Truthless in Gaza

Post below excerpted from AWOL Civilization. See the original for links

Western journalists have a long record of collaboration with the Arab propaganda machine. Let me point to just one example with which I am familiar from personal experience. After the signing of the infamous Oslo Accords in 1993, the Western media was suppressing any news that would make the nascent Palestinian Authority look bad. This included a blackout on Arafat's belligerent posturing to the Arab world, in Arabic. Despite the peace treaty signed on the White House lawn, Arafat and his lieutenants continued to speak to their people as if the war against Israel was at its peak. One would never know this, however, from reading Le Monde or watching ABC news. (Unfortunately, this was before the advent of the blogosphere.)

I was in Israel some time later, working as a freelance journalist. I picked up a rather unusual assignment. A team of film technicians and translators had made videos of some of Arafat's Nazi-style, jihadesque speeches to the masses in Gaza. These chilling spectacles, which could make even the most hardened Arafat-watcher's hair stand on end, were translated into Hebrew and English. The team was looking for a native English speaker to present the videos to the Western media. I accepted the offer. At the outset, I was concerned that my personal safety might be endangered when the films were shown to a wide audience.

My fears were for naught. For several days, I visited with virtually the entire Western press corps in Israel: the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, you name it. All of them courteously listened to my pitch. All of them tried to keep a poker face as they watched the video, but signs of shock expressed themselves in a rogue muscle twitch or bead of sweat. All of them responded at the end with some mumbo-jumbo such as "oh, that's just what Arafat's saying to his people; he has to do that to maintain credibility."

Sure, I said to myself. That's certainly what these journalists would say if I had shown them translations of Yitzhak Rabin making speeches in Hebrew calling for the Palestinian Arabs to be driven into the sea. Not a single one of those media outlets ran the story. The silence was deafening. Little did I realize, at the time, that this entire affair-just like al-Dura-was one more link in the long chain of media promotion of all that is anti-Western.

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Hitler's Revenge

In Diana West's book, "The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization," there is a brilliant analysis of the current Western decay. Excerpt:

And therein lies Hitler's revenge - the cultural leveling that either emerged from, or was, in some crucial way, accentuated by, natural outrage over the crimes against humanity committed by the Third Reich. Hitler, of course was totally defeated, along with his tyrannical notion of cultural (Germanic) and racial (Aryan) "supremacy."

But so, too, perhaps, were all notions of Western primacy regarding culture and race (which I take here to include nationhood) - even ones that supported, not supremacy in a murderous form, but judgment in a rational form. Grounded by notions of sovereignty and cultural affinity, such judgment determines the kids of attitudes and choices-on everything from religion to law to literature-that are expressed in cultural identity. In the case of the United States and its European allies, these attitudes and choices derive from a specifically Judeo-Christian identity forged in fire, ink, and steel by those whom our modern-day multiculturalists insultingly deride as "dead, white men."

Having failed to destroy the democracies by making Nazi war, then, Hitler may have unwittingly managed to destroy the democracies by effecting a post-Nazi peace in which the act of pledging allegiance to the flag itself, for example, would practically become an act of nationalist supremacism - racism, even; bigotry, too.

Quite sudddenly, it didn't matter whether the culture in question led to a reign of terror, or to liberty and justice for all. The act of maintaining or defending the culture, or ultimately, even defining it - whether through unabashed opposition to communist expansionism, purposefully selective immigration practices, or even sticking to the Western canon - became confused with and condemned as an exclusionary and, therefore, evil chauvinism. In this way, having won the great victory, the Allies lost the will to survive.

Having defined the ultimate evil of Nazism, not as the ultimate violation of the moral law as traditionally understood, but as the violation of liberal tolerance, postwar liberalism then set about dismantling all the existing ordinary particularisms of our own society (including, in the case of the EU, nationhood itself) in the name of preventing a resurgence of Nazi-like evil. This was the birth of political correctness, which sees any failure on our part to be completely open to and accepting of the Other - and thus any normal attachment to our own ways and our own society - as the equivalent of Nazism.

Openness and acceptance on every and any level - from personal to national, from sexual to religious - are the highest possible virtues of the postmodern Westerner. This makes boundaries and taboos, limits and definition - anything that closes the door on anything else - the lowest possible sins. Judgment, no matter how judicious, is tarred as "prejudice" and, therefore, a neobarbarous act to be repressed and ultimately suspended. Patriotism has been caricatured out of polite society as boorish warmongering. Western civilization itself, which may be taken as the product of both judgment and patriotism, has been roundly condemned for being both prejudiced and warmongering.

The overall effect has been to sap the culture's confidence in its own traditions, even - especially - in the classical liberal tradition that stiffened our spines against Hitler in the first place. The cultural anemia that began to take hold long ago has passively accepted the transformation of America the Western into America the Multicultural (and Western Europe into Multicultural Europe) as a good, or necessary, or even just inevitable thing. And thus - with the practical disappearance of the nation, or perhaps better, the culture, that defeated him - Hitler's revenge.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Leftists sometimes claim that Nazism was in some sense Christian. There is a very detailed account here showing that it was anything but. And I note that the L.A. Times is about as favourable to the Pope as Hitler was. Great socialist minds think alike.

Pakistani troops attack Taliban: "Pakistani troops have launched a counter-offensive against pro-Taliban militants in the northwest, pushing them back into forests and mountains, officials and witnesses reported overnight. The fighting has left more than 50 rebels dead in two days, according to army accounts, as security forces struck back against sweeping gains made in the scenic Swat Valley by militants loyal to a radical cleric."

Deceit comes naturally to the BBC: "The BBC has apologised for adding the sound of babies crying to its footage of quintuplets born to a Russian woman. The five girls, delivered at an Oxford hospital on November 10, are the latest individuals to be drawn into the broadcasting fakery row. The John Radcliffe Hospital distributed clips of the five babies and their parents, who defied doctors in Moscow who advised they abort some of the fetuses. While broadcasters like Sky and ITN ran clips of the footage without the audio, the BBC's footage contains the sound of children crying, even though the babies have respirators in their mouths. A spokeswoman for the Oxford hospital said: "There was no audio on our clip." "The BBC must have put it over. "I thought they weren't supposed to do things like that." A BBC spokesman said the corporation should have left the footage alone. He said: "We received the film without sound and on reflection we should have kept it that way."

Documentation of Saddam's WMD's: "Finally, there are some definitive answers to the mystery of the missing WMD. Civilian volunteers, mostly retired intelligence officers belonging to the non-partisan IntelligenceSummit.org, have been poring over the secret archives captured from Saddam Hussein. The inescapable conclusion is this: Saddam really did have WMD after all, but not in the way the Bush administration believed... The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990's. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam's entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans' noses."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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