Europe's auto-immune disease

An article by Melanie Phillips just published.



In decadent Europe, freedom of speech is dying. Loudly trumpeted as a ‘human right’ for any attacks on America, Israel, Christians or on the core values of the west, it is swiftly transformed into ‘hate speech’ and the shutters are slammed down on the speaker whenever Islam is in the frame.

Lars Hedegaard is President of the Danish Free Press Society, which is devoted to defending freedom of expression -- particularly against the threat from radical Islam to extinguish it on the spurious grounds of‘Islamophobia’. With no sense of irony, Denmark is trying its damnedest to shut Hedegaard up on precisely those grounds.

This witch-hunt has now reached its third round. In January 2011, Hedegaard was tried and aquitted for racism and hate speech over remarks he made two years previously concerning sexual abuse within Muslim communities. After his acquittal was appealed, however, he was retried and convicted. I wrote about all this, and the way in which both the acquittal and the subsequent conviction turned on what were essentially technicalities, on my previous blog here.


...


Europe is clearly suffering the political equivalent of auto-immune disease -- destroying its own defences while embracing those who repudiate life, liberty and reason itself.



Read it all. It will ruin your day.

Jew Splits Anti-Zionist Lip

Mike L.

(Cross-Posted at Israel Thrives.)

In certain quarters people are upset that an IDF officer smacked an anti-Zionist activist in the mouth with his rifle.

Speaking strictly for myself, I find it very difficult to care.

Andreas Ias is a member of the anti-Zionist International Solidarity Movement (ISM) that believes that Israel must dissolve itself as a Jewish state by allowing millions of non-Israeli Arabs to move into the country in order to swamp the minute, and thus vulnerable, Middle East Jewish population. The guy is a member of an organization that is an enemy to the Jewish people and who would, if he could, deprive the Jews of the Middle East of their means of self-defense. Toward this end he seeks to help "Palestinians" delegitimize the Jewish state through stunts that are meant to make Israel look bad before the world community.

And now the poor guy has a busted lip.

Gee, I'm heart-broken, I tell ya.

Israeli humour

geoffff


For some reason that post about the comical failure of the pro-war activists to get their boats out of the harbours last year, to take part in the annual Death to the Jews left/liberal jihad and charity drive, reminded me of my current favourite Israeli commercial. It was just one thing after another for the hapless losers. Engine trouble, mysterious sinkings in the night, water police, problems with officialdom, unexplained explosions ...

Recently I bought a new tablet. I don't have to tell you what make.

Left/liberal Peace Activists at Work

geoffff

This is the gift that the Destroy Israel Now left/liberal activists left for the Jewish state after their detention and deportation from Ben Gurion airport following their annual "Flytilla" Pallywood-style publicity stunt aimed at demonising Israel and supporting overt genocidal antisemitism. Current members of the Australian Greens , including former parliamentarians and local counsellors, and their Australian friends and allies, participate in these protests.

As usual, the protest was a damp squib; about as successful as a North Korean missile launch. Most of the dickheads didn't even manage to get on the planes, reminiscent of last year's Death to the Jews Flotilla when most of their boats didn't manage to get out of the Mediterranean harbours. Not even Turkey.

Last year a number of blogs did a good job at outing Australian participants in these obscene pro-war demonstrations. Not all of them are keen to show their faces and even then most often on Press-TV, the official English language broadcaster of the regime that hangs gays and child rape victims from cranes, exterminates religious and ethnic minorities as policy and tortures and butchers university students and other dissidents in the streets.

It's a bit harder this year because most of them didn't get anywhere near Ben Gurion airport to unfurl their Welcome to Palestine banners. Welcome to Palestine. Whatever could they mean by that? Ben Gurion is in Tel Aviv.

(h/t Mike L / Doodad)

Progressive-Left "Humanitarian" Racism

(Cross-Posted at Israel Thrives)

Mike L

The most racist political movement in the West today, aside from radical Islam, is the progressive-left.  I come out of that movement and I am here to tell you that it is absolutely crawling with a kind of insipid racial condescension that you will not find anywhere else within the American political scene.

Those of us who come out of the progressive movement in the United States tend to assume that racism is a malicious right-wing conservative tendency, whereas the truth is that the American conservative-right has done a much better job of marginalizing its racists than has the progressive-left.  It will make me few friends to say so, but it happens to be the case, and I give considerable credit to William F. Buckley.

People are now beginning to awaken to the situation and this article by Manfred Gerstenfeld, entitled "Beware the humanitarian racist," is one that is worthy of attention.  The reason for this, of course, is that Gerstenfeld is right.  Contemporary progressive-left racism is different from the more traditional forms of racism, but it is the prominent form in the twenty-first century west.

Progressive-left racism, which is to say contemporary western racism, when it is not directed at Jews takes the form of "humanitarian racism."  That is, it is <i>well-meaning</i> racism and therefore not even generally acknowledged as racism.  Its primary form of expression is that of condescension.  Among many people on the progressive-left non-white people are considered so inferior that they should never be held responsible for their own behavior.  Consider it a kindly form of racism. Thus when a French Muslim Jihadi kills some French soldiers, a rabbi and 3 little Jewish girls, out of love for Allah and because they tell one another that Jews are mean, progressives refuse to acknowledge radical Islam as the source of hatred.  Instead they blame Americans, or the West more generally,… and the Jews.

The United States and the West are to blame, or so they tell themselves, because of our racist and militarist and colonialist and imperialist pasts and present.  The Jews are to blame because we, both diaspora and Israeli, tend to support the Jewish state.  Among anti-Semitic progressives, Israel is considered (contradictorily enough) as an imperial puppet of the West, as well as the nefarious power behind the scenes, pulling the strings, over western media and governments.

In this way humanitarian racism lends support to radical Islam because it agrees with certain fundamental premises of that genocidal movement.  The convergence of radical Islam with the western Left is a phenomenon that I refused to face until the Mavi Marmara incident.  This was a case of “well-meaning” progressives joining forces with actual genocidal Jihadis in order to confront Jews on the open seas.  When Israel sought to detain this ship so that it would not be allowed to break the blockade of Gaza, Israeli soldiers were clubbed and knifed by Muslims seeking martyrdom in an effort to murder Jews.

They were then lionized as “peace activists” throughout the progressive left.

Progressives, in effect, told the world that Koranically-based genocide of the Jews, a little project that has been ongoing for 1,400 years, was actually a matter of “resistence” and thereby something to be supported.

It should be noted, however, that there are distinct differences between progressive-left humanitarian racism and progressive-left anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.  The first thing to acknowledge is that the former is very widespread throughout the progressive movement, while the latter is not.  The former is encouraged, while the latter is tolerated.  Humanitarian racism is the primary form of racism in the West today, while anti-Semitism cloaked under the banner of anti-Zionism is accepted by the progressive-left under the alleged umbrella of “human rights” and “social justice.”

Why any Jewish person would continue to support a political movement that stands directly against our own well-being is beyond me.  Why any Jewish person would support a president of the United States who tells the world that the rise of radical Islam, under the misnomer “Arab Spring,” is something akin to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, is also beyond me.

The time to stand up is now.

Bye bye Bobby Boy Scout

AKA  Dirty Deal Doc. I was working on a piece on why this blog has it in for the Australian Greens when the head toad jumped. Don't worry. Nothing has changed. This blog still has it in for the Australian Greens.

I've got a theory on the resignation. Brown has never really been in politics. All those years the Greens have been the indulged spoiled brats at the table. No one took them too seriously. They can't do much harm people thought and their heart is in the right place. They are allowed to be irresponsible because they will never have responsibility. They are big kids and the other kids love them and Bob Brown is just an oversized boy scout.

That changed. For the first time the Greens were getting a taste of the blowtorch that serious politicians have always worked with.  For the first time parts of the media put them under the cynical and skeptical focus that had been reserved for the major parties and especially the conservatives.

Bob and Paul woke up one morning in Senegal and realised that the boy scout was a real power politician with a party with factions that despised and leaked on one another, with critics and enemies, and serious scrutiny of who they are, where they come from and what they are about; and perhaps worst of all the passionate contempt of numerous people including whole communities who regard Brown and his colleagues as a physical threat to their families.

Peter Pan looked in the mirror and suddenly, in a second, to his horror realised he had grown up. He saw something ugly and it wasn't just his face.

Of course he resigned.

That bizarre Earthian speech was his last grab at convincing himself and anybody who would listen that he's different; he's a good guy really and his heart is in the right place. Really quite spiritual; you know with the aliens and comets and misty mountains and stuff.  It was a direct play to the crystal waving, astrology touting, organic, alternative, way out weirdo party faction that spawned him in the first place and to which he now returns.

Gunter Grass

Another piece from Dr Mike Lumish I lifted from his blog Israel Thrives to which this blog is a proud contributor.

An unnecessary sideshow has been opened by the probably ill-advised decision of the Israeli interior minister to bar Grass from entry to Israel. One can understand this. Grass is no ordinary former Nazi. He is a former member of the Waffen SS. He claims he was conscripted and he never fired a shot. This could be true. Much of the Waffen SS were not required to do the shooting themselves. They often used Ukrainians, German special miltary police units and others to fire the guns and in any event more often used gas.

Grass's poem is a thing of supreme ugliness. An ugly thought steeped in bigotry expressed in a clumsy and ugly way. Israel is a threat to the world because the Jews might preemptively nuke Iran and kill millions of Iranians using German submarines. Maybe they will take out the military use equipment the Germans have sold to Iran into the bargain.

It is striking that the "this is hypocrisy because the Jews have the bomb too" brigade always put Israel and Iran into the same "region". Away. Not here. Perhaps it's because both countries start with the letter "I".  Iraq too is definitely in the "region".

But what really is the "region"?  India? Why not; another "I" country. Pakistan?  China? Russia? France? UK? All of these countries are within range of Iran's missiles. They all have nukes. Why does Grass pick out Israel as suddenly the threat? Because it is being suddenly threatened?

Here is an essay by Allan Dershowitz on why barring Grass from Israel was a mistake that should be reversed.

The decision by Israel's Interior Minister to bar German writer, Gunter Grass, from entering the Jewish state is both foolish and self-defeating. Grass wrote an absurdly ignorant and perversely bigoted poem comparing Israel to Iran and declaring Israel to pose a great danger to world peace. He also warned Germany that by selling submarines to Israel, it is becoming complicit in a crime against humanity.

These wrong-headed views deserve to be rebutted on their demerits, as Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, did quite effectively in his public response to Grass, by exposing his "shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran, a regime that denies the Holocaust and threatens to annihilate Israel," by pointing out that "it is Iran, not Israel, that threatens other states with annihilation," and that it is Iran who supports the Syrian regime's crackdown of its people and "stones women, hangs gays and brutally represses tens of millions of its own citizens." Grass' poem has also been effectively critiqued by Israelis across the political and literary spectrum. That is as it should be in an open, vibrant democracy, accustomed to rancorous public debate. But a great nation, committed to freedom of expression and dissent, should not bar a critic, even a critic as bigoted as Grass, from its territory.

Gunter Grass has always had a problem with Jews, from his early days as a member of the Hitler youth and Nazi SS to his most recent application of a nasty double standard to the Jewish state. But his ridiculous poem doesn't pose any security threat to Israel that would justify his physical exclusion from the country.

Maybe. Read the article. The Israelis says they are just pointing out Israel has to bar former Nazis by law. Perhaps they are merely taking the opportunity to remind Grass of that. It certainly does not impede the right and power of this particular former Nazi to express himself. Just at some physical distance is all.

geoffff

Günter Comes Full Circle

Mike L.

(Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers.)

Nobel prize winning writer, Günter Grass, was a Nazi.

As a member of the Waffen SS, he was a soldier and a fighter for Nazi beliefs, values, and ideals. If he was a "good" Nazi he believed that Jews are responsible for much, if not most, of the world's misery and therefore needed to be stomped like a cockroach.

The Germans didn't slaughter the Jews because they were mean, they did it because they believed that the Jewish people were a disease on German culture and society, if not cultures and societies throughout the world. In particular, the Nazis accused its population of Jews (which amounted to about 1 percent of the whole) of being responsible for World War II, itself. They considered the Jewish people a menace who needed to be crushed. Whatever else Günter Grass thought that he was doing as a young Nazi, he promoted this bloody defamation of the Jewish people. It was a view that led to the slaughter of two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, including much of my own family.

Since that time, of course, Grass has redeemed himself... or so we all thought. The writer of The Tin Drum was widely believed within liberal Jewish circles to be a Nazi who reclaimed his humanity. In all fairness, I have not closely followed this man's career, but he is someone that I was aware of growing up. I read The Tin Drum as a kid and I saw the movie. My recollection, faulty as it may be, was that this was an artist of sensitivity and intelligence.

That's what I thought.

Every once in awhile... however... unfortunately... to my never-ending horror and disgust... an artist or thinker that I admired comes busting out with malicious anti-Semitic nonsense of the type that historically has gotten us killed. When I first heard Helen Thomas yammering about the need for Jews to "get the hell out of Palestine" and to move back to Poland and Russia and Alpha Centauri Seven, I practically fell out of my chair. I just couldn't believe it.

And now we discover that the great, world-renowned writer, Günter Grass, still believes that the Jews are a menace to the world who want nothing more than genocide for another people, for no other reason than shear malice. He wrote:

It is the alleged right to the first strike / That could annihilate the Iranian people/ Subjugated by a loud-mouth / And guided to organized jubilation / Because in their sphere of power / It is suspected, a nuclear bomb is being built.

Annihilate the Iranian people? Really? Merely because we "suspect" a bomb is being built?

Over at Bloomberg News, Jeffrey Goldberg has some words:

Perhaps it reads better in the German, or perhaps Grass is simply T.S. Eliot’s inferior in anti-Semitic poetry, but put aside the poem’s aesthetic shortcomings and consider the idea advanced in the first two lines: That Israel, which in reality is contemplating targeting six to eight nuclear sites in Iran for conventional aerial bombardment, in fact wants to annihilate the Iranian people in a “first strike.”

This is, of course, delusional. Not even the Iranian regime seems to believe this. To make yourself believe that Israel is seeking to murder the 74 million people of Iran, you must make yourself believe that the leaders of the Jewish state outstrip Adolf Hitler in genocidal intent.

In this way the former Nazi, Günter Grass, much like his former compatriots, the original Nazis, is again telling the world that the Jews are a menace that must be stopped at all costs. The hideous irony is that the Israelis are not calling for the genocide of anyone. All they want is to be left alone so that they can build computer doodads and send Natalie Portmans out into the world.

The fact is, however, that many of the surrounding 200 to 300 million Arabs (and Persians) are calling for the slaughter of the Jews. We are 1/50th of the region's population, yet western European's often tell one another that the Jews are menacing the Arabs and Muslims, even as so many Arabs and Muslims scream to the hillside about their genocidal desire to murder us.

How's that for twisted and sick?

And, so, Günter Grass comes full circle. He started out supporting a political movement that defamed the Jewish people, leading to our slaughter, and now he intends to go out defaming us again.

Good-bye, Günter.

You're done for the day.