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Postmodernism is fundamentally frivolous. Postmodernists routinely condemn racism and intolerance as wrong but then say that there is no such thing as right and wrong. They are clearly not being serious. Either they do not really believe in moral nihilism or they believe that racism cannot be condemned!

Postmodernism is in fact just a tantrum. Post-Soviet reality in particular suits Leftists so badly that their response is to deny that reality exists. That they can be so dishonest, however, simply shows how psychopathic they are.

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13 May, 2008

The fall and rise of NYC

By Myron Magnet

Fear was a New Yorker's constant companion in the 1970s and '80s. We lived behind doors with triple locks, some like engines of medieval ironmongery. We barred our ground-floor and fire-escape windows with steel grates that made us feel imprisoned. I was thankful for mine, though, when a hatchet turned up on my fire escape, origin unknown. Nearing our building entrances, we held our keys at the ready and looked over our shoulders, as police and street-smart lore advised; our hearts pounded as we tried to shove the heavy doors open and slam them shut before some mugger could push in behind us, standard mugging procedure. Only once was I too slow and lost my money. A neighbor, who worked at a midtown bank, lost his life.

So to read Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet when it came out in 1970 was like a jolt of electricity. Just when New York had begun to spin out of control--steadily worsening for over two decades until murders numbered over 2,200 a year, one every four hours--Bellow's novel described the unraveling with brilliant precision and explained unflinchingly why it was happening. His account shocked readers: some thought it racist and reactionary; others feared it was true but too offensive for a decent person to say. In those days, I felt I should cover my copy with a plain brown wrapper on the subway to veil the obscenity of its political incorrectness.

The book was true, prophetically so. And now that we live in New York's second golden age--the age of reborn neighborhoods in every borough, of safe streets bustling with tourists, of $40 million apartments, of filled-to-overflowing private schools and colleges, of urban glamour; the age when the New York Times runs stories that explain how once upon a time there was the age of the mugger and that ask, is new york losing its street smarts?--it's important to recall that today's peace and prosperity mustn't be taken for granted. Hip young residents of the revived Lower East Side or Williamsburg need to know that it's possible to kill a city, that the streets they walk daily were once no-go zones, that within living memory residents and companies were fleeing Gotham, that newsweeklies heralded the rotting of the Big Apple and movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy plausibly depicted New York as a nightmare peopled by freaks. That's why it's ! worth looking back at Mr. Sammler to understand why that decline occurred: we need to make sure it doesn't happen again.

A septuagenarian Holocaust survivor who lives on 90th Street near Riverside Drive (my turf for most of the last 45 years), the novel's main character, Artur Sammler, sees disorder and decay wherever he looks. Out in the public realm, vandals have cut the receivers off pay phones and turned the booths into reeking urinals. In the parks, dog waste has killed the grass, and bums are everywhere. In one park, Sammler observes a wino "sullenly pissing on newspapers and old leaves," while a homeless woman sleeps on a bench, her "sea cow's belly rising, legs swollen purple." Even the freshly opened daffodils show smudges of soot on their pure yellow petals. Central Park promenaders who now savor the lush Great Lawn or the sublime Bethesda Fountain should know what a heroic effort of philanthropy and policing it took to reclaim what less than two decades ago was a dusty, sterile, graffiti-marred wasteland where dope dealers and muggers reigned. Nothing you see today is the pure production of nature but springs instead from civic will and vision.

Along with disorder went crime. Sammler knows he can't jog in Riverside Park any more because of the muggers, and he sees in the park's trees and bushes "cover for sexual violence, knifepoint robberies, sluggings, and murders." Crime pervades the whole city, even into private sanctuaries. Sammler's niece opens her window to admire a beautiful sunset and then forgets to lock it, allowing burglars to climb in from the roof below, as used to happen routinely. The least of her losses is the financial one. "The sentimental value of her lockets, chains, rings, heirlooms was not appreciated by the insurance company." Such things are precious to her because they link her to her dead husband, her dead parents. For such loss, and the loss of her sense of safety in her own home, there can be no recompense.

How wonderful it would be to have "the privileges of remoteness" that $50,000 a year could buy, Sammler thinks--"club membership, taxis, doormen, guarded approaches," all of the insulation that only 17 years later, as Tom Wolfe calculated more lavishly in Bonfire of the Vanities, took an income of $1 million a year. (Since Dickens, our best urbanologists have been our novelists.) But, Bellow points out, even the "opulent sections of the city were not immune. You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature."

The novel's personification of all that crime is a tall, powerfully built thief whom Sammler sees several times working the Riverside Drive bus, a dandified black man sporting a camel's-hair coat, homburg, and Dior sunglasses. Sammler, slightly taller, can watch him over the heads of the other standees as he skillfully snaps open the handbags and methodically empties the purses of his unaware victims. One day, shielded from the other passengers by his broad, well-tailored back, the thief robs a weak old man with red-lidded eyes of "sea-mucus blue," cowering in the bus's back corner, his "false teeth dropping from his upper gums" in his terror. The thief pulls open the man's jacket with its ragged lining, takes out his plastic wallet, and methodically rifles through the contents, pocketing the money and the Social Security check, while dropping the family photos like so much trash. Then, in a gesture of ironic contempt, he jerks the knot of the old man's tie "approximately! , but only approximately, into place."

So much, in other words, for the old man's claim, through the symbol of his otherwise useless necktie, of membership in a civilized community, where civility and forbearance govern our relations with one another and family bonds matter. And so much for his social security in the literal sense, if the state can't even secure him from invasion and violation in public and in broad daylight. It's the ultimate satire: the state that promises you the security of an old-age pension can't even provide you the security to keep it--the primary purpose of a state. It's almost as bad as today's Britain, where the welfare state provides for your welfare not by stopping omnipresent thugs from beating you senseless but by sewing you up afterward for free.

Out of understandable anxiety for the social order, Sammler phones the police twice to have the bus thief arrested. They go through the motions with bored cynicism. If they will post a cop on the bus, Sammler says, he'll point out the pickpocket. We don't have enough manpower, the desk officer replies; you'll have to get on our waiting list. A waiting list? Sammler objects. "This man is going to rob more people, but you aren't going to do anything about it. Is that right?" The confirmatory answer is silence--the contempt-edged passivity that anyone who called the cops in the seventies and eighties, when, as Bellow remarks, the police were never around when you needed them, will remember well.

While Bellow was writing Mr. Sammler's Planet, not only were the criminals who preyed on the city overwhelmingly black (as is still true in New York), but much worse black violence threatened to destroy urban America in a latterday version of the European upheaval that nearly killed Sammler. Race was the social problem. In 1965, riots raged for six days in Los Angeles's Watts ghetto, leaving over 30 dead and whole blocks in ashes; in 1967, over 40 died in the Detroit ghetto riots before the National Guard, with army reinforcements, restored order; and over 25 died in the Newark riots, in which the looters, shooters, and arsonists left $10 million of property in ruins. A year later, after Martin Luther King's assassination, rioting raged in black neighborhoods for days in over 100 cities. Meanwhile, black radicals--most notably, the weapons-toting, cop-killing Black Panthers--were calling for armed revolution.

The year Sammler appeared, Tom Wolfe jeered at the white elite's embrace of the Panthers in his hilarious essay "Radical Chic," describing a party Leonard Bernstein had thrown to introduce the paramilitary-garbed black-power group to such friends as Richard Avedon, Lillian Hellman, Robert Silvers, and Barbara Walters in his Park Avenue duplex. But for Bellow, despite his keen sense of the absurd, such antics were no laughing matter. They were part of the reason why New York was falling apart.

Since the nineteenth century, bohemians, writers, and intellectuals have toyed with the "romance of the outlaw," as Sammler puts it. "He thought often what a tremendous appeal crime had made to the children of bourgeois civilization. Whether as revolutionists, as supermen, as saints, Knights of Faith, even the best teased and tested themselves with thoughts of knife or gun. Lawless Raskolnikovs." But in Sammler's New York, and in elite culture generally in the sixties, that romance of the outlaw focused primarily on blacks, whose status as social victims and outcasts transformed their criminal acts (ex officio, so to speak) into manly, quasi-heroic revolts against oppression, however inchoate. Another of Sammler's nieces, a rich, pretty Sarah Lawrence grad, embodies this prevailing worldview: she regularly sends money to "defense funds for black murderers and rapists." Her uncle has no patience with this attitude. You can't excuse a crime by saying it has been committed by a victim. "To whom would this not apply, if you start to say poor creature?" he dryly objects.

But though this exculpatory impulse springs partly from a widespread wish to make amends for centuries of racial injustice and to see "the unity of the different races affirmed," its roots go deeper than that. The American elite, Bellow saw, had lost confidence in its core values. "The labor of Puritanism was now ending"; the Puritan outlook that had guided America for three and a half centuries, the bourgeois outlook that "formerly was believed, trusted, was now bitterly circled in black irony." Without faith in their core bourgeois values and in the social order that rested on those values, the old elite had ceased to believe in its own legitimacy. Not surprisingly, "Mr. Sammler was testy with White Protestant America for not keeping better order. Cowardly surrender. Not a strong ruling class. Eager in a secret humiliating way to come down and mingle with all the minority mobs, and scream against themselves."

Trouble was, Americans wanted two mutually exclusive things, Sammler observes. They sought "the privileges, and the free ways of barbarism, under the protection of civilized order, property rights, refined technological organization, and so on." But you can have only one or the other. That is the meaning of the camel's-hair-clad robber's self-display. Yes, here is the big black member that everyone wants; but it is attached to a criminal. Its freedom, power, and authority are lawless, ready to make use of anyone, barbaric, bestial. Throughout, Bellow describes the robber as an "elegant brute" with the "effrontery of a big animal." He is an "African prince or great black beast . . . seeking whom he might devour"--as Saint Peter described that incarnation of evil, the devil. His gesture expresses to Sammler that he has the power and the will to devour him if need be. President Johnson might claim the authority to rule the world; the robber claims the alpha male's authority ! to rule the jungle, the state of nature, by force and violence.

As the classical political philosophers held, the civilized order that protects our lives and property rests on restraint. We curb our freedom of aggressive impulse to ensure the safety of all, ourselves included. The resultant freedom to go about our cities unmolested and to channel our energies into the civilized arts and sciences that generate human progress is a higher freedom than the liberty we relinquish. We limit our sexual freedom in order to form stable families that teach children to internalize civilization's self-restraint and make it part of their character, a process that turns the raw material of nature into human beings. "I thought everybody was born human," Sammler's pretty niece tells him. He replies, with this civilizing process in mind: "It is not a natural gift at all. Only the capacity is natural."

When Sammler, who between the wars was the London correspondent for several Warsaw magazines, gives an informal talk at Columbia about his acquaintanceship with such luminaries as H. G. Wells, J. M. Keynes, and John Strachey, a bearded listener rudely interrupts. How dare Sammler quote George Orwell's statement that "British radicals were protected by the Royal Navy? . . . That's a lot of shit," the man splutters. "Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It's good he died when he did." The Levi's-clad man has no use for the notions that an anti-Communist (though still a leftist) like Orwell could be great and that radicals were free to spout their revolutionary nostrums not only because liberal England gladly tolerated diversity of opinion but also because it guarded its liberal freedom with the very military might the radicals despised. The audience shouldn't listen to Sammler, "this effete old shit," the young man continues. "His balls are dry. He's dead.! He can't come." The young man, in other words, subscribes to the philosophy of the thief in the camel's-hair coat: all authority resides in the genitals, beside which Sammler's wide erudition and the Western culture over which he ranges so widely throughout the novel count as nothing.

The professors were turning against Western culture because, with religion weakened among the elites, culture was the last authoritative bastion of "Thou Shalt Nots," the repository of the great thinkers' conclusions about what kind of life and behavior is best for man, what makes our existence meaningful and human, what allows us to fulfill our highest potentialities--and what leads to strife and sorrow. This final push for liberation on campus, including a liberation from Enlightenment reason itself, didn't want to hear about the right life or the wrong. Every kind of experiment in living--"coupling in all positions, tripling, quadrupling, polymorphous"--was fine in elite culture's "united effort to conquer disgust." The era's artists and playwrights turned against culture, too: Bellow mentions the painting of Andy Warhol, with its fey, arch insistence that there's no difference between the higher accomplishments and the lower, or among art, commerce, and celebrity; and! he mentions the Performance Group's famous production of Dionysus in '69, whose naked actors evidently had missed Nietzsche's caution that art needs the shaping, ordering Apollonian element to contain the frenzy, sexual license, and intoxication of the Dionysian, which, left to itself, ends in murder. For the elites, it was Dionysus all the way.

But neither the death of New York nor the death of conscience ever happened. Like most Americans, the majority of New Yorkers (chiefly in the outer boroughs rather than Manhattan) were pragmatic folk, capable of learning from experience. They didn't want to lose their town, and they elected Rudy Giuliani to clean it up. And all over the country, kids turned against the way their baby-boomer, sexual-revolutionary parents had brought them up, and resolved to do something different. They understood there was a better way to live.

How did they know it? A residue of the old culture, too strong to die? A pragmatic or instinctive understanding that there is a right and a wrong life for man, which some of the old philosophers called Natural Law? From page one of Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow himself insists that, beyond the explanations we construct through Enlightenment reason, the soul has "its own natural knowledge." We all have "a sense of the mystic potency of humankind" and "an inclination to believe in archetypes of goodness. A desire for virtue was no accident." We all know that we must try "to live with a civil heart. With disinterested charity." We must live a life "conditioned by other human beings." We must try to meet the terms of the contract life sets us, as Sammler says in the astonishing affirmation with which Bellow ends his book. "The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. . . . As all know. For that is the truth of it--that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."

More here



From Dove to Hawk

A prominent Israeli historian explains why, after decades of research about the Jewish state, he now holds out little hope for reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians

I remember the moment when the Palestinian diaspora began to interest me, professionally. It was in Rashidiye Camp, outside Tyre, in June 1982, just after the Is-rael Defense Forces had scythed through on their way north to oust the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon. A journalist at the time, I picked my way through the devastated buildings. Most of the men had fled or been detained or killed by the Israelis, but I was struck by a group of old women hunched over a tabun, an outdoor oven, making pita bread far from their homeland. A few weeks later a stash of documents produced in 1948 by the Palmah-the strike force of the Haganah, the main Zionist underground in Palestine-was opened for me, revealing why and how many of these people had been displaced as Israel was born.

My historical account of that event, published a few years later, was greeted with some acclaim by Palestinians and their sympathizers-and much shock by Is-raelis, who had been brought up to believe, or to pretend to believe, that the Palestini-ans had fled their homes four decades earli-er because of orders or advice from their leaders. In certain places, at certain times, there had been such advice and orders, of course. But there had also been Israeli ex-pulsions, as well as the chaos of British withdrawal and economic hardship and anxiety about an uncharted future under Jewish rule. In most places it was the flail and fear of onrushing hostilities that had set some 700,000 Arabs on the roads.

Myself and several other young Israeli historians were dubbed revisionists and commonly assumed to be doves. But what brought me to my conclusions about 1948 were the facts, not my political views. Con-trary to current historiographic discourse I believe there is such a thing as the Truth-what, why and how things happened-and I've always sought it in my research. If I've since come to a much bleaker opinion about the possibility of reconciliation be-tween Jews and Palestinians-many would now call me a hawk-it is also because of that research.

During the 1990s, as the Oslo peace process gained momentum, I was cautious-ly optimistic about the prospects for peace. But at the same time I was scouring the just opened archives of the Haganah and the IDF. Studying the roots of the Arab-Is-raeli conflict-in particular the pronounce-ments and positions of the Palestinian leadership from the 1920s on-left me chilled. Their rejection of any compromise, whether a partition of Palestine between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants or the cre-ation of a binational state with political parity between the two communities, was deep-seated, consensual and consistent.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian na-tional movement during the 1930s and 1940s, insisted throughout on a single Muslim Arab state in all of Palestine. The Palestinian Arab "street" chanted "Idbah al-Yahud" (slaughter the Jews) both during the 1936-1939 revolt against the British and in 1947, when Arab militias launched a campaign to destroy the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. Husseini led both campaigns.

So when Yasir Arafat rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's two-state proposals at Camp David in July 2000, and then President Clinton's sweetened offer the follow-ing December, my surprise was not exces-sive. Nor was I astounded by the spectacle of masses of suicide bombers launched, with Arafat's blessing, against Israel's shop-ping malls, buses and restaurants in the second intifada, which erupted in Septem-ber 2000. Each suicide bomber seemed to be a microcosm of what Palestine's Arabs had in mind for Israel as a whole. Arafat's rejectionism and, after his death, the election of Hamas to dominance in the Pales-tinian national movement, persuaded me that no two-state solution was in the offing and that the Palestinians, as a people, were bent, as they had been throughout their history, on "recovering" all of Palestine.

I found that current events had echoes in the historical record, and vice versa. The founding charter of Hamas repeatedly refers to the victory of Saladin over the me-dieval crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, and compares the crusaders to the Zionists. In researching my new history of the 1948 war, I was struck by the fact that this analo-gy, usually overlooked or ignored by previ-ous historians, suffused the statements and thinking of Palestinian leaders and the leaders of the surrounding Arab states dur-ing the countdown to, and the course of, the war. A few days before Arab armies struck at Jewish forces in Palestine, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, secretary general of the Arab League, told the British minister in Transjordan their aim was to "sweep the Jews into the sea."

If the documents I studied 20 years ago painted Palestinians tragically, as the underdog, this record did the opposite. It has become clear to me that from its start the struggle against the Zionist enterprise wasn't merely a national conflict between two peoples over a piece of territory but also a religious crusade against an infidel usurper. As early as Dec. 2, 1947, four days after the passage of the partition resolution, the scholars of Al Azhar University proclaimed a "worldwide jihad in defense of Arab Palestine" and de-clared that it was the duty of every Muslim to take part.

This history has deepened and reinforced my pessimism, itself bred by the fail-ure of Oslo. Those currently riding high in the region-figures like Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal, Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-are true believers who are convinced it is Allah's command and every Muslim's duty to extirpate the "Zionist entity" from the sacred soil of the Middle East. For all its economic, political, scientific and cultural achievements and military prowess, Israel, at 60, remains profoundly insecure-for there can be no real security for the Jewish state, surrounded by a surg-ing sea of Muslims, in the absence of peace.

Source

I think that the last sentence above was simply what he needed to say in order to get his article published in "Newsweak"



Obama And The Emerging Tradition Of Emotive, Non-Rational Liberalism

Post below recycled from Discriminations. See the original for links

Lately I've been trying to get a handle on what is widely said to be our enduring, endemic, pervasive racism, but a racism so "underground, hidden, subtle" that it is visible only to highly trained social scientists (such as the one discussed here) who, to skeptics, resemble nothing so much as dowsers claiming to have near-magical powers to find underground water with forked sticks. Summarizing the findings regarding "racial resentments" in recent literature of political psychology, John Judis of The New Republic writes that

racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject.... Political psychologists devised new tests to uncover these sentiments....

The answers [to questions inserted into the American National Election Studies] revealed a degree of racial resentment that wasn't apparent from more explicit questions about racial bias. In 1986, for instance, 59 percent of respondents agreed that blacks were not trying hard enough (only 27 percent disagreed), while 67 percent thought blacks should work "their way up ... without any special favors." Psychologists David Sears and Donald Kinder, as well as others, found that this racial resentment was the single most important factor--more important than even conservative ideology or political partisanship--in explaining strong opposition to a host of government programs that either directly or indirectly benefited minorities. Of course, that doesn't mean there couldn't be principled conservative opposition to government-guaranteed equal employment or urban aid. But, according to the political psychologists, racial resentment played the largest role in fueling public skepticism.

Now here comes another one, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, who points to "a more subtle form of prejudice" he describes as our symbolic racism.

Racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the United States over the past several decades, of course, and overtly racist beliefs are much less prevalent among white Americans of all classes today. But a more subtle form of prejudice, which social scientists sometimes call symbolic racism, is still out there - especially among working-class whites.

Symbolic racism means believing that African American poverty and other problems are largely the result of lack of ambition and effort, rather than white racism and discrimination. Who holds symbolically racist beliefs? A relatively large portion of white voters in general and white working-class voters in particular, according to the 2004 American National Election Study, the best data available on this topic. A few answers underscore how widespread these attitudes are:

* Almost 60 percent of white voters agreed with the statement that "blacks should try harder to succeed." A startling 43 percent of white college graduates nodded at this one, along with 71 percent of whites with no college education.

* Fully 49 percent of white voters disagreed with the statement that "history makes it more difficult for blacks to succeed." Forty percent of white college graduates disagreed with it, along with 58 percent of whites with no college education.

So, believing with Jesse Jackson and Bill Cosby that "blacks should try harder to succeed" makes one a symbolic racist? Would a belief, say, that "affirmative action makes it easier for blacks to succeed" also make one a symbolic racist? For that matter, would believing that blacks should be treated just like whites and Asians - no better and no worse - also make one a symbolic racist? Or just a plain, run of the mill, overt racist? Clearly one or the other since, according to Judis's report, a belief that "blacks should work `their way up ... without any special favors'" is evidence of "racial resentment."

All of this talk of subconscious, non-rational, gut-level racism calls to mind the work of another Emory social scientist, Drew Westen, whose book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, was discussed here. (What is it with Emory's infatuation with emotions over thought?) As I wrote there, quoting an article in the Los Angeles Times,

Westen writes that it doesn't make sense to argue an issue using facts and figures and to count on voters - particularly the swing voters who decide national elections - to make choices based on sophisticated understandings of policy differences or procedures. He says Democratic candidates must learn to do what Republicans have understood for many years - they must appeal to emotions....

Actually, maybe they (or at least one) have (has) learned, although not in a way these political dowsers would approve. According to the lefty blogs and the Obama tankers in the mainstream press, Hillary has been "channeling George Wallace," as Joe Conason so artfully put it, by appealing to these subterranean racist sentiments. As everyone knows by now, Hillary commented that

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." "There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

According to Conason,

There is indeed a pattern emerging - and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.

New York Times OpEdist Bob Herbert echoed Conason.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way - any way - back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train. He can't win! Don't you understand? He's black! He's black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It's a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years

Herbert continued:

I don't know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people - or most working-class white people - are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

If it is a slur, it's a slur that has become increasingly prominent and popular in social science today. Not for the first time (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.), one of the more predictably splenetic outbursts came from the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson. "As a statement of fact, that's debatable at best. As a rationale for why Democratic Party superdelegates should pick her over Obama," he writes,

it's a slap in the face to the party's most loyal constituency - African Americans - and a repudiation of principles the party claims to stand for. Here's what she's really saying to party leaders: There's no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you'll be sorry. How silly of me. I thought the Democratic Party believed in a colorblind America.

This isn't silly. It's audacious, unadulterated balderdash. Robinson knows perfectly well that the Democratic Party has not believed in - nor has it supported any policies, judges, or principles based on or advocating - "a colorblind America" since about 1965, and neither has he.

As I have commented more than once, virtually all of the discussion of the Democratic primaries has been couched in a very unsubtle version of demographic determinism. Democratic voters have been routinely described as being more or less of one mind (if that) on most major public policy issues; they have differed only in their demographic identities, splitting along lines of race, gender, age, etc.

But when Hillary notes, quoting an AP article, that her coalition is broader than Obama's, she's denounced as the second coming of George Wallace who "violated the rhetorical rules" (Conason, linked above). If she's guilty of appealing to the baser instincts of Democratic voters, isn't this exactly the behavior that one would expect to flow from all the advice to "frame" the debate (see here, here, here, and here) by appealing to the emotions of the electorate? And speaking of rhetorical rules, Joan Walsh of Salon nervously asks, "[c]an Democrats learn to talk about race." Like a prissy school-marm telling her charges to sit still, shape up, and fly right, she petulantly informs Democrats to watch their mouth:

Everybody's going to have to be more careful in the next few months, in the way they talk about race, while also talking about it. A lot. I don't know how we figure that one out, but we have to.

It's almost enough to make one pity the poor, conflicted Democrats. They so love to talk, especially about race, but they just don't know how. The traditional American idiom of fairness, i.e., treating everyone "without regard" to race, creed, or color, has become a foreign language, spoken only by ideological aliens (Republicans and conservatives).

I think the underlying problem here is that Democrats, apt and eager acolytes of their social science gurus, believe that everything important is, well, underlying - that emotion, attitude, prejudice, unconscious racism trump and even run roughshod over conscious thought, rationality, evidence, principles, moral beliefs, etc. And to their credit, they are perfectly bi-partisan in their disdain for the rationality of American voters: Republicans and small-towners bitterly cling to God and Guns because of economic disappointment; white, blue-collar Democrats similarly vote against their own interests out of "racial resentments."

In many respects there's nothing new in the Democrats' subordination of rationality and thought to feeling and emotion. Remember all the talk, not so long ago, about the Democrats as the "Mommy Party" (warm, compassionate, healing, inclusive, generous) and the Republicans as the "Daddy Party" (strict, demanding, competitive, stingy, just-the-facts rule enforcement)? And let us not forget all the hoo-hah over Thomas Frank's dismissal of the crazy Kansans that was such a popular rage among Democrats and that was just discussed here.

We've just heard a modern riff on the thought vs. emotion melody when Rev. Wright informed the Detroit NAACP about the "two different ways of learning" of blacks and whites.

European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America....

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning. They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn't stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning....

Rev. Wright was widely ridiculed for these and similar remarks, but in their subordination of analytical thought to emotion they were closer to the mainstream of modern liberal epistemology than is commonly supposed.

Let me give just one example - as it happens, from Rev. Wright's most famous and now recently former acolyte, Barack Obama. Obama, as we've seen with his bitter/clinging put-down of small town voters, is no stranger to the idea that people's behavior is often governed more by their emotions and subconscious concerns than by a clear, thought-out position on the "issues," but as far as he himself is concerned, he has the image of being almost too thoughtful, rational, articulate, etc., to connect with ordinary people. Thus I think it is quite revealing that even he, former editor of the Harvard Law Review and part-time professor of constitutional law, is on the record saying that he would subordinate head to "heart" in nominating judges and Supreme Court Justices. As Edward Whelan explained in The Weekly Standard,

In explaining his vote against Roberts, Obama opined that deciding the "truly difficult" cases requires resort to "one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy." In short, "the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart." No clearer prescription for lawless judicial activism is possible.

Indeed, in setting forth the sort of judges he would appoint, Obama has explicitly declared: "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges." So much for the judicial virtue of dispassion. So much for a craft of judging that is distinct from politics.

Obama's heart-centered judicial philosophy has recently been discussed in two enlightening posts on the Volokh Conspiracy blog (here and here). Read both, and the comments. Here's a small sample: One commenter asked, "why wouldn't you want someone "with a good heart" setting down that law?" to which another replied: "When it comes to setting the law, a good brain is vastly more important." Another asked:

So, I'm curious: when Obama was lecturing in Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago, were I to take a class of his and write on the final exam "Justice X's opinion in Case Y was correct because Justice X's heart was in the right place", would Obama have given me an `A'?

And if he didn't, would his refusal be based on some theoretical ground that would of necessity conflict with his often-stated heartfelt, heart-based philosophy ... or because he disagreed with what was in Justice X's heart?

Again, there's nothing altogether new here. Pragmatism has long been an important, and often dominant strain, in American liberalism, and its offspring, legal realism and an even more extreme post-modernism (search here for my many discussions of Stanley Fish), also reject fealty to rules and principles in favor of whatever road will lead to one's preferred result.

Nevertheless, even though this phenomenon is not new, it's important to recognize that when Obama lets slip his belief that voters often act irrationally and Hillary "frames" the argument for her candidacy in a way that strikes many liberals and mainstream pundits (but I repeat myself) as racist they are not going off half-cocked as idiosyncratic individuals but are rather both reflecting and acting out of what has become the dominant heart and gut over head epistemology of modern liberalism.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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12 May, 2008

Wellness Ueber Alles

A new battlefront in the war to erase politically incorrect civil liberties is taking place across corporate America under the innocuous-sounding banner of "Wellness." Wellness certainly sounds nice; what kind of person is against wellness? That sounds as crazy as being anti-hope, or standing in the way of change.

Obviously we all want to be well, but now it appears you won't have much choice in the matter. Be well or face consequences beyond the state of one's health. But always remember: We're doing this for your own good.

The latest thing that's in our best interest is a renewed focus on quitting smoking, or as they say in more sophisticated circles, smoking cessation. And I'll take a brief time out to recognize that, indeed, quitting smoking is in a smoker's best interest, however, what's different this time around are the tactics employed. Before we discuss them, let's do a review of liberal social engineering programs from inception to execution. These steps should prove generally predictive of smoking cessation efforts currently underway.

* A group of individuals anoints themselves as better-informed than the rest of us. They base this largely on the fact that they listen to the same programs on NPR and consistently vote Democrat.

* The self-defined elite group comes to an agreement that the rest of us are not as enlightened as they. This is expressed in many ways, usually involving code words such as "clinging", "mean-spirited", or "greedy". If you hear these words being applied to you or your associates, this is a clear indication that you are not one of the elites.

* The elites begin to develop a sense of responsibility for their lessers. This is often expressed in statements like, "It's just makes me so sad to see them like that. I wish there were something we could do to..."

* The elites form a plan. The plan generally involves making everyone else behave like them. As enthusiasm rises, what were once "differences" become "problems" and finally metamorphose into a "crisis". When the word "crisis" appears, this usually signals the end of planning phase. The Plan predictably contains the following elements: coercion, moral superiority, lack of debate and voting, and a succession of "experts" who testify on its behalf.

* The plan is imposed. If the legislative branch refuses, the judiciary is prevailed upon to conjure up a constitutional justification.

* The plan begins to fail. This step is usually followed by demands for more resources to "properly implement the plan", (see the War on Poverty), and angry accusations at non-elite groups for their mean spirited, clingy refusal to change.

* The plan fails.

* The elites meet to form a new, better plan.

The smoking cessation plan seeks to turn recalcitrant smokers -- those so far unaffected by health education, high taxation and appeals to self-interest -- into non-smokers through the imposition of a "smoke free campus". What this means essentially is that no one is allowed to smoke anywhere on company property. Not content with banning smoking indoors and segregating it outdoors, it is now banished entirely like some wayward cleric in 13th century Europe, (or in the case of Islam - 21st century Europe). In many cases, these smoke free campus programs make it a company offense to even retire to your own vehicle and smoke a cigarette with the windows rolled up. The justification: your car is parked on our property and we don't approve of smoking!

What are your options if you still stubbornly wish to assert your right to smoke? Put on your walking shoes; you're going on a hike. Keep in mind that many corporate headquarters sit on multi-acre sites, and you realize that the afternoon smoke break is turned into something resembling the Boston Marathon. Harried smokers trekking across vast empty lawns to stand across the street, puffing furiously to make up for the ten minutes wasted traversing the tobacco-free DMZ. We may as well take this to its logical conclusion and hang a scarlet "S" around their necks while we're at it.

At this point you may well question my motivation for this cynical diatribe against change. Chalk it up to my basic lack of hope. Let me go on record as stating that although I did smoke as a younger man, I have not engaged in this self-destructive habit since New Years Eve 1994. I do not write this from the point of view of a disgruntled smoker forced to tint his car windows or purchase ergonomic walking shoes in order to continue the habit. I have no dog in this fight. Instead I use these corporate anti-smoking campaigns as an example of the stark differences between liberal and conservative ideology. As a conservative I don't see it as my job, much less my right, to make other people do things that are "in their best interest". As a conservative, my assumptions are:

* I have no idea what someone else's "best interest" is;

* Other people's "best interest", by definition, is none of my business.

It's a little concept called liberty. And by the way, it's the cornerstone of the Enlightenment, and a document known as the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers were very fond of liberty and fought a couple of wars with England on the very subject. Ditto a whole lot of civil rights workers in the 50's and 60's.

Freedom is the right of emancipated adults to make choices for themselves and accept the responsibility for the consequences. Don't think that the good intentions of the elites stop at the point of preventing you from putting smoke in your mouth. There are all those bad choices people make about what to eat just begging for correction.

The exercise of personal liberty, for all its flaws and imperfections, is far superior to the alternative, which for all my searching to avoid an over-used, often clich‚ term, is best defined as fascism. Not the jack boot, kick your door in at 3AM variety. But the more insidious, smiley-face variety described admirably by Jonah Goldberg as Liberal Fascism.

So the next time some well meaning do-gooder comes along and tries to take away your freedom of choice remember to mention John Locke and George Washington. Point out that you're not monitoring their "lifestyle choices" and would appreciate it if they returned the favor. Instruct them that freedom is a messy proposition and doesn't come with the right to make other people's decisions for them. Tell them to put that in their pipe and smoke it (metaphorically of course, because we all know smoking's bad for you).

Source



Muslim threat to a blogger

Post below recycled from Infidels are Cool. See the original for links

Another moronic thug spewing hatred and evil towards anyone who criticizes Islam, now directing their threats right here at the nearly famous Infidels that are cool enough for some Islamo-hatemail. Here's the hate mail/death threat I received last night: The IP is based out of a hosting company in Netherlands but the IP location is inside the UK:

mahamed417@hotmail.com | 89.241.97.116

Are you fucking smacked. If I ever find out who you are my SMS boy's will come and blow holes in your face like we did to Adrian Marriot.

Him mentioning "SMS boys" refers an offshoot of the The Muslim Boys gang operating in South London called "South Man Syndicate", also known as "South Man Dem". I posted about these gangs back in January 2008. And Adrian Marriot was killed in 2005 by members of the Muslim Boys gang for refusing to convert to Islam. More info here:

Spero

The gang that ordered Adrian Marriott to convert to Islam is called The Muslim Boys. Until the killing, its ascendancy passed mainly unnoticed by the media. The Muslim Boys were viewed as just another of the many gangs that operated in south London, with names such as the Stockwell Crew, the Peel Den Crew, Mad Crew or Mad4T, the SMS (South Man Syndicate, also known as South Man Dem) and PDC (Poverty Driven Children). The police took the threat of the Muslim Boys more seriously. When Adrian Marriott's funeral took place in Brixton, the ceremony was guarded by armed police.

The Muslim Boys drew their recruits, mainly young black youths, from Brixton, Peckham, Lambeth, and Streatham. They targeted run-down housing projects such as the Angel Town Estate in Brixton where Adrian Marriott lived with his mother, his brother David, sister Tara and other siblings. The gang's core membership originally came from another housing project in Brixton called the Myatt's Field Estate. The Muslim Boys made most of their income by committing robberies, stealing from drug dealers and laundering money. They gained a fearsome reputation amongst their peers through their forced conversions to Islam.

Before Adrian Marriott was given the order to convert to Islam or die, his sister Tara had already become a target of the Muslim Boys. Tara Marriott and her friend Jade Okai gave in to the gang's demands and converted. They were given hijabs, Muslim headscarfs, which they were ordered to wear. They were also given Muslim books, DVDs and copies of the Koran, by two men who would later be charged with Adrian's murder.

In September 2005 three young men, Marcus Archer, Aaron Irving-Simpson and Marlon Stubbs, all aged 24, stood trial for the murder of Adrian Marriott. A jury at the Old Bailey heard that a few days before his murder, Adrian told his brother that Marlon Stubbs and two other individuals had threatened him at gunpoint and demanded 500 pounds ($979). Shortly after this, Marriott and an associate "accosted" Archer at Loughborough Junction train station. Stubbs then telephoned Marriot's sister Tara and said: "Your brother is a little tadpole. He just messed with a shark, a whale." Stubbs already had a conviction for raping two schoolgirls.

The BBC also covered this in 2005: Man `killed by Islamic zealots'. Jihad Watch was on it too: UK: The rise of the Muslim Boys. So should I feel intimidated or scared? Hell no.

There's this thing in America we call free speech. That means I can speak about the dirty prophet mohamed all day long and be proud that I am able to do so. Sadly this kind of thing would probably get me prosecuted in other countries like Canada (Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn) or in the UK (Lionheart) not to mention the countless bloggers in Muslim countries who are either in jail or in hiding for speaking the truths in which they believe.

So, to this Mahamed, commenter. You'll never silence me or any of the "Anti-Jihad Blogger Coalition" with you pathetic comments. Come meet my M&P .40 [pistol]



"Institutional Racism"

Post below recycled from Discriminations. See the original for links

Earlier today I indicated (here) some skepticism about underground, hidden, subtle "institutional and structural" racism. Whether because of luck or co-incidence or simply a terribly confused contact list, I just received an email notice from an assistant editor at Ms. Magazine informing me of an article in the new issue, "`Too Poor to Parent?,' on institutional racism in the U.S. foster care system."

Curious to learn more about "institutional racism," and hoping to find a good example of this undercover, subtle, hard to pin down but nevertheless pervasive evil, I went to the above link, which provides only an excerpt from the article, not the whole thing. Still, it was revealing (or not, if you're a skeptic ... or an overt or covert racist). It begins quite dramatically:

When a recurrent plumbing problem in an upstairs unit caused raw sewage to seep into her New York City apartment, 22-year-old Lisa called social services for help. She had repeatedly asked her landlord to fix the problem, but he had been unresponsive. Now the smell was unbearable, and Lisa feared for the health and safety of her two young children.

When the caseworker arrived, she observed that the apartment had no lights and that food was spoiling in the refrigerator. Lisa explained that she did not have the money to pay her electric bill that month, but would have the money in a few weeks. She asked whether the caseworker could help get them into a family shelter. The caseworker promised she would help-but left Lisa in the apartment and took the children, who were then placed in foster care. Months later, the apartment is cleaned up. Lisa still does not have her children....

A sad story, to be sure, but at this point some of you may be wondering the same thing I was: where, or what, is the "institutional racism"? What I think is the attempt at answering this question quickly follows:

Black children are the most overrepresented demographic in foster care nationwide. According to the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO), blacks make up 34 percent of the foster-care population, but only 15 percent of the general child population. In 2004, black children were twice as likely to enter foster care as white children. Even among other minority groups, black mothers are more likely to lose their children to the state than Hispanics or Asians-groups that are slightly underrepresented in foster care.

The reason for this disparity? Study after study reviewed by Stanford University law professor Dorothy Roberts in her book Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Perseus, 2002) concludes that poverty is the leading cause of children landing in foster care. One study, for example, showed that poor families are up to 22 times more likely to be involved in the child-welfare system than wealthier families. And nationwide, blacks are four times more likely than other groups to live in poverty.

Color me dense, but I still don't get it. The fact that poor people are "22 times more likely to be involved in the child-welfare system" (why only 22?) than wealthier families is evidence of "institutional racism"?

Similarly, if "poverty is the leading cause of children landing in foster care" and blacks are "four times more likely than other groups to live in poverty," why is the fact that blacks are "twice as likely to enter foster care as white children" regarded as evidence of "institutional racism"? Why, that is, are blacks the "most overrepresented demographic" if poverty is the cause of "representation" in foster care, blacks are four times more likely to live in poverty, but only twice as likely to be in foster care? Alas, I'm afraid "institutional racism" remains too subtle for me to grasp.



Australia: Catholic schools join same-sex lockout

CATHOLIC schools in Queensland have joined the crackdown against students escorting gay partners to Year 12 formals. With the formal season under way, Catholic secondary students have been reminded by their school administrators that it would be inappropriate for same-sex couples to attend major school events such as the formal. "The Catholic Church has a particular vision of family and sexuality flowing on to a responsibility to model this vision for children through formal activities in the life of the Catholic school," said Queensland Catholic Education Commission executive director Mike Byrne. "As such it is not seen as appropriate for students to attend an event such as a school formal as a same-sex couple."

Brisbane's Anglican Church Grammar School last month banned male students from taking same-sex partners to the school formal on June 19. But other secondary schools are more relaxed about who students can take to their formal. Brisbane Girls Grammar School principal Amanda Bell said the school imposed no restrictions on who pupils could take to the dance. "Guests may include male or female friends, cousins, parents, siblings, anyone," she said. "Some girls choose not to bring a guest. The school encourages the girls to invite someone who will support and enjoy this event in a positive spirit."

Karen Spiller, the principal of St Aidan's Anglican Girls School in Brisbane, said the school had "no policy" on who students could or could not bring. "We're very happy for our girls to go along and enjoy their formal in the company of their own friends and cohorts or to bring a friend or a partner," she said. "The focus is on appropriate behaviour and enjoying their relationships with their cohorts."

Queensland state high schools also have their own guidelines regarding school formals, with no restrictions on same-sex couples.

Source

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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11 May, 2008

Homosexual indoctrination starts in Minneapolis

Opponents tell district to leave sexuality out of social culture

A special interest program assembled by the Human Rights Campaign to promote homosexuality has been launched in the 91-school Minneapolis district, even as opponents are urging school officials to keep sexuality out of the social culture. "The government should promote and encourage strong families," said Austin R. Nimocks, a senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. "When school officials have to choose between protecting children in those families or furthering the homosexual agenda, the choice is obvious: protecting our children comes first."

The issue is the "Welcoming Schools" program assembled by the HRC, which advocates for and promotes homosexuality. District spokesman Ross Bennett told WND the program already has been launched in one school and was under consideration by the district's curriculum committee for other uses. He said he knew of one principal in one school who had requested help because of "bullying" that he believed was focused on sexual orientation issues, and the district considers the HRC promotional program another tool for teachers and administrators to use. He said the district's existing anti-bullying program could not be called inadequate, but "there's always room for improvement."

The ADF's comments accompanied a legal memo to the district advising officials of the true intent of the HRC promotion. "HRC says the program is designed to stop bullying, even though its true intent is to promote the homosexual agenda," Nimocks said. "If HRC merely cared about bullying, they would simply endorse the school district's vigorous 'Bullying and Hazing Policy.'" "According to its own statistics, HRC represents only 4.1 percent of American adults who identify themselves as homosexual, but it is attempting to implement its agenda on our children and the remaining 95.9 percent of American adults who don't identify themselves as either 'gay' or 'lesbian,'" he said.

The promotional materials, the ADF said, can lead to a wide range of "practical and legal problems." "Especially within schools, bathrooms, locker rooms, and other intimate places will no longer be protected from members of the opposite sex once 'gender identity' becomes standard behavior for students," the memo states. "From an enforcement standpoint, school officials would be unable to discern whether a boy who is using the girls' restroom is a sexual predator, prankster, or one who sincerely believes that he is somehow a girl."

According to published reports in Minnesota, the district is moving forward with the plan despite opposition from parents, who complained the agenda places too much emphasis on teaching about homosexual and other lifestyle choices, and includes too little about racial and religious diversity "and that it undermines parental authority by causing confusion in children." Supt. Bill Green, however, in a newspaper, endorsed the plan. His office declined to allow WND to ask him any questions, referring all inquiries instead to Bennett.

WND previously has reported on a nationwide campaign to have parents keep their children home from schools when the institutions promote the pro-homosexual "Day of Silence" activist event annually. The advanced state of California's homosexual indoctrination program for public school students also has been documented.

The MinnPost.com website reported it was the principal at Hale School in the district, Bob Brancale, who demanded the program. He said there's a need for an anti-bullying program that includes homosexual issues and he wanted the program installed and his teachers trained. The principal said there were 240 behavioral referrals this school year and 60 were for bullying, including about half involving "some form of gay slurs," the report said. The school board said it left curriculum matters to its school managers.

But the Alliance Defense Fund said the proposal will make problems. "The 'Welcoming Schools' project incorporates within itself two incorrect and dangerous assumptions - (a) that one's sex is a mental decision and not a biological fact, and (b) that individuals are born with an immutable 'sexual orientation,' including children as young as five-years-old having normal same-sex attractions." "It is clear that the goal of HRC is to implement an educational program to indoctrinate young children with social viewpoints that are extremely controversial, out of the mainstream, and rely on unproven scientific theory that runs counter to American cultural and scholastic interests," the ADF advisory said. "The indoctrination of children with HRC's anti-religion political agenda will present serious practical and legal problems, especially [as] adults are charged with the safety and security of other people's children."

Among other issues, the ADF said, presenting such indoctrination in class would violate the district's own policy addressing teaching controversial material. Further complicating the issue would be the program's targeting children ages 5-7 with a lesson "that sex is an irrelevant biological inconvenience." "In fact . HRC embraces the notion that a person can identify as neither male nor female, but instead 'intersexual,'" the ADF said.

The promotional material's use of "gender identity" is just an attempt to "socially normalize behavior flowing from a known and recognized mental illness (Gender Identity Disorder)," the ADF said. "As a society, if we were to begin ignoring the needs of those inflicted with schizophrenia, denying them treatment, care, medication, and counseling, the consequences would be devastating. The turning of a blind eye to GID is no less destructive," the letter said.

On a practical level, schools no longer would be able to segregate boys and girls for restroom needs, locker room facilities and other intimate situations once "gender identity" is fully embraced, the ADF said. "By choosing to embrace HRC's political agenda, school administrators would be forced to defer to the perceived or designated sex of each individual, without regard to their biological reality," the group said. Working under such a belief system, "there is no circumstance under which a teacher or school administrator would know whether to object to any given individual's usage of the boys or girls restroom."

"Moreover, all students possess privacy rights, even within their school.," the group said. "The law protects students . in refraining from having their bodies exposed to members of the opposite sex. . There exists no compelling interest that justifies your endangering the health, welfare, and safety of . students in order to acquiesce to a wayward and misguided political agenda."

The legal advisory also noted the HRC program lacks scientific support and usurps parental rights. "The 'Welcoming Schools' project is sex-based education - nothing more," the ADF said. "Allowing the country's largest LGBTQ advocacy and political organization to dictate elementary school curriculum will pique the curious and inquisitive minds of the school district's children, leading to disastrous consequences."

One of those consequences, according to ADF, would be an open door to damage claims. "Since everyone arguably possesses some semblance of 'sexual orientation,' nothing will prevent students from making various or inconsistent claims." ADF said, which could not be defended because the basis for such claims woudl be a perceived sexual orientation.

Source



Ontario Premier's Plan to Scrap Lord's Prayer Backfires as Groundswell Grows in Opposition

The Ontario premier's plans to scrap the recitation of the Lord's Prayer in the Legislature has resulted in a groundswell of opposition. The flood of emails objecting to the proposal temporarily crashed the website of Queen's Park, and hundreds of phone calls have come in protesting the move. MPPs have complained that the time and money spent on the project could have better been spent elsewhere, especially considering there had been no calls to abolish the prayer leading up to McGuinty's decision to put the proposal to scrap the prayer before a committee.

In a move that reportedly surprised MPPs, Premier McGuinty, who continues to claim membership in the Catholic Church, told the legislature in February this year that the time had come to "move beyond" open acknowledgement of Christianity in the Ontario government. He asked a committee to draft a religiously neutral "prayer" that would better suit Ontario's "religious diversity". "I've asked for a parliamentary committee, with representation from each of the parties and the Speaker's involvement as well, to take a look at how we can move beyond the Lord's Prayer to a broader approach that is more inclusive in nature," McGuinty said.

McGuinty told media, "We're much more than just Protestants and Catholics today. We have all the world's faiths represented here." But Ontario, statistically speaking, is not as "diverse" as Mr. McGuinty might believe. Recent figures show that two-thirds of Ontario's population is Christian. In Canada overall, professing Christians still make up at least 70 per cent of the population.

McGuinty admitted that his suggestion to abolish the Lord's Prayer had resulted in a scolding from his Catholic mother. He told media today that he is "looking forward" to hearing the recommendation of the committee. But committee chairman Steve Peters told media that while the response was overwhelmingly against the idea from the public, the committee had not finished its consultation process. Various groups, including atheists and non-Christian organizations, have been given until the end of the month to make presentations.

Conservative MPP Garfield Dunlop said, "The Lord's Prayer is inclusive enough that it covers a lot of different religions. It's not just about religion. It's about tradition." "You don't tamper too much with what you've got," he said. "This really irks a lot of people and gets under their skin."

NDP MPP for Parkdale-High Park, Cheri DiNovo said that "about 80 per cent" of constituents are in favour of keeping the Lord's Prayer. "Now he's getting his groundswell," she added.

Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory said, "I don't think there was any thirst to have a debate on this at all, certainly not compared to hospital emergency rooms or lost jobs. But now that Mr. McGuinty - for reasons best known to him - has started the debate, people are quite animated about it."

Source



The land of the almost free to speak up

I'd like to think it was the sangria talking. But the plain truth is, when Anna said she doesn't find this country to be especially free, it was Anna talking. Granted, her complaint is hardly new. People often grouse about the lack of freedom in the land of the free.

But you see, Anna is from Estonia, a former republic of the old Soviet Union. As in the Evil Empire, world's leading exporter of communism. So when Anna says she feels less free in the United States where she now lives than in the once-totalitarian regime where she was born, well . . . it gets your attention. And when she says Americans sometimes remind her of the gray, fatalistic people who shuffled along under communism, unwilling to think too deeply, say too much or laugh too loudly for fear of offending the State, it is striking, to say the least.

You won't know Anna from Estonia. She is a friend's fiance, and these insights were not part of some think tank paper but, rather, came in the ebb and flow of table talk one recent night at a Mexican restaurant. Still, I think Anna is onto something. Americans, she said, love to trumpet their freedom. But it's hard to square that with political correctness that straitjackets communication for fear of giving unintended offense, hair-trigger litigiousness that requires major corporations to treat customers (''Caution: Coffee is hot'') like idiots for fear of being sued, zero tolerance policies and mandatory sentencing guidelines that remove human judgment from human encounters for fear of rendering unequal justice.

You do not have to agree that Americans compare unfavorably with the dull and dispirited Party men and women of a generation ago -- I don't -- to believe Anna has a point. A nation of iconoclasts and originals seems hellbent on becoming a nation of hall monitors. A nation born in revolution has lived to see revolution neutered and co-opted. So much so that even that which poses as a threat to the status quo (hip-hop, for example) nowadays has commercial sponsorship and corporate tie-ins.

It's hard to imagine an Elvis Presley happening in such an era. Or a Malcolm X, a Miles Davis, a Marlon Brando, a Bob Dylan, a Walt Disney, a Betty Friedan or any of the other American originals who poleaxed the 20th century. After all, originality is anathema to uniformity and, make no mistake, uniformity is what we're talking about here, the campaign to regulate language, law, culture and every other aspect of human intercourse in the hope of thereby removing from that intercourse every hint of risk or danger of unequal treatment.

To put it another way: You can hardly accuse the cashier of being rude to you because of your sexual orientation if the cashier is a keypad; you can hardly sue the maker of the vending machine you rocked until it fell over on you if it bears a sign that says rocking this machine will cause it to fall over on you; you can hardly say the judge gave you a harsh sentence because you're Hispanic if the judge had no role in choosing your sentence.

And if this impulse toward uniformity sounds noble in theory, what it leads to in practice is kids kicked out of school because Midol violates the zero-tolerance drug policy, or a parolee getting 25 to life because the pizza slice he stole violates the three-strike law.

And, too, it leads to Anna from Estonia making it a point to show visiting friends a sight they could never see in the old country. They laugh, they point, they whip out cameras and take pictures. Of the Everglades? No. Of Mount Rushmore or Lady Liberty? No. Anna said they take pictures of the idiot signs. These she said, crack her friends up. ''Caution: Coffee is hot.'' Apparently, elsewhere in the world, you don't need a sign to know this.

Source



Change That Kids Could Believe In

Among the many items that presidential hopeful Barack Obama lists in his agenda for lowering American poverty is legislation that would "promote responsible fatherhood" by, among other measures, stricter enforcement of laws requiring absent fathers to support their children. Perhaps Obama should take a look at the latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics on child custody and child support. The data might prompt him to revamp his legislation in support of a broader reform--responsible parenthood among both sexes.

The recently released data indicate some progress, after a decade of tougher enforcement of court-ordered child support by certain localities. While the overall share of parents with custody of kids who received at least some child support in 2005 (the latest year statistics are available) grew slightly--to 77.2 percent, from 75.8 percent in 1995--the percentage of parents receiving all the support due them increased to 47 percent, from only 37 percent a decade earlier. Those gains are significant, because the data show that single-parent households that get full child support from absent parents are far less likely to wind up in poverty.

But below the surface of the census report is a troubling trend that has as much to do with mothers as with fathers: the rapidly rising percentage of custodial single parents who have never married. These parents, mostly mothers, are far less likely to have support agreements with the child's absent parent, because their relationships are less solid than those between formerly married couples who raised children together for some time before splitting. Only 48 percent of never-married parents have such agreements, compared with 62 percent of all other parents. Further, these never-married parents are far less likely to receive child-support payments even when arrangements are in place--only 40 percent received everything due them in 2005, compared with half of all other parents.

What's most troubling is that unwed parents represent the fastest-growing segment of single parents: their numbers have increased by a quarter since 1995, and they now make up 30 percent of all parents with court-ordered custody of children when the other biological parent is absent. The growth in out-of-wedlock births is a serious impediment to reducing child poverty in America. Whereas fewer than 10 percent of children living with two parents live below the poverty line, about 37 percent of those living with single mothers do. Kids born out of wedlock are particularly likely to wind up in poverty. In 2007, half of all women who had children out of wedlock were in poverty, ensuring that their children wound up there, too.

Over the years, society has tried to make absent parents, mostly fathers, contribute to the support of their children. But the image of a rich deadbeat dad enjoying the high life while his kids and ex go hungry is a fanciful one that applies to only a small percentage of families. A far larger problem is fathers who can't support their children because they're unemployable for a host of reasons, ranging from incarceration to drug addiction. Gleaning lessons from welfare reform, some social entrepreneurs are developing programs, like Philadelphia-based Public/Private Ventures's Fathers at Work, to make these fathers more employable and hence better able to support their children. If such efforts prove successful, they could play an important role in reducing child poverty.

But the problem of unwed parents is even more complex. According to 2007 census data, only 28 percent of unwed mothers who gave birth last year were living with a partner. Such arrangements do not augur well for men's making lifetime commitments to their kids' support and development.

So while enforcement programs haul the deadbeat dad--or the occasional deadbeat mom--into court, something more is needed. Obama's agenda aims to encourage marriage with more tax credits for working-poor married couples and other family-friendly initiatives, but the rise in out-of-wedlock births is not a function of tax policy. We long ago destigmatized this form of parenthood: young men boast about the children they've fathered illegitimately, and young women seem unaware that such births are a superhighway to lifetime poverty for them and their kids. But there's nothing cool about the terrible consequences that rising out-of-wedlock births are having for America's children. It would be refreshing to see a natural leader and strong father figure like Obama talk frankly about this problem. Such a discussion is long overdue.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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10 May, 2008

America's War on Words

The Bush administration has launched a new "outreach" policy reflecting it's reluctance to discuss jihadism in public. This time, it has targeted language. We are no longer at war with "jihadism". Rather, we are engaged in a war against "extremism".

In a document titled: "Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication" released in March 2008, Federal agencies including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center will now be issued instructions on how not to describe "jihadists", or the "mujahedeen", or to use any references relating to Islam, Islamic theology or Muslims in the context of our current war. Nor are these the only words to be struck from the government's political lexicon. Words and phrases like "al Qaeda movement", "Salafi", "Wahhabist", "Sufi", "ummah" (the Muslim world), "Islamic terrorist", "Islamist", "holy warrior" and even "caliphate" are also to be removed from diplomatic discourse.

The erroneous rationale given is that these terms promote support for "extremism" among Arab and Muslim audiences by providing religious credibility to "extremists" while offending moderate Muslims. The directive states that the term "jihad" tends to "glamorize terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have and damages relations with Muslims around the world". The memo says the advice is not binding and does not apply to official policy papers, but should be used as a guide for conversations with Muslims and media.

This directive mirrors identical policy guidelines distributed to British and European Union diplomats last year to better explain the current war to Muslim communities there (as if they don't already get it). Last summer, Prime Minister Gordon Brown prohibited his ministers from using the word "Muslim" in connection with terrorism. And in January this year, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith went even further, announcing that the British Government had dropped the hollow term "War on Terror" as well as "Islamic extremism" and decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as "anti-Islamic activity". Civil servants now have to refer to Islamic terrorists merely as "criminals" without any reference to Islam in order to "prevent the glorification and incitement of terrorism". Bat Ye'or would call these actions just another manifestation of creeping British "d'himmitude" (infidel submission to Islam), but the fact that the US government is now following the British lead (where fear or misguided sympathy under the guise of "outreach" or "multiculturalism" is the motivating factor) is disturbing.

There are billions of Muslims and literally thousands of Islamic scholars and organizations who believe that democracy and Islam are indeed compatible; who reject violence in pursuit of Islam's goals; who condemn terrorism; who advocate equal rights for minorities and women; and who accept pluralism within Islam. The jihadi Salafists, however, have externalized jihad and interpret this struggle as a holy war to be waged against infidels and apostates until a global Islamic caliphate has been established under shari'a law. These two distinctly different interpretations of the Muslim holy books affect the vast majority of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims as much as they affect non-Muslims. But rather than clarify the distinction between these two divergent schools of interpretation and define jihadi Salafism as the enemy, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center have chosen to sanitize their diplomatic jargon in the name of "Muslim outreach".

It's a fair guess that the vast majority of the global Muslim community understands quite well that a segment of their co-religionists are responsible for a considerable amount of terrorism around the globe, so they don't need us to explain it to them, especially in generic terms which make us look foolish. Nor is anything we say going to affect jihadist credibility amongst Muslims. The argument that: "We must carefully avoid giving bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders the legitimacy they crave....by characterizing them as religious figures, or in terms that may make them seem to be noble in the eyes of some" is ridiculous. Few if any in the Muslim world care what non-Muslims think about jihadist groups like al Qaeda, so the argument that we have to be careful in our language so as not to give bin Laden credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of Muslims is a non-starter.

At least the 9/11 Commission had the wisdom to define the enemy without all the political correctness we see in this directive. As Jeffrey Imm points out in the Counter Terrorism Blog:

"The 9/11 Commission Report uses the term "jihad" in referencing the enemy 79 times and specifically defines "jihad" as a "holy war" executed by Osama Bin Laden and his compatriots (Section 2.3, Paragraph #302 on page 55), as well as defining "mujahideen" as "holy warriors" (Paragraph #302, same page). The 9/11 Commission Report refers to such "mujahideen" 22 times. ..The 9/11 Commission Report refers to the term "jihadist" 31 times, including the references to the "worldwide jihadist community" (Section 5.1, Paragraph #691 on page 148), to "Islamist Jihadists" (Section 5.3, Paragraph #741 on page 158), to "Islamist and jihadist movements" (Section 6.3, Paragraph #887 on page 191), and multiple references to an NSC memo on "Jihadist Networks"..Most importantly, the 9/11 Commission Report provides the definition of "Islamist terrorism" as being based on the ideology of "Islamism" (Notes, Part 12, Note 3: "Islamism", page 562)? ...Does the NCTC now claim that the 9/11 Commission Report "legitimizes" the actions of Jihadists?"

The only reasonable explanation behind this policy (both here and in Britain) is that these directives represent an emerging trend in our federal security, intelligence and legal agencies (DOJ, DHS, CIA and FBI) that we can somehow better protect America and American foreign interests and reduce the level of violence by engaging in "outreach" with pro-jihadist organizations or countries whether it be Iran in the Middle East or representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US. In effect, jihadist ideologies no longer concern our State Department provided there is a reduction in the level of violence that such groups promote. It amounts to surrender to the forces of global Islam with the only qualification being that jihadists conduct themselves peacefully so as to reduce the necessity of future American military interventions. Part of this policy holds that the language used to describe jihadism actually incites it, so if we change our language, we can reduce the problem. But this "problem" with jihadism is not and never has been one of linguistics, and it will not disappear.

This "outreach" approach is flawed because it ignores the totalitarian ideology of jihadist Islam, the central tenet of which remains conquest, submission and the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate (another term US diplomats will no longer be allowed to use). This new War on Words is just another manifestation of our failed strategy in dealing with global jihadism. Perhaps we should cease using the words "freedom" or "democracy" since these concepts are offensive to Shari'a law, and start setting up no-pork aisles in our supermarkets, or adopt such British "outreach" practices as banning piggybanks, pulling Holocaust education from school curricula and, in some cases, changing the names of pig-centered children's classics like "The Three Little Pigs" to avoid offending Muslim sensitivities.

An Administration that continues to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority and billions of petro-dollars to our enemies should be more concerned with legitimizing jihadists by funding them than they are about nomenclature.

Source



Australia's Federal district passes civil unions law for homosexuals

The ACT is similar to America's DC. The Federal government barred them from allowing homosexual marriages so a watered down arrangement was passed

The ACT Assembly has passed a watered-down version of its civil unions bill after it failed to secure the support of the Federal Government. The ACT Government was forced to scrap its plans for laws to legally recognise same-sex civil union ceremonies after the Federal Government refused to support the move, on the grounds that the arrangement mimicked marriage. The laws introduce a relationships register similar to that in place in Tasmania and Victoria.

ACT Attorney General Simon Corbell says the laws still represent a significant step foward for the ACT. "Same sex couples will now be recognised under Territory law," he said. "No longer will they have to rely on proving some sort of de facto status, no longer will the power bills and bank accounts have to come out to demonstrate that you are actually in a committed caring relationship."

Chief Minister Jon Stanhope says he is disappointed that the Government was forced to change the legislation. "This is not the outcome that the ACT Government wanted," he said. "It doesn't deliver the equality under the law that the ACT Government had wished to deliver. "It is a matter of embarrassment to me that my party did not stand up for this fundamental principle."

Source



Useless British police again

A police force says it can't break up illegal all-night raves - because it's too dark. Chief Inspector Gill Ellis, of Kent Police, said that it was not safe to disperse revellers in remote locations when it was dark, reports the Daily Telegraph. She blamed the lack of action on 'health and safety' regulations when tackled by locals who are fed-up with raves in a wooded area near Sevenoaks.

Chief Supt Ellis insisted that safety regulations meant officers had to wait until sunrise to break up the bashes. She said it could also be dangerous to disperse ravers because they may get into their cars to drive home while still high on drink and drugs. Chief Supt Ellis told the meeting: "We will wait until daylight hours for reasons of health and safety before making interventions."

But councillors pointed out a bash in March, which took place at Longspring Woods near the village of Shoreham, had been allowed to go on until 1pm the following afternoon. Cllr Phil Hobson, an IT consultant in his early 50s, said: "It's ridiculous that a rave would be allowed to go on all night and into the afternoon. "What the police told us is if a rave is happening and they don't know about it significantly in advance they can't get the man power there to stop it. "I think it is disgusting. The police are there to catch criminals and stop illegal activity."

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Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

This is a rather surprising article in two ways: 1). It appeared on the Leftist Puffington Host; 2). It is by Sam Harris, a libertarian. Most libertarians are "antiwar". They think that if we don't bother the Muslims, they won't bother us. Over 1,000 years of history are apparently lost on them

Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film entitled Fitna ("strife" in Arabic) over the internet. The film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur'an. Given that the perpetrators of such violence regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions, merely depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial. Controversial or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free society to strenuously defend Wilders' right to make such a film. But then one would be living on another planet, a planet where people do not happily repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of "religious sensitivity."

Witness the free world's response to Fitna: The Dutch government sought to ban the film outright, and European Union foreign ministers publicly condemned it, as did UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Dutch television refused to air Fitna unedited. When Wilders declared his intention to release the film over the internet, his U.S. web-host, Network Solutions, took his website offline.

Into the breach stepped Liveleak, a British video-sharing website, which finally aired the film on March 27th. It received over 3 million views in the first 24 hours. The next day, however, Liveleak removed Fitna from its servers, having been terrorized into self-censorship by threats to its staff. But the film had spread too far on the internet to be suppressed (and Liveleak, after taking further security measures, has since reinstated it on its site as well).

Of course, there were immediate calls for a boycott of Dutch products throughout the Muslim world. In response, Dutch corporations placed ads in countries like Indonesia, denouncing the film in self-defense. Several Muslim countries blocked YouTube and other video-sharing sites in an effort to keep Wilders' blasphemy from penetrating the minds of their citizens. There have also been isolated protests and attacks on embassies, and ubiquitous demands for Wilders' murder. In Afghanistan, women in burqas could be seen burning the Dutch flag; the Taliban carried out at least two revenge attacks on Dutch troops, resulting in five Dutch casualties; and security concerns have caused the Netherlands to close its embassy in Kabul. It must be said, however, that nothing has yet occurred to rival the ferocious response to the Danish cartoons.

Meanwhile Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists, threatened to sue Wilders for copyright infringement, as Wilders used his drawing of a bomb-laden Muhammad without permission. Westergaard has lived in hiding since 2006 due to death threats of his own, so the Danish Union of Journalists volunteered to file this lawsuit on his behalf. Admittedly, there is something amusing about one hunted man, unable to venture out in public for fear of being killed by religious lunatics, threatening to sue another man in the same predicament over a copyright violation. But it is understandable that Westergaard wouldn't want to be repeatedly hurled at the enemy without his consent. Westergaard is an extraordinarily courageous man whose life has been ruined both by religious fanaticism and the free world's submission to it. In February, the Danish government arrested three Muslims who seemed poised to murder him. Other Danes unfortunate enough to have been born with the name "Kurt Westergaard" have had to take steps to escape being murdered in his place. (Wilder's has since removed the cartoon from the official version of Fitna.)

Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely vilified for "seeking to inflame" the Muslim community. Even if this had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia."

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called "a chilling effect" on our exercise of free speech. I have, in my own small way, experienced this chill first hand. First, and most important, my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali happens to be among the hunted. Because of the failure of Western governments to make it safe for people to speak openly about the problem of Islam, I and others must raise a mountain of private funds to help pay for her round-the-clock protection. The problem is not, as is often alleged, that governments cannot afford to protect every person who speaks out against Muslim intolerance. The problem is that so few people do speak out. If there were ten thousand Ayaan Hirsi Ali's, the risk to each would be radically reduced.

As for infringements of my own speech, my first book, The End of Faith, almost did not get published for fear of offending the sensibilities of (probably non-reading) religious fanatics. W.W. Norton, which did publish the book, was widely seen as taking a risk--one probably attenuated by the fact that I am an equal-opportunity offender critical of all religious faith. However, when it came time to make final edits to the galleys of The End of Faith, many of the people I had thanked by name in my acknowledgments (including my agent at the time and my editor at Norton) independently asked to have their names removed from the book. Their concerns were explicitly for their personal safety. Given our shamefully ineffectual response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, their concerns were perfectly understandable.

Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet, recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar "Beyond the troubled relationship." Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). The author began, as though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of Islam to be "intrinsically rational." He then went on to argue, amid a highly idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational religion's current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be fully ascribed to the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation, Nature also agreed to publish a brief response from me. What readers of my letter to the editor could not know, however, was that it was only published after perfectly factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam were expunged. I understood the editors' concerns at the time: not only did they have Britain's suffocating libel laws to worry about, but Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK had just revealed a penchant for suicide bombing. I was grateful that Nature published my letter at all.

In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders' film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a "kill fee." I declined.

I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers, as can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates, infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There are, to be sure, reasons why this is so. Some of these reasons have to do with accidents of history and geopolitics, but others can be directly traced to doctrines sanctifying violence which are unique to Islam.

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the FLDS sin for sin--Muslims commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage (often between underage girls and older men), and wife-beating--but add to these indiscretions the surpassing evils of honor killing, female "circumcision," widespread support for terrorism, a pornographic fascination with videos showing the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of anti-semitism that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an aptitude for producing children's books and television programs which exalt suicide-bombing and depict Jews as "apes and pigs."

Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children. But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam?

What about all the civil, freedom-loving, moderate Muslims who are just as appalled by Muslim intolerance as I am? No doubt millions of men and women fit this description, but vocal moderates are very difficult to find. Wherever "moderate Islam" does announce itself, one often discovers frank Islamism lurking just a euphemism or two beneath the surface. The subterfuge is rendered all but invisible to the general public by political correctness, wishful thinking, and "white guilt." This is where we find sinister people successfully posing as "moderates"--people like Tariq Ramadan who, while lionized by liberal Europeans as the epitome of cosmopolitan Islam, cannot bring himself to actually condemn honor killing in round terms (he recommends that the practice be suspended, pending further study). Moderation is also attributed to groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamist public relations firm posing as a civil-rights lobby.

Even when one finds a true voice of Muslim moderation, it often seems distinguished by a lack of candor above all things. Take someone like Reza Aslan, author of No God But God: I debated Aslan for Book TV on the general subject of religion and modernity. During the course of our debate, I had a few unkind words to say about the Muslim Brotherhood. While admitting that there is a difference between the Brotherhood and a full-blown jihadist organization like al Qaeda, I said that their ideology was "close enough" to be of concern. Aslan responded with a grandiose, ad hominem attack saying, "that indicates the profound unsophistication that you have about this region. You could not be more wrong" and claiming that I'd taken my view of Islam from "Fox News." Such maneuvers, coming from a polished, Iranian-born scholar of Islam carry the weight of authority, especially in front of an audience of people who are desperate to believe the threat of Islam has been grossly exaggerated. The problem, however, is that the credo of the Muslim Brotherhood actually happens to be "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."

The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear to live in just such a place. All of their talk about how benign Islam "really" is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time: Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society. A recent poll showed that thirty-six percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a person should be killed for leaving the faith. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should have been brought to justice. And these are British Muslims.

Occasionally, however, a lone voice can be heard acknowledging the obvious. Hassan Butt wrote in the Guardian:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy. By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

It is astounding how infrequently one hears such candor among the public voices of "moderate" Islam. This is what we owe the true moderates of the Muslim world: we must hold their co-religionists to the same standards of civility and reasonableness that we take for granted in all other people. Only our willingness to openly criticize Islam for its all-too-obvious failings can make it safe for Muslim moderates, secularists, apostates--and, indeed, women--to rise up and reform their faith.

And if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of "affirmative action" at work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name of paying "respect" to the glaring pathologies in their culture. Hirsi Ali has also observed that there is a quasi-racist double-think on display whenever western powers trumpet that "Islam is peace," all the while taking heroic measures to guard against the next occasion when the barbarians run amok in response to a film, cartoon, opera, novel, beauty pageant--or the mere naming of a teddy bear.

Have you seen the Danish cartoons that so roiled the Muslim world? Probably not, as their publication was suppressed by almost every newspaper, magazine, and television station in the United States. Given their volcanic reception--hundreds of thousands of Muslims rioted, hundreds of people were killed--their sheer banality should have rendered these drawings extraordinarily newsworthy. One magazine which did print them, Free Inquiry (for which I am proud to have written), had its stock banned from every Borders and Waldenbooks in the country. These are precisely the sorts of capitulations that we must avoid in the future.

The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it. As Ibn Warraq, author of the revelatory Why I Am Not a Muslim, said in response to recent events:

It is perverse for the western media to lament the lack of an Islamic reformation and willfully ignore works such as Wilders' film, Fitna. How do they think reformation will come about if not with criticism? There is no such right as 'the right not to be offended; indeed, I am deeply offended by the contents of the Koran, with its overt hatred of Christians, Jews, apostates, non-believers, homosexuals but cannot demand its suppression.

It is time we recognized that those who claim the "right not to be offended" have also announced their hatred of civil society.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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9 May, 2008

Transgender student is age 9

For comments on this appalling business, see STACLU

For school officials in Haverford Township, the challenge was daunting: What do you do when a 9-year-old student, with the full support of his parents, decides that he is no longer a boy and instead is a girl? Parents of a third-grade student at Chatham Park Elementary School approached the administration on April 16 to ask for help in making a "social transition" for their child.

The Haverford School District consulted experts on transgender children, then sent letters to parents advising them that the guidance counselor would meet with the school's 100 third-grade students to explain why their classmate would now wear girls' clothes and be called by a girl's name. Some parents objected. Eight called the principal to ask that their child not attend the session, and some posted angry messages on the Haverford Township blog. "Why is the school introducing this subject to 8- and 9-year-olds?" wrote the parent who started the blog thread, which had been viewed more than 3,000 times as of yesterday. "Why were we not notified sooner. We received the letter today, the discussion at school is tomorrow."

Other parents thought the school should not have called attention to an already delicate situation. "I did not think that the letter needed to go out," said Valerie Huff, whose daughter is friends with the transgender student. "The kids don't make any big deal about it at all."

Mary Beth Lauer, district director of community relations, said there were no easy answers for school officials. "This is something that was going to come out," Lauer said. "Isn't it better to be proactive, and let people know what is happening and how we're dealing with it?"

The student has not received medical treatments to change his sex, but has told others that he considers himself a girl, according to several people who know the family. He had begun wearing girls' clothes, Huff said, and an approaching school event would have made the child's gender identity an issue, according to Lauer, who declined to discuss the matter in greater detail.

In the April 21 letter to parents, Chatham Park principal Daniel D. Marsella wrote that a transgender child is one whose biological gender does not match his or her gender identity. Marsella assured parents that the talk with students, held two days later, would use "developmentally appropriate language" to explain "how we need to help this student make a social transition in school."

When the guidance counselor, Catherine Mallam, spoke with the children, she explained that one of their classmates looked like a boy on the outside but felt like a girl inside, according to a summary of her remarks prepared by the school for parents. She asked them to accept the student as a girl and not make unkind remarks. The students seem to be accepting their classmate's change, Lauer said. The child is doing well but some comments on the blog have upset the child's parents, Huff said.

About one in 5,000 people is transgender, said Walter O. Bockting, a psychologist and coordinator for transgender health services at the University of Minnesota. Bockting said he sees about 10 children a year who are 9 or younger. "It's a little early, but occasionally that happens," he said. Not all transgender people have sex-reassignment surgery in adulthood, and such surgeries are not typically performed on children, said Sharon Garcia, president of TransYouth Family Allies, a non-profit group that helped the Chatham Park student and school officials devise a way to explain the situation to parents. So far, 49 families have contacted TransYouth Family Allies asking for help with a transgender child, Garcia said. Most of the children are between 6 and 10.

Parents of transgender children often change school districts in order to accommodate a child's desire to switch genders, which is what Garcia said she did when her 5-year old son tried to hurt himself after professing for years that he was a girl. "I have yet to meet a parent who did not fight this kicking and screaming," she said. "None of us want this for our children, none of us want to go there, but it gets to the point where it's not a choice anymore." The child at Chatham Park wanted to stay at the same school because of friends, Garcia said.

Bockting said families of transgender children should consult an expert and carefully consider whether to switch roles before trying it. The child's feelings should be deep and persistent, he said. When a young child seems set on changing his or her sexual identity, he encourages him or her to wait until puberty. "Many transgender people have feelings that date to childhood, but puberty will give an idea how strong the feeling is," he said.

Some medical experts think parents should not let a child change gender roles at a young age. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studied sexual reassignment surgery in the 1970s, said a school's decision to support a student's transition could have long-term psychological consequences. "They do not have a right to stop the child, but it's different when they gather everyone around and say, 'Johnnie is Jeanie,' " he said. Society, he added, should not support the decision of an immature person. There is no evidence that the transition ultimately helps the person, he added.

McHugh said he reached his conclusions after studying the issue for 30 years, especially in the 1970s, when Hopkins was pioneering sexual-reassignment surgery. "People came to us saying that if we changed them, we'd solve all their problems," he said. "So we changed them, and their problems remained."

Garcia says letting her child dress and act as a girl was the right decision. "I went from a suicidal child to a child who tries out for a lead part in the play," she said. "I knew society wasn't going to be accepting, but my choices were, do this and have a happy, alive girl or have an unhappy, dead boy. So we did what we needed."

Source



What Happened to the Middle East's Jews?

By Barry Rubin

Uh-oh! It's Israel's sixtieth birthday and that means articles on Israel in the news media and, in turn, that may often mean something between inaccuracy and slander. I've been conditioned by now to know what to expect. Let's try a test. Read the following headline from a Reuters story, and guess the theme. Ready? Here we go:

"Israel's Advent Altered Outlook For Middle East Jews." My assumption was that the headline implied a story saying: everything was fine for Jews in the Arab world and Iran until Israel was created and that fact was responsible for forcing them to leave. The article itself isn't that bad, does include material to the contrary, and doesn't directly blame the destruction of these communities on Israel's creation. Yet still this is an implication, no doubt, that many readers will take away from the text which can be found here

Consider this formulation. The article states: "The 1948 war at Israel's creation, which forced some 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homeland, hardened Arab attitudes to deep-rooted Jewish minorities across the Middle East." Get it? First the Palestinians flee and then the Arabs get angry at the Jews. Up to then the Jewish minorities are "deep-rooted" which implies they were well accepted and secure. A couple of paragraphs down the article continues: "Israeli statistics show more than 760,000 Middle Eastern Jews had moved to Israel by 2006, with more than 40 percent arriving in the first three years of the state's existence." So let's summarize:

Step 1: Palestinians become refugees

Step 2: Arabs are angry. (Can you blame them?)

Step 3: They take it out on the Jews or at least these Jews "moved," a word used for when you get a new job, load up the U-Haul and head across town.

In other words, the sins of Israel's creation include both Palestinian Arabs and Middle Eastern Jews becoming refugees, rather than it involving a de facto population transfer with an equal cost to both sides, and in which only the deliberate creation of permanent refugee status for Palestinians by their own leaders and Arab states produced prosperity on one side and ongoing problems for the other. What this concept also leaves out, at least in part, is:

* Centuries'-long discrimination against Jews, ranging from the mild to the violent, including forced conversions at times, a problem Moses Maimonides was dealing with nine hundred years ago. Of course, as in Europe, there were long periods (certainly in Iraq and Egypt, for example) in which Jews fared very well. This is not to say that all Jews lived terribly among their Arab neighbors but clearly this was a major factor in their lives. A strong current of anti-Semitism in Islam long preceded the origin of Zionism.

To be fair the article does say:

"In the past, Moroccan Jews were considered subordinate to Muslims and discrimination was widespread. Every city has its Mellah, the poorest quarter to which Jews were once confined. Their residents were the first to leave when they could." And it mentions that "Over 120,000 [Iraqi Jews] were flown to Israel after 1948 when government persecution intensified.

* Rising Arab nationalism which was not all or mostly, in contrast to what the article seems to argue, due to Zionism or Israel's creation. Even the secular nationalist movements had a strong tinge of Islam also, certainly so in North Africa, which made it hard to believe that Jews would be welcome in the future regardless of Israel.

It should be noted that Christians, too, have been pushed out of the Arab world and often treated badly, though their treatment varies widely among different countries. Indeed, leaving aside Egypt, the proportion of Christian emigration approaches that of Jewish emigration. There is a serious problem with intolerance in Ar