Ben-Yishai reported that since the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) first arranged for the transfer of injured Syrians almost two years ago, some 1,600 Syrians have been treated in Israel. Now that UNDOF has fled its postings after frequent attacks, Israel relies on “trusted intermediaries.”
“The runners at the Boston Marathon put my police officers, my citizens and others at risk. This program invited an incendiary reaction. Citizens picked my community, which does not support in any shape, passion or form, this ideology.”
Is the United States Constitution an incendiary device or is the resurgence of Islam as practiced in the seventh century an incendiary device?
The overall media consensus has been to blame the intended murder victims for recklessly provoking the terrorists. Such provocation, we are told, is unacceptable and irresponsible behavior given the risk of retaliation by offended radical Muslims.
By this bizarre logic, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma marchers should be condemned for instigating the melee on the Edmund Pettus bridge. Same for the three murdered civil-rights workers in Mississippi, the victims of Bull Connor’s police dogs, and anyone else who has taken a stand that might irritate violence-prone people.
The Kelly File. “Is freedom of speech under attack in America?” Fox News, May 6, 2015.
As “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” both direct attacks on the American Homeland and intellectual forays into weakening cultural adhesion to bedrock principles and values has served primarily to strengthen the arguments and ranks of America’s conservatives, who, in fact have become America’s most thoughtful liberals in line with the “classical liberalism” on which the nation was founded.
For all intents, Lincoln’s back in town.
Allen West included this observation in a post published last August:
First of all, let’s establish this point: modern conservatism is classical liberalism as developed by English political philosopher John Locke. His basic principles were the personal rights of life, liberty, and property. Clearly, today’s “post modern liberal” has nothing in common with John Locke. Today’s liberalism has more in common with Marxism/progressivism/socialism — but as with all things Leftist, the lexicon is changed in order to mask true identity and intentions.
Search string “Lincoln, classical liberalism” yields a few delightful URLs. Count “6 Quotes That Will Remind Republicans Lincoln Was a Liberal” (February 11, 2015) among them (it kicks off with, “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”).
• We will promote our belief that pluralism and moderation are fundamental principles of the Holy Qur’an.
• We recognize and honor the principles of individual liberty and freedom. We believe that the practice of religion and its laws are a matter of free choice within an individual’s beliefs and conscience only. Our governmental laws should be based upon our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and derived from reason.
• We believe that every Muslim is equally entitled to his/her opinion concerning the religion of Islam, in an environment free of ostracism, intimidation, and reprisal. While we recognize the value of scholarship and learned discourse in Islam, we believe that all Muslims should play an active role in the debate and ijtihad of our own faith.
• We will work to educate the public regarding the special historical relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
• We will publicly affirm our belief that the primary threat to America is from both violent and non-violent Islamists who exploit the faith of Islam, and who use identity politics, victimology, tribalism, and intimidation to further their goal of Islamist hegemony.
What the arc of time may be for the intellectual transformation of the Ummah toward the above stated values (there are twelve such on the page referenced) seems to BackChannels unknown, but the blog has been around for enough years to observe that those who bid into a modern course have stood by their own programs and sought growth and greater distribution for core religious institutional concepts fit to the “classical liberalism” on which the United States has been developed.
The Garland, Texas “Draw Muhammad” event and the attack associated with it continue to play in the press. However it unfolded, whatever the play by play and the who, what, when, how, it was small and professionally foiled by police.
The shooters were known and had been tracked.
Headlines from the reading side of the BackChannels screen: “Gunman in Texas Shooting was FBI Suspect in Jihad Inquiry”; “Texas Attacker Left Trail of Extremist Ideas on Twitter”; “FBI alerted Garland Police about jihad attacker 3 hours . . . “; “ISIS Inspired, but Did Not Orchestrate, Garland Shooting at Muhammad Event”; “Texas attacker had private conversations with known terrorists”.
Block and search if you need to read the story behind a headline . . . the point is the First Amendment, the American gold standard of freedom of speech, won the day, the terrorists lost, and the arguing online about the right to speak freely — to challenge thought, to criticize ideas, to observe and report — and to argue about politeness, provocation, and, I suppose, cultural sensitivity, which all makes for lively debate, is as it should be and much, much preferred to silenced debate.
One more clip (and more to follow) from Pat Condell, posted on YouTube July 11, 2013 —
Addendum – May 10, 2015
How can any thinking and civilized person ever believe there is a wisp of truth to the proposition: “There are times when it is ‘understandable’ that people would slaughter others because of a cartoon”? Everyone who follows world events in the United States, regardless of their political leanings, has seen the unimaginably vile actions of ISIS against “unbelievers” and “those who defame the prophet.” How can anyone take their side? To do so even to the smallest extent renders the defender equally vile. And yet, of course, that is what we have come to in the cesspool that is the American left.
In 2009, Yale University removed several illustrations from a book I had written about the global controversy over the Danish cartoons. The redacted illustrations included the cartoons as also other pictures featuring Muhammad, including an Ottoman print of Muhammad going into battle with Ali at his side and an illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy made by Gustave Doré. The publisher was Yale University Press. The university argued that the images could be considered offensive by Muslims and lead to violence, including attacks on Yale and other American institutions. In an Orwellian twist, Yale University cited my own book as evidence that reproduction of the cartoons was dangerous. The press defended its decision with reference to the advice of an expert panel (of which more later) ‘that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.’
There is no legitimate controversy over why the Kouachi brothers targeted Charlie Hebdo. They murdered not to redress the social grievances or right the historical wrongs the PEN authors named. They explicitly told us why they murdered — for Islam, to avenge the Prophet Muhammad. Progressives who think otherwise need to face that reality. Put another way, the Kouachi brothers may have suffered racial discrimination and even “marginalization,” yet had they not been Muslims, they would not have attacked Charlie Hebdo. They would have had no motive.
And now we are bystanders in the destruction of our own remarkable history. We are allowing the barbarians to destroy memory while we watch. We were warned decades ago when Israel began fighting against the destruction of history by Muslims destroying artifacts under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in their attempt to eradicate the Jewish past in order to promote a Muslim future.
In the 1980s the Waqf destroyed an ancient wall on the Temple Mount, probably from one of the courts of the Second Temple, (Herod’s Temple) during an unauthorized dig. “The wall was six feet thick, and more than 16 feet of it was exposed, but the entire wall was quickly removed and the area covered before Israeli archaeological authorities could study it.”
In September 2000, the Muslim Waqf closed off the Temple Mount entirely to any archeological oversight by the Israel Antiquities Authority and then removed 13,000 tons of rubble from the Temple Mount, including archeological remnants from the First and Second Temple periods. History was dropped into the dump.
The purpose of autocratic and capricious information control — to shut someone up; to censor or forestall expression — is personal or cultural erasure.
We express solidarity with the many American Muslims who feel wounded by this malicious disregard of their sacred heritage. Further, we are dismayed that a member of the American Jewish community led this incendiary effort. We can only imagine how upset we would be if a group set up a public display of cartoons mocking Jews, offering (as was the case here) a $10,000 prize for the “best” rendering.
Our long history as a persecuted and often taunted minority does not allow us to stand by in silence when such an act is perpetrated against another religious community in our society. Jewish history and teaching compel us to denounce such offensive and inflammatory behavior.
More than 25 rabbis signed the above letter, which hews to the social and transactional element in the Garland controversy: indeed, we should be careful of one another by being polite.
Then too we may be even more careful of one another by being plainly honest about present and past states of affairs. For that, many Jews would simply begin with the legend of the Banu Qurayza.
The Southern Poverty Law Center regards Pamela’s organization as a hate group . Since Morris Dees, the chief trial council of the center and most of the top officers in that organization are members of my own tribe, I wonder if he would still be so loudly condemning Pam Geller if Jihad attacked a synagogue and killed innocent Jews.
Since we are their favorite targets, this is a nightmare that is just waiting to happen. But, Dees and his left wing buddies would prefer to support condemning the one women with balls big enough to stand up to Jihad and tell them no , not today.
Texted last night and this morning by one of BackChannel’s friends —
5/4/2015/0018
In the cab. Men actually left vehicle and were on foot. Swat told e . . . .
5/4/2015/0837
Not having fun. Police officer shot led times two. Bomb squad. We have been moved to a hardened position.
The event was sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and attended by its president and co-founder, Pamela Geller — who is also president of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). Both are listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Since when has earnest and honest — not disingenuous, not libelous — speech been framed as “hate speech” — and with the speakers branded as a “hate group”?
Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.
I had been writing a series of columns in the Village Voice about certain thought police at that very paper. I had found out that on Monday nights, when the paper went to bed, some editors and copy editors — without telling the writers — were cutting out certain words, sometimes sentences and paragraphs, that might offend the Voice’s constituencies.
Hentoff, Nat. “Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.” New York, HarperCollinsPublishers, 1992.
Where are we today?
How did this happen that comment and criticism of Islam — the same would seem much more safe and secure when the target of critical speech involves Christianity, Judaism, and every other religion expressed in the brave and free United States of America — has been framed as provocation for violence and seems to be being made to serve to excuse it?
Just so no English language speaker is caught short or left behind while trading the dozens, The Racial Slur Database lists some 2,649 of these pejoratives.
Contempt, which is what epithets express, contribute to our defensive arsenal in language: they are the weapons we reach for when we are done with words and reason and, overall, ready to rumble.
Pamela Geller, the organizer of the Texas “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, that ended in a terror attack on a police officer, said on national television Monday she’d do it again – that free speech is way too important to cede to Shariah law extremists.
“Clearly what happened is indicative of how needed this conference was,” said Geller, on “Fox & Friends,” in reference to the violence that came on the tail end of the cartoon drawing contest, as WND previously reported.
Said Pamela Geller: “Inoffensive speech needs no protection; offensive speech needs protection.” (about 1:40 into the Fox video).
Ad hominem attacks and epithets may be offensive and also protected speech too, but add virtue to Geller’s so-called hate speech: considered and contemplated, well researched, respectful, clearly delineating “the terrorists”, albeit in absolute terms, while — for readers who actually care to look into this issue — recognizing Islamic humanists and reformists and other Muslims often in the path of jihadists themselves.
On the web, where most of my experience of the world arrives mediated, I have seen the development of a new global across-the-broadest-campus intelligentsia, and perhaps that soon should be the focus of a BackChannels post.
When contentious issues and conflict are worked by the public, is God like a cook watching over a simmering pot on the stove?
Too cool, and the food doesn’t transform — it needs some serious heat; too hot, and the pot boils over or boils out — those conditions need some serious cool.
Pamela Geller is a 56-year-old Jewish arch-conservative from New York, a vehement critic of radical Islam who organized a provocative $10,000 cartoon contest in this placid Dallas suburb designed to caricature the prophet Muhammad.
Elton Simpson was a 30-year-old aspiring Islamic militant from Phoenix who fantasized to an FBI informant about “doing the martyrdom operations” in Somalia and was convicted in 2010 of lying to the FBI about his plans to travel to the volatile eastern African nation.
The “Islamists” — which noun we use to set them apart from Muslims who are not “Islamists” and have been frequently the targets of the same — have a deep investment in force of will and intimidation. Control, locus of control, need for control, motivation for sadism, etc. are more topics worth concentrating on.
Americans know — and I believe I’m within reason saying this — that Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer exercise and represent free speech in action accommodated to American constitutional principles. Ascribed to Patrick Henry: ““I may not like what a man says, but I shall defend to the death his right to say it!” That’s it.
We don’t shout down opponents; we don’t deny anyone a soapbox. We may choose not to listen to their rants; we may choose to not invite our “verbal adversaries” to our house parties. But we don’t shut them up lest we ourselves suffering being shut up.
While Geller and Spencer have been “framed” — called, described as, denoted as, accused — as “Islamophobes”, the truth is that practice will simply elicit its opposite, sooner or later, in political reaction. I’ve shared the Back-Channels concept “Shimmer” with Geller — didn’t hear back — and out of no cause or motivation not my own but solely curiosity and enthusiasm for the broadband web, I’ve made acquaintance and friends across the Islamic world.
Religious teleology adjusts to many forces across time. The Catholic Church maintained the charge of Deicide against the Jews until into the early 1960s, and the Lutheran Synod in America tooks its time ejecting, at least officially, the same. In other aspects, the Jesuits continue writing letters to Jesus and God only knows — or only God knows! — the ways in which people profess faith and integrate themselves with a spiritual program or script . . . or come to the immense opportunity to adjust and update the same in fact or emphasis.
A Religion News Service article reprinted in the Washington Post and elsewhere, including the Christian Century, described Zaytuna as “A college that requires the study of both Wordsworth and the Quran for graduation… now the first fully accredited Islamic university in America.”
Yet WASC approved only one program: a B.A. in Islamic law and theology.
In January 1953 the MGB was officially accused of “lack of vigilance” in hunting down the conspirators. The Soviet news agency Tass made the sensational announcement that for the past few years world Zionism and Western intelligence agencies had been conspiring with “a terrorist group” of Jewish doctors “to wipe out the leadership of the Soviet Union.” During the final two months of Stalin’s rule, the MGB struggled to demonstrate its heightened vigilance by pursuing the perpetrators of this non-existent plot. Its anti-Zionist campaign was, in reality, little more than a thinly disguised anti-Semitic pogrom. Shortly before Stalin’s sudden death in March 1953 Mitrokhin was ordered to investigate the alleged Zionist connections of the Pravda correspondent in Paris, Yuri Zhukov, who had come under suspicion because of his wife’s Jewish origins. Mitrokhin had the impression that Stalin’s brutal security supremo, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was planning to implicate Zhukov in the supposed Jewish doctor’s plot. A few weeks after Stalin’s funeral, however, Beria suddenly announced that the plot had never existed, and exonerated the alleged conspirators.
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Page 2. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
In the “Russian Section” (of the in-house library), the above title is appended “UR” for unread. BackChannels hopes to update that status soon. Even so, with the theme of anti-Semitism emerging on the second page of a mighty classic, so it appears, among the scholars, the same may inform the character of today’s “Solidarity” organizations and their updates on Soviet disinformation and propaganda programs that produced the privileged and the privileges of the Party.
These historic incidents and the portent of books like The Sword and The Shield may be easily accessed by the lay public as well as scholars, but time having become the new space, information has become the vegetation on the landscape, and large packages so easily spied on Amazon may not be so easily opened. With each passing year — the volume was published in 1999 — fewer and fewer readers, lay or scholar, are likely to have the experience of seminal works. For the most part, the public won’t know, won’t have personal or transmitted historic memory, giving cognizant autocrats freedom to deliver the past to their constituents.
The ultimate goal of state censorship is self-censorship among the citizenry. If you can get the people to police themselves, and each other, it takes part of the burden off the state and also makes people complicit in their own oppression. And so it’s disturbing to see things take this turn in Putin’s Russia. As the New York Times reports, Moscow bookstores removed from their shelves–voluntarily (sort of)–their copies of Maus, the pathbreaking graphic novel of Nazi crimes against the Jews. It’s the “voluntarily” part of this that stands out, and makes it clear that Putinism has not been, and will not be, good for the Jews of Russia.
When the Ferguson riots broke August 9, 2014, the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left got busy churning out “false flag” accusations involving New Establishment elements for incitement. In related search, “DHS Is Employing Agent Provocateurs and are Behind the . . .”; “Ferguson Witness: Government is Planting Provocateurs in . . .”; “Busted! ‘Agent Provocateur’ Caught Red Handed in Ferguson!” With such as those, BackChannels would happily invoke its mouthy “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” and remind that the old KGB proved adept at “false flag” manipulation of the Russian constituency with, among other episodes, the “Moscow Apartment Bombings”, today relentlessly examined and rehashed by Miami University scholar Karen Dawisha in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy (listed in the “Russian Section”).
The injury and death of Freddie Gray will receive — is receiving — the scrutiny deserved regardless of the public press “for justice” (without injustice proven but certainly suspected) and the spillover into violence.
This is what promotes that violence:
Malik Shabazz, president of Black Lawyers for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based group that called for the demonstration and advertised it on social media, told the crowd that he would release them in an hour, adding: “Shut it down if you want to! Shut it down!”
A city, a society, a long fought quest for equality and justice frequently achieved.
Yesterday in WND, conservative journalist Aaron Klein noted of Shabazz, “Not a single news media outlet quoted above informed its readers of that which a simple Google search of “Malik Shabazz” reveals. As highlighted on his Wikipedia page, until October 2013, Shabazz notoriously served as the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party.”
Klein goes on to note in relation to Shabazz episodes involving voter intimidation (“using such phrases as ‘white devil’ and ‘You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker'”), anti-Semitic invective, and incitement.
Violence and looting overtook much of West Baltimore on Monday, seriously injuring several police officers and leaving a store and several vehicles in flames.
Shutting Not Much Down, But Some appears to be continuing into the evening.
With generations of of the Left to Far Left in town, one’s ears may tune to the rhetoric to come: will it be accusing, ad hominem, venomous? Will it be responsible, encouraging inquiry, open observation, and discussion? In what part either?
Thanks to retreats like this one, it is Khamenei’s red lines, not Obama’s, that have determined the shape of the emerging deal—a fact that prompts the president’s critics to accuse him of fecklessness and/or naïveté. But these descriptions miss the mark. The president is not wedded to any set of specific demands. For him, the specific terms of the nuclear agreement are far less important than its mere existence. One of Obama’s greatest diplomatic successes is to have persuaded much of the world, including many of his critics, that the primary goal of his Iran diplomacy is to negotiate a nuclear arms-control agreement. In fact, the primary goal is détente with Iran.
BackChannels comment: It makes complete sense, and I hope it’s completely wrong — but it’s a complete and lucid analysis of a foreign policy that has been wrested from the awareness and perception of most Americans and fellow travelers.
BackChannels 