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Life looks different when unfiltered by the Obama-luvin’ liberal media

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
February 21, 2013 •Leave a Comment
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Naturally we see this — what I call enhanced intellect — all day long on conservatives sites, but I also see this other phenomenon amazingly often: when real people write their unfiltered comments about news articles on all those non-political web sites like Weather.com. Suddenly, you see a fresh and different viewpoint which, well, the Obamatons and their news media division would haughtily disapprove of, and work hard to obliterate, obfuscate, fail to report, and so on.

Rather than obliquely mocking and sneering at conservatives and Republicans, as is ubiquitous across all the non-Fox News Channel media on every issue social and economic, we see quite the opposite: people mocking the ridiculous sun spotspostures of liberal, leftists, and all the assorted tribes of the progressive left.

Here’s an example from this morning. This is from a news article about sun spots, which, you’ll remember, might explain some of that “man-made global warming” — sorry, “climate change” — which we hear and see the media shrieking about all day long, every day (but which is actually a climactic change which has been ongoing since approximately the year 4,500,000,000 BC). These are actual comments, in the order I found them, which I’ve simply copied and posted — I only took out the names and photos and superfluous information. And there are many, many more such comments.

(Bullet points indicate a unique commenter or reply to a previous comment)

  • This shows the dire straights that our planet is in , the global warming , check that….global climate change (new and improved lingo) has spread so far that it is now affecting the sun. Someone please help us , Al Gore to the rescue…
  • Sound Garden track comes to mind…
  • I doubt the sun can influence the climate…..right Al Gore?
    • They would have to call it something like a “solar system” if the Sun had any influence on climate.
  • It’s almost worth it to wish that it would create a Carrington type event.Just think with no electricity, power grids or electronics all the useless leeches on the planet would die off.
    • Even useless leeches like pacemaker dependents and premature babies?
    • Jillane Kent lol yes
    • egardless of J.K.s pithy statement, I agree with Zac. Humans as a species are way overdue for a cleansing. Yes, technology has helped extend lives, but it has also helped decrease the quality of life as we all plunge into sedentary lifestyles that make us more and more dependent on fragile technology. Would I survive? Maybe, maybe not. But the human species would be the better for it.
  • Should I bring my tomato plants inside?
    • I know where you hang out.
  • Get yer camping gear out, the power grid will fry. Dogs and cats living together…MASS HYSTERIA!
    • Love the Ghostbusters reference, there!
  • How is this possible? We re-elected Obama! Have the sea levels gone down yet?
  • It’s all OK.Today will be better than Tomorrow.
  • It’s Bush’s fault.
  • I am sure Congress will come up with something to solve this problem. Perhaps they can pass another bill delaying the Sun’s decision to erupt for another few months while we watch and do nothing.
    • Time to dust off the “We Can’t Wait” campaign signs and air out the snappy t-shirts
    • They could increase taxes on all sunspots and that would grantee slower development and possibly the rest of the sun would become unemployed.
  • CNN will ask if this massive sunspot is due to global warming.
    • Evil capitalists are affecting the Sun’s climate .The UN should really do something about this .
      :p
    • It’s because we are driving too many SUV’s
    • No it’s not Ian. You know as well as I do that it is all the “cow farts” that are causing the problem.

I could provide a dozen other examples just from today’s other news; alas I don’t have the time it takes to properly format and post them here. But do yourself an intellectual favor and take some time today to see for yourself. See what people are saying about the things going on today, as unfiltered by the liberal-leftist reporters and meme-makers and left-wing talking-point purveyors and the Obama stenographer pool who are systemic in the liberals’ mainstream media division.

 

UPDATE:
AMAZING COINCIDENCE – The next story I read this morning, this one at the excellent DailyCaller.com, was about a Democratic Party state senator, Ira Silverstein, who is pushing for a law banning those nasty commenters at online sites who post their comments without using their real names and all manner of addresses and identifying credentials. He want them exposed.

A recently introduced bill in the Illinois state Senate would require anonymous website comment posters to reveal their identities if they want to keep their comments online.

The bill, called the Internet Posting Removal Act, is sponsored by Illinois state Sen. Ira Silverstein. It states that a “web site administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless the anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate.”

Read more at DailyCaller.com

It’s one thing for web site owners to do this for their own reasons, mostly having to do with protection from slander and libel lawsuits against them, and for the security of their own web site properties, but it’s quite another thing for the government to travel down this road.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
February 21, 2013 •Leave a Comment
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Israel: Decades-old conflict not about to cease

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
November 24, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Since 9/11, western powers have behaved more or less like Prince Hamlet, conflicted by doubts and stalemated by niceties that barely register with those who have mounted their version of “slings and arrows” against the West and its allies.

A dozen years following 9/11 should have erased any remaining doubt that Osama bin Laden spoke for many in the Arab-Muslim world who believe Islam is locked in a millennial conflict with the West, and victory will belong to the party that has the faith to take defeats and yet remain on the field of battle as the last man standing.

Bin Laden and his associates might well be described as the crudest expression of this deep-seated conviction of Islamist thinking and practice — that Islam is politics in action, not merely a religion, with the mission to establish its system of government based on the Shariah.

Waging war, engaging in diplomacy, signing treaties, and maintaining or breaking truce are merely means in the pursuit of the end that Islamist doctrine prescribes.

Hamlet’s dilemma was how to act commensurate with the knowledge of the crime given him by the ghost of the murdered king, his father.

The tragedy that unfolds in Shakespeare’s drama is a result of action delayed and ineptly executed by the Prince of Denmark.

The West cannot play Hamlet, while Islamists have mastered the art of exploiting the West’s niceties to their advantage.

It is instructive to note Islamists are most cautious in dealing with Russians and Chinese — that neither Moscow nor Beijing will hesitate in using disproportionate force when needed and will not be troubled by any doubt over actions taken against Islamist terrorism.

But what is worse than playing Hamlet is playing the role at the expense of another.

The West does this with Israel.

Sitting in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem one evening when visiting Israel, it became strikingly clear to me, as it is to most Israelis, that the ground zero of the millennial conflict between Islam and the West is right where I sat.

Islamists have made it amply clear, and the vast majority of Muslims support them, that this millennial conflict will not cease until Israel is annihilated.

Those Muslims small in numbers who repudiate such obscenity are in turn repudiated, ostracized, or killed as apostates from Islam.

Israelis are left with no choice but to act with wisdom and courage in doing whatever is necessary for survival. Yet instead of resolutely supporting Israel, many in the West have parked their discredited anti-Semitism inside mosques to appease Islamists.

In an ancient temple located outside of India’s capital are found words inscribed on the wall, “Coincidences, if traced far back enough, become inevitable.”

The recurrent conflict between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, as was 9/11 and many similar, can be traced back sufficiently to see a pattern whose message brooks no doubting.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
November 24, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Free speech distinguishes the West from the rest

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
September 29, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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In Crowds and Power, the late Elias Canetti, a wonderfully gifted writer and Nobel laureate, brought a unique perspective in examining the human condition and history under the stress of mobs in politics.

When individuals gathered together turn into a crowd and then erupt into a mob, the transition from one into another is the obliteration, even momentarily, of the individual as a thinking being reduced physically into a mindless atom constituent of a mass set in motion by the wish to demonstrate power.

The crowd as mob, wrote Canetti, “wants to experience for itself the strongest possible feeling of its own animal force and passion and, as means to this end, it will use whatever social pretexts and demands offer themselves.”

The politics of the Arab-Muslim world of late — or at least since the 1979 revolution in Iran that brought clerics with a medieval mind-set to power — has been reduced to the pathology of the mob in politics.

This is not unique in history and, for instance, as it was with the pathology of mob politics during the “reign of terror” in France or the Maoist “cultural revolution” in China, the situation in the Arab-Muslim world may likely pass at some point in the future.

In the meantime, however, it should be clearly understood that there is no reasoning with mobs, and any sign of weakness in terms of appeasing mobs by acknowledging or giving in to their demands amounts to stoking their wild frenzy.

Those religious and political leaders at the head of Muslim mobs, or riding them for their own demagogic ends, sense that they are pretty close to intimidating the West into surrendering on the subject of free speech, and accepting that mocking what is sacred to Muslims — their religion, their prophet and their sacred book — must be deemed offensive and banned.

Free speech is the pulse of a free society, the antidote to the pathology of politics driven by mobs. And, moreover, free speech as the hallmark of individual freedom distinguishes the West from the Rest and, in particular, the Arab-Muslim world.

Yet once again free speech is threatened not as much by the pathology of mob politics, but by the weakness of those in the West who mistakenly believe Muslims might have a point and their demand should be met in some fashion.

This is what President Obama said at the UN this week in responding to the mob frenzy in the Arab-Muslim world: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

When one finishes parsing the sentence, one is left thinking the president of the United States agrees with Muslim mobs, and denouncing those who cause offence by ridiculing what others hold sacred can only mean admitting free speech should be abridged.

On the contrary, what needs to be said to the Arab-Muslim world, irrespective of how mobs there engage in rampaging their own societies, is that the West as a civilization is also defined by something sacred.

This something sacred and universal in appeal is individual freedom, manifest in the principle of free speech in whose defence people have made the ultimate sacrifice and, hence, this principle is non-negotiable.

 



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
September 29, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Religions not the same

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Michael Coren
September 29, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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This is a tale of two religions.

On the one hand, Christianity: Regularly abused and slandered both in the western world and the Islamic heartland.

On the other, Islam: Protected by blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority states, and by a blanket of fear, political correctness and the racism of lowered expectations in the west.

Recently, of course, one of those incredibly rare events occurred, and a film offensive to followers of Mohammed appeared on YouTube. We know the result. Yet beyond the murder and mayhem in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, matters are less violent but equally worrying here in Canada.

I attended an anti-blasphemy rally in Toronto last weekend, and spoke to dozens of the perhaps 2,000 people who were there. They called for laws protecting Islam from offence, wanted to arrest people who insulted Muslims, screamed for the death penalty for the man who made the film. I was barged, threatened, abused and told I was a “Zionist liar” and an “evil man.”

Omar Khadr’s brother was there, proclaiming how proud he was of his sibling, and there were endless cries of Islamic triumphalism, anti-Semitism, and calls for violence.

Oddly enough, little of this was reported in the mainstream media, when there is ample evidence on film of what happened. But, as we’ve been told repeatedly for so long, all religions are the same and it’s fundamentalism that’s the problem.

Thing is, I’ve never been threatened with death by a Christian fundamentalist, never seen hundreds of people slaughtered by them, never really met more than a handful in my entire life.

So, back to the tale of two religions. The Edward Tyler Nahem gallery in New York opened its exhibition of “Piss Christ” this week, depicting a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine. The creator of this trash, Andres Serrano, says it’s “meant to question the whole notion of what is acceptable and unacceptable.”

Oh please! You know this is acceptable, because it’s accepted. You’ll win even more awards, gets lots of applause for being so brave towards those nasty Christians, and that’ll be the end of it.

Just as happened when we had displays of the Virgin Mary covered in dung, and the Pope also in urine — quite a bodily waste fetish among these twits.

The point is not so much the bad, sad, pathetic art, but the reaction to it from those it directly offends.

The film about Mohammed is appallingly made, but does contain some truth about the man’s life.

The Christ in urine display is also appallingly bad, and says nothing of interest or authenticity about the life of Christ.

The Muslim response to the former is violence and demands for blasphemy laws, the Christian response to the latter a press release and indifference.

So, are all religions the same?

Only to the extent that all political ideas are the same, and all people the same. Fascism is not democracy, a saint not a mass murderer. They are as different as are religions. Frankly, we all know this, it’s just that some are too terrified to say it in public.

Hey, if the fanatics have their way, you won’t be allowed to anyway.

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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Michael Coren
September 29, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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PM shows leadership in cutting Iran ties

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
September 22, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Canadians of a certain age remember well the exchange between Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and reporters in Ottawa on Oct. 13, 1970, over troop deployment during the crisis then unfolding in Quebec.

Trudeau responded to questions regarding soldiers on Canadian streets saying, “Yes, well, there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns.”

I was reminded of this encounter between Trudeau and journalists Tim Ralfe from the CBC and Peter Reilly of CJOH-TV, when a similar cackle of noise from lots of bleeding hearts in the country rose in unison in opposition to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government’s decision to suspend diplomatic ties with Iran.

The announcement by Foreign Minister John Baird to recall Canadian diplomats from Tehran and expel Iranian officials in Ottawa, in retrospect, could not have been more timely given the spike in orchestrated Islamist violence across the Middle East and North Africa during the past week and a half.

The decision itself, as Baird explained, reflected the carefully drawn assessment of the untenable relationship with the Iranian regime bent upon a destructive and lawless course of behaviour in the region and internationally over many years, going all the way back to its revolutionary seizure of power in 1979.

The Iranian regime founded by Ayatollah Khomeini and his radical Shiite Muslim followers is boastful about exporting the Islamic revolution, and its intent to destroy Israel.

It makes no attempt to hide or deny its role as the fountainhead of Islamist terrorism, as the principal backer of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Asaad, and its refusal to comply with the UN Security Council resolutions relating to its nuclear policy.

Iran is a rogue regime both by choice and as a deliberate policy set forth by Khomeini. It is committed in opposing the United States, as the “Great Satan,” and its allies, including Canada, for the values of freedom and democracy they represent, and to weaken and diminish their presence in the Middle East.

But, most importantly, Harper came to recognize with a stunning clarity that is just about unique among leaders in the West of how utterly depraved and hell-bent on rogue behaviour is the Iranian regime of Khomeini’s followers, and that Tehran needs to be isolated by self-respecting western democracies and their allies.

The recall of Canadian diplomats from harm’s way in Tehran is only the first essential step of many needed to bring at least the Western powers, including Japan, to effectively squeeze the regime economically to such an extent that Iranians may succeed in bringing a regime change of their own that they were unable to do in 2009.

The support among Canadians for Harper’s decision is wide and deep.

The opinion survey by Angus Reid shows a whopping 72% in agreement with the government, and over 80% of Canadians have an unfavourable view of Iran.

It might well be said Canadians have a keen understanding of the problems and threats emanating from the Arab-Muslim world, and with such support our PM can provide leadership at a time when it is sorely missing in Washington.

 



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
September 22, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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The play’s the thing: Mark Steyn on the Obama admin’s utter failures

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
September 16, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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As if I had to tell you, columnist Mark Steyn wrote the best piece regarding the latest example of total, epic failure on the part of the Obama administration: the global Islamist chaos.

Read Disgrace in Benghazi

 

From BoldColors.net

.

 



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
September 16, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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A night with the fanatics

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Michael Coren
September 15, 2012 •1 Comment
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On Tuesday evening, I covered a 9/11 vigil in Toronto, and a counter-protest across the street organized by Islamic and leftist groups calling for the return of Omar Khadr.

We didn’t know that as this was taking place, Muslim fascists in Libya and Egypt were murdering people who had in some way offended them. One of the dead was the U.S. ambassador to Libya, representing a nation that had given so much to free the Libyan people from tyranny.

The ostensible reason for the slaughter was outrage over a fringe movie depicting the prophet Mohammed in a negative light.

So what? We are supposed to be free to speak our minds. The issue here is not the movie but the Islamic reaction to the movie.

Remember, the same week this tiny film was made public, the internationally celebrated Venice Film Festival gave an award to a movie showing a naked woman masturbating with a crucifix.

The Christian response was an e-mail.

I doubt any of this would have moved the crazies protesting Tuesday. They described their demonstration as a hate-free zone, but told me and the other Sun News team to “f— off” as soon as we arrived. Not one of the many protesters could tell me the name of the medic who was killed by Omar Khadr, and some of them said it didn’t matter. They were also indifferent to the stories I told them of Christians, gays, women and moderate Muslims being slaughtered by militant Islamists.

What was noticeable was how many non-Muslim, white student types were there, including one with a megaphone with OCAP — Ontario Coalition Against Poverty — written on it, as an ownership marker. In that most of the crowd seemed to have the latest iPhones and iPads, I’m not sure where the poverty was.

As always, these extremist groups wheel out their token Jew or two, like the old South African apartheid regime always had a black traitor who would praise the system. One of the Jewish ladies at this event explained how all of Israel was occupied territory.

The crowd screamed “fascist” and “hoodlum” at the peaceful crowd of mainly Jewish, Hindu and Chinese people across the road, and then ostentatiously sat down when the Canadian national anthem was played.

Suddenly Omar’s sister Zaynab Khadr was spotted and internal e-mails revealed she would be kindly providing refreshments — no joke.

The lovely Zaynab once said of Americans killed on 9/11, “They deserve it.

“They’ve been doing it for such a long time, why shouldn’t they feel it once in a while?”

We asked her politely for a comment, and the zoo erupted.

We were pushed and threatened, and a group of people surrounded us screaming “racist, racist” and tried to prevent us from moving. One of them grabbed my arm and microphone, but his grip was as tenuous as his grasp of logic.

So, a night with the fanatics. Thank God they do not have the guns and bombs possessed by their friends in the Middle East.

But be aware, they live among us, and their hatred and anger knows few bounds.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Michael Coren
September 15, 2012 •1 Comment
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Islamist jihad against West rages

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
September 15, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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As Americans stopped to mark the 11th anniversary of 9/11, and ponder how much the world has changed during these years, an ocean away more terrorist attacks were mounted on American interests in the Middle East.

The attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya resulting in the murder of Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador, with three members of his staff and several Libyans, was an act of war by men indoctrinated with the same ideology of those who carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Osama bin Laden is dead and so is Ayatollah Khomeini, but the war they declared against the “satanic” West continues. The West, on the other hand, has opted to be an ostrich.

The result is more than a decade after hijacked jetliners plowed into tall buildings in New York, Islamists are ascendant across the Middle East and hoisting their Shariah-based totalitarian ideology. The U.S. under the Obama administration stands instead as having reverted back to the pre-9/11 mentality.

The American election is barely seven weeks away and the Islamist jihad against the “Crusaders,” in the language of al-Qaida’s founder, will very likely get obscured in the fog of political debates and recriminations in the U.S.

But there is no mistaking that an apologetic West, as represented by President Obama, emboldened the Islamists, resulting in the manner in which the so-called Arab Spring unfolded.

The abandonment of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt accompanied by the embrace of Muslim Brotherhood is turning out to be a repeat of Iran in 1979 when Khomeini swept into power.

It is extraordinary that an apologetic America, as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo symbolized, and Europe with its appeasement mind-set cannot get their act together in compelling a third world rogue state, Iran, to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons capability or face dire military consequences. This failure to disarm Iran while embracing Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — the political grandfather of all the various Islamist offsprings in the greater Middle East and beyond — makes the present situation eerily similar to the 1930s.

What needs to be done, and should have been done by the previous Bush administration, is to take a page from George Kennan — the architect of President Truman’s policy against the Soviet Union — and update his strategy of containment for the Arab-Muslim world. The Arab-Muslim world deserves to be isolated and contained, as was the former Soviet Union. An Iron Curtain, in Winston Churchill’s memorable words, should descend separating the West and its allies from the Arab-Muslim world until the latter has exhausted itself of its own demons.

The situation America, and by its default the West, finds itself in relation to the Arab-Muslim world is to a large extent, ironically, the result of its own guilt-ridden attitude and political correctness. This state of mind, or multiculturalism, gravely inhibits a realistic assessment of 9/11 and what has followed.

The explanation on offer that this new wave of Muslim rage was ignited by a crudely amateurish docu-drama about Islam’s prophet, and the individual responsible must be severely punished, is pathetic in describing a guilt-ridden West seeking to placate the Arab-Muslim world.

Islamists are at war, and the West needs to respond accordingly.

 



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
September 15, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Arab Spring now a Christian nightmare

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
August 25, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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In the 1990s, western democracies stepped forward to stop ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia by dispatching NATO forces in support of UN peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia precipitated ethnic strife, and like all such struggles anywhere in the world, the Balkan conflict was complex and layered with history of grievances, identity politics, and religious bigotry. If one reaches back to the early years of the last century, this region was a cauldron of ethno-nationalism that ignited the First World War.

Some 16 years later, the so-called Arab Spring mirrors the conflict that ripped through the Balkans.

The rotten structures of Arab states were primed to crash once the people set aside their fear of despots. But not unlike the Balkans, the death knell of Arab dictatorships has been accompanied by predictable conflicts among people divided by religion, sect and ethnicity.

There is one stark difference, however, between the Balkans and the situation in the Arab-Muslim world. In the Balkans, the minority most seriously hurt by the conflict were Bosnian Muslims.

It was in part to protect Bosnian Muslims that the West intervened with force and, eventually overseen by President Clinton’s administration, the parties agreed to abide by the Dayton Agreement of November 1995 reached in Dayton, Ohio and formally signed in Paris a few weeks later.

In the Arab-Muslim world, the so–called Arab Spring has hurt most seriously the dwindling Christian minorities of the Middle East. While Arab despots in the name of secularism paradoxically provided some protection to Christians, the situation has worsened with Islamists taking power.

William Dalrymple, the well-respected historian and author of From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1998), recently wrote, “Wherever you go in the Middle East today, you see the Arab Spring rapidly turning into the Christian winter … The past few years have been catastrophic for the region’s beleaguered 14 million strong Christian minority.”

The decline, probably disappearance, of Christians from the Middle East is an ominous sign of a tragic future for the region.

And such an eventuality has precedence.

Jews of the Arab-Muslim world from the pre-Christian era, with their rich heritage and long historical presence in ancient cities across the region — Alexandria, Algiers, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Constantine, Damascus, Fez, Oran, Sana’a, Tripoli, Tunis and more — were compelled to leave lands conquered by Arabs in the name of Islam following the establishment of Israel in 1948.

There have been numerous anti-Coptic riots with attacks on Christian churches in Egypt. From Gaza reports have come of forced conversions among Christians reduced to a miniscule presence.

Iraqi Christians fled in large numbers following post-Saddam sectarian strife, and they found refuge in Syria.

This safe-haven for Iraqi Christians is in jeopardy as the sectarian conflict in Syria has intensified, and Syrian Christians are endangered.

While Christians flee from their ancient homes in the Arab-Muslim world, the West’s failure to respond effectively, unlike its response in the Balkans, is more than an immense moral failure.

It is another sign of the West scandalously appeasing Islamist totalitarianism that might well be as catastrophic as when Europe’s major democracies appeased Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
August 25, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Britain paid the price for world freedom

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
August 20, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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On the final Saturday evening of the London Olympics, NBC presented Tom Brokaw’s tribute to Britain, “Their Finest Hour.” This no doubt irritated many viewers, as they scrambled for alternative channels to watch their favourite events.

But NBC made the right decision to bring viewers, with faded or little memory of the past, some history of our tormented world in which the Olympics is hosted.

The previous occasion when London played host to the Summer Olympics was in 1948, and stench from the war that ended in 1945 was still in the air across Britain and the rest of Europe. Twelve years earlier, Hitler’s Berlin held the Summer Games, and then the next two were cancelled due to the war he unleashed upon the world.

Brokaw’s tribute was also a timely reminder of how precarious the world has become since 9/11, and the rise of the Arab-Muslim version of fascist or totalitarian politics — the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist offshoots — has been in many ways similar to what occurred in Europe between the two world wars.

When Hitler’s army invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Britain finally declared war on Germany, its policy of appeasement under prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in ruin.

Britain stood alone with her dominions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand) and overseas empire (India) in defence of freedom for the next 21 months until Hitler broke his pact with Stalin.

During this period across the Eurasian landmass — from the shores of the Pacific to the Atlantic — totalitarian powers ruled aggressively, and only Britain as a beleaguered island stood in their way while at a distance an isolationist America watched.

Britain could have negotiated a truce with Nazi Germany and avoided the horrors of the Luftwaffe bombings that began in the summer of 1940.

A beaten France surrendered under the leadership of Marshal Philippe Petain, a revered national hero from the First World War, at the head of the collaborationist Vichy government.

But prime minister Winston Churchill had defied his party during the years of appeasement and warned people about Hitler’s racist-expansionist ideology. Churchill knew what was at stake, and though Britain was threatened by Hitler with an invasion in the summer of 1940, he was unwilling to go down in history as Petain did — in ignominy.

In 1984, Brokaw covered the 40th anniversary commemoration of the Allied landing in Normandy, France. He later wrote in his bestseller, The Greatest Generation (1998), “What I was not prepared for was how this experience would affect me emotionally.”

“Their Finest Hour” was, a grateful Brokaw narrates, when Britain stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany. If not for Britain the story of Europe, and the rest of the world, would have turned out differently.

The NBC decision to break from Olympics revelry and let Brokaw remind viewers of what has gone before was a small demonstration of some courage. This is because people in the West have been lulled into the false belief that the freedom, democracy and peace they enjoy can be everlasting and maintained without any cost.

Such falsehood enables gutless politicians in the West, willfully unmindful of history, to repeat the folly of appeasing enemies of freedom.

 



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
August 20, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Filed Under: America, Canada, World
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It’s about power: Al-Quds Day a celebration of hatred and terrorism

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Michael Coren
August 20, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Beyond the hatred, the racism and the anger, there’s a certain irony surrounding Al-Quds Day, commemorated this weekend internationally and to its shame — in Toronto.

The event was founded by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and is an overwhelmingly Shiite Islam event. Anybody who knows Islam will understand that the Shiites are despised in most of the majority Sunni world. They were treated as second-class citizens in Lebanon, they are murdered in Pakistan, they are thought as being, golly, even worse than the Jews in Syria, and there aren’t any in Egypt because Saladin killed them all.

So spare me the lies and propaganda about Islamic brotherhood and the fraternity of Muslim believers. You have not seen genuine hatred if you haven’t seen how Muslim sect treats Muslim sect. And you’ll see a lot more of it when President Assad falls, and his fellow Alawites, a version of Shiite Islam, are likely slaughtered like cattle.

While this sordid event can take place in Canada, it would likely be banned or violently suppressed in most Muslim countries. Believe me, it’s not about Jews; it’s about power, and the psychotic inability of international Muslim leadership to tolerate anybody who does not agree with the established position.

The epicentre of Al-Quds Day is Iran, where homosexuals are publicly executed, women stoned to death, dissidents gang-raped and then murdered, the Holocaust denied, and international terrorism planned and financed. Tehran is the model that many of the people at the centre of this protest admire and would like to see replicated everywhere. They couldn’t give a damn about the Palestinians, and see their plight as another way to extend their own ideology. Good Lord, some of them even pretend to be Iranian when they’re not. I interviewed one of the Al-Quds Day organizers some years ago, and knew him to be Pakistani. He lied to my face, because being Iranian is apparently way sexier in the Islamic fanatic community.

So this is not about free speech at all. Freedom is sacred, but it is not the same as license. All civilized people condemn public pleas for violence and genocide, which is what will be heard at the demonstration if they are in any way similar to past gatherings, and judging by activists’ e-mails that have already been circulated.

There may well also be Hezbollah flags flown. This internationally recognized terrorist group is illegal in Canada and is also playing a central role in the Syrian massacres that we read about every day.

Imagine, for example, a large group of people waving Paul Bernardo flags, or Nazi banners.

A lot of mainstream Arabs and supporters of Palestine are uncomfortable with this gruesome display, but too many politicians, especially Liberal ones, seem to measure morality by votes. It’s not whether something is wrong or not, but how many people might support the party if a stand is taken.

That’s horrible. In some ways even more horrible than the day itself.

As you read [Friday, August 17, 2012 08:00 PM, EDT] this I’ll be speaking to 800 Catholics in Winnipeg. No terror, no hatred, no screaming for blood.

Religions aren’t all the same.

Really, really not the same.

 



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Michael Coren
August 20, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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• Also follow Joel Johannesen on Twitter -- @JoelJohannesen

Canucks: Buy Ann Coulter’s “MUGGED” thru PTBC; help us score capitalist millions in commissions!

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
August 16, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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According to Barack Hussein Obama, Joel Johannesen did not build this PTBC site some ten years ago, but only saw it through to its fruition thanks to the benevolence of government (™Barack Hussein Obama idiocy tour, 2012).

All of that socialist claptrap notwithstanding, I’m still using this site to whimsically seek to become one of Barack Obama’s fabled, evil, “millionaires and billionaires,” so please pre-order our former columnist Ann Coulter’s newest book “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama” through our PTBC – Amazon.ca link. It will be her 9th New York Times best-seller.

Even though Ann Coulter doesn’t like Barack Obama, it’s not racist to not like him (despite what lying liberal demagogues repeat over and over). It’s just astute, right thinking! And for now at least, government does still allow conservatives to say things, and write them down, then sell the thoughts after publishing them; and it’s thanks once again to the benevolent government that you can buy them from private retailers like Amazon.ca (but pay the sales tax!). Thanks government!

So it’s really thanks to government that Ann Coulter could write the book, and you can buy it, and all of this has come together thanks to the state. So we’re good.

Thanks!

Ann Coulter 2012 book 'MUGGED'

 

(A shout-out to Al Gore for inventing the internet. Which he apparently did on his own.)

 

*Americans buy it here*



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Joel Johannesen
August 16, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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West refuses to read old warning signs

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
August 13, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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In an interview ahead of the 2012 London Olympics, Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, speaking with Charles Moore of the Telegraph, discussed the unfolding reality of the Middle East.

Blair admitted after 9/11 he underestimated the bad “narrative” of Islamists that the West oppresses Islam and Muslims.

Any objective reading of recent history indicates, however, the extent to which the West in accommodating both has leaned perilously in appeasing the enemies of freedom and democracy. Among all western leaders, Blair is the most clear thinking on Islamism and Islamists.  This is strikingly evident from his memoir, A Journey: My Political Life (2010), in which he devotes considerable space to the subject.

Blair confided in his interview with Moore that Islamists seek “supremacy, not co-existence,” and that the “West is asleep on this issue” even as it poses the greatest challenge in our time.

The extent to which the West is asleep, or unserious, about this subject is symbolized by the Huma Abedin flap in Washington. This flap is the portal through which we can take measure of how the West has been lulled into embracing the Muslim Brotherhood, and how multiculturalism has become a tool for Islamists to disarm the gullible westerners choking in guilt over their past history of colonialism.

What is not new — and Blair is well aware of this — is that the West has a record of being willingly lulled by its enemies into a false sense of security. The decade of the 1930s stands out as the West’s most ignominious period of appeasement in the past century, of wilfully ignoring the rise and consequences of Nazism.

But it was not only with the Nazis, there was also the woeful gullibility in dealing with Stalin and the Soviet Union. The KGB files smuggled to Britain by Vasili Mitrokhin and disclosed in his book co-authored with Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield (1999), reveal how deep and far went the penetration by Soviet agents inside governments in western democracies.

Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist and Communist, for instance was, as Mitrokhin points out, the most valuable Soviet spy recruited in Britain in 1941. He would be the most important Soviet asset as a member of the British team of scientists sent to work on the Manhattan project in Los Alamos, and his contribution to the Soviet bomb as Moscow’s spy was invaluable.

Then there was, among others in the U.S., Alger Hiss in the State Department. Whittaker Chambers — an American Communist and Soviet agent who defected — divulged all he knew about Soviet espionage in America to Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state and president Franklin Roosevelt’s adviser on internal security, on the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939.

When Berle briefed Roosevelt, according to Mitrokhin, the president “seems to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd.”

Hiss remained in government and went to Yalta in February 1945 for the Big Three conference.

There Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill discussed post-war Europe’s future and, as KGB files disclose, Stalin came out smiling, having been briefed ahead of time courtesy of Hiss.

The West seems destined to repeat its folly.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
August 13, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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SALIM MANSUR: Stain on Canadian democracy removed.

By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
June 16, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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Salim MansurIn voting 153-to-136 in support of amendments removing sections 13 and 54 from the Canadian Human Rights Act, the Conservatives in Ottawa under Stephen Harper’s leadership took a historic step in defending free speech.

Section 13 has the Orwellian clause of the human rights act, which reads “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” is prohibited.

The weasel word here is “likely” and, by invoking it, authorities have shut down freedom of expression, as the University of Ottawa did when it cancelled the appearance of Ann Coulter, an American conservative author and political commentator, in March 2010.

In times to come, historians might likely note that with this vote Canada turned a corner in its long downward slide into the bog of multiculturalism and political correctness, and began its climb back to once again becoming a robust liberal democracy.

The idea of protecting free speech by placing limits on it, as Section 13 did, in a democracy such as ours, was retrogressive.

Yet this idea was sold to the public by the country’s political-intellectual elite as a policy indicative of Canadian exceptionalism.

Canada’s Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, speaking to an American audience in April 2004, told them forthrightly that “we in Canada are more tolerant of state limitation on free expression than are Americans.”

Instead, Section 13 represented an elite consensus around the opinion that Canadians could not be trusted with their freedom.

Increasingly disconnected with the general populace, Canada’s ruling elite seemed to forget ordinary Canadians went abroad twice within a generation in the last century to protect the freedom of others.

Ordinary Canadians helped defeat the Nazis — possibly history’s worst offenders of freedom — and yet, ironically, the ruling elite considered they could be corrupted sufficiently by some fringe political club or lonely misanthrope to pose a threat to individuals or minority groups in a liberal democratic society.

The temptation of those in power to control or censor free speech, however good the intention, is indicative of the totalitarian instinct lurking inside many of us.

It is a slippery slope that once taken has ended too often, as history illustrates, in some of the worst excesses committed against freedom of individuals.

“The origin of freedom lies in breathing,” wrote Elias Canetti, recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature. In other words, free speech is the foundation upon which all other freedoms rest.

And we forget this at our peril, warned Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese human rights activist, political prisoner, and the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Peace.

While denied permission by the Chinese leadership to receive the Nobel Prize, Liu Xiaobo sent the following message to his well-wishers: “Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth.”

Once Bill C-304 — the private member’s bill moved by Alberta Conservative MP Brian Storseth — receives royal assent and comes into force repealing Section 13, a stain on Canadian democracy will have been removed and free speech made more secure.



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• By (links to archive) • Twitter link or Web site: Salim Mansur
June 16, 2012 •Leave a Comment
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• Also follow Joel Johannesen on Twitter -- @JoelJohannesen