There are those who are able to think for themselves, who think outside the box and defy the hatred they were brought up on. Their minds and hearts opened up to learn about their so called “enemy” known as the Jews. Many of those who crave warm, peaceful, friendships with Jews and Israelis wouldn’t dare expressing their thoughts in public. However, there are a few courageous souls who decided to speak up loudly and clearly against anti-semitism (which I’d rather refer to as anti-Jewish sentiments), BDS and the anti-Israel propaganda not only in their own countries but also in the West.
Affection for Israel need have no discriminators, of course. This excerpt comes from Arab Canadian Fred Maroun:
Despite this, Israel still has a surprisingly diverse set of defendants, mostly among Jews, but also among non-Jews. These remarkable people have decided to stand for what’s right rather than for what’s hip. The non-Jewish pro-Israel activists come from all backgrounds: Arabs such as Palestinian Bassem Eid, Syrian Aboud Dandachi, Egyptian Hussein Aboubakr, Lebanese Jonathan El-Khoury, and Jordanian Mudar Zahran; non-Arab Muslims such as Kasim Hafeez; Christians such as Father Gabriel Naddaf; African-Americans such as Dumisani Washington; North American Natives such as Ryan Mervyn Bellerose; and many others.
Have we gone through a time warp, or is it Newton’s inexorable law of motion? Great racial progress has been made in the American justice system. There’s a black Attorney General, black Supreme Court Justice, black prosecutors, black police… Rarely is a black person tried by an all-white jury.
Yet despite this progress, we have lynch mobs in Ferguson, Miami, and Baltimore.
“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.
As our institutions acquire growing amounts of data about what best suits people in their different situations, a lot of us might well become increasingly willing, even eager to choose not to choose. When is that a mistake? The answer depends mostly on two crucial factors: whether it is a big bother or instead interesting and fun to make a choice; and whether people are likely to be better or worse off if they make decisions on their own. If the question involves mystery novels, vacation spots, religious affiliations, political candidates, or romantic partners, most of us would do best to make active choices. But if the question involves computer settings, retirement plans, mortgages, or health insurance, good default rules can be a blessing, even an act of mercy, for a lot of us.
If there are any regular readers of BackChannels, it should go without saying that “Shimmer” always applies.
Beyond the Islamist’s “jihad” and everyone else’s struggle with living authentically good lives — not saintly lives, just good ones 🙂 — the basis in Torah that becomes the source material for the transformation of Rome and of the Arab Peninsula may call for revisiting in the cause of greater Christian-Jewish-Muslim accommodation or melding.
With regard to the American Freedom of Speech concept, this ascribed to Patrick Henry and slipped to young minds early in their American education (at least for my generation) tells of both attitude and behavior set before ALL Americans: ” “I may not like what a man says, but I shall defend to the death his right to say it!”
The current demonizing and framing of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer and the democratic Left’s handling of the conservative voice reminds me of two Soviet Era fixtures: the KGB disinformation campaigns (reference Pacepa and Rychlak in the Russian Section of this blog’s library) and, as a philosophy, Hegelian dialectic, which, stating this offhand and without scholarship, would nonetheless seem to suggest that the branding takes place before a public possessed of its own independence and mind and inclined or stimulated to respond to the demonizing in a manner opposite the effort. Basically, Americans (who follow the news; who read independently; who argue around the dinner table or chat at the bar; and who have ready access to the Internet through computers, phones, and pads) are a deeply literate and informed people inclined toward freedom in the making up of their own minds.
Related
A mighty global community of humanist activists and public intellectuals has taken on the corrective updating of the medieval world. As much was probably not laid out in those terms, but whether out of outrage with “honor killing” or the horrors brought to the modern world by the al-Qaeda affiliates, they’re “in it” or engaged in producing greater coherence in global worldview.
“Locus of Control” may be thematic in the workout of motivation within the “Islamic Small Wars” and the resettling of attitudes and beliefs derived from cultural speech and texts, but there may be some way to go before understanding that variable. In the conservative ranks of the west, the reaction to Islamist ambition and Islamic teleology as presently set has been robust in a right-back-at-ya manner.
Some are saying I provoked this attack. But to kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it.
Sunday in Garland, Texas, a police officer was wounded in a battle that is part of a longstanding war: the war against the freedom of speech. Some people are blaming me for the Garland shooting — so I want to address that here.
United West — for those who might like to visit the art show with Tom Trento, this piece tops the United West web site: “MUHAMMAD ART EXHIBIT & CONTEST
Live Streaming now, Sunday May 3rd, 6pm-8pm Eastern,” and it features a three-hour YouTube video of the event.
I may copy the links to this blog’s “Alpha-Zulu” page — a catchall index of nouns relevant to BackChannels and linked to external sources — but suffice it to suggest that if one wanted to overview the intellectual drifts around a conflict area — and do it as a private citizen! — this online research capability plus social media provides for exactly that plus distillation.
Thanks to UC Berkeley and surrounding colleges like San Francisco State (where Bazian did his undergraduate studies and led a Palestinian takeover of that campus as class president), Bazian’s campaign keeps gaining legitimacy as it aids the endless war against both the United States and Israel by militant Islamists including those who are fighting U.S. troops abroad.
BackChannels intends to continue navigating the center of the political channels, but the above from the vigilant of the anti-Jihad brings up the greater issue that is the infiltration of American intellectual assets by supports of such as Hamas. This blog locates this kind of incursion in the great “Syndicate Red Brown Green” effort to obtain more resource through political mafia means and in the process weaken the United States and NATO and related circles of influence and power as arbiters of the lawful.
That’s a lot to say in a very short space, but basically, the politically lawless and most venal of the world — that “Khamenei-Putin” thing — have extraordinary access to cultural centers throughout North America and the world, and if they’re going to be confined by opposition and resistance, it will be through the methods of the lawful, from blogs to journals to tenure committees . . . .
Addendum – May 9, 2015
In his introduction to a timely volume of essays, The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, Paul Berman provides a witty summary of the efforts by university boycotters to frame their campaigns as “modern and progressive” when in fact they are “disgraceful and retrograde.” But the truth is that anti-Semitism never needed a sophisticated veneer in order to win susceptible recruits among the educated and the allegedly enlightened.
From The Awesome Conversation (May 9, 2015): “We’re going to be battling these forces back a long time. For that, there’s not better forum and place than the United States where free speech lives and malicious speech becomes recognized and known for the intellectual barbarism it represents.”
As deputy leader of the radical nationalist Jobbik party in Hungary, Szegedi co-founded the Hungarian Guard – a paramilitary formation which marched in uniform through Roma neighbourhoods.
And he blamed the Jews, as well as the Roma, for the ills of Hungarian society – until he found out that he himself was one. After several months of hesitation, during which the party leader even considered keeping him as the party’s “tame Jew” as a riposte to accusations of anti-Semitism, he walked out.
BackChannels 