And our liberal friends sound like they’re talking sense, observes Tim Blair.

Global warming alarmists actually make a great deal of sense. That is, once you imagine that every time they open their mouths they’re talking not about the environment but about Islamic terrorism. …

Al Gore’s hard-hitting documentary about the Islamist threat – An Inconvenient Faith – might face the occasional bombing attack, but would otherwise be crucial viewing for those wishing to be informed on the great menace of our age.

Let’s work through several typical greenoid statements to see this process at work, whereby formerly irrational and fear-mongering comments on global warming (confirmed kills: exactly zero) become entirely reasonable and defensible when framed as statements on Islamist terror (confirmed kills: many thousands and counting):

“It doesn’t make sense for us to sit back and wait for others to act. The fate of the planet that our children and grandchildren will inherit is in our hands, and it is our responsibility to do something about this crisis.” – former US president Bill Clinton.

Christopher Hitchens has an article in Vanity Fair describing how Britain has “move(d) from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation.”

The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini. But the appellation “Londonistan,” which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi. The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, “the Star Wars bar scene,” catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war. …

My colleague Henry Porter sat me down in his West London home and made me watch a documentary that he thought had received far too little attention when shown on Britain’s Channel 4. It is entitled Undercover Mosque, and it shows film shot in quite mainstream Islamic centers in Birmingham and London (you can now find it easily on the Internet). And there it all is: foaming, bearded preachers calling for crucifixion of unbelievers, for homosexuals to be thrown off mountaintops, for disobedient and “deficient” women to be beaten into submission, and for Jewish and Indian property and life to be destroyed. “You have to bomb the Indian businesses, and as for the Jews, you kill them physically,” as one sermonizer, calling himself Sheikh al-Faisal, so prettily puts it. This stuff is being inculcated in small children—who are also informed that the age of consent should be nine years old, in honor of the prophet Muhammad’s youngest spouse. Again, these were not tin-roof storefront mosques but well-appointed and well-attended places of worship, often the beneficiaries of Saudi Arabian largesse. It’s not just the mosques, either. In West London there is a school named for Prince Charles’s friend King Fahd, with 650 pupils, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. According to Colin Cook, a British convert to Islam (initially inspired by the former crooner Cat Stevens) who taught there for 19 years, teaching materials said that Jews “engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan,” and incited pupils to list the defects of worthless heresies such as Judaism and Christianity. …

It’s impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie’s death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims (see photograph), the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god. Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as “magnificent” and proclaimed that “Britain belongs to Allah.” When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari’a, he replied: “Who says you own Britain anyway?” A question that will have to be answered one way or another.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Failure of school authorities to impose discipline on unruly minority students due to political correctness has led to a legal award of damages to a white female teacher subjected to verbal obscenities in Charleston.

Real Clear Politics:

In a new twist in American race relations, a federal court has ruled that a white teacher in a predominantly African-American school was subjected to a racially hostile workplace.

The case concerned Elizabeth Kandrac, who was routinely verbally abused by black students at Brentwood Middle School in North Charleston. Their slurs make shock jock Don Imus look like a church deacon.

Nevertheless, despite frequent complaints, school officials did nothing to intervene on Kandrac’s behalf, arguing that the racially charged profanity was simply part of the students’ culture. If Kandrac couldn’t handle cursing, school officials told her, she was in the wrong school.

Kandrac finally filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and subsequently brought a lawsuit against the Charleston County School District, the school’s principal and an associate superintendent. Last fall, jurors found that the school was a racially hostile environment to teach in and that the school district retaliated against Kandrac for complaining about it.

The defendants sought a new trial, but U.S. District Judge David C. Norton recently affirmed the verdict. However, he did not support the jury’s findings of $307,500 in damages for lost income and emotional distress.

Although Kandrac clearly suffered — she was suspended from her job shortly after a story about her EEOC complaint appeared in the local newspaper, and her contract was not renewed — her case didn’t meet evidentiary requirements for damages. The judge said a new trial would have to determine damages, but the school district and Kandrac settled for $200,000.

Complete article

Former Harvard Crimson editor, now law professor at the University of Oregon, Garrett Epps demonstrates the classic form of the dementia afflicting members of the democrat nutroots in this spectacularly self-righteous and paranoid rant in Salon.

By evil chance, I spent the Saturday night before Election Day 2000 at a jolly dinner for high-level Republicans. Most of the talk over the entrees concerned why then-candidate George W. Bush had been too pusillanimous to tell the voters that Al Gore was not just a liberal, but a Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist. But as the desserts circulated, so too did a piece of comic relief — an anonymous leaflet explaining to voters that because of heavy voter registration, the rules had been changed: Republicans would vote on Tuesday, Democrats and independents on Wednesday.

I think of that dinner whenever I read about the widening scandal of the U.S. attorneys and the politicization of the Justice Department under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzo is probably the most endangered man since William Tell’s son Walter. The pattern behind the scandal, however, transcends Gonzales’ fate or that of his underlings.

At least part of the U.S. attorneys plot seems to derive from the “election fraud” hoax that Republicans are trying to perpetrate in order to gain control of the country’s voter lists. So nailing this inept crew of thugs won’t be good enough. We need laws protecting the right to vote from the kind of phony, partisan prosecutors that Gonzales, Rove and Co. were trying to put in place, and from the punitive, restrictive voter-ID laws that are a prominent part of the far-right political agenda.

Republicans do cherish their little practical jokes — the leaflets in African-American neighborhoods warning that voters must pay outstanding traffic tickets before voting; the calls in Virginia in 2006 from the mythical “Virginia Election Commission” warning voters they would be arrested if they showed up at the polls. The best way to steal an election is the old-fashioned way: control who shows up. It’s widely known that Republicans do better when the turnout is lighter, whiter, older and richer; minorities, young people and the poor are easy game for hoaxes and intimidation.

Mr. Epps does not even seem to realize that he is telling us in so many words that he is an enthusiastic partisan of the claim to power of a coalition in which people so gosh-darned stupid that they can be made to believe absolutely anything, and people actively fearful of arrest, are essential components.

Voting returns from urban areas characteristically featuring democrat percentages resembling the margins achieved by dictators in the mock elections conducted in one-party states would tend to suggest that democrats don’t really have any such problem. But, personally, I am quite prepared to argue that anyone successful at persuading the cluelessly stupid and the inveterately criminal elements of society to stay out of politics was doing the Lord’s work.

Leftists, like Professor Epps, have long since abandoned any pretence of desiring a democratic process consisting of a rational debate based on Constitutional principles. For them, democracy simply consists of getting together a large enough mob to overwhelm any opposition so it can get down to work looting the means and property of others.

There is no issue about the quality of judgement or the purity of motive of the democrat voter. Stupid is fine, and selfish and greedy is even better. From the viewpoint of the left, Society is just a collection of warring factions, all fighting for the largest possible share of the spoils. The left doesn’t care if its constituents are dishonest or dumb, it just wants them numerous, loud, and aggressive.

The New York Times announced that its third “Public Editor” will be Clark Hoyt, the former Washington Bureau chief at Knight Ridder. The latter organization compiled a conspicuous record of early opposition to the US invasion of Iraq and general hostility to the policies of the Bush Administration.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said that record contributed to his selection of Mr. Hoyt.

Hoyt will be succeeding the flaccid liberal Daniel Okrent and the invertebrate Byron Calame in what most readers have long since recognized as the sham position it is.

The New York Times Public Editorship was created as a defensive response to wide-spread criticism of the Times’ flagrantly biased and selective news coverage. The paper’s management has carefully hand picked for the position a series of left-liberal journalists sharing 100% of the Time’s management’s world view and ideology “to represent” public opinion critical of Times’ journalistic policies and coverage.

The first public editor, Upper West Side Liberal democrat Daniel Okrent, apparently actually proved too combative for Mr. Keller’s taste, and Okrent’s infrequent bland and tepid dissent was replaced more recently by Byron Calame’s oleaginous sycophancy.

One has every confidence that Clark Hoyt will compile a record fully worthy of his predecessors.

Dan Simpson‘s editorial is an unfortunately typical expression of the excessive and exaggeratedly phobic attitudes of members of our over-domesticated, metrosexual intelligentsia toward firearms.

Guns are regarded as detestable and intrinsically dangerous objects which need to be kept under official control at all times, ideally in bank vaults. Their complete removal from American society is so unquestionably desirable that even house-to-house searches, and the shredding of the Bill of Rights, would be a perfectly acceptable price.

Obviously, this kind of policy proposal represents not a practical response to a real problem, but rather an irrational and emotional outburst, indifferent to benefits and costs, oblivious to process and law, expressive of an overwhelming combination of fear and aversion so profound as to dispense completely with practicality, proportionality, and cause and effect.

This kind of hostility toward firearms, this hoplophobia, needs to be recognized as the kind of irrationalism that it is.

In a sane society, familiarity and skill with arms, possession of the ability to defend oneself and others would be looked upon as essential components of every man’s education.

In dojos offering training in kendo and aikido, the following phrase written in the grass script on a scroll is commonly hung for purposes of admonition and inspiration.

These Japanese radicals are pronounced Katsujin-ken Satsujin-to (sometimes, Katsujinken satsujinken) meaning “The sword which kills is the sword which gives life.”

They are often rendered more explicitly in English as “The sword which cuts down evil is the sword which preserves life.”

This adage is attributed to the masters of YagyÅ« school, the Tokugawa shoguns’ personal instructors in swordsmanship.

And those Yagyū school sword sensei-s were right. The rightful use of weapons is essential in an imperfect world to defend innocent lives against unjust violence.

A wider commitment to skill at arms and a more common readiness to defend the innocent would be infinitely more effective at saving the lives of victims of attacks by madmen and criminals than a totalitarian program attempting to enforce universal disarmament.

Katsu-tempo satsu-tempo.

At Virginia Tech, a gun in the hands of the right bystander could have been the gun which destroyed evil and the gun which preserved life.

A liberal indulges in a pretty repulsive bit of fantasy in the Toledo Blade.

Now, how would one disarm the American population? First of all, federal or state laws would need to make it a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in prison per weapon to possess a firearm. The population would then be given three months to turn in their guns, without penalty.

Hunters would be able to deposit their hunting weapons in a centrally located arsenal, heavily guarded, from which they would be able to withdraw them each hunting season upon presentation of a valid hunting license. The weapons would be required to be redeposited at the end of the season on pain of arrest. When hunters submit a request for their weapons, federal, state, and local checks would be made to establish that they had not been convicted of a violent crime since the last time they withdrew their weapons. In the process, arsenal staff would take at least a quick look at each hunter to try to affirm that he was not obviously unhinged.

It would have to be the case that the term “hunting weapon” did not include anti-tank ordnance, assault weapons, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, or other weapons of war.

All antique or interesting non-hunting weapons would be required to be delivered to a local or regional museum, also to be under strict 24-hour-a-day guard. There they would be on display, if the owner desired, as part of an interesting exhibit of antique American weapons, as family heirlooms from proud wars past or as part of collections.

Gun dealers could continue their work, selling hunting and antique firearms. They would be required to maintain very tight inventories. Any gun sold would be delivered immediately by the dealer to the nearest arsenal or the museum, not to the buyer.

The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty. Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm.

Clearly, since such sweeps could not take place all across the country at the same time. But fairly quickly there would begin to be gun-swept, gun-free areas where there should be no firearms. If there were, those carrying them would be subject to quick confiscation and prosecution. On the streets it would be a question of stop-and-search of anyone, even grandma with her walker, with the same penalties for “carrying.”

A fine fantasy, if the idea of living like a herd animal under the complete control of the state appeals to you.

I also find it remarkable how eager liberals are to trample the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans in order to attempt to prevent the crimes committed by an infinitesimally small number of deranged people. And I find the limitless faith in these kinds of ameliorist schemes even more remarkable. If you are a liberal, the calculative power of human reason expressed via governmental force is omnipotent. Just pass yourself a law, and “so let it be written, so let it be done.”

Liberals don’t believe that a lot of people would bury or otherwise conceal their guns. Liberals don’t realize that new guns can be built in American basements with hand tools the same way the are built in Afghan villages. Liberals don’t understand that black markets invariably spring up to provide any banned commodity. Existing laws would not have stopped the Virginia Tech shooter from obtaining heroin and cocaine if he wanted them.

Terrye reflects on the liberals’ commitment to bringing about American defeat.

There is a commercial I have seen in which some old baby boomer sitting in a fancy office says he is going to use some service {I forget what it is} so that he can stick it to the man. His young assistant says But sir, you are the man. To which the old boy responds, Maybe.

I think liberals have found themselves in a world in which they are the man. They are the people running the World Bank with all of its phenomenal corruption. They are the people responsible for the United Nations with its corruption and incompetence on display every day. They are the people who railed against the likes of Saddam Hussein for years, only to rail against the United States even more. The truth is if they have to choose between the leader of the free world, the President of the United States and some tin pot dictator with a swiss bank account…they are more than likely to choose the dictator.

For years, they played the rebellious teenager speaking truth to power and now they find they are the power. And guess what? They are no better than the other guy. That is what is eating at them. They know they can’t reason with the Iranians or the Syrians or people like Hugo Chavez or that nutcase in North Korea. They have shown time and again that all they can do is declare defeat and demand reform. They are good at the defeat part, after all it is some other poor bastard who is sitting out on that limb they are sawing off, but the reform part…not so good. They will spend a lot more time complaining about Wolfowitz than they will the 800 billion lost to corruption at the World Bank. After all, if they go after the Mugabes of the world they will lose the support of those dictators. Better to let them line their pockets and pretend not to notice the kickbacks. Just blame the poverty on capitalism and free trade and ignore the obvious thievery.

They will not demand anyone go to jail over the Food for Oil scandal even though it made a mockery of the United Nations, an institution they show reverence for. No, they will go suck up to Assad and pretend he did not kill the political opposition in Lebanon. They will turn their back on democracy in Iraq. They will whine about the Patriot Act, but they will demand we talk to the Mad Mullahs who are proud of the fact that they publicly execute women of ill repute. They will worry over global warming and the supposed end of the world, but they will not deal with the threats that face us in the here and now. They don’t know how.

The Democrats woke up in the world of the 21st century and discovered they are the man. And all they know how to do is bitch. And while bitching might be fun, it doesn’t fix a damn thing.

Opening this week in New York fresh from Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival, this year’s answer to Brokeback Mountain takes the contemporary cinema’s defense of forbidden love one step further.

New York Times:

The director Robinson Devor apparently would like viewers who watch his heavily reconstructed documentary, “Zoo,” to see it as a story of ineluctable desire and human dignity. Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, with many scenes steeped in a blue that would have made Yves Klein envious, “Zoo” is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion.

Abashed by nationwide ridicule resulting from Dean Betty Trachtenberg’s ban on stage weapons in university theatrical productions, the Yale administration has announced its cancellation of the ban on free speech grounds. Yale should also reverse its ban on possession of firearms on campus, on second Amendment grounds, but that’s hardly likely, is it?

The Yale Daily News:

Stage weapons will again be allowed in University theatrical productions, in a reversal of last week’s ban, Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said Tuesday morning.

Administrators decided Monday afternoon to require that audiences instead be informed of the use of stage weapons before the start of every performance, she said. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, which left 33 students dead last Monday, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg had told students that they would be required to substitute obviously fake props for realistic stage weapons in theatrical productions.

Klasky said the University reversed the policy because of concerns about free speech.

“As an institution that has always valued free speech, we wanted to uphold the principles that we have always adhered to,” she said.

Klasky said the policy of announcing the use of stage weapons in advance will hold for all future campus productions.

The ban affected at least two shows that went up over the weekend: the play “Red Noses” and the opera “Orpheus in the Underworld,” and attracted national media attention as well as causing a stir among students involved in theater on campus. Several students complained that the requirement infringed on their free speech, while others pointed out that the policy was unlikely to assuage anxiety about Virginia Tech.

But over the weekend, Trachtenberg, who is retiring at the end of the academic year, said student criticism of the stage weapons ban had been exaggerated.

“I think people should start thinking about other people rather than trying to feel sorry for themselves and thinking that the administration is trying to thwart their creativity,” Trachtenberg said. “They’re not using their own intelligence. … We have to think of the people who might be affected by seeing real-life weapons.”

Klasky declined to name the people involved in making Monday’s decision.

The James Lewis column I just linked has provoked some vehemently negative dissent from Hilzoy on the left, who was so enraged that she accidentally deleted her first draft, but managed finally to conclude:

it’s just another hit piece against an academic department that makes precisely no attempt to characterize that department accurately, that Lewis chooses instead to treat the members of that department as mere instantiations of some “trend” that exists only in his head, and that he does this at a time when the people he uses as political props must be suffering enormously, makes it lower than dirt.

Dan Riehl, speaking from a rightwing perspective, is even more indignant:

For God’s sakes, are there no limits to which some won’t go to, quite frankly, pathetically attempt to score a political point? Seung-Hui Cho was insane. He could have studied nothing but The Wealth of Nations, the Constitution, the Boyscout Manual and Mary Had a Little Lamb and still he would likely have emerged as the psychotic killer he eventually became.

Attempting to construct a false logic for perceived political gain to explain away sheer madness is as contorted and dangerous as lunacy itself. There are plenty of good reasons to find fault with the Liberal philosophy that holds sway within all levels of our contemporary system of education. Seung-Hui Cho is not one of them.

Anyone attempting to invoke his name for the benefit of conservative thinking isn’t thinking much at all, let alone conservatively. Such tactics leave conservatism looking foolish and those attempting them as if they are in need of a good couch after a hefty shot of Thorazine. In fact, stopping at calling such efforts crazy may be too kind. Ultimately, they are more dangerous than even that.

Sorry, Dan, Hil, I don’t think it’s in the least difficult to draw a connection between the 23-year-old shooter’s pathological rage and accusatory rhetoric, featuring wildly-exaggerated and not particularly accurately-directed grievances, and the entire leftwing “culture of complaint” dominating the perspective of the majority of faculty at most American universities today, including Virginia Tech.

Just look at these references by Virginia Tech’s own Nikki Giovanni in a widely-hailed poem, titled “We Are Virginia Tech,” read aloud at a Memorial Convocation last Wednesday.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

1:44 video

Are Cho’s irrational accusations really a completely different species of rhetoric from Giovanni’s accusatory baby elephant and Appalachian infant?

You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. ‘But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.

You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.

Are his economic grievances really at odds with the class warfare routinely treated as a background assumption of the conventional contemporary academic perspective?

Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.”

Envy, narcissism, and paranoia were key factors motivating Cho’s attacks and they are also the vital ingredients in the witches’ brew of leftist ideology presiding over American Academia today.

James Lewis, at American Thinker, wonders if his university’s faculty and curriculum might not have some connection to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Yes, I know. Tens of thousands of ordinary college students are lonely, full of rage, lost and frustrated. A few percent are psychotically disturbed, and some of them can kill. Our big factory colleges are alienating. Take millions of adolescents, and at any time there are bound to be quite a few confused and seething souls walking loose. Just visit downtown in any American or European city, and you can see all the lost and disturbed living in their private hells. And no, that doesn’t excuse executing thirty-two innocents.

Still, I wonder — was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes — did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently — was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho’s English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Just check out their websites.

Read the whole thing.