30 March 2007 @ 1:46PM >> It’s official: just as I suspected, a student mob that stormed the stage and shut down a speech sponsored by the College Republicans has emerged victorious, earning what Columbia’s student newspaper calls “a slap on the wrist.”

It’s yet another defeat for free thought and free speech on college campuses. The university has given a wink and a nod to the heckler’s veto, and left-wing students at Columbia now know that they can shut down any speaker with which they disagree and get away with it.

Way to go, Columbia!

30 March 2007 @ 7:52AM >> Hours of rioting in a central Paris train terminal recall the two-week-long waves of riots that broke out all over France a year-and-a-half ago. Some of the elements are quite similar, such as how word-of-mouth propaganda recast criminals into victims, and how the local media refused to identify the rioters by any label other than “youths.” Nidra Poller reports from Paris on the latest turbulence:

24 hours after the punk jihad riots, the media delivered a profile of the “kid” whose arrest sparked 8 hours of mayhem in the bowels of the Gare du Nord.

The “kid” is one Angelo H. He is, it turns out, 32 years old, an illegal Congolese immigrant, and subject to a deportation order 1993.

The “kid” has been in trouble since he came to France at the age of ten—twenty-two registered condemnations for violent incidents and many that went unreported.

The cops initially went to arrest a little cheater and found they had bagged a hardened criminal. Instead of paying for a ticket like millions of law-abiding passengers Angelo H. jumped the turnstile and was, exceptionally, arrested. In a matter of seconds he had head-butted—or slapped—one of the RATP agents. When the agents wrestled him to the ground, Angelo screamed bloody murder, a small crowd gathered in protest against the agents’ brutality. And the call to battle rang out.

Almost instantly Angelo became a thirteen year-old boy whose arms were fractured by the cruel agents (shades of Mohamed al Dura). Then a pregnant woman was added to the list of victims of police brutality. All that was missing was “the infidels set fire to the mosque.”

29 March 2007 @ 12:12PM >> Yesterday’s post on Cinnamon Stillwell’s piece discussing the movie 300 elicited more than the usual amount of e-mails. Here’s a small sample.

Garrett, a freshman at Wake Forest University writes:

I’m sure that you have heard of Victor Davis Hanson and his especially insightful view of the world. He not only wrote the introduction to the book The Making of 300 but has spoken on the radio about the values war between East and West.

Hanson takes a grippingly perspicacious look into the dominance of Western culture in warfare in his book Carnage and Culture. He examines nine different battles and how each are indicative of some facet of Western values and how those values do more for martial success than things like resources and geography.

I don’t know if you have seen the movie, but when Xerxes descends his throne and his slaves form a human staircase for him I could not help but think that one thing this movie got right is that in relative terms of course, 300 is a story of freedom versus serfdom and it is undoubtedly a deciding factor in that epic struggle.

I highly suggest you read it. The book will gives credence and historical evidence to something that many of us who see the war on terror have realized all along.

Mikey from Jacksonville writes:

Cinnamon Stillwell is way, way off in her take on 300 and what she views as a cultural disconnect between critics and masses.

For one, there’s no such disconnect, really. 300 is running a 61% on the Tomatometer at rottentomatoes.com, which is pretty good (and indeed, the best of the weekend’s top five).

Secondly, she posits a very common strawman, which is that critics and audiences are often at odds. This is just wrong. It’s easy to come up with examples (like say, Ghost Rider) where this holds, but the inverse is more often true. The top ten highest grossing films of all time adjusted for inflation are Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, The Sound of Music, ET, The Ten Commandments, Titanic, Jaws, Doctor Zhivago, The Exorcist, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. These all were, and continue to be, critical darlings.

I agree with her that the critics who criticize 300 are misguided, though. Personally, I loved the film. I think the problem with the negative critics is that they’re viewing a 5th century BC story through 21st century eyes. Of course there were things in Spartan society that today we’d see as less than heroic, but that’s not the point. Other than visual artistic liberties, the film was remarkably historically accurate. Perhaps there are things about Spartan society that bother us and make us think it’s less than worth saving, but this does not make 300 a bad film. Merely one that is disagreed with.

28 March 2007 @ 7:56PM >> Over at the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, Cinnamon Stillwell has an interesting analysis of critics’ reaction to the movie 300, which she notes was “the highest-grossing March opening ever and third-highest opening for an R-rated feature”:

While critics described the film as overly violent, juvenile, stupid, macho, right-wing, race-baiting and, according to Stephen Whitty of the Newark Star-Ledger, an expression of “Saturday-matinee xenophobia,” “300” clearly has resonated with the masses.

Read more for her theory why.

24 March 2007 @ 10:54AM >> In Canada, decisions about health care services are made by political appointees. So naturally, the provisioning of such services becomes politicized.

Few people know this more acutely than Janice Fraser. She needed a bladder operation but was told that, under Canada’s strictly regulated national health system, the hospital was only allowed to perform 12 such operations a year. At her position on the waiting list, she’d have to wait nearly three years. Janice wasn’t going to be able to wait that long; she was running the risk of wearing an external urine bag for the rest of her life.

So Janice hoped that she’d be able to make a personal appeal to Ontario’s Health Minister, a man named George Smitherman. Unfortunately for Janice, Smitherman didn’t have time to meet with her. He was too busy meeting with other constituents, including a man living as Susan Gapka. The time Gapka spent with the Health Minister helped convince him to support government coverage of sex change operations.

Two Women, a new short film by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg (the executive producers of Indoctrinate U) shows how putting health care decision-making in the hands of politicians yields decisions that are politically motivated. Instead of serving individuals like Janice, politicians would rather pick up votes in blocks by catering to interest groups.

For Janice Fraser, who did not belong to a politically correct interest group, the results were tragic.

23 March 2007 @ 10:36AM >> Europe is increasingly surrenduring its own culture and bowing to the mandates of Sharia law.

First, from Germany:

A 26-year-old mother of two wanted to free herself from what had become a miserable and abusive marriage. The police had even been called to their apartment to separate the two — both of Moroccan origin — after her husband got violent in May 2006. The husband was forced to move out, but the terror continued: Even after they separated, the spurned husband threatened to kill his wife.

A quick divorce seemed to be the only solution — the 26-year-old was unwilling to wait the year between separation and divorce mandated by German law. She hoped that as soon as they were no longer married, her husband would leave her alone. Her lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk agreed and she filed for immediate divorce with a Frankfurt court last October. They both felt that the domestic violence and death threats easily fulfilled the “hardship” criteria necessary for such an accelerated split.

In January, though, a letter arrived from the judge adjudicating the case. The judge rejected the application for a speedy divorce by referring to a passage in the Koran that some have controversially interpreted to mean that a husband can beat his wife. It’s a supposed right which is the subject of intense debate among Muslim scholars and clerics alike. “The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law),” the daily Frankfurter Rundschau quoted the judge’s letter as saying. It must be taken into account, the judge argued, that both man and wife have Moroccan backgrounds.

“The right to castigate means for me: the husband can beat his wife,” Becker-Rojczyk said, interpreting the judge’s verdict.

And from France, newspaper editor Philippe Val describes the trouble he’s in as a result of publishing those Mohammad cartoons:

A French court is tomorrow expected to decide whether I and the newspaper I edit, Charlie Hebdo, committed a crime by publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. If the court finds me guilty of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion,” in effect racism, as the organizations of French Muslims that are plaintiffs in this case claim, I could be imprisoned for six months and fined thousands of euros. A great deal is at stake, for free speech in France and Europe, in the outcome of this trial.

[...]

Before publication, I was pressured not to go ahead and summoned to the Hotel Matignon to see the prime minister’s chief of staff; I refused to go. The next day, summary proceedings were initiated by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France to stop this issue of Charlie Hebdo from hitting newsstands. The government encouraged them, but their suit was dismissed.

After the cartoons appeared, the Muslim groups attacked me by filing suit against me on racism charges. President Jacques Chirac, who campaigned for this just-completed trial, offered them the services of his own personal lawyer, Francis Szpiner. Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque, who always took orders from the Elysee, was apparently not convinced this case was necessary; he told me as much several times. But Mr. Boubakeur was under pressure from the fundamentalists at the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France), who had come to dominate the French Council of Muslim Worship, which he heads, and Mr. Chirac. Why? Only he knows. We can only guess. Probably to nurture his friendships in the Middle East and win arms contracts for France, while at home playing to Muslim public opinion that’s supposedly in thrall to fundamentalism.

[...]

Since it is hardly thinkable that the French parliament could be persuaded to re-establish the crime of blasphemy, the plaintiffs chose the legal path to try to obtain a ruling condemning all criticism of religion. But in order to survive, democracy needs to confront dogmas. We saw this happening when rights for women and homosexuals were established; we see it again today in defending genetic research on stem cells, for instance.

This trial is important for all the forms of expression that should flourish in democracy: painting, cinema, literature, journalism, scientific research, and even the free speech exercised in everyday life. The limits to this freedom are already fixed by laws that protect life, and that penalize racism, insults and defamation. In publishing the Danish cartoons, no one broke any of them.

22 March 2007 @ 9:19AM >> Cathy Seipp, a Los Angeles-based writer who I was fortunate enough to get to know over the last few years, passed away yesterday at the tragically young age of 49. Despite not being a smoker, she had lung cancer, which she had been battling bravely for the last few years.

I started corresponding with Cathy online after we discovered that we had some mutual friends, and I first met Cathy a couple years ago in New York at the launch party for Pajamas Media. She was one of those people who instantly put you at ease. With her frequently-worn smile, she had a way of making strangers feel like life-long friends.

I did not realize at the time that this energetic, vivacious woman was already years into her treatment for cancer. It’s a testament to her fighting spirit that after we met, I never would have guessed that she was at the time undergoing painful and debilitating treatment.

I can only imagine what she went through these last few years. And although I’m sure she’s happy now to be free from her physical pain, I am selfishly saddened, knowing that my inbox will never again be graced with an e-mail from “misscathy.”

Goodbye, Cathy.

18 March 2007 @ 7:03PM >> I just got back home from taping Hannity’s America a little while ago. It airs tonight on Fox News.

Knowing the show airs tonight gave us a hard deadline for finally completing the Indoctrinate U website. So while a total lack of sleep over the last 3 days probably didn’t help my coherence with Sean Hannity (I don’t even really remember what I said, but hopefully it made sense), at least we were able to get everything working on the site, including the trailer and an innovative sign-up feature that gave me a chance to write some code for Google Maps. More on that later. For now, I’m going to start a belated St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

Update: Wouldn’t you know it, my cable is out. So I guess I won’t be taping it... Thanks, Time Warner!

15 March 2007 @ 8:07PM >> I will be appearing on Sean Hannity’s television show this Sunday night to discuss my upcoming film Indoctrinate U. We will be showing clips from the film as well as the trailer, which will be released online this weekend. Hannity’s America airs on Fox News Channel at 9PM and again at midnight (Eastern time).

13 March 2007 @ 8:57PM >> ...she still has this religion is that even extreme cold is taken as proof of warming.

11 March 2007 @ 12:49PM >> Cigarettes kill, but are they strong enough to kill partisanship?

11 March 2007 @ 12:47PM >> Czech President Vaclav Klaus on environmentalism:

Environmentalism is a religion that is based more on political ambitions than science, the president of the Czech Republic warned Friday.

Speaking at the Cato Institute, a public policy think-tank, President Vaclav Klaus said that environmentalists who clamor for policy change to combat global warming “only pretend” to be promoting environmental protection, and are actually being driven by a political agenda.

“Environmentalism should belong in the social sciences,” much like the idea of communism or other “-isms” such as feminism, Klaus said, adding that “environmentalism is a religion” that seeks to reorganize the world order as well as social behavior and value systems worldwide.

9 March 2007 @ 8:18AM >> When the weather doesn’t fit the script, you don’t hear about it so much.

7 March 2007 @ 9:19AM >> More apalling news from our “allies” in Saudi Arabia:

A Saudi woman who was kidnapped at knifepoint, gang-raped and then beaten by her brother has been sentenced to 90 lashes — for meeting a man who was not a relative.

[...]

After driving off together from a shopping mall near her home, the woman and the man were stopped and abducted by a gang of men wielding kitchen knives who took them to a farm where she was raped 14 times by her captors.

[...]

“G” said one of the judges told she was lucky not to have been given jail time. “I was shocked at the verdict. I couldn’t believe my ears,” said the woman, who has appealed against her sentence.

The woman also told the paper she tried to commit suicide because of her ordeal and was beaten by her younger brother because the rape had brought shame on their family.

[...]

There are severe legal restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia, including a strict dress code required outside the home and a ban on driving.

In the 1980s, scores of activists and celebrities spoke out quite publicly against the racial aparthied system in South Africa. But today, an apartheid of gender exists throughout much of the Middle East, and these activists are largely silent.

The only explanation I can think of is that it requires real courage to stand up for human rights in the Middle East.

Lots of people are willing to speak out when there’s no risk. But when standing up for the rights of women in the Middle East can get you killed in the middle of a Western city, the brave activists start scurrying for cover.

Where are the feminists when you need them?

6 March 2007 @ 8:29AM >> Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has taken to injecting religion into his political speeches, a mixture that Democrats usually oppose—when their opponents do it.

It’s interesting to note that when Edwards invokes Jesus, he does it to slam the United States by saying Americans are selfish. This coming from a man with a 28,000 square foot multi-million dollar mansion bought with money he collected as a lawyer whose racket was suing doctors into bankruptcy.

One of the reasons that health care costs have been rising so precipitously is because of trial lawyers like Edwards. So maybe he should spare us the lectures on selfishness and take the advice that Democrats usually give: keep religion out of politics.

4 March 2007 @ 12:19PM >> Why wait until college to start indoctrinating your child with political propaganda?

A children’s book called Why Mommy is a Democrat, filled with cute illustrations of cuddly animals, will help prevent the harrowing possibility that your children will someday come to their own conclusions about political issues.

And while this book has been around for over a year, I just noticed recently that it received a glowing review from an organization calling itself the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature:

Should you happen to be a Democrat, you’re going to like this book. I liked it a lot. Mommy is a tufted-ear squirrel who embodies and makes visual all the good things Democrats like to think they do, like playing by the rules, treating everyone fairly, and sharing their toys. The picture book starts out, “Some Mommies are called Democrats,” and follows a “Democrats do such-and-such. “just as Mommy does” pattern. Little lovable animals inhabit the very finely done colored-pencil illustrations, exemplifying abstract beliefs like tolerance and accessible health care. They are all smiles and benevolence, and Mommy beams upon them.

As a running contrast to the positive scenes in the foreground of the detailed 2-page drawings are background scenes juxtaposing the heartlessness of non-Mommylike people and the woe of the poor. The elite characters are never named “Republican” but they’re identifiable. Items like the newspaper the headline of which reads: “Tax Refund,” carried by the cigar-smoking escort of a snooty woman totting a poodle, are dead giveaways. So is the representative multicultural-looking down-and-out young man who is barred from an expensive school, sleeps under a tree in the park, or looks in trash cans for dinner. Every Democrats’ heartstrings will vibrate with joy as Zilbert picks all the acupuncture points for our pain and pleasure-like the reference to the 2000 election.

A very smart, enjoyable collaboration and highly recommended.

If you look at the top of the page, you’ll notice that “the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature” is actually part of the English Department at San Diego State University.

So, while academics often deny that they’re politically biased, we now have a taxpayer-funded school going on record in favor giving pre-school children left-wing brainwashing manuals wrapped in sugary-sweet illustrations.

I can see why academics would praise this book. If the indoctrination started before grade school, professors wouldn’t have to work nearly as hard.

3 March 2007 @ 9:15AM >> Professor Mike Adams of the University of North Carolina is a rare breed in academia. The professor and prolific columnist actually believes it is an outrage for taxpayer-funded universities to be employing instructors who are actively encouraging war against the United States. The latest column from Adams introduces us to the writings of one Julio Pino, a professor at Kent State University.

Professor Pino has a blog called Global War (now offline in the wake of this scandal), in which he declares 2007 to be “the year of Islamic victory” and does so “in the name of OBL.” (That would be Osama bin Laden, for the acronymally-challenged.)

Professor Adams describes Professor Pino’s website:

[J]ust in case you were curious about the purpose of this site, it is provided in the upper right corner: “We are a jihadist news service, and provide battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our brothers worldwide. All we want is to get Allah’s pleasure. We will write ‘Jihad’ across our foreheads, and the stars. The angels will carry our message throughout the world.”

There is also an “Oath of Freedom” in the upper right corner: “We were born free. We will live freely and when death comes to us, we will die freely. Jihad is changing all that can be changed; freeing ourselves through our own efforts; and the conviction that truth will prevail, inshallah.”

Under the entry “Sister Detonates Herself to Eliminate Shia Traitors” there is a description of a female suicide bomber who recently killed 41 people. Just in case you wondered how the host of the site feels about the suicide bomber, the next line tells you: “Now she lies on the Golden Couch of Paradise.”

[...]

Although obsessed with the notion that America is being over-run by “Christian fascism,” he has affectionately referred to his students his “little Jihadists” and his “beloved Taliban.” In other words, he makes no bones about the fact that he works to indoctrinate, not educate, the children of the taxpayers of the State of Ohio.

No word yet on whether Professor Pino would at least spare the taxpayers of Ohio from his “global war.” After all, those taxpayers are lending Pino legitimacy by paying him to be called “Professor” and allowing him to present himself as a learned scholar. The least he could do is ask for those generous Ohioans to be killed last in the glorious Jihad.

---

Update: Professor Pino’s website has been taken offline, and he now states that “he wouldn’t acknowledge any connection” with the site. (Tellingly, he does not deny any connection with the site, either.) “The Web site is not the issue — freedom of speech is the issue,” he said.

2 March 2007 @ 10:39AM >> “At Columbia University, the wheels of justice grind exceeding slow. If at all.” So say the editors of the New York Post in reference to the student mob that, last October, shut down a speech by someone who—horror of horrors—actually supports enforcement of the nation’s borders.

Now Columbia wants the restricted speech zone that is its campus to expand into surrounding neighborhoods. And Columbia wants the government to evict the current occupants so the school can take the land for itself. Columbia hopes the city will use its power of eminent domain to seize the land from the people who currently own it, which the city can do even if the land owners don’t want to sell.

The Post notes:

An ideologically inspired mob attacked an invited speaker at one of America’s great universities. Months pass, and no meaningful punishment is meted out, and the university’s president - whose own academic specialty is the First Amendment - has yet to extend a personal apology to the victim.

And this same university - which clearly is unwilling to police its own grounds - seeks to extend its reach into surrounding neighborhoods by using the government’s power to condemn and seize private homes and businesses.

The two issues aren’t directly related, but eminent domain is such an extreme exercise of government power that it should only be used sparingly and with the greatest care and consideration. The city isn’t obligated to seize the land and give it to Columbia. And the city has every right—no, the city has a duty—to consider the behavior of the organizations that benefit from the exercise of its power.