The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Muslim Student Association Doesn’t Get Credit for Soccer League Sponsorship

Posted on | May 5, 2013 | 7 Comments

Kind of an interesting omission, don’t you think?

Coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing has ignored admitted bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s connection to his college’s Muslim Student Association, a group that has close relations with both the Muslim Brotherhood and a local imam friendly with an al-Qaida operative.
Although a student leader and the mainstream media have downplayed Tsarnaev’s ties to the the group, Tsarnaev associated frequently with the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.
The Washington Post on April 27 reported that Tsarnaev, who has admitted his role in the Marathon terrorist bombing to police, played intramural soccer with MSA members, contradicting earlier reports that the U. Mass-Dartmouth student spurned an invitation to join the controversial Muslim Brotherhood-linked student organization.
“For a time, Jahar played on an intramural soccer team composed of students involved with the campus Muslim Student Association,” explained the Post’s Marc Fisher, a fact that has since been missing from coverage.
In fact, Tsarnaev played soccer with the Muslim Student Association nearly every week, according to MSA Secretary Bassel Nasri in an interview with George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer on April 19, 2013. Nasri simply neglected to say they were MSA games. Although Stephanopoulos described Nasri as “a soccer buddy” of Tsarnaev, neither he nor Sawyer mentioned that they were co-religionists and that the soccer games were organized by the Muslim Student Association.
Nasri was later interviewed by CNN and again didn’t mention that he had known Tsarnaev through the Muslim Student Association’s weekly soccer games.

So Dzhokhar was (a) involved with the Muslim Student Association, and (b) participated in a terrorist attack, but when (c) an officer of the MSA is interviewed on national TV, then (d) reporters call the MSA officer “a soccer buddy,” because (e) obviously soccer was more important than Islam to the terrorist bomber.

Certainly, there must lots of Lutheran and Methodist soccer leagues out there, fomenting dangerous religious extremism . . .

(Hat-tip: Leslie Eastman, College Insurrection.)

 


Category: Islam, Media Bias, Terrorism

You Disagree With @Instapundit At Your Peril, But I’m Going With Nicolaitanism Over Oikophobia

Posted on | May 5, 2013 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Pondering why we can’t talk about guns, Insty quotes Barry Snell

. . .we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. . .

and concludes:

As with most lefty causes, the key driver is a craving for moral superiority, usually driven by oikophobia.

Now, I’ve only been pondering modern political evil for a few years, but I’ll opt for Nicolaitanism as an explanation:

Nico-, combinatory form of n?k?, “victory” in Greek, and laos means people, or more specifically, the laity; hence, the word may be taken to mean “lay conquerors” or “conquerors of the lay people”. However, “Nicolaitan” is the name ostensibly given to followers of the heretic Nicolas —the name itself meaning “victorious over people,” or “victory of the people,” which he would have been given at birth.

An informal definition of Nicolaitanism could be: “Bossy little power-monger”. That is, somebody who’s life’s quest is to acquire and exert as much authority over others as possible. Impediments to amassing power, such as freedom of speech and the right self-defense, must be obliterated.

The exact meaning of Nicolaitanism in the Revelation isn’t known. But it’s always been a mind-blower that Christianity, which was born in an atmosphere of heavy Roman/Pharisaic oppression, replicates that oppressiveness in so many instances.

So it’s not clear to what degree our modern, elite, liberal, lefty, Socialist, Postmodern, Politically Correct, Godless, Commie, blue state, critical theorist, Democrat, Alinskyite, union, baby boomer, polysexual, abortion-on-demand, #Occupy-loving, group-thinking, anti-Enlightenment, crypto-Marxist overlords conform to the original Nicolaitan heresy. Probably not much at all.

Nevertheless, I submit that recreational overlording has more explanatory power than a simple fear-based label.

Category: Instapundit

A Festive Occasion!

Posted on | May 5, 2013 | 35 Comments

National Offend a Feminist Week begins tomorrow and ends (as per tradition) on Mother’s Day, but why not start the party early, eh?

UPDATE: Thinking back to when it all began in 2009, I got misty-eyed with nostalgia:

Thank you, Daley Gator!

UPDATE II: Loyal reader Jeff in Walla Walla reminds us of another festive holiday occasion.

 

Category: Feminism, National Offend a Feminist Week

The Highly Ironic Syrian End-Game?

Posted on | May 5, 2013 | 17 Comments

When last we examined the mess in Syria, President Obama was embarrassed that the Assad regime had crossed his “red line” by reportedly using chemical weapons against the rebels (who are, by the way, a dangerous mob of Islamic extremists). And so now the ironic denouement, in headlines via  Memeorandum:

 

Damascus hit ‘by Israeli strikes’
— BBC

Israel Targeted Iranian Missiles in Syria Attack
— New York Times

Israel launches second airstrike in Syria,
targeting weapons shipment
— Washington Post

Israeli warplanes continue to pound Damascus
— Associated Press

So Obama, who has never been credibly accused of doing Israel any special favors, receives an unexpected gift: Bibi Netanyahu gets fed up with living next door to a madhouse, and intervenes to knock the legs from under the Assad regime. And then there’s this:

Assad “to declare war” on Israel
following fresh airstrikes
Reports suggest that Syria’s embattled dictator,
Bashar al-Assad, is shortly set to declare war
on Israel after interventions against the regime

That’s basically a suicide note from Assad. Israel has the most powerful military in the region — the IDF has nuclear weapons, remember — and a war between Syria and Israel can only end one way.

Does the expression “Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin” ring a bell?

And what will follow the destruction of Assad? Will we see Israel occupy part of Syria? Will Israel be content to let al-Qaeda-allied jihadists take over in Damascus? Will Syria descend into the sort of “failed state” anarchy we’ve seen in Lebanon?

These are just questions, and I don’t pretend to have the answers. But gee, this “Arab Spring” is working out just peachy, isn’t it?

 

 


Category: Israel, Syria

A Zinn Tidbit From “Dupes” By Kengor

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

Burkely Herman is turning into a fun interlocutor on twitter since RSM delivered him a jolly spanking earlier today. There has been some feedback from BH. I’d like to chip in a paragraph from Paul Kengor’s “Dupes”

. . .Dr. Howard Zinn, a Boston University Professor. Zinn is an interesting case. He had been a World War II bombardier, a patriot, who went on to attend Columbia University for graduate school on the GI Bill, where he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate. With Columbia’s training, Zinn was primed for another kind of service. His work found a captive audience in POW camps in Hanoi, where the Vietcong so admired his arguments that it provided his material to detained airmen (that is, downed bombardiers). Specifically, the Vietcong stocked the prison library with Zinn’s book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. He eventually became a runaway bestselling historian, with his leftist work A People’s History of the United States a staple for many high-school history teachers and devoured by liberal college students. (p. 311)

Props to Zinn’s capitalism. I hope he enjoyed all of the money.
One wonders how much time Zinn spent at Columbia with the godless Commies. . .

Category: Progressivism

Why I’m Not on the Harvard Faculty

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 73 Comments

Besides the fact that all I’ve got is a bachelor’s degree from a third-tier state university, there’s also the problem that I don’t think it’s necessary to apologize for saying bad things about dead bisexual British economists, which is now apparently taboo. You can badmouth dead people or defame the British or libel an economist unless any of them happen to be bisexual, in which case, they are beyond reproach.

A friend on Twitter informs me that John Maynard Keynes was an anti-Semite who was also head of the British Eugenics Society, which under ordinary liberal custom would be enough to render someone historically radioactive. However it seems the new rule is that being gay — or, as was apparently the case with Keynes, being nominally bisexual — is sufficient to silence all criticism.

Niall Ferguson says, in effect, “John Maynard Keynes was a bad economist who was wrong about everything and also, he was gay, which might be relevant to the problem.” OUTRAGE!

Well, here you go: Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer and a cannibal, and also, he was gay, which might be relevant to the problem.

Good-bye, Harvard faculty appointment!

UPDATE: My larger point — and if Ken at Popehat didn’t see this, no one else can be blamed for missing it — is to wonder why this particular molehill has become a peak in the Himalayas. The Ferguson/Keynes controversy was the top thread at Memeorandum, as if it were the most important thing that happened Saturday.

Does this make any sense? Why was this academic controversy magnified out of all proportion? Is necrohomophobia — fear of dead homosexuals — really such a serious problem in America? One of the commenters takes this jab at me:

Robert Stacy McCain is a simple-minded, hateful person, and also, he wears stupid hats, which might be relevant to the problem.

Simple-minded and hateful — and why? Because I did not rush to join the online lynch-mob of ritual denunciation?

It’s this aspect, redolent of the Moscow Show Trials, that alarms me. Also, how dare you call my hat stupid, you hat-hater!

These are the jokes, people. Lighten the hell up.

UPDATE II: Speaking of jokes, Andrew Sullivan has nominated me for the “Malkin Award.” This is my second such honor, the first having occurred in the aftermath of the 2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza, when I outlined my “Mideast Peace plan” as the hypothetical first gentile Prime Minister of Israel. These damned hypotheticals are always getting me in trouble.

 

Category: Economics, Gays, Intellectuals

What Part of ‘Fuck You, Commie Scum’ Is So Hard for @BurkelyH to Understand?

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 65 Comments

Burkely Hermann, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Class of 2016

Burkely Hermann describes himself:

#Socialist, citizen of the world and college student who fights for global justice and works to challenge the powers that be.

Well, who is Burkely Hermann and why should anyone care? He popped up on Twitter this morning to deny an obvious truth:

Michelle Malkin is never going to bother responding to an insignificant troll like Burkely Hermann, a freshman at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, but it’s Saturday afternoon and what better to do today than to make an example of this ignorant Occupy-loving scumbag?

For some unknown reason which he did not bother to explain, Hermann went on a sort of Twitter rampage of pro-Howard Zinn messages, re-Tweeting three-year-old messages including these from Michael Moore and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal:

As to Howard Zinn’s role in the Communist Party (CPUSA), I wrote about this extensively when Zinn’s FBI file was released in 2010:

Read either or both of those articles, and then read the 400-page FBI file itself, and make up your own mind. No honest and intelligent person could disagree with my conclusion:

The FBI files demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Zinn — author of A People’s History of the United States, widely used as a textbook or supplement in many of our nation’s high schools and universities — was a card-carrying Communist at a time when the Soviet Union was America’s most dreaded enemy.

Burkely Hermann is neither honest nor intelligent, however, and yet supposes himself both intellectually and morally superior to anyone who calls attention to the obvious facts about Zinn.

This is how it always is with leftist punks: They imagine that their ideology confers on them a special insight, providing them with access to esoteric truths which no one outside the Cult of the Enlightened can understand, so that if you disagree with them, the very fact of your disagreement is proof (to them) that you are “ignorant,” etc.

Facts and logic that contradict their arguments are dismissed as somehow tainted because they don’t come from reliable (i.e., leftist) sources, whereas any specimen of counter-factual lunacy is acceptable to them, so long as it supports their anti-social worldview. There is therefore no point in trying to reason with such fools.

Case in point: After I responded to Hermann’s deliberate trolling, he Tweeted to one of his allies a link to an article in The Progressive about Zinn’s FBI file, as though the article somehow disproved Zinn’s CPUSA affiliation, which it certainly does not.

What that article does is to portray the FBI (and its director, J. Edgar Hoover) as unreliable, paranoid extremists who were persecuting Zinn because he “was active in protesting and speaking out at that time,” as Zinn’s daughter is quoted as saying — but this does nothing at all to contradict the evidence against Zinn. It may be true that (a) Hoover was paranoid, (b) FBI agents were sloppy, and (c) Zinn was an idealist, without in any way discrediting the testimony from multiple sources that (d) Zinn was an active member of the CPUSA.

This was a problem with the pro-Communist Left going back to the time of John Reed: No matter what evidence you offered about the evil folly of Bolshevism, they would always find some way to deflect or deny or ignore it. And this problem persists into the 21st century — here with the punk Burkely Hermann, who wasn’t even born when the Soviet Union collapsed under the massive weight of Marxist lies — because American educators and intellectuals will not teach the truth about the Cold War.

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have documented the ways in which historians have obscured the reality of how the CPUSA abetted Soviet espionage during the Cold War, and I can damned well guarantee that Burkely Hermann knows nothing about that book.

There are vast libraries of books that leftists refuse to read, because their worldviews are so fragile that they cannot stand contact with reality. If you ever encounter a leftist who has read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed or the Peter Collier/David Horowitz classic, Destructive Generation, please let me know, because I’ve never met one such person in the past 15 years.

Notice how conservatives instantly repudiated David Cole (a.k.a., “David Stein”) once his past as a Holocaust denier was exposed, yet the Left dissembles and accepts any flimsy excuse for Howard Zinn’s embrace of the maniacal mass-murderer Josef Stalin. Notice also Burkely Hermann’s “fuck the FBI” response:

Scratch an Occupy/Anonymous activist and a sociopathic cop-hater bleeds — which is one reason I pay attention to trolls like this.

Back in 2009, one such troll decided to get up in my face and I kept an eye on him for the next three years until one day, he melted down in public, threatened an FBI agent and got himself arrested. Can’t say I never tried to warn him, but these fools never listen.

 

 

UPDATE: Re-reading my July 2010 post about Zinn’s FBI file, I see nothing I’d change except a few typos. What I think may confuse some younger readers (and perhaps Hermann is confused by this) is how the FBI or anyone else could determine what sufficed as evidence of CPUSA membership at a time when the CPUSA was effectively outlawed and its members were intensely secretive.

In Zinn’s case, there was at least one CPUSA informant who reported having attended lectures on Marxist-Leninist doctrine at the Party’s Brooklyn headquarters. This unnamed informant, interestingly enough, named George Kirschner as a Brooklyn CPUSA official at that time — evidently the same George Kirschner who later co-authored one of Zinn’s projects. But beyond that kind of direct evidence (including the presence of Zinn’s name on a 1947 CPUSA mailing list), there were multiple incidences of Zinn’s involvement in Communist “front groups.”

You really have to study the history of that era to understand the significance of the fact (to cite just one example) that Zinn served as a delegate from a Communist-infiltrated group (American Veterans Committee) to the national convention of a group blacklisted by the Attorney General in 1947 (Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee). Let anyone ask some of the surviving anti-Communists of the 1950s and ’60s — especially M. Stanton Evans — how conclusive that evidence was, in terms of Zinn’s standing with the CPUSA. And when you fast-forward two decades from there to the late 1960s to find Zinn teaching a seminar entitled “Marxism and Contemporary Problems,” sponsored by an organization founded by Herb Aptheker . . .

Well, for crying out loud, if you think further proof than that is required, you probably wouldn’t believe Zinn was a Commie even if his membership file turned up in the KGB archives in Moscow.

 

Category: #Occupy, History, Progressivism

Obama Administration’s Benghazi Lies Exposed as State Department Cover-Up

Posted on | May 4, 2013 | 20 Comments

Flaming skull alert at Ace of Spades for the release of e-mails confirming that (a) officials knew from the outset that the attack on the consulate in Libya was the work of terrorists, but (b) this information was suppressed for political purposes:

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to [CIA] warnings.”

So, it was CIA vs. C.Y.A. at the State Department which, quite frankly, has been infiltrated by Edward Said-influenced Arab specialists to such an extent that it was practically a Muslim Brotherhood outpost even before the Obama administration took over.

Seriously, you can ask Bush administration people about this: Middle Eastern scholarship within academia is so dominated by anti-Western views that, insofar as anyone has the credentials to qualify as a specialist in the field — i.e., to get hired into and promoted within the bureaucracy — they’re certain to have been saturated in ideas about “Western imperialism” and the legitimacy of Arab/Islamic grievances. And while this has also been a problem at the CIA and the Pentagon, the State Department is absolutely chock-full of such people in staff positions, so that even with hawkish neocons in the political appointee roles during the Bush years, the pro-Arab/pro-Muslim culture at Foggy Bottom never really changed.

I feel the need to point this out now because some of my well-meaning conservative friends, who (quite correctly) complain about the dubious influences within the Obama administration, often neglect to discuss the larger problem, which pre-dates Obama. However, there is good reason to think it is more of a problem now:

In 1998 Obama attended a speech by [Edward] Said, in which the scholar called for a nonviolent campaign “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.” In a well-publicized photo, Obama and Said can be seen talking over dinner at this pro-Arab event.
According to the Los Angeles Times, in the early 1980s Obama had been one of Said’s students in an undergraduate English class at Columbia University.

None of this is necessarily related to the Benghazi cover-up — I don’t mean to feed anyone’s conspiratorial paranoia — but it does highlight the nature of the larger problem, what Jeanne Kirkpatrick rightly called the “Blame America First” mentality.

There is a sort of  perverse narcissism involved in this worldview: Encountering people who hate us, liberals think, “It’s about us.”

This error was what crippled liberalism during the Cold War. If the Soviet Union wanted to destroy America, liberals imagined, this must be because of something wrong with America, rather than something wrong with the Soviet Union. So liberals wanted to change American foreign policy — détente! — in a more pro-Soviet direction, accepting the Leninist critique of “Western imperialism” as essentially accurate, so that you had Jimmy Carter claiming (and evidently believing) that a U.S. commitment to “human rights” would somehow repair the damage to American international prestige.

Except it wasn’t about us. It was about them. Read more

Category: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Intellectuals, Islam, Libya, Terrorism
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin