“Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak arrived in Washington this week to press flesh with the president. In an interview, Mubarak told PBS television that Barack Obama’s speech had shown him that ‘America is not against Islam.’ …
The address Mubarak was referring to was delivered by a grandiose Obama in Egypt’s capital, early in June. There, the president prostrated himself before the Muslim world, offering up prolix praise for the religion of peace – a tradition that his predecessor established. …
Given the veritable mirage of lies he conjured in Cairo, blaming the decadence of Arab countries on nefarious Western imperialist intervention in the 19th and 20th centuries, B. Hussein’s historical horizons vis-à-vis the Middle East could also do with some broadening.
A good start would be to stop relying on ‘Lawrence of Arabia’s’ homoerotic, ahisotric memoir for the facts.” …
Wikipedia is the Southern Poverty Law Center of online “resources.” It is an example of why populism in data is a piss-poor idea. Any rightist who’s had to fight that outfit for the removal of libel and lies knows of what I speak.
In short, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia of and for the Age of the Idiot. (And the malevolent.) Of course, libertarians love it—and their motives are lefty, as is often the case: Behold spontaneous order! (More like disorder.) The fact that millions of people have mastered enough technology to post online falsities masquerading as fact about those they dislike is no more significant to freedom than the fact that billions of humans have a bowel movement every day. So there!
And, as Derb demonstrates, Wikipedia makes “correcting” very difficult indeed. personally, I’ve opted for letters c/cd to a lawyer (and when I obtain proof traceable to the woman I suspect of saucing up the barely true tales posted about me … it won’t be pretty).
Truth in advertising is the issue here. Wikipedia needs to be labeled differently. It cannot be allowed at once to post lies and pose as a purveyor of truth. Right now, it uses its credibility as an encyclopedia to damage the good name of a person and present it as fact. Think of the debate over holocaust denial. Free speech always. The only question vis-a-vis denial is how and where you file it. In the library, the Dewey Decimal Classification for denial ought to be “Pseudo-history.” Right now Wikipedia bios fuse fact with fiction, yet this amalgam is filed as fact. This dubious syndicate needs to be “reclassified” itself. (Ideas?)
So far generalities. Now to more particulars. Today I was researching Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi for a section of my interminable book. Without going into detail, the Zuluchief is one of the good guys of South Africa; Mandela’s mafia—the ANC—is the bad element. Of course, Buthelezi being a free market man, who fought for the devolution of power rather than its concentration in a dominant-party state (the endgame of the ANC and its Anglo-American buddies)—he was tarred as the bad guy by the same axis of evil.
And by WikiLibel. As far as I know, “necklacing,” the indigenous practice of placing a car tire around a putative offender’s neck and igniting it with gasoline, was invented by the ANC as a method of punishing collaborators. Nelson’s wife, Wini Mandela, was an avid practitioner. No, I’m not claiming there was never any cross-fertilization in the ethnic war between the Xhosa (ANC/Mandela) and the Zulu (Buthelezi). However, the ANC should take credit for inventing and perfecting this technique.
But not according to our falsifiers, who give Buthelezi the good old WikiLibel treatment.
Update (August 3): AGGRESSION AGAINST NON-AGGRESSORS. A syndicate poses as a transmitter of immutable fact. The outfit’s process allows for the repeated trashing of vulnerable individuals in its bio section—vulnerable because mass support is not behind them. Individuals enjoying the support of the masses and their crooked cognoscenti are spared. All this under the guise of truth and objectivity.
As I predicted, those whose life’s work is in undermining ordered liberty, and elevating the virtues of populism and anarchy, rush to the defense of this bully pulpit. I speak of libertarians, naturally.
Their analytical tools? Accuse the “little woman” (moi) of personalizing the matter, sulking, and not being willing to, periodically, forfeit her good name and the integrity of her record on the alter of the Collective Good—namely data disseminated by the masses.
Predictable.
It doesn’t take much mental acuity (entirely lost in the herd instincts of my interlocutors) to distill the argument of this post. All one has to do is READ IT. Again.
What moved me to write was not my ongoing libel by Wikipedia, but the blatant, malicious, cunningly embedded slander in the bio of Prince Mangasutu Buthelezi. The latter is one of the good guys of South Africa, RIP. Yet the Zulu royal has been tarred over the decades by westerners—from the state department, to the New York Times to every petty diplomat blindly doing the business of democracy in that part of the world.
In their support for Saint Nelson and the revolutionary ANC—Acorn with machetes—the majority of libertarians (not all, mind you) have been as zealous as the neoconservatives. So sure, they’d dismiss my motives for writing this post. What do these plebs, every bit as ahistoric in their sympathies as the neoconservatives, know of Buthelezi?
According the WikiLibel, the grisly tradition of necklacing (see above), originated with the prince and his political party. Wrong. Necklacing was invented and perfected by the Saint’s syndicate and put to use by his wife.
If you’re not really famous—anointed by the intellectual monopoly in the Age of the Idiot—and WikiLibel doesn’t look too shabby if it lies about you; then they’ll sanction your maligning. Good luck in trying to remove the libel. Read Derb’s experience, one among many. Otherwise you, a non-aggressor, is aggressed against and it’s up to you to keep fending off attacks you did not provoke. How excellent
Some anarchists have no problems with libel, and even advance arguments for it. Free speech baby. Fist in the air; power to the pitchfork wielders.
I predicted libertarians would ooze all over this particular spontaneous bowel movement. I was right.
For the Atlantic slave trade, contemporary Americans and Britons have been expiating at every opportunity. But as historian Jeremy Black points out in The Slave Trade, Europeans also brought about the demise of this despicable practice in Africa.
Having made the obligatory pilgrimage to Ghana, Barack told Anderson Cooper—the “journalist” noted for introducing the country to the practice of tea bagging—that “slavery is a terrible part of the United States’ history and should be taught in a way that connects that past cruelty to current events, such as the genocide in Darfur.”
What a change that makes, doesn’t it?
Does our overlord seek to repetitively rub in the never-changing theme of the white man’s burden, the theme WASPs welcome like wimps? Or is he open to teaching Americans about the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert? Or across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. How about the vibrant, indigenous slave trade conducted well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa?
I suggest that Africa’s own Little Lord Fauntleroy read the words of a brother who’s seldom seen on the idiot’s lantern, and whose works are not distributed widely across the racial tyranny that is America: Keith B. Richburg.
Wrote Richburg in Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa:
“I feel for [Africa’s] suffering, I empathize with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestors got out, because, now, I am not one of them. In short, thank God that I am an American.”
Repeat after Richburg, Mr. president.
Update (July 14): Myron, I had objected to the use of “slavery” with reference to the West. Alistair addressed the so-called plight of women in the West. The Third World is a different matter (or is it what remains of the Second World that you decried?). There, statutes may declare slavery illegal, but tradition sees nothing wrong with forms of it. Guess what wins out?
OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH. Dialogue is good, dhimmitude is not. From a cursory look, Obama’s speech is festooned with feel-good fantasies, cliches, and plain errors, highlighted by the great Robert Spencer, who provides a point-by-point Guide to the Perplexed (via “Virgil”). Naturally, our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one. Terrorism, of course, is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam. However, Hussein omits any reference to “Islam’s bloody borders,” as the scholar Samuel Huntington put it. More from me later.
Over to Spencer, who dishes unvarnished truth.
Update I: ME HERE (see Spencer below) Where to begin? In his speech, Obama equated Islam with peace. That’s nothing new in the annals of American presidents. Remember Bush?
About the greatness of Cairo University. Is anyone of these Nobel Prize greatsa graduate?
Thomas Jefferson owned a Koran. So what? So do I.
I’m “an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama.” So the president is owning his name. After making hay about scribes (like this one) who used it in vain.
Grammar: “I’m aware that there’s still some who would question or even justify the events of 9/11.” So he’s not such a pedantic writer. Should be: “there are.”
“The Holy Quran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as — it is as if he has killed all mankind.” Not quite. The adage, bowdlerized from the Jews, is heavily qualified in the Koran. I covered it in “More Fatwa Fibs”.
THIS NEXT ITEM from Hussein, the “student of history,” as he refers to himself, is particularly priceless: “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.”
Memo to Hussein, “student of history”: The ideas of human rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. There is no such thing in Islam, despite what our Head Historian says about “the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles.” Does the latter failed parallelism (pairing a country and a religion) mean that Hussein acknowledges Islam is a political system? Or perhaps he is just bad at constructing corresponding syntactic constructions.
This is growing tiresome: the banality of the cliches Obama uses come straight out of … a Michelle Obama univesrity thesis.
LATER.
Update II (June 6) Krauthammer: Speech abstract, vapid, and self-absorbed. Pretty much. This is good. Watch:
SPENCER: I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning,
…whose Grand Sheikh, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, has given his approval — on Islamic grounds — to suicide bombing.
and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.
According to Islamic law, a Muslim may only extend this greeting — Peace be upon you — to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided,” i.e., Peace be upon the Muslims. Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naive non-Muslim Islamophilic Presidents offer the greeting to Muslims.
We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.
“Co-existence and cooperation”? When and where, exactly?
Note that Obama lists only ways in which the West has, in his view, mistreated the Islamic world. Not a word about the jihad doctrine, not a word about Islamic supremacism and the imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that existed long before the spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world, which Obama D’Souzaishly suggests is responsible for the hostility Muslims have for the West.
Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.
The idea that the jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, but has no evidence to back it up. The evidence that appears to back it up is highly tendentious — check out here how Dalia Mogahed (now an Obama adviser) and John Esposito cooked survey data from the Islamic world to increase the number of “moderates.”
And of course it was by no means only “the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians” that “has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.” It was also the Islamic texts and teachings that inspired those attacks that have fueled this perception. But Obama is not singular in declining to acknowledge the existence of such texts and teachings. In that he is following George W. Bush and every influential American politician, diplomat, and analyst. …
