Equal Opportunity Failure: Baltimore Riots Are About 50 Years of Progressive Misrule

May 7, 2015 | Politics

From Baltimore Is Not About Race - WSJ:

...the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure.Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies.These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning.If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence.How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create.

New York Times Condones Terrorist Acts of Violence When It Says “We Are For Free Speech, But…”

May 7, 2015 | Politics

From Free Speech vs. Hate Speech - NYTimes.com:

There is no question that images ridiculing religion, however offensive they may be to believers, qualify as protected free speech in the United States and most Western democracies. There is also no question that however offensive the images, they do not justify murder, and that it is incumbent on leaders of all religious faiths to make this clear to their followers.

But it is equally clear that the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Tex., was not really about free speech. It was an exercise in bigotry and hatred posing as a blow for freedom.

Here is the cartoon that the NY Times has written such hateful and disparaging things about -- you decide.

Comments Steve Simpson at Voices for Reason - Attacks on Free Speech Come to the U.S. | The Ayn Rand Institute:

As I wrote last week, many intellectuals in America and elsewhere have taken an attitude of appeasement toward the terrorists and their sympathizers, thus ensuring that their attacks will continue. Of course, violence is not justified, they say, but should we really go out of our way to celebrate those who offend others or humiliate “marginalized” groups? (In this case, the answer is “yes.”)Already, we are seeing that attitude toward the organizers of the event in Garland, who are being called “Islamophobes” and purveyors of “hate speech,” always with the caveat that of course violence is not justified.But this attitude is a form of justifying violence, in the same way that criticizing a rape victim for dressing provocatively is a justification of rape. It says, you brought this on yourself, or you provoked your assailant, or you are the type of person who deserved this. In all events, the message is that your actions, not the actions of your assailants, are the relevant cause of the attack.There are many circumstances in which it’s appropriate not to take sides in a debate or to criticize one side or the other or both. But that applies only when there actually is a debate to take sides in or to ignore. It seems too obvious to point out, but a debate does not exist when one side is trying to kill the other.The moment someone resorts to violence in response to speech is the moment that the issue is no longer about the merits of any side’s position or the character of the speakers but about whether we are going to have the freedom to take positions — that is, to think for ourselves — at all. If we fail to support those who are trying to speak, we necessarily end up condoning, and therefore supporting, those who are willing to resort to violence. There’s no middle ground in a dispute like this, because there’s no middle ground between speech and force. Free speech cannot exist when some people are willing to resort to force.Whatever one thinks about Charlie Hebdo and the organizers of the Garland event or of any of the arguments or positions they take or support, there is no question that Islamists who threaten and use violence want to shut down all debate, all discussion, all thought, and all criticism of their religion. That is why they resort to violence.

Are you yellow-smiley-face-ophobic?

May 6, 2015 | Politics

Ban of Drawing Muhammad is a Modern Construct

May 6, 2015 | Politics

From How images of the prophet Muhammad became ‘forbidden’ - The Washington Post:

It’s so commonly reported that Islam forbids Muhammad’s portraiture that it seems almost a waste of space to repeat it. After all, isn’t that why some Muslims were so outraged in 2006 when the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten depicted Muhammad in an unflattering light? Isn’t that why the Metropolitan Museum of Art pulled three paintings of the prophet? Isn’t that why the TV show South Park had to censor all mentions of Muhammad in a 2010 episode?  “Islam forbids images of Muhammad,” CNN boomed in a headline last week.But the reality is substantially more complicated. The Koran, in fact, does not directly forbid the portrayal of Muhammad. And the second most important Islamic text, the Hadith, “presents us with an ambiguous picture at best,” wrote Christine Gruber of the University of Michigan. “At turns we read of artists who dared to breathe life into their figures and, at others, of pillows ornamented with figural imagery.” The most explicit fatwa banning the portrayal of Muhammad, she notes, isn’t tucked into some ancient text. It arrived in 2001. And its creator was the Taliban. The ban is a very modern construct.

Mohammed Cartoons: Diana West on the Media’s Embrace of “Dhimmitude”

May 6, 2015 | Politics

When a group of people peacefully gathering for an afternoon to discuss or protest or otherwise exercise their lawful rights to free speech regarding Islam and its noxious prophet require thousands of dollars' worth of security to protect their lives from jihad killers (and thank goodness, otherwise the slaughter would likely have far exceeded the death toll of the Charlie Hebdo/Jewish market attacks), freedom, in the Western sense of the word, no longer exists. The "public square" is a war zone.That means that the liberty that is (was) the foundation of our republic is not "threatened," but rather has already been engulfed by the advance of Islam, its law, its culture, into our society. (Airport security is another tip-off.) Here -- not in the Middle East, not in the Turkish, Pakistani and other Islamic sectors of the EU -- it is now accepted that silence buys safety, that submission to sharia is the norm. By this process, Dar al Harb (House of War) becomes Dar al Islam (House of Islam/Submission), and without a fight.Not so for the artists, writers, spectators and one politician, Geert Wilders, who participated in Geller's cartoon-contest-homage to Charlie Hebdo, and voluntarily placed themselves on the front lines of a very real fight for liberty against followers of Islam's creed of violence, repression, and exploitation of women, children and non-Muslims (as exemplified by the example of its prophet). A low-ebb marker is the extent to which their fellow-citizens in media and politics prefer to embrace "dhimmitude" through sharia-compliance rather than support the defense and defenders of their own God-given liberties.

Government Funded Blasphemy Against Christianity is Illuminating According To the Left

May 6, 2015 | Politics

In 1987, Andres Serrano submerged a crucifix in a glass of his own urine and took a picture. Entitled “Piss Christ,” the photograph won first place in a contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.In 1996, another avant-garde artist, Chris Ofili, smeared elephant dung on a portrait of the Blessed Mother and displayed it in a government-funded Brooklyn museum.And so the stage was set for the ensuing nightmare of Christian terror and violence that descended on the American art community.

Just kidding. Nothing of the sort happened. There were no canonical death warrants issued, no attempts on the artists’ lives, and no threats of violence against the artists, the contest organizers, the museum curators, or anyone else.To be sure, Christians objected to “Piss Christ” and the feces-covered Holy Virgin. And they rightfully wondered why their tax dollars had been used to promote these blasphemies. But their objections and questions were condescendingly dismissed by the secular left in the media and intelligentsia. As one prominent art critic sniffed, Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” was “deliberately provocative” in order to “jolt viewers into an expanded frame of reference, and perhaps even toward illumination.”As if in one voice, the mainstream media and self-anointed intelligentsia argued that antiquated religious sensitivities must not be allowed to interfere with either an artist’s free expression or his right to government funding regardless of how offensive his work may be to Christians.Well, it seems that things have changed.