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WRONG SIDE WINNING
Former peacenik Sarah Baxter notices how twisted is today’s peace movement:
Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.”
For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”
As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic ... On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say.
Got that right. One of the few to speak up is Pamela Bone, whose latest piece appears in The Australian:
My parents were atheists, but whenever a school form required an answer about our religious denomination, my mother would tick “Presbyterian”, because “that’s what you’re supposed to be”.
Terrorist! I kid, I kid. Go read the whole thing.
(Via Adrian the Cabbie)
Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.
And how is this different to Ban the Bomb useful idiots marching for unilateral nuclear disarmament? All that’s changed is the totalitarian ideology for whose unimpeded victory they are marching. Tools.
Posted by Jim Geones on 2006 08 16 at 04:20 AM • permalinkAnyone willing to bet the same lefty op ed writers who thought the anti nukes crowd were lovely also adore the Hezbllocks mob?
Stupidity, the universes one unchangable constant….
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2006 08 16 at 04:21 AM • permalinkI found Pamela Bone’s article a little confusing; what was she trying to say? Unless there’s an editing error, this quote, for example, makes no sense:
Unbelievers are those who declare, “God is the Messiah, the son of Mary,” says the Koran. “Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people.”
Was she attempting to bring “all religion” down to the same level as Islam, either due to PC concerns or lack of theological knowledge? ... or was she saying that ALL religion is evil (“folly” is the euphemism she uses)?
No, Narnian1, I believe she is referencing that quote to indicate that, for Muslims, those for whom Jesus is the Son of God (or God incarnate) are to be shunned as unbelievers, and as an example of a belief system that requires one to accept certain tenets without question.
If you read the rest of the paragraph her intent becomes clear. Choose what belief system you will, but respect the choice of others.
Oh, and I disagree with your point in #5—convince me.
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 08 16 at 04:47 AM • permalinkSpeaking of frauds:
“Reuters has been caught red-handed in an astonishing variety of journalistic frauds in the photo coverage of the war in Lebanon.”
http://www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/
‘The old toy in the rubble trick,’ as Maxwell Smart might say. But there’s worse, much worse.
Unless there’s an editing error, this quote, for example, makes no sense:
She’s quoting the Koran - which quite clearly labels Christians as wicked people that Muslims should not make friends with.
As can be seen <a href=“http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/5/index.htm#53”>
EDIT: Oops, Mentalfloss beat me to it.
Posted by Quentin George on 2006 08 16 at 05:36 AM • permalinkPamela rambles a bit, but it was still a good article.
Posted by Daniel San on 2006 08 16 at 06:08 AM • permalink#8 Ushie,
The small children are used to prevent police intervention, this usually works( but not always…mwahahaha).Posted by Daniel San on 2006 08 16 at 06:11 AM • permalinkIt is very telling that some of these people cannot equate their experience in past protests to what is happening now. They did all they could to make today what it is; being surprised is a confession that they never knew what they were doing. This happens to the unprincipled all the time, though I’m sure they think they’ve been acting on principle. They have acted on certain principles, of course, just not what they thought they were.
P.S. I’m talking about protesters like Sarah Baxter, who can’t understand what’s happened. There are those protesters who understand perfectly well what principles they represent.
Pamela Bone is wrong.
Religion isn’t the problem. There are no Buddhists hacking peoples heads off. Hell even the Christians haven’t burned anyone alive in yonks. The Jews? They just want to be left alone already.
The problem is one particular religion, which she goes to great length to avoid singling out. Therein lies the problem.
In WWII, the Allies weren’t at “war with tanks” or “war on planes” or “war on submarines”. No. They were at War with Germans and War with Japanese. Who they defeated.
In 2006, we keep hearing that we are at “War on Terror”. Rubbish. We are at war on Islamic Fascism - or at least we should be, but I’m not sure many people have noticed as nobody seems to admit it. When some people mention it, they are forced to retract it.
When planes are being hijacked and buses blown up, vague discussions about “religion” in general are about as useful as the IDF sitting around discussing the politics and philosophy of incoming Katyusha missiles.
Posted by Nikki 2000 on 2006 08 16 at 06:43 AM • permalinkSaltydog writes:
They did all they could to make today what it is; being surprised is a confession that they never knew what they were doing.
Nail. On. The. Head.
After decades of cheerleading gangsters masquerading as ‘liberation movements,’ treating charlatans like Arafat as ‘statesmen,’ and fawning over jailers and presidents-for-life like Castro, it’s a bit late in the game for terminally naive adolescents like Baxter to be surprised at all the mayhem they helped let loose on the rest of us.
Worse, they don’t see the connection between their delusions about how this world works and what’s going on all around them. They still think they were right about things like the nuclear freeze, the Ortega brothers and subsidizing third world victimology and dependence.
They think George Bush started it all.
Perhaps the “sisterhood” is better termed the “sell out sisterhood”. They have sold out every principle they have claimed to support on the altar of Anti-Americanism.
Posted by Lefty Wobbling Right on 2006 08 16 at 09:39 AM • permalinkAs a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s…
Hmmm. Peace movement. 1980’s. Lessee, Soviets in Afghanistan, Iran/Iraq War, Sandanistas. Nope, peace movement not against any of those.
Falklands, Grenada, Panama, Reagan standing up to Communism in a variety of ways. OK, now we’re getting somewhere. Those need to be protested. And oh by the way, where are the “nuclear freeze” folks now that Iran and the Norks are getting them? Boy this ditz Baxter and her sistas have a lot to answer for. The realization now that Leftism didn’t get it done for her cause is some cause for hope I suppose.
Posted by Vanguard of the Commentariat on 2006 08 16 at 09:45 AM • permalinkDon’t worry. I’m sure that places like New Zealand will ban the entry of any Indian, pakistani or Iranian ships until they announce that they bear no nuclear weapons, as they did to the US Navy, right? And the City council of San Francisco will pass a resolution condemning nuclear proliferation, right? (as if anyone cared what the City Council of San Francisco thought about the subject).
And oh by the way, where are the “nuclear freeze” folks now that Iran and the Norks are getting them?
As I recall, they’re firmly in favor of it. One of their official spokesthings said as much.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2006 08 16 at 10:37 AM • permalink#13 It is very telling that some of these people cannot equate their experience in past protests to what is happening now. They did all they could to make today what it is; being surprised is a confession that they never knew what they were doing.
Exactly so.
Last week, a Muslim mother was willing to carry her six month old baby on a plane with a bottle of formula containing the ingredients for a bomb. And I’m supposed to be impressed by mothers who take their babies in strollers to “peace” marches with Hezbollah supporters?
For as long as there has been a right and a left, the “extreme right” has always been made up of extreme leftists.
It’s simply how the left gets over the cognitive dissonance of always seeing their policies fail all the time, often resulting in death tolls even wars can’t match. Adolf Hitler, in the 1920s, was considered a leftist; the National Socialist party he led was a highlight of civilization’s progress in the social sciences, gaining the loyalty of both industrialists like Henry Ford and celebrities like Charles Lindbergh.
Today, you will never see a single grade-school history book that doesn’t assert that Hitler was never a member of the left, but rather a evil right winger. The best you will see is the ones that create an extra definition, “reactionary,” to distinguish between right-wingers who are pure evil and right-wingers who are merely stupid and insane.
Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot… whenever leftist leaders implement leftist policies that lead to the deaths of millions, they are immediately rebranded right-wingers, and history re-written to reflect this.
Castro is only still a leftist because the horrors of his regime are being covered up, still. Once the mass graves filled with the remains of the victims of his communal farming and health care systems are unearthed, he will be re-branded a right winger too, by the very same people who today are hailing him as the last true leftist revolutionary.
Posted by Tatterdemalian on 2006 08 16 at 11:09 AM • permalink#24 Tatterdemalian,
I completely agree with you. For all of my adult life, I’ve heard the excesses of Communist regimes brushed off by saying, “Well, that wasn’t true communism in Russia, (China, East Germany, Cambodia, North Korea…)” as if it would be worthwhile trying to give true communism another go.
I retort, “Well, you know Hitlerism wasn’t true fascism!”
The smarter Lefties understand the joke.
Oh, I also wanted to commend Sarah Baxter on her Times (UK) piece. I actually ran around with some of the “straight” womyn that did things like Greenham when I was a student in London in those days. (Speaking from experience, I tell the young ones who complain that no one likes the US, ‘twas ever thus.)
I’ve been looking for five years for all the Leftie gays and feminists and Jews and Tranzi Human Rights-types I thought would rally ‘round in this war against Islamo-Fascism and they are few and far between.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a good piece on how he could conceivably support some terrorists but not others. I don’t agree with everything he says but he shows that he is thinking about such stuff.
In hindsight Reagan’s hardline negotiating stance helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1980s the Berlin Wall was down and the velvet revolutions in eastern Europe were under way.
It wasn’t just hindsight. For President Reagan and members of the right, it was foresight. They knew that the only way to eliminate the danger of nuclear war was to eliminate Communism. And they succeeded brilliantly. Not only did the left not help one iota in defeating the Communist threat and removing the danger of mutual nuclear destruction, they opposed all efforts vociferously. And they’ve gotten away with it.
But not this time. The right is once against waging a war against an unimagingly dangerous facist mindset, with the left opposing its efforts every step of the way. This time if the left doesn’t run with us or step out of the way, we run over them.
Posted by wronwright on 2006 08 16 at 12:59 PM • permalinkThey did all they could to make today what it is; being surprised is a confession that they never knew what they were doing.
Ah but, Salty, you misunderstand. The well-meaning Sarahs of the world did not intend that this should happen. You can’t hold them responsible for that which was not intended.
I, too, take strong exception to the Pamela Bone piece. She seems to suggest that the answer to Islamofascism lies in a world-wide embrace of atheism. Although she states as the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved, it is no more moral to believe than not to believe , the whole tone of her essay suggests that it is, in fact, non-believers who occupy the moral high ground. Frankly, I find her ridicule of faith quite offensive.
Pamela finally gets it right in the last paragraph:
Blame the religious ideology that persuades young men that by strapping explosives to their bodies and killing as many infidels as possible, they are assured of glory in paradise, surrounded by dark-eyed virgins. That’s where the wickedness lies.
But, for whatever reason—fear, prejudice, channeling John Lennon, she finds it necessary to indict all religious ideology, all beliefs. If she really intends to lump my Christian beliefs (predicated on an ordinary man rising from the dead—why, how absurd) with those of the Islamofascist thereby condeming them all, I’m forced to say to Pamela, screw you, Ms. Bone.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 08 16 at 01:37 PM • permalink#29: I disagree with your interpretation of the article.
She says that religion should not be a cover for teaching and behaviour unacceptable to our society.
This axiomatically indicts Islamic extremism.
Except for an insignificant fringe, Christianity does stand up to scrutiny.
As for me, I’m a great fan of Christianity because it tolerates athiests.
And the City council of San Francisco will pass a resolution condemning nuclear proliferation, right? (as if anyone cared what the City Council of San Francisco thought about the subject).
I wonder if anybody in the Operations shack in Tehran has pointed out to Amedinajad that he can push a lot of walls over on a lot of homosexuals if he holds his August 22nd surprise in San Francisco?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 08 16 at 08:23 PM • permalinkTim quotes Pamela Bone:
“My parents were atheists, but whenever a school form required an answer about our religious denomination, my mother would tick “Presbyterian”, because “that’s what you’re supposed to be”.”When Raymond Dart, discoverer of Australopithecus africanus, applied shortly after World War I to become Professor of Anatomy at the newly founded South African medical school at the University of Witwatersrand, he put freethinker on the application as his religion. His professor commented that it was a very Calvinist country there, and that this might prevent him from getting the job. Why don’t you just say that you are a Protestant, he suggested, and nobody will think to ask you what it is you are protesting against.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2006 08 16 at 09:35 PM • permalinkNewspapers would be doing the world a favour if, as the “thought for the day”, instead of printing the nice passages out of the holy books, they printed the most absurd and abhorrent texts, so that they can be seen as the dangerous nonsense they are.
That’s called the editorial page.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 08 17 at 08:49 PM • permalink
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From reports that I have read of the Greenham protesters it is not a bit surprisings to find that many are marching alongside Muslim extremists. And using intermperate lanugauge as well.