I have to admit, I”ve never minded being the only Jew in a room full of anti-Semites. To be surrounded by people who sincerely believe you have preternatural inborn powers and abilities is actually quite the ego boost. When dealing with the segment of the alt-right that isn”t terribly fond of folks of the Jewish persuasion, I take absolutely no offense at any barbs thrown my way. Frankly, I can”t understand why that sawed-off pip-squeak egotist Ben Shapiro doesn”t join me. He was always the type to pick and choose his friends for maximum ego-stroking. He ought to migrate to the alt-right; you”ve never been verbally fellated until you”ve been accused of being an evil, all-powerful, world-controlling demigod.
Hell, the alt-right won”t even let me cop to mistakes. When I tell some of my “fans” that, as a neocon, I supported the invasion of Iraq under a very mistaken belief that the outcome would be much better than it was, I”m always told, “Save them lies for the sheeple. You know damn well you Jews planned this whole thing”ISIS, anarchy, the refugee crisis, all so’s you can flood the West with mud people and build your damn “Greater Israel.” Jews don”t make mistakes; they always know what they”re doing.”
Well, you got me there, crackerbarrel. Can”t put anything past you. We Jews are way too smart to ever make a clumsy misjudgment of such massive significance.
Just as I find myself unbothered by the anti-Jewish elements on the alt-right, I also have no problem with the more traditionally conservative Trump supporters who seem to not only embrace the “low-information voter” designation, but don”t even consider it a slur. You know the type; they always start out every statement of praise for their candidate by declaring, “I may not be some highfalutin intellectual” or “I may not have no fancy education” or “I may just be simple country folk,” only to lead into their explanation of why their gut tells “em that Trump is the right man for the job.
That kind of “I”m plain as dirt but I knows what I believe” voter doesn”t phase me one bit, because they”re not trying to masquerade as something they aren”t. Plus, inherent in their shtick is a de facto admission that I”m smarter, at least book-smarter, than they are. So, again, the ego-boost thing.
Sadly, the one type of American voter who grates on me like a nursery full of shrieking, colicky newborns is the infernal species I”m doomed to live among here in L.A.”the leftist hipster. Leftist hipsters have neither the Trumpkins” aw-shucks humility nor the anti-Semites” worshipful admission of the Jews” place as overlords in the human pecking order. Leftist hipsters are defined by their smugness, their pseudo-certainty, and their unyielding belief that their views are based on science and rationalism, whereas everyone else’s are based on ignorance, superstition, and fear.
There is nothing that is not foul about leftist hipsters. They traffic in the very fear, ignorance, and superstition that they accuse others of employing. Leftist hipsters will be the first ones to accuse conservatives of being “racist,” yet almost every political move the leftist hipster makes is in some way rooted in a pathological hatred of white people, a hatred that leftist hipsters”most of whom are themselves white”view as the ultimate self-critical virtue-signaling: “Look how evolved, enlightened, and noble I am”I”m willing to hate my own skin color.”
The night of the Brexit vote, I had a leftist hipster patiently explain to me that my fears about Muslims “invading” Europe through mass immigration are ignorant and unfounded, because the real threat is that now, with the U.K. severed from the E.U., England will most certainly reconquer India and reestablish Rhodesia. The leftist hipster in question, a New York avant-garde “artist” of some small acclaim, said this with a completely straight face, a face that reflected her absolute metaphysical certitude that whereas fears of Muslim immigrant rapists and jihadists are completely rooted in fantasy, the fear of England retaking India is thoroughly grounded in science and rationalism.
I”ve been consistently amused over the past few weeks at the sight of leftist hipsters trying like hell to sell themselves on Hillary Clinton. The average leftist hipster was a Sanders supporter, because of course we all know that socialism works perfectly”it’s been scientifically proven by professors in Ivy League classrooms”and reports of the collapse of Venezuelan society under the weight of Hugo Chavez’s socialist policies are nothing more than lies cooked up by “Pox News” or “Faux News” or what have you. Only the superstitious and irrational see food lines in Caracas; the “IFL science” freethinkers see the reality”well-fed noble brown people riding solar-powered unicorns to markets overstocked with fair-trade soy burgers and free-range tofu drumsticks.
But sadly, as deluded as leftist hipsters are, they can still read the writing on the PBR can. Sanders is on his way out, and with Trump on track for the GOP nod, it’s going to be Hillary versus “like, literally Hitler.” So of course the hipster crowd needs to find a way to support a warmongering drone-loving Wall Street-backed unremittingly corrupt rapist-defending Democrat.
Oh, sure, they could support her purely as the anti-Trump, a reluctant vote in the name of saving the world from (did I mention like, literally?) Hitler. But leftist hipsters could never be satisfied with that, because their psychological stability depends on maintaining the illusion that everything they do is grounded in rational progressivism and noble intentions, and voting for one bad person merely to defeat another bad person doesn”t offer the kind of reinforcement of intellectual superiority that, say, hating on one’s own skin color does.
No, an actual reason to support Hillary is needed. Needless to say, that’s a tall order, considering that she has been condemned as a poor candidate by both Comrade Sanders and virtuous black man Obama (back in “08). But nothing is impossible for the plucky demographic that gave the world Pomplamoose. The same night that I was informed of Britain’s plan to reanimate the Raj, I was involved in a fascinating online discussion with Mark Ebner and his friends. For those who may not know, Ebner is an accomplished, best-selling investigative journalist and TV host who specializes in celebrity scandals. His exposés of Scientology have garnered international acclaim, and he was one of the first journalists to break the story of Bill Cosby’s alleged sexual improprieties.
And he hates Trump. Quite passionately.
Ebner, who resides in L.A., has a lot of hipster friends (as do I, so I can”t really hold that against him), and the night of the Brexit vote, they were engaged in a vibrant debate regarding how best to engender the kind of “passion” for Hillary that could motivate disillusioned Sanders supporters to go all-in for Betty Benghazi. Again and again, the contributors to the thread kept striking out in their search for the magic hook upon which leftist hipsters could hang their support for the crooked corporate harpy.
But never forget the infinite monkey theorem. After a number of false starts, true-crime writer and prominent celebrity ghostwriter Gil Reavill hit the nail on the head: Support for Hillary must be promoted in the name of “the reproductive rights of the women you know and love.”
As Hans Landa would say, that is a bingo! Ebner himself thumbed-up the concept. It’s gotta be all about abortion. While the ignorant, superstitious, racist, (air quotes) God-fearing conservatives fearmonger about unimportant things like Hillary’s corruption and untrustworthiness, rational progressive hipsters need to understand what really matters in this election”the fact that women are about to lose the right to have doctors tear the living shit out of the fetus-shaped tumors that somehow randomly sometimes start growing inside of them like an unwanted violinist.
The question of whether Britain should be in or out of the European Union might seem like a complex technical matter upon which people of goodwill might differ.
But nationalism is now the worst idea of all time, because Hitler. Lex at WWTDD notes:
Some portion of the American public is vexed about Brexit. Almost none of them understand the precise meaning of the vote…. If it weren”t for the catchy Brexit moniker, ninety percent of them wouldn”t have been tracking it. It’s always important to ask yourself, did I discover this issue through my One Direction Fan news feed?
The near universal response of the punditry to a majority of Brits voting to leave the E.U. has been so enraged that the average voter must have begun by now to notice that their furious elites just plain don”t like them. As a Bizarro World Sally Field might have exclaimed in wonder, “You hate us, you really hate us!”
The past week has been the mirror image of the Stale Pale Male taunting and touchdown dances that followed Obama’s reelection. Then, it was Democracy Rules (because we”ve imported millions of ringers). Now, it’s Democracy Sucks (because voters are stupid).
I”ve long been suggesting that it would be prudent for elites to moderate the policies under which they”ve flourished, such as by scaling back mass immigration. Open borders might make sense to individuals who see themselves as Randian supermen who could dominate anywhere. But the more humble or realistic might prefer a place to call home””Home is where you don”t have to explain yourself.”
The Establishment’s refusal to moderate its policies”for example, “Britain today receives more immigrants in a single year than it did in the entire period from 1066 to 1950,” as Benjamin Schwarz recently observed”inevitably leads citizens to seize upon the few opportunities they are afforded to offer their opinion, such as the Brexit referendum.
What has ruined the E.U. is the ideological momentum of elites. Now that the public has twigged to the fact that globalism is basically a scam to allow those who would do pretty well in life anyway to do even better, the globalists have doubled down on their claims to be justified by their more advanced morality of universalism.
Personally, it’s interesting to finally see become widely admitted what I”ve been pointing out for the entire 21st century: that the contemporary globalist ordering of the world (in comparison with the postwar nationalist structure) is very good for the people at the top, and perhaps for those at the bottom (although they are more used as virtue-signaling totems by the ruling class), while it exploits those in the middle. This predation is then rationalized by arguing that the victims, the typical citizens, deserve their fate because they are evil.
That’s the KKKrazy Glue that holds together this high-low coalition.
And yet, one obvious problem with the European Union is its “democracy deficit.” The word “democracy” still is prestigious, but democracy is pragmatically incompatible with a European-wide polity. As I wrote in 2000:
A single language unifies a country into a shared “information sphere.” When citizens can understand each other, they are much more likely to identify with their compatriots”and sacrifice for them. They can also monitor politics across their society and intelligently participate in debates.
[James] Bennett comments, “No one person can really follow European politics as a whole, since that would require reading and speaking such a wide variety of languages with subtlety and ability to understand context, that only a few handful might even try. A “European” politics outside of the corridors of EU headquarters in Brussels does not and cannot exist.”
One example of the problems of conducting politics in translation:
…Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev notoriously told the U.S., “We will bury you.” American citizens took that as an extremely aggressive threat. Yet, according to [Jamie] Hamilton [of a translation firm], in Russian the phrase actually “connotes something fairly mild: “we’ll outlive you,” “we’ll be there at your funeral.””
…These days, most citizens get their political opinions from watching leaders and pundits speak on television…. If the Euro-politicians were speaking different languages and therefore would have to be dubbed like a bad kung fu movie to make them intelligible to the citizens, apathy will reign.
Historically, multilingual rule tends to lead to self-perpetuating autocracy:
An older word for “superstate” is “empire.” The rigorous demands of running an empire naturally tend to undermine democracy…. The Roman Republic discovered this when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul.
Yet the reality that has become apparent in the sixteen years since I confidently explained why the European Union is doomed to be controlled by its Brussels bureaucracy is that the E.U. has turned out to be a house of cards dominated by the leader of its strongest old-fashioned state, which is Germany.
I moved out of Boystown over a decade ago, but still trek down there every five weeks to get my hair done. I can”t stomach the prospect of explaining to some new, nearby stylist that yes, I do want a perm, and yes, my hair is supposed to look more or less like Barbara Stanwyck’s wig in Double Indemnity, and yes, I do know that that was supposed to be an ugly hairdo. (God, you just don”t GET it!) (Mom!!!)
So I”m loyal to my hairdresser, who’s even older than I am, knows what the hell I”m talking about, and tunes the salon’s radio to one of the few remaining stations playing music from the previous century. Incredibly, he’s also pretty much the only straight in the Village.
Our schedule only gets screwed up in July, during Pride Month. (Oh, please: It hasn”t been just “Day” or “Week” for ages, around the same time they dropped the “Gay” part.) The salon is right on the parade route, so they shut down for that whole weekend.
“It’s a pain, but what can you do?” said my stylist as I sat in his chair a few weeks back. “The naked guys in the parade are the worst. Besides, it’s illegal. The cops don”t do anything, though. I guess they don”t want to go after minorities.
“Not,” he added, “that gays are minorities anymore…”
“Well, actually,” I replied”God, those two words have gotten me into so much trouble””gays make up only about two percent of the population.”
Now, my hairbender is, admittedly, soaking in it, but poll after poll shows that plenty of other folks are convinced that gays make up a bigger slice of the population than they do. And why not? That’s the fruit, so to speak, of relentless propaganda that started with one lying pervert’s “one-in-ten” nonsense. Supertankers” worth of homo blood, sweat, tears, and other bodily fluids have since been expelled over the course of”well, “generations” doesn”t seem like quite the right word”and now gayness is the very grout and mortar of modern life, from your TV to your kids” classrooms. Every month seems like Pride.
That’s probably why this year, Toronto figured it had to add something particularly novel to the festivities, so the cops issued an official apology for the very event that, legend has it, inspired Pride in the first place.
On February 5, 1981, over 250 men were arrested in raids on four downtown bathhouses as part of “Operation Soap.” Owners were charged with “keeping a common bawdy house” and patrons as “found ins.” Some of these were marched into the streets while still naked, which is the alleged “reason” for the notorious nudity during the subsequent annual parade. You see, it’s a homo homage to the travails of their elders, a reenactment of their Trail of Bears! (Those in the “community” who object to this hairy ass-pect of queer “culture” are dissed as “nice gays,” a “pejorative term akin to “Uncle Tom.””)
The day after the raids, thousands of gay men marched on 52 Division and Queen’s Park in protest. Some stayed politicized and got into AIDS advocacy (refusing, of course, to acknowledge the obvious connection between that disease and what went on in those very bathhouses).
Today, Pride Toronto (like AIDS) is big business, the pot of gold at the end of that ubiquitous rainbow.
“In hindsight,” one veteran activist said last week, “I look upon the bathhouse raids as probably one of the best things that ever happened to the LGBT community at that time.”
But he didn”t turn down that official apology, of course.
Famous-in-Toronto gay pastor Brent Hawkes was pleased with it too, a fact the CBC reported without mentioning that he’s also pleaded not guilty to “indecent assault on a male and gross indecency related to allegations of a sexual assault against a minor in 1974 and 1975.”
Which reminds me…
Impish comedian Aziz Ansari just penned an essay for The New York Times to complain about how scared Trump makes him and his Muslim family. Only a few short weeks after the attacks we are lamenting the incredible danger Muslims are in and worrying about how a candidate’s idea may affect people if it becomes law and is then put into a time machine and sent back to when they immigrated here. How’s that for Islamophobiaphobia? His parents come from India where Muslims slaughtered millions of Hindus despite being rewarded their own country. Many fled to America where they quickly became the most successful people in the nation. With a median income of $101,591, they are above Taiwanese, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Lebanese, and finally white Americans, who come in at a mere 16th place after Nigerian-Americans. Hasan Minhaj is another Indian Muslim who keeps getting affirmative-action handouts because we feel so terrible for his people. We are so scared of being racist we are refusing to acknowledge they are kicking our asses. 60 Minutes just did a feature on corruption on Wall Street and didn”t even notice that every single person in their story was Indian (or East Asian). Sorry, but you can”t waltz into a country, dominate them financially, and then complain about how “dangerous” it is. As Coulter points out when confronting wealthy Mexican students, blacks have a history that includes slavery. You just got here. You can”t indulge in the American dream while whining about how scary it is. That’s the textbook definition of privilege.
Aziz dragged out all the emotional tropes that pass for facts these days: Only a tiny minority of Muslims are terrorists. Moderate Muslims don”t tolerate it. There were no Muslim celebrations on 9/11, etc., etc. Why is it every time a bad Muslim murders people, we start worrying about good Muslims” feelings? Shapiro and Crowder already did a great job of refuting the extremist-minority myth. When calculating those numbers, you discover that an alarming number of “moderates” think “suicide bombing is sometimes or often justified.” With young American Muslims, it’s one in four. On CNN’s Why They Hate Us Saturday night, I saw Fareed Zakaria argue that animosity from extremist Islam comes from the fact that we don”t assume our Bangladeshi cabdriver is a terrorist even though he’s Muslim. Actually, Fareed, their hatred comes from the part of the Koran that explicitly says, “Hate Us.” I have spoken to cops who saw Muslims celebrating during 9/11 (with my own eyes I saw Puerto Ricans screaming, “Bomb that shit, nigga” as the towers fell, but that’s another story). Jesse Hughes told me he saw Muslims dancing in the street during the Bataclan shootings. Are we really still trying to pretend a wildly disproportionate number of Muslims don’t tolerate jihad?
Ansari goes on to discuss all the horrible mass shootings we”ve had recently and points out how white the shooters are, arguing we should be just as wary of whites. This is in a country that is 75% white. Nice logic. It’s the kind of reasoning you can get away with when emotional voters dominate elections. I”m reminded of proud spinster Rebecca Traister on Bill Maher bragging that single women were responsible for getting Obama into office. Liberals love focusing on mass shootings because the perpetrators are white males, but the numbers behind this illusion don”t even come close to backing it up. As John Lott recently discovered, France suffered more casualties from Muslims in one year than America has from all mass shootings over Obama’s entire presidency (532 to 396). We”ve had an average of 50 casualties a year from mass shootings. It’s hard to find something else with numbers that low. Texting while driving kills about 1,000 a year. A surprising number of fatal dangers seem to hover around 30″40,000. Prostate cancer, breast cancer, and gang-related shootings are all in that zone. Unfortunately for the narrative, gang shootings are black-on-black crime and they”re done with illegal handguns. Here in New York, I”d go straight to jail if I brought even my musket into the city, but we”re still at a murder a day. So politicians sit on the House floor like spoiled brats and pretend automatic-weapons bans will save lives even though we tried that and they didn”t. It doesn”t make any sense but it looks good and that’s all a virtue signal requires.
Dancing around an unpleasant reality is what politics are all about nowadays”Donald Trump excluded”with political correctness the enveloping cloud that hides truth and the facts. There are boundaries that are set by those faceless gray men and women none of us ever see, those who control the networks, the newspapers, and the academy, in other words the so-called elite, and woe to anyone who dares defy them. Our elected officials are the first to play this game, starting with the man who sleeps in the White House as I write.
Things have gotten so bad that biology has been replaced by chosen gender, with heavy penalties decreed for those who prefer the scientific interpretation of what is a man and what constitutes a woman. The great Roger Scruton calls it “transphobia,” just as “Islamophobia” is the excuse by our elite for the attitude that leads to mass murder and the enslavement of women. In reality, trans women are nothing but men with fetishes, and vice versa, and if anyone wishes to debate this, please go reproduce yourself first and then call me.
Which brings me to the Orlando tragedy and all the lies that have followed. My first question is, and I posed the same one after the Boston Marathon bombing, what the hell was this family of Afghan con men doing in this country anyway? Why was the father given TV time to spout lies? Why are we letting Chechens, Somalis, Afghans, Nigerians, and Eritreans”rather than the millions of Europeans I know are dying to immigrate”into the good old U.S. of A.?
Secondly, and just as important, why did we need to sexualize the massacre in Orlando? Omar Mateen was obviously homosexual, however repressed, and decided to prove his manhood by murdering innocents who were not repressed. Why was it painted as an exclusively antigay attack, and why was militant Islam never mentioned? Most ISIS fighters bugger men when they”re not raping women. Why is it the act that dare not speak its name by the media? Ditto for the Taliban. Yet in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia homosexuality warrants a death sentence. Go figure.
Thirdly. and most important, how is it possible for The New York Times to quote one Ms. Gowrinathan, who studies gender and terrorism (some studies) and said, “[The killer] is the outcome of the United States” political culture, not the Islamic State’s,” and to have one Ms. Epstein of Georgetown agree? I know, I know, there are nutcases everywhere, but no serious paper or institution would quote them, unless it suited them. Well, how about getting some people to blame the Jews for their own destruction, rather than Nazi Germany, or, much easier, find some Israelis to blame the Palestinians for Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine for the past sixty years?
Although two can play the Times“ game, this is a serious magazine, and unlike the NY Times, it’s not run by freaks for freaks. Basically, for liberals and lefties, the Orlando massacre was all about gun control. For LGBT activists, the only thing that mattered was that it was an attack against LGBTs. (Thank God for the acronym.) Meanwhile, both Obama and the dreaded Hillary avoided the one true word that explained the terrorist act: Muslim, or Islam, was never mentioned. What in Allah’s f—-ing name is going on here? How can the war on terror ever be won if we refuse to name the enemy? The Jews are accused of many things they”re guilty of, but never of stupidity. And never a day goes by without Jewish-owned newspapers like the Times reminding us of what the Nazis did to the Jews, 75 years after the fact. But here we are, fighting a so-called war on terror, and neither the Democratic nominee nor the president has the balls to utter the word “Islam.”
Let’s face it. If Muslims had their way, and by that I mean most Muslims, homosexuality would be not only banned, but a capital offense, as it is in most Muslim countries. But instead of concentrating on that fact, what did the gay lobbies do? Point their fire and ire against perceived homophobia. One placard in front of the White House said it all: “Homophobia equals Islamophobia.” A friend of mine calls such vile absurdities atrocity exhibitionism. But it’s worse than exhibitionism. First and foremost, it’s a big lie. It’s turning a blind eye to Muslim hatred of everything: gays, Jews, women, Christians”you name it, Muslims hate it. It’s the refusal to declare war on Saudi and Qatari and Kuwaiti money that finances terror by our elite because they”ve been bribed time and again. Makes one wish for Saddam Hussein, with his hard-drinking sons and his tanks on Kuwaiti soil.
As a graduate of journalism school, it took me many years of tireless research to conclude that most journalists are so full of shit, it’s a wonder they don’t explode. I’ve learned to be especially wary of anyone who makes a point of referring to themselves as a “journalist””more often than not, you aren’t dealing with an objective fact-digger but rather a robotic ideologue who will mercilessly mangle facts to fit his narrative while swiftly discarding any fact that even slightly subverts it.
The most depressing thing about trying to deal exclusively in facts is the fact that most people don’t care about facts. Fact is, they believe what they want to believe.
Case in point: An incident on June 2 in a laundry room at a low-income apartment complex in Twin Falls, Idaho.
According to this report, a gang of Syrian refugees raped a little girl at knifepoint. And according to this shrieking headline, the media remained shamefully silent after “Three Syrian Refugees Violently Rape 5-year-old Child in Idaho.” Many of the initial and more salacious reports were derived from a petition by Twin Falls residents that gave the following account of the event:
The little girl was at the FAWNBROOK apartment buildings where both her parents and grandmother reside. She was playing in between those two apartment units when 3 boys (from 2 Syrian refugee families, ages 8, 10, 13) pulled a knife on her, held it to her throat, forced her into the laundry unit, stripped her naked, raped, and urinated on her. The 13 year old “coached” the younger boys as he videoed. Due to age restraint the boys could not ejaculate but did urinate on her.
Local residents were allegedly enraged that the prosecutor had sealed the details of the case, which is standard practice regarding underage victims of sex crimes. But as more information began slowly leaking in, it appeared that locals had been engaging in a game of “Chinese whispers” that led to several factually errant embellishments.
For one, the three alleged perps were not Syrian. Two were Sudanese and the other one was Iraqi. It has not been confirmed whether they were resettled in the US under a refugee program, although all three were said to have been in America for less than two years. Police said there was no evidence of a knife at the scene. They also said that the girl had not been gang-raped, although one of the three boys had sexually assaulted her.
With slimy deceptiveness, the left-leaning press”also known colloquially as “the press””leaped on these errant nitpicky details to foster an impression that nothing bad had happened at all. The Idaho Statesman was especially shameless in this regard”one headline referred to the whole incident as a “False Twin Falls attack” before launching straight into a sob story about an alleged attack on a Syrian immigrant in Boise.
Boise Weekly ran with a headline about “False Claims,” calling it all a “convoluted story about an alleged sexual assault.” And at the website Raw Story, which approaches North Korea levels of blind ideological bias, claims that “Anti-Muslim bigots made up shocking gang rape story to smear Syrian refugees.” Spokane’s Spokesman-Review called it a “False story” peddled by “anti-Muslim and conspiracy-oriented websites.”
And writing for Salon”the world’s premier gathering spot for pampered white people who hate being white and seem to think that nonwhites will spare them because of it”the perpetually sourpussed and rape-obsessed Amanda Marcotte refers to the Twin Falls incident as a “Right-wing urban legend [that] shows how ugly [the] anti-refugee movement has become.” She waxes hysterical about “hysterical right-wing corridors” and “right-wing nuts making lurid accusations” due to their “drooling hysteria” and “racist hysteria.”
This is the same Amanda Marcotte who wrote the following about the Duke Lacrosse case before it was revealed it was a 100% fabricated race hoax perpetrated by a black woman who was later convicted of murder:
Can”t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.
It’s the same Amanda Marcotte who gullibly swallowed the 100% fact-free Rolling Stone account of a vicious gang rape by white boys at the University of Virginia that, as luck would have it, didn’t happen at all.
I’ve often noticed that for “rape culture” delusion-mongers such as Marcotte, false rape accusations only ever happen when it’s a white woman accusing a black man of rape. We can now add suspected Muslims to the list of males who never rape but are always falsely accused of it. When confronted with the world’s only true “rape culture,” these logic-shunning freaks run screaming from it in denial.
Muslims in 2016 have become to the left what the “transgendered” were in 2015″a protected class who can do no wrong. Remember, these True Believers didn”t blame Islam for the Orlando massacre, despite the fact that Omar Mateen dialed 911 to declare he was doing it in the name of Allah. Instead, they blamed white supremacy or even Donald Trump. There is no reasoning with them.
The Week’s Most Quixotic, Robotic, and Idiotic Headlines
WORLD RECOILS IN SHOCK AND HORROR AS BRITAIN VOTES TO BECOME BRITISH AGAIN
Because English voters are small-minded, xenophobic, Islamophobic, pasty-skinned, elderly cretins stubbornly clawing onto the wrong side of history, they ignored the dictates of their betters and voted to leave the European Union on Thursday. On Friday morning, progressives soiled their diapers across the planet at the thought that anyone would be so hateful and uninformed as to think that a monstrous and largely undemocratic financial/political organization that is flooding one’s nation with hostile rapist outsiders and sadistically taunting indigenous Britons about their demographic extinction might not have the natives’ best interests in mind.
Britain’s exit may have a domino effect, as rumors are swelling that “France, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and Hungary could leave.”
On Friday, American President Barack Cocaine Obama mentioned the Brexit decision in passing while giving a speech at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. He referred to the “fears” that globalization invokes among the “old boys’ network” as the world stretches and grows and fertilizes its labor pool with all those virtuous nonwhites and women and minorities who must constantly struggle against the throwbacks and yahoos who in their fascist hatred are standing up to resist “this process of global integration.”
Future American Emperor-for-Life Donald Jehoshaphat Trump issued the following decree on his glorious and infallible website:
The people of the United Kingdom have exercised the sacred right of all free peoples. They have declared their independence from the European Union and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy….Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence. Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first. They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people.
Obviously one would have to be an entitled bigoted bully to pick on an oppressed minority such as “the global elite.”
VIBRANT MOBS TORTURE WOMAN ON PARIS STREET
In Paris, France”Europe’s glittering metropolitan diadem that is widely considered the world’s most beautiful city because it’s where Muslims commit mass murder against magazine editors and concertgoers“a female tourist was beaten and tortured by “marauding youths” on Wednesday near a police station.
According to an unidentified British witness, “The screams were blood-curdling, especially as the police had pretty much given up for the evening.” After rising from slumber the next morning, police at the Les Halles station claimed they “knew absolutely nothing” about the mass assault.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN LESBIAN VEGAN SEEKS TO RADICALLY TRANSFORM JUDAISM
Sandra Lawson is a black-skinned and square-jawed woman who exclusively enjoys the sexual company of other women and refuses to eat anything containing the flesh or bodily secretions of animals. As if it wasn’t difficult enough being a black lesbian vegan”in Philadelphia, no less”she is also a rabbinical student. She may be the world’s only black lesbian vegan Jewish Philadelphian, but for her this is problematic rather than a bragging right. “When I Google “rabbi,” I want to see more than bearded white guys,” Lawson recently kvetched to the Times of Israel.
We concur with Lawson that we as a society haven’t even yet begun to achieve racial justice until you see more black lesbian vegan Philadelphians when you Google the term “rabbi.”
CATHOLIC CANUCKS CONTINUE GETTING FLOGGED
Even though The Holy Bible is quite clear that God is a raging homophobe who wants to toss all gayrods and lezzies into the Lake of Fire where they’ll shriek in vain for all eternity, much of modern Christendom has become infected with the KultMarx virus to the point where the Lord’s followers now condemn “homophobia” rather than homosexuality.
In Ontario, Canada, a Catholic school board has enacted a policy wherein students would be expelled for expressing “homophobia.”
And in Montreal, Catholic Archbishop Christian Lepine has decreed that priests will henceforth be forbidden from being alone with children.
The Catholic Church is clearly allowing itself to be crucified in the service of a new secular god.
I always thought the Freuds a pretty sordid bunch, and after the latest revelations, it seems I wasn’t far off. I first met Clement Freud when John Aspinall employed him as an adviser for food and wine. He was lugubrious and aggressive, and none of us punters liked him one bit. He was not a gambler but talked as if he were a big one. While crossing the Atlantic on board the QE2 back in 1974, he tried to play the tough guy with me over—yes, you guessed it—a lady, but it didn’t work. But there’s no use giving him the business now that he’s dead, so all I will say is I found him just a bit less loathsome than his painter brother and leave it at that.
Sexual depravity is something unknown in the Taki family, but I suppose it should go hand in hand if one’s name is Freud. I never read Sigmund, but wasn’t he always banging on about depraved sexual matters and dreams? What he should have been writing about is male abusers imposing their views on women in Muslim societies. We Christians are taught from day one to worship women. Mind you, Western feminists see it the other way round, that our culture is all about men controlling women. The feminists then say that the Islamic State appeals to men who desire that sort of control over women. In other words, our culture and the IS are one and the same. Leave it to feminists to find a roundabout way to get it as wrong as that.
The Orlando terrorist was a wife-beating control freak, but some ludicrous woman in Washington, D.C., by the name of Epstein declared the killer “the outcome of American culture, not the Islamic State’s.” The ludicrous NY Times reported this bullshit with a melancholic straight face. I laughed out loud. Thank God I’m back in London, because things are getting very confused over on the other side. Everyone sounds as hysterical as The Guardian’s Owen Jones, a man with many fetishes, I assume, the least being inhaling jockstraps. The next thing you know, this trans business will be taken seriously.
But if you thought comedy was dead, you obviously haven’t read anything by one Laura Collins-Hughes. Here she is writing about The Taming of the Shrew: “The ending, which finds Kate docile at last, is meant to be winsome. But when she gives her final speech, reminding women of their duty to their husbands—it always makes me feel sick. It always makes me cry.” She then goes on to tell us of her despair of the play and of its most toxic line, when Kate exhorts other wives to place their hands below their husbands’ feet.
All I can say is I’d rather fall in the hands of the Islamic State than spend any time with these humorless harridans. It’s a Shakespeare comedy, for Christ’s sake, not a Trump political manifesto, and this witless woman reminds me of the touchy-feely Jews who think The Merchant of Venice should only be produced in Nazi concentration camps. (What about in the West Bank?)
I suppose what the world needs are more laughs, but everyone seems to be so uptight nowadays, as uptight as that great aristocrat Philip Green. Boy, he looked like a lizard caught in a mosquito net while trying to look tough and spitting back answers to MPs. In Winnie’s words, some tough guy, some testimony. He should be forced to pay back 600 million pounds or so, or to live in Monaco the rest of his miserable life, a very close call. Green is the type who gives his boat a name that is directly the opposite of his own character. Lionheart suggests a courageous, proud person. Although it is none of my business, I think he should name his boat Pensioner, in honor of all the thousands he’s screwed à la Maxwell.
Finally, Pugs celebrated its tenth anniversary last week, and our annual lunch was among the best ever. I say so because we sat down at 1 p.m. and sort of finished at 8 p.m. That’s what’s called a successful lunch. Nick Scott was voted yet again president for life; Bob Miller was elevated to vice commodore; our commodore Tim Hoare brought twenty bottles of the best red wine this side of Lafite; both Pavlos and Nikolaos, Greek royal princes, attended; and the only sour note was our president, who with schoolmarmish sincerity made fun of the poor little Greek boy’s malapropisms when using such words as “lambent” and “sclerotic.” I cordially endured it and then got very drunk. Nice to be back in London again, especially if I wake up with the right—Leave and never ever look back—result just as you’re about to read this.
The gift of political prophecy is certainly not mine, and I suspect that the best, most certain way of prophesying correctly is to prophesy often. That way one will, by laws of chance, sometimes be right. The human mind’s propensity to remember its successes and forget its failures will see to the rest: One will soon come to think of oneself as an oracle.
Nevertheless, some people have such a gift for getting things wrong that it implies perspicuity of a kind”a mirror-image kind, no doubt, but still not altogether to be despised, for they are useful as guides. In the days when I read The Economist religiously (more than thirty years ago), I marveled at its ability to get so much wrong, and in such dull prose into the bargain. It was almost like the fifth horseman of the apocalypse: No sooner did a country flourish on its pages than it descended into civil war or total economic collapse. Such, at any rate, is my recollection, though memory is sometimes no more reliable than prophecy.
There is a certain kind of Western third-worldist, usually upper-middle-class, educated, intelligent, cultivated, gifted, and completely stupid, who sees in some godforsaken country or unscrupulous leader the hope of the world. The late Basil Davidson, for example, a brilliant linguist, excellent writer, charming man, and brave adventurer, had an astonishing gift for extolling leaders and political movements just before they were about to bring about catastrophe, mass murder, and total impoverishment.
Thus he extolled Tito shortly before that great man embarked on killing hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. He then saw an immensely bright future for China just before the Great Leap Forward and its consequent famine, which was probably the worst, in numbers of victims, in the whole of human history. Perhaps his greatest feat of clairvoyance was in seeing a brilliant future for Guinea-Bissau as beacon and teacher of justice and equality to the world. Neither age nor experience could wither his enthusiasm: He was always a man in search of his next illusion. In a way it was admirable, though if I were a poor peasant somewhere in the world that Basil Davidson was visiting in preparation of a book extolling a guerrilla movement, I would tremble for my own future.
The former literary editor of The Guardian, Richard Gott (who resigned his post because he had taken Soviet money, though this did his career little lasting harm), is another of the species; but while there is hardly a third-world totalitarian of whom he did not approve, he was mainly interested in Latin America. His last great hope was Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who, of course, was much less sanguinary than his previous favorites such as Che Guevara. Whether it was Gott or the leftist caudillos who grew more moderate is an open question; be that as it may, Gott saw in the pantomime-Castro, the opera buffa revolutionary, Hugo Chavez, yet another potential savior of the continent.
In 2000 he wrote a book about Chavez that I thought startling in its adulatory idiocy. The Bourbons may have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, but Gott was far worse than any Bourbon. Despite it being obvious that Chavez’s crude and demagogic economic notions were capable of producing a sand shortage in the Sahara, Gott saw in them a rainbow with a pot of social justice at the end of it. As late as 2012, Gott wrote an article in The Guardian with the title “Chavez’s economic lesson for Europe.” Its subtitle was “Hugo Chavez’s rejection of the neoliberal policies dragging Europe down sets a hopeful example.”
Chavez’s policy was simply to use Venezuela’s large oil revenues, in effect its unearned income, to subsidize the standard of living of millions of people, while at the same time antagonizing foreign and even domestic capital. Oddly enough, it did not occur to the learned author of the article that Greece, for example, had no revenues from a resource comparable to oil to distribute, though for a time borrowed money played the role of those oil revenues; nor that an economy utterly dependent on the price of oil was extremely fragile, and that to distribute largesse on the assumption that the price would remain high forever was improvident, to say the least.
How do you feel about Muslims? Not good, eh? They”re different from you and me. They”re hostile, right? The enemy within? Scary.
Thinking about Islam, I think also about Kipling. He is one of these writers you don”t come to the end of. He can always surprise, sometime disconcert you. Take, for instance, his observation that where there is Islam there is a comprehensible civilization. How does that sound today? At odds with the perception? At odds, even, with reality?
One might start by qualifying it. Kipling had no experience of Arab countries. It was while working as a young journalist in Lahore in what is now Pakistan that he got to know, like, and admire Muslims. Mahbub Ali, the Afghan horse trader and British government agent, one of the most striking and attractive characters in Kipling’s masterpiece Kim, was based on a real man in the horse-dealing trade who was a close friend of the young journalist. There were also Muslim members of the Masonic lodge into which Kipling was inducted. There were Hindu members, too, and at least one Jew, but Kipling had neither sympathy for Hinduism nor understanding of it. Islam was different because, as he wrote, “my life had lain among Muslims, and a man leans one way or another according to his first service.”
Kipling recognized, as anyone of sense must, that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have much in common. They all believe that there is only one God, even if Christian monotheism is complicated by the doctrine of the Trinity. They are all people of the Book, respecting, and obedient to, the authority of their sacred text. The three religions have their roots in the same part of the world. Christianity started as a Jewish heresy, and Muslims count Moses and Jesus among the prophets. Moreover, in all three religions, faith is expressed publicly by observance of certain rituals. All three also require their adherents to subscribe to certain social principles and duties.
All three have preached peace and submission to the will of God, but have a warrior history. In the case of the Jews that history has been, till recently, remote. It’s a long time since the prophets of the Lord commanded the Israelites to smite the Amalekites and Philistines and destroy them utterly. (Yes, the First Book of Samuel calls for what we now recognize as genocide.) But that was ages ago. For some two thousand years there was no Jewish state, and if Israel today is a formidable military power, it is so only locally and, it would argue, in self-defense.
Christianity has a history of aggression in the name of the faith. Popes preached the Crusades against the infidel who occupied the Holy Land, and these Crusades are still remembered in the Muslim world. In Eastern Europe the faith was imposed on pagan peoples by the sword. The Christian armies of Charlemagne, Frankish king and Holy Roman Emperor, forcibly converted the Saxons, and the Teutonic knights suppressed and converted Wends and Prussians. Christians advanced with the Bible in one hand and the sword, or lance, in the other. More recently, though European (and American) empires spread over the globe, imperialism was driven by political and commercial interests, not by religion. Missionaries might attempt to bring the heathen to the light, but they met with as much discouragement as support from the imperial powers. There was no attempt to convert the subjects of the British Empire in India to Christianity. Kipling would have thought any such aspiration ridiculous.
Islam was different. Arguably it still is. As John Buchan’s Sir Walter Bullivant (Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office) says in Greenmantle, “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.” There are, of course, many”both Muslims and non-Muslims”who deny this and tell you that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Others, looking at the world today, at the Arab world, at Iran and Pakistan, think this claim nonsensical; we are all aware of the threat of Islamist terrorism.
For a thousand years after Muhammad, Islam was aggressive. Muslim armies conquered North Africa, Spain, and Sicily. They advanced to the east, and Persia, which we now call Iran, became a Muslim country. They destroyed the Roman Empire in the east, and in 1453 took Constantinople. They occupied Greece and the Balkans. Twice, in 1529 and 1685, the army of the Ottoman Empire was at the gates of Vienna. A religion of peace? Anyone looking at this historical record must say, “Come off it.”
There’s another side to it, however. Of course there is. There’s another side to every generalization, historical or present-day. It’s not merely that most Muslims, like most people anywhere, want to be allowed to get on with their private lives, and sensibly think family, friendship, business, and work more important than politics, most of the time anyway. It’s also that, after the first centuries of conquest, Muslim rulers in Spain and Sicily, and the Ottomans in southern Europe, were tolerant of their Christian (and Jewish) subjects, who were mostly left unmolested so long as they paid their taxes; they were left free to practice their religion. Their rulers were certainly more tolerant of them than Spanish kings were of their Muslim subjects after the Reconquista, and”this is the sad and important point”much more tolerant then than some Muslim states are today.
How come? Why is jihad”holy war”preached again almost fifteen hundred years after Muhammad?
For much of the 20th century, political Islam seemed in decline, a back number. Modernization was the order of the day in the Muslim world. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Turkey came under the rule of Kemal Ataturk, becoming a secular state in which religion was relegated to private life. In the 1950s Turkey became a member of NATO. Iran and Pakistan were also Western allies, Iran especially under the rule of the Shah, being a secular state closely allied with the U.S.A. In the Arab world, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria were also secular states in which Arab socialism was the driving force. As in Turkey, Islam was supposed to know its place.
But when a country tries to modernize, there are losers as well as winners. When that modernization in the Muslim world was imposed by authoritarian regimes imitating the West or supported by the West, it provoked a reaction; and this took the form of a religious revival. Resentment festered, and this was sharpened by the perception of the Muslim world’s inferiority to the West, its sense of humiliation. An early consequence was the Iranian revolution and the overthrow of America’s ally, the Shah. He was replaced by an authoritarian Islamic regime. Modernization went into reverse, women losing rights they had acquired. Iran has now been an intolerant Islamic republic for almost forty years, a republic whose leaders loathe and despise Western politics and Western culture.
The West has had an ally in the Muslim world, the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The alliance has been based on a quid pro quo: They supply us with oil, we supply them with military hardware. Yet it’s an uneasy and increasingly strained alliance. Geopolitical interest binds the Saudi ruling family to the West, but Saudi Arabia is the homeland of the narrowest, most puritanical form of Islam, the Wahhabism; and the Saudis have been happy (idealistically or cynically”take your pick) to export this and promote it throughout the Muslim world. Wahhabism, the driving force of the Islamism we fear, loathes and despises everything about the West. It preaches jihad, and Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 murderers were Saudis or had their roots in Wahhabism. ISIS, the so-called Islamic State, is the vilest and most extreme expression of this narrow and intolerant puritan creed. The Islamists export terror to the West, but their first and most numerous victims have been fellow Muslims.
