Kathianne
12-17-2007, 10:09 PM
Nope I didn't mean to post in conspiracy and I've not gone off to the dark side, ala our friend Jason. The only people that want a one world government are the Islamics that want there to be one government under Sharia. Right now, it appears they are winning:
http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/12/fear_and_loathing_on_the_hugh.php
December 17, 2007 1:00 AM
O'Donnell: Afraid of Muslims - but not Mormons or the late Cathy Seipp
Pundit and television writer Lawrence O’Donnell created quite a stir on the McLaughlin Group and on the Hugh Hewitt Show from bashing Mitt Romney and Mormonism. But Roger L. Simon thinks the West Wing producer revealed far more disturbing things about himself than he did about the candidate or his religion.
by Roger L. Simon
...
Still, I am not nearly as much of a chicken as Lawrence O’Donnell revealed himself to be on the Hugh Hewitt radio show last week.
O’Donnell was on to discuss some controversial remarks he made about Mormonism on the McLaughlin Group in reaction to Mitt Romney’s speech on the presidential candidate’s religion. Actually the remarks were more than routinely controversial - the Democratic pundit/television writer (The West Wing) launched a full-scale attack on Mormonism, branding its founding father Joseph Smith a racist and demanding Romney disassociate himself from Nineteenth Century tenets and behaviors of his faith long ago abandoned.
Now I want to be clear - I didn’t take seriously a word O’Donnell said about Romney and Mormonism on McLaughlin. It was a plain, old-fashioned political hatchet job of the most transparent sort...What interests me far more is what O’Donnell said during the following exchange at the end of his interview on Hugh’s show, in which the seemingly playful pundit showed far more about himself than he may have intended:
HH: Okay. And do you believe, would you say the same things about Mohammed as you just said about Joseph Smith?
LO’D: Oh, well, I’m afraid of what the…that’s where I’m really afraid. I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.
HH: Well, that’s candid.
LO’D: Mormons are the nicest people in the world. They’re not going to ever…
HH: So you can be bigoted towards Mormons, because they’ll just send you a strudel.
LO’D: They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.
HH: They’ll send you a strudel. The Mormons will bake you a cake and be nice to you.
LO’D: I agree.
HH: Lawrence O’Donnell, I appreciate your candor.
I appreciate O’Donnell’s candor too, but perhaps not in the way that Hugh meant. In fact, when I first read those statements, my mouth dropped open.
They are particularly disturbing if you compare the estimated number of Muslims in the world (1.5 billion) to the number of Mormons (12 million) and the likelihood of either group being responsible for, say, a bombing in the New York subway. Of course, O’Donnell is clearly aware of this – all too clearly. And he has decided to opt out.
This means he has opted out as well of a whole series of the most important questions of our time, such as are there moderate Muslims, can Islam be reformed, what is the relationship between religious doctrine and violence, what is jihad, what is dhimmitude, can true democracy exist under Islam, is it terminally expansionist in its ideology, can women and homosexuals achieve their rights under Sharia law, what happens when Sharia expands into Western society, etc.
...
...These people have buried their traditional liberal values under a veneer of false tolerance and trendy cultural relativism and essentially turned liberalism on its head.
O’Donnell is no longer a liberal in the sense I understood it growing up. In fact, he runs away from defending the basic cannon of liberalism without which it cannot exist – free speech. A true liberal is a man like Flemming Rose who had the courage to defend that freedom against the onslaught of opposition to the publication of the Danish cartoons. Where was O’Donnell on that? Quivering in his corner, worrying whether he will be shot? Where was O’Donnell (a man of the entertainment industry, no less) when director Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death by an Islamist on the streets of Amsterdam for making a film critical of Islam? Busy attacking George Bush, I imagine. The courage of Rose and Van Gogh (and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan, etc.) is paying O’Donnell’s check from the McLaughlin Group in a very real sense. He owes them all a commission.
O’Donnell’s words remind me more clearly than anything in recent days why I no longer identify as a “liberal” in its modern usage. It has become a meaningless term. I may be a chicken, but I am not a coward. I have criticized Islam often and I will continue to do so.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWM2N2E2ODI2ODUzNjAyZmNkNTY0OGI0MGI0NWU1NzY=
Mark Steyn is Losing [Stanley Kurtz]
In the battle for freedom of speech in Canada, Mark Steyn is losing. True, there’s been a flurry of discussion on the blogosphere, and a number of powerful Canadian Op-Ed pieces on the controversy. But don’t be fooled, Mark Steyn is losing.
For one thing, the opinion pieces protesting the case against Steyn have come largely from Canadian conservatives. Unless these political outliers are joined by more "classically liberal" Canadians, there is little chance that Canada’s system of Human Rights Commissions will be reigned-in or reformed.
Consider the conclusion of David Warren’s "Then They Came for Mark Steyn...:"
For nota bene: this should not be a Left or Right issue. Freedom for one is freedom for all, and tyranny against one is tyranny against all...
I mentioned last week the case Mohamed Elmasry and the Canadian Islamic Congress have brought against Maclean's magazine for publishing Mark Steyn — simultaneously before multiple human rights commissions, a tactic that is itself an egregious abuse of process. It is a case that should clang alarm bells right across Canada. Yet we've heard only a few modest tinkles.
Warren’s piece is a must-read for its powerful portrayal of the real-life slippery slope Canada’s Human Rights Commissions have fallen down — so powerful that it’s easy to miss Warren’s point about the minimal reaction to the Steyn case in Canada to date. But Warren is right. The seriousness of the threat to Canada’s free speech has not yet been recognized.
Have a look at this editorial on the apparent murder of Aqsa Parvez in Canada’s National Post. This piece rightly notes that assimilation problems among Canada’s Muslim immigrants are not as severe as the problems we’ve seen in Europe. Even so, it seems to me that the piece goes out of its way to underplay the problems that do exist. And note the swipe at "high profile conservative columnists" who have been "particularly vigorous about highlighting these pathologies." This implicit swipe at Steyn, without adding a public plea for his right to free speech, bodes ill indeed. The National Post is far more hospitable to conservative views than most Canadian outlets. I would be delighted to be corrected on this, but so far as I know, the National Post has yet to speak out on the case against Steyn, or on the abusive powers of Canada’s Human Rights Commissions. If even the National Post is silent on the Steyn affair, free speech in Canada is in trouble.
Now look at this post from Gary J. Wise, a Toronto Attorney who runs the Wise Law Blog. Wise has been alerted to the controversy by posts at the Volokh Conspiracy. He blames the fracas on American conservatives, and seems unaware of the various columns on the controversy by Canadians. (For some links to Canadian columns, go here. And be sure to read John Robson’s hilarious, "Self-Censorship? Me? Absolutely!") Wise has little to say in reply to core concerns about this case–that simply bringing cases against expressions of opinion creates costs (financial and more) that have the effect of chilling speech. He also has nothing to say about the vague powers of these bodies, or about changes in their functioning unanticipated by, and even repudiated by, some of their founders. (Again, see Warren’s latest column for more on the history of these commissions. And for my own view, see "Steynophobia" and "The Case Against Steyn".)
In any case, I take Wise’s post to express the current attitude of Canada’s liberal elite: untroubled by the vague and expanding powers of Human Rights Commissions, uninterested in the chilling effects of accusations on conservative opponents, unaware of the views of Canada’s own conservatives on the Steyn affair, disdainful of American criticisms, and only barely aware of the controversy itself. Combine this with the silence to date by the National Post, and we must conclude that Mark Steyn is losing.
12/17 11:56 AM
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDExODAwZjNlYjI3NmM1ZTJlZTc0MDQ1NzRjOTc2MGE=
Monday, December 17, 2007
Re: Mark Steyn is losing [Mark Steyn]
Stanley, you may be right. The Canadian Islamic Congress is arguing that my article is a "crime". By accepting the case, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has indicated it's prepared at least to consider the possibility that it's a "crime". That in itself is a significant concession to my opponents, and damaging not just to me but to the concept of a free press.
Over in London, Melanie Phillips has her say on the matter in The Spectator. Miss Phillips is the author of the bestselling Londonistan, and my column about her book is also part of the Canadian Islamic Congress' complaint against me. I conclude it as follows:
One final thought: Miss Phillips is one of Britain's best-known newspaper columnists. She appears constantly on national TV and radio. No publisher has lost money on her. Yet Londonistan wound up being published first in New York, and its subsequent appearance in Britain is thanks not to Little, Brown (who published her last big book) but to a small independent imprint called Gibson Square. I don't know Miss Phillips's agent, but it's hard not to suspect that glamorous literary London decided it would prefer to keep a safe distance from this incendiary subject.
That's how nations die — not by war or conquest, but by a thousand trivial concessions, until one day you wake up and you don't need to sign a formal instrument of surrender because you did it piecemeal.
12/17 06:32 PM
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/407686/the-blood-runs-cold.thtml
The blood runs cold
Monday, 17th December 2007
The lights are going out on liberal society – and it is the most liberal societies with their fingers on the ‘off’ switch. The thesis of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, that Europe was succumbing to an Islamist takeover, has been proved spectacularly correct -- in Canada, and with himself as the designated victim. The New York Post reports that both Steyn and Macleans magazine, which reprinted a chapter of his book, are to be hauled before two Canadian judicial panels to answer the charge that they have spread ‘hatred and contempt’ for Muslims. And what was the heinous view Steyn vouchsafed to occasion such a charge?
…the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada's liberalized, Western civilization.
Well excuse me, but some of us were under the impression that a global war was currently being waged by a section of the Islamic world in order to write the truth of that assertion in blood.
The irony, of course, is that by this action Canada is thus demonstrating that if any culture is incompatible with liberalised western civilisation, it is clearly Canada’s. The idea that certain arguments must not be made, and that to do so is to find oneself arraigned before a judicial tribunal, is the very antithesis of a liberal society. It is a symptom of totalitarianism. It is also doubly ironic that it is the Islamic world, through the Canadian Islamic Congress, that is bringing this action -- since in seeking to suppress the view that the Islamic world is incompatible with liberalism, it is demonstrating with the starkest possible clarity the truth of that proposition.
It is no accident that it is uber-‘liberal’ Canada, which worships at the shrine of human rights law, where this medieval inquisition is taking place. The fact that the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission are to conduct this kangaroo hearing is grotesque but not in the least surprising. The belief fundamental to human wrongs law, that minorities are sacrosanct and that to criticise them is proof of rampant prejudice, is part of the mindset which has turned truth, morality and freedom inside out. If a writer who tells the truth about Islamists spreading hatred and contempt for the west is himself hauled before a court charged with spreading hatred and contempt by telling such a truth, then the Orwellian nightmare has well and truly arrived.
As I have said many times before, the real threat to civilisation comes not from acts of terror, appalling though these are; it comes from the fact that Islamists are progressively making slaves out of us in our own countries.
http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/12/fear_and_loathing_on_the_hugh.php
December 17, 2007 1:00 AM
O'Donnell: Afraid of Muslims - but not Mormons or the late Cathy Seipp
Pundit and television writer Lawrence O’Donnell created quite a stir on the McLaughlin Group and on the Hugh Hewitt Show from bashing Mitt Romney and Mormonism. But Roger L. Simon thinks the West Wing producer revealed far more disturbing things about himself than he did about the candidate or his religion.
by Roger L. Simon
...
Still, I am not nearly as much of a chicken as Lawrence O’Donnell revealed himself to be on the Hugh Hewitt radio show last week.
O’Donnell was on to discuss some controversial remarks he made about Mormonism on the McLaughlin Group in reaction to Mitt Romney’s speech on the presidential candidate’s religion. Actually the remarks were more than routinely controversial - the Democratic pundit/television writer (The West Wing) launched a full-scale attack on Mormonism, branding its founding father Joseph Smith a racist and demanding Romney disassociate himself from Nineteenth Century tenets and behaviors of his faith long ago abandoned.
Now I want to be clear - I didn’t take seriously a word O’Donnell said about Romney and Mormonism on McLaughlin. It was a plain, old-fashioned political hatchet job of the most transparent sort...What interests me far more is what O’Donnell said during the following exchange at the end of his interview on Hugh’s show, in which the seemingly playful pundit showed far more about himself than he may have intended:
HH: Okay. And do you believe, would you say the same things about Mohammed as you just said about Joseph Smith?
LO’D: Oh, well, I’m afraid of what the…that’s where I’m really afraid. I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.
HH: Well, that’s candid.
LO’D: Mormons are the nicest people in the world. They’re not going to ever…
HH: So you can be bigoted towards Mormons, because they’ll just send you a strudel.
LO’D: They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.
HH: They’ll send you a strudel. The Mormons will bake you a cake and be nice to you.
LO’D: I agree.
HH: Lawrence O’Donnell, I appreciate your candor.
I appreciate O’Donnell’s candor too, but perhaps not in the way that Hugh meant. In fact, when I first read those statements, my mouth dropped open.
They are particularly disturbing if you compare the estimated number of Muslims in the world (1.5 billion) to the number of Mormons (12 million) and the likelihood of either group being responsible for, say, a bombing in the New York subway. Of course, O’Donnell is clearly aware of this – all too clearly. And he has decided to opt out.
This means he has opted out as well of a whole series of the most important questions of our time, such as are there moderate Muslims, can Islam be reformed, what is the relationship between religious doctrine and violence, what is jihad, what is dhimmitude, can true democracy exist under Islam, is it terminally expansionist in its ideology, can women and homosexuals achieve their rights under Sharia law, what happens when Sharia expands into Western society, etc.
...
...These people have buried their traditional liberal values under a veneer of false tolerance and trendy cultural relativism and essentially turned liberalism on its head.
O’Donnell is no longer a liberal in the sense I understood it growing up. In fact, he runs away from defending the basic cannon of liberalism without which it cannot exist – free speech. A true liberal is a man like Flemming Rose who had the courage to defend that freedom against the onslaught of opposition to the publication of the Danish cartoons. Where was O’Donnell on that? Quivering in his corner, worrying whether he will be shot? Where was O’Donnell (a man of the entertainment industry, no less) when director Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death by an Islamist on the streets of Amsterdam for making a film critical of Islam? Busy attacking George Bush, I imagine. The courage of Rose and Van Gogh (and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan, etc.) is paying O’Donnell’s check from the McLaughlin Group in a very real sense. He owes them all a commission.
O’Donnell’s words remind me more clearly than anything in recent days why I no longer identify as a “liberal” in its modern usage. It has become a meaningless term. I may be a chicken, but I am not a coward. I have criticized Islam often and I will continue to do so.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWM2N2E2ODI2ODUzNjAyZmNkNTY0OGI0MGI0NWU1NzY=
Mark Steyn is Losing [Stanley Kurtz]
In the battle for freedom of speech in Canada, Mark Steyn is losing. True, there’s been a flurry of discussion on the blogosphere, and a number of powerful Canadian Op-Ed pieces on the controversy. But don’t be fooled, Mark Steyn is losing.
For one thing, the opinion pieces protesting the case against Steyn have come largely from Canadian conservatives. Unless these political outliers are joined by more "classically liberal" Canadians, there is little chance that Canada’s system of Human Rights Commissions will be reigned-in or reformed.
Consider the conclusion of David Warren’s "Then They Came for Mark Steyn...:"
For nota bene: this should not be a Left or Right issue. Freedom for one is freedom for all, and tyranny against one is tyranny against all...
I mentioned last week the case Mohamed Elmasry and the Canadian Islamic Congress have brought against Maclean's magazine for publishing Mark Steyn — simultaneously before multiple human rights commissions, a tactic that is itself an egregious abuse of process. It is a case that should clang alarm bells right across Canada. Yet we've heard only a few modest tinkles.
Warren’s piece is a must-read for its powerful portrayal of the real-life slippery slope Canada’s Human Rights Commissions have fallen down — so powerful that it’s easy to miss Warren’s point about the minimal reaction to the Steyn case in Canada to date. But Warren is right. The seriousness of the threat to Canada’s free speech has not yet been recognized.
Have a look at this editorial on the apparent murder of Aqsa Parvez in Canada’s National Post. This piece rightly notes that assimilation problems among Canada’s Muslim immigrants are not as severe as the problems we’ve seen in Europe. Even so, it seems to me that the piece goes out of its way to underplay the problems that do exist. And note the swipe at "high profile conservative columnists" who have been "particularly vigorous about highlighting these pathologies." This implicit swipe at Steyn, without adding a public plea for his right to free speech, bodes ill indeed. The National Post is far more hospitable to conservative views than most Canadian outlets. I would be delighted to be corrected on this, but so far as I know, the National Post has yet to speak out on the case against Steyn, or on the abusive powers of Canada’s Human Rights Commissions. If even the National Post is silent on the Steyn affair, free speech in Canada is in trouble.
Now look at this post from Gary J. Wise, a Toronto Attorney who runs the Wise Law Blog. Wise has been alerted to the controversy by posts at the Volokh Conspiracy. He blames the fracas on American conservatives, and seems unaware of the various columns on the controversy by Canadians. (For some links to Canadian columns, go here. And be sure to read John Robson’s hilarious, "Self-Censorship? Me? Absolutely!") Wise has little to say in reply to core concerns about this case–that simply bringing cases against expressions of opinion creates costs (financial and more) that have the effect of chilling speech. He also has nothing to say about the vague powers of these bodies, or about changes in their functioning unanticipated by, and even repudiated by, some of their founders. (Again, see Warren’s latest column for more on the history of these commissions. And for my own view, see "Steynophobia" and "The Case Against Steyn".)
In any case, I take Wise’s post to express the current attitude of Canada’s liberal elite: untroubled by the vague and expanding powers of Human Rights Commissions, uninterested in the chilling effects of accusations on conservative opponents, unaware of the views of Canada’s own conservatives on the Steyn affair, disdainful of American criticisms, and only barely aware of the controversy itself. Combine this with the silence to date by the National Post, and we must conclude that Mark Steyn is losing.
12/17 11:56 AM
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDExODAwZjNlYjI3NmM1ZTJlZTc0MDQ1NzRjOTc2MGE=
Monday, December 17, 2007
Re: Mark Steyn is losing [Mark Steyn]
Stanley, you may be right. The Canadian Islamic Congress is arguing that my article is a "crime". By accepting the case, the Canadian Human Rights Commission has indicated it's prepared at least to consider the possibility that it's a "crime". That in itself is a significant concession to my opponents, and damaging not just to me but to the concept of a free press.
Over in London, Melanie Phillips has her say on the matter in The Spectator. Miss Phillips is the author of the bestselling Londonistan, and my column about her book is also part of the Canadian Islamic Congress' complaint against me. I conclude it as follows:
One final thought: Miss Phillips is one of Britain's best-known newspaper columnists. She appears constantly on national TV and radio. No publisher has lost money on her. Yet Londonistan wound up being published first in New York, and its subsequent appearance in Britain is thanks not to Little, Brown (who published her last big book) but to a small independent imprint called Gibson Square. I don't know Miss Phillips's agent, but it's hard not to suspect that glamorous literary London decided it would prefer to keep a safe distance from this incendiary subject.
That's how nations die — not by war or conquest, but by a thousand trivial concessions, until one day you wake up and you don't need to sign a formal instrument of surrender because you did it piecemeal.
12/17 06:32 PM
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/407686/the-blood-runs-cold.thtml
The blood runs cold
Monday, 17th December 2007
The lights are going out on liberal society – and it is the most liberal societies with their fingers on the ‘off’ switch. The thesis of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, that Europe was succumbing to an Islamist takeover, has been proved spectacularly correct -- in Canada, and with himself as the designated victim. The New York Post reports that both Steyn and Macleans magazine, which reprinted a chapter of his book, are to be hauled before two Canadian judicial panels to answer the charge that they have spread ‘hatred and contempt’ for Muslims. And what was the heinous view Steyn vouchsafed to occasion such a charge?
…the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada's liberalized, Western civilization.
Well excuse me, but some of us were under the impression that a global war was currently being waged by a section of the Islamic world in order to write the truth of that assertion in blood.
The irony, of course, is that by this action Canada is thus demonstrating that if any culture is incompatible with liberalised western civilisation, it is clearly Canada’s. The idea that certain arguments must not be made, and that to do so is to find oneself arraigned before a judicial tribunal, is the very antithesis of a liberal society. It is a symptom of totalitarianism. It is also doubly ironic that it is the Islamic world, through the Canadian Islamic Congress, that is bringing this action -- since in seeking to suppress the view that the Islamic world is incompatible with liberalism, it is demonstrating with the starkest possible clarity the truth of that proposition.
It is no accident that it is uber-‘liberal’ Canada, which worships at the shrine of human rights law, where this medieval inquisition is taking place. The fact that the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission are to conduct this kangaroo hearing is grotesque but not in the least surprising. The belief fundamental to human wrongs law, that minorities are sacrosanct and that to criticise them is proof of rampant prejudice, is part of the mindset which has turned truth, morality and freedom inside out. If a writer who tells the truth about Islamists spreading hatred and contempt for the west is himself hauled before a court charged with spreading hatred and contempt by telling such a truth, then the Orwellian nightmare has well and truly arrived.
As I have said many times before, the real threat to civilisation comes not from acts of terror, appalling though these are; it comes from the fact that Islamists are progressively making slaves out of us in our own countries.