Posts Tagged ‘Muslim’

LinkSwarm for December 11, 2015

Friday, December 11th, 2015

Been an awful week for a variety of reasons, perhaps the least of which is I’m getting over a nasty cold.

  • Hillary Clinton and the Chamber of Suckups.
  • Hey Democrats: Why do you insist in shoving Hillary down our throats?
  • “Our royal elites have decreed that we must stop worrying about terrorism. Now shut up and eat your Syrian refugees!”
  • Speaking of which, Obama shut down an investigations that could have thwarted the San Bernardino attack. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Gozer: “Choose your destructor!” Liberals: “Donald Trump!
  • Meanwhile, Ted Cruz has picked up the key endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats in Iowa.
  • Old and Busted: We need to tone down violent rhetoric. The New Hotness: We need to shoot Trump supporters. Bonus: Same guy.
  • Principled lefty Nat Hentoff says the ACLU is worse than useless when it comes to defending campus free speech.
  • Largest percentage of hate crimes are against Jews.
  • Study shows campus rapes are actually very rare, on par with numbers seen in the general populace. Naturally, feminists are enraged…
  • More stomach-churning details of how Rotherham’s Muslim child rape gangs operated. Funny how our elites, when faced with real Muslim child rape gangs, prefer to talk about a pretend campus rape epidemic…
  • After twenty years of relentless anti-gun propaganda from the mainstream media, a majority of Americans now oppose an “assault weapons” ban. Good work, New York Times!
  • El Chapo, the head of the Sinaloa Mexican drug cartel, threatens the Islamic State.
  • Signs that the life of “everybody makes $70,000” Gravity CEO Dan Price may not be perfect: accusations he waterboarded his wife.
  • Wendy Davis even lies when shes admitting to lying.
  • There can be only one.
  • Privilege Theory and Progressive Antisemitism

    Saturday, April 4th, 2015

    Once upon a time, American anti-antisemitism was seen as a bastion of the poorly-educated nativist right. (This was never entirely true, as quotas limiting Jewish admissions were imposed at many Ivy league universities in the 1920s, and Father Coughlin, perhaps the most prominent American anti-Semite of the 20th century, founded the National Union for Social Justice.) But William F. Buckley was fairly diligent in excluding anti-Semites from the modern conservative movement, a vigilance that continued well into the 1990s, as Joseph Sobran and Patrick Buchanan (cast out for tiptoeing up to the line) can attest.

    Conversely, antisemitism has been rising on the left, both here and in Europe, as John-Paul Pagano details:

    Israel’s stunning victory against combined Arab armies in 1967 set in motion streams of hostility—some anti-Israel, some “anti-Zionist,” some anti-Jewish—which would pool, roil, and gather strength until the turn of the millennium, when the Second Intifada unleashed them in a cataract of anti-Semitism. Two groups were swept along most forcefully by the current: Arabs and Muslims; and Left-wing radicals, who took their cues on Israel and Zionism from Moscow, where “anti-Zionism” assumed a central place in the Soviet anti-colonial catechism.

    That’s the first strand. Pagano then offers a section on the rise in the unassimilated Muslim immigrant population in Europe, and the increasingly open antisemitism and attacks against Jews by those populations over the last decade. Then he gets to the meat of his argument:

    I think there are three main drivers guiding progressives like [Freddie deBoer] who have similar responses to the very real injuries suffered by Jews who are targeted, excluded, abused, and sometimes murdered for reasons that are clearly the result of hatred: an excess of rationalism, the way anti-Semitism short-circuits the “privilege” analysis of racism, and a prioritization of some victims of racism over others.

    But it’s the “privilege” theory so beloved of Social Justice Warriors that really ties it all together:

    Paul Berman made the point in Terror and Liberalism—a book the mere mention of which sends deBoer types running for the bathroom—that we in the West are inheritors of Enlightenment rationalism, and as such we find it difficult to understand and constructively respond to irrational political movements. In this respect “we are all Noam Chomsky,” Berman wrote in reference to the man who has done the most to advance this reductive Weltanschauung. In politics Chomsky proposed two warring innate ideas—an instinct for greed (embodied by the corporatized West) and an instinct for freedom (embodied by those opposing the West)—and honed this analysis by applying it to the abattoir in Cambodia during the 1970s. There have been few enormities that more clearly exhibit irrationalism than the Khmer Rouge auto-genocide; but in Chomsky’s hyper-rationalist view, no such movement of self-cannibalizing lunacy could exist (at least not among victims of American imperialism). So, he wrote that there was no genocide to speak of in Cambodia, and if there was violence, it was because greedy U.S. war-making had driven the Cambodians to it.

    So too with some interpretations of crises relating to radical Islam and the Middle East. Irrationalism is the wrong explanation, because it simply can’t be right; or if violence and hatred do exist, they assume the discrete and contingent form of being a rational (i.e., predictable and understandable) response by the victims of the United States and Israel. For deBoer and the segment of the Left he represents, anti-Semitism is not a coherent and meaningful force among Muslims—that is to say, a movement; or if it is, it is not a self-sustaining irrational movement, one founded on conspiracist racism against Jews and drunk on salvationist violence. Rather it is tightly correlated to the wrongdoing of Americans and Jews themselves, and thus acute in onset and understandable.

    Hyper-rationalism pairs well with the dogmatic underdog-ism of the Left, which assumes that weakness is a source or at least a marker of virtue. Yet just as the poverty of Chomsky’s political analysis became clear after the United States withdrew from Indochina, the silliness and toxicity of New Left ideas about race have become plainer as Jim Crow recedes.

    Perhaps the worst of these is the formula that racism equals prejudice plus power. People of color can’t be racist, according to this definition, because they are structurally disempowered by our racist-capitalist “system.” Whites are racist, wittingly or not, because they are existentially driven to oppress non-whites in order to preserve their “privilege.” Analyses of “structural racism” and “privilege” assert a kind of Wizard of Oz sociology that exhibits some elements of conspiracy theory—false consciousness, social determinism, and peoples of good and evil locked in Manichean struggle.

    In the mental shorthand of many, Muslims are people of color and Jews are white. That demarcation has fateful consequences. We in the West have a horrendous history of racism; in the United States the oppression of African Americans for hundreds of years is an enduring betrayal of liberal values. Responses throughout the educated West to the Arab-Israeli conflict have been warped by fear that Zionism is a form of racism—as the Soviet architects of that libel surely intended. We are prone to seeing Israeli violence as illegitimate per se, and to regarding violence, hatred, and illiberalism among Arabs and Muslims as a rational—predictable and understandable—response to Western and Israeli imperialism. We miss the part that is a will to power, aspirational imperialism in its own right.

    The “prejudice plus power” idea erases real anti-Semitism—a construct with its own history of horrific effects, which is often lumped in with racism, but is actually something else. To borrow from comedy parlance, most racism “punches down”—an incumbent group constructs and subordinates an underclass. The stereotypes that make up such racism diminish their victims. For example blacks, to the white racist, are inferior, criminal, stupid, lazy, and lusty. Anti-Semitism is often the opposite, envisioning the Jew as a preternatural creature—as evil, brilliant, controlling, connected, rich, and powerful beyond measure. Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory. As such, Anti-Semitism often “punches up.”

    When deBoer implies that anti-Semitism is not increasing in Europe and that the real problem is Islamophobia, he ties all of these threads together. Muslims, people of color, can’t be racist, at least not in any coherent and self-sustaining way; they are an oppressed people reacting to the depredations of Jews and other whites. Irrationalist movements that are powered by Jew-hatred don’t exist anymore; that sort of thing was the preserve of white people 70 years ago. Anti-Semitism today is embraced most frequently and fervently by people of color—but to note that is “the basic logic of bigotry,” blaming the victim while aggrandizing the powerful. As Chomsky put it himself, “Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98 percent control.”

    Most people on the Left today prioritize the well-being of Arabs and Muslims over Jews.

    Read the whole thing.

    Another Day, Another Muslim Child Rape Ring in the UK

    Monday, March 9th, 2015

    “As many as 373 children may have been targeted for sex by gangs of men in Oxfordshire in the last 16 years, a serious case review found.”

    All the men were from “Muslim backgrounds”.

    It’s infuriating that political correctness and fears of offending Muslim sensitivities have caused so many officials to repeatedly look the other way and fail to investigate child rape cases in the UK. As in Rotherham, the officials that let this happen should end up in prison.

    Rotherham was disturbing enough. To find out that there was another Muslim child rape ring operating in the UK (albeit one with only one-third the victims) rather staggers the moral imagination. It also begs the question: How many more Muslim child rape gangs in the UK remain to be uncovered?

    Pat Condell: “Jews are being driven out of Europe by Muslim anti-Semitism”

    Wednesday, January 28th, 2015

    Once again, Pat Condell cuts right to the heart of the matter progressive multiculturalists desperately seek to obfuscate.

    Samples:

    “Not all Muslims hate Jews, but crucially the religion of Islam does hate them.”

    “Every anti-Israel rally that’s full of Muslims quickly turns into an anti-Jewish hate fest. Pointing this out does not make me or anyone else a racist. However, denying it in the face of the evidence does make you a coward and a liar, especially if you call yourself a journalist.”

    “Yet we in Europe are busy importing this mentality wholesale as part of our multicultural rainbow coalition of suicidal stupidity and moral cowardice.”

    “The number of Jews leaving France for Israel is doubling every year.”

    “In fact Jews are the new Jews. Muslims are the new Nazis.”

    Watch the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)

    Thoughts on Rape in Sweden

    Thursday, October 16th, 2014

    Pat Condell offers some pungent thoughts on the connection between mass Muslim immigration and rising rape statistics in Sweden:

    Is Sweden the rape capital of Europe? Indeed, this BBC report confirms it, though they claim that it’s an artifact of how the statistics are kept.

    However, I’m finding a hard time finding official statistics to verify what percentage of rapes are committed by immigrants or by the children of immigrants. (I have seen these statistics referred to in some discussions, but have not been able to locate them directly.) There does seem to be evidence that immigrants are “five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes.” But that’s from 2005. Are Muslims committing the majority of rapes in Sweden? It seems entirely possible, but I don’t want to fall prey to my own confirmation bias.

    Of course, since Sweden has fined Michael Hess for making a connection between Islam and rape, one can understand why published statistics could be hard to come by. Especially since “the question of whether Michael Hess’s statement is true, or at least for Michael Hess appeared to be true, is irrelevant to the proceedings.”

    Anyone have any better sources?

    Shockingly, Bill Maher Makes Sense on Gaza

    Monday, July 21st, 2014

    Here’s something from the “Blind Squirrel Find Acorn” department: Bill Maher actually making sense on Israel’s incursion into Gaza.

    Some choice quotes:

    “If Hamas had the opportunity, they would kill the maximum number of Israelis, which would be all. And Israel has the capability to kill a lot more and they do not. They seem victims of the soft bigotry of high expectations.”

    “Can we ask why Israel wins all the time? Because they’ve won every war. They have to. You can’t go 8-1 and be Israel. You have to go 8-0 every year to still exist.”

    “Jews have 155 Nobel Prizes and Muslims have two. Maybe it’s who you know, but that seems a big advantage for Team Hebrew.”

    Egypt’s Death Toll: 500 and Rising

    Thursday, August 15th, 2013

    And the violence continues apace in Egypt. Egypt’s government cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood, the brotherhood looting government buildings and attacking the Christian Coptic minority. And assaulting the occasional journalist taking their picture.

    Looking for insight as to what Obama should do? Sorry, all out of insight today. The best thing to do is stay the hell out of the way, make the usual meaningless appeals for calm as a sop to the “international community,” and let things run their course. Which seems to be pretty much what Obama is doing, either through calculation, incompetence, or indifference.

    This, in fact, is the way politics is conducted in the Middle East: Two factions kill each other until one is weakened enough to stop fighting. It’s in our interest to see as many of the Bad Guys (Muslim Brotherhood) killed by the Not Nearly As Bad Guys (Egyptian military) as possible.

    Sorry I couldn’t be more cheerful. Here’s a cute dog video compilation to make up for it.

    Egypt Update for July 1, 2013

    Monday, July 1st, 2013

    The big Egypt news today, just in case you hadn’t seen it:

  • Widespread protests estimated at 17 million people have called for the ouster of Mohammed Morsi and his violent, corrupt, incompetent Muslim Brotherhood from power.
  • The Egyptian Military has given Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood 48 hours to meet people’s demands or Eddie Murphy goes back to prison the military will step in and impose their own solution.
  • There have been scattered reporters that some police have gone over to the protesters’ side.
  • Protesters have burned and ransacked Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo.
  • The MSM seemed to largely ignore the story over the weekend and is now playing catchup.
  • Some links:

  • This point by point breakdown of the last three years isn’t awful.
  • Thanks to Obama’s bungling middle east policy, protesters now hate the U.S. more than ever. “We are very critical of the Obama administration because they have been supporting the Brotherhood like no one has ever supported them.”
  • When I read these sorts of Egypt is finally ready for Democracy pieces, I want to believe them, but I just don’t. I do believe the Egyptian people are ready to kick the Muslim Brotherhood to the curb, but I’m not yet convinced a majority there (or in any Arab nation) want a constitutional democracy and the rule of law.
  • Walter Russell Mead thinks that Egypt is just coming apart.
  • He, in turn, links to this New Yorker piece.

    In conversations with opposition politicians over the past six months, I have been struck by two things: their vehement hatred of the Brotherhood, and their inability to articulate solutions to the country’s problems. People speak in vague terms about social justice and democratic values. I have yet to meet a politician with a substantive plan to overhaul a system of food and fuel subsidies that eats up almost one third of the budget, or to reform the education sector, or to stimulate foreign investment….

    After two years of watching politicians on both sides of the fence squabble and prevaricate and fail to improve their lives, Egyptians appear to be rejecting representative democracy, without having had much of a chance to participate in it. In a country with an increasingly repressive regime and no democratic culture to draw on, protest has become an end in itself—more satisfying than the hard work of governance, organizing, and negotiation. This is politics as emotional catharsis, a way to register rage and frustration without getting involved in the system.

  • Map of Muslim Riots Across the Globe

    Friday, September 14th, 2012

    Map of Muslim unrest using Google maps. I think this is updated in real time but I’m not 100% sure.

    Update: now embedded:


    View Muslim Protests in a larger map

    Egypt’s High Court Declares Parliment Invalid

    Thursday, June 14th, 2012

    “Egypt’s highest court declared the parliament invalid Thursday, and the country’s interim military rulers promptly declared full legislative authority.”

    Well, things are about to get very interesting indeed. Does the Muslim Brotherhood think it can take on the army in a full-blown civil war? I tend to doubt it, if only because potential sources of money and arms outside the country are somewhat preoccupied with the Syrian civil war right now (on both sides). On the other hand, this is as close to real power as the Muslim brotherhood has ever tasted; they may not want to give up without a fight.

    The Guardian is providing live updates.