Just an average day in the National Health in Britain. But we won't get to this point for at least twenty years.

. . . I heard Rita Cronin on the Today programme. Her son, Kane Gorny, who suffered from multiple medical problems, had a hip replaced in St George’s Hospital, Tooting. One of his perennial problems was dehydration, and he repeatedly asked the nurses for water. None brought him any, so he took the desperate step of dialling 999 from his hospital bed. When the police arrived, the hospital staff told them that Mr Gorny was in a confused state, so they went away. Still no nurses would give him water. He lashed out at them angrily, so they had him surrounded by security guards . . . and sedated, still without water.

Mr Gorny died in that hospital from what the coroner described as “dehydration contributed to by neglect”. While his parents were discussing his death with the matron in her office, Miss Cronin recalled, a nurse stuck her head round the door and asked, “Shall I bag him up now?”

From a column in The Telegraph by Charles Moore.

JULY 20, 2012 4:00 A.M. Emancipation: The Un-Holiday  Lincoln himself thought the proclamation “the great event of the nineteenth century.” By Allen C. Guelzo First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, by Francis Bicknell Carpenter (U.S. Senate)   Do not look for a great celebration to break out on July   22. Granted, the 22nd of July has never been much of a red-letter day. No great battles to commemorate, no horrifying cataclysms, no lily-gilding birthdays. The one event that does hang a laurel around July 22 will still go largely unnoticed — despite being at the heart of great battles, a national cataclysm, and a new birth of freedom — and that is Abraham Lincoln’s unveiling of the Emancipation Proclamation to the startled members of his cabinet, exactly 150 years ago last Sunday. The Emancipation Proclamation did more, and for more Americans, than any other presidential document before or since. It declared that over 3 million black slaves (representing some $3 billion in capital investment) would “thenceforward, and forever, be free” (thus transforming that $3 billion into a net zero, overnight) and turned the Civil War from being a police action against the breakaway southern Confederacy into a crusade for freedom. It was, as Lincoln himself said, “the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century.” Still, there will be no federal holiday, no emancipation parades, no proclamation fireworks. This will be, first, because the language of the proclamation is so stultifyingly and legally dull, full of whereases and therefores, that the whole thing leaves approximately the same impression on the spirit as a lump of coal. Who wants to celebrate a document that begins, “In pursuance of the sixth section of the act of Congress entitled ‘An act to suppress insurrection and to punish treason and rebellion, to seize and confiscate property of rebels, and for other purposes . . .’”? But the uninflected detachment of the proclamation’s language is far less a problem for the proclamation’s reputation than the limitation clauses Lincoln insisted on inserting. The proclamation did not simply proclaim liberty throughout all the land; far from it, the proclamation expressly exempted the four slave states that had stayed with the Union (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri) and the counties and parishes in Virginia and Louisiana that had been occupied by Union troops and restored to civil order. If the proclamation was indeed about freeing slaves, then the slaves in those places must have had an interesting time understanding why they didn’t qualify. Even worse, Lincoln specifically offered as the constitutional justification for this dramatic act of governmental taking nothing more Moses-like than his war powers as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” What should have been, by our lights, an opportunity for this most eloquent of presidents to wax more eloquent still is described by Lincoln as “a fit and necessary military measure.” No parting the Red Sea, no making the world safe for democracy. The proclamation is presented as nothing more than a military tactic for subduing the Confederacy. But lurking behind these deflations of the proclamation is a more modern, but also more lethal, objection: that the proclamation is just one more self-righteous reminder to African-Americans that they have no agency of their own, but must rely on the goodwill of white folks, even for freedom. “I just can’t wrap my head around celebrating the fact that someone else freed my ancestors,” complains John McWhorter, much less that “freedom happened partly as the result of whites making other whites see the error of their ways. . . . I am always more interested in what we did rather than what somebody did to us.” [Then the good Professor should contemplate the massacre at Fort Pillow, such units as the 55Th. Massachusetts, and the battle of the Crater for examples of blacks taking the bloody path to freedom into their own hands.] And so the Emancipation Proclamation has gone into eclipse as just another tardy, and empty, gesture of political manipulation, conceived by a Manipulator-in-Chief. Or is this eclipse instead a bitter testimony to the shallowness with which we read a complex historical document, written by an unfathomably complex man, at the height of our most complex national crisis? Is the proclamation legalistic in tone? Yes — but then again, it is a legal document, transferring the ownership of 3 million or more items of “property” from their owners to the “property” itself. One false step by Lincoln in the wording of the proclamation, one indulgent flight of anti-slavery rhetoric, and any slaveholders with access to the federal courts would have been on the courthouse steps the next morning, angrily demanding injunctions. And at the apex of those courts sat none less than Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision, spoiling for a chance to put a stake into emancipation’s heart. This is also why Lincoln zoned off the exempted areas from the proclamation’s application. Lincoln had no legal or constitutional way to lay hands on slavery apart from invoking “the war power of the government.” Since the exempted zones were precisely those that were no longer at war with the United States, or never had been, Lincoln had no “war power” to exercise there. If he had tried, he would have provoked the same train of federal litigation that led nowhere but to the lap of Roger Taney. And is it really the case that the proclamation undermines black agency and pride, taking away with one hand what it purports to give with the other? Only a historical fool will deny that slaves took the opportunities presented by the Civil War to grab whatever pieces of freedom came within their reach, with or without a by-your-leave to Abraham Lincoln. They deserted the plantations whenever the Union armies marched by; they hid escaped Union prisoners-of-war; they guided Union generals through swamps; and they went north into the teeth of white northern hostility to find any kind of life they could, so long as it was free. One thing they could not do, however, was emancipate themselves. The runaway slave would always remain, legally, a slave. [And those blacks in Union blue who fell into Confederate hands were treated as runaways whether they were from the north or the south of the Mason-Dixon line. Not as prisoners of war.] And if the day ever came when the Union grew tired enough of war to open negotiations for some amicable settlement with the Confederacy, we should not deceive ourselves into thinking that southern negotiators would not have made the rendition of those runaway slaves part of the settlement — or that war-weary northern whites would not have agreed to it. Emancipation had to be de jure, not just de facto, and that required a legal action. And the only man with the power, the authority, and the wisdom to do it so that it could never be undone was Abraham Lincoln. Precisely because notions of self-emancipation are more a matter of sentiment and pride than of footnotes, they pose the most intractable resistance to restoring the honor of the Emancipation Proclamation. But to deny the proclamation its place in the history of all Americans repudiates the basic lesson of our tumbled past: that white and black owe each other far more than either can pay off. “Those of us engaged in this racial struggle in America are like knights on horseback,” wrote Langston Hughes in 1943, “the Negroes on a white horse and the white folks on a black.” There is no shame in admitting what we owe each other as Americans; the shame is only in repudiating that debt. — Allen C. Guelzo is the author of Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2012) [Which I intend to buy real soon.]

Self Defense is a Civil Right.

After the Aurora shooting,

Another chance for

The Materialists to flaunt their

Superior wisdom.

After the Aurora shooting the usual suspects stood up again and tried to demean the American people and their freedoms.

 “We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Maybe we should take better care of each other.” --- Michael Moore at the Huffington Post. (Think maybe he has an armed body guard or four?)

“The time has come for our nation to face the National Rifle Association and its bullying tactics. There is no way that our forefathers envisioned twelve innocent people lying dead on the floor of a movie theater when they wrote the Second Amendment.” --- Russell Simmons at the same stand. (This may be the first time Russell has said anything close to positive about the founders.)

“There’s a proclivity to aggression [in men] that’s biological, but it takes a social trigger to engage it,” says William Pollack, the director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital in Boston and a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School. “We socialize healthy, normal boys to ‘stand on their own two feet’ for fear that otherwise they won’t be real boys,” says Pollack, whose New York Times bestseller, Real Boys, dissects the inner emotional lives of young men. “They’re taught not to tell anyone when they feel pain, because they should be stoic, and they certainly shouldn’t cry.” As a result, Pollack says, men have a preconditioned level of tolerance for violence that makes it easier for them to act on it without remorse.” --- This bit of folk wisdom is from Lizzie Crocker at The Daily Beast, and no I don’t know who she is either. (As for remorse Mr. Holmes’ lawyer seems to have trained him in the use of remorse face on the stand.)

I could go on and on ad nauseum but you get the drift; the cause of mass murder is everywhere but in the heart of the murderer. James Holmes spent many hours in research and study to find and purchase his weapons and armor. He spent more hours in the design of his booby traps and gas bombs. He probably spent time getting his reloading technics as close to perfect as he could without a range to practice on, but it’s the fault of the NRA for defending the Second Amendment? I don’t think so.

But this idea that the average American doesn’t need to take care of his own defense is so prevalent that is has become the standard fare. Yet we all know that the police are not libel if they get to your home after you and yours are raped and murdered. Even some conservatives believe that self-defense is beneath them, that “There are just too many guns out there.” Yet if the many thousands of times per year that a firearm is used in home defense were published in the MSM the idea that the country is awash in guns would fade away.

So why am I harping on the issue of self-defense rather than the carnage in front of our faces? Because gun control is a liberty issue, it gives the government the positive right to protect you while taking away the negative right (not of government origin) of self-defense. There is no way that Mr. Holmes could have been picked from a crowd as a mass murderer before his action. A comic book nerd maybe, but are we to shut down Comic-Con on this type of evidence? And at this point he is still innocent till proven guilty by a jury of his peers, that’s you and me folks.

What does it look like when a nations citizens are disarmed? We can look at two riots, The “Hoody Riots” last year in Great Britain as compared to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992. After many years of agitation, starting with the reaction to the mass murder at Hugerford in which the murderer carried, and used, a semi auto rifle, the Home Office began a regimen of gun-control measures. As you know Great Britain has no written Constitution, therefore no Second Amendment. This is even though the common law assumed for centuries that a citizen had the right to defend himself against bodily harm. As time progressed the government steadily widened the scope of the controls till by 2006 even air pistols were illegal. And the use of a firearm in your own defense is to face a jail sentence.

We were all witnesses to the “Hoody Riots” last summer in which young people attacked and trashed stores across the width and breadth of the country. They often stole electronics just to smash them in the street. When questioned by local reporters they said, “We’re just having great fun!” The police ran from pillar to post with no ability to protect private property, which they still have in Britain. The riots went on from August 7 to August 15, when they finally burned themselves out. As for the shop owners, they had no means of effective defense, and took their lumps.

After the verdict came in in the Rodney King trail rioters went nuts in LA. Even though the National Guard was eventually called in to quell the violence, it went on from April 29 to May 4. The difference is in the reaction of the shop owners of Korea town. The organized self-defense units and protected their property with a mix of rifles and shotguns, keeping damage to a minimum. As a matter of fact the most damage was in the minority communities, so much for painting “Black Owned” on your store front.

So what do I mean by materialism. It is the concept that some object or instrumentality will cause a person to react in some specific way. Thus Mr. Holmes didn’t kill those people, his guns did. It didn’t work in Marxism and it doesn’t work in this case.

JimG33

             

                   

                    

Racism is a river that flows both ways

Alonzo Nation over at PJTV drops a gauntlet before James Earle Jones. Maybe his Grandma taught him to hate, but that doesn't mean he had to follower her and revere her prejudices. Unless, of course, he's going to be Al Sharpton and make his living on it.

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=84&load=7186

The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen at War.

[The link is to a PDF of a letter from Rep. Michelle Bachman to Rep. Keith Ellison on the subject of the Muslim Brotherhood in America and its strategy of jihad. The quote below is on that same subject. Please have patience as I try to work on $%*@# linking.]
JimG33

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. --- As stated explicitly by Yusuf al-Qaradawi acolyte of Mohamed Akram, in his “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America”, May 22, 1991


http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/michele-bachmanns-letter-to-keith-ellison/print/

Some one always says it better than I can. Again It's Jonah.

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for...but part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and you pay forward for the next kid who comes along. --- Elizabeth Warren, candidate for The Senate in Massachusetts, self appointed intellectual mid-wife of OWS, and self proclaimed Indian maiden. But just so she could get some free lunches.

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           Co-sponsoring Your Success By Jonah Goldberg July 20, 2012 12:00 A.M. “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . .  If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped  to create this unbelievable American system that we have that  allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.” — Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13 The president’s defenders have claimed he either misspoke last week at a Roanoke, Va., campaign event or that  what he said is true. Both defenses have merit. Obama surely didn't mean to say something that politically  idiotic so plainly. And it’s true that no man’s accomplishments are entirely his own. We’re all indebted to  others, and we all rely on government to provide some basic things.Only the straw-men conservatives  of Obama’s imagination yearn for an America with no roads and bridges. At best, Obama’s “gaffe” is a banal truism, and if the president’s praetorians want to defend him on grounds of  platitudinous banality, fine. But even they have to know in their hearts that this is a pathetic maneuver, given that  the reason they’re rushing to defend Obama in the first place is his commitment to the very philosophy they deny  he’s espousing.  This is the great irony of Obama and his defenders. He is a progressive ideologue and a passionate believer in  “social justice,” and that’s a large reason why his fans love him so. But if you ever say that he is what he is — if  you take his words seriously — they ridicule you for believing he’s anything other than a pragmatist and a moderate. Meanwhile, what many conservatives don’t appreciate is that Obama is not some otherworldly radical,  importing foreign ideas, but that he in fact fits within an old American intellectual tradition. Indeed, you might even  call him a reactionary progressive; he seeks to restore the assumptions and priorities of the Progressive Era. Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism, spoke for a generation of progressive intellectuals  when he wrote that the “individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been  formed.” For the progressives, society and government were almost interchangeable terms. John Dewey, the  seminal progressive philosopher, believed that “organized social control” via a “socialized economy” was the  only means to create “free” individuals. For the progressives, freedom wasn't the absence of government  coercion, it was a pile of gifts from the state. Progressives invented the idea of the “moral equivalent of war” as a means of inciting citizens to drop their  personal priorities and rally around the state for a government-defined “cause larger than themselves.”  Obama came into office under the motto “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” and has been looking for  “Sputnik moments” ever since in a search for a way to rationalize his agenda.  To the extent Obama ever speaks the language of religion, it is to justify, even sanctify, the works of  government. He often invokes the Hallmark-ized biblical teaching that “I am my brother’s keeper,  I am my sister’s keeper” as a means to rationalize not personal action but government action.  (Obama’s own half-siblings have received little attention from their very wealthy and famous relative.) Progressive minister Walter Rauschenbusch famously declared that only the “God that answereth by  low food prices” should be God. You might say that under the Obamacare vision, only the God that  answereth with free birth control should be God. In the slideshow “The Life of Julia,” the Obama campaign celebrates a progressive vision of citizenship  where all of a hypothetical young woman’s accomplishments are co-produced by the state:  “Under President Obama, Julia decides to have a child.”  [Nice to know he favors the missionary position.] It’s all of a piece with Obama’s conviction that “a problem facing any American is a problem facing  all Americans.”  [Reminds me of the headline in today's Daily News asking the President to get rid of all the guns.  The idea that the that the great majority of the American people are unable to control their desires to play the Joker as a reason to invalidate the Second Amendment is another example of the Left's lust  for power. "Give me liberty or give me death" said Patrick Henry. I say the loss of liberty is death!] The problem facing Obama is that there’s a reason the American people never fully embraced the  progressive vision. The idea driving America is the individual pursuit of happiness. Just because the  word “individual” appears in there doesn’t make it a selfish ideal; it means it’s a vision of liberty.  We each find our happiness where we seek it. For some that’s in business, for others the arts,  or religion or family or a mix of them all. And very often our happiness depends upon the satisfaction  we feel at having conquered problems on our own. Under President Obama, that sense of happiness is a mirage, because everything is a co-production  of the state. — Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of  National Review Online , a visiting fellow at the  American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Tyranny of Clichés. You can write to him  by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO.  © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc [And if you want more of this "stuff" check out the new book by Sam Harris, in which the concept of  personal responsibility is denieghed, and moral choice is relegated to the deep  mind, or maybe string theory. But maybe he should contemplate the history of eugenics in  the twentieth century before he walks down that road.]

.Thirty five years later.

 "If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." says Our President. 


In all my thirty-five years as a freelance carpenter and cabinetmaker I never saw his sorry ass at the work bench. He was never there to tote the other end of a piece of twelve quarter lumber. Or spend hours at the sharpening station, or at the drawing table working up plans. Our planing out a recalcitrant piece of White Oak. Or giving his song and dance to a potential client to part with $15,000 on a dream. Or trying to make that dream pay, without losing the aesthetic.  Or trying to figure out how to upgrade tools and machinery on a wing and a prayer.


As a matter of fact guys like him are a danger to themselves in any kind of work shop. Give him a chisel and he'll probably stab himself.


But he knows all about it. Sure Barry. Dumb ass!


And by the way my taxes paid for those roads and subways, and those bureaucrats in their offices in their pressed suits contracted out that work. To guys like me. Which is as close as they ever got to a concrete pour.


Dumb ass!!


JimG33

The God Particle.

A Higgs Boson enters a church.
The priest says, "Thank God you're here, now we can have Mass."
Rim shot.
JimG33 

From the desk of the Neo-Neocon.

July 11th, 2012

The press and Romney at the NAACP: did you know he was a white Mormon?

Drew M. at Ace’s points out a few things about the press coverage of Romney’s NAACP speech. At this point the anti-Romney slant of the coverage fails to surprise me in the least, but that doesn’t make it any less reprehensible:

So Mitt Romney went to talk to the NAACP today. I didn’t see the whole speech but it seemed like reasonably good stuff. He focused on family, jobs and education. I didn’t see but there were reports he received a good bit of applause when he promised to defend traditional marriage.

Of course the media will not be focusing on that or the applause for charter schools, his invocations of faith or anything else. No, they will focus exclusively on his being booed for saying he’d repeal ObamaCare and that he will do better for blacks than Obama has.

While that sort of hackery is to be expected, a couple of outlets are going well over the line.

First, ABC News is all in on Obama (warning auto playing video).

After focusing on the booing, ABC drops in this little nugget.

Romney, a white Mormon whose father ran for president when blacks weren’t even allowed to join the priesthood, told Obama’s most reliable supporters that they have been let down by the country’s first black president.

Well then. If fathers and religion are on the table, I look forward to discussing the polygamy of Barack Obama Sr. and the racism of Jeremiah Wright. Oh wait, we can’t do that…

Aside from Romney applause lines, what will the media ignore? Obama doesn’t have the guts to go to a hostile crowd like this and give a speech. In fact, Obama won’t even be addressing the NAACP convention. [What's up with that dude?] You’d think sending Job Biden in his place would be enough to turn them against him but it’s probably not.

There’s another thing the media is ignoring: the record of Romney’s father George on civil rights for black people was very—how shall I put it?—progressive. See this:

During his first State of the State address in January 1963, [Governor George] Romney declared that “Michigan’s most urgent human rights problem is racial discrimination—in housing, public accommodations, education, administration of justice, and employment.” Romney helped create the state’s first civil rights commission. 

When Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Detroit in June 1963 and led the 120,000-strong Great March on Detroit, [Governor George] Romney designated the occasion Freedom March Day in Michigan, and sent state senator Stanley Thayer to march with King as his emissary, but did not attend himself because it was on Sunday. Romney did participate in a much smaller march protesting housing discrimination the following Saturday in Grosse Pointe, after King had left. Romney’s advocacy of civil rights brought him criticism from some in his own church; in January 1964, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles member Delbert L. Stapley wrote him that a proposed civil rights bill was “vicious legislation” and telling him that “the Lord had placed the curse upon the Negro” and men should not seek its removal. Romney refused to change his position and increased his efforts towards civil rights. Regarding the church policy itself, Romney was among those liberal Mormons who hoped the church leadership would revise the theological interpretation that underlay it, but Romney did not believe in publicly criticizing the church…

When George Romney ran for his second term as governor of Michigan, he received 30% of the black vote, unheard of for a Republican.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons his son Mitt believes that it’s at least possible to gain the support of some black voters this time. At any rate, it’s a story I doubt you’ll be hearing from the MSM.

The Iowahawk flies high! Who knew he was reading Hawking.

DNC Scientists Disprove Existence of Roberts' Taxon

WASHINGTON DC - Jubilant scientists at the DNC's High Speed Word Collider (HSWC) announced today they have conclusively disproven the existence of Roberts' Taxon, the theoretical radioactive Facton particle that some had worried would lead to the implosion of the entire Universal Health Care System.

"I think it's time to pop the champagne corks," said HSWC Director David Plouffe. "Then blaze some choom."

The landmark experiment in Quantum Rhetoric began early this week after legal particle cosmologist John Roberts published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Tortured Logic that solved the long-debated Pelosi's Paradox in Universal Health Care Theory.

"Pelosi's Paradox states that in order to find out what is in a health care bill, it would have to be passed," explained physicist Steven Hawking. "But in order to be a law it would have to be constitutional, which means someone would have to know what was in it, which would mean it couldn't have been a bill in the first place. Think of Schroedinger's Cat, except with a lobotomy."

To solve the paradox, Roberts proposed the existence of the Taxon - an ephemeral, mysterious facton particle that in theory would allow the Universal Health System to be constitutional, without directly observing what was in it. DNC scientists at first cheered Roberts' findings, but it soon came apparent that it opened an even deadlier dilemma.

"If Roberts' Taxon were really to exist, and was woven throughout the Health-Government-Time continuum, the merest realization of it would create a giant black hole in Gallup Space and cause free healthcare reality to collapse upon itself," said Plouffe.

In order to disprove the Taxon, scientists at the HSWC devised a test experiment in their enormous Carney Lab bullshit accelerator. This test involved speeding a small mass of Facton - theoretically containing Roberts' Taxon - and smashing it at near-light speed against a flaming super-dense ionized clod of purified 

bullshit.

Schematic of experiment (graphic courtesy HSWC)

"It was a complete success," said Plouffe. "The collision produced only inert crap particles like Feesons and Penaltyons, obliterating any traces of a single highly radioactive Taxon. What's more, we were thrilled that it also resulted in over 300 milliaxlerods of of positive Fernstroms."

[But this refutes the possibility of the existence of the God Particle, the Commercion. Has the Taxon superseded it?]

While super high-density bullshit was critical to the experiment, Plouffe said other key variables were necessary to keep potential Taxons from escaping to Gallup Reality Space.

"We were careful to shroud the collision within the Beltosphere, which is protected with a thick sheath of inert, pliable media," he noted. "As additional protection, we surrounded it with a negatively-charged gaseous squirrel field."

Base on the success of the test, Plouffe said the HSWC would soon begin work on destroying traces of a new deadly Facton particle, the Unemployon.

"LOOK, SQUIRREL!" He added.

Robert Fisk, back at the same old lemonade stand.

[This is all that can be expected from the likes of Robert Fisk, a “reporter” who has never found an enemy of the United States that he couldn’t support. From the days of the Viet Cong and the Kymer Rouge, to the fall of Saddam, to the growth of Islamism, he’s always right there on the job. Lying in support of these people is just his way.

JimG33]

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -

Robert Fisk Demonizes Mideast’s Persecuted Christians

Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On July 4, 2012 @ 12:41 am In Daily Mailer, FrontPage | 

Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the U.K.’s widely-read Independent, recently showed why it is that Islamic jihadists and terrorists, including the late Osama bin Laden [1], strongly recommend his propaganda to Western readers.

In a recent article [2], Fisk goes out of his way to demonize the abused Christian minorities of the Middle East for supporting those secularist leaders most likely to preserve their freedoms and dignity.  For instance, after portraying the Middle East’s “old guard” in the worst possible terms, he complains that “Ahmed Shafiq, the Mubarak loyalist, has the support of the Christian Copts, and Assad has the support of the Syrian Christians. The Christians support the dictators. Not much of a line, is it?”

In Fisk’s way of thinking, Christians of Egypt and Syria are unpatriotic freedom-haters because they support secularists, whereas the Sharia-pushing Islamists are patriotic freedom-lovers for not.

“Not much of a line, is it?”—especially from someone who supposedly lives and travels in the Middle East and is deemed an authority on the region.  Completely missing from his narrative is why Christians are supporting Shafiq and Assad: because the alternatives, the Islamists, have been making their lives a living hell.

Fisk’s biased narrative is, of course, not original to him, but rather originates with his friends—the Islamists.  Soon after the first presidential elections in Egypt, many Islamists bemoaned Shafiq’s good showing, laying the blame directly on Egypt’s Christian Copts, who reportedly came out in large numbers voting for the secular candidates.  Tarek al-Zomor, a prominent figure of the Gama’a al-Islamiyya, [The group that has as its leader The Blind Sheikh, Abdel Rachman.] the terrorist organization that slaughtered some 60 European tourists, including several of Fisk’s countrymen, during the Luxor Massacre, “demanded an apology from the Copts” for voting for Shafiq, threatening that “this was a fatal error.”

Others, like Abu Ismail,[3] the Salafi presidential candidate who was disqualified, expressed “great disappointment” in “our Coptic brethren,” saying that “I do not understand why the Copts so adamantly voted for Ahmed Shafiq,” portraying it as some sort of conspiracy between the Copts, the old regime, and even Israel: “Exactly what relationship and benefit do the Copts have with the old regime”?

The uncritical [?] Fisk follows suit and asks the same questions, portraying the Mideast’s Christians as unpatriotic.

Missing from the Islamists’—and Fisk’s—narrative is the fact that Christians are under attack by Islamists, especially in Egypt and Syria, where Christian women and children and regularly abducted, molested, and forced to convert; where churches and monasteries are regularly attacked; where blasphemy laws imprison or kill and calls for jizya are back [4]—in short, where Christians are persecuted (see entries for Egypt and Syria in my monthly “Muslim Persecution of Christians”[5] for an idea).  Moreover, the ultimate goal of Fisk’s supposedly “freedom-loving Islamists—the enforcement of a decidedly anti-freedom Sharia law—will naturally spell disaster for Christians, since this draconian law code emphatically condemns non-Muslim “infidels” to dhimmi status—barely-tolerated, second-class “citizens” of the Islamic state.

Back in the real world, the reaction to Islamist complaints that Copts are not voting for them has been one of amazement.  As one Coptic activist put it: [6] “Did they [complaining Islamists] really expect a Christian to choose a president to represent him from those who cut off the ear of a Christian,[7]  blocked the railways in objection to the appointment of a Christian governor [8] in Qena, burn downseveral churches [9] and who are diligently working to write a Constitution which undermines the rights of Christians?”

Even Egyptian Muslim writer Khaled Montasser, [10] in an article titled “The Muslim Brotherhood Asks Why Christians Fear Them?!” explained that the Brotherhood’s own official documents and fatwas decree several anti-Christian measures, including the destruction of churches and the prevention of burying Christian “infidels” near Muslim graves—hence why Christians are not voting for Islamists.

As for Syria, since the uprising, “opposition forces”—that is, Islamists—have been attacking Christians and churches,[11] including through “kidnappings and gruesome murders.”[12] None of this happened before the uprising and under Assad’s secular rule.  As an earlier report [13]put it, “Should Assad fall, it is feared that Syria could go the way of Iraq post-Saddam Hussein. Saddam, like Assad, restrained the influence of militant Islamists, but after his fall they were free to wreak havoc on the Christian community; hundreds of thousands of Christians were consequently forced to flee the violence.”

Should the “opposition” get their way and topple the Assad regime, the same brutal pattern experienced by Iraq’s Christian minorities [14]—who have been liked to, and killed off like, dogs, to the point of nearing extinction—[15] will come to Syria, where a preacher recently urged Muslims to “tear apart, chop up and feed” Christians who support Assad “to the dogs.”

All of these “subtleties” are completely [and I would say deliberately] missed by the Independent’s Middle East foreign correspondent. Instead, he bemoans how those in Washington who support secular rulers “will want to pump up Christian fears and frighten the West with the awfulness of ‘Muslim fundamentalism.’”

At a time when Christian minorities in the Islamic world are experiencing a form of persecution unprecedented since the pre-colonial era, it is commonplace for Western “reporters” to ignore or whitewash [16] their plight.  Robert Fisk, however, takes it a step further and paints these persecuted Christians as the bad guys, thereby facilitating their ongoing sufferings.  He and the Independent should be ashamed of themselves

1- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/03/al-quaida-cunning-methods-us-news

2- http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-hosni-mubarak-has-fallen-assad-clings-on-yet-the-fate-of-their-nations-is-anyones-guess-7814810.html

3- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeqPddy3BM8&feature=relmfu

4- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10872/the-specter-of-jizya-returns-to-egypt

5- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11713/muslim-persecution-of-christians-april-2012

6- http://www.aina.org/news/20120528191505.htm

7- http://www.aina.org/news/20110325223845.htm

8- http://www.aina.org/news/20110502234500.htm

9- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10492/egypt-destroying-churches

10- http://www.elwatannews.com/news/details/10238

11- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11322/syria-christians-fate

12- http://barnabasfund.org/US/News/Archives/Syrian-Christians-in-desperate-straits-will-the-churches-survive.html

13- http://www.barnabasaid.org/US/News/Archives/Help-Christians-affected-by-worsening-crisis-in-Syria.htm

14- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/9440/iraq-christians-persecution

15- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10912/iraq-christians-near-extinction

16- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11539/media-whitewashes-muslim-persecution-christians