Bloodthirsty Liberal

And what doesn’t:

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it “exists to strengthen Black America’s political voice,” claimed that my book espouses a “white supremacist ideology.” Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, “The End of White America.”

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America’s leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people said that Buchanan’s “extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world.”

Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR’s Diane Rehm — that I believe homosexual acts to be “unnatural and immoral.”

On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.

“Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite,” said Foxman. Buchanan “bemoans the destruction of white Christian America” and says America’s shrinking Jewish population is due to the “collective decision of Jews themselves.”

I take no position on the particular point Foxman and Buchanan are arguing. Here’s Buchanan’s explanation:

[W]hat else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6 percent in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50 percent by 2050, if not the “collective decision of Jews themselves”?

It sounds to me like Buchanan laments the decline.

But if his book was published only four months ago, why has Foxman dogged him for 22 years?

I was hoping you’d ask:

On American Jews and the Pro-Israel Lobby

2010: “If [Elena] Kagan [President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court] is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this Democrats’ idea of diversity?”

– Column, “Are Liberals Anti-WASP?” May 14, 2010
2008: “Israel and its Fifth Column in this city seek to stampede us into war with Iran. Bush should rebuff them, and the American people should tell their congressmen: You vote for 362, we don’t vote for you.”

– Column, “A Phony Crisis — and a Real One,” July 15, 2008
2007: “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at….”

– On The McLaughlin Group, February 2, 2007

[and just to show consistency]

1990: In an August 25,1990, column, Buchanan criticized commentators urging military intervention in Iraq, naming Abe Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthamer and Henry Kissinger. On August 29th, he wrote the following:

“’The civilized world must win this fight,’ the editors thunder. But, if it comes to war, it will not be the ‘civilized world’ humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.”

- Washington Times, August 29, 1990

1990: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”

- The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990

1990: “Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.”

- McLaughlin Group, June 15, 1990

For 22 years (more certainly), Buchanan has held these abhorrent and degrading—and Constitutionally protected—views. Without losing a gig. In fact, the network of Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, and the late Keith Olbermann—itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Matters—championed him for a decade.

Yet let the feathered boa of one tranny be ruffled, and he’s out on his tuchas.

It’s interesting what gets you fired these days, and what gets you hired. Very interesting.

At least we know where we stand:

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley filed by two Jewish students who alleged harassment by Muslim students.

US District Judge Richard Seeborg said much of the alleged harassment, even if true, constituted protected political speech that UC Berkeley had no obligation to stop.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Seeborg issued his ruling last week.

The plaintiffs, a current student and a recent graduate, said the harassment included checkpoints at an annual event protesting Israeli policies.

Demonstrators in military attire and carrying fake weapons at the checkpoints allegedly asked passing students whether they were Jewish.

Fair enough. I therefore look forward to “Stone an Adulterer Week”, “Hang a Queer Week”, “Cane a Woman Driver Week”, “Marry and Deflower a Twelve-Year-Old Week”, “Throw Acid in the Face of an Independent Woman Week”, “Behead a Jew Week”, “‘Honor’ Kill Your Sister Week”, “Drag a US Serviceman Behind a Jeep Week”, “Burn an Independent Contractor Week”, “Jihadist Flying Lesson Week”—why there must be enough to fill an academic year!

And all of them “protected political speech that UC Berkeley ha[s] no obligation to stop”!

Get busy, university Hillels. Beats beer pong. To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!

Other countries think just as little of their Nobel laureates as we do of ours:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Abd Al-Mun’im Al-Shahhat, spokesman of the Egyptian Salafi movement, which aired on Al-Nahhar TV on December 2, 2011:

Interviewer: Go ahead and say what you think of Naguib Mahfouz.

Abd Al-Mun’im Al-Shahhat: In my view, the literature of Naguib Mahfouz encourages depravity. It all takes place in drug dens, where people smoke hashish, and in whorehouses. Children of Geblawi is a symbolic philosophy story, with an atheist aspect. That is my view, and nobody can prevent me from expressing it.

[…]

If you ask me whether the state should prohibit atheist literature – this question should be referred to Al-Azhar’s Academy for Islamic Research.

Obama’s philosophy takes place in drug dens and whorehouses, too—see the Occupy Movement. Maybe this guy has a point.

Many of us have experienced this in our own small way, but this journalist is willing to discuss exactly how the Obama administration shut him up.

h/t Yerushalimey

Obama’s greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US.

How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot’s horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant’s rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.

Six months later, a PBS official told me: “This wasn’t censorship. We’re into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry.”

In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word “ban” was rarely used, and those responsible would invariably insist they believed in free speech.

The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, believes in free speech. The foundation’s website says it is “dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity”. Authors, film-makers and poets make their way to a sanctum of liberalism bankrolled by the billionaire Patrick Lannan in the tradition of Rockefeller and Ford.

The foundation also awards “grants” to America’s liberal media, such as Free Speech TV, the Foundation for National Progress (publisher of the magazine Mother Jones), the Nation Institute and the TV and radio programme Democracy Now!. In Britain, it has been a supporter of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am one of the judges. In 2008, Patrick Lannan backed Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, he is “devoted” to Obama.
World of not-knowing

On 15 June, I was due in Santa Fe, having been invited to share a platform with the distinguished American journalist David Barsamian. The foundation was also to host the US premiere of my new film, The War You Don’t See, which investigates the false image-making of warmakers, especially Obama.

I was about to leave for Santa Fe when I received an email from the Lannan Foundation official organising my visit. The tone was incredulous. “Something has come up,” she wrote. Patrick Lannan had called her and ordered all my events to be cancelled. “I have no idea what this is all about,” she wrote.

Baffled, I asked that the premiere of my film be allowed to go ahead, as the US distribution largely depended on it. She repeated that “all” my events were cancelled, “and this includes the screening of your film”. On the Lannan Foundation website, “cancelled” appeared across a picture of me. There was no explanation. None of my phone calls was returned, nor subsequent emails answered. A Kafka world of not-knowing descended.

This is ok because Obama is the Messiah, and we really can’t complain about the loss of freedom of expression. So shut up.

These guys lie a lot too:

The silence lasted a week until, under pressure from local media, the foundation put out a terse statement that too few tickets had been sold to make my visit “viable”, and that “the Foundation regrets that the reason for the cancellation was not explained to Mr Pilger or to the public at the time the decision was made”. Doubts were cast by a robust editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The paper, which has long played a prominent role in promoting Lannan Foundation events, disclosed that my visit had been cancelled before the main advertising and previews were published. A full-page interview with me had to be pulled hurriedly. “Pilger and Barsamian could have expected closer to a packed 820-seat Lensic [arts centre].”

The manager of The Screen, the Santa Fe cinema that had been rented for the premiere, was called late at night and told to kill all his online promotion for my film. He was given no explanation, but took it on himself to reschedule the film for 23 June. It was a sell-out, with many people turned away. The idea that there was no public interest was demonstrably not true.

Liberals play hardball. In some ways I couldn’t care less, because I think that they are all so flawed, but every little tear at the fabric of society weakens us. Writing about the Silence of the Left:

…the Russian dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote: “When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”

I suppose that having seen conservatives in my neck of the woods targeted by these very people (and the author freely admits that Obama is more of a war monger than Bush ever dreamed of being), I just find it hard to feel empathy for his plight. What goes around comes around.

- Aggie

With apologies to Voltaire, shouldn’t that be our attitude?

Burning the Muslim holy book “was hateful, it was intolerant and it was extremely disrespectful and again, we condemn it in the strongest manner possible,” said Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan.

U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry said in a statement that Americans respect the Quran “and all religious texts and deplore any action that shows disrespect to any religious faith.”

…

The comments came as clashes Sunday in Kandahar, Afghanistan, between police and stone-throwing demonstrators killed as many as three people, including two police officers, and injured at least 10.

…

At least nine people were killed and 73 injured in Kandahar on Saturday, and 12 people died Friday — including seven U.N. employees — when angry demonstrators stormed a U.N. compound in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan.

…

Karzai strongly condemned the Quran burning and asked “that the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and the U.S. president condemn this action … in very clear words to the public,” his office said in a statement.

U.S. President Barack Obama also condemned the action on Saturday, while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, told the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the Senate would “take a look” at the issue.

…

The national assembly of clerics on Sunday condemned both the Quran-burning and the killings of civilians and United Nations staff members in the demonstrations.

Even the assembly of clerics condemned the killings as well as the burning! That’s more than our own government could do.

Look, I don’t want to burn the Koran (it’s not worth the match), but isn’t burning the Koran protected by our free speech laws?

Well, isn’t it?

Maybe I should hold a big book burning in my town square. I will burn Bibles, Torahs, Bhagavad Gitas, Tripitakas, Dianetics, plus copies of Edith Hamilton’s Greek Myths.

Everything but the Koran, which I will sell at a tidy profit to all the curious onlookers who come by, promising them it would be better for them to learn it now than later. And I will use the proceeds from this protected form of free expression to bail myself out of jail.

Follow the money.

James OKeefe of theprojectveritas.org has released another tape. In this tape, an NPR executive explains that the donation can be hidden. In other words, listeners and other donors don’t have to know that NPR is funded by the Muslim Brotherhood.

On a personal note, a dear friend has said for many years that if anyone could ever figure out a way to locate the funding for NPR (and other leftist news organizations) they would discover that the money is coming from our friends the Saudis or other groups that would turn off sort of mild Leftists. After listening to this tape, you’ll understand that one way they accept money from unsavory individuals and groups is to hide it as “anonymous”.

NPR has the right to be just as despicable as they please, but not on my dime.

- Aggie

Hey, watch your language! This is a family blog.

Police in China showed up in force in several major cities after an online call for a “jasmine revolution”.

Calls for people to protest and shout “we want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness”, were circulated on Chinese microblog sites.

The message was first posted on a US-based Chinese-language website.

Several rights activists were detained beforehand and three people were arrested in Shanghai, but the call for mass protests was not well answered.

Reports from Shanghai and Beijing said there appeared to be many onlookers curious about the presence of so many police and journalists at the proposed protest sites, in busy city-centre shopping areas.

Police in the two cities dispersed small crowds who had gathered. There were no reports of protests in 11 other cities where people were urged to gather on Sunday.

The BBC’s Chris Hogg in Shanghai says the men arrested there were roughly handled as they were dragged away shouting “why are you arresting me, I haven’t done anything wrong”.

Our correspondent says it was not clear what prompted the arrests and the men had not shouted any political slogans.

China’s authorities blocked searches for the word jasmine on the internet.

Hush Yo Mout’ is the Deputy Minister of the People’s Propaganda in China, and he’s not happy.

On Saturday President Hu Jintao called for stricter controls on the internet “to guide public opinion” and “solve prominent problems which might harm the harmony and stability of the society”.

Anybody who could fix his mouth to say anything remotely like that is not our friend—and I mean you, Chris Matthews.

What he said:

I do not want civil discourse

For a decade, from the election of Bush 43 forward, the Left has lied and cheated as it tried to return to power. Al Gore made a mockery out of the American electoral system by being a spoilsport over Florida, which Bush indeed won by 537 votes. Dan Rather forged a document to try to derail Bush’s re-election. Twice Democrats stole U.S. senators from the Republicans. After voting to support the war to get by the 2002 election, many Democrats quickly soured on the war. The profane protests were cheered by liberals who misattributed “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” to Thomas Jefferson; the words belong to the late historian Howard Zinn.

Once in power, liberals were the opposite of gracious.

For two years now, I have been called ignorant, racist, angry and violent by the left. The very foul-mouthed protesters of Bush dare to now label my words as “hate speech.”

Last week, the left quickly blamed the right for the national tragedy of a shooting spree by a madman who never watched Fox News, never listened to Rush Limbaugh and likely did not know who Sarah Palin is.

Fortunately, the American public rejected out of hand that idiotic notion that the right was responsible.

Rather than apologize, the left wants to change the tone of the political debate.

The left suddenly wants civil discourse.

Bite me.

The left wants to play games of semantics.

Bite me.

The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade.

Bite me.

Oh, it just gets better and better. Read. It. All.

Just another nibble. I can’t resist:

My free speech matters more than the feelings of anyone on the left. You don’t like what I say? Tough.

I will not allow people to label my words Hate Speech or try to lecture me on civility. I saw the lefty signs. The left’s definition of civil discourse is surreal.

We have a terribly unfit president who has expanded government control beyond not only what is constitutional but what is healthy for our freedom.

Indeed, this call for civil discourse is itself a direct threat to my free speech.

So screw you.

You don’t like my words? You don’t like my tone? You feel threatened?

Too bad.

No.

Actually, that is what I want. I want the lefties to feel bad. I want them to feel hurt. I want them to cry to their mommies.

That way the field will be cleared so we grown-ups can fix the nation and the economy. If you can’t put up with a little excrement, get the hell out of the barn.

With respect to the great Don Surber, barnyard excrement is all we’ve had from them for years.

I hesitate to take up the causes of individual people if I don’t know them and their beliefs. I can’t say whether I believe in Geert Wilders or not—but I support free speech (and the truth) unreservedly:

For a prosecutor, it was a simple matter of cause and effect. First, I showed that the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, called for acts of violence: He admonished Muslims that Allah commanded them to slay non-believers and precisely quoted Islamic scriptures to back up that admonition. Then I showed that Muslim terrorists responded to these scripturally based exhortations by plotting and carrying out terrorist acts.

For this, the Clinton administration presented me the Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award, the Justice Department’s highest honor. For doing exactly the same thing, the justice department of the Netherlands presented Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders with an indictment.

…

For demonstrating cause and effect, for graphically displaying — most notoriously in his short film, Fitna — that Islamic scriptures beget jihadist atrocities, Wilders was put on trial in the Netherlands. In this Kafkaesque situation, as Diana West reports, it would have been hard to conjure words more frightening than the ones that tripped off the Dutch prosecutor’s lips: “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’ witnesses might prove Wilders’ observations to be correct. What’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.”

The truth is irrelevant. The truth is illegal. That sums up very nicely mainstream Europe’s attitude toward Islam and anything Islam happens to have in its sites (Israel, Jews, Christianity, civilization).

Europe is gripped by fear—numbing, paralyzing fear. Which rarely shows a people at their best. See 20th century European history for further examples.

The Washington Post refused to publish a cartoon that simply asked the question, without a depiction of Muhammad.

Let’s read the ombudsman’s explanation carefully, not for what he said, but for what he declined to say. I will put brackets [] around the missing information which I will supply to our readers.

“Non Sequitur” is a popular comic that runs daily in about 800 newspapers, including this one. But the “Non Sequitur” cartoon that appeared in last Sunday’s Post was not the one creator Wiley Miller drew for that day.

Editors at The Post and many other papers pulled the cartoon and replaced it with one that had appeared previously. They were concerned it might offend and provoke some Post readers, especially Muslims. [A small point - they were concerned that Muslims would threaten to murder the creator and the publisher. They were not worried about giving offense at all.]

Miller is known for social satire. But at first glance, the single-panel cartoon he drew for last Sunday seems benign. It is a bucolic scene imitating the best-selling children’s book “Where’s Waldo?” A grassy park is jammed with activity. Animals frolic. Children buy ice cream. Adults stroll and sunbathe. A caption reads: “Where’s Muhammad?”

Miller’s cartoon is clearly a satirical reference to the global furor that ensued in 2006 after a Danish newspaper invited cartoonists to draw the prophet Muhammad as they see him. After the cartoons were published, Muslims in many countries demonstrated against what they viewed as the lampooning of Islam’s holiest figure. [And here we have the second lie: It wasn't just demonstrations; it was deaths and attempted murder of the publisher of the cartoons and the fact that the cartoonists are in hiding, under police protection.]

Ready for another whopper?

Miller’s Sunday drawing also keyed on “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day!,” a free-speech protest this year by cartoonists responding to what was widely interpreted as a death threat from an Islamic cleric against two animators who depicted Muhammad wearing a bear suit in an episode of the “South Park” television show. If enough cartoonists drew Muhammad, protest organizers reasoned, it would be impractical to threaten all of them. [But in fact, the creator of Everybody Draw Mohammad Day, Molly Norris, is in permanent hiding, having been advised by the FBI to relinquish her career, her home, her family and her identity.]

Shamefuller and shamefuller:

What is clever about last Sunday’s “Where’s Muhammad?” comic is that the prophet does not appear in it.

Still, Style editor Ned Martel said he decided to yank it, after conferring with others, including Executive Editor Marcus W. Brauchli, because “it seemed a deliberate provocation without a clear message.” He added that “the point of the joke was not immediately clear” and that readers might think that Muhammad was somewhere in the drawing.

What is terrifying about the Washington Post decision and the decisions of other editors across the nation is that they backed off from publishing the cartoon and then even from having an honest discussion about why they refused to publish it. It wasn’t ordinary concern for the feelings of a group of readers – that’s laughable. It was because they feared being targeted personally by a murderous fatwah and an angry crowd of Muslims determined to shoot them, stab them or behead them. That is what the concern was. And they didn’t even have the balls to tell their readers about the fate of other cartoonists and other editors who had run afoul of the Religion of Peace™.

- Aggie