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Why is it permissable to mock one religion but not another?

by Mojambo ( 83 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Bigotry, Dhimmitude, Free Speech, Hate Speech, Hillary Clinton, Islam, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Religion at September 27th, 2012 - 8:00 am

A great column from last week by Bret Stephens (a former editor of the Jerusalem Post) that I somehow missed but is still quite relevant. There is a Broadway play called “The Book of Mormon” which our estimable Secretary of State has seen and was reportedly laughing hysterically at. To say the least it was not friendly to the Mormon faith (and what a coincidence, Mitt Romney happens to be a Mormon!).

By the way “Hasa diga Eebowai, ” a Ugandan phrase, translates to “F*ck you, God” in English.

by Bret Stephens

“Hasa Diga Eebowai” is the hit number in Broadway’s hit musical “The Book of Mormon,” which won nine Tony awards last year. What does the phrase mean? I can’t tell you, because it’s unprintable in a family newspaper.

On the other hand, if you can afford to shell out several hundred bucks for a seat, then you can watch a Mormon missionary get his holy book stuffed—well, I can’t tell you about that, either. Let’s just say it has New York City audiences roaring with laughter.

The “Book of Mormon”—a performance of which Hillary Clinton attended last year, without registering a complaint—comes to mind as the administration falls over itself denouncing “Innocence of Muslims.” This is a film that may or may not exist; whose makers are likely not who they say they are; whose actors claim to have known neither the plot nor purpose of the film; and which has never been seen by any member of the public except as a video clip on the Internet.

No matter. The film, the administration says, is “hateful and offensive” (Susan Rice), “reprehensible and disgusting” (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, “disgusting and reprehensible” (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let’s get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it’s because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

Here’s what else we learned this week about the emerging liberal consensus: That it’s okay to denounce a movie you haven’t seen, which is like trashing a book you haven’t read. That it’s okay to give perp-walk treatment to the alleged—and no doubt terrified—maker of the film on legally flimsy and politically motivated grounds of parole violation. […….]

And, finally, this: That the most “progressive” administration in recent U.S. history will make no principled defense of free speech to a Muslim world that could stand hearing such a defense. After the debut of “The Book of Mormon” musical, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints responded with this statement: “The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ.”

That was it. The People’s Front for the Liberation of Provo will not be gunning for a theater near you. Is it asking too much of religious and political leaders in Muslim communities to adopt a similar attitude?

[……..]

The defense could add that a great religion surely cannot be goaded into frenetic mob violence on the slimmest provocation. Yet to watch the images coming out of Benghazi, Cairo, Tunis and Sana’a is to witness some significant portion of a civilization being transformed into Travis Bickle, the character Robert De Niro made unforgettable in Taxi Driver. “You talkin’ to me?”

A defense would also point out that an Islamic world that insists on a measure of religious respect needs also to offer that respect in turn. When Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi—the closest thing Sunni Islam has to a pope—praises Hitler for exacting “divine punishment” on the Jews, that respect isn’t exactly apparent. Nor has it been especially apparent in the waves of Islamist-instigated pogroms that have swept Egypt’s Coptic community in recent years.

Finally, it need be said that the whole purpose of free speech is to protect unpopular, heretical, vulgar and stupid views. So far, the Obama administration’s approach to free speech is that it’s fine so long as it’s cheap and exacts no political price. This is free speech as pizza.

President Obama came to office promising that he would start a new conversation with the Muslim world, one that lectured less and listened more. After nearly four years of listening, we can now hear more clearly where the U.S. stands in the estimation of that world: equally despised but considerably less feared. Just imagine what four more years of instinctive deference will do.

On the bright side, dear liberals, you’ll still be able to mock Mormons. They tend not to punch back, which is part of what makes so many of them so successful in life.

Read the rest – Muslims, Mormons and Liberals

Tags: Bret Stephens, Mormonism
Posted in Barack Obama, Bigotry, Dhimmitude, Free Speech, Hate Speech, Hillary Clinton, Islam, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Religion | 83 Comments »

The president would rather be loved than feared, he is neither

by Mojambo ( 32 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, Elections 2012, Iran, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, World at August 29th, 2012 - 8:00 am

The wages of appeasement are the worst of both worlds. You are neither popular (and popularity in the world is overrated) nor are you respected. Neville Chamberlain could attest to that if he were still with us. Obama, who was awarded a Nobel Peace prize before he was even sworn in as president, always thought it was George W. Bush which made America unpopular.

by Bret Stephens

A few days ago there occurred one of those telling little episodes that captures the essence and folly of the Obama administration’s approach to foreign policy. The meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement is being hosted this week in Iran, and the administration had urged United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon not to attend as a signal of displeasure at Tehran’s serial violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Of course Mr. Ban is going.

The administration’s response to Mr. Ban’s decision was “muted,” according to the New York Times, evidently out of sympathy for his delicate position: Most U.N. member states are also members of the Non-Aligned Movement, and it’s customary for U.N. secretaries-general to attend the meetings. There’s also hope Mr. Ban will make a public stink in Iran about its leaders’ nuclear bid or their calls to wipe out Israel. And maybe he will.

Still, there’s no overlooking the central point of this tussle: In the global popularity contest between Barack Obama and Ali Khamenei, the ayatollah is winning.

[…]

For Mr. Obama, on the other hand, the meeting should serve as another reminder that his core foreign policy concept—that global popularity generates global power—has failed. No U.S. president since John F. Kennedy has come to office with more global goodwill than Mr. Obama; no U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has been so widely rebuked.

Consider the record. His failed personal effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. His failed personal effort to negotiate a climate-change deal at Copenhagen in 2009. His failed efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran that year and this year. His failed effort to improve America’s public standing in the Muslim world with the now-forgotten Cairo speech. His failed reset with Russia. His failed effort to strong-arm Israel into a permanent settlement freeze. His failed (if half-hearted) effort to maintain a residual U.S. military force in Iraq. His failed efforts to cut deals with the Taliban and reach out to North Korea. His failed effort to win over China and Russia for even a symbolic U.N. condemnation of Syria’s Bashar Assad. His failed efforts to intercede in Europe’s economic crisis. (“Herr Obama should above all deal with the reduction of the American deficit” was the free advice German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble offered this year.)

In June, the Pew Research Center released one of its periodic surveys of global opinion. It found that since 2009, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. had slipped nearly everywhere in the world except Russia and, go figure, Japan. George W. Bush was more popular in Egypt in the last year of his presidency than Mr. Obama is today.

It’s true that these surveys need to be taken with a grain of salt: efficacy, not popularity, is the right measure by which to judge an administration’s foreign policy. But that makes it more noteworthy that this administration should fail so conspicuously on its own terms. Mr. Obama has become the Ruben Studdard of the world stage: the American Idol who never quite made it in the real world.

[…]

But note that the drone strikes have been pursued in spite of global public opinion—the U.S. is the only country surveyed by Pew in which the strikes enjoy majority support. Note, also, that the strikes are the sort of thing Mr. Obama’s core supporters would have been shrieking about incessantly in a previous administration.

For the most part, however, Mr. Obama has steadfastly pursued his belief that it’s better to be loved than feared, ignoring the old Florentine’s warning that “men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than to one who makes himself feared.” And so the injuries have come: disses from Putin; mockery from Ahmadinejad. Maybe Mr. Obama thinks that, as the Most Powerful Man in the World, he can breezily afford to ignore their slights, and perhaps he can. But Americans can’t and shouldn’t.

I tend to think that the buzz about American decline mistakes the mediocrity of the president for the destiny of the nation. But we have an election on, the outcome of which will decide whether one man’s mediocrity becomes a whole nation’s destiny. Mr. Obama is now the world’s leading has-been, trying to revive a career on the strength of a talent that was greatly exaggerated to begin with. But a country that’s willing to reward mediocrity with a second chance risks becoming a has-been itself.

Read the rest: Barack Obama; Global Has-Been

Tags: Bret Stephens
Posted in Barack Obama, Egypt, Elections 2012, Iran, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, World | 32 Comments »

Romney v. Obama on Israel; and Romney’s successful trip

by Mojambo ( 127 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Palestinians, Turkey at August 3rd, 2012 - 7:00 am

The other day the Knish wrote on his blog regarding the Romney trip to Israel and the nontroversy about Palestinian culture and their low GDP “What Romney didn’t mention, but should have, is that the Palestinian Authority dealt yet another blow to its economy when it drove out the Christian population. Christians in the territories have traditionally made the best businessmen and the capital of the Palestinian Authority was actually started by Jordanian Christian refugees escaping Muslim persecution. And their decline follows a pattern of Christian communities across the Middle East declining and disappearing under Muslim rule.” As for Obama v. Israel – just give him a second term and he will make Jimmy Carter and James Baker seem like fervent Zionists.

by Bret Stephens

Mitt Romney infuriated Palestinians during his visit to Israel on the weekend by calling Jerusalem “the capital of Israel.” He then added insult to injury by noting—in the context of a discussion of “culture”—the “dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” between Israelis and Palestinians. A Palestinian official called the remark “racist.”

I’m beginning to warm to Mitt.

We live in a time when being pro-Israel has become a key test of a candidate’s presidential fitness, and rightly so. George W. Bush passed that test on a helicopter ride over Israel with Ariel Sharon in 1999. Barack Obama tried to do the same when he paid homage to the besieged Israeli town of Sderot in 2008.

By contrast, Jimmy Carter thinks Israel is a virtual apartheid state, which is just the sort of thought that makes Carter Carter. To be anti-Israel doesn’t absolutely, positively, make you an anti-Semite. But it does mark you out as something between a moron and a crank.

President Obama has yet to do anything toward Israel that would put him in the Carter league—quite. But give him a second term. Perhaps his performance so far has been only an overture.

Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.

This performance includes unprecedented personal chilliness toward the Israeli prime minister; unprecedented warmth toward Turkey’s anti-Israel prime minister; an unprecedented effort to put diplomatic distance between the U.S. and Israel; and, more recently, an unprecedented campaign of intelligence and military leaks designed to stay Israel’s hand against Iran. The president only seems to get right with Israel when he senses he’s in political trouble, or when his fundraising efforts lag, or when there’s a big Aipac speech to deliver. Last week, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, couldn’t bring himself to name Israel’s capital when asked at a briefing. Why?

You hear a lot of theories trying to explain this, often centered on Mr. Obama’s past friendships with the likes of Prof. Rashid Khalidi, Rev. Jeremiah Wright or Rabbi Arnold Wolf, the late firebrand of the Jewish far left. I have a simpler theory: The president’s views are of a piece with the broader left-right debate on the nature of success.

When detractors think about Israel, they tend to think its successes are largely ill-gotten: Somebody else’s land, somebody else’s money, somebody else’s rights. It’s the view that Israel gets an unfair share of foreign aid from the U.S., and that it takes an unfair share of territory from the Palestinians. It’s also the view that, as the presumptive stronger party in its dealings with the Palestinians, Israel bears the onus of making concessions and taking the proverbial risks for peace. As the supposed underdogs, Palestinians are not burdened by any reciprocal moral obligations.

By contrast, when admirers of Israel visit the country, they typically marvel at everything it has planted, built, invented, re-imagined, restored, saved. Israel’s friends think that the country has earned its success the hard way, and that it deserves to reap the rewards. Hence Mitt Romney on Sunday: “You export technology, not tyranny or terrorism. . . . What you have built here, with your own hands, is a tribute to your people.”

Animating one side of this divide is a sense of admiration. Animating the other is a sense of envy. Could Mr. Obama have uttered lines like Mitt Romney’s? Maybe. But you get the feeling that scrolling in the back of his mind would be the words, “You didn’t build that.”

Does this mean that Mr. Obama is “anti-Israel” in the most invidious sense? Mr. Obama seems sincere when he speaks of his admiration for Israeli kibbutzim, or his outrage at Holocaust denial, or his solidarity with Israeli victims of terrorism. And he seems more than sincere in his desire to return Israel to something approximating its 1967 borders.

But all this amounts to a form of nostalgia for the Israel that once was—the plucky underdog, the proud member of the Socialist International. And Israel isn’t going back there any more.

Mr. Romney’s attitude toward Israel seems to come from a different place. He admires the country as much for where it’s going as for where it has come from. And he’s not prepared to give Palestinians an automatic pass for their failure to do something with the political and economic opportunities they’ve been given. Israeli success, in his mind, is earned—and so is Palestinian failure.

Mr. Romney has a history as an eminently malleable politician, and the views he has offered on Israel have, so far, been politically risk-free. How would he act as president? Who knows, although it would be unthinkable for any Republican president today to seek to strong-arm or publicly humiliate Jerusalem the way Jim Baker did during the George H.W. Bush presidency.

Yet beyond that, one sensed in Mr. Romney’s speech in Jerusalem qualities of conviction and sincerity—two of his lesser known traits. Keep that up, governor, and you may yet win this election.

Read the rest – Mitt versus Barack on Israel

Dr.K. says (and I agree) that Romney showed more then enough competence to be the leader of the Free World, despite the media’s attempts to, make it seem like it was one gaffe (God how I hate that term) after another. There was nothing that Romney said that was not true.

by Charles Krauthammer

At the outset of his recent foreign trip, Mitt Romney committed a gaffe. In answer to a question about the Olympics, he expressed skepticism about London’s preparations. The response confounded and agitated Romney supporters because it was such an unforced error. The question invited a simple paean to Olympic spirit and British grit, not the critical analysis of a former Olympic organizer.

Soon that initial stumble was transmuted into a metaphor for everything that followed. The mainstream media decided with near unanimity that the rest of the trip amounted to a gaffe-prone disaster.

Really? The Warsaw leg was a triumph. Romney’s speech warmly embraced Poland’s post-Communist experiment as a stirring example of a nation committed to limited government at home and a close alliance with America abroad, even unto such godforsaken war zones as Afghanistan and Iraq, at great cost to itself and with little thanks.

[……]

Yet all we hear about Warsaw is the “gaffe”: two phrases uttered by an aide, both best described as microscopically rude. At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a pack of reporters hurled questions of such journalistic sophistication as, “What about your gaffes?” To which Rick Gorka suggested that the reporters kiss his posterior, a rather charming invitation that would have made a superb photo op.

The other offense against human decency was Gorka’s correlative directive to “shove it.”

The horror! On the eve of the 2004 Democratic Convention, Teresa Heinz Kerry offered precisely that anatomically risky suggestion to an insistent Pittsburgh journalist. Not only did she later express no regret, but Hillary Clinton reacted with: “Good for you, you go girl.”

So where’s the Romney gaffe? Is what’s good for the Heinz not good for the Gorka?

And at his previous stop in Jerusalem, Romney’s speech was a masterpiece of nuance and restraint. Without directly criticizing Obama, Romney drew pointed distinctions deftly expressed in the code words and curlicued diction of Middle East diplomacy.

He declared flatly that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. The official Obama position is that Israel’s capital is to be determined in negotiations with the Palestinians. On Iran, Romney asserted that Israel has the right to defend itself. Obama says this as boilerplate. Romney made clear he means it — that if Israel has to attack, the U.S. won’t flash the red light before nor punish Israel afterward.

What about the alleged gaffe that dominated reporting from Israel? Romney averred that Israeli and Palestinian economic development might be related to culture. A Palestinian Authority spokesman obligingly jumped forth to accuse Romney of racism, among other thought crimes.

The American media bought it whole, despite the fact that Romney’s assertion was a direct echo of the U.N. Arab Human Development Report, written by Arab intellectuals and commissioned by the U.N. It unambiguously asserted that “culture and values are the soul of development.” And went on to report how existing cultural norms — “including traditional Arab culture and values” — are among the major impediments to Arab economic progress.

[……]

Romney’s point about “culture” was to highlight the improbable emergence of Israel from resourceless semi-desert to First World “startup nation,” a tribute to its freedom and openness.

Look at how Romney was received. In Israel, its popular prime minister lavished on him a welcome so warm as to be a near-endorsement. In Poland, Romney received an actual endorsement from Lech Walesa, former dissident, former president, Cold War giant, Polish hero. Yet the headlines were “shove it” and “culture.”

Scorecard? Romney’s trip was a major substantive success: one gaffe (Britain), two triumphs (Israel and Poland), and a fine demonstration of foreign-policy fluency and command — wrapped, however, in a media narrative of surpassing triviality.

Read the rest – Romney’s Excellent Trip

Tags: Bret Stephens, Charles Krauthammer
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Palestinians, Turkey | 127 Comments »

Remember when Bashar Assad was called a ‘Reformer’?

by Mojambo ( 141 Comments › )
Filed under Ahmadinejad, Barack Obama, Hezballah, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Lebanon, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Syria at July 24th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

I have long maintained on this blog that Hillary Clinton has been singularly unimpressive as Secretary of State – in fact she is as unqualified for her position as her boss Barack Obama is for his. Not only has Hillary Clinton called Bashar Assad (a man who aided terrorists in killing our troops in Iraq and whose government orchestrated the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon) a “reformer” but a whole host of liberal Democrats and RINO’s have made the pilgrimage to Damascus to pay homage to the dorky Opthamologist – people such as John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Arlen Specter and Moonbat Kucinich -and these hajj’s to Damascus were done just for the purpose of annoying the Bush administration. Vogue Magazine (whose owner is the unlovable Obama sycophant and fundraiser Anna Wintour) did a puff piece profile over Assad and his wife Asma – a piece so revolting that Vogue has erased it from its archives). I guess an apology to the “Syrian people”, (who are just as complicit in Syrian terrorism as their government) would be expecting too much (not that I care for the Syrian people one bit).

by Bret Stephens

A reader of last week’s column on Hillary Clinton chided me for failing to mention her remark, made as the revolt in Syria was gaining strength last year, that Bashar Assad was “a reformer.” The reader makes a fair point, one that helps explain why the administration has been so feckless about confronting the Syrian dictator.

But the real scandal of Mrs. Clinton’s remark lies in its broader context.

Here’s Mrs. Clinton’s fuller quote, from March 27, 2011, answering CBS’s Bob Schieffer on why the U.S. was prepared to intervene against Moammar Gadhafi but not against Assad: “There’s a different leader in Syria now,” she explained. “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he is a reformer.”

That caused some raising of eyebrows. So a few days later Mrs. Clinton clarified: “I referenced the opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.”

How could Mrs. Clinton justify administration policy by citing opinions she supposedly refused to endorse? Because she’s a genius, obviously. The more relevant point is that she was mouthing the conventional liberal wisdom of the day, which paid more heed to a dictator than to those he repressed. Maybe it’s time Assad’s apologists apologize to the people of Syria.

Take Joshua Landis, the University of Oklahoma professor who writes the influential Syria Comment blog. In September 2005, Mr. Landis chided the Bush administration for its failure to more closely engage Assad.

“Assad’s regime is certainly no paragon of democracy,” Mr. Landis wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “but even its most hard-bitten enemies [within Syria] do not want to see it collapse.” Mr. Landis went on to praise Assad for freeing political prisoners,”tolerat[ing] a much greater level of criticism than his father did,” and enforcing a degree of religious toleration that “had made Syria one of the safest countries in the region.”

Views like these were well in keeping with most media portrayals of Assad. A lengthy and mostly flattering New York Times profile from 2005 portrays Assad and his wife Asma as a progressive duo struggling to drag their unwieldy country into the 21st century—while trying to deal with an inept Bush administration too stupid to engage him or give him latitude for reform.

Also in 2005, a ferocious battle erupted in the U.S. Senate over the confirmation of John Bolton as ambassador to the U.N. A key point of contention: his congressional testimony from late 2003 claiming Damascus had “one of the most advanced Arab state chemical weapons capabilities,” and that it might have a covert interest in developing a nuclear bomb. The CIA reportedly went berserk over what it considered Mr. Bolton’s undue alarmism, which would later help sink his nomination in the Senate.

What came next was a chorus of congressional sycophancy. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi enthused that “the road to Damascus is a road to peace.” On March 16, 2011—the day after the first mass demonstration against the regime—John Kerry said Assad was a man of his word who had been “very generous with me.” He added that under Assad “Syria will move; Syria will change as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States.” This is the man who might be our next secretary of state.

Maybe it’s unfair to score Messrs. Landis, Kerry and the others for not anticipating how Assad would behave in the face of a revolt. Then again, Mr. Landis’s 2005 op-ed was published just a few months after former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s spectacular murder in Beirut. Syria’s secret nuclear program was exposed by an Israeli bombing in 2007, yet that didn’t deter the rush toward engagement that began under Condoleezza Rice. Sen. Kerry was well aware of the military aid Syria was illegally providing Hezbollah, which also seemed to do nothing to dent his enthusiasm for Assad.

Nor was there a shortage of commentators warning of the perils of courting Assad. So why the headlong rush to do so? Maybe because it fit into a wider ideology of engagement that encompassed not only Assad but also Ahmadinejad and Putin. A simpler answer, and probably a truer one, is that it was the opposite of what the neocons wanted to do.

Now we know what the George Costanza-esque “do the opposite” approach to Syria has yielded: A secretary of state inclined to give Assad a pass when the Syrian revolt began; an administration that took months to call for the dictator’s ouster; a U.S. that has helped Assad buy time by insisting that only the U.N.—where he is defended by Russia and China—could sanction any kind of action. It’s true that the administration has gradually changed its tune. But did 10,000-plus Syrians have to die in order to bury the myth that Assad’s apologists had constructed for him?

On Monday, a Syrian government spokesman all but admitted that the regime had stocks of chemical weapons. So John Bolton was right. Maybe when this administration stops thinking of its critics as the enemy, it won’t be caught mute and flat-footed when our real enemies show their colors.

[…….]