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)

Among the orations at Copenhagen's 10th anniversary commemoration of the Mohammed cartoons was the 50-minute speech of Mark Steyn (YouTube video).

A couple of quick excerpts:
• on the "courage" of the media: 19:35
• on meeting President Bush in the Oval Office: 14:41
(Dubya's memorable line gets just as much applause when repeated at 33:31)

Mark Steyn remembers Saturday September 26:

we were a merry band, all things considered, at Christiansborg Castle. I thank my friend Katrine Winkel Holm, of the Danish Free Press Society, and her delightful sister, Marie Krarup, defense spokeslady for the Danish People's Party, for arranging to host us behind the fortress-like walls of Parliament - so nobody could bust in and shoot us, as they did at a similar free-speech event in February. I was heartened to meet fellow free-speechers who had traveled from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Britain and even Canada. My fellow panelists included Henryk Broder, author of The Last Days of Europe; Vebjørn Selbekk, whom the quislings of Norway's government treated disgracefully for publishing the cartoons; and Douglas Murray, who's already written up the event in The Spectator:

My main message for the audience was to keep in mind that freedom has never been particularly popular. Most people prefer their security and comforts to freedom and although history shows that although everyone benefits from being free, it has always been a small minority who actually pursue and protect the cause. I suppose one has to wrestle whatever comfort one can from that. It was a terrible thing to see the security now needed in Denmark, as elsewhere, for people who are simply asserting their right to write and draw what they want, even – shock horror – things that might be mildly critical of the founder of one religion. That a journalist or historian should need bodyguards in 21^st century in an indictment on our continent. But still, surveying the room on Saturday I think we've got enough people. A few Danes, a few Swedes and Norwegians. A few Americans and a couple of Brits might be all that is needed. Perhaps by the 15^th anniversary things will be better.

Perhaps. On Europe's present course, though, the security we'll need in 2020 doesn't bear thinking about. But I'll be there.

~A transcript of Vebjørn Selbekk's powerful speech can be found here:

We had interviewed leading Norwegian cartoonists. One of them was Finn Graaf. He is maybe the hardest hitting cartoonist in the history of the Norwegian press. One of his specialities is drawing Israeli prime ministers as Holocaust camp guards. He has done that with almost every Israeli prime minister since Menachem Begin in the late Seventies.
But Mister Graff told us that he would never draw the prophet Mohammad. Not because he had more respect towards the Muslim faith than other religions or ideologies. No, he bluntly put it this way in the interview:

'I have to draw the line somewhere. I do not want to get my throat cut. Therefore I will refrain from drawing Muhammad.'

One-way "hard-hitting" isn't really hard-hitting at all, is it? As I said ten years ago, it's the easiest thing in the world to be tediously provocative with those who refuse to be provoked.

The other speeches can be found at Free Press TV (tak til Hodjapjort)

 

Related: Wild Seadogs of the Øresund
(tack sä mycket till Instapundit).
 
More on Mark Steyn from the files of No Pasarán

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

The Free Speech Society's Asger Bonnevie has a (Danish-language) report on The Danish Muhammed Crisis in Retrospect, the 10th anniversary commemoration in Christiansborg castle of Flemming Rose's publication of the Mohammed cartoons.

Translated from Danish:

Make use of the freedom of expression and insist on living as free people. That was the rallying cry as the Free Speech Society gathered around four free speech activists on the occasion of the Muhammad drawings' 10th anniversary.

On the list of speakers were Henryk Broder, Vebjørn Selbekk, Douglas Murray, and Mark Steyn.

The hall had been booked by Marie Krarup [MP of the Danish People's Party], and the speeches were all conducted in English. The sun was high in the sky, and the Landstings Hall was full. 

”Record the state of affairs, so we can remember them”

Henryk Broder, the German journalist and author Hurra, wir kapitulieren! [Hooray, We're Surrendering!] was first to speak. Broder is pessimistic about progress in Europe since the cartoon crisis. 

In the EU system, he sees parallels to the Soviet Union's last days and urges that we witness to what happens in those years, so people in the future will have a record. In conclusion, he called for avoiding complacency in the face of anti-democratic forces.

”Is freedom defended by political arguments, or religious arguments?”

Vebjørn Selbekk is editor of the Norwegian newspaper Dagen [The Day]. In the name of free speech, he reprinted the 12 cartoons from Jyllands-Posten in 2006.

Selbekk had already noticed the trends, but he refused to give terrorists a veto over editorial content. Shortly there after, he was under police protection, living at a secret address.

The Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet, or AP) stabbed him in the back, and he was made a scapegoat. Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere spoke of "extremists on both sides," as if the opposing parties were on an equal footing. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg went a step further, suggesting there was even a "joint responsibility" for the embassy attacks.

What drives Selbekk is indignation that people should be afraid to express their opinions. Extremists hate our values ​​and our freedoms, and all will have to deal with this threat.

This is done by not putting restraints on one's utterances — using as much free speech as you like. If people do not do that, assessed Vebjørn Selbekk, then the extremists win. Lately Selbekk has received an award for his efforts. On August 31, 2015, he received the Fritt Ord Honors Prize for his principled defense of free speech.

”When the history of this era will be written, the name of Denmark will be talked about with enormous pride!”

The next speaker was Douglas Murray. He is an English author, journalist, and commentator. He led the think tank Centre for Social Cohesion from 2007-2011 and is now director of the Henry Jackson Society.

His opening remarks with a topical example. The police had approached a London gallery and removed one of the works. The work represented a potential risk, according to the police, and there was uncertainty whether the bill for extra police manpower would possibly be forwarded to the artist or to the gallery owner. Murray was furious at this and refuses to place trust in a police force that acts as art critics.

Murray believes that the ruling class has internalized the fatwa against the Muhammad cartoons. This must be the lesson of the past decade. A majority of the press and a majority of artists, in his opinion, are cowards.

He accused European politicians to only deal with secondary issues, i.e., with the symptoms of the real problem: whether Islam is a religion of peace or not.

Freedom of speech is not only a right, thinks Murray, it is a necessity. We need to hear dissident voices and opposing views, because only if we can hear them, can we take well-informed decisions and avoid mistakes.

Douglas Murray finished by paying tribute to Denmark's example.

“'If it is not the crusades, it is the cartoons'”

The final speaker was the Canadian-American writer and commentator Mark Steyn.

Steyn began with a variation on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes. In Steyn's version, the "multi culti emperor" turned out not to be wearing clothes either. what differed from the original is that no one would listen to the boy, and nor was he thanked. We have perverted Hans Christian Andersen, said Steyn, and in the 22st century the boy is punished.

Back then, Mark Steyn paid a visit to the White House, where he asked George W. Bush about his assessment of the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons. The president slightly shook his head:

If it is not the crusades, it is the cartoons. They are always angry about something.

This anecdote was rewarded in the Landsting Hall with applause.

Steyn excoriated the international press for bending to the Islamists' wishes regarding the prohibition of images. Instead of a rational response to violence and threats, one that Steyn felt would lead to the reprinting of the cartoons on all the world's newspapers' front pages, we stand in a situation where CNN pixielates the Muhammad cartoons.

This is particularly shameful in view of the fact of how the media is otherwise loving to go around presenting one award for journalistic courage after another.

Steyn argued that the problem is Western society's lack of confidence. We no longer believe in ourselves and our fundamental values. We are willing to sacrifice them. The aim of terrorism is to hijack the debate and to terrorize us into refraining from certain subjects. And to great success.

Steyn's conclusion was a call to continue to live as free people. Use the freedom of expression and share the risk, so no matter how many people the terrorists kill, they can not succeed in their enterprise.

Fight the hate speech fairies, and their islamic Enforcers. We are free!

• More on Steyn's oration: Bush Remarks Lead to Applause During Steyn's Copenhagen Speech on the 10th Anniversary of the Danish Mohammed Cartoons

• 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)

• More on Mark Steyn from the files of No Pasarán

"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™

The party of the Kennedy brothers and Daniel Patrick Moynihan is now the party of Valerie Jarrett and Terrence Bean

MSNBC host Chris Matthews and a panel of guests sneered at Appalachian whites last week on Matthews’s Hardball show

writes Benny Huang.

No one on Matthew’s panel betrayed the slightest self-consciousness when speaking in condescending tones about the white working class. It’s hard to imagine any of them speaking the same way about blacks with “attitude” living in urban areas.

“There is part of that white community that—they missed—they didn’t get to go to good colleges or college,” Matthews continued. “They feel like the Democrats have been focused on the elites and the minorities and they’ve been missed somehow.”

That’s because they have. Those working class whites Matthews speaks of, commonly known as “bitter clingers,” are making a slow but justifiable exit from the Democratic Party. When Democrats take a stand against coal, when they bring in boatloads of legal and illegal immigrants, when they make it difficult to exercise second amendment rights, when they support racial discrimination against whites (“affirmative action”), the message that the white working class hears is “not welcome.” And for good reason.

Liberals, who dominate the party and the media—two institutions that are often difficult to distinguish—have employed an effective pincer maneuver against the American majority. They launch their attack from above and below, appealing to the rich, but also to perpetual wards of the state, or what I call “the non-working class.” Liberals will never admit that such a class exists. Perpetual wards of the state are, in their estimation, still part of the working class…even though they don’t work.

It should be noted here that the white working class is not exclusively rural, Appalachian, or even southern. There are white working class people in all fifty states as well as in urban areas. The dwindling Irish Catholic population of South Boston is a good example of working class whites who are neither rural nor southern, though they have traditionally voted Democratic just the same.

… Even Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses after the Supreme Court invented a right to same-sex marriage, was elected as a Democrat. Davis was falsely tagged as a Republican in a recent New York Times story. The reporters in this instance assumed that she was a Republican because New Yorkers can’t imagine a person like Davis voting Democrat. It’s weird, I know. In Kim Davis’s neck of the woods, “Democrat” is not synonymous with moonbat leftist. 

The party apparatus still wants the white working class’s support because a vote’s a vote and a win’s a win. Unfortunately, these working class whites tend to be more moderate which poses a problem for the urban elite who dominate the modern liberal establishment. They don’t want to tolerate a contingent within the party that might temper its platform.

The Democratic Party is consequently roiled by a quiet civil war that no one wants to acknowledge. Don’t be fooled for a moment, however, into thinking that the war is fought between the liberal elite and the white working class. The white working class doesn’t have enough clout in the party to stand as a belligerent in this conflict. It’s a war between those who still want to make a bid for the white working class vote and those who find them so embarrassing that they’d prefer to send them packing.

Hillary Clinton made a bid for the white working class vote in 2008 and she’s been paying for it ever since. The media are actually quite critical of Mrs. Clinton, treating her almost like a Republican. The Clinton email server saga has not been dismissed as a “phony scandal” as most Democratic scandals are. Why might that be? My theory is that Hillary made the fourth estate very angry in 2008 when she campaigned against their preferred candidate, Barack Obama, and she has not yet earned her way back into their good graces.

The Clinton campaign made an effort to appeal to more traditional Democrats—a category which includes, but is not limited to, the white working class—while the Obama campaign courted the youth vote, minorities, and unabashed progressives. It was a big gamble on Hillary’s part and she lost. There just weren’t enough traditional Democrats in the party in 2008 and there are even fewer today. The party of the Kennedy brothers and Daniel Patrick Moynihan is now the party of Valerie Jarrett and Terrence Bean.

 … In 2008, Hillary found out that she couldn’t ride to victory with Clintonian overtures to the white working class, either because they weren’t that enthused about her, or because the demographics of the party had shifted. Both factors were probably in play.

Hillary lost more than just the nomination. She lost the adoration of the liberal elite which she still hasn’t won back. They won’t forgive her for pandering to what they perceive to be the worst elements of the party—the Kim Davis wing, the Southie Irish wing, the bitter clingers.

The Democratic Party is suffering from something of an identity crisis. A vestigial constituency group truly embarrasses them to the point that they often can’t hide their disdain when speaking of them, yet they still need their vote. The party is sharply divided as to whether this demographic group, which is already halfway out the door, is worth keeping.

Instead of rushing to grant asylum to hundreds of thousands of nameless Syrian refugees, the Western world should seek solutions in the Middle East — and urge the vaunted Islamic “ummah” to take in its own refugees

It has become well-accepted in the West that Europe and the United States ought to welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq

writes Ben Shapiro (shookhran to Luís Afonso).

 … this sounds wonderful when we consider the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Middle East. Boosted by the absence of any Western leadership, ISIS has driven millions from Iraq and Syria, and Afghanistan continues to degrade into chaos. But before the West mainlines Muslim immigrants into its veins, it’s worthwhile to stop and ask two questions: First, why the media focus on the humanitarian crisis now? Second, who are these refugees?

Why The Focus Now? Europe’s refugee crisis has unfolded over the last year, but only now seems to have broken through into mainstream media coverage. That coverage sprang from a viral photo of a three-year-old Syrian boy’s corpse washed up on the beaches of Turkey. According to media coverage, the boy’s mother and brother drowned as well, while his father lived.

The photo certainly breaks your heart. But where were all the photos of gassed children from Bashar Assad’s Syria when President Obama drew a red line, and then promptly violated it? Where are all the photos of babies beheaded by ISIS? Why did this photo make the front pages?

The answer: the other photos would have driven more Middle East involvement from the West. The current photo does not. It merely demands that Europe accept more Muslims from the Middle East into its midst, without solving any of the underlying problems driving the refugee crisis in the first place. It pushes the notion that the West somehow owes membership to people who may very well reject the most basic tenets of the West.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper rightly pointed out this week that refugee policy will not solve the crisis in the Middle East. Canada, he said, must “fight the root cause of the problem and that is the violent campaign being waged against these people by ISIS.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed, explaining, “Because of the onslaught of militant Islam in the Middle East and in Africa, Europe is facing the waves, a tsunami of people tragically fleeing from the worst crimes that humanity has seen since the Holocaust.” But the media have no interest in fighting ISIS or Bashar Assad, so Harper’s and Netanyahu’s comments take a back seat to the moral posturing of various nations competing to see who can accept the most refugees.

Who Are These Refugees? That competition to accept refugees would be fine if we knew that the refugees plan on assimilating into Western notions of civilized society, and if we knew that they were indeed victims of radical Muslim atrocities. Unfortunately, we know neither. It is deeply suspicious that major Muslim countries that do not border Syria refuse to take in large numbers of refugees, except for Algeria and Egypt.

Turkey has taken in nearly two million refugees, according to the United Nations, and keeps the vast majority in refugee camps — a typical practice in a region that has kept Arab refugees from the 1948 war of Israeli independence in Arab-run camps for seven decades. Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq have taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees as well, but all border the chaotic, collapsing Syria, and thus have limited choice in the matter. Iran has taken in no refugees. Neither have Pakistan, Indonesia, or any of the other dozens of member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain all refused to take any refugees, and explicitly cited the risk of terrorists among the refugees, according to The Guardian (UK).

These fears are not without merit, as even Obama administration officials have acknowledged: back in February, director of the National Counterterrorism Center Nicholas Rasmussen called Syrian refugees “clearly a population of concern.” FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach explained, “Databases don’t [have] the information on those individuals, and that’s the concern. On Tuesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that terrorist infiltration was “a possibility. I mean, you can’t, you can’t dismiss that out of hand.” He then added, “Obviously, if you look at those images though, it’s pretty clear that the great majority of these people are innocent families.”

Actually, images show a disproportionate number of young males in crowds of refugees. And those images reflect statistical reality: according to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Mediterranean Sea refugees are overwhelmingly male: just 13 percent are women, and just 15 percent are children. The other 72 percent are men. Compare that population to the refugees in the Middle East from the same conflicts: 49.5 percent male, and 50.5 percent female, with 38.5 percent under the age of 12. Those are wildly different populations.

And they act in wildly different ways. According to The Daily Mail (UK), Syrian refugees have turned the Greek island of Lesbos into a “war zone,” and refugees in Hungary taunted police with Islamic chants of “Allahu Akbar.” Hungarian national television channel M1 reported on Tuesday that “Islamist terrorists, disguised as refugees, have shown up in Europe… Many who are now illegal immigrants fought alongside Islamic State before.”

 … Humanitarian concerns are deeply important. But so is maintaining the character of the West, and maintaining the security of its citizens. Instead of rushing to grant asylum to hundreds of thousands of nameless Syrian refugees, the Western world should seek solutions in the Middle East — and urge the vaunted Islamic “ummah” to take in its own refugees.

The First Rule of MSM News Coverage

Here is the first rule of “mainstream” news coverage in America

reports Andrew Klavan (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

Whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative; when those prejudices and illusions are contradicted, the incident is considered an aberration — and treating it as representative is deemed hateful.

It was by satirizing that rule that Breitbart’s mustache-twirling evil-doer Ben Shapiro once again got himself in hot water this week. The flagrantly brainy provocateur ran a headline describing the heart-shredding murder in Virginia of a local TV reporter and her cameraman: “Black, Gay Reporter Murders Straight, White Journalists — Media Blame the Gun.” The headline violated mainstream media protocol by being completely true while running counter to the leftist narrative. The two straight white people had in fact been killed by a mentally ill black gay Obama supporter who saw micro-aggressions everywhere and played the race card whenever he could.

 … When a police officer is forced to kill a street thug, he’s a white officer killing a black teen. When yet another Islamist murders an infidel or a fellow Muslim, he’s just some random guy. When a racist lunatic kills black people, the Confederate flag must come down. I’m still waiting for calls to ban the rainbow flag after the Virginia incident, or for a mainstream discussion on whether the whole idea of micro-aggressions is the chimeric imagining of spoiled, childish, over-indulged brats who wouldn’t know oppression if it beheaded them or…  no, wait, that’s actually the only option.

I’m not a Donald Trump supporter because I don’t think he represents my beliefs, but the success of his loud-mouthery should send a message to the mainstream news media. The message is this: You lie to us every day and we hate you for it. I’d like to add, Your dishonest narrative isn’t fooling anybody, but I’m sure it is. But not all the people, and not all of the time.

When Will ABC News Release the Full Vester Flanagan Manifesto?

The metastasizing migrant catastrophe is not the result of famine or drought or disease; It is man-made and should have been ­prevented

The photo of the dead Syrian child who washed ashore in Turkey is heartbreaking

admits the New York Post's Michael Goodwin,

as are the scenes of migrants throwing themselves on train tracks in Hungary and thousands of others shunning shelter for a long march to Austria and Germany.

The photos are also misleading. Their emotional power suggests the tragedy would end if only Europe opened its hearts and doors.

Not so. Millions, perhaps tens of millions, of destitute and desperate people want out of Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and other hellholes of the Middle East and North Africa. There is no visible end to the humanitarian crisis historians are calling the world’s worst since World War II, and the comparisons don’t end there.

Then and now, the waves of misery have a common root. This is what happens when genocidal maniacs are appeased and the West fails to confront them.

The global order that held since Hitler was defeated is disintegrating before our eyes. Borders are erased and entire populations are put to the sword or forced to flee the new tyrannical monsters.

This metastasizing catastrophe is not the result of famine or drought or disease. It is man-made and should have been ­prevented.

But that would have required leaders with the moral conviction of Roosevelt and Churchill. ­Instead, America and Great Britain are led by frat boys.

Barack Obama and David Cameron indulged themselves in the delusion that human nature had magically changed and the world would take care of itself while they gutted the arsenals of ­democracy.

History will record their fecklessness, and that of France, Germany and the other once-great powers. That is, unless history ­itself is erased by the madmen of Islamic State.

Not content to slaughter those they deem infidels and apostates, the would-be Hitlers are cleansing Syria and Iraq of its ancient temples and artifacts. They aim to control the past as well as the future.

They are deadly serious about their purpose, and so they are winning. We hem and haw, meet, talk and propose, while they act.

They are not the only malevolent forces on the march. Vladimir Putin, after gobbling up chunks of Ukraine without paying a serious price, is establishing a military presence in Syria.

That makes Russia a working partner with Iran, Syria’s biggest benefactor, and creates a new axis of evil in a region already the most dangerous on the planet.

China, too, is aggressively flexing its might. An unusual military parade in Beijing came as five Chinese warships were spotted off Alaska, within 12 nautical miles of the coast, the Pentagon told The Wall Street Journal. It reported that a Chinese official said the ships entered the Bering Sea after a joint military exercise with Russia.

It was surely not a coincidence that the provocation happened with Obama in Alaska to preach the gospel of climate change. It was almost as though China decided to mock his absurd assertion that melting ice and rising seas are the greatest threat. Perhaps Beijing reads his e-mails?

The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians — they, too, are serious people. Each has taken the measure of Obama, and now they are taking liberties.

They would be foolish not to. As the calendar moves toward the end of Obama’s tenure, those who wish us ill move faster to claim their trophies, knowing they will face no resistance.

As a result, the president who declared, “I was elected to end wars, not start them,” has opened the floodgates to our adversaries. Weakness is his legacy.

Obama has been a gift to the worst of the world, topped by his surrender to Iran. He and the quislings masquerading as the leaders of Europe see no evil as Iran spreads its tentacles. Sooner, on their own, or later, with America’s blessing, the mullahs will have their doomsday weapon.

Kim Davis and Martin Luther King both defied the law for the same reason—Both agree that they have an obligation to disobey any law that is unjust

Dr. Susan K. Smith is offended by comparisons between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kim Davis

reports Benny Huang, referring to the Kentucky clerk who has refused to sign any marriage licenses since the Supreme Court imposed same-sex marriage on her state.

Smith, a pastor and “social justice advocate” (whatever that is) protested the invocation of St. Martin of Atlanta’s name to justify the deeds of a bigot like Kim Davis. “But I am angered by the claim that Ms. Dixon (sic) is acting as did Dr. King when he was thrown into jail for working to end racial injustice,” wrote Smith in a recent column at the Huffington Post. Dr. Smith is apparently so sloppy that she didn’t even get the clerk’s name right. Her name is Davis, not Dixon. “Ms. Dixon (sic) has been jailed because her God-sense tells her it is right and fitting to discriminate against people; Dr. King was in jail because his God-sense told him it was wrong to mete out injustice against anyone – especially blacks.”

 … I don’t generally like lawlessness. Liberals, on the other hand, celebrate lawlessness, which explains why they gave the lawless Martin Luther King a holiday and generally revere him as something of a demigod. I don’t believe he deserves a tenth of the deference we afford him which is why I must stress that Kim Davis’s obvious similarity to King is not necessarily flattering.

It is, however, accurate. Dr. Smith would know this if she’d ever read anything that King wrote. Has she? I don’t see how she could have read, for example, King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or his “Paul’s Letter to the American Christians” and concluded that King would oppose Kim Davis.

I think Dr. Smith falls into a common trap when evaluating King; that is, she creates in her own mind an image of the man as she wished him to be—a fighter for “justice,” as defined by Smith herself. It probably never occurs to her that King’s idea of justice might diverge from her own. In Smith’s mind it’s axiomatic that the mainstreaming of homosexuality and the crushing of dissenting voices are civil rights issues. As a champion for civil rights, MLK would certainly be on her side. Any attempt to counter her vision of King with the actual historical MLK is enough to raise her blood pressure.

Martin Luther King did not support same-sex marriage. Period. No one in pre-1968 America did, not even “gay” “rights” activists. (Their aim was to destroy the institution, not join it.) Nor did King find homosexuality morally acceptable. He was a mid-20^th century Baptist minister with the accompanying moral code regarding sex. He claimed the Bible as his authority and the Bible is absolutely unequivocal on the subject of homosexuality. The fact that King had a plethora of mistresses and enjoyed an orgy every once in a while proves only that he was a hypocrite, not a “gay” “rights” activist.

King’s clearest public proclamations on homosexuality are found in an advice column he wrote for Ebony Magazine in 1958. When a boy asked his advice on how to handle feelings of attraction toward other males, King actually advised psychiatric treatment! He also referred to the feelings as a “problem.” Most importantly, King said that the boy’s attractions were “probably not an innate tendency.” In other words, he did not subscribe to the shoddy, unfalsifiable “born that way” theory. It doesn’t take much of a leap to infer that King would have rejected any comparison between race and homosexual conduct and would probably have been offended by it, as many blacks are even today. As they should be.
 
King did not march for homosexuals’ supposed “rights” because he did not see them as equivalent to his struggle against Jim Crow. He understood homosexuality as a behavior—and a deviant one at that. So if Kim Davis is a “bigot,” then Martin Luther King is a “bigot” too. What then is so outrageous about comparing the two?

 … Kim Davis and Martin Luther King both defied the law for the exact same reason—because they considered themselves responsible to a higher power. (I’m not sure King really meant it, of course, on account of his incredible hypocrisy.) They both claimed that God’s law was superior to man’s law.

 … On all of the key issues, King and Davis are of the same mind. Both oppose segregation. Both oppose homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and its accompanying imposition on people of faith. Both agree that they have an obligation to disobey any law that is unjust. Both measure the justice of a particular law by the standards of God. 

Related: Today, MLK Jr Would Be Unemployable in America, Given That He Would Be Anathema to Most Americans… of the Left (!)

The other Davis: None Other Than MLK Welcomed Judgment, So Why the #$#%$@# Should We NOT Judge a Texas Democrat like Wendy Davis?!

 … it isn’t judging that perturbs liberals so much; it’s other people judging according to criteria that liberals don’t like.

"If you look at the first 100 years after slavery, black communities were a lot safer"

Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all? 

the Wall Street Journal's Kyle Peterson asks the man who ought to be rewarded with a Nobel Prize in economics.

“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” [Thomas Sowell] says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.”

 … take “disparate impact,” the idea that different outcomes among different groups—say, that there are more male CEOs than female—is ipso facto evidence of discrimination. The Obama administration has used disparate impact to charge racism in housing, employment and other matters. In the absence of discrimination, the theory goes, people naturally would be dispersed more or less at random. Nonsense, Mr. Sowell says. “In various books I’ve given lists of all the great disparities all over the world, and I recently saw a column by Walter Williams in which he added that men are bitten by sharks several times as often as women.”

Differences in outcome is a matter that Mr. Sowell takes up in his new book, “Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective,” out Sept. 8. Its theme, he says, is that “in a sense, there was never any rational reason to believe that there would be this evenness that they presuppose.” Some continents have more navigable rivers and deep water harbors than others. Some cultures value education highly, and some don’t. Underwhelming as the conclusion might sound to those with the urge to reorder society, many disparities arise simply because people are different, and because they make different choices.

Another problem is that the “disparate impact” assumption misidentifies where group differences originate. He sets up an example: “If you have people in various groups in the country, and their kids are all raised differently, they all behave differently in school, they do differently in school. And now they’re grown up and they go to an employer, and you’re surprised to find that they’re not distributed randomly by income.” It’s “just madness,” he says, to assume “that because you collected the statistics there, that’s where the unfairness originated.”
 
Mr. Sowell, looking back, can count the lucky breaks that contributed to his own success. As a baby he was adopted into a household with four adults who talked to him constantly. When he was 9 years old, the family left the South, moving from North Carolina to Harlem in New York. A mentor there took him to a public library for the first time and told him how to transfer out of a bad school into a good one. Not everyone has that kind of luck.

“It is unjust—my God it’s unjust,” Mr. Sowell says. “And yet that doesn’t mean that you can locate somebody who has victimized somebody else.” In human affairs, happenstance reigns.

Why do we never seem to learn these economic lessons? “I think there’s a market for foolish things,” Mr. Sowell says—and vested interests, too. Once an organization such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created to find discrimination, no one should be startled when it finds discrimination. “There’s never going to be a time when the EEOC will file a report saying, ‘All right folks, there’s really not enough discrimination around to be spending all this money,’ ” he says. “You’re going to have ever-more-elaborate definitions of discrimination. So now, if you don’t want to hire an ax murderer who has somehow gotten paroled, then that’s discrimination.”
 
It’s a funny line—and an instance of what sets Mr. Sowell apart: candor and independence of mind. No one can suggest that he doesn’t say what he thinks. In 1987, while testifying in favor of Judge Robert Bork’s ill-fated nomination to the Supreme Court, he told Joe Biden, a senator at the time, that he wouldn’t have a problem with literacy tests for voting or with $1.50 poll taxes, so long as they were evenly and fairly applied. When I ask whether he remembers this exchange, Mr. Sowell quips, “No, Joe Biden is forgettable.”

 … Mr. Sowell is unsparing toward those who purport to speak for American blacks. I ask him about the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. “People want to believe what they want to believe, and the facts are not going to stop them,” he says, adding that black leaders—from President Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder down to Al Sharpton—“do all they can to feed that sense of grievance, victimhood and resentment, because that’s where the votes are.”

What about Ta-Nehisi Coates, the black writer whose new book, a raw letter to his son about race relations in the U.S., is stirring public intellectuals? I read Mr. Sowell a line from Mr. Coates’s 15,000-word cover story for the Atlantic calling for reparations for slavery: “In America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.”

“Ah . . . yes,” Mr. Sowell sighs, as if recognizing a familiar tune. “What amazes me is not that there are assertions like this, but that there is no interest in checking those assertions against any evidence,” he says. “One of the things I try to do in the book is to distinguish between what might be the legacy of slavery, and what’s the legacy of the welfare state. If you look at the first 100 years after slavery, black communities were a lot safer. People were a lot more decent. But then you look 30 years after the 1960s revolution, and you see this palpable retrogression—of which I think the key one is the growth of the single-parent family.”

 … Does anyone believe that racism and the legacy of slavery are stronger today than in the 1970s—or for that matter in 1945, when Mr. Sowell enrolled at Stuyvesant? “It’s not a question of the disproportion between blacks and whites, or Asians, but the disproportion between blacks of today and blacks of the previous generation,” he says. “And that’s what’s scary.”

Every media outlet has chosen to share Lila Perry’s delusion that he’s a girl, which explains why noone can find the teen’s real name anywhere

I can’t find Lila Perry’s real name anywhere

reports Benny Huang, who never refers to the Hillsboro High School crossdresser as "she" or as "(s)he" or as "he or she."

The seventeen-year old gender-dysphoric male student from Missouri has become a news item in the past week because he wants to use the girls’ changing room for gym class and, oddly enough, the girls aren’t thrilled about it.

 … After first coming out as a “gay” male, Lila announced in February 2015 that he would henceforth identify as female, which I guess makes him a heterosexual girl…who happens to be a boy? This stuff gets really confusing. Hillsboro High School accommodated his mental illness—and that’s what it is—by allowing him to use a gender-neutral faculty changing room. As the new school year began, however, Perry decided that even this accommodation wasn’t good enough. “I am a girl,” said Perry. “I am not going to be pushed away to another bathroom…”

I understand his point. If he accepts the gender neutral changing facility he’s necessarily conceding that he is somehow less of a girl than the others—which he is, of course. But because the entire point of this asinine exercise is to force other people to validate an enormous lie, no compromise is acceptable.

Nowhere in the whole mess can I find the student’s actual name. I doubt his parents named him “Lila” because he wasn’t born a girl. I suspect that “Lila” selected a more feminine name when he grew sick of being a boy. That doesn’t make it any less a pseudonym.

Every media outlet I know of has chosen to share Lila’s delusion that he’s a girl, which explains why I can’t find the student’s real name anywhere—not in the Washington Post, the New York Times or even on Fox News’s website. They all refer to this gender-confused boy with feminine pronouns or as “Ms. Perry.” To mention that “Lila” is actually Bill or Norm or Hank would send the message that “Lila” is an adopted persona. Which it is.

Some people will wonder what the big deal is. If people feel more comfortable in their skin when they “identify” as something other than what their chromosomes or sexual hardware define them to be, what’s the big deal? And that’s nearly always how this issue is framed—as people having the autonomy to define themselves, which is the first step to being themselves. The rest of us are just big, mean bullies who want to force them to live as someone they’re not.

But Lila Perry is a boy. That’s a fact. He was, in the parlance of the homosexual movement, “born that way.” So if we’re “forcing” him to do anything, we’re forcing him to be who he is. I think he’d be a lot better off if he’d knock off the charade and seek therapy before the homofascists make it illegal.

Speaking for myself, however, I must say that I don’t want to force Lila to do anything. If he wants to revel in his mental illness that’s his business—but he shouldn’t make the rest of us join in. Unfortunately, there may be times when his right to believe a delusion will collide with everyone else’s right not to believe it. Gym class happens to be one of those times.

Such is his dilemma—if he settles for the gender neutral changing room or, heaven forbid, the boys’ locker room, he is in fact conceding that his feminine identity is a sham. But if he plows ahead with his false identity, he is essentially asking every member of his high school to assent to a lie. These are two mutually exclusive positions—either he will use the girls’ room or he will not, either he will receive the validation he so desperately craves or he won’t. There’s no middle ground.

 … essentially what transgenders are asking us to do [is] to pretend that we believe something we know to be a fiction. Bianca [the life-sized sex doll from the Ryan Gosling movie “Lars and the Real Girl”] is not a real woman, and neither is Lila Perry, but for the sake of people’s feelings, we’re asked to play along.

Be nice. Be polite. Pretend you believe the lie until you do believe the lie.

It might be overly generous, however, to say that transgenders are “asking” us to believe a lie. The increasingly militant transgender movement is doing a lot more demanding than asking these days, a fact that conservative author and attorney Ben Shapiro can attest to.

 … The transgender community, like the homosexuals before them, are not happy to live their lives as they see fit. They crave acceptance, validation, even celebration. It isn’t even primarily about them—it’s about you, your attitudes, and your conception of their bodies. There are reliable indicators that they will not use gentle persuasion as a means of changing minds.

Indeed, states Elizabeth Price Foley, who sounds pretty disgusted:

This is typical far-left hyperbole, branding those who disagree with you as “bigots.” 

The Instapundit guest blogger concludes:

I’m sorry, but “Lila” is clearly just a dude with a wig, and I wouldn’t want my teenage daughter to share a locker room with him/her/it

Human needs aren’t nearly as important to the average liberal Democrat as sustaining a poverty-stricken political fiefdom

 … the United States is, for better or worse, a European-style welfare state that just happens to be located across the ocean

deplores Benny Huang.

Whether our massive welfare spending is a good thing or a bad thing is a very debatable point. I know some people would say that money spent on “human needs”—as if that’s all it ever goes to—is money well spent. I would counter that “human needs” aren’t nearly as important to the average liberal Democrat as sustaining a poverty-stricken political fiefdom. They buy power with other people’s money and expect the rest of us to stand in awe of their supposed generosity.

 … The poor in my state of Massachusetts, however, live pretty well on the dole. I was not at all surprised to discover that only Hawaii and the District of Columbia offer more robust benefits packages than the Bay State.

Come to Massachusetts’ post-industrial inner cities and you’ll see satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms from the government-subsidized housing. No one would be caught dead without their iPhone. They spend almost three hundred dollars a month on their pack-a-day cigarette habit and they prefer top shelf liquor. That’s how “poor” people live in Massachusetts. It’s not exactly a “Feed the Children” commercial.

 … It’s a form of national suicide, a rather peculiar phenomenon that deserves some explanation. Ever since the Watts riots happened fifty years ago this summer, American politicians have sought to “invest” in poor inner city neighborhoods. As “investments” go, it’s been about as lousy as buying confederate currency in 1864. The War on Poverty was launched the same year that Watts went up in flames but that didn’t prevent Detroit and Newark from burning in 1967. Nor did it prevent the nationwide urban conflagration of April 1968. Looting and rioting returned to Los Angeles in 1992. Ferguson exploded in 2014, followed by Baltimore in 2015, followed by more Ferguson rioting on the one year anniversary of Michael Brown’s attempted murder of Darren Wilson.

Paying people not to riot clearly isn’t working.

  … facts absolutely never penetrate the liberals’ bubble. They revel in asking snappy questions that contain the implicit assumption that we as a nation have almost no social safety net to speak of. Here are a few:

“Why is that we always have plenty of money for the military but not for basic human needs?” Answer: the military budget, though expensive, has been constantly decreasing, adjusting for inflation, since the end of World War II. We call on today’s military to do more with less. Welfare on the other hand is always growing. The inflation-adjusted $22 trillion that we’ve spent in the War on Poverty is more than three times the combined cost of all wars since the Revolution. The War on Poverty is undeniably the most expensive we’ve ever waged, and the longest.

“Why can’t we be more like Europe?” Answer: We are like Europe. Our welfare state is on par with theirs and it’s killing us.

“Why do people go hungry in a country as rich as ours?” Answer: Very few actually do, but even those who don’t have enough to eat can’t blame a lack of programs or appropriated funds. There are state, federal, and local programs, not to mention private charities.

A rational discussion cannot begin with an irrational premise. The idea that somehow our country adheres to a philosophy of rugged individualism is absurd. We hand out other people’s money like it’s going out of style. Our social safety net is deep and wide. The moment we acknowledge this stubborn fact is the moment we can begin a useful dialogue. I’ll be waiting with bated breath.

Does anyone think that if Obama withdrew the 30,000-odd U.S. troops in South Korea that he would “end the war”?

To see how confused and even absurd the Democratic approach has been to Iran, consider the case of Korea

offers the New Republic's Martin Peretz (via Instapundit).

Does anyone think that if Obama withdrew the 30,000-odd U.S. troops in South Korea that he would “end the war”? On Obama’s logic, we should be exiting our troops immediately and freeing up hundreds of billions of dollars of funds over the next decade for North Korea, while enabling a sponsor like China to sell them conventional arms and ballistic missile technology. Then we can sit back and “hope” that North Korea will “change.”

Two decades ago, the North Koreans challenged the administration of our last Democratic president in the same way as Iran challenges our current one. Who can forget The New York Times’s editorial judgment in 1993 that “President Clinton is adopting a sound diplomatic strategy for coaxing North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions” by “rightly resisting pressure to get tough with Pyongyang”? This month, one day after the Ayatollah said emphatically the deal will not change his country’s attitude toward the U.S., the Times asserts that President Obama “was right to keep the focus on restraining” the Iran nuclear program, but that if the sanctions are not lifted quickly enough, the so-called Iranian “moderates” could be discredited, “boosting the hard-liners.” Cognitive dissonance seems to be the official editorial policy of the Democratic elite.

The obvious point is that the nature of the Iranian regime matters, just as the nature of the North Korean regime matters. While our leaders take a holiday from history, the bad actors of the world do not take much of a vacation. American voters know this, which is likely why Obama did not disclose his detailed intentions regarding Iran in his 2012 re-election campaign. But now many Democrats complain that supporting the deal is their only choice. Moreover, the president, this time through the agency of his UN ambassador, the putative idealist Samantha Power, has laid a procedural trap for the wavering Democrats by introducing the big power treaty to the Security Council where it has already passed. This will make congressional review doubly difficult, and more than doubly important. In any case, the compact deserves negation on its own terms. But, as it happens, the Ayatollah who truly runs Iran declared on the morrow of the announcement of the agreement his intention to wage war. On Israel, no surprise. And on us, the U.S., the very architect of this peace.

Can you name the facts about the D-Day invasion?

Can you name the facts about the D-Day invasion?
The story of D-Day.

You will be amazed at how often the opinions expressed by “some” or “many” or “critics” turn out to be left-leaning opinions

How many times have you read a news story which says something like this?

asks Patterico:

Although the [Bush] administration defends its proposed cuts as humane, some say that the cuts are unconscionable.

You have probably read sentences like this so many times that they don’t sound strange any more. But think about it: what is the relevance of the fact that “some say” anything? After all, “some say” that Elvis is still alive. “Many say” that astrology is infallible. And some “critics” will tell you that the world is flat.

So why are you reading about what “some say” in the paper? Obviously, the reporter and/or the editors think it’s important for you to hear this particular opinion. Often, words like “some” or “many” can be replaced with the phrase “Times editors” with no appreciable change in meaning. When you see such locutions, you should ask yourself: who exactly is saying this? Is the contrary view being portrayed fairly? Does the article have an obvious spin? Is that spin consistent with what “some say”?

The use of phraseologies like “many say” lends the opinions a certain weight, suggesting that they are held by a number of potentially unbiased folks out there. The opinions expressed by “some” or by “critics” tend to be reported uncritically and sympathetically.

Meanwhile, when interviewees say things that support a conservative position, they tend to be labeled as representatives of a particular cause, politician, or branch of government, so their bias is always clear.

Once you become aware of the phenomenon, and you start to look for it, you will be amazed at how often the opinions expressed by “some” or “many” or “critics” are left-leaning opinions. For example, here are some things that “some” or “critics” have said in the last two or three days in the pages of the Times:

In [this] story about Justice Scalia’s speech to an advocacy group, “some” are critical of Justice Scalia:

The Philadelphia dinner was the third instance in which Scalia’s outside activities have created what some say is an appearance of partiality on issues before the court.

In this story, “critics” accuse the Bush administration of playing politics with terrorism. The subhead reads:

Critics say an accused terrorist’s role in Iraq attacks is exaggerated, noting weak evidence.

And the body of the story has this quote:

The focus on Zarqawi is part of a political strategy to portray the terrorism threat as essentially foreign and rooted in the Al Qaeda network, thereby downplaying the significance of Iraqi insurgents, critics say.

In this story and this story, “critics” don’t like Bush campaign ads with 9/11 footage. One story said:

Critics called these ads “unconscionable,” “inappropriate” and “in poor taste.”

Another said:

The critics called the spots insensitive and offensive.

  … You get the idea. The moral is: you should be cautious whenever you see a phrase like “many believe” or “critics say.” Phrases like this should function like a flashing red neon sign saying: “Caution: leftist viewpoint likely. Opinion may be shared by newspaper. Scrutinize carefully.” 

That is always good advice, when reading the L.A. Times or any other newspaper.
(Cross-posted at Oh, That Liberal Media.)

• (Somewhat) Related:  "I'm a lifelong Republican, BUT…": Watch Out for the Moby

• Token Articles, Letters, and Other Examples of "Objectivity"

Apparently firemen put out fires better when there’s a Jew, an Italian, and a Puerto Rican on every fire engine

“Looking like the community” is very important to liberals, and not just on the police force. They consider it to be of the utmost importance that the fire department, the president’s cabinet, and even the military “look like” the constituencies they’re supposed to serve.

Thus writes Benny Huang.

Apparently firemen put out fires better when there’s a Jew, an Italian, and a Puerto Rican on every fire engine. Don’t ask me why.

 … One reason there aren’t more black police officers is standards—moral, legal, and academic. Police departments across the country have chosen to lower standards just to recruit blacks. Some departments have stopped requiring applicants to know how to swim while others will hire applicants who didn’t even finish high school. Departments often accept lower civil service exam scores from minority applicants. And it’s still not enough.

Proponents of “diversity” also blithely brush aside another issue—namely that their rhetoric is strongly suggestive of a quota system. Quotas were found to be illegal in Regents of California v. Bakke (1978), a landmark affirmative action case.

 …/… There’s another problem with police departments reflecting the communities that they serve and it becomes apparent when looking at communities that have very low minority populations. Can a small town that is almost entirely white refuse to hire minority officers because they don’t “look like the community?”

I think most people would say no, and so would I. But there’s a disconnect there. Why is “looking like the community” so vitally important in some communities but not in others? It seems that police departments have to be colorblind when colorblindness benefits minorities, and color conscious when color consciousness benefits minorities. In short, they have to be color conscious when deciding whether or not to be colorblind.

A case in point can be found in Granville, Massachusetts, a picturesque New England town that looks like something from a Norman Rockwell painting. Despite being 98.69% white, Granville hired an Hispanic police chief in 2005.

And no one cared. That’s not because the people of Granville are a bunch of hippy liberals. Granville is in fact the most conservative town in the state, according to Business Insider.

 … Should a town that’s almost 99% white be served by a (full time) police force that’s 100% Hispanic? I don’t have a problem with it, but then again I’m not a liberal. I don’t concern myself with racial bean-counting.

If lily white communities like Granville are going to be prohibited from hiring officers with an eye toward the racial makeup of their community, and highly “diverse” communities like Ferguson are going to be required to do exactly that, then someone will have to delineate a threshold between the two. At what point must a community shift from an ostensibly colorblind hiring process to an obligatory color-conscious hiring process? Ten percent minority? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

I think we already know the answer to that question. All of that jive about “looking like the community” is a one-way street. If it helps blacks, great. If it doesn’t, it’s dropped like a bad habit. I call that black privilege.

“Diverse” police forces are not the answer to all that ails us. Besides the fact that recruiting blacks is more difficult than might be supposed, there are legal and moral issues to consider. Standards must be lowered and qualified people must be passed over.

We no longer have old-fashioned religious blasphemy laws, we have a kind of secular blasphemy laws

Mick Hume of 'Spiked' on Trigger Warnings and Free Speech in the UK (5:26)

Blasphemy laws are ridiculous, outdated, historical anachronisms… But what's interesting is, in Britain, for example, we no longer have blasphemy laws — that was seen as being a great step forward … — but what they did was introduce hate speech laws instead.

So we … no longer have old-fashioned religious blasphemy laws, we have a kind of secular blasphemy laws: there are new [rules] you are allowed not to break, there are new groups you are not allowed not to offend …and in many ways, more insidious and pervasive than blasphemy ever was — which was a dead law on the statute books for most of the last 100 years…

FIRE's Greg Lukianoff:

I had the pleasure of sitting down with spiked! editor-at-large and self-proclaimed propagandist Mick Hume while I was in the U.K. in July. We talked about all-things free speech, from the growing tendency in the U.K. to ban offensive speech to European blasphemy laws to his new book, Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?. If Mick’s name looks familiar, it may be because of his great piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, “Even Speech We Hate Should Be Free.”