Saturday, June 02, 2007

The Ugly Liberal Is Back

Post lifted from Stratasphere

Many are too young to remember the ugly liberals of the 60’s and 70’s who spit on soldiers and yelled ‘baby killer’. Some might remember the ugly liberal showing up again early in Bill Clinton’s first term when the spit on and heckled young boy scouts who were simply marching in the American flag to an Democrat event. Well, the ugly liberal is back it seems, and as ugly as ever:

Vandals burned dozens of small American flags that decorated veterans’ graves for Memorial Day and replaced many of them with hand-drawn swastikas, authorities said Monday.
Forty-six flag standards were found empty and another 33 flags were in charred tatters Sunday in the cemetery, authorities said. Swastikas drawn on paper appeared where 14 of the flags had been.

Members of the American Legion on this island off Washington’s northwest coast replaced the burned flags with new ones Sunday afternoon.

The vandals struck again on Memorial Day after a guard left at dawn, the San Juan County sheriff’s office said. This time, the vandals left 33 of the hand-drawn swastikas.

Liberalism has been so devoid of original thought for so long their only offering is immature hate. The thrill of being a juvenile deliquent seems to be the one last dumb trick some fo these jerks can muster. Slashing tires during elections, running out of state to avoid losing votes and defacing graves. The tell tale signs of small minds confused by reality.

I am not saying the sad sacks exist only on the left. No one can ignore the idiocy of the Phelps clan. But the Phelps represent one screwed up family, not a political movement.

Update: Sadly there is more vileness here:

As veterans and their families filtered in to a local American Legion on Memorial Day, they found a somber scene.

Swastikas were sprayed all over the Manoa American Legion building in Delaware County, prevalently displayed and polluting the patriotic look of the veterans' sanctuary.

“I was just shocked to think that someone would come to a place like this and desecrate it with a swastika," said Phil Miller of American Legion Manoa Post 667. "Especially on Memorial Day. It’s just horrible."

And here.

Standing ramrod straight in dress blues and crisp khakis, the seven color guard members lifted their rifles for one of the most solemn moments of any Memorial Day parade, the 21-gun salute. Hundreds who had gathered to witness the tribute watched in silence.

Just then, the eggs came flying. One glanced off a tree branch, and landed far away from the marchers in yesterday’s Memorial Day Parade in Rockland, said Ryan Durfee , a former Marine who was marching in the color guard. Another crashed 8 feet in front of the color guard.

And here:

Vandals used a large landscaping stone to shatter a monument to Korean War veterans in northeast Iowa, authorities said.

About $3,000 in damage was done to the monument’s limestone edging and a black marble panel, which is inscribed with the names of veterans who were killed in action, police said. The monument is in a small park on the north edge of downtown Oelwein.

And more here:

he American Flag waves in front of a statue honoring our nation’s veterans, but the now headless statue at Kiwanis Memorial Park in Richland has, to some, become a symbol of something else.

“It goes to show me that people today simply don’t understand what the cost of freedom is all about,” said Lt. Col. Craig Minnick. “If they did, they wouldn’t do anything like this.”

And here:

Just days after several American flags were stolen and burned in Natick, the community came together to show its resolve and patriotism on Memorial Day.

NewsCenter 5’s Shiba Russell reported that vandals who struck last Thursday, burning decorative American flags in town trash barrels around the town square, did not dampen the enthusiasm of residents who showed up for Memorial Day ceremony.

They raised the flag over the square to the strains of the American national anthem, and all the flags from war memorials that were burned were replaced.

It seems this is how the mature lefties react when they lose votes in Congress. Pathetic.



Obsessive censorship in Britain

Five months on from the airing of the British reality TV show, Celebrity Big Brother, there is still a great deal of handwringing and finger-pointing over the crass remarks made by reality TV has-been Jade Goody and other contestants to the Indian actress, Shilpa Shetty. Goody and two other celebs have been accused by some of bullying Shetty in a `racial manner'.

Last week, the British media regulator, Ofcom, rode into the CBB debacle on its high horse, dispensing censorious writs against Channel 4. Elsewhere, London's Metropolitan Police Force (Celebrity Division) announced that it is considering questioning CBB contestants again after `new evidence' regarding their behaviour emerged. Ironically, the individual at the centre of the storm - Shetty - has dismissed the catty behaviour of Goody, Jo O'Meara and Danielle Lloyd as ignorant but not racist, and hardly worth dwelling on. So why can't Ofcom, the police, Labour MPs and commentators leave this tired and over-egged `controversy' alone?

According to Ofcom's judgement on the affair, Channel 4 made `serious editorial misjudgements' in its handling of various incidents in the CBB house, such as by broadcasting Goody's reference to Shetty as `Shilpa Poppadom' (1). Ofcom complains that the CBB producers `failed to contextualise or justify the inclusion [of this comment]'. Perhaps Channel 4 should have aired a warning along the lines of: `This programme contains the opinions of foul-mouthed celebrity chavs which some viewers may find disturbing.'

But then, bizarrely, Channel 4 has also been criticised for covering up other `incidents of racism' in the CBB house. Thus, says Ofcom, the channel could be accused of `condoning the behaviour of some of the housemates because interventions were felt to be too late' (2). So Channel 4 is slammed both for failing to censor allegedly racist material and also for censoring allegedly racist material.

For many media pundits, this all proves that the executives at Channel 4 are not fit to run a public broadcasting channel (a cursory glance at Channel 4's dismal, prurient and mocking output would surely have confirmed that fact, without the benefit of an Ofcom report). Yet in their rush to cheer Ofcom for rapping Channel 4's knuckles, and for raising a question mark over garish reality TV programmes that give airtime to wannabes and airhead celebrities, commentators have failed to ask the most pressing question: what right do the unelected stuffed shirts at Ofcom have to decide what Channel 4 should or should not show the public?

Commentators and politicians have given their nodding approval to Ofcom's insidious brand of `liberal censorship'. Censure by Ofcom is justified on the grounds that it is protecting the viewing public (which includes children, don't forget!) from material that is `offensive', `inappropriate' and `unacceptable'. Why don't we be done with it and employ Ofcom representatives in actual TV studios and behind the cameras, so that they can make sure that everyone in TV-land behaves according to its strict guidelines? I loathe Big Brother and the public school nihilists who produce it as much as the next journalist. But having Ofcom dictate the terms of British broadcasting is a far worse prospect, and a disaster for TV on a par with bringing back soap-in-the-sun Eldorado.

Channel 4 has been ordered to broadcast a summary of Ofcom's findings ahead of three of its programmes: the first episode of the new Big Brother series, which starts on 30 May, as well as before the first re-versioned showing of BB the following morning and before the first eviction show. Even Dermot O'Leary's meejah-bloke prattle would sound positively enticing in comparison with a long boring mea culpa about where Channel 4 allegedly sinned against Ofcom's commandments. What next? Will Ofcom reprimand the producers of Big Brother for not apologising for Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade? Much has been made of the fact that, after a great deal of political and media campaigning by community groups and certain MPs, 45,000 people complained about the bullying incidents on CBB. What about the other five million or so people who watched the show and didn't complain? Do they not count? Behind the claims that Ofcom is providing a useful service to the public, in fact this is about an unelected minority dictating to the rest of us about what we can watch; Ofcom is Mary Whitehouse dressed in liberal attire.

As I have argued previously on spiked, the Goody/Shetty row, and the response to it, revealed much about the role that race and `anti-racism' play in British society today. At a time when the authorities find it increasingly difficult to forge any meaningful consensus on what British society is for, being against racism or `intolerant behaviour' has stepped in to fill the vacuum in moral values. The more atomised and fragmented individuals appear to be, and the more isolated established institutions feel from wider society, the more that `anti-racism' is rolled out in an attempt to create a new sense of Britishness and British values.

Goody's crass behaviour was described by everyone from Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality to the Sun as an `outrage', an embarrassment to the nation's moral standing - yet in truth, such outbursts are actually quite useful for the political and media elite in the sense that they can be used to reinforce the new moral framework. This is why institutions such as Ofcom, the Met and the political establishment can't let the CBB debacle go (even after its main `victim', Shetty, has got over it): they need such examples of intolerant behaviour in order to force everybody else into line.

The implication behind today's official `anti-racism' is that the mass of British people are only a cigarette paper away from starting pogroms against ethnic minorities. This is what Ofcom means when it refers to the `context' of Goody and Co's jibes against Shetty. It is implying that without `context' - that is, paternalistic guidance about acceptable language and behaviour, issued by bodies that know better than the rest of us - the masses will run around calling Indian people `poppadom', or worse. Although Ofcom is ostensibly slapping Channel 4's wrists, its actual intended target is CBB viewers, who apparently cannot be trusted to watch scenes of negative behaviour. To counter the alleged damage done to the public by these scenes, Ofcom now insists that Channel 4 apologises not just once, but three times, to make sure that we viewers get the `correct' message loud and clear.

Another message has been transmitted by the obsession with CBB: namely, that Indians living in Britain are victims, too. In recent years, we have been constantly told that Muslims and black youth face insurmountable obstacles in British society, and thus they need special treatment to help them to deal with their alienation. By contrast, first- and second-generation Indians have largely been left out of this victimising process (which is often a self-fulfilling one). That is one reason why Indian youth are far less preoccupied with ethnic identity than their Muslim or black peers - it is also why, crucially, they tend to do considerably better at school, too. Most Indians in Britain do not consider their ethnic background and skin colour as a barrier to advancement or, judging by some of my Indian students' chatter about gigs and clubs in Camden, as a block against taking part in mainstream British society.

Thus, many British Indians wrote off the CBB debacle. They seemed to view it as a hugely overblown controversy, and one which was massively unrepresentative of their own experience of living in twenty-first-century Britain, and especially London. Could the continual parading of Shetty over the past five months, and her alleged victimisation at the hands of three representatives of what one journalist called `thick white Britain', be part of an attempt to encourage young Indians to see themselves also as a `race apart', as a victim class? Certainly, Labour MP Keith Vaz, who has stepped in to the debate to demand an apology from Channel 4, seems keen to promote the idea that Indians are the latest victims of modern Britain, rather than one of its hidden success stories. After all, the way to win public recognition these days is by playing the victim card rather than the success card.

Five months on from the CBB debacle, we don't need any more on-air apologies or handwringing. Rather, we could do with saying `F off' to Ofcom and all the other peddlers of today's censorious and divisive PC outlook.

Source



The morally blind "Amnesty" organization

They think in terms of race rather than in terms of harm done to people. So who are the racists? Article below by Australian columnist Andrew Bolt

AMNESTY International has a lethal dose of our new intellectual disease - the racism of the anti-racists. It's got it so bad that what was once the world's most admired human-rights group can no longer tell the moral difference between a democrat and a dictator. At least, not when the democrat is as white as - yes! - John Howard, and the genocidal despot is not.

Amnesty's secretary-general, Irene Khan, last week released its 2007 report, and in its foreword listed what to her were the greatest threats to human rights. "Today far too many leaders are trampling and trumpeting an ever-widening range of fears," trumpeted Khan, a Bangladeshi Muslim whose own country, by the way, is under military rule. And she named four leaders - no one else - who demonstrated to her this kind of "myopic and cowardly leadership".



The Muslim and morally blind Ms Khan above. Not an unusual combination of attributes. Muslim respect for human life and their love of Western civilization is well-known

First, was our own Prime Minister Howard - prime evil for stopping boats of illegal immigrants. Second, was US President George Bush, for invoking "the fear of terrorism" just "to enhance his executive power". (I know, that fear was invoked not by Bush, but by terrorists on September 11, 2001, and ... but we're interrupting Khan's lecture.) Trailing in third place, in Khan's pantheon of evil, was Sudan's Islamist President, Omar al-Bashir, behind a genocide in Darfur that's killed some 200,000 people. Last was Robert Mugabe, who has turned Zimbabwe into a cemetery for the starving, although Khan merely accuses him of grabbing land for his supporters.

This grouping of two leaders of free democracies with two genocidal thugs is bizarre, but does have supreme virtue for the modern anti-racist racist. See? Two whites were "balanced" by two dark-skins. Two Westerners by two Third-Worlders. Two Christians by a Muslim and an old Communist. What could be fairer? And that fake balance - so kind to the cruel - ran right through Khan's essay. A typical line: "The politics of fear has been made more complex by the emergence of armed groups and big business that commit or condone human rights abuses." How about that? Al-Qaeda (which Khan never mentions by name) is no more deadly than a big business like Nike.

Here's another: "If unregulated migration is the fear of the rich, then unbridled capitalism, driven by globalisation, is the fear of the poor." Perfectly balanced. The capitalism that actually makes poor people richer, is thought by Khan to be as scary as the race riots and no-entry immigrant enclaves of France, or the bomb plots of jihad-minded sons of immigrants in Britain.

Nowhere does she note that the West is swamped by migrants from the East precisely because the East has too little capitalism. And, of course, too many dictators. Nor does Khan acknowledge that the fears expressed by her hated Western politicians have very real causes, often originating in lands ruled by Muslim theocracies and autocrats.

You might think I've read too much into one article, but Khan has form in likening the worst to the West, and seeing an equivalence between those defending the West and those trying to destroy it. Three years ago, for instance, she said that of all the horrors of the world, the US-led "war on terror" (her scare quotes) was "the biggest attack on human rights, principles and values". Honest. To Khan, defending ourselves against Islamist terrorists is deadlier to human rights than, say, the brutalising of Zimbabwe, the mass murder in Darfur, the state oppression in China, the civil wars in Algeria and Sudan, the withering of democracy in Russia, the Islamist fascism of Iran, and the open jail of North Korea.

The following year, Khan even called Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our time" - this time making a prison for 400 suspected terrorists seem as terrible as the vast Soviet network of forced labor camps in which millions of innocent civilians were jailed in conditions so brutal that countless of them died. This outraged Pavel Litvinov, a former Soviet "prisoner of conscience" adopted by Amnesty, who warned: "By using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty's spokesman put its authority at risk."

I wish. In fact, Khan's anti-racist racism and consequent likening of white democrats to black totalitarians has made her a hero. In 2004, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize and invited to give the University of South Australia's annual Hawke Lecture, broadcast across the land by the ABC. How the audience at that lecture cheered Khan as she cried there was a "feeling in many parts of the world that the West has lost its moral high ground to advocate human rights" - an irrational feeling she has tried harder than most to whip up. Those cheers confirmed that Khan simply reflected a suicidal tendency among the West's intelligentsia to see the worst in the West and the best in the totalitarians pledged to destroy it.

Want recent examples? There are our prominent Leftists - ABC host Phillip Adams, propagandist John Pilger, columnist Jill Singer, Islamist Keysar Trad - who've invited Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to visit and "inspire" us. That is, when he's not too busy closing down TV stations that criticise him, rigging laws to stay in power and calling George Bush a "devil".

There's Age cartoonist and National Living Treasure Michael Leunig, who similarly draws Bush as a devil, Howard as a murderer and Israel as Auschwitz, but demands we treat terrorist chief Osama bin Laden as our "relative" and "consider (his) suffering". There's the Melbourne University Press boss, Louise Adler, who two weeks ago likened al-Qaeda recruit David Hicks to Nelson Mandela.

There's University of Technology Sydney's Islamic law lecturer, Jamila Hussain, who this week called visiting author Ayaan Hirsi Ali an "extremist" who should stay "where she came from" when real extremists - Muslim ones - have forced this liberal Sudanese-born feminist and critic of misogynist Islam to bring her bodyguard to ensure she doesn't suffer the fate of her former colleague, director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004.

Or take the Global Peace Index released this week by The Charitable Foundation of local IT millionaire and philanthropist Steve Killelea. It rated Australia at 25 in its ranking of countries most at peace - and the US at just 96, below even Syria, China, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia and Libya. Democratic Israel was rated the least peaceful of all, apart from Sudan and Iraq. Not one report I saw of that survey drew the obvious conclusion: that this was madness. That this was a manifestation of a moral blindness among our elites.

And now Amnesty International is as blind as the rest, flailing at the very societies that most protect the freedoms it claims to defend. How defenceless we are, when even this once-great defender of human rights now treats us as one of the deadliest enemies of all.

Source

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

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


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

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