Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Islamosocialism

1. Peace Now, then Disaster:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/6978

2. What Israel lacks - Zionists!
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3375100,00.html

3. San Francisco State University's assaults on democracy:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27351

4. The Rogue Jew:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27338


5. March 13, 2007
GLOBAL VIEW
By BRET STEPHENS
Islamosocialism

March 13, 2007; Page A22
"It is a profound truth," declared the British Socialist Party in a 1911
manifesto, "that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." Not the
least of the oddities in the subsequent history of progressive politics is
that today it has become the principal vehicle in the West for Islamist
goals and policies.


Caroline Lucas, a member of the Green Party faction in the European
Parliament, is a longtime activist in anti-nuclear, animal-rights and
environmentalist causes, and not someone likely to describe herself as an
anti-feminist. Yet in June 2004, she joined British MPs Fiona Mactaggart
of Labor and Sarah Teather of the Liberal Democrats for a press conference
in the House of Commons organized by the Assembly for the Protection of
Hijab. The Assembly, better known as Pro-Hijab, is a pan-European
organization formed "to campaign nationally and internationally for the
protection of every Muslim woman's right to wear the Hijab in accordance
with her beliefs and for the protection of every woman's right to dress as
modestly and as comfortably as she pleases."

Once upon a time, feminists and socialists alike would have translated
that as "subservience to the patriarchy." Now they seem to have
rediscovered their roots as civil libertarians, at least when it's
politically expedient. Consider the issue of the Armenian genocide. In
1998, the French-speaking wing of Belgium's Socialist Party (PS)
co-sponsored legislation to criminalize denial of the Ottoman Empire's
murder of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians, much as Holocaust denial is
also against the law.

Yet for the past several years, the same PS has been blocking the process
of criminalization it helped initiate, presumably in the service of free
speech. "Additional legal and historical research," says Belgian Deputy
Prime Minister Laurette Onkelinx, remains to be done in ascertaining
exactly what happened in Anatolia in 1915.

Progressives have also been remarkably mindful of civil liberties in
matters of immigration. When the German state of Baden-W.ttemberg last
year required applicants for citizenship to answer a series of questions
regarding their personal views, the leader of the German Green Party,
Renate K.nast, denounced it as "immoral." "A country governed by law," she
argued, "cannot ask questions about moral values." Among the questions:
"Where do you stand on the statement that a wife should obey her husband
and that he can hit her if she fails to do so?"

Curiously, however, Europe's progressives have been somewhat less tolerant
on other issues concerning moral values and personal belief. Take
"Islamophobia," which progressives often consider akin to racism and have,
in some instances, sought to ban by legal means. In Britain last year,
Tony Blair's government enacted the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which
criminalized "threatening" comments against religious persons or beliefs.
Comedian Rowan Atkinson and author Salman Rushdie, among others, warned
that the law undermined basic rights of speech. But for London Mayor Ken
Livingstone it was not enough: He defined "Islamophobia" as
"discrimination, intolerance or hostility towards Islam and Muslims," and
regretted that criminal acts were not more broadly defined by the
legislation.

Since coming to office nearly seven years ago, Mr. Livingstone has become
a symbol of the marriage of the European left and the Islamist right. It's
a marriage of mutual convenience and, at least on one side, actual belief.
In the Netherlands, a recent study by the University of Amsterdam's
Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies found that 80% of immigrants --
the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslims -- voted for the Labor party
in recent elections, while the two main center-right parties received a
combined 4% of the immigrant vote. In neighboring Belgium, the left-wing
sociologist Jan Hertogen credits immigrants for "[saving] democracy" by
voting as a bloc against the secessionist and anti-immigrant Vlaams Belang
party.

For Muslim voters in Europe, the attractions of the Socialists are
several. Socialists have traditionally taken a more accommodating approach
to immigrants and asylum-seekers than their conservative rivals. They have
championed the welfare state and the benefits it offers poor newcomers.
They have promoted a multiculturalist ethos, which in practice has meant
respecting Muslim traditions even when they conflict with Western values.
In foreign policy, Socialists have often been anti-American and, by
extension, hostile to Israel. That hostility has only increased as Muslim
candidates have joined the Socialists' electoral slates and as the Muslim
vote has become ever more crucial to the Socialists' electoral margin.

More mysterious, however, at least as a matter of ideology, has been the
dalliance of the progressive left with the (Islamic) political right.
Self-styled progressives, after all, have spent the past four decades
championing the very freedoms that Islam most opposes: sexual and
reproductive freedoms, gay rights, freedom from religion, pornography and
various forms of artistic transgression, pacifism and so on. For those who
hold this form of politics dear, any long-term alliance with Islamic
politics ultimately becomes an ideological, if not a political, suicide
pact. One cannot, after all, champion the cause of universal liberation in
alliance with a movement that at its core stands for submission.

This is not, of course, the first time such a thing has happened in the
history of the progressive movement, or in European history. On the
contrary, it is the recurring theme. In the early 20th century, the
apostles of Fabianism -- George Bernard Shaw among them -- looked to the
Soviet Union for inspiration; in the 1960s the model was Mao; in the late
1970s, the great French philosopher Michel Foucault went to Iran to write
a paean to Khomeini's revolution. In nearly every case, the progressives
were, by later admission, deceived, but not before they had performed
their service as "useful idiots" to a totalitarian cause.

But the stakes today are different. At question for Europeans is not the
prevailing view of a distant country. The question is the shaping of their
own. Europe's liberal democrats were able, sometimes with outside help, to
preserve their values in the face of an outside threat. Whether they can
resist the temptations of Islamosocialism remains to be seen.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117375197026135001.html


6. Study: 68 percent of Israeli Jews fear Arab Israeli rebellion
Ahiya Raved YNET Published: 03.12.07, 19:00 / Israel News
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3375611,00.html

Over 63 percent of Israeli Jews avoid entering Arab towns, according to a
new study by the University of Haifa.

Some 68 percent of Jewish Israelis fear the possibility that Israeli Arabs
will start a popular revolution, and nearly 65 percent believe Arabs
endanger the security of the state due to their high birth rate.
Meanwhile,
60 percent of the Israeli Arab public fear mass expulsion.

7.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1173700686097&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Our World: Lame ducks and sitting ducks
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST


8. Duh:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/121829
GSS: Israeli-Arabs are Existential Danger to Israel

9. Darfurism:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/03/the_darfurians_and_the_sudanes.html

10. Eurotrash:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/03/the_hidden_premise_of_european.html

11. Intellectuals vs. "Intellectuals"
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/03/why_do_intellectuals_oppose_th.html






<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?