Saturday, July 17, 2010

Riot, Dudley, U.K.

During the course of a Muslim rampage in Dudley, West Midlands, a car hurt six people. The car just jumped out from nowhere and hit six people for no reason. It might have been drinking the night before and was angry that its wife kicked it out of the garage. Yeah, that's probably right. Meanwhile, back at the riot....

From Jihad Watch, Hugh writes:

A story on the BBC website about six pedestrians hurt when the driver of a car tried to run them down in Dudley reads thus:

17 July 2010

Six hurt as car hits pedestrians in Dudley

Six pedestrians were injured, three seriously, when they were struck by a car in the West Midlands.

The ambulance service was called to the junction of King Street and Stafford Street, Dudley, at 1605 BST.

Three men, aged 42, 37 and 32 suffered head injuries. The 37-year-old also broke his leg.

Three others, including a girl aged 16 whose leg was broken, also needed hospital treatment.

An 18-year-old man suffered a foot injury and a 19-year-old man has a suspected broken leg, the West Midlands Ambulance Service said.
----------------------
It will be interesting to see what further information comes out about the driver, and other occupants, of that car. Let's see how long it takes.


We won't find out from the BBC or from some of our media in Vancouver, Canada who are so confused and [...] that they think of the Tea Party as akin to Hizb'allah supporters. More here as it comes.

Up-Date. Dudley Police Report: 6.00pm

A man has come forward to police after six people were injured in a road traffic collision close to the scene of today’s EDL protest in Dudley.

The man came forward to West Midlands Police following the incident in King Street, Dudley at around 4pm today.

Police have appealed for witnesses to the incident but at this stage there is nothing to suggest the collision was deliberate.

A force spokesman said: “We are in the very early stages of the investigation but initial witness accounts suggest a family car was caught up in a small pocket of protesters.

“Whilst trying to work its way clear the car collided with some of the protesters as they left the protest area.”

The injured, none of whom have suffered life threatening injuries, were men and women ranging from 16-years-old to 45.

So it looks like nothing much happened but that a person accidentally hit six pedestrians. We need a national news corporation to inform us of this. Thank you, BBC. Thank you, Dudley Constabulary. "Man, family car, small pocket of pedestrians, no life-threatening injuries. "

Up-date 2.

A Hindu temple is attacked. Must be English racists, right? In the same way that Tea Party supporters are no different from Timothy McVeigh, so all English are racists who hate everyone else.

"Initially the demonstration was going off peacefully but protesters tried to force some of the barriers that had been placed around the car park where they had been allowed to gather," Little said.

"They did that with a little success and when police arrived in riot gear that's when it turned ugly."

Little said many more demonstrators could have been arrested "given the violence that was shown towards the police".

Police are also investigating possible damage to a Hindu temple in Dudley.

Sky News.

If you're wondering why it is that Dudley is in such a state today, then perhaps you'd like to look at the area and its relatively recent history, from c. 1810 to 2010 to see if there's a trend in the culture that produces a huge Muslim welfare population and a hostile and anti-native constabulary guided by a clique of burghers trembling over the end of Romance and the green and pleasant land of -- oops-- Dudley and environs.

Dudley, (not so much in particular but generally for the sake of this post-modernist England,) is the rough home of Ludditism in the early nineteenth century. The areas of Dudley(ism) are welfare and anti-Industrial backwaters of Reaction since c. 1815. [Yes, professional historians will quibble.] It's the general local tradition. Smash machines, deny industrial progress, live on the dole. Live under a tyranny of Labour government in one form or another, whether it be latifundista Toryism or Trotskyite dhimmitude. It's much the same.

I'm providing links to the tales of Sandwell below to show what there is in the way of local culture in the hope that one might take away a sense of how backward such an area is and why we shouldn't be surprise by this. It's not a perfect analysis, and nothing can be, but generally it fits. In an anti-Modernist culture stretching back for centuries, we will have to expect this kind of reactionary situation.

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2009/03/sandwell-down.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2009/10/sandwells-yvonne-davies-and-our-tribal.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2009/10/sandwells-big-bill-thomas-alcatraz.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2009/10/big-bill-thomas-day-off.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2009/11/bill-thoms-sandwell-er-lye-in-mornin.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2010/03/big-bill-thomas-dead.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-football-can-save-modern-world.html

These links should give at least some idea why things are such as they are. It doesn't just spring up from the ground over-night. There is much deep background, and I hope that if one has the patience to look through the links and puzzle it out at least some of today's events will make sense in this context.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Hey, Racist.

Ha. The problem with a free country as opposed to a dictatorship is that in a free country the bullshit changes its face on a regular basis, and that leaves some people confused about the essential bullshitness of it. In a dictatorship, the bullshit is always the same, and once people catch on to it after the first round the rest is just more of the same, which no one buys but genuine mental cases. But most of us in free countries don't really get the fundamentals of this or anything else cause we're-- RACISTS.

This is the free West, and when "racist" is so worn out as to be laughable, then we'll see the geniuses turn to some other bullshit, like, for example, "Tea Party."

Yalla, racists.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Borders on Disorders

You might wonder about the drug-gang problem from Mexico into America, into the counties of Arizona, for example, and you might wonder what people aside from yourself are thinking about it. To give an idea of the public sentiment, try this for a moment, and then we can go on to other things in relation to the situation that is generally dhimmitude in it's Leftist manifestation today.

  1. Sir Baby De Porky Says:
    July 7th, 2010 at 5:04 am

    I think you need to do some backtracking on the whole Christianity issue , and keep what
    you can be sure about , and carefully quarantine /discard the rest !!!

    Here is my take , after 35+ years of research in spiritual matters , on these issues :

    Jesus was for real , he was the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra , went 18 years to
    Kashmir / Tibet , studied spiritual life there , came back a lacto-vegetarian with Yogic
    mystic powers , preached and kicked ass to the NWO of the time , and got , logically ,
    slaughtered for it , but didn’t die , and fled back to India and died there years later !!!

    The Church is so corrupt and rife with pedophilia , you’d better switch gears here !!!

    P.S. Watch ” Ring of Power ” ( i.e. ” Empire of the city ” , the longer version ) for
    appetizer , then we could talk some more…if you wish !!!

Infowars.com

Yes, it's Prison Planet. It's very popular, and it doesn't mean a thing. If Prison Planet were the most popular site on the Internet, it still means nothing, because even that would only cover a small number of people in the nation. That is not to disparage the impact a small group can have on a large nation such as ours. We'll come to that in a later part of this post, the central idea here. First, a bit of background on the problems in Arizona with drug gangs.

Pinal County investigators say an area known as the smuggling corridor now stretches from Mexico's border to metro Phoenix.

The area , once an area for family hiking and off road vehicles has government signs warning residents of the drug and human smugglers.

Night vision cameras have photographed military armed cartel members delivering drugs to vehicles along Highway 8.

"We are three counties deep. How is it that you see pictures like these, not American with semi and fully automatic rifles. How is that okay?" asked Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu.

Babeu said he no longer has control over parts of his county.

"We are outgunned, we are out manned and we don't have the resources here locally to fight this," he said at a Friday news conference.

Five weeks ago Deputy Louie Puroll was ambushed and shot as he tracked six drug smugglers.

ABC News Arizona.

Some parts of America are under siege from Mexican drug gangs. It's an immediate threat to many of our fellow citizens, and we should act to remedy this outrage instantly with whatever needs be done. That would be a prudent course of action, one based on citizenship. But we don't live in a nation today that values citizenship. Our intelligentsia today advocate and promote an anti-America, an anti-Americanism in lieu of citizenship. Many Americans, even if they are a small segment over-all, seem to love this pseudo-intellectual dhimmi approach to politics and social living generally. They seem to think it makes them appear smart to say the cliches of the Left. To be a "critic" is to seem smart-- to some. To be a "social critic" is to be not only smart but moral. The nation suffers from the presence and positions of these morons; but we might face something far worse if we act out of turn to change this outrage to something reasonable and practical. Drug smuggling killers traipse across our nation with near impunity, our intelligentsia swoon over their machismo, and the goofy faction yuk it up and smoke pot, cheering on the side-lines, jabbering about Jesus going to India to learn yoga. Bad as it is that our nation is led by cheerleaders for murderers, eunuchs, and lunatics, we might be more unhappy to see the opposition to all this in their glory unrestrained. We must do something drastic-- and soon-- to secure our borders and to secure our culture from the cutter-ants of Left dhimmi fascism; but we must be smart about it. Some solutions are likely worse than day-light shoot-outs at the Alameda.

I'll be straight here: I'm fine with civilian militias acting in place of non-existent state actors, i.e. lack of police and soldiers to do the work at hand. I mean this to include Mexican civilians too. I'm happy with an international militia tracking and killing drug-smugglers. People have a right to defend their own lives, and they have a duty to protect their nations. If there is no state power to do so, then the people must act. But I don't mean just that guy and his buddies with their rifles and some drunks along for the ride.

This solution is worse than the problem: http://vandal49588.blogspot.com/

We have this national and top-to-bottom social problem because our intelligentsia are dedicated to promotion of the Freak Show. In large part it stems from men who wish to be tough guys but who are, when it comes to it, effeminate and weak, emasculated and anti-social. Those who laud the primitive are generally those who couldn't survive it for a week alone. These are men who would be raped in prison, not the prison rapists. The dhimmis among us like it. Our intelligentsia is full of men who love the idea of hanging out with men who are hyper-masculine and violent. That they would be the butt-boys of such men, (well, not on the outside, not on the public streets, not at cocktail parties where they can have it both ways, that they can safely suck-up without getting nailed by the brute realities of such men,) is something they refuse to accept because they feel that that will never happen. I've seen it happen, and though I think it's well-deserved, I don't like it. There used to be amateur boxing arenas for men such as these to go to lap up the testosterone-filled atmosphere and where they can feel up the boys. We could bring back boxing arenas for such men with such needs. No need for such men to rule our nation and drag the rest of us into it as well. These sweat-licking, toe-sucking fat old men might like getting kicked in the face by tough guys, but our nation is not to be ruled by such men. Fuck these fetish freaks.

Ah. Look who shows up to right this malignant wrong. Neo-Nazi toe-suckers. Good grief. Normal Americans and normal Mexicans would rightly combine and slaughter the drug gangsters en masse in a week of blood-letting frenzy on the scale of The Terror. Instead we have toe-suckers in Congress and the legal system, in fact, our intelligentsia generally, playing butt-boy to tough guys. Those who act to stop this sickness? Neo-Nazis no one loves. Dhimmi butt-boys on one side, and neo-Nazi losers on the other.

I call for a citizens' Terror from the normal middle. Where does The Terror end? What about the innocent? Who should live and who should decide? No one is so smart that they can decide such things. Communities under threat of extinction act, and in time they get tired and sick of the smell of blood and the sound of screaming. Then it stops. The Terror stops, when it begins as the manifest will of the people, because the people intuit that further violence is harming them generally. Communities know. Neo-Nazi thugs with rifles in their pick-ups and butt-boys in positions of political power are not leaders of free and healthy communities. they do not know when to stop. They're just freaks with fetishes. they hate the normal and the moral for not sharing their fetishes. So what? Democracy is sometimes healthiest as ochlocracy. It's not so much the Mexican drug smugglers or the jihadis who are our problem, it's the freaks right here. Stop the freak show before we see people turning to the neo-Nazis for some relief from all this madness. Just some common and ordinary ochlocracy for a year or two.

Death be not proud

This is how a Mexican drug-gang killer meets his end. He reduced himself to being waste on the sidewalk. He's dead, and his stuff has to be dumped in a deep pit in the ground or has to be burned so it doesn't stink up the place and cause illness in the area. No nothing for him ever again. He's gone. That's it. He is nothing.

In its way I think it's like gladiation. One cares nothing for life on principle. It is a principle, has its rules and order and meaning. For all that, I think I prefer the mediocrity of the philistine middle class in America. I don't see the nobleness of the Grand Gesture. I just see garbage on the sidewalk. I have some deep respect for a man up to his eyes in grease and motor parts and paperwork and obnoxious customers demanding a discount. I might well die on a sidewalk in a puddle of my own blood, but if I do so it won't be as a grand gesture to show my contempt for life but to protect some fat lady who works at Walmart all day to come home and fall asleep in front of the television at night. That seems meaningful to me. To die fighting to protect people's right to live ordinary lives seems to me about as good as it gets for the likes of me. That no one would notice is the best of it all.

(Photo credit) http://newamericamedia.org/2010/07/mexican-elections-grim-post-mortem.php

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Waiting for Achilles Godot

Erasmus somehow saved a fragment from Aeschyus' Mymidones, a play now lost that deals with Achilles' bodyguards in the war against Troy, known to us as Turkey, a few lines from a Libyan saying about an eagle seeing itself impaled by an arrow:

"Thus not by others, but with our own feathers/ are we undone."

Aeschylus, The Myrmidones.


It's a mad, mad, Mad magazine world. What? Me worry? The only problem is Christians and other rightwing bigots, the racists, the conservatives, the pick your imaginary villain. The problem is whatever is not the problem. That settles it. Everything else is fine and improving. Thank the gods for the government. This is the best in the best of all possible worlds and the government is making everything better. Jihad? It's a spiritual striving, only turned against Western Arrogance when we deserve to be punished for past transgressions, slavery and the CIA over-throw of the Iranian Communists in the 1950s, and so on. If there are any problems in the world, then we are responsible for them, and if we are nicer people, we can change all that so everyone loves us. Jihad? What? Me worry?

"Normalcy bias."
The normalcy bias refers to an extreme mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of the government to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred that it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

Glazov interviews some folks below to see if there is a Muslim/World problem we aren't facing honestly. I think "Normalcy bias." O.K., I think that when I'm on a date. Maybe I worry too much. But what if Geert Wilders is right, that Islam is a serious danger to the world as a place of freedom and safety and relative affluence? What if our intelligentsia comprises fools who are dangerous to us as individuals and nations?

Jamie Glazov, "Symposium: The Fear that Wilders is Right," Front Page Magazine. 9 July 2010

FP: Roger Simon, Robert Spencer and Kevin Levin, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Today we witness the blatant desperation in our culture and media for a “moderate Islam” — an Islam that many non-Muslims vehemently insist exists, but that mysteriously eludes them. This moderate Islam will make everything better, we are told, once the “extremists,” who are the “minority” in Islam, will be sedated. This sedation will be most easily achieved, the argument continues, when the Islamophobes stop blaming Islam after Islamic terrorists point to Islamic scriptures in explaining what inspired them to perpetrate their terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, in terms of the planet that we happen to be occupying, a “moderate Islam” is nowhere to be found; no school of Islamic jurisprudence exists that counsels Muslims to renounce the Qur’an’s teachings on Islamic supremacism and the obligation of violent jihad. And yet, to suggest the truth of this reality in our culture gets one only the accusation of being a racist and an “Islamophobe.”

Roger Simon, let me begin with you. What do you think of this phenomenon? You recently wrote a profound piece at Pajamas that touched on one of its crucial foundations. In analyzing why the likes of Glenn Beck and Charles Krauthammer have attacked Geert Wilders, you interpreted that these conservative individuals, from whom we might have expected something different on this score, are, what it all comes down to it, rejecting Wilders because they are afraid that he might be right....

Simon: [...]

Islam is an almost unsolvable conundrum. How do you deal with a religion with a billion adherents that is expansionist in ideology and threatens to kill its apostates? How do you get a reformation of that religion when its holy book, from which those dictums come, is reputed to be dictated verbatim by God and is therefore immutable? Talk about “inconvenient truths,” these are about as inconvenient as they get. No wonder they are buried from the discussion and ignored. We in the West live in a society that cannot even begin to wrap its mind around that. I know – it’s hard for me.

So where does that leave Wilders? I believe that consciously or unconsciously those who brand him as excessive, or even racist, are living in fear that he may be right. They have to hate Wilders, because if he is correct, their whole world disintegrates. Who would want that?

He and the small group like him have therefore morphed into our clearest contemporary examples of those poor Greek messengers to be killed for bringing the bad news. A salient recent example is Nicholas Kristof’s unhinged attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the New York Times Book Review – a supposed liberal going off on a woman who had a cliterodectomy for daring to dwell on how women were oppressed in the Islamic world. It’s almost pathological. Another recent example are the similarly unhinged attacks on Israel over the Gaza flotilla incident while completely ignoring vastly more horrific acts occurring in the Muslim world on an almost daily basis. We dare not insult them lest they go mad.

It’s almost as if the world has become a giant dysfunctional family, enabling their huge Muslim branch to remain besotted – or drugged out – on sub-Medieval ideology. And the situation is getting worse. The principle bastion of hope of reformation of the Islamic world – Turkey – made its turn back toward fundamentalism years ago now.

So again, where does that leave Wilders? One lonely canary. We have to support him, but I’m not optimistic. I hope my colleagues are.

FP: Thank you Roger Simon.

Kenneth Levin your thoughts? A species of the Oslo syndrome is involved in this phenomenon right?

Levin: I do see a form of the Oslo Syndrome operating here. [...]

The perpetrators of 9/11 and their myriad supporters quickly made clear their objective of imposing their Islamist rule worldwide and their comprehension of doing so as a religious duty. Yet many in America sought, and continue to seek, to recast the threat, to rationalize it, and to urge policies aimed at appeasing Islamist leaders and followers in the delusional hope of thereby extricating the nation from the dangers it faces.

Geert Wilders argues that Islamofascism derives directly from Islamic teachings, including Koranic exhortations. His movie, Fitna, advancing this argument, is unimpeachable in its citations of Islamic scripture and in its images of Islamofascism on the march. That those who oppose him are motivated in large part by a wish to appease the purveyors of the Islamist threat is indicated by the fact that the negative responses to Wilders have focused not on rebutting his arguments but on demonizing him and using anti-democratic means to silence him. As Roger Simon suggests, they are compelled to hate Wilders because they so want to cling to their delusional denial of the threat.

The ugly, perverse, self-destructive nature of the assault on Wilders, and the necessity to defend him, have been articulated by many. ...

Beyond the unconscionable attempts to silence Wilders, there are other indications, both in Europe and America, that the hostility directed against him is motivated primarily by a wish to deny the threats we face and to appease its agents. Thus, in both Europe and the U.S., we have a huge chorus of officials insisting Islam is a religion of peace, They insist that Islamist forces pursuing a war of world conquest have “hijacked” the religion and that the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving and tolerant. Yet these same officials give virtually no public support to those - too few - Muslims within their nations who at once declare themselves to be believing Muslims and do speak out forcefully against Islamofascism. On the contrary, such people are typically ignored and government outreach is almost invariably directed to individuals and groups linked to Islamist, hatred-promoting agendas.

[....]

One can argue there is often a more venal motive behind this phenomenon. Saudi Arabia is the prime financier of Muslim extremism in the U.S., including of education in bigotry – particularly anti-Jewish and anti-Christian bigotry - in U.S. mosques and Islamic schools, and Saudi Arabia is pandered to because of its oil wealth and its readiness to use its prodigious financial resources to win official tolerance of its intolerant message. But if officials and others looked honestly at the existential threats we face from Islamofascism, the likelihood is they would be less inclined to politics as usual and to being swayed against defensive measures by Saudi blandishments. The impact of the Saudi role is a reflection of widespread official averting of eyes from the nature of the threat.

One can also argue that much of the Western accommodationist reaction to the Islamist threat, and desire to silence Wilders’ message, are a product of Western leftist orthodoxy. The combination of hostility towards the West, moral relativism, and boosterism regarding virtually anything non-Western or anti-Western – all seminal doctrines of the contemporary leftist catechism – inevitably leads to denial of, or excuses for, or even defense of, the Islamist challenge.

But even among those whose ideological allegiances weigh against looking honestly at the nature of the threat, there were many individuals who responded to 9/11, and the additional terror that followed on the atrocities of that day, and the declarations of Islamofascism’s leaders and minions, by reevaluating their leftist ideology and abandoning their old verities for a saner comprehension of the realities we face. Those who continue day after day to cling to their delusions regarding the nature of the threat do so by persisting, day after day – out of a desperate desire to believe reality to be otherwise, to believe the threat can be wished away or rationalized away or appeased away – to continue averting their eyes from the nature of the challenge.

FP: Robert Spencer, your thoughts on the need to hate Wilders so one can cling to one’s delusional denial of the threat we face? What do you think of Roger Simon’s and Kenneth Levin’s perspectives?

[....]

Spencer: Jamie, Roger Simon is quite right that those who call Wilders “excessive, or even racist…have to hate Wilders, because if he is correct, their whole world disintegrates.” [I]’ve encountered this phenomenon many times: people essentially admitting that they don’t want to face up to the truths that Wilders and others enunciate because they believe the implications of those truths are simply too terrible to contemplate. I was told several years ago that the editorial board of a major American publication, when asked to do a profile on me and feature my writing, turned down the proposal because if what I was saying were true, “the U.S. would find itself at war with every Muslim country in the world.”

I don’t accept that as a natural outcome of what I say, but I find interesting the open avowal of the idea that what I say about Islam and jihad simply cannot be true, because if it were, the implications would be too disturbing to contemplate – and so therefore it must be false, or at least should be ignored! I encountered this again in a debate with a professor of Islamic studies at a significant American university, whose opening gambit in response to my initial presentation was to tell the audience that if what I said were true, it would be very depressing – as if that were sufficient to establish its falsity.

Contributing to the persistence of this unreality is something that Kenneth Levin alludes to – the fact that “the negative responses to Wilders have focused not on rebutting his arguments but on demonizing him and using anti-democratic means to silence him.” That demonization is a tested and true weapon in the Islamic supremacist arsenal, as well as that of the Left, ... and it is so frequently employed because it is so very effective. There are so many spineless conformists on the Right in America – they are very easily cowed by charges that someone is a “racist,” or a “bigot,” or even worse, an “Islamophobe,” and maybe even a secret “neo-Nazi.”

It doesn’t matter if there is absolutely nothing to these charges (and in the case of Wilders and others thus charged and shunned, including my colleague and coauthor Pamela Geller and myself, there isn’t); for many prominent mainstream “conservatives,” the charges themselves are enough. They will shun any contact or association with people who have been thus tarred. They are thoughtless and cowardly enough to run in the other direction at the mere suggestion of a taint, often without even investigating the case themselves. They don’t seem to realize that by doing this they’re playing the Leftist/Islamic supremacist game — effectively allowing the opposition to define the terms of the debate, choose the playing field, and make the rules. And that, it goes without saying, is a sure path to defeat.

More at: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/07/09/symposium-the-fear-that-wilders-is-right/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_campaign=806d38e0e6-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

That's four guys in agreement talking to each other. Leftards aren't going to give up their religion due to that. They cling to their 'normal' and resent any disruptions, sometimes hysterically. Normalcy bias is probably lovely for those attached to it. It isn't, as I know from having seen vivid examples in life, but what the hey? Let's look at it further and see what we can. It won't change the minds of the biased, but for some it might clarify the situation, giving us confidence in our understandings, firming us up, as it were, in this battle against the disaster that is Left dhimmi fascism in practice in our Modern world.

Richard Landes, "The Hidden Costs of Jew-Baiting in England," Pajamas Media. 10 July 2010

London is an amazing place, full of vitality, intensity, foreign tourists and residents, a patchwork of pluralism. Talk to the average person, and nothing seems amiss: this cab driver, having driven in London for 40 years, sees no significant change in the neighborhoods he travels through; this financier sees no signs of intimidation; this shopper, this tavern-hopper, this man on the bus, lives in an interesting and relatively normal world. A superficial walk through the [Regent’s] park gives the distinct sense of normality.

But talk to the Jews, and you get a different story. The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists held a conference here this week. The topic: Democratic and Legal Norms in an Age of Terror. Panels discussed everything from the Goldstone Report, to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, to “universal jurisdiction” (lawfare against Israelis brought in foreign courts). Here, in the Khalili Lecture Theatre of the SOAS (School for Oriental and African Studies), Jewish lawyers discussed a grim reality whose only public appearance on an everyday basis is the drumbeat of calumny that a boisterous elite — NGOs, journalists, academics — rain down on Israel.

Perhaps the most startling of the sessions concerned the BDS movement. Jonathan Rynhold, from the BESA Center at Bar Ilan, and Anthony Julius, author of Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, both presented a picture of British anti-Zionist activity whose intellectual and moral foundations were profoundly irrational, a dogmatic will to stigmatize and destroy Israel that responded to no argument about proportion (what about other places?) or reason (you make no moral demands of the Palestinians). And behind that lies a much weightier volume of negative feeling, a kind of unthinking animosity that expressed itself in its most banal form when a woman explained to Julius: “We all know why the Jews are hated: you marry among yourselves and live in ghettos like Golders Green and Vienna [sic].” In so doing, she put her finger on the most widespread subtext for hostility to Jews – “they think they’re the chosen people.”

Daniel Eilon, an English barrister, explained to me one of the mechanisms. It isn’t real anti-Semitism. In fact, most of the stuff that comes out against Israel is intellectually hopeless — phony narratives based on fantasy “facts.” This is really just good old-fashioned Jew-baiting. It’s saying things in all righteous innocence that you know will hurt the Jews to whom you address the criticism. The problem for the Brits (and the Europeans in general), he pointed out, is that historically, there’s never been a particularly high price to pay for Jew-baiting. Now there is.

What my friend referred to with this last remark is lucidly analyzed by Robin Shepherd in his recent book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel. The elephant in the room, of course, is radical Islam — the people who interpret being “chosen” by Allah as a charter to dominate the world and submit everyone, willingly or not, to Islam. They’re the people no one dares bait; and they’re the folks who take full advantage of every deference to press for more. Daily aggressions from violent gangs constantly expand the territories where the Queen’s writ does not run. In tempo with the retreat of British law and enforcement, Sharia advances from internal community affairs (explicitly on the model of Jewish religious courts) towards the policing of community boundaries and claims on the state for special treatment. The British — like so many other Western nations –mainstream the extremists and marginalize the moderates. As Nick Cohen put it: “The world faces a psychotic movement and won’t admit it to themselves.”

A documentary filmmaker reveals a double assault on freedom of speech: on the one hand, everyone is terrified of peers calling them Islamophobes; and on the other, anyone who does something negative on Islam puts his or her life in danger. When I respond animatedly to her point, she looks around nervously and signals for me to lower my voice. How often did my British informants tell me in hushed tones about being intimidated!

News agencies send their journalists to special courses in self-defense for how to deal with hostile situations. How much of this responds to the pervasive dangers of doing journalism in Muslim countries, and how often does it come up in those areas where the Queen’s writ does not run? One such journalist who works for the BBC reports that when a mob turns ugly, they are told to stand back to back, palms open, pointing down and out — a posture of non-threat, but also one of subjection.

And of course, the best protection is positive coverage. Most of the time, “but we’re from the BBC” works to allay Muslim hostility: it’s code for “we’re on your side.” But for some crowds, even that’s not enough.

The result of this pervasive intimidation that comes from both peers and enemies is a body politic that feels no pain. Like a victim of CIP (congenital insensitivity to pain), the British public receives only vague hints of the assaults on its body. A widespread omerta operates in the mainstream news media, guaranteeing that many, if not most aggressions go unreported, or in a code — Asian street gangs — that only those looking for clues will notice. Aggregator sites online offer deeply disturbing collections of news items.

As a result, Brits look away while their Muslim communities are taken over by fascist zealots who enforce dress and behavior codes, who silence dissent, and who mobilize a resentful youth with violent hatreds. For these men, infidels are by definition guilty, deserving rape and lethal assault, as part of Allah’s justice. Douglas Murray’s study of twenty-seven Muslims, targeted by zealots, reveals the workings of a community hijacked by thugs.

The trials and tribulations of Afshan Azad, the Bengali Muslim-born actress in the Harry Potter films, beaten and threatened with death by her family, illustrate the depth of the community pressures. Her brothers’ failures to bring her to heel (or kill her) endanger their lives: “We are going to get trouble from the community now. It is bad news for our safety, her safety. My younger brother is going to get harassed at college. All our family is going to be harassed by the community because of this.” The tribal community rules, even in college.

So while a large and growing population falls under the grip of a Mafioso culture with an imperialist ideology of world conquest, the British look away. The “prestigious” London School of Economics disinvited Douglas Murray from speaking, lest his presence provoke violence. Paralyzed by an inability to discuss the problem, they become a train-wreck in slow motion. The lavish expenses that the government has paid out to immigrant families, which has at once increased their numbers and stilled their rage, is now run out. Budget cuts of up to 40% across the board will only exacerbate the frictions, and if the government pours money into appeasing the Muslims, they will alienate the British working class losing their benefits.

Which brings us back to Jew-baiting. As Shepherd explains in his chapter on Islam in Europe, this is a European-wide phenomenon that is directly related to the fear of criticizing Muslims. Anti-Zionism is the key extremist discourse by which jihadis radicalize communities and mobilize warriors for Allah’s armies. The disturbing figures for how many British Muslims support terror, think Muslims did not commit either 9-11 or 7-7, think the law should punish people who insult Islam, and think that apostates from Islam should die should not be read the way we read political polls in the West. These minorities are the dominant voices in their communities, if only because they use their terror tactics against fellow Muslims far more readily than against outsiders.

So while their enemies advance, the British elites are like deer in the headlights, incapable of speaking up for even their own principles of free speech and tolerance. Intimidated into silence about Muslims, somehow, they find their voice in denouncing the “real” genocidal evil empire: Israel. Thus some wax eloquent, like the Methodists with their thinly-disguised, resentful supersessionism; and others wax violent, like the anti-Zionist vandals, who damaged hundreds of thousands of pounds of property and got off scott free to the cheers of a Green MP.

Of course, every sin these brave ideologues accuse Israel of committing is done a thousand-fold by the very people who generate their demonizing narrative — the radical Muslims. It is these zealots who interpret their chosenness as a warrant to rape and massacre, to dominate and humiliate infidels. They are the toxic communitarians who believe in their side right or wrong, to the death — not the Jews, who can’t stop publicly beating their breasts about all their sins. Indeed, one of the mysterious factors in this madness is the role played by Jewish anti-Zionists, who, in Julius’ memorable phrase, are “proud to be ashamed to be Jewish.”

Instead of taking note of such sobering perspectives, Western anti-Zionists shy away from the dangerous and painful but legitimate and necessary criticism of Muslim radicals. They prefer the easy, cost-free baiting of any Jew proud enough to feel that his or her own people deserve a state. Instead of turning to the Muslims and saying “why can’t you express a fraction of the self-criticism of the Zionists?” they prefer to repeat the most toxic accusations against the Jews and claim: “I’m not saying anything that Jews haven’t said.”

They are the true Islamophobes — afraid to criticize Islam, eager to join in its chorus of hatred.

And in this act of demission before the Islamist challenge, British opinion makers and shapers also submit to their own bullies, their own zealots who push the Jew-baiting beyond the weekend sport of the salons, into the professional arena of anti-Zionist activism. When the founders of Hamas in 1988 penned their genocidal charter that explicitly targeted all infidels, little did they suspect that within twenty years, those infidels would chant “We are Hamas!” in the streets of London. Who could hope for a more useful infidel than that?

In the European past, Jew-baiting may have seemed relatively cost-free. After all, humiliate a Jew and the worst he’ll do is hector you. Sure, sometimes the sport got out of hand, and killing Jews en masse, or forcing them to convert, or kicking them out may have deeply damaged the economy and empowered repressive forces, like the Inquisition, to go after other religious dissidents. But who really noticed?

Today, however, the situation has changed dramatically because Europe doesn’t just run the risk of internal failure, but getting vanquished by an implacable and merciless foe. By failing to denounce toxic Muslim communitarianism and instead adopting its shrill discourse of demonization about Jews, Brits feed the monster that devours them. If it continues apace, if the British do not make Muslim civility towards Jews the shibboleth of assimilation to a free and democratic culture, they risk losing that civil polity entirely. As always with real anti-Semites, the Jews are only their first target.

Can Britain wake up in time? And if and when it does, can it swallow the painful price of giving up its addiction to Jew-baiting? Or will it be, as some close observers think, the first country in Europe to succumb to Islamism? Walking through the delightful streets of London, watching a brilliant performance of Henry IV Part II at the reconstituted Globe Theatre, passing by a multi-cultural mass of dancers by the embankment at night, viewing the vibrant energy of the city, one has little clue to the problem.

Or is watching this joyful celebration akin to seeing a fat man with a serious cholesterol problem dine on his deep-fried fish-and-chips and wash down those tasty truffles of moral Schadenfreude that so grieve the Jews and comfort the resentful?

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-hidden-costs-of-jew-baiting-in-england/?singlepage=true

"Normalcy bias" screams out at me here. People are terrified of being afraid. Those of us who aren't afraid of being pissed-off await our hero, which makes me think of Achilles skulking in the background, refusing to come forward to lead our army against the threat we face, the threat we must act against, normalcy bias predominant or not. It's not that jihadis are a billion strong and we can't possibly fight them without nuking the whole world. A couple of well-placed punches and Islam's rotten edifice will fall of its own corruption.

In keeping with the hero Achilles in a mad, mad, Mad Magazine world, here's a bit more to finish this off:

Ulysses:

And 'tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,
Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length,
Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida.
Act 1, Scene 3, L. 133-35

(Originally posted at Covenant Zone.)

Sunday, July 11, 2010

To Murder Molly Norris

I'm taking this personally in a way I haven't done even when I'm the one under direct attack by jihadis: An American jihadi is calling for the the murder of Molly Norris. My usual good temper is shot to shit right now. Scaring Molly Norris is grounds for war where I come from. How can anyone be so low as a jihadi? I can't begin to imagine the sickness of the soul that possesses these Muslims.

"Qaida magazine urges killing of those who defame Mohammed"
DUBAI: An English-language Al-Qaida magazine in its first issue ran an article it said was penned by US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki calling for the execution of anyone who defames the Prophet Mohammed.
"The proper solution to this growing campaign of defamation" of the prophet is "the execution of those involved," reads the article in web magazine "Inspire," in a text provided by the US monitoring service SITE on Sunday
.
The article singles out Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris, who satirically proposed to make May 20 an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," although Islam bans the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous.

"A cartoonist out of Seattle, Washington, named Molly Norris started the 'Everyone Draw Mohammed Day,'" the article attributed to the radical Yemeni cleric says.

"She should be taken as a prime target of assassination, along with others who participated in her campaign."
Times of India/India Times.

Let's make it easy. "How many jihadis do not want to murder Molly Norris?" Those few might be the few I don't hate. The rest are garbage. This makes me sick to my stomach. Come for me! I'm easy to find.