Islam versus The Islamists on TV. Round One to Islamists

Read this if you want to get your dander up about tax-subsidized PBS scotching a film on moderate Islamists after allegations that WETA, a far-left outlet of PBS based in DC [I was Associate Producer for a WETA project and can vouch for their far-left tilt] tampered with the project. Martyn Burke, the producer alleges:
• A WETA manager pressed to eliminate a key perspective of the film: The claim that Muslim radicals are pushing to establish "parallel societies" in America and Europe governed by Shariah law rather than sectarian courts.

• After grants were issued, Crossroads managers commissioned a new film that overlapped with Islam vs. Islamists and competed for the same interview subjects.

• WETA appointed an advisory board that includes Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. In an "unparalleled breach of ethics," Burke says, McCloud took rough-cut segments of the film and showed them to Nation of Islam officials, who are a subject of the documentary. They threatened to sue.

"This utterly undermines any journalistic independence," Burke wrote in an e-mail to WETA officials." Burke also alleges that PBS demand that two conservative backers of the project resign from participation.

DePaul Prof McCloud has been caught in an untruth:

In an interview, McCloud said she showed a single video frame to a Muslim journalist who was not a Nation of Islam representative.

However, in a January e-mail, McCloud told Crossroads producers that she had spoken with Nation of Islam representatives and "invited them over to view this section." She also wrote that they were outraged "and will promptly pursue litigation."

Stewart, the WETA executive, said McCloud was admonished for "inappropriate" conduct.

The project I worked on way back in the day was also threatened with litigation and, in my case, a five-minute rejoinder was tacked on to the end of the piece, which dealt with the Middle East.

Anyone familiar with DePaul knows that its association with Islamic affairs tends to be radical, due to a law school professor named Cherif Bassiouni.

PBS was able to escape accountability for its ultra-left bias a couple of years ago when a Bush appointee tried to clean house, but was nailed for a minor infraction by a whistle-blower. Like any government-connected bureaucracy, the lifers in CPB and PBS are almost to-a-man/woman Democrats or lefter than that.

Hitchens on Hirsi Ali as an "Enlightenment Absolutist"

Remember back in college when your agnostic professors used to intone against the backwardness of medieval religious civilization and then exalt the glories of the Enlightenment, a narrative which brushed aside centuries of Church-dominated "superstition and obscurantism?" That was the prevailing doctrine at the University of Michigan in the late sixties.

But in a classic case of Giambattista Vico's ricorso, Christoper Hitchens has discovered the beginning of an ultimate betrayal of the Enlightenment we were all taught in graduate school to revere. [Actually, as a reconverted Catholic, I now believe the Enlightenment more than a bit oversold, to say the very least.]

Hitchens cites one of my favorite poems, September 1, 1939, W.H. Auden's gloomy meditation on how all the s**t in the world is hitting the fan one more time, only now even worse than ever, as the planet slides into World War II. [Pardon my indulgence]
"Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again."
I'm now reading Victor Davis Hanson' book A War Like No Other based on Thucydides wonderful history concerning The Pelopponesian War [431-411 B.C.] Back in the day, I studied Attic Greek and read several authors in their original flowing language [unfortunately, not Thucydides before my Attic faded]. Hanson brilliantly shows the insanity of the jealous and hopelessly reactionary Spartans attack on the rich, globalizing [the contemporaneous term was attikizo]arrogant Athenians, busy enticing the entire Mediterranean with its seductive democracy, a democratic ethos that was seducing the poor in many Greek city-states into calling for Athenian home-grown models. More importantly to the Spartan ephors, the economic and artistic growth concomitant with democracy was undermining the tough oligarchic semi-serf dictatorship of the militarist Spartans. So the Spartans rashly decided in 432 BC to strike at Athenian democracy and prosperity in order to undermine the growing seductions of globalization just as Al Qaeda struck at the WTC and the Pentagon, a pre-emptive blow to an overwhelmingly powerful hegemon.

Of course, the Auden poem is correct that Thucydides saw all the ironies of a rich democratic power attacked by a benighted reactionary militarist ethos. Substitute religious for militarist, and the parallelism with Al Qaeda is uncanny.

And today, Hitchens points out the incomprehensible irony of the two great reactionary forces in constraining human freedom, atheistic socialists and violent religious reactionaries, seeking common cause in tearing down Enlightenment values and replacing them with, on the one hand, a semi-totalitarian elitist nannified dirigiste guardian state and on the other, a hateful and violent religious imperialism employing terrorism and immigrant communities as their beachhead into democracies based on Enlightenment values.

As Hitchens notes in his article, these two opposing ideologies, like Stalin and Hitler before September 1, 1939, have become allies of convenience to attack globalization and democratic values from two fronts. Internally, the ultra-left socialists employ progressive moles to advance their attacks on economic free markets and religious/volunteer organizations and private education. Externally, the Islamists ally with these leftist dupes to wreak slaughter and havoc in London, Madrid, and a couple of failed attempts in Germany and the US, knowing that the leftist media will downplay their nefarious agenda and cover up their crimes with MSM counterattacks on the GWOT.

Hitchens has recovered his sanity after decades of railing against capitalism and zionism. We can only hope that the media elites in academia, newsprint and TV, Hollyweird, and the moles in the US public educational establishment eventually awaken and avoid the catastrophes that ensue when jealous militant reactionaries meet rich democratic globalizers.

That already happened, as Hitchens, W.H. Auden, and Victor Davis Hanson all know. I am going to see the movie 300 this weekend to get a good fix on the event at Thermopylae [which I have visited in Greece] in 490 B.C. that began the incredible century of Greek cultural glory. Like the French holding back the German Army in 1914, Thermopylae began a century of conflicts and cultural efflorescence and worldwide prosperity and again, a final conflict. As the Greek example indicates, all the remarkable gains of the twentieth century could implode as Thucydides delineates in his magnificent history, which is more exactly a work of moral philosophy.

Unfortunately, Thucydides recounted a century that ended in the Greeks tearing themselves apart in an insane civil war.

Omne Exemplum Clauditur, [every metaphor limps], but Ayaan Hirsi Ali's cry for freedom from religious oppression is a canary in a coal mine for all of our values.

Hitchens does well to put the contending forces into context.

Hirsi Ali Irks Euro Nomenklatura

Those orchidaceous Dutch, who fervently collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews
dislike Hirsi Ali intensely, says Anne Applebaum, writer of the Pulitzer-winner Gulag and a world-ranking expert on group-think in a Slate piece.

You see, Hirsi has disturbed the Euros complacency about Islam, and brought an inconvenient truth [THAT IS ACTUALLY TRUE!] to the fore by her book Infidel, which trumpets Western values, a most unfashionable thing to do among Dutch intelligentsia and their Brit collaborators, like Timothy Garten Ash, who sneers at Hirsi Ali for her juvenile enthusiasm for democracy and liberal values.

The multiculturalists refuse to turn over the Islamic rock to investigate just what kind of life lives beneath, and condone honor killings and sharia law as some sort of commendably exotic eccentricity. However, a few Europeans actually criticize the sometimes violent and deeply reactionary culture that persists in the 45 signatory countries of "Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam."

Yes, there are many moderate Muslims in Europe who want to live a quiet life. Unfortunately, among them dwell a growing minority of aggressively violent conspirators who want to overthrow Western values, the ones that distinguished European academics and writers so often disparage with ill-concealed disdain.

How these sophisticated European polemicists square their hatred of the pope with their admiration of Islam continues to baffle this confused observer.

Rundown of The Decline of the West

I'm down with the flu, but think that Jules Crittenden is the voice of sanity in a
piece on just how messed up the situation is, with the Dems reverting to their default-mode of treacherous backstabbing, although now it's on each other when they are not stabbing American national interests in the back. Plenty of interesting and instructive links in the piece above.

The French went through just such a phase in their inglorious descent from world power to their current status as craven cowards and backstabbing feminized morons. The Decline of the West, with the Democratic Party as enabler and enthusiastic cheerleader, proceeds apace.

Brace yourselves for 10 Muharram tomorrow

The Muslim feast of
Ashura
is January 30, and my bet is that the large collection of bad hombres killed yesterday near Najaf were in a staging area for a big terrorist attack on Shi'ite pilgrims going to Najaf or Kerbala, the two great Shi'a pilgrimage sites, for this gruesome festival commemorating the death of Husayn, the son of 'Ali. While living in Lebanon, I saw an Ashura street demo in South Beirut with a very mild public version of the terrific penitential self-flagellation and cutting that takes place in Shi'ite mosques.

Even NPR hints that the horrific attack on the Samarra mosque and Zarqawi's assaults on Shi'ites in Sadr City and elsewhere are instigated by an Al Qaeda campaign to foment civil war and boost the ranks of defeatists in the USA. The brunt of the attacks on Najaf and Kerbala may have been thwarted by yesterday's news of hundreds of casualties among the Sunni insurgents, but the good tidings of an Iraqi military success has been put on the back pages of the MSM outlets and TV news. East-to-get video of terror-bombings in Baghdad make front-page, top of the broadcast news. Successes in out-of-the-way places are duly noted, but buried by lurid tales of insurgent nastiness and funerals of stateside families mourning their heroic dead. At one point a few days ago, I switched from ABC to CBS to NBC and all simultaneously [I believe it was Friday night's weekend wrap-up] had stories of berieved families. AQ Agitpreppie Brian Williams had his usual shallow commentary, and the MSM campaign to discredit victory in Iraq continues...

Yes, Bush and his lieutenants botched the job, but that doesn't mean walking away before the job is finally finished. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow the Al Qaeda will still be on the job, whether we walk away or not.

Hitchens Makes Mincemeat of Old Left Radicals

The Perfessoriat, the BBC, and George Galloway all come under the withering fire of the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Nick Cohen's book, What's Left? How the Liberals Lost Their Way. CH as usual eviscerates with a sharp scalpel all the frauds on the far left who still love to hate Bush/Blair/democracy.

Some choice cuts:

...there are thousands and thousands of middle-aged lefties for whom their once-revolutionary "credentials"” are all they have left to show for a lifetime of "activism," and who could not face their friends — or, perhaps, their students — if they found themselves endorsing a war fought by British or American soldiers. (I myself remember repressing a twinge of annoyance at the idea that the assault on civilisation represented by the 9/11 attacks would drive my anti-Kissinger book from the front page where I still believe it belonged.) But Cohen goes further: "I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail, because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him."”

It is this sentence, and its implications, that make his book an exceptional and necessary one. Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”. Those who do this are not “anti-war” at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high.

Treason on the left is not new, but has become the media shibboleth with Dysfunctional-Bush-Hatred and Global Warming the new armaments in the long leftist war against free enterprise and political freedom. Of course, no one dissects these walking talking cadavers better than Hitchens, himself a veteran Man of the Left.

It’s all here: from the pseudo-radicals who said there was nothing to choose between Nazi imperialism in Europe and British rule in India, through the supporters of the Hitler-Stalin pact, all the way to those who defended Slobodan Milosevic as a socialist and those who took, quite literally took, money from the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein. Just in the past decade or so, had this “anti-war” rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by “Greater” Serbia, and the Taliban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe, but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.

This betrayal (because there is no other word for it) has been made possible in part by a degraded version of multiculturalism. The hard left has junked its historic secularism, to say nothing of its principles of equality for females and homosexuals, to make common cause with Muslim outfits some of which are associated in other countries with the extreme right. It has done this by the use of nonsense terms such as “Islamophobia”, which are designed to give the no-less nonsensical impression that Islam is some kind of persecuted ethnicity. But the vile attacks by Islamists on the Jews (Britain’s oldest minority) and on India (Britain’s most important democratic ally after the United States) show the truly reactionary and hateful character of the opportunist alliance between failed ex-Stalinists and fanatical theocrats. For Cohen, as for some others of us, this is no longer a difference of emphasis within the family of the left. It is the adamant line of division in a bitter fight against a new form of fascism, at home no less than abroad.

I think he is right to identify the opening of this crisis with the events in Bosnia and Kosovo, because in that instance it was America (pushed by the supposed “poodle” Blair) that used force to prevent the annihilation of a Muslim community. Those who opposed that rescue operation, and who yet denounce the fight against Bin-Ladenism and its allies as “targeting” Muslims, have given the game away and shown that they hate only Anglo-American policy, to a degree that results in blindness. Meanwhile, Israel is always and everywhere to be denounced (and not always wrongly) while the other product of British partition policy during 1947-48, the part-rogue and part-failed state named Pakistan, is never indicted in the same way for its numberless bigotries and aggressions. This is bad faith, and needs to be unmasked as such. Cohen’s book is an admirable example of self- criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.

Like St. Paul who was a sort of one-man Mossad for the Orthodox Jewry of his day, CH has had the scales fall from his eyes and recognizes the shallow, superficial twaddle purveyed by the High Priests of the Liberal Left, be it useful idiots like Gore on GW or former-rightie opportunists like Arianna Puffington and her attendant Host twittering at the moon as they flutter skyward above the darkling plain.

CH ends with a recommendation to read another book:

Do not feel that you have to be a leftist or liberal to read it, because it engages with an argument that is crucial for all of us, and for our time.

Read on... books:
Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (Norton £9.99)
A huge influence on Cohen’s ideas

The long demise of a defunct intelligentsia continues, but as their moral authority erodes, the shrill hysteria increases, so leftists are left to tabloid issues like the Plame fiasco or pseudo-heroism by barely literate actors and other showmen.

Australia Steps Up to the Plate

Any political agenda, religious sect or other collection of individuals seeking radical change by direct action should heed what Australia has done to keep radical groups disguised as religious zealots from agitating for violent or non-parliamentary constitutional change.

They're telling them to "clear out."

Must be nice living in a country where the political leadership is actually willing to enforce the laws of the land.

A Modest Proposal

There is a petition circulating to restore Greek Orthodox religious services to Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom] Cathedral in Istanbul. The EU has supposedly promised to make this plea to the Turkish government if one million signatures can be collected.

My modest proposal is that the EU promise the restoration of Islamic services in The Grand Mosque of Cordoba, AKA Mezquita Cathedral, as a quid pro quo to the Turkish government. This would be a face-saving device at least allowing the Turks to consider the proposal as something other than outright blackmail.

Both houses of worship have suffered the same architectural vandalism by the conquering faith. Hagia Sophia is disfigured by large Koranic inscriptions while the Cordoba Mosque suffered the insertion of a cookie-cutter gothic nave which serves as the Catholic Cathedral, an inclusion which ruined the original architectural integrity.

There will be objections from pious Catholics, but the trade-off by a secular-humanist Spanish government might be easy. In Cordoba, my understanding is that the Muslims have asked only that they be allowed to conduct Friday services in the non-consecrated Islamic section of the prayer grounds.

However, my sense is that rising Islamist fervor in Turkey would probably nix any political decision to allow use of Hagia Sophia as a place of worship by Christians, even on an occasional basis.

It's worth running up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.

Idiocracy Worth Renting

It's a shame that the Mike Judge flick Idiocracy never went into theaters, but the takedown of FoxNews in the movie might have been too much for the Fox execs to handle. The shame of it all is that this cautionary tale, though filled with strains on one's suspension of disbelief, should serve as a red flag to the chattering nomenklatura that their days as an elite are numbered.

Not that they'd watch a movie which graphically depicts how the failure to "cull the herd," extremely politically incorrect language to begin with, will lead in a few centuries to a moronic dumb and dumber civilization where the "average" Luke Wilson is the smartest man in America.

Hat tip to Steve Sailer for touting this flick, though the carping critic in me keeps wondering how a bunch of dummies could keep electricity running if they use Gatorade for irrigating their crops. Look at Baghdad's grid problems today!

Idiocracy isn't quite as good as Mike Judge's Office Space, already a cult film which my 17-year old daughter turned me onto early last year---her boyfriend is a high IQ pre-med student at U. Miami and watched it for the umpteenth time with us.

But the defunct WASP aristocracy will be closely followed by the present oh-so-socialist LDLs in the ash-heap of history if they don't improve their breeding skills---pace the professoriat that wants to convert college kids to intellectual and procreational sterility.

"Perfidious" Brits? Part Two

The Guardian has a story on the sad state of Christianity in the postmodern UK. Of course, it is the Guardian, so who knows how valid this particular poll might be.

Eighty-two percent of the 1,006 adults questioned for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in the run up to Christmas said they saw religion as a cause of division and tension between people compared to 16 percent who disagreed. At a time when Britain's multi-cultural, multi-faith model, their outward symbols and culture are under the microscope after last year's home-grown Islamist extremist suicide bombings, 63 percent said they were not religious.

Read more if you want to combine Christmas depression with SADS.

Darn, my cousin Dennis Mangan has a great little post quoting Theodore Dalyrymple on the subject. Here's a slice:

[TD] says that one problem with Dawkins is that he thinks progress inevitable:

And yet Dawkins disregards other important aspects of morality in which regression had undoubtedly occurred. To give only one example: the rate of indictable offences has increased 40 times in the country of his birth, Britain, in his lifetime, notwithstanding an enormous increase in wealth and the standard of living as measured by consumption of material goods. And this rise of crime alone has had a terrible effect on the quality of life of millions of people, who justifiably live in constant fear and who arrange their lives accordingly. The old, for example, are under perpetual curfew, imposed by some of the young, in Britain.

Dalrymple ends on a weak note:

Dawkins's latest book is an example of the nothing-but school of historiography: European history is nothing but the history of warfare and genocide, American history is nothing but the history of exploitation and oppression of the blacks, and so forth. For him, the history of religion is nothing but the history of bigotry, savagery, ignorance, intolerance. Of course, all of these are to be found in the history of religion, and bigots still abound. The problem with the nothing-but school of history, apart from its incompleteness and untruth, is fuels the very thing against which it rails, bigotry and hatred.

Dawkins views are that, but he also fails to make the case that a world without religion, even were it possible, would be better. The Lenins, Stalins, and Maos were not religious, nor were Tamerlane and others of his ilk driven by religion. Man will always find excuses to plunder and murder others and if religion isn't available, he will find something else.

Although I recall Tamerlane was vaguely Muslim, he and Robespierre and Adolph were not driven by religion, but in Robespierre and AH's case by hatred of religion. Dawkins shares that hatred and a vituperative temperament that should make us happy he chose not to pursue a political career!