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!

Virtuous Vikings

Free Speech, Islam, Journalism

[W]hile clucking about the sanctity of free speech, countless commentators climbed into the Danes. The illustrators were called juvenile, obnoxious, Islamophobic, even immoral. They were accosted for doing nothing to advance enlightened argument; of acting in “terrifically bad taste”; and indulging in “gratuitous provocation, not worthy of publication,” to quote some of the politicians and pundits who trashed them…
What was the premise for dubbing mild satire immoral and unenlightened, and inadvertently maligning the innocent illustrators? Other than that the stuff offends Muslims, I see none. And to give offence is not always immoral. It is certainly not immoral to lampoon the connection between Muhammad, author of Islam, and the savagery and atavism that grip the Muslim world today…

Read the complete column, “Virtuous Vikings,” here. It leads today on WND’s Commentary page. As always, comments are welcome.

Hollywood's Constant Kvetching

Hollywood

Never again will I be seduced by The New York Review of Books’ professional rates. The Review is an ideological rag; it’s in the pamphleteering business, there to promote a left-liberal political perspective. It offers obtuse critiques of books and art, ever tethered to politics.
Not so the rigorous and generally apolitical Times Literary Supplement. Here’s an appropriately cynical sampler from the TLS. It’s Keith Miller’s review of The Constant Gardener, for which Rachel Weisz won an Oscar:

[I]f you, too, believe that Rachel Weisz can a carry a movie, then The Constant Gardener is for you…
A giant corporation has been testing its wares on desperate locals, drowning in want, and in many cases already dying of AIDS. Since [Weisz’s] idea of deep cover is tying a succession of brightly colored cloths around her ala Lady Hesther Stanhope (to the delight and gratitude of the natives), and loudly barracking corrupt officials at parties, it is not long before the forces of darkness realize she is on their trail, and violence inevitably follows…
There is little or no moral ambiguity… All the colonials are bad, except our hero and heroine. All the black Africans are good, except one token despot glimpsed at a party, and several anonymous machete-wielding thugs whose badness is made to seem conveniently elemental.

Hollywood’s Constant Kvetching

Hollywood

Never again will I be seduced by The New York Review of Books’ professional rates. The Review is an ideological rag; it’s in the pamphleteering business, there to promote a left-liberal political perspective. It offers obtuse critiques of books and art, ever tethered to politics.
Not so the rigorous and generally apolitical Times Literary Supplement. Here’s an appropriately cynical sampler from the TLS. It’s Keith Miller’s review of The Constant Gardener, for which Rachel Weisz won an Oscar:

[I]f you, too, believe that Rachel Weisz can a carry a movie, then The Constant Gardener is for you…
A giant corporation has been testing its wares on desperate locals, drowning in want, and in many cases already dying of AIDS. Since [Weisz’s] idea of deep cover is tying a succession of brightly colored cloths around her ala Lady Hesther Stanhope (to the delight and gratitude of the natives), and loudly barracking corrupt officials at parties, it is not long before the forces of darkness realize she is on their trail, and violence inevitably follows…
There is little or no moral ambiguity… All the colonials are bad, except our hero and heroine. All the black Africans are good, except one token despot glimpsed at a party, and several anonymous machete-wielding thugs whose badness is made to seem conveniently elemental.