← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Kevin_O'Keeffe
Thread ID: 17707 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2005-04-10
2005-04-10 20:26 | User Profile
[url]http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20050407-095608-3316r.htm[/url]
Preserve free speech
By Diana West THE WASHINGTON TIMES
If Kafka met Monty Python, and George Orwell edited their collaboration, they might have come up with something like the following real-life exchange. It took place in an Australian court where two Christian pastors were found guilty of "religious vilification" of Muslims by lecturing to their flock on Islam. At one point during the trial, defendant Daniel Scot began to read Koranic verses in his own defense. The Pakistani-born pastor hoped to prove to the judge that his discussion of the inferior status of women under Islam, for example, had a specific textual basis in the Koran. As he began to read, a lawyer for the Islamic Council of Victoria, the plaintiff in the case, objected. Reading these verses aloud, she said, would in itself be vilification. Poor, ultimately convicted, Mr. Scot put it best: "How can it be vilifying to Muslims when I am just reading from the Koran?"
****Like a recollected frustration dream, the Australian experience comes to mind at word of a depressingly similar situation in this country. Not in a court; not at a church-sponsored seminar; but in journalism. In the marketplace, literally, of ideas. I'm talking about an online bookstore run under the imprimatur of National Review magazine. There, "The Life and Religion of Mohammed" by J.L. Menezes, a Roman Catholic priest, used to be for sale. So did "The Sword of the Prophet," by Srdja Trifkovic.
****Suddenly, last week, they weren't. It seems that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) decided NationalReview shouldn't sell these books. The magazine could have told the, shall we say, controversial, Muslim lobby group ââ¬â three of whose former associates have been indicted on terrorism-related charges, and whose executive director, Niwad Awad, has publicly declared his support for Hamas ââ¬â to run along and boycott books somewhere else. Instead, National Review whipped those tomes off their e-shelves practically before CAIR could get its "action alert" online. Just a little pressure ââ¬â including a CAIR letter about the books to Boeing Corp., a big National Review advertiser ââ¬â did the dirty trick. (CAIR promised to copy its letter to ambassadors of Muslim nations that buy Boeing planes.)
****Here's the thing. I am not writing to mount a defense of these eminently defensible books, nasty bits and all, including, according to advertising copy, "the dark mind of Mohammed," his multiple wives (among them a little girl), "rapine," "warfare," "conquests" and "butcheries." Suffice it to say, as crack scholar-author of Islam Robert Spencer has written, "Everything with which CAIR took issue can be readily established from Islamic sources." (And if that doesn't suffice, read his analysis, "CAIR's War Against NationalReview,"at [url]www.frontpagemag.com[/url].) He should know. Not only is Mr. Spencer familiar with the books in question, but he happens to have written the ad copy for the Menezes book CAIR found so objectionable.
****Of greater concern is the philosophical battle National Review declined to fight, and the reasons the magazine declined to fight it. According to National Reveiw Editor Rich Lowry's post at National Review Online, because the magazine's book service is put together by an independent publisher, and since the CAIR-provoking copy wasn't written by a National Reveiw staffer, Mr. Lowry saw no capitulation in removing the Menezes book at CAIR's behest. (National Review this week returned "The Sword of the Prophet" to its bookstore.) "In contrast," he wrote, "Robert Spencer and some others on the right feel very strongly that it is important to discredit Mohammed and Islam as such in order to win the war on terror. That's certainly their prerogative, but it is not the tack National Review has taken."
****This statement reveals an unnerving disconnect. The study undertaken by Mr. Spencer and kindred Islamic scholars isn't calculated to "discredit Mohammed and Islam" ââ¬â as if "discrediting" Mohammed and Islam would convince jihadis to make peace to begin with. The fact is, a thorough examination of the expansionist, religious-cum-political ideology of Islam is vital to any successful defense against its jihadist expression. Ignoring facts about Mohammed and Islam, given their role in animating terrorism, would be like ignoring facts about Marx and Communism in that earlier ideological struggle National Review championed ââ¬â worse, even, considering the inspiration Muslims draw from the personal life of Mohammed.
****But what may be most damaging about National Review's act of reference-cleansing is that it helps legitimize CAIR's drive to tar all criticism of Islam as "hate speech" and thus squelch it. This, of course, was roughly what an Australian court ruled against Preacher Scot. It can't happen here? Maybe not. But the only way to preserve freedom of speech is to speak freely.
2005-04-10 20:29 | User Profile
[url=http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/chronicles.cgi/Christianity/Thomas_Fleming.National_(Jihad)_Re.writeback]link to original post[/url]
Our Country No Longer
What the recent case in Australia demonstrates about our society (I can cite an Australian court case as evidence for what is wrong with America precisely because the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are ALL being undermined and corrupted via the precise same process) is that this is simply no longer our country. The leftists (including so-called neo-"conservatives") and their Master Race of Anyone-Who-isn't-European-and/or-Christian, and their other allies (Feminists and homosexuals, primarily), have completed their long march through our culture, and have thus remade it in their image. The traditional population of the USA has been displaced; our Constitution is a cynical joke.
I have read Dr. Flemming and other seemingly reasonable and well-intentioned men claim the route to secular salvation with regard to this treasonous state of affairs is to, in effect, emulate our Jacobin degenerate opponents, and thus recapture our society one collegiate English department and one small circulation newspaper at a time, so to speak. The reason such a strategy will be insufficient to restore authentic Western civilization to the English-speaking world is because our opponents do not respect the rule of law, or any such Constitutional niceties as free speech for those with whom they disagree, for example. They will employ law enforcement, the intelligence agencies, and eventually the military itself, to crush us mercilessly in precisely the way which we refrained from doing when we held the upper hand. This is because we our decent men & women, and they are not. I fear a Second Civil War (or Revolution, if you will) is the only way this tragic and disgusting status quo which we are forced to endure will finally be sent back to the Stygian depths from which it hatched. We have wasted too many decades for this to end peacefully, I regret to have to report.
2005-04-12 02:20 | User Profile
Kevin, sadly you are most likely right when you say, "We have wasted too many decades for this to end peacefully, I regret to have to report."
I personally am not looking for a fight. But ultimately, the fight will be brought to us. Someday, the enemy will give us one of two options; 1) fight or 2) kneel and take a bullet to the back of the head.
I intend to be prepared.
2005-04-13 08:29 | User Profile
Here is a reply from someone names Nicholas G. Moses, who's email address indicates he is affiliated with the University of Miami (after a quick Google search, I have ascertained he is a student there, along with being Sergeant-at-Arms of the University of Miami College Republicans; and I thought I was battling it out with a professor....sigh), along with my rebuttal:
Nicholas G. Moses wrote:
"Mr. O'Keeffe makes some noteworthy points that I have considered myself, although one should always be skeptical of anyone whose e-mail address is 'NATLSOCIALIST76@aol.com.'"
One should probably be skeptical of just about anyone making controversial political statements on the Internet - not merely those of us who are candid about our unpopular political affiliations. I can assure you that I am a rather reluctant and skeptical (pan-Aryan) national socialist, and if I thought paleo-conservatism was sufficient to achieve victory over those who would see us all destroyed, I'd be a paleo-conservative instead.
Unfortunately, conservatism, by its very nature, does not seem to have many adherents who are psychologically capable of defeating the sort of enemies we presently face. While paleo-cons are clearly the best of a dysfunctional lot, Patrick Buchanan's endorsement of George W. Bush for re-election in 2004 is a classic example of how conservatives, be they paleos or what-have-you, simply are not able to make the symbolic break with officialdom that is going to be necessary in order for those righteous men & women who have spoken out against the present wickedness to be spared the Abu-Ghraib treatment (shorthand for torture employing such methods as electrocution and homosexual rape) prior to their being buried out in the Mojave desert, or beneath the Alaskan tundra. I fear conservatives, even many well-meaning paleos, will still be saluting the flag and singing "Hail to the Chief!" when the President's motorcade drives by, assuming (falsely) that they will be spared in the upcoming orgy of degenerate cruelty and bloodshed on the part of the operatives of the emerging American police state.
If men like Patrick Buchanan won't even go so far as to endorse Michael Peroutka or Ralph Nader against a murderous, treasonous, imbecilic, lying, filthy, worthless, cowardly, ignorant, plutocratic gangster like George W. Bush, is it any wonder that men like David Duke start to seem more appealing to those of us who are desperate to preserve, for ourselves and our posterity, some substantial portion of American civilization?
Paleo-con theorizing is all well and good for financially secure men in their 50s, 60s and 70s, who in many cases will be dead of natural causes before things get too scary anyway. Among those of us in ours 20s & 30s, who's offspring are still just young children, and thus we realize our children face a certainty of either a Hellish or brief life if things don't change in this nation (not to mention the fact we have much less social status to lose, seeing as how its now so difficult for us to enter the middle class, in part because just about the only lifelong, careerist positions - government jobs - are generally all reserved almost solely for those who are of non-European descent, as anyone who walks into any government office can clearly see for themselves), we perhaps do not place quite the same level of emphasis on the importance of always pleasing our enemies by giving them the impression of our preferring James Madison to Sir Oswald Mosley. We care more about achieving victory than we do about not seeing mean things written about us in the editorial pages of the New York Times. As much as I admire much of the writing in Chronicles (and The American Conservative, for that matter), I'm not at all sure many of you paleos have your priorities straight in that regard, and thus your (characteristically conservative) strategy will never be to win, but merely to reduce the extent of the losses we will suffer during the course of our seemingly endless series of humiliating defeats and vile degradations. So yes, I'm a national socialist. You can even call me a "Nazi" if it helps makes you feel superior.
We aren't going to be able to vote and protest our way out this debacle, so it frankly makes sense to adhere to those leaders (and ideological perspectives) which acknowledge that terrible reality, and who are psychologically capable of moving forward within that context. While Kevin Alfred Strom of the National Alliance wants Bush impeached, removed from office, and subsequently put on trial for treason, many paleo-cons actually voted to re-elect the man! Explain to me again why national socialists are beyond the pale, yet paleo-conservatives are not? How is what Hitler did to the Jews any worse than what Bush is doing to the Arabs?
2005-04-13 15:31 | User Profile
Once again, the enlightened elite showing their tolerance and intellectual honesty by censoring and punishing anyone they believe are corrupted by that ignorant, ancient book called the Bible.