JayinPhiladelphia
A bit of a 'response' to Mike's post here on Friday, and I'm sure he can relate. I just want to quickly note why even bothering to engage in 'I-P' at sites like Daily Kos (one of the leading blogs when it comes to the mainstreaming of antisemitism on the Left over the past decade) is not just a waste of time, but beyond that is indeed a dangerous legitimization of that hate-friendly site, as well.
Let me first start out by saying that JNEREBEL is one of the best, and most consistent, pro-I folks that unfortunate site has ever seen. Along with fizziks (just to mention another name noted here recently), and a few others. But that's not the point here, so I'll move on.
My main contention is now, and has been for months, that the problem with that site is that pro-Israel people like us are forced to start with two hands tied behind our back, one foot shackled to a staple rack, and blind-folded.
Unless we internalize the Palestinian narrative, that Israelis are colonialist interlopers practicing Apartheid, or some such other ludicrous bullcrap, one automatically starts off from a position of suspicion. As a 'racist,' or some such other nonsense. It certainly doesn't help, either, that certain "progressive zionists" there take it upon themselves to act as enforcers, as well.
After all, what better way to boost their 'progressive' credentials in the eye of the "Adalah" side there, than to agree with terrorist lovers, that people like Mike and oldschool and I hold positions beyond the pale?
I even know of a 'progressive zionist,' in fact, who admitted to being confused as to whether to even oppose BDS or not, until just recently. I guess he finally felt safe doing so once his Batman felt it was a sure... spike... to come out against it.
This is a place where the much-loved moderator once called the Nazis "a blip," in order to justify his insanely bigoted position that mentioning "concentration camps" in the context of I-P did not automatically mean one was comparing Israelis to Nazis. A hallmark of contemporary antisemitism, which Mr. Blades so desperately sought to provide an excuse for.
Why on earth would he be so desperate to do that?
I wonder. Oh wait, no I don't.
But back to the above. I reject the position we're necessarily forced into, as supporters of Israel, on that site. Particularly as when viewed against how the antisemites and other assorted bigots there start out, and are allowed to go on. And on. And on. And on. And on. And on.
One of their leaders at that site is a violent, hate-filled woman who harasses Holocaust survivors, and then whines when security at TLV tags her as the dangerous bigot that she is.
Here's my question - why do we even need to respect the opinion of a racist lunatic like her in the first place? Those who continue to participate at Daily Kos, unfortunately, do so by their continued presence there. It's time to stop that. And it's also time to call out that site for what it is. A hate-friendly pile of shit, which continues even to this day to mainstream antisemitism through the diaries of those who are considered "trusted users" there.
When the front page stops publishing the "findings" of antisemitic, Troofer commissions, then I'll cut some slack to that site. Until then, no.
UPDATE: I still can't comment via Blogger, here or anywhere else, for whatever reason. The dropdown box contains no options for me to 'sign in' under any account, although I can endlessly sign out! I don't know what's going on with that, I tried to set up a new Blogger account and that didn't work, either, so it's probably that my browser is busted or something. I'll figure it out next weekend, I guess.
Anyway, I didn't really post this to get an answer or anything. Just something I had to say, and now that I did I feel better. From here on out, it's my intent to stop paying any attention whatsoever to that place, and to get my focus back on things that actually matter to me. Like food politics, and trying to clean up the sickening zombie town at the foot of the Somerset El station here in Kensington. This was just closure, is all.
UPDATE 2: It's fascinating to me, how clearly important this site is to someone who nonetheless loves smearing and hurling charges at all of its participants, as if there's nothing more important in the world to him. Even more important than trying to come up with new ways to say "Obama rocks my socks!" Also, I don't know about any of youze, but if I believed somebody was threatening my family, and made a point of crying about that for weeks, I wouldn't continue to obsessively follow and post on that very person's blog, myself. But perhaps our guest was lying about that, too. Totally shocking. Or not.
The Day of the Dhimmi is Done - Michael Lumish, Proprietor
Sunday, July 8, 2012
On Wine and Olive Oil
JayinPhiladelphia
I spent yesterday up in North Jersey with my mother (the non-Jewish side of my family), and on our trip to the liquor store after she picked me up from the train station, I convinced her to buy some Israeli wine. Her natural inclination, partially due to the locavore ethic I impressed upon her over the last decade, is to buy New Jersey or New York wines; as Pennsylvania wines would be mine these days.
I bought a 4-pack of Allagash White, my current favorite summer beer, myself (although Philadelphia Brewing Company's Walt Wit, brewed just down the street from me, is growing on me), but only because I have a... bad history... with the drink, and all I can indulge in these days is a beer or three, and only with others, while I'm away from home. Otherwise, I also certainly would have gone with some of that Israeli wine myself.
This is just to note that this is all in 'honor' of the BDSers, who like to think they're doing something moral or unique; but who are only, in fact, yet the latest in the long, sad line of those who've called for economic boycotts against Jews throughout history.
In general, my religion is farmers' markets and farmstands, although I'll always make exceptions for Israeli produce, where I never otherwise would have done so for products which have traveled halfway around the world.
I'm not an investor, and I doubt I ever will be (hey, maybe they can even make fun of me for being a poor ethnic white person who lives in inner city Philadelphia -- they can join that dick Charles Murray in that! -- yeah, but I'm sure I'd still be the "right winger"...), so I can't buy shares of stock in companies they target, but olive oil and whatnot is surely fair game for me. :)
But, anyway. Thanks to those folks! As they fail again, and again, and again, and again... my mother and I, people who never in a million years would have gone out of our way to buy Israeli wine or olive oil, are very much enjoying same at this very moment, while youze try to sugarcoat and explain away yet another one of your massive failures at this year's Presbyterian General Assembly. Not to mention everywhere else, but particularly in this case. Youze were actually supposed to win this one, yet once again failed miserably.
Go move your bowels in the ocean, BDSers.
I spent yesterday up in North Jersey with my mother (the non-Jewish side of my family), and on our trip to the liquor store after she picked me up from the train station, I convinced her to buy some Israeli wine. Her natural inclination, partially due to the locavore ethic I impressed upon her over the last decade, is to buy New Jersey or New York wines; as Pennsylvania wines would be mine these days.
I bought a 4-pack of Allagash White, my current favorite summer beer, myself (although Philadelphia Brewing Company's Walt Wit, brewed just down the street from me, is growing on me), but only because I have a... bad history... with the drink, and all I can indulge in these days is a beer or three, and only with others, while I'm away from home. Otherwise, I also certainly would have gone with some of that Israeli wine myself.
This is just to note that this is all in 'honor' of the BDSers, who like to think they're doing something moral or unique; but who are only, in fact, yet the latest in the long, sad line of those who've called for economic boycotts against Jews throughout history.
In general, my religion is farmers' markets and farmstands, although I'll always make exceptions for Israeli produce, where I never otherwise would have done so for products which have traveled halfway around the world.
I'm not an investor, and I doubt I ever will be (hey, maybe they can even make fun of me for being a poor ethnic white person who lives in inner city Philadelphia -- they can join that dick Charles Murray in that! -- yeah, but I'm sure I'd still be the "right winger"...), so I can't buy shares of stock in companies they target, but olive oil and whatnot is surely fair game for me. :)
But, anyway. Thanks to those folks! As they fail again, and again, and again, and again... my mother and I, people who never in a million years would have gone out of our way to buy Israeli wine or olive oil, are very much enjoying same at this very moment, while youze try to sugarcoat and explain away yet another one of your massive failures at this year's Presbyterian General Assembly. Not to mention everywhere else, but particularly in this case. Youze were actually supposed to win this one, yet once again failed miserably.
Go move your bowels in the ocean, BDSers.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Liberal Jewish Myopia
Mike L.
{Cross-posted at Geoffff's Joint Bar and Grill and Pro-Israel Bay Area Bloggers.}
I used to spend quite a bit of time covering the Arab-Israel conflict as it was discussed on the popular screaming-left political blog Daily Kos, but have slowed down that coverage due to the fact that Daily Kos, itself, has been moving away from the discussion.
Still every now and again I come across either a comment or a "diary" that I feel a need to point out. Here is a comment from JNEREBEL that cries out for a response:
JNEREBEL is one of the few remaining pro-Israel people left on Daily Kos and I certainly have nothing whatsoever against him or her, except for the endless naivete and the refusal to understand that times are changing. Let's dissect the comment a little.
Decades?
The truth of the matter, of course, is that "the issue" is Arab-Muslim Koranically-based hatred toward Jews and it has being going on not for decades, but for 14 hundred years. The Long Arab War against the Jews has been ongoing since the 1920s, but the issue, itself, is far, far older.
Further, is the two-state solution the only real solution? It might be, but none of us really know that, we just constantly tell one another that. Personally, I still favor the two-state solution, but no longer believe that it can possibly come about through a negotiated agreement for the simple fact that the Arabs have consistently and persistently refused a Palestinian state through a negotiated agreement in peace next to Israel.
At a certain point we must come to finally understand that NO MEANS NO.
Does no one want war? I do not think so. Polling of the Palestinians has consistently showed that large numbers of them are perfectly fine with violence against us "children of apes and pigs." In fact, both of their prevailing political parties, i.e., the PLO and Hamas, are grounded in ideologies of war and a devotion to destroying the Jewish state of Israel, so please JNEREBEL spare us this well-meaning nonsense that no one wants war. The enemies of the Jewish people most certainly do want war and some of them reside on Daily Kos, itself.
This is what I mainly have issue with. I am just so sick to death of this never-ending liberal Jewish moral-equivalency nonsense. I even know one "progressive Zionist" who thinks that the Likud is more or less the moral equivalent of Hamas. It's always "both sides." But this can only be true if one entirely ignores the fact that the Arabs have refused offer after offer after offer for a Palestinian state on historically Jewish land.
We have got to stop blaming ourselves for Palestinian and Arab intransigence and their ongoing violent campaign against the Jews of the Middle East. The problem here is not that both sides are intransigent, but that the Arab side is. The problem here is not that Jews oppose Palestinian sovereignty, but that the Arabs and the Palestinians oppose Jewish sovereignty on any bit of land that was at any time part of the Umma.
I understand that it is in the best liberal tradition to try to be as fair as possible... even though they almost never are... but one needs also to be fair to one's self and to one's own people. JNEREBEL would have us believe that after 1,300 hundred years living under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism in the Middle East, followed by 100 years of war against the Jews due to the movement for Jewish sovereignty in Israel, that the fault lies equally between the Jews are their tormentors.
It doesn't.
The problem here is not with the 6 million in Israel, but with the fact that their neighbors (who outnumber them by a factor of 50 to 1 in the Middle East) simply will not allow them to live in peace. The ongoing war against the Jews will never end so long as the world thinks that the tiny minority of Jews who live in the Middle East are to blame for their own persecution. They aren't. And when good-hearted liberals like JNEREBEL repeat the nonsensical canard that "both sides" are to blame they make it impossible for the Jews of the Middle East to free themselves from 1,400 hundred years of oppression.
It would be something akin to saying that "both sides" were responsible for the slavery of the Africans in the Americas. Well, I'm sorry, but just as the ancestors of Black Americans bare no responsibility for the fact of African-American slavery, so the Jews of the Middle East are not responsible for centuries of dhimmitude and for Koranically-based hatred toward Jews by the vast majority in the Middle East.
The false moral equivalency that we constantly find within "I-P" discourse on the progressive-left is mirrored in JNEREBEL's next claim:
Each side.
This is absolute nonsense. It was not the Israeli side that placed preconditions on the current round of non-talks, but the Palestinian side, at the encouragement of US president Barack Obama, who did so. The Israelis have been calling for negotiations without preconditions for years, but it was Obama and his dull-minded, counterproductive requirement of "total settlement freeze" that ruined the possibility of negotiations through the insistence upon a precondition.
But JNEREBEL means well.
The never-ending persecution of the Jews in the Middle East continues decade upon decade, century upon century, but well-meaning liberal diaspora Jews simply cannot bring themselves to understand that the Jews of the Middle East did not ask for this and they do not want it. It is the Arab-Muslim belief in the inferiority of the Jewish people and our essentially demonic nature that is at the core of the reason why they will not stop harassing us. They cannot accept Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land because it is humiliating to the Umma and thus they launched a war which continues to this day. Furthermore, if the Palestinians are suffering it is because they are the front-line troops in this unjust and unnecessary aggression against us.
But what Jewish people throughout the world must come to understand is that their aggression against us... Arab-Muslim aggression against the Jews of the Middle East... is not the fault of those Jews and claiming otherwise is an exceedingly dangerous lie.
We usually call it, with much disparagement, blaming the victim.
I very much wish that JNEREBEL, who is pro-Israel and who I am guessing is probably Jewish, understood this.
{Cross-posted at Geoffff's Joint Bar and Grill and Pro-Israel Bay Area Bloggers.}
I used to spend quite a bit of time covering the Arab-Israel conflict as it was discussed on the popular screaming-left political blog Daily Kos, but have slowed down that coverage due to the fact that Daily Kos, itself, has been moving away from the discussion.
Still every now and again I come across either a comment or a "diary" that I feel a need to point out. Here is a comment from JNEREBEL that cries out for a response:
The two-state solution is the only real solution (0+ / 0-)
to the issue which has haunted the area for decades.
It will come to pass as it is the only option available except for war which no one wants to see occur.
There is plenty of blame on both sides as to why it has not happened as of yet and fruitless to debate going forward.
Each side should stop with the pre-conditions and sit down to negotiate the final status treaty for two states for two peoples.
by JNEREBEL on Thu Jul 05, 2012 at 11:20:15 AM PDT
JNEREBEL is one of the few remaining pro-Israel people left on Daily Kos and I certainly have nothing whatsoever against him or her, except for the endless naivete and the refusal to understand that times are changing. Let's dissect the comment a little.
The two-state solution is the only real solution to the issue which has haunted the area for decades.
Decades?
The truth of the matter, of course, is that "the issue" is Arab-Muslim Koranically-based hatred toward Jews and it has being going on not for decades, but for 14 hundred years. The Long Arab War against the Jews has been ongoing since the 1920s, but the issue, itself, is far, far older.
Further, is the two-state solution the only real solution? It might be, but none of us really know that, we just constantly tell one another that. Personally, I still favor the two-state solution, but no longer believe that it can possibly come about through a negotiated agreement for the simple fact that the Arabs have consistently and persistently refused a Palestinian state through a negotiated agreement in peace next to Israel.
At a certain point we must come to finally understand that NO MEANS NO.
It will come to pass as it is the only option available except for war which no one wants to see occur.
Does no one want war? I do not think so. Polling of the Palestinians has consistently showed that large numbers of them are perfectly fine with violence against us "children of apes and pigs." In fact, both of their prevailing political parties, i.e., the PLO and Hamas, are grounded in ideologies of war and a devotion to destroying the Jewish state of Israel, so please JNEREBEL spare us this well-meaning nonsense that no one wants war. The enemies of the Jewish people most certainly do want war and some of them reside on Daily Kos, itself.
There is plenty of blame on both sides as to why it has not happened...
This is what I mainly have issue with. I am just so sick to death of this never-ending liberal Jewish moral-equivalency nonsense. I even know one "progressive Zionist" who thinks that the Likud is more or less the moral equivalent of Hamas. It's always "both sides." But this can only be true if one entirely ignores the fact that the Arabs have refused offer after offer after offer for a Palestinian state on historically Jewish land.
We have got to stop blaming ourselves for Palestinian and Arab intransigence and their ongoing violent campaign against the Jews of the Middle East. The problem here is not that both sides are intransigent, but that the Arab side is. The problem here is not that Jews oppose Palestinian sovereignty, but that the Arabs and the Palestinians oppose Jewish sovereignty on any bit of land that was at any time part of the Umma.
I understand that it is in the best liberal tradition to try to be as fair as possible... even though they almost never are... but one needs also to be fair to one's self and to one's own people. JNEREBEL would have us believe that after 1,300 hundred years living under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism in the Middle East, followed by 100 years of war against the Jews due to the movement for Jewish sovereignty in Israel, that the fault lies equally between the Jews are their tormentors.
It doesn't.
The problem here is not with the 6 million in Israel, but with the fact that their neighbors (who outnumber them by a factor of 50 to 1 in the Middle East) simply will not allow them to live in peace. The ongoing war against the Jews will never end so long as the world thinks that the tiny minority of Jews who live in the Middle East are to blame for their own persecution. They aren't. And when good-hearted liberals like JNEREBEL repeat the nonsensical canard that "both sides" are to blame they make it impossible for the Jews of the Middle East to free themselves from 1,400 hundred years of oppression.
It would be something akin to saying that "both sides" were responsible for the slavery of the Africans in the Americas. Well, I'm sorry, but just as the ancestors of Black Americans bare no responsibility for the fact of African-American slavery, so the Jews of the Middle East are not responsible for centuries of dhimmitude and for Koranically-based hatred toward Jews by the vast majority in the Middle East.
The false moral equivalency that we constantly find within "I-P" discourse on the progressive-left is mirrored in JNEREBEL's next claim:
Each side should stop with the pre-conditions and sit down to negotiate...
Each side.
This is absolute nonsense. It was not the Israeli side that placed preconditions on the current round of non-talks, but the Palestinian side, at the encouragement of US president Barack Obama, who did so. The Israelis have been calling for negotiations without preconditions for years, but it was Obama and his dull-minded, counterproductive requirement of "total settlement freeze" that ruined the possibility of negotiations through the insistence upon a precondition.
But JNEREBEL means well.
The never-ending persecution of the Jews in the Middle East continues decade upon decade, century upon century, but well-meaning liberal diaspora Jews simply cannot bring themselves to understand that the Jews of the Middle East did not ask for this and they do not want it. It is the Arab-Muslim belief in the inferiority of the Jewish people and our essentially demonic nature that is at the core of the reason why they will not stop harassing us. They cannot accept Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land because it is humiliating to the Umma and thus they launched a war which continues to this day. Furthermore, if the Palestinians are suffering it is because they are the front-line troops in this unjust and unnecessary aggression against us.
But what Jewish people throughout the world must come to understand is that their aggression against us... Arab-Muslim aggression against the Jews of the Middle East... is not the fault of those Jews and claiming otherwise is an exceedingly dangerous lie.
We usually call it, with much disparagement, blaming the victim.
I very much wish that JNEREBEL, who is pro-Israel and who I am guessing is probably Jewish, understood this.
Geoffff's Joint Peace Prize
geoffff
The bar and grill is rightly world famous for its coveted Peace Prize, generally acknowledged as the only prize of its genre in the market which does not discredit its recipient. We stand by our record. Unlike our competitors, the Nobel Peace Prize and the Sydney Peace Prize, the Joint has never bestowed an award on some painted sneering apologist for war, hate and genocide. The Joint's peace prize is the prize you can be proud of. It is the prize you can put on the mantelpiece without embarrassment and tell your grandchildren about.
Earlier recipients of the Geoffff's Joint Peace Prize include such enormous contributors to world peace as Israel's security fence (the most successful and enduring peace initiative in the Middle East since Begin and Sadat) and the US Navy (for taking out the foulest terrorist in history and making and keeping the peace since 1941).
With precedents like that this is not an award that can be tossed around like confetti. Therefore it is not lightly that this blog announces that the award goes to:
Guns N' Roses !!!
For the band's concert in Tel Aviv on 3 July 2012 when lead guitar, "Bumblefoot" Thal played Hatikva with the band then segueing into Don't You Cry.
The award will be emailed to the band's official website shortly.
Congratulations gentlemen. I've always liked you.
With nasty little creeps like Elvis Costello spitting sanctimonious contempt at free people determined to remain free, the sound of the Californian hard rock band shoving it to morally bankrupt musicians simpering for boycott and war is like a cold beer on a hot day.
cross posted Geoffff's Joint Bar and Grill
The bar and grill is rightly world famous for its coveted Peace Prize, generally acknowledged as the only prize of its genre in the market which does not discredit its recipient. We stand by our record. Unlike our competitors, the Nobel Peace Prize and the Sydney Peace Prize, the Joint has never bestowed an award on some painted sneering apologist for war, hate and genocide. The Joint's peace prize is the prize you can be proud of. It is the prize you can put on the mantelpiece without embarrassment and tell your grandchildren about.
Earlier recipients of the Geoffff's Joint Peace Prize include such enormous contributors to world peace as Israel's security fence (the most successful and enduring peace initiative in the Middle East since Begin and Sadat) and the US Navy (for taking out the foulest terrorist in history and making and keeping the peace since 1941).
With precedents like that this is not an award that can be tossed around like confetti. Therefore it is not lightly that this blog announces that the award goes to:
Guns N' Roses !!!
For the band's concert in Tel Aviv on 3 July 2012 when lead guitar, "Bumblefoot" Thal played Hatikva with the band then segueing into Don't You Cry.
The award will be emailed to the band's official website shortly.
Congratulations gentlemen. I've always liked you.
With nasty little creeps like Elvis Costello spitting sanctimonious contempt at free people determined to remain free, the sound of the Californian hard rock band shoving it to morally bankrupt musicians simpering for boycott and war is like a cold beer on a hot day.
cross posted Geoffff's Joint Bar and Grill
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Another BDS Fail
JayinPhiladelphia
We'll see this fight again in two years, unfortunately, I'm sure. But for now, the Presbyterian Church (USA), at their General Assembly in Pittsburgh, has handed BDS yet another loss. The BDS'ers are doing worse than my Phillies this year, which is actually rather amazing.
For further coverage on this, see Divest This! and Will Spotts.
On a personal note, I'm still fighting this weird Blogger Bug, which has left me unable to comment for almost a week now, but I'll figure it out soon.
Anyway. BDS Fail. Again. Heh. Bigoted losers.
We'll see this fight again in two years, unfortunately, I'm sure. But for now, the Presbyterian Church (USA), at their General Assembly in Pittsburgh, has handed BDS yet another loss. The BDS'ers are doing worse than my Phillies this year, which is actually rather amazing.
For further coverage on this, see Divest This! and Will Spotts.
On a personal note, I'm still fighting this weird Blogger Bug, which has left me unable to comment for almost a week now, but I'll figure it out soon.
Anyway. BDS Fail. Again. Heh. Bigoted losers.
Tunisia's Islamic Government Cracks Down on Democracy
Mike L.
{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers.}
I have been making much of the fact that when Tunisia fell to a Sharia government during the misnamed "Arab Spring" president Barack Obama hailed the event as the wondrous up-welling of democracy. He said:
When these riots and revolutions and rapes throughout the Middle East began I was willing to take a wait-and-see approach. I had no way of knowing whether or not our progressive friends, such as the president, were correct when they cheered on the "Facebook kids" as the burgeoning democratic force that would finally tear away the brutal dictatorial regimes. I doubted it. True. But unlike Obama, who immediately jumped on what turned out to be a pro-Islamist bandwagon, I was willing to wait before making a final judgment.
To this day, many progressives continue to tell us that the "Arab Spring" is a democratic wave throughout the region. The truth of the matter, of course, is entirely different. The "Arab Spring" is an Islamist and fascistic surge brought about, in some measure, through democratic means, but the ideological source of the movement is not democracy, but Sharia... with a little dash of Nazism for spice. The intellectual figures who stand behind it include Sayyid Qutb, but not John Locke.
Thus, today we are getting reports that the Sharia government of Tunisia is cracking down on democracy through grabbing control of the media.
Even now I do not expect the progressive-left to acknowledge its mistake. Obama never has and I expect nothing better from his partisan supporters. As much of the Arab Middle East tumbles into Sharia we will continue to be lectured at about democracy, even though the "Arab Spring" is not about democracy and even though Sharia means second and third class citizenship for us dhimmis.
What the "Arab Spring" actually is is a widespread Arab reaction against modernity and against the vicious secular dictatorships, such as Mubarack's, that have ruled much of the area for many decades. The questions that people like Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna were asking themselves at the start of the movement early in the last century were not, "how can we best serve the people through the establishment of democracy?" but, "how is it that if Islam is the perfect form of human organization that we have been taken over by the infidel Europeans?" This was the motivating question behind radical Islam. People like Qutb and al-Banna, who are the ideological forefathers of the movement, looked at an Arab world that had lost its dominance and concluded that the only way to bring that dominance back was a return to the true faith. The "Arab Spring" is thus an Islamic reform movement, with ideological tendrils that go to Nazi Germany, but not a democratic movement. It is not a movement that is going to transform the region into some Arab-Muslim version of western democracy.
It is a sign of maturity to acknowledge mistakes. For example, I am more than happy to acknowledge that I made a terrible mistake when I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I wonder when the progressive-left is going to acknowledge its mistake in telling us that the rise of Sharia in the Middle East is the magnificent up-welling of democracy? I wonder when Barack Obama will do so?
On second thought, strike that. I know when Obama is going to acknowledge this crucial error in judgement.
Never. That's when.
{A Tip 'O the Kippa to Barry Rubin.}
{Cross-Posted at Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers.}
I have been making much of the fact that when Tunisia fell to a Sharia government during the misnamed "Arab Spring" president Barack Obama hailed the event as the wondrous up-welling of democracy. He said:
There are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat.
When these riots and revolutions and rapes throughout the Middle East began I was willing to take a wait-and-see approach. I had no way of knowing whether or not our progressive friends, such as the president, were correct when they cheered on the "Facebook kids" as the burgeoning democratic force that would finally tear away the brutal dictatorial regimes. I doubted it. True. But unlike Obama, who immediately jumped on what turned out to be a pro-Islamist bandwagon, I was willing to wait before making a final judgment.
To this day, many progressives continue to tell us that the "Arab Spring" is a democratic wave throughout the region. The truth of the matter, of course, is entirely different. The "Arab Spring" is an Islamist and fascistic surge brought about, in some measure, through democratic means, but the ideological source of the movement is not democracy, but Sharia... with a little dash of Nazism for spice. The intellectual figures who stand behind it include Sayyid Qutb, but not John Locke.
Thus, today we are getting reports that the Sharia government of Tunisia is cracking down on democracy through grabbing control of the media.
Freedom of the press is a core democratic ideal and when the press is controlled by the government it means that democracy does not exist. Well, guess what? I am not the least little bit shocked to learn that democracy is not very high on the priority list of the Sharia government in Tunisia. Why would it be, when democracy is entirely inconsistent with Islamic law?On Wednesday, the National Authority for the Reform of Media and Communications (INRIC) – an independent commission charged with reforming Tunisia’s media sector – decided to suspend its activities, accusing the government of attempting to censor and exert control over the media.
“The committee refuses to be just a decoration. The government is trying to control the media sector,” said Hichem Senoussi, a member of INRIC.
Even now I do not expect the progressive-left to acknowledge its mistake. Obama never has and I expect nothing better from his partisan supporters. As much of the Arab Middle East tumbles into Sharia we will continue to be lectured at about democracy, even though the "Arab Spring" is not about democracy and even though Sharia means second and third class citizenship for us dhimmis.
What the "Arab Spring" actually is is a widespread Arab reaction against modernity and against the vicious secular dictatorships, such as Mubarack's, that have ruled much of the area for many decades. The questions that people like Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna were asking themselves at the start of the movement early in the last century were not, "how can we best serve the people through the establishment of democracy?" but, "how is it that if Islam is the perfect form of human organization that we have been taken over by the infidel Europeans?" This was the motivating question behind radical Islam. People like Qutb and al-Banna, who are the ideological forefathers of the movement, looked at an Arab world that had lost its dominance and concluded that the only way to bring that dominance back was a return to the true faith. The "Arab Spring" is thus an Islamic reform movement, with ideological tendrils that go to Nazi Germany, but not a democratic movement. It is not a movement that is going to transform the region into some Arab-Muslim version of western democracy.It is a sign of maturity to acknowledge mistakes. For example, I am more than happy to acknowledge that I made a terrible mistake when I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I wonder when the progressive-left is going to acknowledge its mistake in telling us that the rise of Sharia in the Middle East is the magnificent up-welling of democracy? I wonder when Barack Obama will do so?
On second thought, strike that. I know when Obama is going to acknowledge this crucial error in judgement.
Never. That's when.
{A Tip 'O the Kippa to Barry Rubin.}
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)