Mark Hyman knows what needs to be done with regard to airline security, abolish the contemptible and offensive TSA and abandon political correctness, start following Israel’s example and profile.
It is long past time to disband the TSA. Replace it with an effective, free market system that actually works.
Critics of the TSA’s naked body scanners and intrusive pat-downs (including its genital probing) miss the biggest problem with this agency. It is the TSA’s premise that the 89-year old great-grandmother in a walker, the soccer team comprised of 11-year old girls, the two-year old toddler on the family vacation, the airline crewmember and the soldier traveling home from Iraq pose the same potential threat to airline safety as the Middle Eastern man traveling alone, without luggage, on a one-way First Class ticket that was purchased with cash. The TSA is fueled by political correctness run amuck. Its sole accomplishments to date have been establishing a sizable airport presence and humiliating passengers.
For a number of years following 9/11 I regularly flew between Baltimore and Atlanta. I was saddened at the all-too-frequent sight of a soldier dressed in his camouflage uniform on the way to or from his two-week R&R with boots off and the contents of his backpack strewn across the floor as a TSA agent nosed through the belongings to see what potential threat faced other air travelers.
No one has been spared the unwarranted indignities and gross violations of privacy perpetrated by the TSA.
In 2002, then-75 year old Congressman John Dingell (D-MI) was forced to strip down to his underwear because his artificial hip set-off alarms on the magnetometer. The issue is not that Dingell should undergo the same invasive inspections as everyone else. Instead, it is that the 99% of American airline passengers who do not raise meaningful red flags should not be subjected to such invasive inspections. (As an aside, I happen to believe members of Congress pose a greater threat to the American way of life when they are voting than when flying.)
Then-U.S. Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) was asked to produce a picture I.D. at the Washington National Airport security screening area before a 2002 trip. Reagan National is the airport used by nearly every member of Congress when flying. Burns showed the TSA screener his U.S. Senate identification. The official refused to accept the government-issued I.D. but allowed Burns to proceed to his flight when he produced his Sam’s Club shopping card as proof of identification.
Retired Brigadier General and former South Dakota Governor Joe Foss nearly lost his Medal of Honor when TSA officials threatened to confiscate it from him during a 2002 screening of his carry-on belongings. Believing the medal could be used as a weapon, the TSA screeners fortunately relented when the 86-year old showed them a photograph of President Franklin Roosevelt presenting the medal to him for his WWII heroics.
In 2003, a U.S. Army medic who was wounded in Afghanistan when he was shot in the jaw was grossly mishandled at San Francisco International Airport. His jaw wired shut, the soldier was given a small pair of wire clippers to use in the event he became air sick in order to keep from choking on his vomit. TSA officials confiscated his wire clippers and he was forced to fly from San Francisco to Texas even though flight attendants informed him there was nothing on board the aircraft to open his jaw in an emergency.
In 2004, a chartered airline flight rotating an Army unit back to the U.S. from an Afghanistan deployment was stranded on the tarmac at San Francisco airport for hours during a layover. The troops were not permitted to deplane to purchase food and drink nor to use the bathroom. TSA officials ruled the soldiers posed a threat to airport security because the unit’s weapons were stored in the cargo hold of the aircraft.
This quarantine of troops returning from combat is not isolated. A planeload of servicemen were detained at nearby Oakland airport on their last layover while en route Hawaii in 2007 after departing Kuwait a day earlier. In spite of having all baggage x-rayed and hand-searched before boarding their aircraft in southwest Asia, the troops were ordered by TSA to deplane near an outdoor baggage handling area if they wanted to stretch their legs. TSA prohibited them from entering the terminal as they posed a threat to airport safety. Troops returning from Vietnam may have been spat upon but at least they were permitted to visit the snack bar and men’s room.
Last year a retired assistant police chief who observed she had been chosen for additional screening with uncanny regularity during her frequent travels asked a TSA screener why it appeared so many women had been selected for secondary screening on that particular day. The answer, said the screener, was that cross-gender pat-downs were not permitted and on that TSA shift there was a shortage of male screeners so women were singled-out for further scrutiny.
One commercial airline pilot confided his frustration at continually being subjected to x-ray screenings and pat-downs. He told me that in the first 1500 feet of elevation after take-off and the last 1500 feet before touch-down that no other crewmember in the cockpit could prevent him from using the jetliner as the ultimate weapon if he wanted to fly the aircraft into the ground. “I’m in complete control and no one can stop me.”
Another commercial pilot who is a licensed Federal Flight Deck Officer and is permitted to carry a sidearm onboard his aircraft reports that half of the time after checking in with the TSA he is whisked through security. The rest of the time he is instructed to place his weapon in his carry-on bag and run it through the x-ray machine to determine if he possesses any objects that might pose a threat in flight. It is as if the script writers on Saturday Night Live are making up the rules.
It is not as if the TSA is a highly professional workforce merely following asinine rules. In 2003, TSA baggage screeners at La Guardia airport were given the answers in advance of their certification exam to ensure an appropriate number of screeners were cleared to work. ...
Congressman John Mica (R-FL) reported that under the watchful eye of the TSA, at least 17 known terrorists evaded screeners and traveled on 23 occasions from eight U.S. airports utilizing SPOT methodologies. Among these was the failed Times Square bomber who was apprehended just prior to boarding his flight to Dubai. Meanwhile, TSA screeners continue to poke, grope and fondle longtime airline crewmembers who are merely trying to do their job.
Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that “at least 23” TSA workers have been fired since 2007 for stealing from passengers. There are numerous reports of TSA workers having also been fired for drug use, perpetrating pranks on passengers and other misbehavior. From a numerical standpoint, more TSA employees than terrorists have been caught who pose a threat to Americans.
The rash of reports of TSA officials humiliating passengers and overstepping the bounds of common decency underscore the agency is indeed broken. One surmises it is only a matter of time before it is discovered that naked body scanner operators are swapping graphic images of runway models and other attractive people who are forced to enter the voyeurs’ playground. ...
Obviously U.S. airports require a competent security screening program. Two programs offer a model. Anyone who has crossed from Tijuana into California at the busiest border crossing in the world has witnessed U.S. border agents who observe, profile and question the public in order to narrow the field to those who legitimately require secondary inspection.
The same is true of the system at Tel Aviv Airport. Airline security officials in Israel are not required to be politically correct and give the third degree to a Danish school teacher on holiday for every Palestinian they further scrutinize. Israel’s El Al Airlines has had a rather impressive security record and it does not rely on humiliating elderly widows or terrorizing toddlers.
Charles Krauthammer celebrates the latest American folk hero, the 31-year-old programmer who sparked a nationwide revolt against against the Kafkaesque indignities visited upon ordinary travelers by the Transportation Safety Authority.
John Tyner, cleverly armed with an iPhone to give YouTube immortality to the encounter, took exception to the TSA guard about to give him the benefit of Homeland Security’s newest brainstorm – the upgraded, full-palm, up the groin, all-body pat-down. In a stroke, the young man ascended to myth, or at least the next edition of Bartlett’s, warning the agent not to “touch my junk.”
Not quite the 18th-century elegance of “Don’t Tread on Me,” but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm, it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch. ...
That riff is a crowd-pleaser because everyone knows that the entire apparatus of the security line is a national homage to political correctness. Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives – when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone.
The ultimate idiocy is the full-body screening of the pilot. The pilot doesn’t need a bomb or box cutter to bring down a plane. All he has to do is drive it into the water, like the EgyptAir pilot who crashed his plane off Nantucket while intoning “I rely on God,” killing all on board.
But we must not bring that up. We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.
The junk man’s revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy. Metal detector? Back-of-the-hand pat? Okay. We will swallow hard and pretend airline attackers are randomly distributed in the population.
But now you insist on a full-body scan, a fairly accurate representation of my naked image to be viewed by a total stranger? Or alternatively, the full-body pat-down, which, as the junk man correctly noted, would be sexual assault if performed by anyone else?
This time you have gone too far, Big Bro’. The sleeping giant awakes. Take my shoes, remove my belt, waste my time and try my patience. But don’t touch my junk.
The Daily Mail reports on an outrageous demonstration of Islamic insolence in London yesterday.
Islamic protesters sparked fury today after they burned a model of a poppy and deliberately broke the silence at Armistice Day commemorations in central London.
As millions of Britons fell silent to remember those who have died in war, members of a group called Muslims Against Crusades clashed with police during an ‘emergency demonstration’ in Kensington, west London.
As the clock struck 11am, the Islamic protesters burned a model of a poppy and chanted ‘British soldiers burn in hell’.
They held banners which read ‘Islam will dominate’ and ‘Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell’. ...
The protest, in Exhibition Road, near Hyde Park, involved about 50 people while about another 50 counter-demonstrators had to be kept apart from the group by a line of police.
Three men were arrested at the scene – two for public order offences and one for assaulting a police officer. ...
It is thought Muslims Against Crusades is a splinter group of Islam4UK, founded by Anjem Choudary.
Freedom of speech has never traditionally included the right of the foreign enemy to propagandize and insult a country’s war dead in its capital in time of war.
A responsible government would round up these demonstrators and deport them back to their native homelands. The privilege of residency ought to be considered to entail minimal obligations of loyalty and civility. There is an element of real insanity in the manner in which government officials transatlantically have become so hypnotized by extravagant and politically correct interpretations of liberal rights theory that even more basic moral obligations have become obscure to them.
Any government which asks its citizens to fight and die on its behalf has a primal obligation to uphold and vindicate the cause for which they fight and to honor their service and sacrifice.
How do Ivy League universities make sure that they are only admitting reliable conformist tools these days? By incorporating loyalty oaths to liberal group think and political correctness in the application process.
Glen Ricketts and Peter Wood describe the college applications diversity essay in the latest National Association of Scholars newsletter.
The CAO [Common Application Online] at Yale, for example, asks prospective students:
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
That’s virtually identical with what you can expect to find at dozens of other institutions, where “diversity” is cultivated with tedious uniformity.
Let’s weigh this question. The first sentence simply asserts that the “range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences” adds to the “educational mix.” Few people would doubt that, and the sentence is no doubt written to command bland assent. But if we force it to stand up for inspection, it displays a remarkable intellectual slovenliness. When we go to college, we do indeed benefit from encountering people with views and experiences other than our own. But that encounter depends on something else: a shared commitment to the broader purposes of education. The enlivening “mix” that Yale would like to foster requires students, at some level, to put aside differences at least long enough to consider one another’s views.
The “diversity” doctrine doesn’t necessarily prevent that deeper sharing from taking place, but it does cut against it and urges students instead to huddle inside their pre-chosen identities. The Yale CAO question is the first of a long series of subtle steps that teach students to lead with their particularities and to cultivate a kind of group vanity.
The second sentence in the assignment (“Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.”) is a masterpiece of question-begging. What of the student who has slowly and painfully worked his way out of psychological isolation or social alienation to achieve a sense of identification with the larger community? Such a person would seem to have no acceptable answer to the task of explaining “the importance of diversity” to his own life. Would the Yale admissions office look favorably on the student who answered, “I have found ‘diversity’ to be a cudgel by which self-appointed elites attempt to enforce their preferences over others. Diversity to me has been the experience of having my individuality denied, suppressed, and demeaned. It is a word that summarizes a smarmy form of oppression that congratulates itself on its high-mindedness even as it enforces narrow-minded conformity.”
No, any student really seeking admission to Yale wouldn’t say such a thing. But chances are very good that a great many students harbor insights very much like that. They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are.
These “diversity” essay questions are never innocent. They are a tool to keep college applicants aligned with the dominant ideology on campus, which continues to favor group categorizations over both individuality and the broader claims of shared community.
I would not have gotten in in the current era. No doubt about it.
I would have written a belligerent and full-throated denunciation of group identity and privileges, ruthlessly pointing out its inconsistencies, contradictions, and hypocrisies, making the argument for intellectual diversity, and I suppose I would have attended some very different college from Yale.
NPR has terminated its contract with Juan Williams, one of its senior news analysts, after he made comments about Muslims on the Fox News Channel.
NPR said in a statement that it gave Mr. Williams notice of his termination on Wednesday night.
The move came after Mr. Williams, who is also a Fox News political analyst, appeared on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday. On the show, the host, Bill O’Reilly, asked him to respond to the notion that the United States was facing a “Muslim dilemma.” Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”
Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly. ...
NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”
Here are the comments that got Williams fired.
Your tax dollars fund National Public Radio and pay the salaries of the representatives of the arrogant and intolerant left who enforce political correctness at the expense of freedom of thought and expression. Let’s hope the next Congress does something about this.
Last Wednesday, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity annual pledge hazing ritual took the form of open defiance of political correctness. Pledges were required to march across the Old Campus, blindfolded, hands on each other’s shoulders in a human chain, chanting deliberately outrageous expressions of anti-feminist machismo.
Some of the slogans used included: “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f—- dead women.”
Persons of normal intelligence would realize, of course, that the purpose of such an activity would be to test the courage and commitment of those aspiring to join the fraternity by subjecting them to an ordeal exposing them to personal humiliation and to a certain amount of genuine risk.
Since America and Yale are both presided over today by prigs and nincompoops with less than normal intelligence and overdeveloped faculties of indignation, the risk was clearly a bit greater than the officers of Yale’s DKE chapter had expected.
Deep thinkers in the national media and the Academe, people like Tracy Clark-Flury at Salon, the management of Yale’s Women’s Center, Yale College Dean Mary Miller , and Feminist and Queer Studies Prof Melanie Boyd who doubles as Special Advisor to the Dean of Yale College on Gender Issues, all got their knickers in a twist and began blathering about “hate speech,” “sexism,” and “verbal assault.”
Inevitably, a forum on “Yale’s Sexual Climate” (which I would have guessed would be intensely favorable) was held, allegedly representing “the first step in a long process of dialogue and systemic change.”
An apology was extorted from the fraternity’s president, the international DKE organization suspended the Yale chapter’s pledge activities, and the virago enforcer of political correctness indulged in a few threats.
I wouldn’t say the question of disciplinary action has disappeared from the conversation,” [Melanie] Boyd said.
One Yale Daily News commenter found it ironic that DKE was being so thoroughly pilloried for tongue-in-cheek outrageous expressions, while the Yale Women’s Center in complete earnestness has taken the following positions:
Women who choose to act as stay-at-home moms are traitors to their gender
Capitalism is anti-feminist
The United States is the most anti-woman nation in the world
All hierarchies are by definition patriarchal since hierarchy and structure are masculine constructs
Post-birth abortion should be legalized (see: Peter Singer)
There is no biological difference between men and women – it is entirely a social construct
The overwhelming majority of men at Yale actively and knowingly attempt to oppress women in their everyday lives
Gendered pronouns (ie: he or she) are relics of a bigoted society.
Marriage is sexual slavery
Letting the man pay on a date is tantamount to prostitution
Directed Studies is an attempt to defend the patriarchy
Women who vote Republican are brainwashed
Religion was designed to oppress women
Condoms are patriarchal since they put men in control of safe sex
Condoms are feminist since they let women avoid pregnancy
Men should be required to submit their DNA to a database upon entering college, since 1 in 4 women is raped in college.
Why should we object to having the country run and our personal decisions made for us by the intellectual elite who vote for democrats and manage and operate our colleges and universities? Because they have reduced academic culture to this sort of thing.
Peter Wood, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, describes how a new kind of totalitarian stupidity is taking over America’s colleges. But the good news is it’s displacing the older equivalent stupidity: racial cant. In other words: Ebola isn’t all bad; it’s killing off the Plague bacillus.
The pursuit of diversity on campuses remains a highly visible priority, but it is being subtly demoted by enthusiasm for sustainability. As an ideology, diversity is running out of steam, while sustainability is on fire. This month hundreds of colleges will mark the eighth annual Campus Sustainability Day, with activities to include a Webcast offering “social-change strategies and tools” to help campuses lower carbon emissions. ...
Diversity and sustainability are the two most characteristic ideas of the modern academy. Diversity asks us to focus on group identity and personal affiliation, and it puts race at the center of the discussion. Sustainability asks us to focus on humanity’s use of natural resources, and it puts climate at the center of discussion. Outwardly, diversity and sustainability belong to separate narratives. They deal with different topics and might, in principle, have no more friction between them than typically exists between English departments and physics labs. Or between polar bears and tropical fish. But in fact, diversity and sustainability have a complicated, decades-old rivalry.
They vie, in effect, for the same conceptual space and the same passions. Both are about repairing the world; both invite exuberant commitment; both are moralistic; and most of all, both are encompassing ideas that crowd out other encompassing ideas. They also compete for the same financial resources.
Diversity and sustainability are also both second-wave movements. Diversity is second-wave affirmative action; sustainability is second-wave environmentalism. ...
One index of the rise of sustainability at the expense of diversity is the size of the institutional memberships of their professional groups. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education now lists as members 800 colleges and universities in the United States. The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, by contrast, has about 150 member institutions.
Diversity is a story of a once-fresh ideology that swept through higher education in a spirit of triumph but that quickly seems to be losing its status as the sexiest ideology on campus. Diversiphiles would like to keep the adrenaline flowing, but it is hard. Freshmen now arrive on campus already having sucked on multicultural milkshakes from kindergarten to senior prom. Diversity for them is just the same ol’ same ol’. ...
I view this changing of the ideological guard with wariness. Diversity was pretty bad; sustainability may be even worse. Both movements subtract from the better purposes of higher education. Diversity authorizes double standards in admissions and hiring, breeds a campus culture of hypocrisy, mismatches students to educational opportunities, fosters ethnic resentments, elevates group identity over individual achievement, and trivializes the curriculum. Of course, those punishments were something that had to be accepted in the spirit of atoning for the original sin of racism.
But for its part, sustainability has the logic of a stampede. We all must run in the same direction for fear of some rumored and largely invisible threat. The real threat is the stampede itself. Sustainability numbers among its advocates some scrupulous scientists and quite a few sober facilities managers who simply want to trim utility bills. But in the main, sustainability is the triumph of hypothesis over evidence. Its scientific grounding is mostly a matter of models and extrapolations and appeals to authority. Evoking imminent and planet-destroying catastrophe, sustainatopians call for radical changes in economic arrangements and social patterns. Higher education is summoned to set aside whatever it is doing to help make this revolution in production, distribution, and consumption a reality. ...
The diversity movement has always been rife with contradictions. Seeking to promote racial equality, it evolved into a system that perpetuates inequalities. But whatever else it is, the diversity movement thirsts to be part of mainstream America. Its ultimate goal is to make diversity a principle of the same standing as freedom and equality in our national life. The sustainability movement, by contrast, has no such affection for the larger culture or loyalty to the American experiment. It dismisses the comforts of American life, including our political freedom, as unworthy extravagance. Sustainability summons us to a supposedly higher good. Personal security, national prosperity, and individual freedom may just have to go as we press on to our low-impact, carbon-free new order. In this sense, it goes beyond promising to redeem us from social iniquity to redeeming us from human nature itself.
Many campus adherents to sustainability may eventually tire of its puritanical preachiness and its unfulfilled prophecies, but for the moment, sustainability has cachet. Diversity, meanwhile, has aged into a static bureaucracy, and diversicrats increasingly spend their energy polishing the spoons. ...
In the end, I suspect that a quarter-century or so of hugging identity politics close and trying to feel perpetual shame about the nation’s racial past just proved too dreary. Sustainability may be based on a grimmer view of life in general, but it offers relief from that ever-expanding story of group oppression that had eventually become all that diversity had to offer. In an odd way, sustainability is liberating.
Mark Steyn rants over the elite’s response to Koran-burning-that-never-took-place as well as to the plight of the latest victim of cartoon jihad, Molly Norris.
He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.
Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights?
When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.
So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it. ...
It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people. ...
Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She’s the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up “Everybody Draws Mohammed” Day, and then, when she realized what she’d stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:
You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.
On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:
Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?
Jonah Goldberg examines the liberal notion that you are to blame for people’s deaths if you do something Muslims do not like, like burn a Koran or draw a cartoon image of Mohammed, and Muslims riot and kill someone or get killed.
When Pope Benedict delivered his Regensburg address in 2006, he suggested that Islam had a link to violence. In response, many Muslims rioted. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
When Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was asked in an interview about Koran-burning, he brought up former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous comment that the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”
There are a number of grave problems with the crowded-theater cliche. First, you can—even must—yell “fire” in a crowded theater: It just has to be the truth.
But more to the point, fires are not human beings. Fire has no choice but to burn because that is what fire does. Humans have choices. Yet in this formulation (from which Breyer has somewhat retreated), Muslims are akin to soulless, unthinking flames. Taken seriously, this comparison suggests rational people have every reason to fear Muslims in much the same way they fear fire.
There are complex issues here. But the simple truth is the Islamist extremists who behead and riot do have a choice. They want to murder. What they want is an excuse, and they’ll find one no matter what.
‘He’s going to burn a Koran? Quick, let’s go join a terrorist organization that mass-murders people.’
According to Obama, Jones’s “stunt” (a fair description) is already “a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda.” That’s absurd. No sensible person joins a terrorist organization dedicated to mass murder simply because somebody torches a Koran.
If the president, who is principally responsible for American national security, actually believes what he says, what is his excuse for not confronting Islamist regimes? These are not Looney Tunes pastors with followings smaller than the First Lady’s traveling caravan; they are governments that confiscate and destroy Bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, and other articles of profound religious substance and symbolism to non-Muslims. That goes on, systematically, every single day — although still not as often as you’d imagine, because Islamic societies are so innately intolerant that there aren’t a lot of non-Muslim religious items to be found in, say, Saudi Arabia.
Jones is going to burn a Koran; sharia calls for killing human beings who renounce Islam. Does the president have an explanation for why Christians and Jews are not forming terror cells with the bonanza of recruits that must come forward on a daily basis given the “stunts” that, in Saudi Arabia, are known as law enforcement? ...
I wish Americans would trip over themselves with a fraction of the zeal on display here to condemn the torching of the American flag — a symbol of freedom and sacrifice. But that’s beside the point. Burning a book sacred to Muslims is a stupid, provocative thing to do. Yet it is conscious avoidance — okay, willful blindness — to claim that Jones is causing the threat to our troops, in addition to the threat of other attacks and riots by Muslims (of the sort we’ve seen with the Danish cartoons, the false claims of Koran-flushing at Gitmo, the school teacher who named a teddy bear Mohammed, etc.).
Those are all pretexts. The cause is Islamist ideology, which is dehumanizing of non-Muslims (or, in the case of the Ahmadi, even of Muslims who reject parts of mainstream Islamic doctrine). It is the ideology that puts the world’s Muslims on a hair trigger. ...
Wouldn’t it be nice if, while they publicly chide an American citizen for striking the match, our public officials took the occasion to chide the ideology that turns cultures into dynamite?
—————————————————-
Michelle Malkin observes that it isn’t easy to avoid offending a religion with the kind of anger management problem Islam has.
Shhhhhhh, we’re told. Don’t protest the Ground Zero mosque. Don’t burn a Koran. It’ll imperil the troops. It’ll inflame tensions. The “Muslim world” will “explode” if it does not get its way, warns sharia-peddling imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Pardon my national security-threatening impudence, but when is the “Muslim world” not ready to “explode”?
At the risk of provoking the ever-volatile Religion of Perpetual Outrage, let us count the little-noticed and forgotten ways.
Just a few months ago in Kashmir, faithful Muslims rioted over what they thought was a mosque depicted on underwear sold by street vendors. ...
(numerous examples)
The eternal flame of Muslim outrage was lit a long, long time ago.
Alphonse de Neuville, Count Roland Behaving Insensitively at Roncesvalles, 1894
Or guart chascuns que granz colps,
Que malvaise cançun de nus chantet ne seit!
Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit.
Now must we each lay on most hardily,
So songs of shame shall ne’er be sung of us.
Pagans are wrong and Christians are right.
Chanson de Roland, 1013-1015
————————————————————— Sarah Palin says that burning a copy of the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is “insensitive and an unnecessary provocation” and reminds us of the Golden Rule.
I don’t think Golden Rule applies to foreign enemies in time of war, and I’d say that Sarah Palin is clearly getting too close to Washington and sounds more and more like a conventional politician.
The FBI is warning that a backlash and retaliation is likely.
Pastor Jones may be a crank, and burning the Koran is neither genteel nor the most attractive choice of gestures, but here we are.
We are in a situation in which the obscure minister of an insignificant local congregation proposes an action insulting to Islam, and consequently find ourselves threatened and warned of bloodshed and massive violence if we don’t stop him.
Meanwhile, the leadership class of the country is responding by urging him to cease and desist, openly acknowledging fear of Islamic violence. Mere squeamishness and discomfort with being placed in the position of defending a gesture which is just not nice is additionally at work in rendering the American leadership class hors de combat.
Most of the same people ran, rather than walked, to defend Imam Abdul Rauf’s project constructing and Islamic Cultural Center, originally named for one of Islam’s most prized European conquests, within the zone of impact of the 9/11 attacks.
Personally, I’m completely fed up with the intelligentsia’s culture of utilitarian calculation and its cowardly inclination to shrink from direct opposition and open conflict with a hostile and insolent alien superstition. At this point, Pastor Jones burning that Koran is just like knocking off the chip that the town bully has placed on his shoulder.
Knock it off and then clean his clock for him, or prepare to bow and scrape and cringe in perpetuity is the real choice. We already have the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Yale University Press practicing self censorship in response to Saracen sensibilities with respect to the Danish cartoons featuring Mohammed. We have Harvard University introducing sexual segregation in its gymnasium to accommodate Islam.
Where does accommodating and appeasing of Islam stop? With dhimmitude (subjection of non-Muslims to Islam) and with payment of the Jizyah, the Islamic tax on non-Muslims.
[T]he Jizyah shall be taken from them with belittlement and humiliation. The dhimmi shall come in person, walking not riding. When he pays, he shall stand, while the tax collector sits. The collector shall seize him by the scruff of the neck, shake him, and say “Pay the Jizyah!” and when he pays it he shall be slapped on the nape of the neck.
The Tory Party has promised to allow a repeal vote on the infamous 2004 Hunt Ban.
Bloomberg has read an advance copy of Blair’s memoir.
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair said he deliberately sabotaged the ban on fox hunting his government introduced, calling it “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret.”
In his memoir “A Journey,” published by Random House today, Blair said he ensured that the 2004 Hunting Act was “a masterly British compromise” that left enough loopholes to allow hunting to continue “provided certain steps were taken to avoid cruelty when the fox is killed.” He also told Home Office minister Hazel Blears to steer the police away from enforcing the law.
Blair’s 1997 pledge to give Parliament a vote on the subject dogged him throughout his time in office, with lawmakers opposed to hunting repeatedly trying to introduce a ban. Each time, hundreds of thousands of hunt supporters marched through London, and in 2004 some invaded Parliament.
“The passions aroused by the issue were primeval,” Blair, 57, wrote. “If I’d proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I’d have got less trouble. By the end of it, I felt like the damn fox.”
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who described the law last year as a “farce,” has promised a vote on repeal. Since the act came into force in 2005, only three hunts have been successfully prosecuted, according to the Countryside Alliance, which was formed to oppose the ban. ...
Blair said he initially agreed to a ban without properly understanding the issue. Then, during a vacation in Italy, he found himself talking to the mistress of a hunt near Oxford.
“She took me calmly and persuasively through what they did, the jobs that were dependent on it, the social contribution of keeping the hunt and the social consequence of banning it, and did it with an effect that completely convinced me,” Blair said.
