The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack aftermath showed serious problems with democratic institutions and national security among western nations. By publishing a cover that was a challenge to Muslim terrorists, Charlie Hebdo put the West on the spot after all its protestations that “We are Charlie.” Clearly we were not Charlie. Only CBS TV news initially began showing the new Charlie Hebdo cover, and after all other major news outlets turned out to be absolute cowards, CBS began showing only pieces of the cover, like everyone else.
Certainly there are restraints on free speech. Just ask anyone remotely controversial who has tried to speak on a college campus recently. Colleges are the leading centers of censorship. Students abhor free thought and college administrators let them have their way. Certainly there should be limits on free speech, but we find free speech much more restricted than it was fifty years ago. Big brother is here and monitoring what you say. Surprisingly, it is not so much NSA or the FBI, but your friends, neighbors and fellow students, who stand ready to attack you for anything you say that they think is “wrong.” America is less free than it used to be.
In addition, there is the national security issue. News organizations do not believe that the various levels of government (national, state, local) can protect them from terrorism. They are afraid that if they show the Charlie Hebdo cover they will be killed on the way to work, or at work, like Charlie Hebdo. They have some good arguments. The best is probably that they have Middle Eastern correspondents in the region and that showing the cover would put those correspondents lives in danger. But there is also the implication that the network anchors and newspaper editors are afraid for their own lives and refused to show the cover out of cowardice, which means that the terrorists won.
I think on balance you have to say that the Charlie Hebdo terrorists won something. They did not significantly change the societies they attacked, but they did illustrate the moral and security weaknesses of those societies. France claimed to be a home for unfettered free speech, but then restricted the free speech of those criticizing Jews and some others. These restrictions may be reasonable but they do not correspond to the high ideals enunciated after the attacks.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Israeli Dishonor of the Holocaust
I am disappointed that there has not been more of an outcry from the Jewish community about the terrorist killings of thousands of civilians by Boko Haram in Nigeria. This is exactly the kind of indifference that the Jews accuse America of during the World War II Holocaust. Many Jews disparage Roosevelt (and Churchill) for not acting sooner to end the Holocaust by invading continental Europe sooner to reach the death camps. The Jews believe that millions more Christians should have died in order to save millions more Jews in the camps. Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on waiting until the invasion had a better chance of success. Of course the reason it had a better chance of success was that something like 11 million Soviets died fighting Hitler in Russia along the Eastern Front softening up the Germans for the D-Day invasion.
If they are not racists, Jews in general and Israelis in particular need to speak out about the atrocities in Nigeria, Ideally, Israelis should come to the aid of the Nigerians, if not, at least they should lead a worldwide campaign to protect the Nigerians from Boko Haram. It’s a Holocaust issue.
While it did not point out the Jewish hypocrisy on the matter, a recent op-ed in the Denver Post pointed out the worldwide hypocrisy in reacting so strongly to the Charlie Hebdo killings in France and so weakly to the killings in Nigeria.
If they are not racists, Jews in general and Israelis in particular need to speak out about the atrocities in Nigeria, Ideally, Israelis should come to the aid of the Nigerians, if not, at least they should lead a worldwide campaign to protect the Nigerians from Boko Haram. It’s a Holocaust issue.
While it did not point out the Jewish hypocrisy on the matter, a recent op-ed in the Denver Post pointed out the worldwide hypocrisy in reacting so strongly to the Charlie Hebdo killings in France and so weakly to the killings in Nigeria.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Hoothis Take Over Yemen
The situation in Yemen appears to be a mess. We don’t really know who is in control of the
country. That’s not unusual. For a long time, Yemen was more or less
divided into two countries, North and South Yemen, with Sanaa and Aden as its
respective capitals. The Hoothis who are
taking over the country in Sanaa, are a relatively unknown group, described to
some extent by the NYT
They are Shiites getting help from Iran, but apparently not
your ordinary Shiites. And they are fighting al Qaida in Yemen (which sponsored
the French terrorist attacks), as is the government that they are
overthrowing. Again we find the US
allied with Iran against al Qaida, while Israel is killing Iranian generals in
Syria.
Strange world!
Yemen would have been a mess in any case, but did we make it
worse by intervening in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
encouraging government overthrows in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other
countries? We certainly did not have a
beneficial effect.
Yemen borders on Saudi Arabia. Does the instability in Yemen bode ill for
Saudi Arabia, especially if the Shiite Hoothis take over? Although their border is mostly desert, it
can’t be a good thing.
Thursday, January 08, 2015
Who Should I Worry About?
The attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris presents the question of whether I should be worried about Jews taking over America and transferring its wealth and power to Israel, or whether I should be worried about Muslim terrorists attacking Western institutions, or whether I should be worried about the increasing Hispanic nature of America due to the Hispanic influx. Or maybe something else, like the decline of religion in America. Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. People fight, sometimes because they have to in order to survive, sometimes because the choose to overthrow the status quo.
The fact is that I agree with the Democratic side of the Jewish establishment on most issues. I just worry that they love Israel more than America. Jews tend to consider Israel as a 51st state, and people in the Middle East perceive it the same way. They see Israel with its occupation of Palestinian land as an extension of America. They tend to see Israeli hatred of Arabs as an extension of American hatred of Arabs. Israeli and American Jews bear a significant responsibility for Muslim hatred of the West. It's hard to say which came first Arab hatred of Jews before Israel, or Arab hatred of Jews (and the West) due to the creation of Israel and resulting displacement of millions of Arabs. Israel was created first, then the Arabs stated the first war.
The Israelis have faced Arab and/or Muslim terrorism ever since the creation of Israel. Of course the Israelis also stooped to terrorism in order to create Israel. Now terrorism has spread to the whole world, in part thanks to cheaper, easier transportation. The first step was high jacking airliners. The world responded pretty well to these hijackings and now we have moved to a new tactic. It is pretty cheap and easy to get from Yemen to Paris, much easier and cheaper than it would have been 50 years ago. Or over the Internet you can recruit someone in Paris to do your dirty work without having to travel. The increasing homogenization of populations another factor favoring terrorists. A couple of generations ago, a Muslim in Western Europe would have stood out and been easy to track, but not so today. Muslims make up a significant percentage of the French population, partly a result of a long war in Algeria, which brought many Algerians to France under unpleasant circumstances.
All of that is no excuse for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians. If Muslims want to prevent unpleasant depictions of the prophet Mohamed, they should go about it like everybody else in democratic countries. They could try to get a law passed outlawing such depictions. Hopefully they would not get such a law, but that is the way you go about it in democratic societies. We have laws against certain types of pornography and other things that offend most of the population. If many people are offended by certain characterizations of Mohamed, then they could be outlawed or restricted. But violence is not the way to do it. If some Muslims are not going to act in a civilized manner, then Western society must take steps to protect itself from them. The problem, of course, is to take steps that do not destroy the very civilization that we are trying to preserve.
That is the attack from the top, by rich Jews and militant Muslims. What about the attack from the bottom, the increasing influence of Hispanics, who have recently arrived, and blacks, who have recently begun to acquire political and economic power. As a while Anglo, I am sorry to see our traditional power eroded. Rich Anglos may have been as bad as rich Jews, but I always had hope that culture and religion would be some restraint on them, which has been lost in recent years. Rich, white bankers may have been a inwardly greedy as Jews or others, but they had to sit through Sunday services in main line Protestant churches which held them to Jewish and Christian standards set out in the Bible in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and many other places. They at least had to publicly subscribe to these teachings in order to do business and maintain their place in the community. That no longer seems to be true. Thus there are fewer restraints of the worst impulses of human nature. I often thought that blacks, especially black women, had a sincere religious faith and decency that surpassed most everyone else in society. Much of that seems to be lost, as so many black women today end up as struggling, single mothers.
The Hispanic influx is probably much like the earlier influx of Poles, Germans, Irish, Italians, and so on. One difference is that the influx has been so large, at least until recently, that there are not the same pressures to assimilate as there was on the previous immigrants. They could always live in small communities where they could speak their native language, but with Spanish, they are not restricted to small communities. You can pretty easily live a normal, active life in America speaking only Spanish. You are hardly restricted at all. There might be some grocery or department stores that are not Spanish friendly, but there are many that are. If you compare Spanish immigrants to Asian immigrants, there appears to be a big difference. Asians don't bend the community to their ways, but Hispanics do.
I guess I have to accept change, but I'm still resisting.
The fact is that I agree with the Democratic side of the Jewish establishment on most issues. I just worry that they love Israel more than America. Jews tend to consider Israel as a 51st state, and people in the Middle East perceive it the same way. They see Israel with its occupation of Palestinian land as an extension of America. They tend to see Israeli hatred of Arabs as an extension of American hatred of Arabs. Israeli and American Jews bear a significant responsibility for Muslim hatred of the West. It's hard to say which came first Arab hatred of Jews before Israel, or Arab hatred of Jews (and the West) due to the creation of Israel and resulting displacement of millions of Arabs. Israel was created first, then the Arabs stated the first war.
The Israelis have faced Arab and/or Muslim terrorism ever since the creation of Israel. Of course the Israelis also stooped to terrorism in order to create Israel. Now terrorism has spread to the whole world, in part thanks to cheaper, easier transportation. The first step was high jacking airliners. The world responded pretty well to these hijackings and now we have moved to a new tactic. It is pretty cheap and easy to get from Yemen to Paris, much easier and cheaper than it would have been 50 years ago. Or over the Internet you can recruit someone in Paris to do your dirty work without having to travel. The increasing homogenization of populations another factor favoring terrorists. A couple of generations ago, a Muslim in Western Europe would have stood out and been easy to track, but not so today. Muslims make up a significant percentage of the French population, partly a result of a long war in Algeria, which brought many Algerians to France under unpleasant circumstances.
All of that is no excuse for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians. If Muslims want to prevent unpleasant depictions of the prophet Mohamed, they should go about it like everybody else in democratic countries. They could try to get a law passed outlawing such depictions. Hopefully they would not get such a law, but that is the way you go about it in democratic societies. We have laws against certain types of pornography and other things that offend most of the population. If many people are offended by certain characterizations of Mohamed, then they could be outlawed or restricted. But violence is not the way to do it. If some Muslims are not going to act in a civilized manner, then Western society must take steps to protect itself from them. The problem, of course, is to take steps that do not destroy the very civilization that we are trying to preserve.
That is the attack from the top, by rich Jews and militant Muslims. What about the attack from the bottom, the increasing influence of Hispanics, who have recently arrived, and blacks, who have recently begun to acquire political and economic power. As a while Anglo, I am sorry to see our traditional power eroded. Rich Anglos may have been as bad as rich Jews, but I always had hope that culture and religion would be some restraint on them, which has been lost in recent years. Rich, white bankers may have been a inwardly greedy as Jews or others, but they had to sit through Sunday services in main line Protestant churches which held them to Jewish and Christian standards set out in the Bible in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and many other places. They at least had to publicly subscribe to these teachings in order to do business and maintain their place in the community. That no longer seems to be true. Thus there are fewer restraints of the worst impulses of human nature. I often thought that blacks, especially black women, had a sincere religious faith and decency that surpassed most everyone else in society. Much of that seems to be lost, as so many black women today end up as struggling, single mothers.
The Hispanic influx is probably much like the earlier influx of Poles, Germans, Irish, Italians, and so on. One difference is that the influx has been so large, at least until recently, that there are not the same pressures to assimilate as there was on the previous immigrants. They could always live in small communities where they could speak their native language, but with Spanish, they are not restricted to small communities. You can pretty easily live a normal, active life in America speaking only Spanish. You are hardly restricted at all. There might be some grocery or department stores that are not Spanish friendly, but there are many that are. If you compare Spanish immigrants to Asian immigrants, there appears to be a big difference. Asians don't bend the community to their ways, but Hispanics do.
I guess I have to accept change, but I'm still resisting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)