Category Archives: Cultural

No safe spaces for Christians

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What does anyone know about the persecution of Christians? From Jim Goad:

They know nothing of Christianity’s first few hundred years under the Romans. They know nothing of Tamerlane leaving hundreds of thousands of decapitated Christian skulls in his bloody wake. They know nothing of the religious underpinnings of the Armenian genocide. They know nothing of the mass slaughter of Christians under totalitarian communist regimes. They certainly know nothing about the fact that since the early eighth century, Muslim imperialists have raped, murdered, tortured, and beheaded Christians everywhere they could get away with it. They don’t know that the mass persecution of Christians during the French Revolution is considered by many to be the first modern genocide. They don’t know that in Saudi Arabia, Christians are routinely whipped in public and executed. They don’t know that in North Korea, Christians are being exterminated in gas chambers. Despite all the chest-thumping they do about “Islamophobia” and “anti-Semitism,” they don’t seem to know that an estimated 80% of all modern religious persecution worldwide happens to Christians.

And they definitely don’t act like they know that for decades, the Middle East has been one ongoing slow-motion anti-Christian Kristallnacht that only seems to be escalating.

Let my right hand forget her cunning

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It is Psalm 137 in reggae. This is where it was sung and why.

The Jewish rapper/reggae artist known as Matisyahu demonstrated an unusual degree of courage yesterday when he performed at a Spanish music festival in front of a sea of Palestinian flags and hecklers from the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

Previously, Matisyahu had been disinvited to the festival because he refused to take part in a pro-Palestinian video and did not respond to questions about whether he believed in a Palestinian state. But the Spanish foreign minister along with the American and Israeli embassies lobbied the festival organizers and the artist was reinvited.

What happened when he mounted the stage should be made into a Hollywood movie:

Far from boycotting the reggae artist’s gig, the “hate Israel” crowd showed up en masse. And they came bearing flags, immense Palestinian flags, which they waved with gusto from every corner of the 20,000-strong crowd.

As Matisyahu took the mike and looked out to the audience, he was presented with an unmistakably hostile message. It was clear that those who sought to have him banished stood before him in protest. Then the catcalls started, with some chanting, “out, out.” It might easily have been unnerving, disorienting.

But then he began to sing about Jerusalem.

“Jerusalem, if I forget you, fire not gonna come from me tongue. Jerusalem, if I forget you, let my right hand forget what it’s supposed to do.”

And then, as he bounced and twirled around the stage, the most defiant lyrics of all: “3, 000 years with no place to be, and they want me to give up my milk and honey.”

“Tonight was difficult but special,” he later posted on Facebook, along with a clip of the performance.

What courage. Not to be intimidated when the concert organizers demanded he pacify the BDSers, and then to return to the festival’s schedule in defiance of the opposition, and chant Jerusalem on stage with such gusto.

What courage.

Brendan O’Neill – “Here’s my beef with gay marriage”

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This is a guest post at Catallaxy by Brendan O’Neill on gay marriage:

Sinclair Davidson seems to think my main beef with gay marriage is that the people who campaign for it use unpleasant tactics. But this is merely an observation. And it’s the one I made on Q&A last Monday because I had just witnessed the doublespeak of Sam Dastyari, who said, in response to traditional marriage campaigner Katy Faust, that “people are entitled to have different views” (how generous of him) “but this American evangelical claptrap is the last thing we need in the debate”. For me, this summed up the illiberal liberalism of the gay-marriage campaign. “You’re entitled to your view; just don’t express it.”

Beyond this observation, however, my gay-marriage scepticism (an awful phrase, I know) is driven by a belief that gay marriage expands rather than diminishes the power of the state over our lives.

The first way it does this is through allowing the state to redefine the moral meaning of marriage. For much of the modern period, the state has brokered marriage, yes. But the moral idea and value of marriage is something that developed organically over centuries through the interplay of communities and traditions. That the gay-marriage campaign grants the state a new, unprecedented authority over how we define our personal relationships and family lives is clear from the relish with which the ruling elites of Canada, the UK and elsewhere have rewritten public documents to excise mentions of “mothers”, “fathers”, “husbands” and “wives” in favour of a more neutral language to suit their homogenisation of all relationships as “marriage”. Those who say “They’re only words, who cares?” clearly don’t know their Orwell: the policing of language is very often a policing of attitudes, a reengineering of societal values so that they better accord with the elite’s view.

The second way the gay-marriage campaign boosts the power of the state is in the realm of moral conscience and freedom of thought. New equality laws have been utilised to punish those who refuse to acknowledge gay marriage. Bakers who won’t make gay cakes have been taken to court. In the midst of the global celebrations that greeted Ireland’s “Yes” vote to gay marriage, few seem to have noticed that the Irish deputy PM said there would be no “conscience clause”, because it would be intolerable to “exclude some people or institutions from the operation of marriage equality”. Through gay marriage, the state — in the shape of the courts, the policing of “hate speech” and the restructuring of moral education in schools — is exercising greater control over what can be thought and said about human relationships.

So that’s my beef with gay marriage: it allows the state to increase its already considerable clout over both our personal/family lives and our consciences. The ugly tactics of the loudest gay-marriage proponents are no accident: they speak to this illiberal heart of gay marriage. There’s one question I’ve asked every liberal I’ve encountered in Australia, all of whom harangue me for my views on gay marriage: why are Western governments that are so allergic to freedom and autonomy passionately embracing gay marriage? They’ve all struggled to answer. I think it’s because gay marriage chimes brilliantly with these governments’ insatiable desire to diminish the sovereignty of the family and intervene more in our personal lives, and to police what we think.

People say Oz is different, because the law was rewritten in 2004 to say marriage is between a man and a woman. They say this means they’re campaigning for less government definition of what is an acceptable relationship. Look, I’m sure Australia is different in some ways. But from the chattering-class intolerance of dissent to your media’s suffocating conformism on this matter, your sameness to the rest of the West is what’s most striking. Sorry, Aussies, but on this you’re not as special as you think.

A final point: Sinclair, like others, says slavery and other bad things also existed for a long time and then disappeared, so what’s the big deal about marriage changing quickly too? To speak about the enslavement of vast swathes of humanity in the same breath as the inability of free, equal, often middle-class gays to get married is grotesquely to diminish that historic crime. What’s more, slavery took centuries to defeat, and its defeat came at the hands of huge numbers of ordinary people, black and white, fighting for freedom; gay marriage, by contrast, is an idea that has spread like mad in less than a decade and which is spearheaded exclusively by elites: lawyers, politicians, media people, think tanks. You can appeal to historical struggles for freedom all you like, but there’s no disguising the illiberalism, elitism and plain weirdness of the gay-marriage contagion.

A level of ignorance at an unbelievable depth

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I gave a presentation the other day to a group of university graduates during which the issue of electricity and coal came up. So I casually asked how coal is converted into electricity. And you know what? No one knew.

I didn’t go into their politics but given age and demographic, these might have been the heart of the Greens constituency.

You cannot believe just how lacking in basic information many among the young today must be. If they don’t know how coal is used to make electricity, then they are less likely to worry about getting rid of carbon forms of fuel. But it is worse than anything I might have believed. We are dealing with a level of ignorance so profound that it may literally be the end of us.

I’ve seen crazier

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Found at Powerline under the heading, THE CRAZIEST POLITICAL AD OF ALL TIME? [WITH ONE MORE ADDED]. This was the comment by John Hinderaker about the one that was added which has a bit of local flavour:

What follows [actually above] has zero political significance, but it may be the craziest ad ever, period. It has generated a lot of negative comment, but I like the sophisticated tone, the cultured accent…

Cultured accent! Crikey, she’s an Aussie Sheila. The political ad that got Steve Hayward’s attention as the craziest ever is from Canada. Not at all crazy for an independent running for Parliament. Here it is.

At least in Canada they just appoint their mates to the Senate who then do nothing but ratify whatever comes their way from the Commons.

Insane may be just the word for them

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It is the left generally and the media in particular. They are soul sick, disgusting and deranged. This is from Why Trump Resonates & Why the left doesn’t get it in one image.

heads

Here is the exchange that those headlines refer to:

KARL: Would President Trump authorize waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, even torture?

TRUMP: I would be inclined to be very strong. When people are chopping off other people’s heads and then we’re worried about waterboarding and we can’t, because I have no doubt that that works. I have absolutely no doubt.

KARL: You’d bring back waterboarding?

TRUMP: …you mention waterboarding, which was such a big subject. I haven’t heard that term in a year now, because when you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.

Now if you are not familiar with how things work. What both the right and the left will often do is grab something from an interview and note how radical it is, how unacceptable it is, how it shows a temperament that does not reflect well on the person in question.

So take a look at that sub headline from Crooks & Liars and let this fact sink in.

To the people at Crooks and Liars Donald Trump’s statement that: “when you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.” is a statement so outrageous that they believe they can make political hay out if it.

However to any sane human being not only is that statement objectively true but I suspect to the American voter hearing about women being sold into sexual slavery by our ISIS foes

But the Islamic State’s “revival” of the institution of chattel slavery—sex slavery of Christian and Yizidi women and girls no less—has faded from public attention.

Over the past decade, thousands of Iraqi and Syrian Christians—including, in 2013, an entire convent of Syrian Orthodox nuns—have been taken captive for ransom. Last August, shortly after ISIS established its caliphate, it began something new. After capturing non-Sunni women and girls, ISIS began awarding and selling them as sex slaves. The vast majority were Yizidis but some, according to UN reports, were Christians.

Boasting about it and justifying it under islam:

“One should remember that enslaving the families of the kuffar — the infidels — and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah, or Islamic law,” the group says in an online magazine published Sunday.

…said voters might conclude that waterboarding is much too good for them.

But apparently not to those on the left, at least not to those who read crooks and liars.

And if you would like to understand Trump’s appeal, this, I think, comes close to it:

After watching the pro-Obama mainstream media coordinate to effectively put Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)43% and Mitt Romney on defense throughout almost all of their respective presidential campaigns, Republican voters understand that if we are going to beat the Clinton Machine and the media in 2016, whoever we pick as our nominee will have to know how to dodge the media’s sucker-punches and fearlessly stay on offense.

In the face of more than a month of withering scorn and hate from the media, Trump has been everywhere hitting back, taking on all comers, ducking nobody, and turning Gawker into Wile E. Coyote.

The bottom line is that Trump is displaying something sorely lacking in the current Republican field: competence when it comes to handling a hostile, left-wing media.

Competence always translates into votes. The media knows this, which is why in 2012 and 2008 they created a dynamic that said, “Obama can do no wrong, and his Republican opponent can do nothing right.”

Without breaking the back of that media strategy, Hillary Clinton will be our next president, and right now only Trump is showing that he can break the media’s back.

Going Dutch

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“It is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”

Milton Friedman

The AP story is obliviously written by an American who still thinks European countries are run by royalty. Nevertheless, he gets the point well enough to see the future everywhere in countries that, amongst other things, have been invaded by non-productive sponges and drones. We are back to a modern version of the ancient Marxist maxim: those who do not work, do not eat.

King Willem-Alexander delivered a message to the Dutch people from the government in a nationally televised address: the welfare state of the 20th century is gone.

In its place a “participation society” is emerging, in which people must take responsibility for their own future and create their own social and financial safety nets, with less help from the national government.

The king traveled past waving fans [!!!] in an ornate horse-drawn carriage to the 13th-century Hall of Knights in The Hague for the monarch’s traditional annual address on the day the government presents its budget for the coming year. It was Willem-Alexander’s first appearance on the national stage since former Queen Beatrix abdicated in April and he ascended to the throne.

“The shift to a ‘participation society’ is especially visible in social security and long-term care,” the king said, reading out to lawmakers a speech written for him by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government.

“The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.”

The cradle-to-grave welfare state will go. Dependence on the government, other than occasionally and in small amounts, will disappear. If you are not self-supporting, no one else will be obliged to provide for you what you cannot earn yourself. We shall see if there is enough support for such measures in Holland in 2015. By 2030, it will be on its way to being universal since the welfare state can no longer be sustained.

What forces has Obama let loose?

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Found at Instapundit: Ruth Wisse in the Wall Street Journal on “Obama’s Racial Blind Spot”. She’s only, of course, being polite in calling it a blind spot.

Barack Obama’s election to the presidency represented to many Americans this country’s final triumph over racism. Reversing the record of slavery and institutionalized discrimination, his victory was hailed as a redemptive moment for America and potentially for humankind. How grotesque that the president should now douse that hope by fueling racism on a global scale.

Iranian regime is currently the world’s leading exponent of anti-Jewish racism. . . . Whereas Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich had to plot the “Final Solution” in secrecy, using euphemisms for their intended annihilation of the Jews of Europe, Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweets that Israel “has no cure but to be annihilated.” Iran’s leaders, relishing how small Israel is, call it a “one bomb state,” and until the time arrives to deliver that bomb, they sponsor anti-Israel terrorism through Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militias. . . .

Perhaps Mr. Obama is oblivious to what the scholar Robert Wistrich (who died in May) called “the longest hatred” because it has been so much a part of his world as he moved through life. Muslim Indonesia, where he lived from age 6 to 10, trails only Pakistan and Iran in its hostility to Jews. An animus against Jews and Israel was a hallmark of the Rev.Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago that Mr. Obama attended for two decades. And before he ran for office, Mr. Obama carried the standard of the international left that invented the stigma of Zionism-as-imperialism. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama felt obliged to repudiate his pastor (who had famously cursed America from the pulpit), and muted his far-left credentials. Mr. Obama was voted into office by an electorate enamored of the idea that he would oppose all forms of racism. He has not met that expectation.

Some Jewish critics of Mr. Obama may be tempted to put his derelictions in a line of neglect by other presidents, but there is a difference. Thus one may argue that President Roosevelt should have bombed the approach routes to Auschwitz or allowed the Jewish-refugee ship St. Louis to dock in the U.S. during World War II, but those were at worst sins of omission. In sharpest contrast, President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran is an act of commission. This is the first time the U.S. will have deliberately entered into a pact with a country committed to annihilating another people—a pact that doesn’t even require formal repudiation of the country’s genocidal aims.

To which Elizabeth Price Foley has added:

Exactly. Why most American Jews are standing silently by, like sheeple, in the face of these facts is a utter mystery to me. Why did American Jews not demand, at a minimum, Iran’s repudiation of its genocidal aims against Israel? Admittedly, such a repudiation would not have changed the hearts and minds of the Iranians, but it would have at least forced the Administration to publicly recognize and discuss Iran’s genocidal intentions.

As it stands, however, the genocidal aims of Iran toward Israel have been swept under the rug, not even worthy of discussion, which is exactly what the Obama Administration wanted. The Administration’s failure to even discuss the inhumanity of Iran’s racist/ethnic hatred is both shameful and telling, particularly given that Obama is our first black president whose entire presidency has focused incessantly on issues of race and ethnicity. The Obama Administration’s indifference to Iran’s hatred of Jews will further fan the flames such hatred across the globe.

The only explanation I can fathom for American Jews’ acquiescence to the Iran deal is that most are liberals/progressives first, Jews second. How tragic that this attitude has emerged only one generation removed from the Holocaust.

And if you are looking for a bit more along these same lines, there is Sultan Knish discussing The Useless Jewish Organization. This is from somewhere near the end, but you should read it from the beginning.

If Obama’s nuclear deal is to be defeated, it won’t be done by the establishment insiders. The establishment is invested in its own credibility and its politics. It will make a show of fighting the Iran deal before fundraising off its miserable failure. And the money will go to fund its progressive causes.

The establishment will not stand up to Obama, just like it didn’t stand up to FDR. The real action will come from ad-hoc coalitions, like the one behind the Stop Iran Rally, that throw things together. And it will come from a handful of kids somewhat that do what the adults aren’t doing.

It’s not an answer for me that Israel could damage Iran if it started up. The aim of policy ought to have been never to give Iran even the opportunity, but perhaps that was too hard. It is certainly too hard now that they have stopped trying, for no discernible reason. We are all living on the edge of a volcano. When it will erupt, it seems to me, is now only a matter of time, not whether. On the other hand, in spite of its rhetoric, why should the Iranians risk having their country turned into a nuclear wasteland. Tragically, that kind of calculation is all that stands between Israel and a nuclear war.

The art of the impossible

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I so much liked Andy Warhol’s “art is what you can get away with” that I bought a copy of the poster, and a tomato soup mug with the words around the rim. This is an article, Can You Get Away With It? Then It Was Probably Art This Year with a title obviously designed with Worhol in mind. What makes it art? The price tag perhaps, but what else who can know.

Today’s international art practice comprises such a bewildering array of idioms, schools of one, strategies, styles and projects, each with its own recondite vocabulary and apologists, that a kind of cultural gridlock has taken hold – even as works arise that almost dare the audience to shout “Bogus!” and “Shame!” Last month, an orange stainless-steel balloon-dog sculpture by Jeff Koons sold at Christie’s for almost $60-million (U.S.).