Category Archives: The West

'A Christmas Story'

Set in the 1940s, the film ‘A Christmas Story’ depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. This was boyhood before ‘bang-bang you’re dead’ was banned; family life prior to ‘One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads’ and Christmas without the ACLU.

‘A Christmas Story’ is also film before Dakota Fanning (that prototypical, barf-making, American child actor). All the more reason to savor it.

Merry Christmas to all,
ILANA

The End of England

Britain, Political Correctness, Politics, Race, Racism, The West

What people flippantly call “political correctness” is often something far more sinister: state-initiated intimidation, violence, and coercion. How else would you describe the arrest of an English girl (called Codie), by British law enforcement, for asking to be paired in class with English—as opposed Urdu—speakers?
Following the girl’s reasonable request, the disgraceful teacher began “shouting and screaming, ‘It’s racist, you’re going to get done by the police’.” (Teachers, who score very low on college admission tests, are quality people in all state run, union-dominated establishments, aren’t they?) “Codie Stott’s family claim she was forced to spend three-and-a-half hours in a police cell after she was reported by her teachers.”

Codie “said she went outside to calm down where another teacher found her and, after speaking to her class teacher, put her in isolation for the rest of the day.”

Get this, instead of apologizing to the girl, in the hopes of avoiding litigation, “the school is now investigating exactly what happened before deciding what action—if any—to take against Codie.” As if the school has not done enough damage already.

The man behind this regime of gunpoint tolerance is “Headteacher Dr. Antony Edkins.” Under his totalitarianism, “a ten-year-old boy [had been] hauled before a court for allegedly calling an 11-year-old mixed race pupil a ‘Paki’ and ‘Bin Laden’ in a playground argument at a primary school in Irlam.”

Robert Whelan, of the classical liberal think tank CIVITAS (whom I had the pleasure of meeting in April this year), defended Codie. “It’s obviously common sense that pupils who don’t speak English cause problems for other pupils and for teachers. A lot of these arrests don’t result in prosecutions—they aim to frighten us into self-censorship until we watch everything we say.” (Whelan’s colleague, my good friend David Conway, comments here.)

You’d think this act would be hard to follow, but British Airways gave it a bash, suspending without pay a Coptic Christian for wearing a small cross to work, “even as Muslims and Sikhs are allowed to wear headscarves and turbans,” reminds Lawrence Auster.

Letter of the Week: Benedict the Brave

Islam, Religion, The West

During a trip to Germany, the Holy See touched on the topic of Jihad, in “an address about faith and reason” at Regensburg University. The Associate Press reports the following:

Citing historic Christian commentary on holy war and forced conversion, the pontiff quoted from a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologos.
The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war, the pope said. He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’
Clearly aware of the sensitivity of the issue, Benedict added, ‘I quote,’ twice before pronouncing the phrases on Islam and described them as ‘brusque,’ while neither explicitly agreeing with nor repudiating them.
‘The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable,’ Benedict said.
‘Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,’ the pope said, issuing an open invitation to dialogue among cultures.

So how do Muslims respond to western intellectuals who convolute about the values of dialogue and coexistence, while suggesting all may not be well with Islam? By rioting, of course, and calling for the heads of the offenders.

Letter of the Week is apropos, courtesy of Dennis O’Keeffe, PhD., Professor of Social Science at the University of Buckingham. Dennis, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a Liberty-Fund conference, is also Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs:

Dear Ilana,

Have you heard that his Holiness is in trouble? For citing a Byzantine Emperor’s rebuke of Mohammed for claiming Divine endorsement of his campaign of conversion by murder and the sword. Having taught hundreds of Muslims at high school and university, I have no trouble saying that almost all of them were nice people. As with most populations the majority are good. We are going around in circles, however, if we do not notice that the Koran justifies religious conquest. If Muslims are offended by this, let them get together and have the kind of Reformation which was the precondition in the Christian case for Christians of different persuasions to stop murdering each other. Or dumping the faith would do. I suspect that this has become a more difficult option now, because of the protection of nonsense which multiculturalism bestows on backward religions. Twenty years ago it was quite common for Muslim students to tell lecturers like myself that they do not believe in Islam. Would they even dare to say it now? Would the curators of the national museum of Mexico City dare to say what the Aztecs were really like?

—Dennis

‘Remembering the World Trade Center’

Islam, Terrorism, The West

Every year since September 11, 2001, New Yorker Chris Matthew Sciabarra (who was gracious enough to endorse my book) has written a tribute to the World Trade Center. In 2003 he penned this:

“We all knew that these buildings had come to symbolize so much of what made New York great. That’s one of the reasons they were targeted. It’s the kind of thing that led the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand to write in The Fountainhead, fifty years earlier, that New York’s skyline was ‘the will of man made visible. She wrote'”:

Is it beauty and genius people want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see this city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

Read Chris’ poignant yearly tributes here.