous, is the (simplistic and obvious) self-satisfied assertion that we are unduly alarmed of a danger from radical Muslims in the West because it is a &#8220;myth (that there exists) a united Islam, a bloc capable of collective and potentially dangerous action. The truth is that there are no powerful Muslim political movements in Europe, either continent-wide or at the national level, and the divisions that separate Muslims wordwide, most obviously between Sunnis and Shiites, are apparent in Europe as well.&#8221; (Newsweek, July 11, 2009, William Underhill.)</p>
<p>Neither I, nor to the best of my knowledge any of the other criticized authors, have asserted that a caliphate, or anything like it, was likely to re-emerge. The already present danger — which will only expand if not checked — is a constant cultural intrusion that will change adversely the very nature of our way of life.</p>
<p>Radical Islam doesn&#8217;t have to win elections (or even win street riots) if they win by intimidation the policies and conduct they seek. For example, as I warned in my book (and came about in the Danish cartoon event a few years ago) the threat of radical Muslim violence succeeded in coercing all but two American newspapers and most European newspapers from exercising their free speech and press right to publish the Danish cartoon.</p>
<p>In fact, just a few weeks ago, the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, was attacked in his home by a Somali Muslim aroused by the alleged blasphemy. Shockingly, most European journalistic commentary argued that Western writers and artists should, for prudence sake, abstain from such expression.</p>
<p>But it is worse than imprudent for Americans (or Europeans) to give up freedoms and ways of life that have been defended for centuries by the martial sacrifice of our ancestors (and current warriors) — and by the intellectual courage of our writers and artists — just because our morally feeble, self-proclaimed &#8220;educated class&#8221; and elites have lost the will to defend our civilization.</p>
<p>As the American people arise to take back our government and our property this November, we should also seek out candidates who are not afraid to oppose such threats to our way of life.</p>
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		<title>Bomb suspect came from elite family, best schools &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/bomb-suspect-came-from-elite-family-best-schools-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bomb-suspect-came-from-elite-family-best-schools-ap</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:49:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43708</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As a member of an uppercrust Nigerian family, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab received the best schooling, from the elite British International School in West Africa to the vaunted University College London. But the education he wanted was of a different sort: Nigerian officials say his interest in extremist Islam prompted his father to warn U.S. authorities. [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As a member of an uppercrust Nigerian family, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab received the best schooling, from the elite British International School in West Africa to the vaunted University College London.</p>
<p>But the education he wanted was of a different sort: Nigerian officials say his interest in extremist Islam prompted his father to warn U.S. authorities. As Abdulmutallab was being escorted in handcuffs off the Detroit-bound airliner he attempted to blow up on Christmas Day, he told U.S. officials that he had sought an extremist education at an Islamist hotbed in Yemen.</p>
<p>A portrait emerged Sunday of a serious young man who led a privileged life as the son of a prominent banker, but became estranged from his family as an adult. Devoutly religious, he was nicknamed &#8220;The Pope&#8221; for his saintly aura and gave few clues in his youth that he would turn radical, friends and family said.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091228/ap_on_re_us/airliner_attack_profile;_ylt=AviHB9zyyYL3W89vJNIZyk52wPIE;_ylu=X3oDMTNjY2ZiMmV0BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkxMjI4L2FpcmxpbmVyX2F0dGFja19wcm9maWxlBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDMgRwb3MDMgRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2JvbWJzdXNwZWN0Yw--">Bomb suspect came from elite family, best schools &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
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		<title>Will Europe Put its Foot Down? &#8211; by Hege Storhaug</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/hege-storhaug/will-europe-put-its-foot-down-by-hege-storhaug/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-europe-put-its-foot-down-by-hege-storhaug</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:20:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Hege Storhaug]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[We must learn from the Swiss as quickly as possible.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41147" title="FRANCE BURQA" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/niqab1.jpg" alt="FRANCE BURQA" width="450" height="562" /></p>
<p>“Either Islam will be Europeanized, or Europe will be Islamized.”  In recent years this prediction has been made by many major experts, among them the American <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis" target="_blank">Bernard Lewis</a>, the Syrian-born German <a href="http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassam_Tibi" target="_blank">Bassam Tibi</a>, and the French <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Kepel" target="_blank">Gilles Kepel</a>.  This is, without question, an uncomfortable and sensitive topic, but it’s one that is very pertinent now that the Swiss have put their foot down and said that they will not accept another minaret within their borders.</p>
<p>In recent decades, Islam has exploded in Europe.  You can see the changes with your own eyes from year to year – whether it’s the increasing presence of hijabs on the street in a city like Oslo, or the bearded men with ankle-high baggy pants, or the new and resplendent mosques that are under construction.  For my part, I’ve noticed an increasing insecurity and unease among “ordinary” people who feel like aliens in their own country.  People ask: what is the purpose of this project?  Don’t we, as a nation, have a right to pass our own cultural legacy, our traditions and values, on to our children and grandchildren?  Should we, in the name of tolerance, give in to the demands made by “others” whose influence is growing, and whose voices are becoming louder, as their numbers increase? Or as a Norwegian Labor Party politician said to me in a private conversation: “On the day that most of the members of the city council are Muslims, what do you think will happen to the right of Oslo bars to serve alcohol?”  Another leading Laborite with over a couple of decades’ experience in politics put it more bluntly when I asked him “What you think about immigration from the Muslim world?”  The answer was so crisp, merciless, and genuinely felt that I gasped: “What have they contributed?”  Period.</p>
<p>Let it be said that of course there are many Muslims in Europe who are getting along just fine and who get the same chills down their spines that other European citizens do when they think of Sharia and the lack of freedom that accompanies classical Islam.  But as a rule those aren’t the Muslims who are the most prominent members of their faith among us; they aren’t the ones who enjoy power in the Muslim community, and they aren’t the ones who are best organized and who have developed exceptionally strong connections to our public officials.</p>
<p>No, it’s not the secularized Muslims who are leading the way – far from it.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali made this clear when I and a colleague of mine from Human Rights Service in Oslo met her at the Dutch Parliament in The Hague in 2005.  As she put it, there most certainly <em>are </em>Muslims in Europe who want a Europeanized Islam – that is to say, a private, personal Islam without political and judicial influence.  But these <em>aren’t </em>the Muslims who are powerfully positioned in Europe’s community organizations, Europe’s corridors of power, and Europe’s universities.</p>
<p>Here is an interesting point: immigrants from Iran tend to be secular, well-integrated, and – very often – well-educated.  Here in Norway, Iranians have generally integrated themselves into our culture, accepting Norwegian values even as they’ve maintained Iranian traditions that don’t conflict with human rights, such as celebrating Iranian New Year.  But Iranians are not the leaders of Europe’s Muslim communities.  Nor can I think of a single mosque in Norway, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, that has been founded by Iranians.</p>
<p>If Iranians, generally speaking, have been an immigration success story, enriching Europe and becoming fully participating members of European society, this isn’t true of the members of many other major immigrant groups, whose origins are in traditional villages in other Muslim countries.  It’s precisely these people’s unwillingness (or inability?) to assimilate to European society – indeed, to appreciate such typically European values as freedom, equality, social participation, and personal responsibility – that may be a major reason why Switzerland said no to more minarets.  At some point, Europe <em>must </em>put its foot down if it truly wishes to continue to be the Europe we know today.  There is a limit as to how many minarets a society can live with, how many hijabs and baggy pants the streets of Europe can tolerate, before the public space becomes as ideologically charged and as palpably unfree as the streets of, say, Pakistan.  We need to stand up and preserve our culture – a successful culture that is itself the only reason why immigrants are streaming from the Muslim world to our continent rather than in the other direction.</p>
<p>Here’s a specific example of how misguided our politicians have been in their handling of the challenge of Islam – an example that I think provides a very clear picture of grotesque weakness.  In 1974, Muslim immigrants from Pakistan established the first mosque in Norway, the Islamic Cultural Centre (ICC).  The name has a comforting, harmless sound: a “cultural center” sounds like something very different from a mosque.  In reality, however, the ICC is a direct subsidiary of an extreme religio-political movement and political party in Pakistan, Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), which was established by one of the leading Islamist ideologues of the last century, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul_Ala_Maududi" target="_blank">Abu Ala Maududi</a> (1903 – 1979). When Pakistan’s worst despot ever, General and President <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Zia-ul-Haq" target="_blank">Zia ul-Haq</a> (1977 – 1988), Islamized that country from top to bottom, his main inspiration was Maududi. Today <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussain_Ahmad" target="_blank">Qazi Hussain Ahmad</a>, who has been a top JI leader for several years and has been banned for security reasons from entering about 25 European countries, as well as Egypt.  He has been under house arrest in Pakistan several times for having instigated violent riots that took human lives. Unsurprisingly, he’s also a fan of Bin Laden. Yet he’s not prohibited from entering Norway, and when he landed at Oslo Airport in August 2004, the arrivals hall was packed with Norwegian-Pakistani men and boys who openly cheered him as a prophet.</p>
<p>The ICC, then, which has a grandiose new mosque with minarets in downtown Oslo, follows an ideology that is a carbon copy of Maududi’s terrifying, violent creed.  It doesn’t just belong to a philosophically dangerous movement; it belongs to a movement which preaches that Muslims should not become fully integrated members of Norwegian society.  This is exactly the same attitude that is preached at every mosque in Europe that has “respect” for itself.  And yet the ICC, like many other mosques that share its theology, was allowed to establish itself in Norway, and in Europe generally, without protest from anybody.  And that’s not all: today it’s one of the largest and most influential so-called faith communities among Norwegian Muslims and has, over the years, received tens of millions of kroner in government support because it is regarded – absurdly – as a purely religious body.</p>
<p>But Europe’s cultural elite is blind to this ugly reality.  On the contrary, that elite, which lives largely off of the dialogue industry – exchanging endless amiable platitudes with Muslim leaders – is all bent out of shape over Switzerland: it views the ban on minarets as an assault on free speech and on freedom of religion; the ban, according to the elite, is an offense against cultural diversity, an expression of intolerance, prejudice, and extremism that will lead to a clash of civilizations.  Not to mention that the ban violates international conventions.</p>
<p>Yet this same elite never gets worked up when Christians are murdered in Pakistan or when their churches and homes are burned down.  Or when women and men are stoned to death in Somalia, or when burka-clad women in Afghanistan are crammed together with goats in the backs of trucks.  Nor do they pay the slightest heed to a woman walking through the streets of Oslo in a burka – a garment that must be described as the clearest possible manifestation of antipathy to Western culture, a powerful statement of complete rejection of the society in which the woman lives.</p>
<p>It is not too much to say, then, that the elite is completely off-balance.  And it’s this lack of balance, this lack of sensible attitudes in the salons of the privileged, this lack of respect for their own culture and for the values on which that culture is founded, that the grass roots are reacting to.  Simply put, ordinary people are sick of being told by their “betters” what to do and think: they want with all their hearts to defend themselves and their own.  Their message is: <em>By all means, come to </em><em>Europe</em><em> and become one of us.  But don’t come here to turn our culture and our values upside down. </em> The people have, in short, begun to wake up and to say no to the utopian multicultural dream. For they realize that Norway will no longer be Norway, and the West will no longer be the West, if the country’s essential culture is not preserved; and Christianity is an indissoluble part of that culture.  Whether one is personally religious or not, that’s simply a fact.  If Islam is going to place itself at the heart of our culture, most Norwegians understand that what we now consider Norwegian will be dead and buried.  The only alternative would be a miracle: a revolution within Islam that would place all of Muhammed’s inhumane actions on the ash heap of history and reduce all of his “sacred” legal and political pronouncements to the status of fairy tales like <em>A Thousand and One Nights. </em>Of course, such a revolution would also require an end to all of the violence and hatred preached in the Koran.</p>
<p>For about a millennium, Islam has failed spectacularly to pull off such a revolutionary project.  It’s precisely for this reason that people are pouring out of these failed states (yes, they’re also failed on account of other kinds of ideological despotism, including socialist projects, which when combined with authoritarian, oppressive religion produce something like gunpowder). The big question, however, is this: why should we expect a form of Islam to develop in Europe that is entirely antithetical to the form of Islam found in the Muslim world?</p>
<p>Of course Norway, and Europe as a whole, should not embrace any and every kind of culture or religion that finds its way here.  But where to draw the line?  There is no one answer to this question.  The answer will vary according to the nature of the culture or religion and the strength of the challenge that it represents.  But if we sell out our mainstream culture, and relativize it, accept a watering down of our rights, we may end up with a set of supposedly democratic but in fact empty and meaningless ideals that fail to provide us citizens with a values-related map or compass.  And what can happen in critical situations if the people don’t share a sense of community?  How can we ensure a sense of belonging if, for example, freedom of speech faces a major threat or if we suffer a terrorist attack?  Can we risk having civil war-like conditions, as we is already the case in Europe’s no-go zones?  Democratic order is, above all, a technical and practical matter, and it can thus <em>never </em>replace people’s need for a community, their need to be part of a common culture.</p>
<p>People must, then, have feelings – positive ones – about one another.  Last winter I had a thought-provoking experience on the east side of Oslo on my way home after work.  A thin layer of snow covered the icy streets.  A Somali women dressed in a tent slipped on the ice as I passed her.  Instinctively, I grabbed her and thus managed to prevent what could have been a bad fall, and helped her back to her feet.  I asked if she was okay, but she just hurried on with a completely expressionless look on her face.  Not a single sign of human connection, not a single glance at me.  I stood there feeling empty and alienated.</p>
<p>Awareness of a society’s and a culture’s need for a sense of community seems especially absent from the EU system.  The kind of communal feeling I am talking about contrasts sharply with the multicultural mentality of the pro-EU and antinational forces.  They refuse to understand that a nation’s culture – its folk songs, traditions, holy days, flags, and national anthems – is different from a broad-based constitution based on ideals of equality.  A text, simply put, cannot replace a feeling of community.  A national community with strong survival instincts is founded not on a text but on matters that are close to the heart, on traditions, on things that are palpable, on things as obvious as a common language and a sense of belonging to a fatherland.  And yes, this sense of community also has something to do with the churches and church spires, as well as the church’s rituals and traditions.  The principles that tie people together cannot be legislated by politicians; such bonds call for something more – trust between citizens, national loyalty, a high degree of agreement as to what freedom is and is not, and a broad sense of support for the obligations that a real community demands of its members.</p>
<p>The minarets, then, don’t symbolize community in the European sense – they symbolize the umma, the Muslim community.  They don’t represent loyalty to Norway or Switzerland or any other European country – they represent loyalty to Mecca and to the umma.  They don’t signify freedom, but illiberalism (women’s oppression, the punishment of apostasy with death).  The minarets, in short, embody the antithesis of the Declaration of Human Rights (as is clear to anyone who has read the 1990 Cairo Declaration about so-called “human rights in Islam,” which was formulated by the Organization of the Islamic Conference).  Nor are they, one might add, a part of our architectural tradition or any other Western tradition.  On the contrary, they bear witness to a state of mind that views us, the “others,” as strangers.</p>
<p>The policy of forcing oneself to tolerate something for which one has no sympathy whatsoever will, moreover, only erode the national culture.  Pointing fingers and making moral judgments is not the way to enhance tolerance.</p>
<p>In light of the immigration from the Muslim world, it’s very important for us to be aware of the history of our Western democracy.  It’s not true, after all, that we adopted democracy, with all the magnificent liberal values that accompanied it, and <em>then </em>developed a broad community of the people.  On the contrary, our free society is a historical consequence of a communal society based on trust, a shared culture in which Christianity has naturally played a central role.  Norway would not have managed to come together under our constitution, signed at Eidsvoll in 1814, if the country that produced it had been split along cultural and religious lines.  The people whose representatives met at Eidsvoll were a people who shared essentially the same culture and religion and who could hence agree on the text upon which their nation was to be founded.  The same thing happened when the Puritans settled in New England and built a society that grew into American democracy.  It is actually somewhat odd to think that America owes the liberal democracy enshrined in its founding documents to a group of original settlers whose strong sense of community was based on conservative religion and illiberal traditions.  It is, then, shared cultural norms, and not theoretical or abstract ideals of equality or international conventions, that lead people to stand shoulder to shoulder and to find community together.  A liberal democracy such as that of Norway or Switzerland is not and never has been self-sustaining.</p>
<p>The minaret case, then, can be very critical for Europe’s future.  How many minarets can Europe tolerate before our strong sense of communal connection is dissolved?  What will happen, then, to our democracy’s liberal values and to the social harmony we have enjoyed?  These are questions that most of the political parties in Norway and in a number of other European countries do not wish to address.  <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-the-swiss-were-right-to-prohibit-construction-of-minarets">As I wrote </a>a few days ago, they absolutely refuse to recognize that Islam is an <em>ideology </em>and a <em>social system, </em>a religion of laws – a religion with a political orientation and with political ambitions.   Yet Islam and Christianity are still treated by Norwegian (and European) officials as identical twins.  This misguided way of thinking may end up costing us heavily.  We must learn from the Swiss as quickly as possible – must learn, that is, to face up to, and respond appropriately to, the political and legal realities of the Islamic congregations in our midst.</p>
<p><em>This essay originally appeared in Norwegian on the website of Human Rights Service, <a href="http://www.rights.no/">www.rights.no</a>, and was translated into English by Bruce Bawer.</em></p>
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		<title>The Pretense of Knowledge &#8211; by Walter Williams</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/walter-williams/the-pretense-of-knowledge-by-walter-williams/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-pretense-of-knowledge-by-walter-williams</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:00:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Does Congress know exactly what's best for you? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-40346" title="pelosi_reid_0705" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/pelosi_reid_0705.jpg" alt="pelosi_reid_0705" width="450" height="294" /></p>
<p>The ultimate constraint that we all face is knowledge — what we know and don&#8217;t know. The knowledge problem is pervasive and by no means trivial as hinted at by just a few examples. You&#8217;ve purchased a house. Was it the best deal you could have gotten? Was there some other house you could have purchased that 10 years later would not have needed extensive repairs or was in a community with more likeable neighbors and a better environment for your children? What about the person you married? Was there another person who would have made for a more pleasing spouse? Though these are important questions, the most intelligent answer you can give to all of them is: &#8220;I don&#8217;t know.&#8221;</p>
<p>Since you don&#8217;t know the answers, who do you think, here on Earth, is likely to know and whom would you like to make these decisions for you — Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Bush, a czar appointed by Obama or a committee of Washington bureaucrats? I bet that if these people were to forcibly make housing or marital decisions for us, most would deem it tyranny.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;Williams, Congress is not making such monumental decisions that affect my life.&#8221; Try this. You are a 22-year-old healthy person. Instead of spending $3,000 or $4,000 a year for health insurance, you&#8217;d prefer investing that money in equipment to start a landscaping business. Which is the best use of that $3,000 or $4,000 a year — purchasing health insurance or starting up a landscaping business — and who should decide that question: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Bush, aczar appointed by Obama or a committee of Washington bureaucrats? How can they possibly know what&#8217;s the best use of your earnings, particularly in light of the fact that they have no idea of who you are?</p>
<p>Neither you nor the U.S.</p>
<p>Congress has the complete knowledge to know exactly what&#8217;s best for you. The difference is that when individuals make their own trade-offs, say between purchasing health insurance or investing in a business, they make wiser decisions because it is they who personally bear the costs and benefits of those decisions. You say, &#8220;Hold it, Williams, we&#8217;ve got you now! What if that person gets really sick and doesn&#8217;t have health insurance. Society suffers the burden of taking care of him.&#8221; To the extent that is a problem, it is not a problem of liberty; it&#8217;s a problem of congressionally mandated socialism. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>It is not society that bears the burden; it is some flesh and blood American worker who finds his earnings taken by Congress to finance the health needs of another person. There is absolutely no moral case, much less constitutional case, for Congress forcibly using one American to serve the purposes of another American, a practice that differs only in degree from slavery, which we all should find morally offensive.</p>
<p>Whether it is <a style="border-bottom: 0.075em solid darkgreen ! important; font-weight: normal ! important; font-size: 100% ! important; text-decoration: underline ! important; padding-bottom: 1px ! important; color: darkgreen ! important; background-color: transparent ! important; background-image: none; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt;" href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/walter-williams.html#" target="_blank">health care</a>, education, employment or most other areas of our lives, I ask you: Who has the capacity to master all the complexity to make choices on behalf of others? Each of us possesses only a tiny percentage of the knowledge that would be necessary to make totally informed decisions in our own lives, much less the lives of others. There is only one reason for the forcible transference of decision-making authority over important areas of our private lives to elite decision-makers in Congress and government bureaucracies. Doing so confers control, power, wealth and revenue to society&#8217;s elite. What&#8217;s in the best interests of individual members of society, such as a person who&#8217;d rather launch a landscaping business than purchase a health insurance policy, ranks low on the elite&#8217;s list of priorities.</p>
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