"If it's not the crusades, it's the cartoons": Bush Remarks Lead to Applause During Steyn's Copenhagen Speech on the 10th Anniversary of the Danish Mohammed Cartoons

For the tenth anniversary of Flemming Rose's publication of the Danish Mohammed cartoons in Jyllands Posten, Mark Steyn made an appearance in Copenhagen along with fellow freespeechers Douglas Murray, Henryk Broder, and Vebjørn Selbekk. Invited at the behest of The Free Speech Society (Trykkefrihedsselskabet), they were listened to and applauded in a filled hall of the Danish Parliament.

Three or four highlights from the speech in Christiansborg's Landsting Hall:

• From all the attacks on free speech for the past decade or so, it has become apparent now that Muslims came with a deal to Western leaders:

Either we kill you.

Or you kill free speech.

• During a visit to the Bush White House, Steyn recalled during his talk, George W Bush told him that he didn't worry too much about the Islamic world's attitude towards the West. The Canadian author — and Bush's words — drew a long round of applause when Steyn quoted the 43rd president telling him why that was so:

If it's not the crusades, it's the cartoons.

(The Bush quote was repeated 10 minutes or so later, and got just as much applause the second time.)

• By contrast, what got the biggest boos was the story of Barack Obama's speech to

the United Nations in which the Apologizer-in-Chief said that "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

• In reference to the Hans Christian Andersen story, The Emperor's New Clothes, as well as to Steyn's recent article, The Emperor's Moral Narcissism, the Canadian pointed out that Denmark's most famous author had it wrong: in reality — at least in the 21st century — the little boy's remark that the emperor was naked would not cause gales of laughter along with sympathy for he who saw and for he who told the truth. Today, instead, the boy would be beaten to a pulp.
 
From Steyn Online:

1.30pm Saturday September 26th at the Landsting Hall at Christiansborg (the Danish Parliament)

Steyn marks the tenth anniversary of an important milestone in the struggle between a fainthearted west and a resurgent Islam: the publication of the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Mark will be appearing in Copenhagen along with Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the original Motoons, as well as fellow freespeechers Douglas Murray and Henryk Broder. Tickets are 100 krone - or, for members of the Free Press Society, 75 krone. One hundred krone sounds a lot, particularly if you say it like Doctor Evil, but it's about 15 bucks US or ten quid in sterling. You can email for tickets or more details about the event here. There's no need to write to them in Danish: the Danes speak better English than most English-speaking countries. If you're in the general area - Scandinavia, Europe, the Northern Hemisphere - we hope to see you there.

More on Mark Steyn from the files of No Pasarán

(Obrigado to Sarah Hoyt for the link)

Update — Mark Steyn in Copenhagen:
"Fight the hate speech fairies, and fight their islamic Enforcers!"

• VIDEO UPDATE: The MSM is "an industry that gives itself awards back and forth for courage and bravery—far more than soldiers and firemen do!": Mark Steyn's Speech in Copenhagen (Video!)

Dropping the Gavel: Boehner to Resign

This just in
(from the Wall Street Journal):
The speaker of the House,
John Boehner, is to resign October 30.

A few past Boehner-related posts:

• When American expatriates boast that Obama's election makes them proud to be Americans again (Mon Dieu ! You Like the New Speaker?!)

• Launch the Torpedoes (what would Rahm Emanuel do if he had Congressman John Boehner's job as House Minority Leader?)

• Caesarism — Obama’s Executive Order is an open invitation to the teeming masses around the world (we are paying people to come here illegally)

Thanks for the Instalink

When Far Leftists, Even Would-Be Assassins, Utter Historical Falsehoods, the MSM's Anchors Fail to Challenge Them

An Aleister post on Progressives Today shows all that's wrong with progressives as well as all that's wrong with the mainstream media (thanks to Ed Driscoll).

The radical leftist who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford 40 years ago is interviewed by CNN's Alisyn Camerota. This allows Sara Jane Moore to opine that she has always been a “pretty good citizen” in addition to making the following remark:

“I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in San Francisco people were saying this all the time [speaking about killing Ford]. Number one, we elect our presidents, we don’t appoint them, and Gerald Ford was appointed, and he was appointed by a crook, if you will pardon the expression. So, uh, it wasn’t a unique feeling. It was partly that there were other people who had talked about it.” 

There you have it, according to commenter John:

If she isn’t the poster child for netherworld leftist drivel I don’t know who is.

While Jeff H adds:

The “Dem/lib/prog/commie/satanist [sorry for the redundancy]®” mindset, in one short statement.

True enough, and of course what is most egregious are the historical falsehoods throughout her statement.

Sara Jane Moore makes it sound like Gerald Ford was a crook because Richard Nixon was a crook (whether either was, or both were, will not be debated here today) and suggests that assassination was the only option available because otherwise both were immune to punishment.

But the facts — the incontrovertible facts and the uncontroversial facts — say otherwise. Ford was not appointed. SJM's suggestion is that Nixon illegally took over a democratic process, and among the candidates he — illegally, unconstitutionally — considered to succeed him in the White House (crooks, all of them, in all probability) he finally singled out one Gerald Ford.

Of course, that's nonsense. Gerald Ford was not appointed, by Nixon or by anyone else, he became president when Nixon resigned. As (duly elected) vice-president, moreover, he was the only person who could (in an entirely legal fashion) succeed the duly elected and the prematurely departed president. As for the suggestion that either or both of these crooks were immune to punishment, doesn't Ford's accession to the Oval Office lie on the fact that Nixon was forced to give up his presidency and leave the White House?

So, yes, we elect our presidents, we don't appoint them, but Gerald Ford was not appointed, the duly elected vice-president duly succeeded the duly elected president when the latter was forced to resign.

What is most jarring, perhaps, is how none of these simple historical corrections are ever brought up, however briefly, by the MSM anchor.

By contrast, in the wake of the Center for Medical Progress's exposition of the shenanigans of Planned Parenthood, the organization's spokesmen as well as the Republicans backing their cause have been berated by the mainstream media journalists (or should that be "journalists", with quotation marks?), most recently George Stephanopoulos. Might not Alisyn Camerotahave, indeed, have been the MSM anchor who repeatedly interrupted David Daleiden?

Do you remember all the outrage the MSM types voiced after Rudy Giuliani suggested Barack Obama did not love his country?

In any case, this helps explain why the mainstream media is always standing accused of using double standards.

Self-victimization hoaxes are all too common because society never fails to reward them: Ahmed was arrested not because of his race or religion but because his “clock” looked like a bomb

It sure is hard being a Muslim, isn’t it?

quips Benny Huang.

You can’t even bring a briefcase with protruding wires to school without everybody thinking you’re a terrorist. Sheesh. 

As Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying, it's Potemkin villages all the way down. Benny Huang goes on to ironically heap praise on the kind at the center of the controversy.

Fourteen year-old Ahmed Mohamed has learned well how to play the victim. The MacArthur High School student caused a ruckus last week in Irving, Texas, when he brought a briefcase to school containing clock parts. He claimed it was a “clock” that he “invented” over the weekend—though it now appears evident that he didn’t really invent anything. According to Ahmed, he brought it to school to impress his engineering teacher. When the briefcase began beeping during English class, the teacher mistook it for a bomb and called the principal. 

 … Ahmed has since been invited to bring his briefcase to the White House to meet President Obama. Oddly enough, the Secret Service would never in a million years allow a similar device anywhere near the President of the United States if it weren’t pre-cleared; and for good reason.

 … on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes,” [when] Hayes asked Ahmed how it felt to go through this whole ordeal Ahmed replied, “I feel really well after, cause before I didn’t think I was going to get any support because I’m a Muslim boy.” I’m sounding the BS alarm. He captured the world’s sympathy because he’s a Muslim boy. I don’t believe for a moment that he could not have foreseen this outpouring of support (and money).

He continued: “So I thought I was just going to be another victim of injustice. But thanks to all my supporters on social media I got this far, thanks to you guys…I see it as a way of people sending a message to the rest of the world that just because something happens to you because of who you are, no matter what you do, people have your back.”

See how he’s framed the issue? This is something that “happened” to him because of “who [he is.]” The implication is clear: this whole situation would have played out differently if he had been a fair-skinned Christian lad. Baloney. Any kid of any race or religion who brought the same item to school would have caused the same stir. The only difference I can see is that a white Christian would not have had the Islamophobia card to play. Consequently, he would not have had the support of a dedicated “civil rights” organization, would not have been invited to the White House, would not have been financially rewarded with multiple crowdsourcing campaigns, and would not have appeared on MSNBC.

Ahmed was arrested not because of his race or religion but because his “clock” looked like a bomb. It’s a briefcase with a bunch of wires and a circuit board. Nor are clocks and bombs mutually exclusive. Time bombs contain clocks. After showing his “clock” to two teachers, both of them told him that it looked a lot like a bomb. His engineering teacher, the one he was supposedly trying to impress, even advised him not to take it to other classes. 

There are some clues that Ahmed baited school officials by knowingly bringing a suspicious device to school. It might have been another self-victimization hoax, an attempt to “prove” other people’s prejudices. Self-victimization hoaxes are all too common because society never fails to reward them. I won’t say for certain that that’s what happened. It’s possible that he really did build a clock to impress his engineering teacher, stumbled into this mess quite by accident, then decided to capitalize on his victimhood. In any case, he is trying to capitalize on his victimhood—and not just financially, though he’s doing that too.

 … I will say this: the teachers, the principal, and the police did nothing wrong except failing to call his parents immediately. They should have done that. The crybabies at CAIR can go stick it. This is not an Islamophobic conspiracy.

  … The situation smells as fishy as last week’s sushi. But I can say with certainty that young Mr. Mohamed, the “inventor” whose “invention” was actually mass-produced by Radio Shack decades before he was born, is milking this for all it’s worth. What he wants is not equal treatment but for Muslims to be handled with kiddy gloves. His goal, and that of CAIR, is to perpetuate the Muslim-as-victim myth so that reasonable people will second-guess their own motives when they see Muslims acting suspiciously. Don’t be fooled by this professional victim.

World Begs U.S. To Use Military Force in Syria So They Can Bitch About It Later

World leaders met at the United Nations today to beg the United States to use military force to stem the ever-growing humanitarian disaster in Syria

quips DuffleBlog's Dirk Diggler (thanks to Sarah Hoyt),

knowing full well they will then turn around and blame the US shortly thereafter.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said, “We call upon the world’s greatest nation — the United States — to help bring peace to this terrible civil war, because, fuck it, none of us want to.”

“And the best part is, when this whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket — which, quite frankly, happens almost every time you intervene in a multi-sided civil war in a God-forsaken third-world country — none of us are responsible for it!” Ki-Moon added.

The “Blame America First” policy is a time-honored tradition in international relations, dating back to the outrage over the US Air Force’s targeted bombing campaign against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, followed by consternation over America’s idleness while the same Khmer Rouge murdered millions of their own countrymen.

“It’s pretty shameful, but hey, it got me a Pulitzer prize,” said Sydney Schanberg, whose two-faced coverage of the war in Cambodia in the New York Times inspired the Oscar-winning film, The Killing Fields.

“Amateurs tend to blame America first and then they’re done with it,” said anti-war MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.  “Just this past week, Vox’s Amanda Taub blamed the U.S. for the entire Syrian Civil War instead of blaming, well, the Syrians themselves.”

“But that’s the type of ‘Blame America First’ coverage that gets you a few thousand clicks at best,” Chomsky continued. “If you really want Oscars, Pulitzers, and charity donations, you have to sucker the US into intervening, then blame America!”

“Just look at Somalia: Send the U.S. military to help deal with a famine, then, boom! A firefight, a downed Black Hawk helicopter, and before you know it, a blockbuster movie from Michael Bay!” he concluded.

Read the whole thing™