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Terrorism has become the real international sport

by Mojambo ( 170 Comments › )
Filed under British Islamic Jihadists, Iran, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Supremacism, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, UK at July 16th, 2012 - 2:00 pm

I cannot say that I am surprised that 40 years after the Munich Massacre, the I.O.C. will still not have a minute of silence in honor the the 11 murdered Israelis. As for Britain, the massive security she needs for the summer games ironically is because so many of her Muslim citizens are potential terrorists, as the Knish points out.

by Daniel Greenfield

In a sign of the times, the London Summer Olympics will be defended by anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles… just as they were in Ancient Greece. G4S, the world’s largest security company, was to provide 12,000 security personnel, but has so far only managed to come up with 4,000. In another sign of the times, not all of their security personnel speak English. So instead the British government will be deploying 3,000 troops, all of whom hopefully do speak English.

This isn’t the first time that the Olympics have come to London. They came in 1908 when the likely threat was from the Hun. They would have come again in 1944, but war intervened, and London needed its anti-aircraft weapons to protect more vital targets. Instead the games had to be rescheduled to 1948 in a Summer Olympics known as the Austerity Games. Still despite the post-war conditions, the games were described as, “a warm flame of hope for a better understanding in the world which has burned so low.”

But if Europeans could hope to relate to other Europeans through sporting matches, that flame seems rather cool when London has to be ringed with anti-aircraft defenses, as in the days of the Blitz. Muslim terrorists showed the world what they thought of the Olympic Spirit in the Summer Olympics of 1972 with the Munich Massacre and ever since then the shadow of Muslim terror has darkened the flames of the torches.

[………]

Terrorism has become the true international sport

Terrorism has become the true international sport and newspapers spend almost as much time forecasting the types of terrorist attacks that may be tried, as they do discussing the athletes. Will it be nerve gas this year? A drone attack? Or perhaps an old-fashioned suicide bombing that seems almost quaint now.

[…….]

Hitler’s V2 rockets were not terribly accurate, but they weren’t meant to be. They were weapons of terror and those work best when they are random. Sieges are more devastating to morale than actual battles. The fear that an attack could come at any time and in any place drains away courage and replaces it with fear until any demand that the enemy makes is met with relieved acceptance.

Random terror is the weapon of the weak, whether it was the declining forces of Nazi Germany or the viciously stupid armies of diversity plotting to impose Islamic law by killing a few hundred people here or there. The scrum of preparations and the frantic media panics make them feel strong and potent. As much as Islamic terrorists love their inky Korans, they love the sight of their names in the paper even more. Reading that the entire country is terrified of them does wonders for their morale even as it plummets our own.

There are few open mentions of who the enemy might be that all those weapons and soldiers are directed against. All we know is that they are extremists who are extremely keen on blowing things up for the mysterious unknown reasons that extremists do things—possibly outrage over student tuition or spending cuts. Of course everyone knows, but everyone is also polite enough to say nothing. It’s easier to order a few thousand more guards, some of whom may speak English, and throw up some surface-to-air missiles, than to discuss why these things have become as much a part of the Olympics as torches, medals and rings.

The ring of steel around London isn’t there to protect against German warplanes, but against the men and women with British passports and accents, from Manchester, Birmingham and London, who burn with another kind of flame. Not the flame of the Olympic spirit, but the flame of the Islamic spirit.

1 out of 4 British Muslims say that the 7/7 bombings were justified. 33 percent say killing in the name of religion is justified. 61 percent want Sharia courts operating under Islamic law. With nearly 3 million British Muslims, that’s nearly 750,000 potential terrorists to a mere 12,000 guards. The sight of British soldiers fresh from patrolling Afghanistan being retasked to guard London should be enormously significant as a sign of things to come.

There are already 16 million Muslims in the European Union. That’s half of Afghanistan. With high birth rates and population doubling, there will be an entire Afghanistan’s worth of Muslims in the EU within two decades.

NATO was unable to hold Afghanistan, but it might consider that as practice for the more vital task of holding London and Paris. And it will need a good deal more men and anti-aircraft weapons that are there all through the year.

Naturally no one is thinking of that now, just as when the flood of Muslim immigrants began no one was thinking that the next time the Olympics came to London it would take twenty battalions and weapons designed to fight a Soviet invasion just to secure the brotherhood games of mankind. Considering that no one had enough wit to have enough guards in place for the Olympics, it isn’t likely that the same system frantically deploying troops now is thinking twenty years ahead.

That’s a pity because the enemy, the bearded men in basement mosques who inspire Muslims to blow themselves up, are thinking twenty years ahead. They’re also thinking two-hundred years ahead to an Islamic London which will be as likely to play host to games full of half-naked athletes and pagan symbols as it will be to host a free press or a pub. The idea sounds absurd, but then again Istanbul used to be called Constantinople.

The thing about absurd ideas is that they only stay absurd if someone stops them from being carried out. As the immigrants keep coming, nailing down refugee status, dole payments and several wives, there will eventually be enough of them around so that the 61 percent that wants Sharia law will get their way, just as they did in Egypt. It will take a while, but that just means there will be plenty more terror alerts to look forward to in the interim.

[…….]

The importance of participation is the glorious slogan of diversity, but the people who might just be working out their 2012 Summer Olympics plots are not satisfied with taking part in London or Europe. They did not come there to win “Good Conduct” medals. They came to win.

Their struggle, their Jihad, is to conquer, and the devil take fighting well. If they have to send out dupes with bomb belts into crowded streets, they will do it. If they have to spend years smiling and commiserating over football scores, they will. If they have to resort to sneaking about, sodomy or explosive pants, they will do those things.

There is no good sportsmanship in terror

There is no good sportsmanship in terror. No one congratulates you for following the rules, any rules, or for empathizing with your rival as he struggles toward the finish line. In the Olympics playing well is more important than winning because victory is materialistic, while sportsmanship is a spiritual act. In Islam, both winning and sportsmanship are materialistic, the only spiritual act is the struggle that leads to victory. There is no room for empathizing with the fallen enemy or admiring the runner who limps across the finish line. These are tests of character and the only test of character in Islam that matters is being willing to kill or die in the name of Islam.

There is no character outside Islam. There are no rules outside Islam. There is nothing outside Islam, and that means there is nothing inside Islam either.

Athletics are meant to substitute for war, but the idea of finding substitutes for war is alien to the Islamic Spirit. The Taliban notoriously persecuted chess and football players, and when they took Kabul, they turned football stadiums into places of execution. Egyptian Salafi clerics are already discussing outlawing football. Mali Islamists have banned football, and Somali Islamists have murdered men for watching the World Cup.

To the Islamists, sports are a distraction from what is truly important in life, a contest whose lack of meaning mocks the seriousness of their preferred sport of death. As the Ayatollah Khomeini said, “There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.” And when you are as empty as Islam is, then everything is serious.

[……..]

The armies of Muslims that have gathered in Europe, whether they know it or not, are not there to play according to any set of rules, they are not there to have fun, they are there to conquer and win.

Read the rest – The Olympic Spirit and the Islamic Spirit

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in British Islamic Jihadists, Iran, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Supremacism, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, UK | 170 Comments »

Why the West prefers to deceive itself about Islam

by Mojambo ( 30 Comments › )
Filed under Dhimmitude, Egypt, Islam, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood at July 12th, 2012 - 11:30 am

The Knish gives his take on the fools who still operate on the illusion that Islam is a religion of Peace. The answer to the question “Why the West loves lying to itself about Islam?” is (in my opinion) because recognizing the problem of Islam then means you have to take action against it.

by Daniel Greenfield

Say that you get a tempting offer from a Nigerian prince and decide to invest some money in helping him transfer his vast fortune from Burkina Faso or Dubai over to the bank across the street. The seemingly simple task of bringing over the 18 million dollars left to him by his father hits some snags which require you to put in more and more of your own money.

Eventually you have invested more than you ever would have ever done up front, just trying to protect the sunk cost, the money that you already sank into Prince Hussein Ngobo’s scheme. And to protect your self-esteem, you must go on believing that, no matter what Prince Ngobo does, he is credible and sincere. Any failings in the interaction are either your fault or the fault of some third party. Anyone who tells you otherwise must be a Ngobophobe.

Now imagine that Prince Ngobo’s real name is Islam.

That is where Western elites find themselves now. They invested heavily in the illusion of a compatible Islamic civilization. Those investments, whether in Islamic immigration or Islamic democracy or peace with Islam have turned toxic, but dropping those investments is as out of the question as writing off Prince Ngobo as a con artist and walking away feeling like a fool. Western elites, who fancy themselves more intelligent and more enlightened than the wise men and prophets of every religion, and who base their entire right to rule on that intelligence and enlightenment, are not in the habit of admitting that they are fools.

The Arab Springers who predicted that the Muslim uprisings would bring a new age of secularism, freedom and an end to the violence between Islam and the West; are busy writing up new checks. Thomas Friedman is penning essays explaining why the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood will mean regional stability and peace with Israel (and if it doesn’t, it will be our fault.)

The Brotherhood’s victory discredits the Arab Spring, which discredits the bid for Arab Democracy, which discredits the compatibility of Islam and the folks on Fifth Avenue

It’s not insanity; it’s the term that rhymes with a certain river in Egypt. The Brotherhood’s victory discredits the Arab Spring, which discredits the bid for Arab Democracy, which discredits the compatibility of Islam and the folks on Fifth Avenue. Follow the river back along its course and suddenly the Clash of Civilizations becomes an undeniable fact. It’s easier to give up and let the river of denial carry you further along until, five years from now, you find yourself explaining why Al-Qaeda ruling Libya is actually a good thing for everyone.

In 1991, Israel cut a land-for-peace deal with a greasy Egyptian bloke named Yasser Arafat. The Cairo-born Arafat would turn his gang of terrorists into a government and police force, and rule over an autonomous territory, in exchange for ending the violence. Clinton smiled beatifically as hands were shaken and a new era of peace was upon us. The era, however, has yet to show up.

Over two decades of terrorism have not shaken the belief of the American or Israeli establishment in the “Two-State Solution”

Over two decades of terrorism have not shaken the belief of the American or Israeli establishment in the “Two-State Solution”, which has solved absolutely nothing, except perhaps the problem of how to make the Middle East into an even more unstable place. As the violence increased and the pathway to peace decreased, American Presidents and Israeli Prime Ministers redoubled their concession offers and their faith in the Two-State Solution—now an article of faith in most circles. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt; it also laps at the shores of Tel Aviv, flows out to the English coast and all across Europe.

Ask a Eurocrat for the time of day and he’ll calculate how much to charge you for the subsidies to artisanal clock farmers that it will take to answer that question. Ask him about Islamic integration and he will instantly tell you that everything is going smoothly and the problems only exist in the minds of a few bigots and the pages of a few tabloids.

[……..]
The Arab Spring, the Palestinian Peace Process and every similar bid to transform the region presumed that disempowerment was the cause of Muslim violence and that, conversely, empowerment was the solution. Give the poor dears some weapons, a country, a ballot box, free and open elections, and they’ll be less likely to blow themselves up while seeking 72 virgins on the downtown express. Instead, empowering people who were violent while disempowered; only made them more violent. Some of the best minds in two hemispheres are engaged in seeking a solution to this paradox, which isn’t a paradox at all but rather a straight-line projection.

If Abdul is beheading people when all he has to work with is a sword then, if you give him a gun, he will start shooting them instead. If he’s blowing up buses when he only has a terrorist group, he will blow up countries when he has a country. Empowering Abdul does not diminish his grievances, because his grievances are a function of his capacity for violence. Increasing his capacity will increase his grievances until the entire world is on the wrong end of his empowerment scimitar.

The liberal projection that “Abdul + Power + Money + Bigger Guns = Peace” made as much sense, as Prince Ngobo’s story about his transfer fees being cursed by witches, but, as the song goes, “You gotta have faith.” Some of the things that we have faith in are bigger than us and some are just us. Those who put their faith in Prince Ngobo and in the benign nature of Islam are really putting their faith in their own instincts, trusting that they are right, even while looking into the eye of the wrongness.

[……..]

Most people project their own desires and motivations on to others. Americans assumed that Muslims just wanted democracy, free enterprise and apple pie. Muslims assume that Americans are conspiring to undermine them and destroy them through a byzantine series of plots and conspiracies, because that is what they would do in our place… and that is what they are trying to do. The Eurocrats assume that Muslims wanted to be good multicultural socialists, because that is what they want them to be. They assumed that the Arab Spring was the equivalent of Europe’s own socialist monarchist movements, after having wrongly assumed the same thing about Arab Socialist movements generations earlier. They assumed those things, because just like Prince Ngobo’s business partners trying to figure out how to call up Lagos, they wanted them to be true because of their own desires.

The sunk cost of the free world into the illusion that Islam is benign, that it is a positive influence and that it can be coexisted with is enormous. Even the dollar, euro and shekel costs make the wildest frauds seem tame. The cultural cost is even greater.

The mechanism of denial is that sunk cost. That faith which our political, cultural and academic superiors have in themselves—in their probity, their insight and their rational tools of scientific governance. Muslims dare not question Islam because they fear Allah. Liberals dare not question Islam because they fear being fools. If they were completely wrong about Islam, then what else were they also wrong about? Pull at one thread and the whole dreamcoat dissolves leaving behind a very naked emperor.

[……..]
Most insidiously, the left likes the imaginary world that that it has created. The multicultural utopia with jolly Pakistanis adding spice to London, Saudis putting up little mosques on the Canadian prairie and sassy Shiites bringing diversity to Dearborn, isn’t just propaganda—it’s the imaginary world that they want to live in. Just as The Newsroom created an imaginary world in which the left won every debate in the last two years, the new world order that they have imagined of a friendly multicultural democratic Islam, is their imaginary world, created and maintained at our expense, and in the face of all reality and reason.

The illusion of Islam has, like the banking system, become too big to fail

The illusion of Islam has, like the banking system, become too big to fail. It cannot fail because it would take too much else down with it, leaving behind a harder world. No matter how unintegrated Muslims in Europe are, the Eurocrats must insist that, aside from a few exploding bumps in the road, everything is going according to plan. Any day now a lesbian Imam will be preaching the virtues of secularism in Finsbury Park. It must be that way because the alternative is unthinkable.

[…….]

We gotta have faith, not in any deity, including the chief deity of Islam, but in our leaders. Muslims believe that Allah is infallible, while we are expected to believe that the politicians and professors, the diplomats and journalists, are. That they are right, even when the continuing violence proves that they are wrong.

The people who shape our half of the world have fallen for the Nigerian Prince scam of Islam and they need to believe that they know what they are doing and they need us to believe it too. And when the check from Lagos doesn’t clear, when the bombs go off, the cars burn, the children are murdered in schools and the rockets fly, then they don’t blame Prince Hussein Ngobo, the car bombers, terrorists and throatslitters—they blame us for ruining the illusion by not believing in it too.

Read the rest – Why the West loves lying to itself about Islam.

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Dhimmitude, Egypt, Islam, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood | 30 Comments »

A sinister and vindictive God

by Mojambo ( 64 Comments › )
Filed under Egypt, Hamas, Hezballah, Islam, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Koran, Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia (Islamic Law), Taliban at June 21st, 2012 - 3:00 pm

The Knish knows that the God of Islam is not the same God that Jews and Christians worship. The mantra “We love death while you love life” tells us all we ever need to know about what President Bush the day after 9/11 referred to as “a religion of peace”.

by Daniel Greenfield

At the beginning of Sweeney Todd, the chorus of his murdered victims sings, “He served a dark and a vengeful god.” In Egypt, an Islamic Sweeney butchered his wife after an argument, cut her up and sold her mutilated body as lamb chops.

Around the same time as Mohammed Sweeney was selling pieces of his wife to customers stocking up on meat before Ramadan, Egyptian voters made their own offering to the dark and vengeful god by voting for Mohammed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose offshoots such as Hamas and Al-Qaeda have a murder toll that beggars anything the real or fictional Sweeney could have aspired to.

Morsi’s election platform was ending the last light of freedom in Egypt by implementing full Islamic law and in a country where 84 percent believe that heretics should be killed, 82 percent believe that adulterers should be stoned and 77 percent believe that thieves should have their hands cut off, the candidate of Allah, the dark and vengeful god of Islam, was bound to win any democratic election.

As a god, Allah does not appear to be much of a lifegiver. Egypt has six times the infant mortality rate of the “Zionist Entity”, five times that of the “Great Satan” and ten times that of the Japanese infidels. Indeed the country with the world’s highest infant mortality rate is the devout home of the Taliban, Afghanistan, which has an infant mortality rate that is 50 percent higher than Rwanda.

[……]

Indonesia just sentenced a man to 2 years in jail for writing, “Allah doesn’t exist” on Facebook. Thanks to Western innovation, Indonesia has Facebook. But it also has blasphemy laws, because if people started doubting the dark god, they might start asking why Indonesia has an infant mortality rate that is 13 times that of neighboring Singapore.

It’s not that the Muslim world doesn’t have doctors. They just tend to be doing other things, like Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a surgeon and the leader of Al-Qaeda; Dr. Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a surgeon and co-founder of Hamas; Dr. Fathi Shaqaqi, the co-founder of Islamic Jihad; and Dr. Abdel Rantissi, a pediatrician and co-founder of Hamas, who boasted, “We will kill Jews everywhere.”

Who has the time to waste on pediatrics when you worship a dark and vengeful god who gave you a mission to kill as many infidels as possible? The only infant mortality rates they care about are the ones that they inflict.

Muslim terrorists have used children as human shields

The Taliban in North Waziristan, Pakistan have offered to allow polio vaccinations for their children only if the drone campaign against terrorists ends. This isn’t the first time that Muslim terrorists have used children as human shields, though perhaps it’s the first time that they used 161,000 children as human shields. The human shield principle depends on the Muslim knowledge that we care more about their children than they do.

[…….]

The Egyptians could have gone into this election asking themselves why an Israeli child across the border is six times more likely to survive his birth than one of their children is. Instead they went into the election asking themselves how they could see more people beheaded for questioning their dark god. If they gave any thought to evening up the difference in infant mortality rates in the 264-mile distance between Cairo and Jerusalem, it was only by invading Israel or by supporting Hamas terrorists.

That is how followers of a dark and vengeful god think. They don’t wonder how they can save the lives of their children, but how they can even the cosmic score by taking the lives of someone else’s children. They don’t think in terms of making their lives better, but their minds are fixed on the dark goal of making other people’s lives worse.

Sweeney Todd was his own dark and vengeful god. So is Islam. Todd killed in his own name and Islam kills in its own name. Draw a mocking cartoon of Mohammed or burn a Koran and in a few hours there will be blood spilled in the streets of Muslim cities. Most of it will be their own blood, but that is what happens when you worship the dark and vengeful god inside you. When you bow before the rage churning in your own heart, then your sacrifice yourself to the hatred within.

Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, presented a slideshow explaining Jihad with the words, “We love death more than you love life.”

Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, presented a slideshow explaining Jihad with the words, “We love death more than you love life.” “The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them,” Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah proclaimed. “We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.” “We love death,” Adis Medunjanin, convicted of plotting to bomb the New York City subway, screeched at a 911 operator. “You love your life! There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger!”

[…….]

“The Jihad is our way and death for Allah is our most exalted wish” are the words of the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement at the top of the Egyptian power pyramid, which is as obsessed with death as the ancient Pharaohs were. But the pyramids that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Muslim groups construct are not tombs, but pyramids of corpses—giant funerary chambers of bodies, those of their own Muslim martyrs and those of their non-Muslim victims, to transport themselves to paradise.

[…….]

Cults of death don’t look to the present or the future, they look to the past, to the realm of the dead

Cults of death don’t look to the present or the future, they look to the past, to the realm of the dead. They worship it and plot to bring it back. They despise the vitality of the living and the future, choosing instead the dirt and ash of the grave, the poisonous hatreds that never die, living on long after Mohammed rasped his last breath after telling his followers to drive out Christians and Jews from the Arabian Peninsula.

Why bother lowering infant mortality rates when you can bring back the glorious past? Why care about the infants at all if their only purpose is to die in the way of Jihad? So what if they die when they’re a few days old, instead of twenty years old. It saves time and their martyrdom can be blamed on the West, which is the source of all ills.

[…….]

By voting for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian people proclaimed that they love death more than life, that they love death more than the lives of their children. The ancient worshipers of Moloch passed their children between the flames, and the modern worshipers of Allah pass their children between the flames of Jihad.

The Egyptians have joined the Tunisians in the democracy of death

The Egyptians have joined the Tunisians in the democracy of death, at the dark altar of the ballot box into which they drop their offerings that say, “We love death. More than life. More than our children. More than thoughts, books, freedom and civilization.” And the world still does not understand what it is witnessing behind the outpourings of propaganda, the jubilant mobs and the analysts spluttering on behind the plastic desks and glowing logos of cable news shows.

It is easy to analyze politics but difficult to analyze evil. Talk about a cult of death has no place in the modern world, where it is a firm article of faith that everyone wants two turkeys in every pot and a car in every Cairo garage. Every intelligent person knows that all religions are the same. That democracy is good because all people are good. Leaders like Mubarak may be bad, but an entire people can’t be bad. All religions celebrate life, and no matter how often they say, “We love death while you love life”, they can’t possibly mean it.

But what if they do? What if the dark and vengeful god that the vast majority of Egyptians want to see executing blasphemers and mutilating thieves has been set loose by the ballot box? What if Allah is the dark half that civilized people and governments keep locked away. The part that tells butchers to chop up their wives and sell them to their customers, that tells merchants to turn into bandits, that tells Meccans to rape the wives of their neighbors and that commands a thousand other atrocities?

What if all our democracy promotion efforts unlocked that dark side, let the beast out of its cage and set it loose to kill? What if Islam’s dark and vengeful god is a chimera made out of the worst parts of his followers, their murderous instincts, their self-despite, their hatreds, lusts and obsessions? What does it say about a people that proclaim their darkest selves to be their god?

“We love death” is the anthem of Jihad. It was the anthem of a butcher who chopped up his wife and served her corpse to his customers. It is the song of millions of Egyptians who chose death over life once they were given the freedom to do it. The death of life for the worship of the dark god who dwells in the darkest places of the human heart.

Read the rest – A dark and vengeful God

Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish
Posted in Egypt, Hamas, Hezballah, Islam, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Koran, Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia (Islamic Law), Taliban | 64 Comments »

The media’s final days

by Mojambo ( 121 Comments › )
Filed under Elections 2012, Media, Politics at May 29th, 2012 - 2:00 pm

The Knish points out how low the media has fallen (particularly Time and Newsweek Magazines). His comparison of those two magazines with the alternative weekly newspaper rags such as The Village Voice is apropos. Although Newsweek always used to be liberal, it had serious liberal thinkers such as Stuart Alsop writing for it, now it has loons such as Andrew Sullivan. By the way I am sorry to see that Michale Fumento has gone David Brock on us over to the dark side with a full blown Johnsonian “My break with the extreme right” manifesto as he has now become a Salon contributor . The Knish comments on the vanishing line between entertainment and journalism – where people such as Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn are considered to be serious news commentators.

by Daniel Greenfield

The magazine business isn’t what it used to be. In the last ten years, Newsweek lost 2.5 million readers, and its newsstand sales are hardly worth mentioning. A full-page ad in it costs less than the price of a luxury car. Sold for a buck to the husband of an influential Congresswoman, merged with an internet site, it survives only by building issues around provocative essays and covers.

If you want to understand why Newsweek put a badly photoshopped picture of Obama with a gay halo on its cover or features Romney doing a number from The Book of Mormon, you need only look at those numbers. Fifteen years ago desperate tactics like that were for alt weeklies like The Village Voice, but Time and Newsweek are the new Village Voice. Or the new Salon.

There is no news business anymore, just media trolls looking for a traffic handout, feeding off manufactured controversies that they create and then report on. Magazines and sites struggling to stay alive while preaching to a narrow audience which likes essays by leftist cranks and mocking pictures of conservatives. And they’re not alone; any magazine that still covers politics, covers it in the same exact way.

There are house-style differences between the New Yorker, which still features its trademark cartoons, and Vanity Fair and Esquire, and Time and Newsweek, but they are all basically the same. The same essays repeating the same views for the same audience; all of them fighting for that small slice of urban yuppie audience which DVR’s Mad Men, has Michael Chabon novels on the shelf that it hasn’t read yet and is forty percent gay.

The real 1 percent is right there. That small elitist fragment of America which writes books for itself, makes TV shows for itself and writes outraged articles for itself about a tiny 1 percent elite that runs everything. It has its own books, its own TV shows, its own music, its own stores, its own stations, its own brands and now it has most of the magazines to itself. It’s a claustrophobic village raising its own inner child with inane repetitions of its narrow-minded views.

If I’m reading through a long mocking piece on Midwestern Republican primary voters who support Michele Bachmann, a sensitive piece on gay teenagers being bullied in school or an essay by a Muslim columnist on American Islamophobia, how can I tell which magazine I’m reading? Easy, is it the one with a gay Obama on the cover or the one with a woman breastfeeding a three-year-old?

The story is no longer the story. Now the cover is the story with magazines reporting on their own covers, which become the story. And the story? Who cares about the story really. You can know everything about the story by glancing at the cover. And then you don’t have to buy it anymore, which explains why newsstand sales aren’t doing too well.

Magazines like to tell advertisers that every single subscription sale actually means five or six readers across a family. That’s wishful thinking. Families with five or six members are not buying Time or Newsweek these days. They might be subscribing to Popular Mechanics or Ebony, but the Newsweek subscriber is lucky if he has two people in the house, at most three, and one of them is probably a cat.

Don’t weep for Newsweek though. It’s a brand and brands never die. They just get dumbed down and sold and resold. Five years from now Newsweek may be an airline magazine or just an internet portal tracking Twitter news trends, but it will be around in one form or another. For now there’s Newsweek Polska with a six figure circulation, Newsweek Korea with 40,000 readers and Newsweek Pakistan with 15,000 readers. Perhaps one day Newsweek will be remembered as a Pakistani news mag that got its start in the States.

The brands may have a future, but the content doesn’t. There are only so many provocative essayists around and only so many people willing to buy badly photoshopped covers featuring the controversy of the week. The friction of the controversy makes dull people seem interesting and stupid people seem smart. It makes the kind of people who moved to New York to be able to see Will Ferrell make fun of Bush on Broadway feel that they’re relevant, but there aren’t enough of them to support a magazine with international news bureaus and all the trappings of a serious news organization.

There’s barely enough money in that market to cover the expenses of Salon, Slate and The Nation, reliably lefty publications which cravenly feed their audiences its prejudices back in small doses. Time and Newsweek muscling into that same turf, not to mention every other site and magazine following that same business model, is a bit much.

[……]

The biggest problem for the media is that no one is paying attention anymore. The iPad and Kindle haven’t meant salvation for the magazine business, because any media device fragments focus. It’s hard to engage readers when they’re not engaged with any one thing, when they’re reading six sites and glancing through your latest Fareed Zakaria or Andrew Sullivan screed just to be able to tell their friends that they read it.

[……]

The media knows that they have many options and that they’re barely paying attention, so it capers like a court jester to try and capture their attention with another showstopping attack on Republicans. But even as it trots out Andrew Sullivan or Tina Fey or any of the other players in the vanishing line between entertainment and journalism, it knows that the attention is fleeting. Today its gay Obama cover makes the headlines, but what will it do next week?

An inbred elite is dull and in constant need of sensation. It has a brief attention span because it is always bored with itself. It feeds off a diet of constant mockery to reassure itself of its own fragile superiority. It wants the appearance of ideas, without the hard work of digesting them. Most of all, it wants the legitimization of its own right to rule. The theme of every elite is its own superiority, and the one we are saddled with is no different. Its message is that it has lifted up our society from a dark time of repression to a new era of enlightenment and that only it can lead us into the light.

The media is an echo chamber for people who work in the media. Its greatest reach is internal, within the complex of people who live or work in a few major cities within the publishing and broadcasting industries. Beyond them is a great void of purple mountains that they occasionally report on but have lost contact with.

America is a foreign country to them. More so than Indonesia or Pakistan. And the 1 percent that they still speak to feels much the same way. A foreign colony on American shores that disdains the natives with their queer morals and prejudices, and fears what might happen if they should rise up against their rightful rulers. That leaves the rulers with little choice but to redouble the propaganda barrage defending their right to rule. And that means another Newsweek cover coming up.

Newsweek might as well become a full-time Pakistani magazine because it isn’t an American magazine anymore. It’s the David Remnick New Yorker with all the class of the Tina Brown New Yorker. Its only signature feature is the transcontinental sneer and that’s the signature feature of the entire media class, which knows more about Indonesia than it does about Indiana, and believes that the problem with America is all the Americans.

[……]

The only function of the media is to spin talking points into something more glamorous. It always knows what the story should be, the only thing to do is dress it up and take it out for a night on the town. But no one reads it or pays attention to it anymore because it has nothing to say. The antics of Time or Newsweek are signs of desperation from media brats who know that the only way to hang on to their vanishing audience is by clowning around for them.

They can’t engage the audience, no matter what they promise advertisers, because they have no intellectual or journalistic capital with which to engage them. All they can do is tell their audience what it already believes in an entertaining way. That is the traditional function of a court jester and it is the new function of the media, which may style itself as a “Protector of Democracy”, but is in reality just the tyrant’s capering fool in the rainbow halo.