The Other McCain

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

If All The Copts In Egypt Packed Up And Walked To Israel. . .

Posted on | March 20, 2011 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

. . .wouldn’t that be one mother of a scriptural allusion? I have no idea what I’d do in their moccasins, but it’s a Clash that would probably end in departure:

Category: Atlas Shrugs

‘Arab Savages’ and Other Things No One Can Write About in 21st-Century England

Posted on | March 20, 2011 | 16 Comments

No matter how savage any Arabs may be:

A Melanie Phillips blogpost on the [U.K.] Spectator website which referred to the “moral depravity” of Arab “savages” is being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission.
The online comment piece, headlined “Armchair barbarism”, focused on media coverage of the murder of five members of a Jewish family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar by Palestinian militants earlier this month.
“The moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media,” wrote Phillips. . . .
“To the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ — because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages — but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. . . .”

Let us mentally transport ourselves back to the civil rights era, and suppose that a columnist used a phrase like “redneck savages” or the “moral depravity of Mississippians” to condemn violence against blacks. We might imagine that some would complain that this language unfairly implicated all Southern whites in the crimes of a hateful few. But there would have been no possibility of official sanction against such a columnist, as is the case with this British “Press Complaints Commission” that is investigating Melanie Phillips.

What is this commission? It was established in 1991 to stave off Parliamentary complaints about the media and is tasked with exercising “non-statutory self-regulation” in the press. I’m insufficiently familiar with the PCC to know whether it routinely acts to enforce political correctness.

Go read the entirety of Phillips’s column and you will see that what she was actually writing about — the object of her wrath — was a blame-the-victims attitude in some quarters of the media, and their willingness to justify the slaughter of the Fogel family in the context of the presumably greater political victimhood of Palestinian Arabs.

One need take no side in the larger dispute over Israeli settlements to say that this act of lawless brutality against the Fogel family (killing the parents and three children, including an infant) was committed by “savages.” And that the savages in question were Arabs, there is no dispute. Furthermore, given the long history of terrorist bombings and other anti-Israeli violence committed by Palestinians, is “moral depravity” too strong a condemnation? Or rather, is it a condemnation so egregiously unfair as to merit a PCC investigation?

This appears to be nothing less than an attempt to intimidate Phillips and her publisher, and to make an example of Phillips: “Don’t speak too harshly against Arab terrorism, or we’ll report you, too!”

Whatever happened to writing a letter to the editor? Or why can’t Phillips’s critics be satisfied to condemn her on their own blogs? Why this hasty resort to the quasi-official authority of the PCC? A free press is too valuable to let it be squelched by such bullying tactics at these.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn notes that the complaint against Phillips was brought by Inayat Bunglawala, chairman of Muslims4UK, “a man who called the blind sheikh behind the first World Trade Center bombing ‘courageous’ and Osama bin Laden a ‘freedom fighter.'”

UPDATE II: Linked by Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom — thanks!

Category: Great Britain, Israel, Journalism

Celebrating 6 With 5

Posted on | March 20, 2011 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

What would be a good way to chase the 6 MegaHit post? How about a Rule 5 post! Fortunately, M. Joseph Sheppard has done a suitable roundup of refined taste and variety. Thank you very kindly, sir.

Category: Rule 5

From Mountains Jenghis Roamed About

Posted on | March 20, 2011 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

This week’s FMJRA is a throwback to a blogging life I distantly remember, trying to come up with a suitable FMJRA backronym for the week. The bad news is that the Wombat is still recovering. The good news is that I happen to have a few spare minutes and bandwidth to pinch-hit for the doughty fellow.
Stacy McCain remains one of the better teachers I’ve ever met, while simultaneously possessed of an aversion to learning anything toward which he’s not inclined, for example, invoking the back-end spell that extracts our last week’s efforts and does a preliminary HTML arrangement thereof.
So, yeah, I’ll do this, Stacy, but don’t think for a moment anyone is buying the whole ‘caveman’ routine. 😉

Japan is heavily in our thoughts and prayers

Read more

Category: FMJRA Award

About The Only Unused Obama Comparison Remaining: Elric

Posted on | March 20, 2011 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

American Power has a jaunty image of a smiling BHO getting his sports on. The post title mentions ‘a disinterested and semi-retired American superpower’.
Now that BHO has his Very Own War, though the notion of the Tomahawk missile as Stormbringer

Tomahawk, Stormbringer: isn't everything these days a political metaphor?

and BHO as Elric of Melniboné comes to mind.

Once we ruled all, but the sun has set on those days, and grows weary with the rising.


From Wikipedia:

Elric was the last emperor of the stagnating island civilization of Melniboné. Physically weak and frail, the albino Elric must take drugs — later retconned to mean special herbs — in order to maintain his health. In addition to herb lore, his character becomes an accomplished sorcerer and summoner, able to summon powerful, supernatural allies by dint of his royal Melnibonéan bloodline. Unlike most others of his race, Elric possesses something of a conscience; he sees the decadence of his culture, and worries about the rise of the Young Kingdoms, populated by humans (as Melniboneans do not consider themselves such) and the threat they pose to his empire. Because of his introspective self-loathing of Melnibonéan traditions, his subjects find him odd and unfathomable, and his cousin Yyrkoon (next in the line of succession, as Elric has no heirs) interprets his behavior as weakness and plots Elric’s death.

Fortunately for us, the author seemed to be alluding to Britain, and the Eternal Champion never seems to have been female.
So much for silly literary comparisons.
Images mooched from The Platinum Warlock.

Category: Barack Obama, Uncategorized

‘Any Similarity Is Coincidence’

Posted on | March 20, 2011 | 7 Comments

A suspicious similarity between Obama’s speech announcing U.S. strikes against Libya and George W. Bush’s speech announcing the Afghanistan invasion:

“The senior White House official said ‘any similarity is coincidence,’ adding that neither Obama nor his speechwriters reviewed Bush’s remarks from Oct. 7, 2001.”

I’m thinking “senior White House official” must be a pretty cool gig. You just lie through your teeth and reporters publish whatever you say.

Category: Barack Obama, Libya

If Obama’s Lost Louis Farrakhan …

Posted on | March 20, 2011 | 14 Comments

“I warn my brother do you let these wicked demons move you in a direction that will absolutely ruin your future with your people in Africa and throughout the world. . . . You can’t order [Qaddafi] to step down and get out. Who the hell do you think you are?”
— Louis Farrakhan, Friday, March 18, WVON-AM

Category: Barack Obama, Libya

OPERATION ODYSSEY DAWN: U.S. Launches Attacks on Targets in Libya

Posted on | March 19, 2011 | 48 Comments

The first Tomahawk cruise missiles hit about 3 p.m. ET today:

Military strikes by the U.S. and its allies against targets in Libya Saturday have “severely disabled” Libyan leader’s Muammar al-Qaddafi’s air defenses, a U.S. official confirms to Fox News. . . .
The Pentagon says 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles have been launched from U.S. and British ships in the Mediterranean, hitting more than 20 Libyan targets along the Mediterranean coastline.

Criticism of Obama from neocon racist right-wingers Michael Moore:

Moore, a frequent critic of President Bush for launching the Iraq War, unleashed a string on tweets comparing the U.S. military’s mission in Libya to Iraq and Afghanistan, using a mantra coined by Charlie Sheen:

It’s only cause we’re defending the Libyan people from a tyrant! That’s why we bombed the Saudis last wk! Hahaha. Pentagon=comedy

And we always follow the French’s lead! Next thing you know, we’ll have free health care & free college! Yay war!

We’ve had a “no-fly zone” over Afghanistan for over 9 yrs. How’s that going? #WINNING !

Khadaffy must’ve planned 9/11! #excuses

Khadaffy must’ve had WMD! #excusesthatwork

Y’know, I had been skeptical of U.S. involvement in Libya, but if Michael Moore is against it . . . well, this might be a Change We Can Believe In.

More at Memeorandum, with blog commentary from Weasel Zippers, Protein Wisdom,  Left Coast Rebel, Ann Althouse, Legal Insurrection, Pundit & Pundette, American Power, Just One Minute and The Lonely Conservative.

UPDATE: Instapundit:

Hey, it’s exactly 8 years to the day since Bush started bombing Iraq! If you voted for change, this is the change you voted for.

Meanwhile, The Rhetorican:

What’s missing? The ubiquitous sense of outrage in every nook and cranny of Leftie-dom that we couldn’t stop hearing back in 2003, before troops even started packing for Iraq.

True: The outrage is not “ubiquitous,” but what are lefties like Michael Moore going to do? They got nowhere to go. They backed the most left-wing nominee in the Democratic Party’s history — yes, Obama is further left than McGovern or Dukakis — and actually managed to get him elected. And the result is . . . ??

We’re still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guantanamo is still in business. Bradley Manning is stripped naked in solitary confinement. Now, another military adventure. You’d think that people who’d been so blatantly screwed over, bamboozled, sold out, ripped off and stabbed in the back would eventually wise up.

But then again: They’re liberals. Read more

Category: Barack Obama, Libya, Michael Moore, Military
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