Friday, February 23, 2007
Campus Nuremberg Rallies against Israel
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27042
Many of them are starring Israeli academic traitors.
2. More "progressive" Jewish anti-Semitism:
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/20773/Anti-Israel_'Progressives'_Run_With_The_Jackals_Of_Hate.html
3. Meet that Zionist:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1171894488324&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
4. Dan Margolit becomes an inciter:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1171894486792&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
5. Hollywood romances Pestilinian terror:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27056
6. Anti-Semitism at Stanford:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1171894488107&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
7. A REAL plan for peace with Iran:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/2
8. February 23, 2007
COMMENTARY
An Upside-Down World
By NICK COHEN
February 23, 2007; Page A10
LONDON -- The other day Ken Livingstone, the mayor of my hometown of
London, organized a conference on Islam and the West. It was a carefully
rigged affair in which handpicked speaker after handpicked speaker stood
up and announced that the democracies were to blame for the tidal wave of
murder sweeping the world. To provide a spurious air of balance, the
organizers invited a few people who dissented from the line of the Muslim
Brotherhood and its British allies. Agn.s Poirier, a French feminist, was
one of them, but she pulled out because although there were no special
facilities for Christians, Hindus and Jews, Mr. Livingstone had provided
separate prayer rooms for Muslim men and Muslim women.
She wanted to know: Does Ken Livingstone's idea of multiculturalism
acknowledge and condone segregation? It clearly does, but what made this
vignette of ethnic politics in a European city worth noting is that
commentators for the BBC and nearly every newspaper here describe Mr.
Livingstone as one of the most left-wing politicians in British public
life. Hardly any of them notices the weirdness of an apparent socialist
pandering to a reactionary strain of Islam, pushing its arguments and
accepting its dictates.
Mr. Livingstone's not alone. After suicide bombers massacred Londoners on
July 7, 2005, leftish rather than conservative papers held British foreign
policy responsible for the slaughters on the transport network. ("Blair's
Bombs," ran the headline in my own leftish New Statesman.) In any
university, you are more likely to hear campaigns for the rights of Muslim
women derided by postmodernists than by crusty conservative dons. Our Stop
the War coalition is an alliance of the white far left and the Islamist
far right, and George Galloway, its leader, and the first allegedly "far
left" MP to be elected to the British parliament in 50 years, is an
admirer of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah.
I could go on with specific examples, but the crucial point is the
pervasive European attitude to the Iraq catastrophe. As al Qaeda, the
Baathists and Shiite Islamists slaughter thousands, there is virtually no
sense that their successes are our defeats. Iraqi socialists and trade
unionists I know are close to despair. They turn for support to Europe,
the home of liberalism, feminism and socialism, and find that rich
democrats, liberals and feminists won't help them or even acknowledge
their existence.
There were plenty of leftish people in the 20th century who excused
communism, but they could at least say that communism was a left-wing
idea. Now overwhelmingly and everywhere you find people who scream their
heads off about the smallest sexist or racist remark, yet refuse to
confront ultra-reactionary movements that explicitly reject every
principle they profess to hold.
Why is the world upside down? In part, it is a measure of President Bush's
failure that anti-Americanism has swept out of the intelligentsia and
become mainstream in Britain. A country that was once the most
pro-American in Western Europe now derides Tony Blair for sticking with
the Atlantic alliance. But if Iraq has pummeled Mr. Blair's reputation, it
has also shone a very harsh light on the British and European left. No one
noticed it when the Berlin Wall came down, but the death of socialism gave
people who called themselves "left wing" a paradoxical advantage. They no
longer had a practical program they needed to defend and could go along
with ultra-right movements that would once have been taboo. In moments of
crisis, otherwise sane liberals will turn to these movements and be
reassured by the professed leftism of the protest organizers that they are
not making a nonsense of their beliefs.
If, that is, they have strong beliefs to abandon. In Europe and North
America extreme versions of multiculturalism and identity politics have
left a poisonous legacy. Far too many liberal-minded people think that is
somehow culturally imperialist to criticize reactionary movements and
ideas -- as long as they aren't European or American reactionary
movements. This delusion is everywhere. Until very recently our Labour
government was allowing its dealings with Britain's Muslim minority to be
controlled by an unelected group, the Muslim Council of Britain, which
stood for everything social democrats were against. In their desperate
attempts to ingratiate themselves, ministers gave its leader a knighthood
-- even though he had said that "death was too good" for Salman Rushdie,
who happens to be a British citizen as well as a great novelist.
Beyond the contortions and betrayals of liberal and leftish thinking lies
a simple emotion that I don't believe Americans take account of: an
insidious fear that has produced the ideal conditions for appeasement.
Radical Islam does worry Europeans but we are trying to prevent an
explosion by going along with Islamist victimhood. We blame ourselves for
the Islamist rage, in the hope that our admission of guilt will pacify our
enemies. We are scared, but not scared enough to take a stand.
I hope conservative American readers come to Britain. But if you do,
expect to find an upside-down world. People who call themselves liberals
or leftists will argue with you, and when they have finished you may
experience the strange realization that they have become far more
reactionary than you have ever been.
Mr. Cohen, a columnist for the Observer and the New Statesman, is the
author of "What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way" (Fourth Estate,
2007).
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117220083341716983.html
