Category Archives: Anti-Semitism

Danes and Deniers

Anti-Semitism, Free Speech, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Journalism, Judaism & Jews, Media

Holocaust denier David Irving, whom I’ve defended here, has become the cause celebre for the terminally self-righteous. Some in the West simply refuse to defend the Danes in a meaningful and morally unambiguous manner. So instead, they bang on about the admittedly shabby treatment of Irving. In their eyes, the Danes and their controversial drawings cannot be disentangled from the Irving issue.

At the risk of repeating myself, the need to repeal laws prohibiting hate speech and Holocaust denial cannot be overemphasized; nobody wants to see Irving jailed for being a jerk.

So what of those who say hounding this Holocaust denier makes the West “guilty of the crimes with which we charge the Muslims”? Well, the idea that aggression exists on a continuum is asinine—pure left-liberalism. According to this slippery-slope illogic, the European laws banning Holocaust denial—and they are indefensible—are as distasteful as beheading—or scheming to behead—”heretics.”

Now that’s a howler!

Christopher Hitchens' Relativism & the Cartoon Controversy

Anti-Semitism, Christianity, Free Speech, Islam, Judaism & Jews

Christopher Hitchens’ cri de coeur over the Danish cartoon controversy fizzled somewhat due to his signature relativism with respect to the facts about the three faiths; it caused him to fudge important distinctions, without which clarity is impossible. One can disdain religion without losing sight of what separates Islam from the Judeo-Christian faiths.

Hitchens says Islam’s anti-Semitism has been borrowed from Christianity. He also mentions a rabbi who grounds his dislike for the Palestinians in scriptures (rather than in the actions of suicide killers and their supporters). These examples are supposed to show that all religions lead their faithful into latrines and lock them there forever.

Hitchens’ arguments, however, are weak. First, Islam is an innovator in anti-Semitism in its own right. For example, the Nazis did not originate the yellow cloth they tagged Jews with; the caliph who succeeded the Prophet Mohammed did. More fundamentally, he neglects to mention that Christianity has changed. Christian and Jewish holy texts, moreover, have been reinterpreted by the sages over the centuries; the Quran has not. Nor can it be, because devout Muslims believe it’s God’s eternal and unquestionable word to Muhammad. At least so deduced the greatest Christian theologian alive, Pope Benedict XVI.

Hitchens should know that one-case studies and spotty historical slates do not remotely equate with the groundswell of virulent, violent fundamentalism that grips and defines the Muslim world today. Contemporary Christianity and Judaism; Buddhism and Baha’ism are religions of peace. The same cannot be said of Islam.

All Speech Should Be Free

Anti-Semitism, Britain, Free Speech, Individual Rights, Islam

Writer Robert Locke recently warned that “free speech may become illegal in England.” He focused specifically on the case of Nick Griffin, “chairman of a small opposition party called the British National Party.” Griffin is apparently facing trial for saying, “at a private political meeting,” that “Islam is an evil and wicked faith. Unfortunately for him,” Locke reported, “government thought police were watching, and recorded him on video tape… Such things really do happen in Britain today. Let us pray they do not happen in America tomorrow, and draw the line now,” Locke excoriated:

“Most Americans know that America’s precious civil liberties were born in England, out of English common law, English ideas of individual rights, and British parliamentary democracy.
Most Americans don’t know that this glorious tradition, in defense of which Americans and Britons fought two world wars and a Cold War together, is dying where it was born.
Today, believe it or not, civil liberty is under attack in the UK as it has not been since the dark days of 1940.
Then, as now, it is threatened by a would-be United Europe, and by those at home who lack the courage to defend it.
Today, European Union laws have snuffed out many of the cherished rights in Britain—rights Americans still take for granted, like the presumption of innocence and the right to elect their own government—and they threaten to snuff out more, from freedom of speech to the right to trial by jury. British liberty is in danger of being swallowed whole by the alliance between Political Correctness and an alien and Napoleonic legal tradition from the Continent, where freedom is nothing more than a loan from the state, revocable at its convenience. [More on the European “superstate” in Adieu to the Evil EU]
Make no mistake: the unelected masters of the European Union know full-well that British liberty is one of the biggest roadblocks on their drive to create a superstate that will rival and displace the USA. They cannot allow the virus of freedom to infect any part of their bureaucratic despotism, and they mean to eradicate it. Tony Blair is their enthusiastic collaborator.
The present British government—just like in the 1930’s—has responded to the aggression of a diabolical foreign ideology by deciding to appease it. Then it was major newspapers hushing up the truth about Hitler. Today it is the fact that in Britain, a man can be thrown in jail for telling the truth about Islam’s agenda of world conquest [my emphasis].
If you know that Islam has waged holy war from Arabia to Lower Manhattan for 1,400 years, aiming at the forcible conversion of the world, you will know this is the simple truth. If you know its holy book, the Koran, explicitly commands every Moslem to wage jihad, you will understand why the world needs to know. If you remember 9/11, you will understand why this is the crucial issue of our time.
…You understand how important free speech is. Without it, all other liberties are moot, as no-one can tell the truth about threats to them [my emphasis]. Islamic radicals are hoping to exploit the British courts—using rights Islam would abolish—to silence criticism of their jihad agenda. If they win this case, they will have acquired enormous powers of intimidation.”

I share Locke’s outrage. England has stooped as low as Turkey, which is prosecuting novelist Orhan Pamuk for “denigrating Turkishness.” That’s Orwellian for daring to acknowledge and decry the Armenian genocide during the First World War and the mass slaughter of the Kurds, also vital truths that should not be forgotten. Locke and I, however, would agree that Turkey has no legacy of free-speech to lament.

In 2002, France prosecuted the brilliant author, Michel Houellebecq. He was dragged before a French Revolutionary Assembly (English for a Parisian court) for calling Islam “a stupid religion.” And there’s Oriana Fallaci, forced to flee her native Italy, because of persecution by that government, acting as a proxy for Muslim groups. Although Locke would not be surprised by these events, I’m sure he’d condemn the assaults on these people.

However, it is not entirely clear whether Locke would defend Holocaust denier David Irving’s right to speak his misguided mind. Unless I have misunderstood him, Locke appears to decry the state’s assault on Griffin because he happened to speak the truth. What of liars? Is their speech a legitimate target of state aggression? Do the British “Rights of Englishmen”—the inspiration for the American Founding Fathers—protect only speech that is true?

American jurisprudence allows the regulation of speech only under very limited circumstances. If speech poses a “Clear and Present Danger,” it can be censored. While the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment doesn’t protect words that are likely to cause violence, the required threshold is extremely high. And so it should be. In fact, the preferred course of action against imams who publicly preach and incite violence against Americans on American soil is deportation, not censorship.

Locke ought to have emphasized the imperative of protecting all speech, truthful and untruthful. That’s the American way—and the right way—although it is clearly no longer cool in Cool Britannia.

Twin Deceits: Shakespeare And Holocaust Denial

Anti-Semitism, Conspiracy, English, Literature, Pseudo-history

Shakespeare too has been the victim of the assault on history and truth. Assorted conspiracy kooks identify “the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a courtier poet with some twenty fairly conventional lyrics to his name,” as the real deal. Writes Brian Vickers, in the August 19 & 26 issue of the Times Literary Supplement: “There are several insuperable objections to Oxford’s candidature: he died with a dozen of Shakespeare’s sole and co-authored plays unwritten (or at least unperformed); the style of his poetic oeuvre is extremely limited and un-Shakespearean; he led a busy and wasteful aristocratic existence abroad and at home.”

The Oxfordians, says Vickers, have performed all manner of chicanery to get around these difficulties, including to re-date plays and to “invent a new chronology, improbably dating Shakespeare’s early comedies to the late 1570s, and postulating that Oxford left drafts of all the remaining plays for Shakespeare to touch up and pass off as his own, either completely hoaxing everyone connected with the Globe [one of the theatres the busy Shakespeare managed—he worked daily with a host of theatre people], or relying on their connivance.”

“The Oxfordian cause has been vigorously pursued, with perverse enthusiasm…Supporters may sustain themselves with a sense of cocking a snook at official culture, or exposing an evil conspiracy whose existence was unsuspected for 300 years. But whatever the Oxfordians are producing, it is not scholarship.”

Scott McCrea’s The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question is “the latest in an honorable line of books reaffirming Shakespeare’s authorship, of which the most notable are H. N. Gibson’s The Shakespeare Claimants (1962), Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (1970; revised edition, 1991), Irving Matus’s Shakespeare in Fact (1994) and Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare (1997).” McCrea’s book is said to be of a high scholarly standard.

“In his final chapter, ‘All conspiracy theories are alike,’ [McCrea] suggests that ‘denial of Shakespeare follows exactly the same flawed reasoning as Holocaust denial’ in that it rejects the most obvious explanation of an event, and reinterprets evidence to fit a preconceived idea (‘the ovens at Auschwitz baked bread’).

[Curiously, when reporter Johann Hari went Undercover with the Holocaust Deniers,” he ran into our Shakespeare denier.]

Facts that contradict the theory are explained by conspiracy, but this ploy means that ‘conspiracy theories are really not theories at all,’ but faiths, which cannot be proved false. McCrea recognizes that, despite his subtitle, ‘there can never be an end to the Authorship Question,’ [ditto Holocaust denial], a depressing prospect.

He maintains a good-humored tone, a pleasant contrast to many works in this field, but one can be too cool. As we survey the never-ending flow of anti-Shakespeare books it is hard not to share the bitterness of Georg Brandes, moved in part to write his William Shakespeare (1898) by the ‘ignorant and arrogant attack’ of the ‘wretched group of dilettanti‘ who have ‘been bold enough… to deny William Shakespeare the right to his own life-work.'”