Racist code words and lies, Menzies is an excellent
example of “objective journalism.”
I was sent an article this morning from August 5, written by a freelance journalist named David Menzies, detailing his “shocking” experience of not only being assa…
Tag: Islamophobia
bastard.logic: Facts vs. Narrative, Utoya Edition
by matttbastard Norwegian journalist Magnus Nome was in the good ol’ US of A when self-styled counterjihadist crusader Anders Breivik decided to escalate his murderous fantasies about Eurabian conquest from Outer Wingnuttia into the real world. Thankfully, CNN, Fox News … Continue reading →
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Oslo vs Tuscan: Asymmetric Reactions
When Jared Loughner shot dead six people in Tuscan in an attempted murder of congresswoman Gabby Giffords, there was several interesting reactions outside of the obviously deserved expressions of sympathy and horror at the tragedy. It is worth comparin…
Continue readingPushed to the Left and Loving It: Sorry Ezra. You Don’t Get Off That Easily
Given that Ezra Levant attacks Muslims at every opportunity, I was curious what he would have to say about the Norwegian disaster, and he didn’t disappoint.First off, he’s right to say that this was not a religious issue. Anders Breivik was not a Chri…
Continue readingPushed to the Left and Loving It: From Archie Bunker to Don Cherry: Why Words Matter
One of my favourite episodes of All in the Family was the one where Archie Bunker is singled out by a group of “concerned Americans” and asked to join their club. At his first meeting he has a rude awakening, when they all put on white sheets.For sever…
Continue readingLeftist Jab: Hack Pundit Of The Week: Mark Steyn
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” -Upton SinclairRegardless of the politics of Anders Behring Breivik, his politics weren’t responsible for his alleged crime. Holding ext…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Norway: Terrible Side-Effect of Islamophobia
The horror, tragedy and seeming madness of the killing spree in Norway are almost impossible to imagine. There is a temptation to focus on the mourning and solidarity with people in Norway and to resist analysis as something cold and foreign to the hum…
Continue readingThey Call Me "Mr. Sinister": Mark Steyn Sees The Truth
And then starts tap dancing as fast as he can. Sorry Mark, you are not being “fitted up”, but called out. No need to fit you up, your writing speaks for itself.Some of us believe this is an early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war. If the insurgents em…
Continue readingPushed to the Left and Loving It: I’m No Soothsayer But I Warned You
It doesn’t take a genius to predict what will happen when hatred becomes policy. After the Norway attack became public, Peter MacKay suggested that it is still a volatile world.It has been, and always will be, a volatile world, which is why it’s the re…
Continue readingCoren Seems To Think We, Progressives, Are ‘Sewers’ And Please Let’s Not Forget The Victims of The Senseless Tragedy in Norway and May They Never Lose Their Resolve
Jymn published the vile and despicable blogging of Michael ‘cue-ball’ head Coren, earlier today; that miserable blog where he seems to imply that those Norwegian victims seemed to deserve what happened to them. Now, in Coren’s comment section, Coren seems to be calling those of us who dare to criticize him or anyone . . . → Read More: Coren Seems To Think We, Progressives, Are ‘Sewers’ And Please Let’s Not Forget The Victims of The Senseless Tragedy in Norway and May They Never Lose Their Resolve
Continue readingPushed to the Left and Loving It: Sun TV, Ezra Levant and Why the Danish Cartoons Matter
Ezra Levant, long time neocon insider and self-proclaimed stockaholic (one of 3 Stockwell Day fans), is among the bombastic characters on Fox News North (Sun TV).He used to run a small magazine (now out of business), where he published the infamous Dan…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Hate Speech, Religious Freedoms, and Islamophobia
Competing with the concurrent LGBT Pride parade in Toronto, a local imam took it upon himself to very publicly condemn homosexuality, referencing how Islamic law instructs us to execute those caught in the act. Sigh, it really would be so much easier d…
Continue readingPushed to the Left and Loving It: Harperite Pal Geert Wilders Acquitted of Hate Speech Charges
The man invited by the Harperites to speak at this year’s Tulip Festival, Geert Wilders, has been acquitted of hate crime charges.Wilders has also appeared on Fox News North and had Ezra Levant in such a tizzy they had to administer smelling salts, in …
Continue readingFive of Five: God’s Word on the Election
Jim Blake is the Calgary based head of Concerned Christians Canada, an Evangelical pressure group with political ambitions. Jim is none too happy about the election of Naheed Nenshi as Calgary’s new mayor.He starts off by quoting the prophet Hosea:The…
Continue readingCanadian Firebrand: Islamophobia: The New Anti-Semitism
A fascinating article by Daniel Luban in Tablet magazine. Luban argues that Islamophobia as it is developing in North American and Europe has strong parallels to traditional anti-Semitism and examines the furor over the “9-11 mosque” as the latest and most fervent example of this. Here’s an excerpt: many of
Continue readingAndy Lehrer: Islamophobia: The New Anti-Semitism
A fascinating article by Daniel Luban in Tablet magazine. Luban argues that Islamophobia as it is developing in North American and Europe has strong parallels to traditional anti-Semitism and examines the furor over the “9-11 mosque” as the latest and most fervent example of this. Here’s an excerpt:
many of the tropes of classic anti-Semitism have been revived and given new force on the American right. Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious conspiracy breeding within Western society, pledging allegiance to an alien power, conspiring with allies at the highest levels of government to overturn the existing order. Because the propagators of these conspiracy theories are not anti-Semitic but militantly pro-Israel, and because their targets are not Jews but Muslims, the ADL and other Jewish groups have had little to say about them. But since the election of President Barack Obama, this Islamophobic discourse has rapidly intensified.
While the political operatives behind the anti-mosque campaign speak the language of nativism and American exceptionalism, their ideology is itself something of a European import. Most of the tropes of the American “anti-jihadists,” as they call themselves, are taken from European models: a “creeping” imposition of sharia, Muslim allegiance to the ummah rather than to the nation-state, the coming demographic crisis as Muslims outbreed their Judeo-Christian counterparts. In recent years the call-to-arms about the impending Islamicization of Europe has become a well-worn genre, ranging from more sophisticated treatments like Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe to cruder polemics like Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia.
It would be a mistake to seek too precise a correspondence between the new Islamophobia and the old anti-Semitism, which differ in some key respects. Jews have never threatened to become a numerical majority, or even a sizable minority, in any European country, so anxiety about Jewish power naturally gravitated toward the myth of the shadowy elite manipulating the majority from behind the scenes. By contrast, anti-Muslim anxiety has focused on the supposed demographic threat posed by Muslims, in which the dusky hordes overwhelm the West by sheer weight of numbers. (“The sons of Allah breed like rats,” as the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci put it.) It may be that in many ways this Islamophobia shares more of the tropes of traditional anti-Catholicism than classic anti-Semitism.
But if the tropes do not always line up, there is some notable continuity in the players involved. One of the most striking stories of recent years has been the realignment of segments of the European far right behind a form of militant support for Israel. Much of the traditional neofascist right remains both anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic, but savvier far-right leaders have realized that by dropping the anti-Semitic elements of their platforms and doubling down on Islamophobia, they can tap into a new base of support from pro-Israel hawks across the Atlantic. Both the British National Party and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium have gone this route, although it remains questionable whether the move away from anti-Semitism is more than skin-deep. (The Vlaams Belang’s predecessor party, for instance, was disbanded after a controversy concerning Holocaust-denying statements made by one of its top officials.) Equally striking has been the rise of Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch politician whose Islamophobia, virulent enough to draw the condemnation of even the ADL, has made him a darling of “anti-jihadists” in the United States.
The entire essay is available here. The Atlantic Monthly‘s Jeffrey Goldberg makes a similar point in his response to Reverend Franklin Graham’s claim that “president [Obama]’s problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim”. Goldberg retorts, “This kind of rhetoric has a strange historical antecedent in Jewish history. In the 1400s, in Spain, a movement arose that questioned the sincerity of those Jews who had previously converted to Catholicism,” and adds that “Anti-Muslim sentiment in America today has many of the hallmarks of the anti-Semitism of yesteryear.”
Tablet is a “daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture” and carries articles from across the political spectrum (for instance here‘s a piece against the one-state solution) as well as non-political pieces.It’s refreshing to see that at a time when Jewish publications and the Jewish community is under increasing pressure to submit to groupthink, Tablet is willing to publish dissenting pieces. I doubt Luban’s piece or anything like it would be published by the Canadian Jewish News, for instance.
Continue readingAndy Lehrer: Islamophobia: The New Anti-Semitism
A fascinating article by Daniel Luban in Tablet magazine. Luban argues that Islamophobia as it is developing in North American and Europe has strong parallels to traditional anti-Semitism and examines the furor over the “9-11 mosque” as the latest and most fervent example of this. Here’s an excerpt: many of
Continue readingAndy Lehrer's Firebrand blog: Islamophobia: The New Anti-Semitism
A fascinating article by Daniel Luban in Tablet magazine. Luban argues that Islamophobia as it is developing in North American and Europe has strong parallels to traditional anti-Semitism and examines the furor over the “9-11 mosque” as the latest and most fervent example of this. Here’s an excerpt: many of
Continue readingbastard.logic: Rima Fakih’s Trojan Bikini
by matttbastard Sometimes it takes well over a thousand words to highlight the absurdity of the viral xenophobia that periodically sweeps over the more Islamophobic denziens of Outer Wingnuttia. This time it would (at first) appear that a mere picture will suffice: Of course, as Echidne … Continue reading →
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