Category Archives: Culture
That 70s Show
The going got weird on Friday. 70s icons, musician James Taylor and ‘Nam vet John Kerry, teamed up to soothe hurt feelings in Paris. The hurt feelings stemmed from the Obama administration’s failure to show up for a march in solidarity with those murdered by Islamist thugs at a Charlie Hebdo meeting and at a Kosher food store. Or “parade” as Valerie Jarrett called it.
70s Show
Taking the “better late than never” approach Secretary of State Kerry showed up in Paris 5 days late with Taylor in tow. He actually said he wanted to “share a hug with all of Paris”. Then Taylor serenaded the trapped Parisians with You Got a Friend.
It’s bad enough that jihadis are killing cartoonists. Now the liberal elites are stealing all the jokes. You really can’t make this stuff up. Oxford University Press has ordered its authors not to mention pigs, pork, or bacon so as not to offend Muslims or Jews. Really.
The best I could add to the farce was an imaginary Governor Chris Christie offering to hug France.
Offending Islam
The New York Times and some others are worried that the murder of cartoonists by radical Islamists will cause offense – to Islamists.
Brendan O’Neill in National Review calls fear of an Islamophobic backlash “a myth”.
Liberals’ instant, almost Pavlovian response to Islamist terror attacks in the West is to worry about a violent uprising of the ill-educated against Muslims.
Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence.
Muslims against radical Islam
Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today says, “the most significant criticism of Islam in past weeks came not from traditional critics in Europe, but from inside the Islamic world itself, in the form of a speech, little-reported in the West, by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Muslim clerics in Egypt.
Al-Sisi commented:
“I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing — and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
“That thinking — I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!
“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people (Muslims) should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands.”
The Muslim mayor of Rotterdam seems to be on board with al-Sisi.
And if you do not like it here because humorists you do not like make a newspaper, may I then say you can f*** off.
“This is stupid, this so incomprehensible. Vanish from the Netherlands if you cannot find your place here. All those well-meaning Muslims here will now be stared at”.
Victor Davis Hanson says the obsessive fear of offending other cultures a form of appeasement that leads to cultural suicide.
Charlie Hebdo
The cartoon on the drawing board is the same one that appeared on the cover of an issue of the French satire mag Charlie Hebdo. Twelve people including cartoonists and editors were murdered by Allahu Akbar screaming barbarians at a Charlie Hebdo editorial meeting. No one was water boarded.
As with the Danish Cartoon Crisis, Few media outlets have published the offending cartoons. Score another one for the terrorists. The Israeli paper Haaretz and Drudge Report are exceptions.
After French president Hollande called the murders an act of terrorism President Obama agreed. There was no mention of Islamic terrorism.
The Vatican called it a double attack on people and a free press.
In a New Year’s day speech the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, actually criticized the Muslim world for condoning terrorism.
It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.
Eric Holder says we’re a nation of cowards. And so we are.
But not for the reasons he thinks. It’s not because we won’t stand up for the liberty of the minority. We won’t even stand up for our own liberty of the majority.
Here in the politically correct West we are free to mock Jesus and Jews but not The Prophet of Islam.
In 2012 President Barack Hussein Obama told the UN, ” the future must not belong to those who slander The Prophet”.
Want to throw shit on the Virgin Mary? Knock yourself out.
Well, some cartoonists in Paris gave it a go anyway. They had the balls to slander the Prophet. The future does not belong to them. They are dead.
They should have dumped dung on Mary.
Today, as after the Danish Cartoon Crisis, mainstream media outlets are not publishing the cartoons. We have found the cowards. They are us.
Sharpton In Hagel Out
Just another day at the White House. Al Sharpton – in, Chuck Hagel – out.
Hagel was hired as Secretary of Defense because he’s a Republican who shared Obama’s views on ending war. Things went south for Hagel when he proved unable to end war and begin war with ISIS at the same time.
Tax deadbeat Reverend Al Sharpton was invited to the White House to end racism…
Ebola Workers
President Obama was all kisses and hugs for civilian Ebola workers returning from West Africa. As for the military he’s all 21-day quarantine.
The rest of us got the usual stern Professor Obama lecture about “The Science”, complete with docs in white coats as props. Obama says “The Science” tells us we don’t need to quarantine Ebola workers because they’re doing “God’s work”. And, like the mayor of Toledo drinking a glass of Lake Erie, he shook hands and hugged his doc props to prove his point.
So why are the apparently Godless troops he sent into Ebola harms way going to be quarantined? Joe Scarborough calls this “Obama’s Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker moment”:
…for the president on the Ebola front. I know there are people that like to feel superior to others and say the American people are just hucksters or idiots.
James Taranto in the WSJ (Doctors Without Scrupples) notes that 80% of respondents in a CBS poll want to quarantine everyone coming into America from Ebola Land. So why opposite policies for civilians and military?:
What is at issue, then, is the administration’s purely discretionary decisions to order quarantines for servicemen and lean on states not to order them for civilians—a contradiction with no obvious basis, and no basis the World’s Greatest Orator and his spokesman have managed to articulate, in philosophy, law or science.
Either servicemen are being subjected to burdens with no basis in “science or best practices,” or the administration is risking public health by prioritizing the personal comfort of civilian medical workers. Why in the world are they doing this?
Ebola Workers and God’s Work
Taranto answers his own question with two possibilities: 1.) He didn’t want to make a decision to overrule his Joint Chief of Staff. 2.) The Scarborough analysis – he’s a snob:
The second is snobbery. Recall that quote from Nurse Hickox’s lawyer: “She’s a very good person.” She and others like her, according to the president, are doing God’s work, and—in pointed if inaccurate contrast to military servicemen—are “experts.” The logic would go something like this: You can’t quarantine her. She’s one of us.
