Augean Stables

For those who might be interested, Solomonia has posted a video of my talk at the Newton Public library.

The talk:

Question and Answer:

Apparently it will be also screened on Newton Cable TV.

I wrote a brief comment on the Guigue affair in an earlier post. Now Nidra Poller gives the deep background.

The Martyrdom of an Anti-Zionist French Official
By Nidra Poller
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, April 03, 2008

A high ranking French official publishes an anti-Zionist diatribe on a French Muslim website and gets sacked. He wasn’t violating a taboo, just disgracing his uniform.

French citizens do not enjoy the same broad freedom of speech granted to Americans, but when it comes to criticizing Zionists and the State of Israel the difference is hardly visible to the naked eye. The abrupt dismissal of sous-préfet [vice-magistrate] Bruno Guigue, author of a text that compares Israel to the Third Reich, is not strictly speaking a free speech issue. As a high-ranking civil servant, i.e. in the service of the State, Guigue is expected to refrain from the public expression of extreme statements, opinions, or affiliations.

Nothing Guigue wrote in the controversial article posted on the French Muslim website www.oumma.com violates current “standards” of discourse on the subject. He might have been sued 6 or 7 years ago for claiming that Israel is the only country whose snipers take shots at Palestinian girls coming out of school, but authors of such statements are rarely taken to court these days. The high-profile hate speech conviction of Edgar Morin, Sami Naïr, and Danièle Sallenave, authors of a comparable diatribe published in the snooty newspaper Le Monde in 2002, was overturned on appeal.

Bruno Guigue is an « énarque, » a graduate of the prestigious national school of administration, breeding ground of almost all French politicians Left and Right—with the notable exception of Nicolas Sarkozy–which accounts for the monotonous similarity of their mindset and operating methods. Guigue, who considers himself a specialist on the Middle East conflict, is the author of several books and countless articles in the same vein as the incriminated specimen.

Read the rest.

The Herald Tribune has an article on David Marash’s departure from English Al-Jazeera. His reason for leaving is most interesting.

Note that when he took the job, he assured everyone that Al Jazeera was a fine and reputable news organization:

Calling Al Jazeera “a thoroughly respectable news organization,” Marash, who will co-anchor the news from the network’s Washington studio, said the new show aimed to “win the high end. We want to give the most sophisticated, most nuanced and most global view of the day’s events.”

Alas…

Anchor quits Al-Jazeera, cites anti-American tone

NEW YORK: Former “Nightline” reporter Dave Marash has quit Al-Jazeera English, saying Thursday his exit was due in part to an anti-American bias at a network that is little seen in this country.

Marash said he felt that attitude more from British administrators than Arabs at the Qatar-based network.

Marash was the highest-profile American TV personality hired when the English language affiliate to Al-Jazeera was started two years ago in an attempt to compete with CNN and the BBC. He said there was a “reflexive adversarial editorial stance” against Americans at Al-Jazeera English.

“Given the global feelings about the Bush administration, it’s not surprising,” Marash said.

But he found it “became so stereotypical, so reflexive” that he got angry.

The English working for an Arab news outlet, more anti-American that the Arabs? I am shocked. This is another fine illustrations of the kind of politics of resentment that have produced an “American Derangement Syndrome” that, along with its mate, Israel Derangement Syndrome, drive so much self-destructive European coverage.

Imagine… these British journalists who feed Arab hatred of the USA… they probably think the Arabs respect and like them for this. More likely, like the Algerians who cheered when France vetoed American efforts to fight Iraq, they think, “these people are weak; they side with their enemies and attack their friends.” And they’d be right to think that.

Geert Wilder’s film on Islam — Fitna (Dissension, Civil War) — which has been rejected from theaters and repeatedly blocked from websites for offending Muslims and engaging in hate speech, is now available.

Watch it, and ask yourself: Is documenting hate speech, hate speech?

Further reflections:

View this movie with the “eyes” of a jihadi Muslim who doesn’t know who made it, and believes in the destiny of Islam to conquer the world by any means. You see quotes from the Qur’an about engaging in Jihad; you hear preachers calling for jihad; you see victims of Jihadi attacks. Take out the Muhammad Cartoon, the Western music, and final coda, and I think he’d go, “Yessss!”

This could well be a recruiting device for Jihadis (e.g., considerably more elegant and to the point that Osama bin Laden’s long rambling recruiting video.

Note that the Muslims most engaged in the violence the Europeans so fear this movie will provoke, are precisely those who would find the contents unexceptional. So why are they threatening to riot?

Interestingly, the response has been remarkably muted so far. But note this comment from an al Qaeda member:

A militant believed linked to al-Qaida’s deputy chief Ayman al-Zawahri told The Associated Press in the northwestern city of Peshawar last week militants would mount revenge attacks against foreigners because of Wilders’ film.

“Foreigners will be attacked. The situation will change, change, change,” said Qari Mohammed Yusuf, whose also said his two brothers died fighting alongside al-Zawahri. “The reaction was in (the Pakistani tribal region of) Waziristan before, but tomorrow it will be in Kabul and even in Holland and in Denmark.“

Revenge for what? Quoting his buddies?

I recently attended a conference in Budapest, where I made the mistake of saying that Europe was in danger of “going under” to Islam. It was something like passing loud and smelly wind in public. Not too many people wanted to talk to me after that, and no one wanted to talk about my remark. What’s so appalling is that it’s precisely that failure to face the problem that makes it so likely. Here Melanie Phillips pulls no punches.

Sleepwalking Into Enslavement
The Spectator
MONDAY, 7TH JANUARY 2008

Step by remorseless step, the free world continues in its trance-like state to attack, disable or paralyse its ability to defend itself against the global Islamic jihad.

In other words, a form of auto-immune deficiency. Here, not only can the system’s “brain” not recognize the nature of the invasive forces, but it actively attacks any anti-bodies that spontaneously form… as in the “Canadian Human Rights Commission” in its prosecution of Ezra Levant for publishing the Muhammad Cartoons.

First, the ineffable UN has condemned not Islamic terrorism but the identification of and defence against it. As Robert Spencer reports:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference, the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, has succeeded in pushing through the UN a resolution condemning the ‘defamation of religions.’ That’s ‘religions,’ not ‘religion’ – yet according to Cybercast News Service, ‘although the resolution refers to defamation of ‘religions,’ Islam is the only religion named in the text, which also takes a swipe at counter-terrorism security measures.’ …The resolution denounces ‘laws that stigmatize groups of people belonging to certain religions and faiths under a variety of pretexts relating to security and illegal immigration.’ Muslims, it says, have suffered from ‘ethnic and religious profiling…in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001.’ This is the fault, in part, of ‘the negative projection of Islam in the media.’ The UN voices its ‘deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.’

Perish the thought. Next, the western liberal mind now presents such a mortal threat to life and liberty that a group of anti-jihadi Muslims has been driven to denounce an American Reform rabbi, Rabbi Yoffie,for his sanitising of Islamic extremism and grotesque moral equivalence. In a column in The Jewish Week, they said they viewed with dismay a ‘partnership’ between the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) which they said was not a legitimate representative of mainstream Islamic believers in the West.

Rabbi Yoffie was cited by the Post in a number of statements with which we disagree. He said, ‘As a once-persecuted minority in countries where antisemitism is still a force, we [Reform Jews] understand the plight of Muslims in North America today.’ We are Muslims concerned to protect the rights of our communities in non-Muslim societies, but we consider absurd any attempt to equate the situation of Muslims in Western Europe and North America today with historic anti-Jewish prejudice and oppression. Muslims in Western Europe and North America have not been subjected, in recent times, to wholesale denial of civil rights. Free discourse about Islam in the Western democracies is occasionally abrasive, but has never resembled the wholesale libels directed against Jews — including by latter-day Islamists — and has not been embraced by or institutionalized by any government in Western Europe or North America.

When I made my remark about Europe possibly going under to Islam, the chair of my panel rebuked me: “It’s like accusing the Jews of wanting to take over the world, a new version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The statement is deeply ironic. It’s an attempt to dismiss the awareness of an Islamic imperialism that does threaten Europe by pretending it’s as false as the forged and destructive fantasy of Jews wanting to take over the world. “Lest we end up being like the Nazis, let us not go down that paranoid path,” it seems to say.

And yet, no Jew ever claimed they wanted to take over Europe or the world; the Jews never had the demographic weight to conceive of a population take-over; and finally, the Jews’ power came from their genuinely playing the rules of the game of civil society. In the current scene, Muslims openly declare their desire to take over; they have effectuated a stunning demographic shift over the past generation which is accelerating; and they act precisely as the Jews are accused of doing in the Protocols — using democracy to destroy freedom.

Rabbi Yoffie continued, ‘Islamic extremists constitute a profound threat. For some, this is a reason to flee from dialogue, but in fact the opposite is true.’ We do not understand the intent of this statement. It appears that Rabbi Yoffie believes dialogue is possible with extremists. We do not agree. We believe that dialogue between mainstream Muslims, Jews, and Christians is necessary, but that the defeat of Islamist extremists is necessary for such interfaith efforts to succeed. We do not support ‘dialogue’ with Islamist and other apologists for violence, or proponents of restrictions on freedom under the pretext of religion.

To which one can only say ‘Bravo’ to these courageous Muslims for reasserting truth and sanity in the face of a lethally deluded Jewish liberal.

Next, an intensely disturbing development in, of all places, the Pentagon. One expects the State Department to grovel to illegitimate force, but the Department of Defence has been assumed to be more robust. No longer. It has fired Stephen Coughlin, its most knowledgeable specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism — because he committed the crime of identifying that extremism. The Washington Times reports that Hasham Islam, a key aide to the Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, tried to get Coughlin to soften his views about Islamic extremism.

Misguided Pentagon officials, including Mr. Islam and Mr. England, have initiated an aggressive ‘outreach’ program to U.S. Muslim groups that critics say is lending credibility to what has been identified as a budding support network for Islamist extremists, including front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

Mr. Coughlin wrote a memorandum several months ago based on documents made public in a federal trial in Dallas that revealed a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-origin Islamist extremist group, to subvert the United States using front groups. Members of one of the identified front groups, the Islamic Society of North America, has been hosted by Mr. England at the Pentagon.

So much for America’s role on the battleground of ideas.

In Britain, one man does get it. The Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, himself the Pakistani son of a Muslim convert to Christianity, created a storm when he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that Islamic extremists have created ‘no-go’ areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. Already separate communities, he says, have been turned into areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability.

Those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live or work there because of hostility to them. In many ways, this is but the other side of the coin to far-Right intimidation. Attempts have been made to impose an ‘Islamic’ character on certain areas, for example, by insisting on artificial amplification for the Adhan, the call to prayer. Such amplification was, of course, unknown throughout most of history and its use raises all sorts of questions about noise levels and whether non-Muslims wish to be told the creed of a particular faith five times a day on the loudspeaker. This is happening here even though some Muslim-majority communities are trying to reduce noise levels from multiple mosques announcing this call, one after the other, over quite a small geographical area.

There is pressure already to relate aspects of the sharia to civil law in Britain. To some extent this is already true of arrangements for sharia-compliant banking but have the far-reaching implications of this been fully considered? It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain.

The Roman Empire fell in part because the Germanic kingdoms carved out autonomous regions from the Empire’s living body politic.

For uttering these truths, the Bishop has been denounced by both Islamists (with the ever-more preposterous Inayat Bunglawala proving the Bishop’s point by asserting that church bells are just as much of a public nuisance in Britain as the muezzin’s call to prayer) and Nick Clegg, the new centrist Gramscian leader of the more mature infantile Liberal Democrats.

Clegg described the Bishop’s comments as

a gross caricature of reality.

Once again, however, it was a Muslim who showed up both the idiocy and the arrogance of the western liberal. Manzoor Moghal, chairman of the Muslim forum, wrote of the Bishop in the Daily Mail:

He has been condemned for making ‘inflammatory’ remarks, distorting the truth about our inner cities and ’scaremongering’ against the Muslim population. But, paradoxically, this reaction from the politically-correct establishment is an indicator of the weight of his case. If our ruling elite were not so worried that his views would strike a chord with the public, it would not have been so anxious to condemn him.

His statement about the dangers of the rise of radical Islam matches the reality of what people see in our cities and towns, where the influence of hardliners is undermining harmony and promoting segregation…However much his critics may sneer at his accusations, the fact is that the determination of some of my fellow Muslims to cling to certain lifestyles, customs, languages and practices has helped to create neighbourhoods where non-Muslims may feel uncomfortable, even intimidated.

Indeed.

It is encouraging that Muslim voices are now being heard more and more speaking up against Islamic extremism. Their task is made infinitely more difficult, however, by western liberals determined to do the extremists’ work for them.

It has been a longstanding argument that only moderate Muslims can save Islam. Given our idiocy, it may be that only courageous moderate Muslims will save the West.

[Post by Lazar and Richard; hat tip: Roger Simon, who brings it as further proof that Christopher Hitchens was right about religion.]

An interesting article in the London Times by Abul Taher discusses an interview with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Emel, a British Muslim lifestyle magazine. (Actually the article is itself a fairly editorial write-up of the interview. I wonder how Archbishop Williams feels about it.)

Given that the Times’ article makes Williams’ even more anti-American than (his own words in) the interview, it raises an interesting question we will address at the end of this post. Is the author doing a hatchet job on the Archbishop by making him sound even more ludicrously anti-American than he really was? Or is he trying to spell out for his readership the anti-American lessons that the Archbishop was too subtle to articulate as clearly as the “reporter” wanted?

Archbishop Williams already has a history of anti-American behavior in his own right, and consistently urges the West to understand terrorists, not demonize them. As chaplain of Clare College, Cambridge, Williams was active in anti-nuclear protests at U.S. bases. After 9/11, he said that terrorists can have “serious moral goals“, and that they should not be labeled “evil“. Yet he had no problem calling the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq “immoral”.

In 2002, Dr. Peter Mullen wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal describing the Most Rev. Williams as

an old-fashioned class warrior, a typical bien-pensant despiser of Western capitalism and the way of life that goes with it. Perhaps this would not matter much in ordinary times, but when the future of Western civilization itself is under threat, such posturing is suicidal. What havoc this man might wreak from the throne of Canterbury.

US is ‘worst’ imperialist: Archbishop
The Sunday Times
November 25, 2007

THE Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.

“Imperial heyday” is Taher’s term. Williams actually did not make this point in his article, although he could fairly be construed to have made it. After all, this kind of thinking is so common in Europe today — the Anti-Zionist variant holds that Israeli imperialism is far worse than, say, French imperialism in Algeria — that the Archbishop could well have made it without any awareness of how facetious it is, how, in a matter of days, British imperial troops and policies killed more “natives” — men, women and children, than the number killed by Americans in any of their recent wars, or the Israelis in the last century.
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In an interview with a French journalist last week I made the point that the French police live in constant fear of a French “al Durah” — with a “youth” killed by the police, even as a mistake, they can end up not just with rioting, but with suicide bombing. That’s why when the rioting happens, the police are extremely reluctant to suppress the violence. The first part of that prediction just came true in Paris where two boys died when their moped smashed into a police car and it led to immediate rioting. Note that the police are nowhere to be seen.

Boys’ moped deaths ignite riot in Paris suburb
By Peter Allen in Paris
Last Updated: 1:44am GMT 26/11/2007

Rioting in Villiers-le-Bel (from Le Monde)

Rioting broke in one of Paris’s tinder box suburban housing estates last night after two young boys were killed when their moped collided with a police car.

Molotov cocktails were thrown, and cars and plastic bins set on fire following the tragedy in Tolinette, a notoriously crime-ridden district of Villiers-le-Bel, some 20 miles north of the centre of the French capital.

One police station was set alight and another, in a neighbouring suburb, was ransacked after youths threw cocktails, and set bins alight and upturned cars.

Officials said seven police and one firefighter had were injured and there were fears the violence, which spread to the neighbouring town of Arnouville-les-Gonesse, could also take hold in other poor, suburban enclaves.

The boys who died were said by locals to be “aged between 12 and 13″.

In other words, the age of Muhammad al Durah. Except that they’re 15 and 16. One of their uncles, speaks of his nephew as 15 in an interview with Le Parisien as reported by Nidra Poller

Interviewed by Le Parisien, the uncle of Moushin Souhhali, one of the victims, says he understands the rage; it’s terrible to lose a 15 year-old boy. His body, claims the uncle, was dumped at the fire station with no respect. The police who, in his opinion, caused the accident were nowhere to be seen. He heard they were speeding. His nephew was a good boy, not a delinquent.

Police insisted that their car had not been chasing the boys, and that the officer driving suffered facial injuries in the incident, which happened soon after dusk.

But the violence had grim echoes of the disturbances which followed the electrocution of two youths in a sub-station as they fled police in the nearby suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois in late 2005. It directly led to two months of serious rioting across France, with a state of emergency being declared.

After last night’s deaths, residents in Tolinette said cars were being burnt out, with police fleeing the scene.

Police fleeing the scene. No wonder they’re called “the lost territories of the Republic.”

One local, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “Around 100 rioters have burn at least two cars, but the forces of law and order are nowhere to be seen.

“There were four police cars here, but they’ve retreated. They were charged by the rioters. Some rioters are climbing up to electric cables to try and break them and put the whole district into darkness.

“The kids who died were only aged between 12 and 13. We’re all trying to get the rioters to calm down, but it’s hard when you’re dealing with the deaths of a couple of kids, and when the police are involved.”

Rumors have the power of “reality.” It turns out the teenagers were not wearing helmets (the “mini-motocross” they were riding was “astonishingly intact“). So we have a typical, almost banal tale of two imprudent youths, turned into an excuse to riot.

A police spokesman later confirmed the boys’ deaths, saying that next of kin would be informed before they could be named.

He confirmed that, as well as the police driver, a superintendent had been badly injured as he tried to put out fires started by youths in rubbish bins.

The officer also confirmed that Molotov cocktails - makeshift bombs made of bottles, petrol and an old rag for a fuse - had also been used.

“The situation is extremely tense - we are trying to contain the trouble,” the spokesman added.

The trouble in 2005 was largely blamed on immigrant youths living in suburban housing projects who complained about discrimination and lack of employment opportunities.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who is now president, built up a ruthless reputation as Interior Minister for using tough policing and longer prison sentences to crack down on the trouble.

Mark Steyn spoke recently in Brookline at an event sponsored by CAMERA. It was a spectacular combination of brilliant and witty. Not a moment wasted; every sentence worth its weight in gold. Before the talk, Josh Katzen introduced him as a cross between Jean Kirkpatrick and Mel Brooks. I whispered to the person next to me, “He’s better than Kirkpatrick.” He responded, “… and not as funny as Mel Brooks.” But after hearing him speak, he may be as funny as Brooks.

Below some notes (filled out with my additions which are necessarily his words) and my comments.

Outsourcing the Future: The West’s World Historical Gamble
Wednesday, November 7, 2007

The default of our society right now is the mode of cultural relativism, epitomized by Christian Amanpour who apparently can’t tell the difference between a Christian school where the girls have dress codes and a Islamist country like Taliban Afghanistan where, by law, women are forbidden by law to feel sunshine on their faces.

And women who violate that law get acid thrown in their faces.

I was here this year on September 11, and heard Governor Patrick speak about 9-11: “a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the USA… a failure of human beings to understand each other, to love each other.” It’s the “each other” that’s the problem. I am not interested in “loving each other”, as much as I would love to understand. We do not live in a cheesy pop-song where “All you need is love…”

Steyn has here brought together two linked phenomena. On the one hand, cultural relativism — various forms of moral equivalence (we’re as bad as they are) and inversion (we’re worse than they are) — and on the other, what I call “liberal cognitive egocentrism.” Amanpour must “level the playing field” lest she be seen as unduly critical of Islam.

Patrick’s language is a cross between vague allusions to the Christian belief in the power of love, and classic liberal cognitive egocentrism: we’re all fine folks, let’s be nice to each other; “we can work it out” so that everyone wins. It’s not that this stance is illegitimate. Indeed, it works, maybe even most of the time (depending on how good you are at doing it). Civil society is the near-miraculous product of getting a critical mass of commoners to adopt these attitudes towards fellow citizens. But on those rare occasions, when this generous approach doesn’t work, applying it backfires.

The West is engaged in a world historical gamble on the power of cultural relativism to solve a series of civilizational dilemmas. At the moment, the Western world is beset by systemic structural defects, the most massive being demographic. The West is in demographic decline just as it has created a welfare state that need increasing population to survive, a problem still more serious in Europe, where both demographic decline and the cost of welfare is steeper than in the USA. As a result, we are outsourcing the future.
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As requested by Anat, here is Sophia’s comment to my post on the Oxford Untion, turned into a post. Her comments in bold, mine in italics.

Why isn’t this just the same old Europe, with its apparently endless and irrational problem with Jews? It’s wearing a new face now, is all.

As the French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Not only do we have a Europe reveling in Judeophobia, but one that seems determined to destroy its civilization. Apparently WWI and II (or, the “Thirty Years’ War”) were not enough to figure out that Europeans, for all their vaunted “maturity” can’t take care of themselves. Only this time, I doubt the US will come to their aid. At least the last two times they let war-mongering and fascism take over, they didn’t accompany their folly with furious anti-Americanism.

And, how many problems in the Middle East are directly related to antisemitic European propaganda that began filtering into the East in 1920 at the latest?

Don’t forget the 1840 Damascus blood libel. But don’t get carried away in this vein. The Middle East has been a deeply troubled region long before the Jews arrived: Hama rules were not invented recently.

Mein Kampf is still a best seller there and so are “The Protocols.” That they’ve found a willing audience there is tragic but they did originate in Europe; how much of the strife between Arabs and Jews has been incited by interested parties in the West, parties who realize a calm, united Middle East might actually become a rich and powerful international group and therefore a threat?

I actually don’t think the Europeans fear that. It wouldn’t occur to them. (I may be wrong.) I think the European mischief in the Middle East is largely the product of the appeal of Arabs as proxy anti-Semites in a post-Holocaust world where it’s not politically correct for Europeans to express those sentiments openly. Ironically, the Palestinians constantly complain that they’ve been forced to pay for the Europeans’ sins of the Holocaust, when they are primarily the victims of their (willing) seduction into the role of the carriers of the deadly virus of anti-Semitism. Like the Spanish in the 16th century, they kicked out their Jews, and the wealth they have has washed through their societies leaving the people impoverished and the elites immeasurably corrupt.

On the other hand, that may be too kind. As Andrew Boston argues cogently and with much material to support his case (contra Bernard Lewis), Islamic anti-Semitism has its own autonomous sources.

And how much of the conflict in the Middle East is driven by industrialist/nationalist desire to keep oil prices high? I’d bet a lot; Gary Kasparov, who is running against Putin in Russia, makes the same point in relation to Putin’s otherwise absurd defense of the indefensible - Ahmadijenad. Similarly the Soviets sought a Middle Eastern partner in Egypt, Libya, Syria and PLO and the people there got trapped in the middle. One of the biggest assets Russia has are its oil resources; combine that with a huge footprint in the Middle East and Central Asia and the global balance of power shifts dramatically; it’s the Great Game in Action, 2007 version, and Israel, with its futuristic, multicultural voice and independence, and its possibility of leading a modern Middle East, is obviously a challenge. Middle Eastern warfare and conflict, though, maintains the status quo.

It’s maddening, in the fact of looming environmental disaster, that this should be so. One of the few countries in the world that has shown what can be done in a difficult environment is Israel; it’s cutting edge - yet one British politician blamed Israel for deflecting attention from global warming due to “the occupation!”

What’s the link to this? What a great case of… I don’t think we have a word yet for this kind of idiocy. First you (the Brits, the French, the “left,” etc) become obsessed with “the occupation” to the point where you can’t even see the tragedies that are really happening, and then you blame Israel for distracting you.

And, have any of you read some of the English intellectuals from the 1930’s? Even brilliant artists like Lawrence Durrell were viciously antisemitic. It was usual; it was the voice of the British upper classes and her intelligentsia - when he and Henry Miller couldn’t find a publisher for their work, though, they turned to a Jew - whom they continued to denigrate for his identity even as he put them on the international map.

Sartre did the same thing with his Jewish admirers (and lovers) when the Nazis came. It’s similar to the way Europeans treat the US today.

The role of the British in the Middle East, the Palestine Mandate and during the 1947-1948 wars and the Wars of Attrition, up until the Suez Crisis, is abominable and little understood. We in America think of Britain in glowing, idealistic and almost patriotic terms but a closer reading of modern history, certainly vis a vis “The Great Game” in Central Asia, even WWI in Turkey and definitely in relation to the Jews both in the Yishuv and those trying to flee the Holocaust, and Europe in the wake of the Holocaust, will show a different face - the face of the Britain our national forefathers fought to escape.

So the English, like the French with their behavior in Algeria and Indochina, have much to repent for, indeed good reason to be highly self-critical of their own culture. And yet their way of handling that guilt is to a) welcome Muslims to prove they’re no longer the racist, imperialists they once were, and b) dump on Israel for reminding them of their colonial past. Will there be historians in the mid-twentieth century to wonder at this folly, or merely triumphant Islamists presiding over a ruined world?

Britain didn’t even recognize Eretz Israel for nine months, drew the disastrous borders of the modern M.E. including the catastrophically divided Iraq, gave “Jordan” to a Hashemite prince and, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, recognized and endorsed the annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem by Jordan in the wake of the war with Israel. This of course included the complete and deliberate expulsion of the Jewish people from those regions as it extinguished the hopes of Palestinian nationalists - and also placed the holiest sites in Jewish history beyond even the reach even of worshippers.

It’s hard to be a Chosen People wannabe when the real Chosen People are still around.

I have argued repeatedly that Antizionism acts in the 21st century as a form of cultural auto-immune deficiency syndrome. By appealing to the moral Schadenfreude that anti-Zionism seems to offer (especially) to the Europeans, it makes it virtually impossible for the consumer of this discourse to identify and defend against their real enemy: global Jihad. It’s so much fun to see the Israelis as cruel colonizing oppressors of a plucky Palestinian national liberation movement (PCP2), that acknowledging the forces of global Jihad behind the secular (Marxist) facade, would just spoil the fun.

After all, if you admit that the Israelis are fighting a monstrous and implacable enemy that has genocidal intentions, how could you dump on them so vigorously for defending themselves? Definitely no fun.

So, like a fat man with a (bad) cholesterol count of over 300, Europeans, addicted to their anti-Zionist bacon cheeseburgers and their anti-American truffles, just keep wolfing down the poison cause it feels so good. In the meantime, they deligitimize the very discourse that could enable them to deal with the real threat they face.

Now, from Alan Dershowitz,we have evidence that, rather than “growing up” and learning to discipline themselves, the Oxford can’t stop. Indeed, (to paraphrase Richard Burton/Henry VIII’s line from Anne of a Thousand Days), “all the world is an anti-Zionist trough and we eat from one end to the other.” Alas poor Europe, I knew it well… or thought I did.

October 21 2007; 09:10AM
Double Standard Watch: Oxford Union is dead
Posted by Alan Dershowitz | Comments: 50

This is an obituary for the Oxford Union, which claims to be one of the most famous and distinguished debating societies in the world. The reality is that it is no longer a debating society at all; it has become a propaganda platform for extremist views, primarily of the hard-left. It has now stopped even pretending to present both sides of controversial issues. To be sure, it puts forward a façade of balance, by presenting speakers who purport to represent both sides of an issue. But the Oxford Union has become a Potemkin village where a façade of fairness serves as a cover for the reality of bias. Consider for example a debate that is scheduled to take place at the Oxford Union on October, 23 2007 at 8:30pm. The proposition before the house is as follows: “This house believes that One State is the Only Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict”

Every rational person knows that the so-called one-state solution is simply a way of achieving by demography what the Arab world has failed to achieve by military attacks: namely the destruction of Israel as a democratic, secular, Jewish state. A one-state solution would produce yet another Islamic fundamentalist state in place of the secular democracy that is now Israel. The resolution is simply another way of presenting an anti-Israel side (the one-state solution) and a pro-Israel side (the two-state solution). Not surprisingly, the three debaters on the anti-Israel side are three well-known anti-Israel extremists. No problem there, because the one state side is the anti-Israel side. As Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the new republic put it: “A bi-national state is not the alternative for Israel. It is an alternative to Israel.”

Now let’s turn to the pro-Israel side. One of three speakers on the pro-Israel side is Peter Tatchell who is a member of the gay rights group called Out Rage! and of the extreme left-wing of the green party. He too is virulently anti-Israel and favors boycotts of the “the oppressive Israel state.” Yet the Oxford Union picked him to represent the pro Israel side, probably because he once opposed boycotting a gay rights march in Israel. I couldn’t find any record of Tatchell proposing boycotts of “oppressive” Muslim states, even those that execute gays. And he’s the pro-Israel advocate!

Yet compared to the next debater for the pro Israel side, Tatchell sounds like David Ben Gurion. Readers of this article will probably not believe it when I tell them who else was picked to represent the pro-Israel side by the benighted Oxford Union (after I turned down an invitation because of the “when did you stop beating your wife” terms of the debate and my proposed teammates). The pro-Israel debater is none other than the notorious Norman Finkelstein, an anti-Semitic bigot who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, saying “[I] can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists would be offended by a comparison with the Gestapo.” This failed academic, who was fired from several universities for sub-standard scholarship, emotional instability and abusing students who disagreed with his extreme anti-Israel views, was recently denied tenure and fired by DePaul University. Finkelstein is beloved by Neo-Nazis such as Ernst Zundel, who credits Finkelstein for helping to promote Holocaust denial. Finkelstein is also an open supporter of Hizbullah, which advocates the destruction of Israel. He has called Israeli supporters, including me, “war criminals”

Yet by the standards of the Oxford Union, Norman Finkelstein is regarded as a pro-Israel “scholar” – at least in this debate. Just last May, the same Finkelstein was selected to debate the anti-Israel side of the proposition: “This House believes the pro-Israeli lobby has successfully stifled Western debate about Israel’s action.” Considering the locus of the debate – and its sponsor (the Arab nation of Qatar) – it is not surprising that the proposition won overwhelmingly, despite its demonstrable falsehood. Truth plays little role in Oxford Union debates.

Will Oxford’s next debate be on whether the Holocaust occurred? And will they select as their debater in favor of the occurrence of the Holocaust the notorious Holocaust denier, David Irving? That would not be surprising since Norman Finkelstein and David Irving are cut from the same cloth and Finkelstein admires the Hitler-loving Irving. Wait! The Oxford Union just announced that David Irving has been invited to participate in a future debate. Recently Irving said that Jews were responsible for what happened to them during WWII (though he has denied that anything really bad happened to them) and that the “Jewish problem” was at the root of most of the wars of the last 100 years. That – plus his total dis-creditation as a scholar – would seem to qualify him, by Oxford standards, for defending the Holocaust. Perhaps his debate partner will be David Duke.

The Oxford Union: may it rest in peace, alongside Pravda and other departed purveyors of “truths,” Stalin-style.

It’s hard to figure out which plays more, whether they can’t stand another point of view, or whether they’re so addicted to hearing nasty things about the Zionists, that they just can’t gobble down enough? It’s like having the New England Patriots have the ball the whole game — who’s that insecure?

In either case, such indulgence spells catastrophe for a group of self-congratulating “intellectuals” who think this is just brilliant — and moral!

I haven’t been paying much attention lately, so it came as (only something) of a surprise to find out that there’s rioting in Amsterdam and Brussels which have not (another suroprise) been covered by the MSM. (Hat tip fp.) Try finding riots in the NYT over the last week and you’ll find articles on Hungary (right wing), Venezuela (students against Hugo Chavez), Iran (students against the government), Israel (Palestinian prison riot), Bolivia (regional against socialist government), but nothing on Europe. Apparently, not mentioning the riots in France in the fall of 2005 for over a week, while the blogosphere was all over it, has not made our MSM more willing to report these things more readily. And not surprisingly, the dextrasphere is all over it, led by the usual suspects, LGF who got it from Digital Journal, Jihadwatch et alia. This is not promising for the MSM’s “learning curve.”

Dispatch from the Eurabian Front: Riots in Amsterdam and Brussels

From the desk of Paul Belien on Tue, 2007-10-23 16:49

Europe’s no-go zones or SUAs (“sensitive urban areas”) are multiplying. These are areas where the police no longer dares to venture and where Islamists hold sway.

Amongst medievalists, we call this areas where “the king’s writ does not run.” If the Europeans were not so insanely anti-Zionist, they would looke at Gaza and Southern Lebanon, and realize that’s what in their future. As Peter Heather noted about the Roman Empire’s fall:

Once inside the Empire, the barbarian immigrant groups continued to unify, producing still larger and yet more powerful entities that the Empire could not hope to dismantle. The result was a reversal of the strategic power advantage that had brought the Empire into being, so that these new, and more powerful, barbarian groups were able to carve out kingdoms for themselves from the Empire’s living body politic.

Every night since the beginning of last week, immigrant youths have been torching cars and clashing with police in Amsterdam’s Slotervaart district. The incidents started on Oct. 14 when a policewoman shot dead Bilal Bajaka, a 22-year old ethnic Moroccan, whilst he was stabbing her and a colleague with a knife. The officers were stabbed in the breast, face, neck and back. Surgeons could only narrowly save their lives.

Since the incident, Slotervaart has seen rioting almost every night. The Amsterdam Moroccans are “shocked” because one of them has been killed by an infidel woman. According to his family, Bilal Bajaka was mentally deranged and had a suicide obsession. Ahmed Marcouch, the Moroccan-born Socialist mayor of Slotervaart, criticized the Dutch authorities for failing to provide adequate health care for Bajaka’s mental problems.

Okay, so a Moroccan immigrant has come to Holland, run for mayor of his district, and he’s mastered the demopathic discourse of using Wester socialist values to blame everyone but his own community’s values. And why shouldn’t he? The Europeans — the Dutch more than most — have done nothing but pander to those who play this game. It’s part of the magnificent sense of superiority that the Europeans feel over the Americans because they have such a great social welfare net.

Bilal Bajaka was, however, a personal friend of Mohammed Bouyeri, the Jihadist who ritually slaughtered the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh in 2004. Bilal’s attack on the two police officers came exactly two years after the arrest of his brother, Abdullah Bajaka, the leader of an alleged plot to blow up an El-Al Boeing at Amsterdam airport. Bilal’s family background is not at all deprived. One of his sisters is a medical doctor, another sister is a Dutch judge.

This is a familiar pattern. One of the striking things about immigrant populations to the West is that the women do better than the men, and — I’m willing to conjecture — the more intense the honor-shame culture, the more the disparity between men and women. The reasons are surely many, but one of them stems from the fact that the men find subordinating themselves to Western demands for real success (study, often “under” a female teacher, submission to rules, tests, correction and contradiction) unacceptable. Women, who are used to being subordinate, do not have to “save face,” often find submitting to these rules ironically liberating.

For ten days now, the situation in Amsterdam’s immigrant neighbourhoods has been tense. Senior police officers compare the current situation in Amsterdam to the 2005 Ramadan riots in Paris. Media outside the Netherlands, however, hardly mention the riots, which aim to drive the police from Slotervaart and turn the neighborhood into a new no-go area – yet another pocket of Eurabia on Europe’s soil.

I’m reading a book on Media, Terrorism, and Theory with a piece by Douglas Kellner in which he discusses various models of global dynamics in the post-Soviet age. On the topic of Samuel Huntington’s thesis in Clash of Civilizations, he writes (p. 162):

While Huntington’s model seems to have some purchase in the currently emerging global encounter [i.e., the behavior of global Jihadis lends great credence to his predictions] and has become an influential conservative ideology, it tends to overly homogenize both Islam and the West, as well as the other civilizations he depicts [i.e., he doesn’t go for the argument that the Jihadi Islamists represent a tiny and marginal minority of Muslims]. Moreover his model lends itself to pernicious misuse and has been deployed to call for and legitimate military retribution against implacable adversarial civilizations by conservative intellectuals…

I think this remark — and a million others to the same effect — reveal what’s behind much of the attitude of the media. It doesn’t matter how accurate or relevant information is, if it puts wind in the sails of conservatives, alerts people to the necessity of fighting back, reverses policies of (ap)peace(ment), then don’t give them airtime. They’re dangerous.

Similar events are currently taking place in Brussels, the capital of neighbouring Belgium and of the EU. Last Sunday, demonstrating Turkish youths ransacked an Armenian restaurant in the Sint-Joost-ten-Node borough. According to the owner the police was present at the scene but did not interfere while his establishment was being demolished. The Armenian had to flee for his life.

In other words, the phenomenon has spread from France to other vulnerable European nations. And the response of the police, like the response of the French police, is to try and contain the phenomenon without confronting it. Ironically, the Europeans who so enjoyed the impact of Al Durah on provoking Palestinian violence against the Israelis, now live in fear of having an al Durah on their hands. In this case, the death of a Muslim who was trying to kill police can provoke violence… imagine what will happen when they get a picture of an innocent child killed by the ruthless infidel police.

Another man who had to run for his life was the Belgian journalist Mehmet Koksal, an ethnic Turk. He was attacked around 11 pm on Sunday evening by a group of some twenty Turkish youths in front of the American embassy in Brussels, a few yards from the Belgian parliament building. The Parliament and the US Embassy are less than one kilometer from Sint-Joost-ten-Node. Koksal fled to a nearby police car, but a female police officer refused to let him into the car, whereupon the youths savagely beat him up. Fearing that they were about to lynch him, the police officer changed her attitude and allowed the journalist to seek refuge in the police car.

This seems to be a policy with the police in Belgium. It’s based on the same attitude that had opinion makers yelling at the Pope for provoking the Muslims to violence by calling Islam a violent religion.

Koksal told the press today that he is not going to press charges against the police for failing to help him. “The police woman was more afraid than I was and ultimately the police came to my rescue,” he said.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’d say this is unforgivable behavior from a policewoman. It’s clear that Europeans, who don’t want to send their soldiers even next door to Kosovo to intervene in genocidal massacres (a fortiori, Darfur), who, even when they do send soldiers, send “little more than heavily armed traffic cops,” are going to have to start to train their police with a bit more courage, not to mention prepare them for urban warfare. Alas. When are they going to wake up?

When discussing the dangers that Europe faces with colleagues, it’s very difficult to get them to take it seriously. Partly this comes from an almost narcissistic sense that Western culture (whose freedoms we academics enjoy to the fullest) is immortal and invulnerable, something like James Dean tooling down the highway on his hog at 120mph without a helmet. Partly this comes from their inability to imagine the Europeans behaving self-destructively, even though many of our own “progressive” values contribute to that behavior. In the asymmetrical warfare between Global Jihad and the West, the role of “progressive” values, aggressively asserted by dupes of demopaths plays a key role. Not only do “progressives” consistently attempt to silence any effort to expose the hate-mongering world of Islam