Monday - February 18, 2013

culture of cowards, h/t frontpage.com

Seems like I always manage to find things I’m not looking for, that end up bothering.
Or perhaps I am looking but don’t know it. Whatever, another very good article, if a bit long, from Front Page caught the eye again. But of course it would considering how often I surf by their stand.

As I said, this is fairly long but might be worth the time.

“A Culture of Cowards”

By Bruce Bawer

This isn’t going to be about Iceland, or about online porn, but there’s a reason nonetheless to start with the news that Iceland’s government – apparently satisfied that it’s safely pulled out of its financial crisis – has turned its attention to a feminist proposal to block online porn using the same technology that China uses to limit its own subjects’ Internet access. This is not good news – for a couple of reasons.

The first, and more frivolous, reason is as follows. I’ve been to Iceland. It’s an interesting place to visit – fascinating, actually – but you wouldn’t want to live there. No, honest – you really, really wouldn’t want to live there. I’m not saying it’s awful in the same way as, oh, Tanzania, where albinos are poached like animals because it’s believed that if you cut off one of their body parts it can bring you power and riches. Or Angola, where the police, if you can call them that, look away from the widespread violence against suspected witches (some of them mere children) because they’re scared of having a spell cast against them. No, Iceland is tough going in a different way. The landscape looks like the surface of the moon. There are almost no trees or other vegetation. Even well-to-do residents of Reykjavik live in ugly, bunker-like concrete structures built to withstand the brutal winters. The population is so small and inbred that when you glimpse somebody on the street whom you find attractive, chances are pretty good that it’s your cousin. The grim, dull life of even the chilly capital’s cooler denizens was captured nicely in the novel 101 Reykjavik by Hallgrímur Helgason, who gave the distinct impression that the only thing more boring than living in Iceland is living in Iceland without online porn.

But my topic here, as I say, is neither Iceland nor online porn – for the blocking of which, I suppose, there are reasonable arguments. The problem is this. If Iceland did opt for such a ban, legislators in other countries would immediately want to get into the act. And for the kind of busybody politicians who consider it their job to sit around thinking up things to regulate, censor, and prohibit (all in the name, naturally, of the common good and their own concept of virtue), such a move would only be a first step. It would – and this is where the subject at hand shifts from frivolous to deadly serious – invigorate the already quite robust crusade to impose government or U.N. controls on the Internet, the principal goal of which, needless to say, is to scrub the Web clean of “Islamophobia” and any other Thoughtcrimes that impede global harmony. As any reader of this site well knows, there are those among us – and above us – who long for the ideological tidiness of the pre-Internet era, when the mainstream news media could have kept a story like, say, Benghazi from ever becoming a story at all, and, more broadly, deluded almost all of us about the basic facts of sharia, jihad, and other pillars of Islam.

It’s alarming how many Americans, more than a decade after 9/11, are still living in La-La Land where Islam is concerned. But imagine how much worse the situation would be if we didn’t have the Internet – if, in other words, pretty much all of our sources of information about Islam were MSM-approved whitewashers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito. If the Internet has been a crucial asset for Americans in the years since 9/11, moreover, it’s been even more of a boon for Europeans – and a thorn in the side to many European public officials, who recognize, and despise, it for what it is: a First Amendment zone in countries that have no First Amendment and that are, in principle, despite their purported devotion to democracy, firmly opposed to unlimited freedom of expression.

I live in Europe, but if not for a U.S. writer reporting last week here at all-American Front Page, I probably wouldn’t have heard a peep about Germany’s latest “hate speech” conviction.

The competition is stiff. But surely the most inexcusable recent attempt by the mainstream media to deep-six a development they preferred not to acknowledge was their reaction to what any objective reporter with half a brain would recognize as a sensational and deeply consequential story – namely, the foiled attempt, apparently by a Danish Muslim, to murder in cold blood Lars Hedegaard, Denmark’s most prominent critic of the Religion of Peace. To be sure, as I wrote on February 6, the silence was not universal. In Scandinavia, the media were all over the story. And why not? The shooting provided Lars’s ideological enemies in the journalism community with an excellent opportunity to get in a few kicks of their own, calling him a racist and misrepresenting his views. Not surprisingly, the abuse was worst of all in Sweden, which seems determined to become the first sharia-run nation in Western Europe. (In fact – not that it will make the slightest bit of difference – Lars has filed libel charges against Swedish TV and several Swedish newspapers.)

UNEDITED VERSION HERE, Front Page .com

Posted by peiper     on 02/18/2013 at 11:24 AM   
Filed Under: • muslims •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

DISCLAIMER

THE SERVICES AND MATERIALS ON THIS WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE HOSTS OF THIS SITE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OR ANY MATERIALS.

Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
3. Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

THE INFORMATION AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS WEBSITE ARE DESIGNED TO COMPLY WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS WEBSITE SHALL BE GOVERNED BY AND CONSTRUED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND ALL PARTIES IRREVOCABLY SUBMIT TO THE JURISDICTION OF THE AMERICAN COURTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEBSITE IS CONSTRUED AS BEING CONTRARY TO THE LAWS APPLICABLE IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, THEN THIS WEBSITE IS NOT INTENDED TO BE ACCESSED BY PERSONS FROM THAT COUNTRY AND ANY PERSONS WHO ARE SUBJECT TO SUCH LAWS SHALL NOT BE ENTITLED TO USE OUR SERVICES UNLESS THEY CAN SATISFY US THAT SUCH USE WOULD BE LAWFUL.

Copyright © 2004-2015 Domain Owner