Monday, March 05, 2018


The Norwegian madness

Tuesday, February 20. It's our first time in Prague, and – except for a couple of visits to Berlin – K.'s first time on territory that was once part of the Warsaw Pact. Today, as we're wont to do on arrival in a new city, we passed on museums and other cultural attractions, preferring instead to walk and walk and walk – to get a sense of the place and the people and start finding our way around.

After several hours of wandering along the winding streets and across cobbled squares dominated by churches, we came back to our hotel and had a drink at the bar. After two gin and tonics, I saw that K. had tears in his eyes. I looked at him quizzically. He could hardly get the words out.

“I'm so angry at my country's government!” he finally exploded.

The country in question being Norway.

K. explained. We had just seen a good deal of Prague, and had passed heaven knows how many thousands of people. Not once had we seen a hijab. Let alone a niqab or burka.

“In this whole big city, not one!” he cried. “And yet in that little town where we live – in the middle of nowhere! – you can't look out of the window for a minute without seeing one.”

For us, the Islamization of Western Europe had been a constant topic of conversation for almost twenty years. We'd voiced anger, frustration, despondency, cynicism. But I'd never seen him get teary-eyed about it.

We lived in Oslo for twelve years. During that time, its Muslim population grew steadily. And so did the percentage of Muslim women in head coverings. During our first years in Oslo, we never saw a niqab, which covers everything but the eyes, or a burka, which covers even the eyes. Gradually, however, both became familiar sights.

Seven years ago we moved to the small town where we now live. It, too, has become supersaturated with hijab – and the occasional niqab.

In 2002, I was called an alarmist. Yet if you'd asked me back then whether, sixteen years later, it would be impossible to walk a few blocks down the main street of a remote Norwegian burg like ours without seeing a hijab, I would've said no: the transformation won't happen that fast.

How wrong I was!

Over the years, we've traveled extensively in Western Europe, to other places where the same process of Islamization is underway. After a while it all seems almost natural – the bearded men in djellaba, the women in hijab, the ubiquitous strollers and baby carriages and armies of children, some of the tiny girls also wearing hijab.

But now here we are in Prague, and for K. the utter lack of any Islamic presence here is little short a revelation. He's been intensely aware all along of what's happening to his country, but now, in Prague, the horror of it has hit him like a punch to the gut.

In the morning, I take yet another long walk, and pass families who I realize are heading home from shul. There are several synagogues in the neighborhood. One Jewish toddler runs gleefully down the sidewalk, and his father chases him and sweeps him up in his arms. He catches me smiling and smiles back. There is no sign of the fear that increasingly causes Jews in Western European cities to keep a low profile, to forego their yarmulkes, to move to the U.S. or Israel. Jews are safe here.

Sitting here in our hotel room, I check some Norwegian news sites on my laptop. At document.no, I read that Oslo's police chief, Janne Stømner, denies any link between the skyrocketing crime rate in east Oslo and the rise in the immigrant population. (I examined this crisis recently in City Journal.) The perpetrators of crime, she insists, are “our own teenagers.”

At resett.no, there's an item about the prize for the year's most important social commentator. The winner: 20-year-old Sumaya Jirde Ali, a hijab-wearing Somali immigrant. It's her second major accolade this year. (Last month she won an award for “civic courage.”) Accepting her prize, Ali mentioned Sylvi Listhaug, the Norwegian Parliament's sole voice of reason on immigration. Here's what Ali said: “F**k Sylvi Listhaug.”

According to Resett, the audience of Oslo cultural-elite types cheered lustily.

(This statement wasn't out of character for Ali. Recently, she tweeted: “F**k diplomatic debate. F**k the police.”)

Finally, rights.no featured an article by Hege Storhaug about Somalis who've been allowed to settle in Norway on the pretext that they come from a failed state – but who send their kids to schools in that “failed state” to shield them from Western values. This widespread phenomenon was discussed on TV the other day by, among others, Progress Party politician Jon Helgheim, who, Storhaug noted, had nothing critical to say about it.

“We were told that if we voted for FrP,” K. said earlier at the hotel bar, using the Norwegian acronym for the Progress Party, “that things would change. But nothing has changed!” He's right. For years, the Progress Party promised, if voted into power, to rescue Norway from insane immigration policies. Well, they're now part of the government. FrP leader Siv Jensen is Minister of Finance. Listhaug is an FrP member, and she talks tough. But what substantial steps has her party taken to reverse Norway's race toward doom? None.

Norway has leverage in the EU. It pours billions into that rathole. But the Czech Republic is a net beneficiary of EU largesse. Nonetheless, along with Hungary and Poland, it's bravely standing up to EU pressure to join in Western Europe's self-destruction. In this country of 10.5 million people, only 3500 are Muslims. In Prague, therefore, K. and I are able to experience a poignant reminder of what cities like Oslo were, not all that long ago – and what they could still be now, if not for the feckless fools who rule them.

SOURCE






Charlottesville judge orders tarps off Confederate statues

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — A judge in Virginia has ordered the city of Charlottesville to remove the black shrouds that were installed over two Confederate monuments after a white nationalist rally last summer.

Local news outlets report Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore gave the city 15 days from the time an official order is signed to remove the tarps.

They currently cover statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas ‘‘Stonewall’’ Jackson. The tarps have been removed several times since being put up in August as a sign of the city’s mourning of the deadly violence at the August rally.

Moore’s decision came during a hearing in a lawsuit against the city, which is seeking to remove the monuments.

The city said in a statement that it is disappointed by the ruling but will respect the court’s decision.

SOURCE






How “Identity Politics” Is Designed To Destroy Us

The Left’s resurrection of the totalitarian faith.

In January 2018 when negotiations over the fate of 800,000 “DACA” recipients broke down, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi blamed the impasse on the alleged racism of President Trump and his senior advisers. “Last night the president put forth a plan,” Pelosi told the US Conference of Mayors; “let me just say what I said last night, that plan is a campaign to make America white again.”[1] This was not only an obvious lie, but a spectacularly brazen one, since Trump’s announced plan would provide a path to citizenship not only for the DACA illegals, who are non-white, but for a million additional illegals, mainly from Latin America, who are also mainly non-white.....

The attacks by Democrats and leftists on federal law, on national borders, and on the idea of assimilation into an American culture can only be understood as attacks on the nation itself. Members of the Democrats’ “resistance” employ loaded phrases like “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” in referring to the White House and the supporters of secure borders and a rational immigration policy. The clear meaning of this abuse of language is that, in the eyes of the left, an American patriotism is illegitimate; American patriotism is equivalent to “white nationalism” and is racist.

The racial politics of the left is part of a larger spectrum of “identity politics,” which has been embraced by the Democratic Party and is better understood as cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxists divide the population into racial, ethnic and gender groups and arrange them in a hierarchy of alleged oppression. This perverse and divisive view of American society was in fact the organizing principle of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, which justified her candidacy as ending the alleged inequality of women and the mythical wage-gender pay gap. Her opponents, she said, belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” which she identified as “racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, xenophobes – you name it." Following her defeat, her Democratic supporters formed a “Resistance” to the incoming president whom they denounced as a white nationalist, sexist, anti-Muslim racist. A “resistance” is hardly an appropriate posture for an opposition party in a democracy, where compromise and tolerance are foundational values. This war declared on the Trump presidency was launched with a Women’s March, billed as the largest protest ever, which presented itself as a movement to defend “oppressed” groups against the incoming “white supremacist” administration that Americans had just elected.

The Women’s March was headed by Linda Sarsour, an advocate of Islam’s misogynistic Sharia law and a vocal supporter of Islamist holy war – especially against the Jews of Israel. Sarsour told the assembled marchers, “I also remember that I live in a country that was founded on the extermination of indigenous people.” This was a declaration of hate for America, approved by the protesters and typical of their speakers. It was also a libel - the perfect expression of the left’s oppressive chain of being, in which whites, males, heterosexuals and patriotic Americans are framed as genocidal enemies of “social justice” and human progress. It was also a lie equal in brazenness to Pelosi’s claim that Trump’s agenda was to make America white again. There are, in fact, more “native Americans” alive today than there were when the first European settlers arrived. It never was, nor has been, the policy of the United States to exterminate indigenous people or any racial or ethnic group.

The ideological miasma that has overcome the Democratic Party and the political left, was crystallized in Hillary’s claim that “sexism” rather than her own incompetence, corrupt history and poorly designed election campaign was responsible for her defeat. “Sexism” is a bastardized term that was coined by Sixties radicals in a calculated attempt to appropriate the moral authority of the civil rights movement through a false association with “racism." Only a perverse reading of history and the social relations between the sexes, could lead to this absurd attempt to link the treatment of African Americans and women. But for radicals the conflation of the two is essential to their Marxist view of the world as a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed, of America as the great Satan on the hierarchy’s crest.

The sinister implications of this terminology are apparent on a parsing of the coinage itself. Before there was “sexism,” there were adjectives to describe specific and concrete behaviors affecting the relations between men and women: “inappropriate,” “rude,” “boorish,” “prejudiced,” “offensive,” “molesting,” and criminal, as in “rape” - to name several. These adjectives compose a spectrum of behaviors with gradations from what is merely annoying to what is prosecutable. Differentiating between offensive behaviors makes it possible to judge individual actions and motives, and arrive at a morally just attitude towards them, along with possible remedies. But once these behaviors are subsumed under the general rubric sexism all such distinctions vanish. The focus is no longer on individual behaviors – which can involve both parties - but on an alleged generalized “oppression” of women by men.

This ideological framework – abstract and collectivist - eliminates individual nuance and distinction. In the right political context, it can criminalize merely boorish and inappropriate behaviors and invoke punishments that can be quite severe. In the hysterical atmosphere created by the “MeToo” movement – a by-product of the Women’s March and the “movement” that produced it, mere accusations become tantamount to guilt with chilling results, and ominous implications for a country built on “due process,” and the defense of individual rights.

In the atmosphere fostered by oppression politics, a United States Senator and former comedian, a lifelong leftist and champion of “women’s causes,” has been forced to resign his Senate seat because of on camera pranks – which were obviously pranks – performed during his stage career. A pioneer public radio host of 40 years – another leftist and Hillary Clinton supporter - has been deprived of his program, banished from his station, and erased from its radio history because of an accusation – and only an accusation – of inappropriately touching a female colleague’s back. What is important is no longer the particulars of these cases, or the character of the individuals involved, but their collective identity as – white oppressor males – and the collective identity of their alleged victims, oppressed women.  

The totalitarian implications of this increasingly powerful ideological trend in the national culture have become pronounced enough to have alarmed some liberals, most notably the writer Andrew Sullivan. Observing that cultural Marxism is now the required creed of America’s liberal arts colleges, Sullivan warns, “When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.”[3]

In America’s universities, which are the training grounds for America’s future leaders, the victory of the cultural Marxists is already complete. In Andrew Sullivan’s words, “The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.”

There are three pillars of the totalitarian outlook. The first is its totalist agenda -  the elimination of private space and the abandonment of the liberal idea that there should be limits to government authority. In its place, totalitarians insist that “the personal is political.” Since the hierarchy of oppression that inspires social justice warriors encompasses all social relationships between races and ethnicities, between men, women, and multiple politically correct genders, there is no area of social life that escapes political judgment and is protected from government intrusion.[4] Already, in New York City – to take one municipality controlled by the political left - there are 31 government designated genders, and fines for failing to recognize them.[5]

The second totalitarian pillar is the idea of the social construction of race, class, and gender. This anti-scientific idea that races and genders are socially created rather than biologically determined is already the unchallenged premise of virtually all academic courses relating to gender and race, and informs many of the planks of the official platform of the Democratic Party. Recognizing the role of biological factors in determining gender and race would require an adjustment to reality, whereas the goal of identity politics is revolutionary and “transformative.” Removing and/or suppressing the alleged creators of genders and races will make possible the social transformation whose goal is “social justice.” The alleged creators of genders and races are the designated villains of identity politics: patriarchal and racial oppressors (white supremacists) who employ these categories to marginalize, dehumanize and dominate vulnerable alleged victim groups.

The centrality of these victim groups is encapsulated in totalitarianism’s third pillar: objectification - the elimination of individual agency and accountability in favor of group identities and oppression status. This of course is the inevitable consequence of collectivist ideologies which make groups primary and remove from individuals their agencies as subjects. If there is inequality its source is an invisible hierarchy of oppression, never the inequalities and failures of individuals themselves. If homicide is the number one killer of young black males, whites must be responsible because whites allegedly control all the institutions and social structures that determine black outcomes – notwithstanding the fact that the same crime statistics plague municipalities run by blacks as those run by whites. What may go on in black communities to account for these and other appalling statistics – out of wedlock births, physical abuse by parents, drug trafficking, lax law enforcement policies instituted by liberal authorities – is rendered invisible by an ideology which regards race as the determining factor regardless of individual behaviors and failings. If women are “under-represented” in engineering positions at Google, this cannot be because of individual choices made by women – to think so is prima facie sexism – but must be the work of a patriarchal conspiracy, however invisible.

While democracy and individual freedoms still prevail in America, the injustices perpetrated by these totalitarian ideas, which have caused so much misery in modern times, will be limited. But the totalitarian march has already resulted in a kind of civil war in our political life, although such violence as exists has been  mainly verbal. But consider what happened when there were no democratic restraints and these ideas became the reigning ideology of a Marxist state in 1917: “We are not carrying out war against individuals,” explained a member of Lenin’s secret police about his government’s campaign against the kulaks, or land owning peasants. “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is – to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.”

Similar questions have already defined the fate of the accused in our country, and the frequency of such incidences should be a warning. Thankfully, despite the disturbing influence of identity politics in our schools, in the Democratic Party, and among growing number of political actors, we are still far away from a Red Terror. But as Ronald Reagan famously warned,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

The erosion of individual freedom and individual rights, and of the idea of individual agency and accountability, is well advanced. The policies of the Democratic Party on immigration, race, women and a host of critical issues are now shaped by a collectivist, identity politics mentality. We cannot be certain where this will lead, and we should be alarmed that it has gotten so far.

SOURCE






Huck strikes back

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee continues to fight back after mounting pressure this week prompted him to resign from an honorary position on the board of the Country Music Association Foundation.

As Fox News reported, he announced his decision to step down on Thursday, just one day after announcing his seat on the charitable board associated with country music events such as the CMA Awards and CMA Festival.

In his resignation, the two-time Republican presidential candidate cast his critics as intolerant of his conservative social views.

He continued his criticism of the perceived leftist influence on the modern country music industry in a tweet early Saturday morning.



The political cartoon illustrated the point he attempted to make in his lengthy resignation letter, reprinted in its entirety by The Tennessean.

Huckabee’s announcement came on the heels of harsh criticism from some in the industry, including prominent talent manager Jason Owen.

He said appointing the socially conservative politician and part-time musician to the board was “a detrimentally poor choice by CMA and its leaders,” which he further described as “grossly offensive.”

In Huckabee’s resignation letter, he cited “the unnecessary distraction and deterrent to the core mission of the Foundation” as the impetus behind his abrupt departure.

The letter went on to provide an opportunity for him to defend himself directly.

“Since I will not be able to continue in what I had hoped to be useful service in this endeavor, I wanted to at least put some things on the record,” he wrote. “I have no expectation that it will change the irrational vitriol directed toward you or me for my religious or political views that necessitated my abrupt departure, but I want you to know what you would never know by reading intolerant and vicious statements on the internet about who I am or what led me to want to be a part of your efforts to empower kids with the gift of music. So please bear with me.”

After recounting the impact music played in his formative years and his work while governor in improving the state’s educational system, he said the backlash leading to his resignation was focused solely on his personal beliefs.

“If the industry doesn’t want people of faith or who hold conservative and traditional political views to buy tickets and music, they should be forthcoming and say it,” he wrote. “Surely neither the artists or the business people of the industry want that.”

He described a time in which the arts stood alone as “the one place America could set aside political, geographical, racial, and economic barriers and come together,” predicting that if that realm of our culture “becomes part of the polarization,” it could signal the end of our civilization.

Denouncing the assertions of those who say he is intolerant, Huckabee described what he would like to see become of the culturally influential industry.

“I hope that the music and entertainment industry will become more tolerant and inclusive and recognize that a true love for kids having access to the arts is more important than a dislike for someone or a group of people because of who they are or what they believe,” he wrote.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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