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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; PC</title>
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		<title>9/11 and the Fog of Denial</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/911-and-the-fog-of-denial/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=911-and-the-fog-of-denial</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 04:58:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[9/11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anniversary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[memorial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240722</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Today's reminder of the heavy price we pay when our leaders succumb to delusions on Islam.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-10-at-6.29.46-PM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240725" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-10-at-6.29.46-PM-450x340.png" alt="9/11" width="295" height="223" /></a>Thirteen years after 9/11, there is one thing that virtually all our politicians, law enforcement officials, and mainstream media guardians of opinion know: that attack had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, and neither does any other jihad terror attack, anywhere, no matter how often its perpetrators quote the Qur’an and invoke Muhammad. Islam, we’re told again and again, is a good, benign thing – indeed, a positive force for societies, and to be encouraged in the West. Jihad terror is an aberration, an outrage against the Religion of Peace’s peaceful teachings. These lessons from our betters are coming more and more often in light of the advent of the Islamic State.</p>
<p>The caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10939235/Rome-will-be-conquered-next-says-leader-of-Islamic-State.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">has a PhD in Islamic Studies</span></a>. But Barack Obama <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-president-obamas-remarks-on-the-execution-of-journalist-james-foley-by-islamic-state/2014/08/20/f5a63802-2884-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">is unimpressed with his Islamic erudition</span></a>: “ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” State Department spokesperson Marie Harf <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/brittany-m-hughes/state-dept-beheading-us-journalist-not-about-united-states"><span style="color: #0433ff;">emphasized</span></a> that Obama meant what he said: “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion. The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.”</p>
<p>Secretary of State <a href="http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/09/231377.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">John Kerry</span></a> said that for some members of the international coalition he hopes to build against the Islamic State, joining it “will mean demolishing the distortion of one of the world’s great peaceful religions.”</p>
<p>British Prime Minister David Cameron <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/11038121/David-Cameron-Isil-poses-a-direct-and-deadly-threat-to-Britain.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">chimed in</span></a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>What we are witnessing is actually a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. These extremists, often funded by fanatics living far away from the battlefields, pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology – and they do so not just in Iraq and Syria but right across the world, from Boko Haram and al-Shabaab to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.</p></blockquote>
<p>Where is “Islam” actually battling these “extremists who want to abuse Islam”? Cameron didn’t say.</p>
<p>Showing as much grasp of the situation as Kerry, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond <a href="http://www.channel4.com/news/iraq-philip-hammond-james-foley-beheading-isis-is-isil"><span style="color: #0433ff;">declared</span></a>: “Isil’s so-called caliphate has no moral legitimacy; it is a regime of torture, arbitrary punishment and murder that goes against the most basic beliefs of Islam.” On the opposite side of the aisle, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/killing-of-james-foley-an-utter-betrayal-of-britain--foreign-secretary-philip-hammond-9687959.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">complained</span></a> that Islamic State “extremists are beheading people and parading their heads on spikes, subjugating women and girls, killing Muslims, Christians and anyone who gets in their way. This is no liberation movement — only a perverted, oppressive ideology that bears no relation to Islam.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, for every Islamic State atrocity she enumerated, there is Qur’anic sanction:</p>
<p>Beheading people: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks…” (Qur’an 47:4).</p>
<p>Subjugating women and girls: “Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them” (Qur’an 4:34).</p>
<p>Killing Muslims: “They wish that you reject Faith, as they have rejected (Faith), and thus that you all become equal (like one another). So take not Auliya’ (protectors or friends) from them, till they emigrate in the Way of Allah (to Muhammad SAW). But if they turn back (from Islam), take (hold) of them and kill them wherever you find them, and take neither Auliya’ (protectors or friends) nor helpers from them” (Qur’an 4:89).</p>
<p>Killing Christians: “Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).</p>
<p>Even if the Islamic State is misinterpreting or misunderstanding these verses, it is doing so in a way that accords with their obvious literal meaning. That should, at very least, lead to a public discussion about the possibility of Islamic reform, what is being taught in mosques in the West, and related issues. But such a discussion is not forthcoming; it would be “Islamophobic.”</p>
<p>And why does it matter, anyway? Why does it make any difference whether or not what the Islamic State is doing is in accord with Islamic texts and teachings?</p>
<p>It matters for many reasons. Aside from all the vague condemnations of the Islamic State that American Muslim groups have issued, how closely the Islamic State actually hews to the letter of Islamic law will help determine how much support it will ultimately get from Muslims worldwide. Two American Muslims have already been killed fighting for it; how many more will there be? Only by examining the Islamic State’s actions in light of an honest assessment of Islamic teachings will we be able to estimate to what extent we can expect to see its actions replicated by other Muslims elsewhere.</p>
<p>These dismissals of the Islamic State’s Islam, of course, are designed to assure us that we need not have any concerns about massive rates of Muslim immigration and the Muslims already living among us. One problem with this is that it prevents authorities from calling upon Muslim communities to teach against the doctrines that the Islamic State acts upon, and to work for genuine reform. And so the door remains open to the possibility that the actions of the Islamic State <i>could</i> be repeated in Western countries.</p>
<p>Barack Obama, David Cameron and the rest would do far better to confront the Islamic State’s Islamic justifications for its actions and call on Muslims in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere to teach against these understandings of Islam that they ostensibly reject. But they never do that, and apparently have no interest in doing it. Instead, they foster complacency among the people of the West. For doing so, they may never pay a price, but their people will almost certainly have to pay, and pay dearly.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/two-men-face-terror-charges-as-police-raid-islamic-book-store-at-logan/story-fnihsrf2-1227053771259?nk=1c1ce3e56ea095ea4048bcf141edc942">On Wednesday</a></span>, Australian police raided an Islamic bookstore and arrested two Muslims on terror charges relating to their activities in recruiting Muslims for the jihad in Syria. Australian Federal Police National Manager Counter Terrorism Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan insisted: “This has got nothing to do with Islam, this is criminal behaviour by Australians involved in terrorist activity.&#8221;</p>
<p>Gaughan could have uttered the epitaph of the West: “This has nothing to do with Islam.” As the jihadist’s knife slices through their necks, Western officials like him will use their dying breaths to gasp it out one more time: “This has nothing to do with Islam.”</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>Joan Rivers and the Humorless Generation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/joan-rivers-and-the-humorless-generation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=joan-rivers-and-the-humorless-generation</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2014 04:40:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CNN]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fredericka Whitfield]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[humor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joan Rivers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politically correct]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[walk off]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236192</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the politically correct culture is killing comedy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ddec5eecb389a90215687b9ef2d7017e.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236193" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ddec5eecb389a90215687b9ef2d7017e.jpg" alt="ddec5eecb389a90215687b9ef2d7017e" width="294" height="228" /></a>Joan Rivers made news recently when she walked off of a CNN set during an interview with Fredericka Whitfield.</p>
<p>When Whitfield suggested that Rivers could be “mean,” the latter informed the former that under no circumstances should she be interviewing someone, like Rivers, for whom comedy is a calling.</p>
<p>Whatever else may be said of Joan Rivers—I, for one, have never had much to say about her at all—this much seems certain: The woman knows that of which she speaks when it comes to her craft.</p>
<p>That is to say, she is acutely aware of the purpose, the <i>invaluable </i>purpose, served by humor. Far from being “mean,” the value of the joke lay precisely in its ability to <i>neutralize </i>life’s sting, to siphon off some of the tragedy of the circumstances into which Earthly existence seems hell-bent upon thrusting us.</p>
<p>Maybe, just maybe, this is the point.</p>
<p>As Jesus said of Hell, in it there will be constant “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Hell is a laugh-free zone, a boiling cauldron of tears.  Heaven, on the other hand, may also admit of tears.  But the tears of Heaven are the fruits of joy, and the laughter that it calls forth promises to be as hearty as it is irresistible, for the inhabitants of Heaven will at long last recognize the seriousness with which we treated our lives on Earth for the folly—<i>the joke</i>—that is has always been.</p>
<p>And here we may be getting to the heart of comedy’s import.</p>
<p><i>This</i> world of ours is an uneasy mix of dust and divinity, evil and good, suffering and delighting.  In short, it is an endless supply of intimations of both <i>Hell</i> and <i>Heaven</i>.  Humor, I believe, is a hint of Heaven, an <i>emblem </i>of <i>eternity.</i></p>
<p>Humor is every bit as much of a divine gift as any other, and an even greater gift than some. <i>The Joke</i> permits us to come as close as possible, in this life, to arresting the relentless flow of time by transforming a situation that would otherwise paralyze those who are at its mercy into an object of ridicule.  It permits us, in other words, to defang and declaw the demons that haunt us, and to do so effortlessly, with a laugh.</p>
<p>The Joke makes the humorous into <i>caricaturists</i>.  But while caricaturists select for their portraits specific <i>individuals, </i>the humorous, in contrast, focus their attention not just on individuals, but upon whole sets of circumstances—including and especially that most peculiar set of circumstances that we know as the human condition itself.</p>
<p>However, as Fredericka Whitfield revealed in her exchange with Joan Rivers, all of this has been lost upon this most humor<i>less</i> generation.  For certain, much of life demands seriousness, but our culture’s prevailing <i>zeitgeist</i>—what we commonly refer to as “Political Correctness” (PC)—demands not seriousness, but <i>deadly </i>seriousness.</p>
<p>In no place and at no time has the Joke been more needed than it is needed in a culturally, ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse society like the United States.  Yet it is just such places—contemporary, incorrigibly PC, Western societies—that have essentially banned it.</p>
<p>The Joke diffuses intergroup tensions.  Whitfield couldn’t have been further of the mark in suggesting that Rivers’ jokes foster mean-spiritedness.  Just the opposite is the case: it is precisely in the Joke’s almost unique power to <i>deflate </i>mean-spiritedness that its value is to be found.</p>
<p>Contrary to the conventional wisdom, racial, ethnic, and religious “stereotypes” are most decidedly <i>not </i>fictions sprung from thin air.  They reflect enduring patterns among a significant number of a group’s members—even if (as is almost always the case) it is only a significant <i>minority.  </i>When these stereotypes reflect positively on a group, all is good.  When they are negative, though, there is no end to the inter-group conflict that they can so easily fuel.</p>
<p>The Joke extinguishes the match before it reaches the fuse.  It fumigates the air, so to speak, by allowing us to laugh at, rather than hate, one other. There was a time, not all that long ago, when people, particularly Americans, took this fact for granted.</p>
<p>Times, sadly, have changed.  Still, what has <i>not</i> changed is that peaceful inter-group co-existence is much better served by the Joan Rivers than the Fredericka Whitfields of our world.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Language of Despotism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-language-of-despotism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-language-of-despotism</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2014 04:40:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[language]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Liberty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Orwell]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyranny]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[words]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235324</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Understanding the Left's weapon of choice. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/war-is-peace.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235326" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/war-is-peace-450x337.jpg" alt="war-is-peace" width="279" height="209" /></a>Originally published by <a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/language-despotism">Defining Ideas</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Long before <em>1984</em> gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Orwell explains the reason for such degradation of language in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Tyrannical power and its abuses comprise the “indefensible” that must be verbally disguised. The gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and mass murder of the Soviet Union required that it be a “regime of lies,” as the disillusioned admirer of Soviet communism Pierre Pascal put it in 1927.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Our own political and social discourse must torture language in order to disguise the failures and abuses of policies designed to advance the power and interests of the “soft despotism,” as Tocqueville called it, of the modern Leviathan state and its political caretakers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy the transformation of meaning serves misguided policies that endanger our security and interests.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">One example from domestic policy recently cropped up in Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent in the <em>Schuette </em>decision, which upheld the Michigan referendum banning racial preferences. In her dissent, Sotomayor called for replacing the term  “affirmative action” with “race-sensitive admissions.” But “affirmative action” was itself a euphemism for the racial quotas in use in college admissions until they were struck down in the 1978 <em>Bakke</em> decision. To salvage racial discrimination, which any process that gives race an advantage necessarily requires, <em>Bakke</em> legitimized yet another euphemism, “diversity,” as a compelling state interest that justified taking race into account in university admissions.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Thus the most important form of “diversity” for the university became the easily quantifiable one of race. Not even socio-economic status can trump it, as the counsel for the University of Texas admitted during oral arguments in <em>Fisher vs. University of Texas</em> last year, when he implied that a minority applicant from a privileged background would add more diversity to the university than a less privileged white applicant. All these verbal evasions are necessary for camouflaging the fact that any process that discriminates on the basis of race violates the Civil Rights Act ban on such discrimination. Promoting an identity politics predicated on historical victimization and the equality of result is more important than the principle of equality before the law, and this illiberal ideology must be hidden behind distortions of language and vague phrases like “race-sensitive” and “diversity.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Another example can be found in the recently released report from the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. The report is the basis for the government’s numerous policy and procedural suggestions to universities and colleges in order to help them “live up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.” Genuine sexual violence, of course, needs to be investigated, adjudicated, and punished to the full extent of the law by the police and the judicial system. But the “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” the Obama administration is talking about is something different.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">At the heart of the White House report is the oft-repeated 2007 statistic that 20 percent of female college students have been victims of “sexual assault,” which most people will understand to mean rape or sexual battery. Yet as many critics of the study have pointed out, that preposterous number––crime-ridden Detroit’s rape rate is 0.05 percent––was achieved by redefining “sexual assault” to include even consensual sexual contact when the woman was drunk, and behaviors like “forced kissing” and “rubbing up against [the woman] in a sexual way, even if it is over [her] clothes.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The vagueness and subjectivity of such a definition is an invitation to women to abandon personal responsibility and agency by redefining clumsy or boorish behavior as “sexual assault,” a phrase suggesting physical violence against the unwilling. As one analyst of the flawed study has reported, “three-quarters of the female students who were classified as victims of sexual assault by incapacitation did not believe they had been raped; even when only incidents involving penetration were counted, nearly two-thirds did not call it rape.” As many have pointed out, if genuine sexual assault were happening, colleges would be calling in the police, not trying the accused in campus tribunals made up of legal amateurs and lacking constitutional protections such as the right to confront and cross-examine one’s accuser.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">What matters more than protecting college women against a phantom epidemic of rape, then, is the need to expand government power into the social lives of college students, empowering the federal bureaucrats, university administrators, and ideological programs like women’s studies that all stand to benefit by this sort of coercive intrusion. This enshrining of racial and sexual ideology into law through the abuse of language has had damaging consequences, whether for the minority college students mismatched with the universities to which they are admitted, thus often ensuring their failure and disillusion; or for the young women encouraged to abandon their autonomy and surrender it to government and education bureaucrats who know better than they how to make sense of their experiences and decisions.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In foreign policy, however, the abuse of language is positively dangerous. Since 9/11, our failure to identity the true nature of the Islamist threat and its grounding in traditional Islamic theology has led to misguided aims and tactics. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, for example, the traditional Islamic doctrine of jihad––which means to fight against the enemies of Islam, which predominantly means infidels––has been redefined to serve the dubious tactic of flattering Islam in order to prevent Muslim terrorism.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Thus in 2008 the National Terrorism Center instructed its employees, “Never use the term <em>jihadist </em>or<em>mujahideen </em>in conversation to describe terrorists,” since “In Arabic, jihad means ‘striving in the path of God’ and is used in many contexts beyond warfare.” Similarly, CIA chief John Brennan has asserted that jihad “is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community,” despite the fourteen centuries of evidence from the Koran, hadiths, and bloody history that jihad is in fact predominantly an obligatory armed struggle against the enemies of Islam. The reluctance to put Muslim violence in its religious context reflects not historical truth, but a public relations tactic serving the delusional strategy of appeasing Muslims into liking us.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">That’s why, to this day, the 2009 murders of 13 military personnel at Fort Hood by Muslim Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan are still classified as “workplace violence” rather than an act of terror. This despite the fact that Hasan––whose business cards had the initials “SoA,” “Soldier of Allah,” on them––shouted the traditional Islamic battle cry “Allahu Akbar” during his rampage. Or that in a presentation at Walter Reed Hospital, Hasan had put up a slide with the great commission to practice jihad that Mohammed delivered in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.’” This command to wage jihad was echoed in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, revered as a “Grand Sign of God” for his theological acumen, and by Osama bin Laden in 2001. Those ignoring this venerable jihadist tradition must use verbal evasions like “workplace violence” and “striving in the path of God” to hide the indefensible––and failed––tactic of appeasement that prevents us from accurately understanding the religious motives of Muslim terrorists, and the extent of the Muslim world’s support for them.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">No foreign policy crisis, however, is more illustrative of the “regime of lies” and abuse of language to serve “indefensible” aims than the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The Arabs’ aim, of course, is to destroy Israel as a nation, a policy they have consistently pursued since 1948. Since military attacks have failed ignominiously, an international public relations campaign coupled to terrorist violence has been employed to weaken Israel’s morale and separate Israel from her Western allies. An Orwellian assault on language has been key to this tactic.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Examples are legion, but one is particularly insidious, here seen in a <em>New York Times</em> headline from 2011: “Obama Sees ’67 Borders as Starting Point for Peace Deal.” The common reference to “borders” in regard to what is in fact the armistice line from the 1948 Arab war against Israel is ubiquitous. Yet there has never been recognized in international law a formal “border” between Israel and what the world, in another Orwellian phrase, calls the “West Bank,” because that territory has never been part of a modern nation. Its only international legal status was as part of the British Mandate for Palestine, which was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, and which was intended as the national homeland for the Jewish people. The Arabs’ rejection of the U.N. partition plan and their invasion of Israel in 1948 put the territory’s status in limbo once Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria, which the international community with a few exceptions refused to recognize. In 1967 Israel took it back in another defensive war against Arab aggression. Since then, its final disposition has awaited a peace treaty that will determine the international border.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This may sound like quibbling over careless language, but the dishonest use of “border” reinforces and encodes in peoples’ minds the big lie of the conflict––that a Palestinian “nation” is being deprived of its “homeland” by Israel, a canard that didn’t become current among Arabs and the rest of the world until after the 1967 Six Day War. And this lie in turns validates the common use of “occupation”––which implies an illegal invasion into and control of another nation, as the Germans did to France in 1940––to describe Israel’s defensive possession of territories that have long served as launch pads for aggression against Israel. Until a peace treaty, the territory known as the “West Bank”––more accurately Judea and Samaria, the heartland of historical Israel for centuries––is <em>disputed</em>, not “occupied.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To paraphrase Thucydides, words like “borders” and “occupation” have had their ordinary meanings changed, and been forced to take meanings that serve tyranny and aggression. And we who accept those new meanings are complicit in the resulting injustice that follows.</p>
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		<title>Jerry Seinfeld, the Racist?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/jerry-seinfeld-the-racist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jerry-seinfeld-the-racist</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:29:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerry Seinfeld]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Male]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218376</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An anti-PC thought-criminal is on the loose! ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218377" alt="121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top-450x336.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>How refreshing the sound of a top-flight celebrity fearlessly shrugging off the idiocy of political correctness! The other day, on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">CBS This Morning, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">an interviewer</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">pointed out to Jerry Seinfeld that most of the guests he&#8217;s had on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">his online series on which he has automotive tête-à-têtes with fellow practitioners of the stand-up art (and the occasional just-plain-funny person), have been white males. “Oh, this really pisses me off,” replied a bracingly honest Seinfeld, who plainly saw where his fatuous interlocutor was headed. After a bit of back and forth, the comic spelled out just how he feels about the application of this kind of absurd bean-counting to matters of entertainment: “People think it&#8217;s the census or something. Its got to represent the actual pie chart of America. Who cares?&#8230;I have no interest in gender or race&#8230;.It&#8217;s anti-comedy&#8230;It&#8217;s PC nonsense.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The attacks on Seinfeld for these purportedly insensitive remarks began materializing almost at once. A contributor to the Gawker website, who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://gawker.com/who-cares-about-diversity-in-comedy-says-jerry-seinf-1515412052">sneeringly</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> called Seinfeld a “maker of comedy for and about white people,” represented him as having indicated that he “isn&#8217;t interested in trying to include non-white anything in his work” and that in his view “any comedian who is not a white male is also not funny.” Having read the entire Gawker article, I strongly suspect that this characterization of Seinfeld, far from being deliberately deceitful, was in fact an honest reflection of the author&#8217;s utter inability to grasp the concept of colorblindedness. Charging Seinfeld with “downplaying the work” of all nonwhite comics, the man from Gawker made a point of demonstrating his own PC purity: comedy, he proclaimed, “should represent the entire pie chart of America, and the glorious, multicolored diversity pie should be thrown directly at Jerry Seinfeld&#8217;s face.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The funnyman also came under fire for a Canadian woman named Maya Roy, who, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/maya-roy/seinfeld-diversity-comments_b_4733365.html">writing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the Huffington Post under the headline “Seinfeld&#8217;s Racist Comments Make Him the Joke,” accused him of “whitewashing New York” in his 1990s sitcom – only to chide him, in her next breath, for featuring on various episodes of that show “heavily accented Chinese food delivery boys” and an “inept Pakistani entrepreneur, Babu Bhatt,” among others. To nonwhite viewers like herself, railed Roy, these nonwhite characters “only existed to make &#8216;whitey&#8217; feel superior.” She contrasted the nonwhites on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Seinfeld </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">with Indian-Canadian comic Russell Peters and Korean-American comic Margaret Cho, both of whom, exulted Roy, “use humour to mock racists and homophobes, and make life just a little more bearable for the rest of us.” (Yes, indeed, they are moral scolds, which is surely part of the reason why I, for one, find both of them excruciatingly unfunny.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Half a century ago, an America in which people don&#8217;t have an interest in gender or race was Martin Luther King&#8217;s dream – the vision around which Americans of every color, eager to see their country live out the meaning of its creed, rallied enthusiastically. Today that kind of thinking is condemned as bigotry. Today a sitcom that doesn&#8217;t seek to mirror the population pie chart risks being called out for racism or sexism. Today a show that permits itself to include black or Chinese or Pakistani characters who, far from being role models and pillars of virtue prove to be every bit as hapless, goofy, mendacious, and/or self-absorbed as the white characters is by definition guilty of hate speech. Today, according to the PC sentries at the gates of American culture, comedy should exist not to amuse us by (among other things) treating received opinions with indifference and even irreverence but, on the contrary, to promote The Proper Values, as determined by, well, people like Maya Roy and the man from Gawker. Its focus should be on chiding the evil souls who harbor prejudice and providing comfort and affirmation to the virtuous innocents who are the objects of that prejudice. In other words, comedy, in this age of victimhood, of group identity, and of ubiquitous therapy, should succor the victims, go out of its way to affirm the unconditionally positive contribution of minority groups (especially those favored by multicultural dogma) to the wonderful mosaic of American society; it should serve, without exception, a psychically healthful, wholesome, and therapeutic purpose, while of course never doing anything that might stand the remotest chance of hurting or offending those who have already (in the PC view) been hurt or offended too mightily.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Time Magazine – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">yes, it still exists – piled onto Seinfeld after his comments on CBS, running a piece in which one Lily Rothman (a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.lilyrothman.com/">self-identified</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> playwright and backpacker who studied at Yale and the Columbia School of Journalism) did her share of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://entertainment.time.com/2014/02/04/jerry-seinfeld-diversity/">tsk-tsking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> about “the homogeneity of [the] guests” on Jerry&#8217;s webseries – guests, mind you, who have ranged from Jay Leno to Howard Stern, from Carl Reiner to Colin Quinn. Ms. Rothman&#8217;s inability to view these performers as a remarkably diverse crew only serves as a salutary reminder that for some people, melanin would appear to be the only</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">measure of difference. Color, in short, is all. It&#8217;s this kind of illiberal thinking that once was recognized as a genuinely serious threat to true liberal values, and that today, in the corridors of American cultural power – including those at </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Time – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is, perversely, the very essence of what goes by the name of liberalism. Ms. Rothman concluded her harangue by expressing the hope that “public pressure” would force Seinfeld to enhance his show&#8217;s “diversity.” Not so many years ago such a sentiment would have been widely recognized as ignoble, despicable – indeed, totalitarian. No more.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If anything is striking about this incident, it&#8217;s not the attacks on Seinfeld – who only a few months ago, by the way, said on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">that his “Mount Rushmore” of stand-ups would consist of Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, and Don Rickles (two blacks, two whites). No, the attacks are just the usual multicultural claptrap. What was striking – and gratifying, and heartening – were Seinfeld&#8217;s original remarks about “PC nonsense” – which, considering that they came from a man who is still the top-earning comedian in the U.S., raised expectations that the growing impatience of influential cultural figures with the poisonous influence of political correctness may yet help bring an end to the madness.</span></p>
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