The following are best described as
opponents of the west.
They are some of the leading opponents in the west
of American and western power,
and opponents of American and western victory against
non-western enemies.
They appear regularly on my local radio and TV,
and in my local newspapers,
so I thought I would gather in one place refutations of them.
They have every right to speak of course, and it is one of the strengths of
the USA, the UK and other democracies that their harshest critics
- indeed practically their open enemies -
are not only free to speak, but can make a good living by doing so,
and even become immensely wealthy
doing so (like Michael Moore).
The people below claim
to be friends of oppressed people around the world,
but in fact they are enemies of the non-western world as well,
since they want to stop the spread of western ideas
to it, and hence prevent its liberation.
The left is worth nothing
- An angry column by Dennis Prager, February 1, 2005,
in the week when leftists scorn
the brave Iraqis as they turn out
in their millions to vote
despite the threats of fascists to kill them.
Truly, since 9/11, the left now stands for the opposite of what
it claims to stand for.
The left are the reactionaries.
The left are the fascist lovers.
On apologists for evil:
"in my lifetime, these people have overwhelmingly congregated on the political Left.
Since the 1960s, with few exceptions, on the greatest questions of good and evil,
the Left has either been neutral toward or actively supported evil."
"It is the Left
- in America, in Europe and around the world -
that should do all the apologizing"
Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian.
Interview with Benjamin Kerstein, 20 August 2012.
Also here.
"What we're looking at with Chomsky is a man who has dedicated essentially his entire public life to political evil. I think we are justified in calling such a person a monster."
In reality, of course, the cause of third-world poverty is
known.
Third-world people are poor because of
third-world governments.
The War on Islamic Fascism
Chomsky on Afghanistan, 2001:
"Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide. ... plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that's just kind of normal".
Chomsky opposed action against
(or even supported)
just about every enemy of human freedom
since WW2.
Indeed, had Chomsky been writing during WW2,
one cannot
imagine him possibly writing in support of the Allies.
The Soviet Union (1),
the Soviet imperialist occupation of Eastern Europe,
Mao's China,
Castro's Cuba,
Communist North Vietnam (2),
the Khmer Rouge (3),
North Korea,
Communist Nicaragua,
the Ayatollah's Iran,
Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
Serbian fascism,
Islamic fascism (4)
- all are supported, defended, or at least action against them is opposed
by Chomsky.
Again, it is impossible to imagine him supporting the Allies in 1944.
Surely he would have condemned
the D-Day liberation of France
as an appalling, illegal and aggressive act against a continent
that was finally at peace. (5)
(1) The Soviet Union:
See Noam Chomsky's Satanic Verses
by Paul Crespo, January 29, 2004
- Chomsky writing on US foreign policy in the 1980s.
Interesting on his credulous belief in
everything the Soviet Union spokesmen say.
(2) North Vietnam:
See Hanoi Chomsky
by Tim Starr, February 11, 2003.
In a 1970 speech, Chomsky is not just anti-war,
but actually
pro-North Vietnam,
and pro-totalitarian communism.
Remember
that communist North Vietnam
killed nearly 2 million innocent people.
And Chomsky and the anti-Vietnam War
protesters must share some moral responsibility
for the communist victory and subsequent democide.
Keith Windschuttle:
"There has now been enough analysis of the Vietnam War to demonstrate conclusively that the United States
was not defeated militarily. South Vietnam was abandoned to its fate because of the war's political costs at home.
The influence of radical intellectuals like Chomsky in persuading the student generation of the 1960s to oppose the war
was crucial in elevating these political costs to an intolerable level."
(3) Cambodia:
Chomsky welcomed the Khmer Rouge victory,
and denied reports of the genocide.
Keith Windschuttle:
"Chomsky was this regime's most prestigious and most persistent Western apologist."
Chavez praised Chomsky as
"one of the greatest pioneers of a better world",
and Chomsky replied that:
"what's so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created."
Chomsky attacks American freedom, sneering that:
"control over the media is in the hands of a minority who own large corporations... and the result is that the financial interests of those groups are always behind the so-called freedom of expression".
The US is so "oppressive" that
Chomsky was invited to address US military cadets in Apr 2006.
As
Harry's Place
says:
"just try to imagine a fierce critic of Chavez being invited to address a class of military cadets in Venezuela."
Chomsky interview (age 92), April 2021.
"Ask him about China's repression of the Uighurs, as Katie Halper and I do here, and he asks, "Is it as bad as Gaza? It's very hard to argue that.""
Good god. Is there a more idiotic commentator on international affairs than Chomsky?
Wrong again and again. His whole life.
Chomsky's sick reaction to 9/11, 12 Sept 2001.
Thousands of innocent people are killed in his own country by fascists,
and this is his reaction.
By the second sentence he has changed the topic to how evil America is.
He couldn't even get through one paragraph without changing the topic.
A fanatic of a man, consumed with hatred.
Iranian state TV "Press TV"
endlessly promotes Chomsky.
And yet Chomsky is always at risk of being seen as just "a Jew" by parts of the Iranian tyranny:
Iranian security accuses leftist Iranian academic of "associating" with the Jew Chomsky, Oct 2014.
As Robert Spencer says:
"This bizarre episode shows how little political correctness and sympathy for the jihad buys for a Leftist academic when he falls into the clutches of Iran's Islamic regime. Imagine what they would do to Chomsky himself, despite his decades of faithful service to their cause. To them, he is just a Jew, no matter how Useful an Idiot he has been and still is."
Free westerners can sell their soul to tyrants, but the tyrants will never trust them.
Chomsky and linguistics
Chomsky's reputation as a thinker
rests on his work in linguistics.
My field is Cognitive Science,
and many in that field believe Chomsky's reputation will not survive
long-term - that he is a figure like Freud.
The central problem is the incompatibility between his ideas
and the origin of language
(i.e. its gradual evolution from non-language
in populations of hominids).
Chomsky scepticism about evolution:
"It surely cannot be assumed that every trait is specifically selected. In the case of such systems as language or wings it is not even easy to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them. A rudimentary wing, for example, is not "useful" for motion but is more of an impediment."
Chomsky scepticism about evolution of language:
"There is a field called Evolution of Language, which has a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense. But anyway, it's growing. In fact, it isn't even about evolution of language, it's almost entirely speculations about evolution of communication which is a different topic. And it's a kind of natural topic to look at if you're caught up in another myth, a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory, which holds that changes take place only incrementally."
A Christian Arab agnostic with a massive chip on his shoulder.
He praised the Orient - and yet of course he did not live there.
He lived (of course!)
in a far better place - the United States of America,
where he enjoyed tenure and great honours at a top university,
while he whined about the alleged flaws of America and the West.
What a hypocrite.
Obituary by Mark Steyn
- ".. he didn't
seem to understand that the life he enjoyed
was only possible in the west.
...
The 300 firemen who died on September 11th died in part for
their fellow New Yorker Edward Said,
though he is too stupid
and graceless to understand."
Warraq
says that
Said's Orientalism".. taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity - were
it not for the wicked imperialists,
racists and Zionists, we would be great once more - encouraged the
Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s,
and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam"
Warraq points out that
"Intellectual inquisitiveness is one of the hall marks of Western civilisation"
- in contrast to most of the world,
who have little interest in anything
outside of their own narrow culture.
It was Westerners who discovered
the orbit of the planets,
the laws of gravity, the distance of the stars,
the size and age of earth and the universe,
the sub-atomic laws of physics,
biological evolution,
the nature of genetic inheritance,
human evolution,
the origin of human civilization,
and a million other things
- and told an ungrateful world about it all.
It was even Westerners who told the Orient about its own past:
"One should remind Said that it was thanks to this desire for knowledge on the part of Europeans
that led to the people of the Near East recovering and discovering their own past and their own identity.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia, Ancient
Syria, Ancient Palestine and Iran were carried out entirely by Europeans and later Americans - the
disciplines of Egyptology, Assyriology, Iranology which restored to mankind a large part of its heritage
were the exclusive creations of inquisitive Europeans and Americans. Whereas, for doctrinal reasons,
Islam deliberately refused to look at its pre-Islamic past, which was considered a period of ignorance."
Review:
"As common sense suggests and Ibn Warraq substantiates, the interest of Westerners in the East from classical antiquity onwards was motivated" [not by "imperialism" or "racism" but]
"by intellectual curiosity; they wanted to find out about the other human beings with whom they were sharing the world. To seek knowledge for its own sake is the special and wholly beneficial contribution the West has made to mankind. ... Rationalism, universalism, and self-inspection are Western traits which expand civilization. Said's cultural relativism leads only to a dead-end."
In short, Said was yet another narrow-minded, reactionary,
tribal Easterner who failed to understand the West.
In this cheeky novel,
one of the villains is the
West-hating professor
"Arthur Rashid".
"Now Rashid, of course, was a star in the intellectual world.
Among his fellow academics, he was considered a great man.
A hugely popular professor of multicultural studies, he was credited with
formulating the very concept of multiculturalism in his best-selling book,Eastern Mind, Western Eyes."
Edward Said (died 2003) certainly
sounds like the model for Rashid.
In the novel, Rashid
is secretly involved with Islamist terror.
The hero even tortures the professor in order to (successfully)
avert a major attack on America!
And then at the end we hear that
Rashid has "disappeared" into the CIA's secret prisons!
Very naughty of Klavan, but you have to laugh.
It makes a refreshing change from
the usual right-wing and "neo-nazi" villains.
Edward Said's cover
implicitly
attacks western artists who took an interest in the Orient,
such as
Jean-Léon Gérôme,
who painted
The Snake Charmer
here.
But it is Edward Said who comes across looking like a bigot, not them. Ibn Warraq
points out the delicious irony that these European "Orientalist" paintings
are not despised but are
much sought after
by wealthy Arabs now.
They pay high prices for them
- since they are rare portrayals of a lost Middle East.
Islam discouraged painting, so often these are the only portrayals of that era.
The childish clown
Michael Moore.
The buffoon
who shows the intellectual bankruptcy of the left
in the Islamist War.
The vulgar, anti-American, mean-spirited, immensely wealthy
multi-millionaire.
The semi-educated author of cartoon-like books
and simple totalitarian propaganda
who makes Chomsky
look like a deep thinker.
Stupid White Men
- a perfect description of the kind of people who bought this book.
And the title!
This kind of PC
patronisation must drive minorities crazy.
As if non-whites are always wise, and cannot be stupid!
The very title of the book declares that whites are cool people who can take insults,
and non-whites are sensitive and must be patronised, like children.
David Frum asks an excellent question
about Moore's inexplicable popularity at Cannes
and at the Oscars:
"If an American were to make a documentary about the (genuine in this case)
links between French President Jacques Chirac and Saddam Hussein
- how do you think he'd do at the Oscars?"
Unfairenheit 9/11:
The lies of Michael Moore
by Christopher Hitchens.
He quotes Orwell, writing in 1945,
but it could just as easily be about the present day:
"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects
or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and
prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point.
But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though
unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy
and admiration for totalitarianism."
The failure of cinema
- Years after the war started, there has been no real movie about the war.
"What I found myself wondering
.. was whether Michael Moore may, in the end, turn out to be the American Loonie Left's
Muqtada al-Sadr.
He's become the rallying point. He's raised the flag, and the most motivated LL's are flocking
to support him. He's become their poster boy, their public face. He provides a focal point;
he's a magnet around which they can gather and organize.
He has chosen the ground they will defend
- and it is dreadful ground indeed."
"the LL's have rallied to his flag. They've moved to his holy city. They've adopted positions on the terrain he's chosen for the battle. And they're using the arguments and evidence he provides as ammunition.
In the short term, it may seem as if the LL's are mobilized and fighting hard. But it also leaves them concentrated and vulnerable. And they are fighting on just about the worst ground they could have chosen."
Worst, that is, if they want to win the election.
"Moore has planted his flag smacko in the middle of the Holy City of anti-Americanism. To defend that position, the LL's will now vocally proclaim something many have long believed but avoided admitting: they hate America and everything it stands for. That is not a message that will sell well to the broad electorate."
"It is rare for a political faction to be blessed with an opponent who is so charismatic to his fanatical supporters, so repulsive to non-supporters, and so vulnerable to criticism and caricature. I can't think of a high-profile leftist I'd rather have "at the centre of things" than Michael Muqtada al-Moore."
Less is Moore, Kyle Smith, September 27, 2009, on the ruthless capitalist millionaire Michael Moore,
who attacks capitalism
while becoming rich out of it
and proposing no alternative.
Smith:
"But I don't begrudge Moore his earnings. Being allowed to separate suckers from their money is one of the more entertaining privileges of capitalism."
Smith is amusing on how leftists like Moore never seem to propose
a better system than capitalism:
"David Denby defined "Snark" as, in part, a system that fails to make an affirmative argument. Snarkists are back-of-the-class spitballers who go silent when asked to teach the class themselves.
Moore .. cannot stand in the front of the room and define for us a new system of government to replace the one he finds so unbearable. ... If he shouted the name of the system he apparently worships .. he would be the mockee instead of the mocker. He'd have to play defense instead of merely being offensive.
As it is, Moore drops hints that communism is kinda groovy while solemnly presenting a clip of an angry victim of foreclosure who speaks of armed uprising against banks ...
The majority of the liberal audience, which hates the same things Moore hates ... feels so cozy in his company that they fail to ask themselves where Moore-ism leads."
I think this rather sums up Michael Moore:
In Feb 1994, an unrelated man called
Michael Patrick Moore
broke into a house in Texas and murdered a 35 year old woman.
He was sentenced to death.
In Mar 2001,
leftist Michael Moore
campaigned to stop the execution
of "the other" Michael Moore:
"I abhor the death penalty. It is the ultimate act of evil."
He failed, and Michael Patrick Moore was executed in Jan 2002.
One good thing is that he did genuinely apologise and repent:
"I can blame it on abuse from my parents but the fact of the matter is, I did it, and there is nobody else to blame."
Anyway, back to leftist Michael Moore.
In Apr 2014,
he said GM executives deserve the death penalty
for not fixing flawed products that led to crashes:
"I am opposed to the death penalty, but to every rule there is usually an exception".
Corporate manslaughter - death penalty.
Direct murder - no death penalty.
Left-wing morality.
"Fahrenheit" shown on TV in Cuba
- The communist tyranny of
Cuba
supports Moore.
No dissent (such as calls for democracy) is allowed to air in Cuba
- but the state promotes Fahrenheit 9/11.
Is Moore proud
that his film is so safe and acceptable to tyrannies all over the world?
Iran
Fahrenheit 9/11 Debuts in Tehran
- The Islamofascist tyranny of
Iran
supports Moore.
No dissent (such as calls for democracy) is allowed to air in Iran
- but the state promotes Fahrenheit 9/11.
An Iranian Moore, poking fun at the Iranian government, would of course be executed.
Some quotes from the Iranians watching the film:
"The authorities obviously gave the film the green light for political reasons, in that anything against the United States must be good"
"They are showing this film to erase from our minds the idea that America is the great saviour"
"out of all the films people would love to see, the authorities had to go for this one
- just because this film is in line with the view of the Islamic regime"
"It [the USA] sure is a great country, where someone like Moore trashes the president and gets away with it
- and makes so much money!"
Poles call 9/11 film "propaganda"
- Film critics in Poland liken Fahrenheit 9/11
to the totalitarian propaganda they grew up with.
Again,
people who have lived under totalitarian regimes
recognise totalitarian propaganda
and a totalitarian apologist
(consider the happy scenes in the film of Saddam's Iraq
before the war)
when they see it.
What's wrong with Fahrenheit 9/11?
by Joey Tartakovsky,
describes the happy scenes of Saddam's Iraq as
"surely one of the most disgraceful instances of cinematic propaganda
in the annals of American film".
The enemy narrator describes Michael Moore as
"one of my favourite guys",
and says of him:
"After all, there are honest and influential guys in America".
Is Moore proud?
These people incinerated three thousand civilians in the city where Michael Moore lives.
They are violent, uneducated religious maniacs fighting to enslave Iraq
under totalitarian rule.
Is Moore proud?
This propaganda video also vividly shows how the
anti-Vietnam War protesters
encouraged the West's enemies
- all the fascists, totalitarians and religious maniacs that the world has been
full of for 5,000 years.
Michael Moore, 18 Jan 2015, pisses on the US military again,
in the week when
the movie
American Sniper,
about hero
Chris Kyle,
came out.
His uncle was
Herbert Laurence Moore,
paratrooper in WW2, killed by a Japanese sniper in the Philippines in 1945.
Michael Moore is pathetic.
As if his uncle
would agree with his nephew attacking a dead
American military hero.
More likely, his
uncle would be disgusted to have such a nephew.
And "invaders"?
His uncle was part of the
US invasion of the Philippines
to liberate it from Japan.
A mean shot,
but he deserves it.
Can't imagine the nephew fighting for the USA under any circumstances!
Apologies to the uncle.
Michael Moore, 19 Jan 2015, yet again defends the enemy - the evil sadists of the Iraqi jihad.
Michael Moore is a truly disgusting human being.
Dennis Prager interviews Howard Zinn
(and part 2).
Zinn is opposed to all war against tyranny,
including the liberation of Iraq,
the liberation of Afghanistan,
the liberation of South Korea,
and he even refuses to declare in favour of WW2.
"I think we have to find ways other than war to get rid of dictatorships and tyrannies."
As Prager says:
"I would love that. But this is where we often consider people on the Left, at best, to be naive."
Pilger
apparently described Castro's Cuba as
"a crucial model for challenging power".
Learning Lies,
John Pilger, 19 February, 2005,
sums up Pilger's alternative universe:
He
denies the basic fact that America protected the free world
from Soviet imperial expansionism during the Cold War.
He describes the long, hard,
American-led effort to save liberal civilization from communist tyranny
as
"modern history's imperial trail of blood of which Iraq is the latest".
What I don't understand is why he excludes the liberation of Europe in 1944 from this list.
Surely the
1944 invasion of Europe
is the defining example
of this modern American imperialism.
He denies that the
Vietnam War
was a struggle against democidal communist tyranny,
and instead claims that America
- rather than democidal communism
- was the real enemy of the Vietnamese people.
Well he must be happy then, since the communists won,
and took over the country for decades.
1.7 million people killed by the communists in democide in Vietnam alone,
and
no human rights,
even today.
Nothing like a happy ending, is there.
Pilger on Vietnam:
"The longest war this century was a war waged by America against Vietnam,
North and South. It was an attack on the people of Vietnam,
communist and non-communist, by American forces."
For oil, or rubber, or something, presumably.
Pilger laughably claims that Ho Chi Minh was not like other communist butchers.
Well if so, then
why didn't he set up a democracy
after 1946?
For 23 years, until his death in 1969, he ruled like a typical communist dictator,
showing no interest in setting up a free democracy.
Why was this?
Can Pilger explain?
Anyone who has ever supported the Iraqi "resistance", even on realpolitik grounds
(e.g. because they are constraining America),
cannot ever again be taken seriously as a moral thinker.
Criticism of John Pilger
for not treating Islamists as
moral agents,
who are responsible for their actions.
"So naturally, the bombs of 7/7 are Blair's. The Islamist terrorists who actually built and deployed them
were acting in a blameless way, with the inevitability of falling rain and lions pursuing prey.
You don't blame the rain for falling. You don't blame lions for killing gazelle.
And you don't blame Islamist terrorists for bombing London.
In this view, the terrorists aren't "wrong" per se. They're just reacting. The only way to get them to stop
is for us to change."
And the writer really nails it:
"To the degree that getting us to change policies is a goal of the terrorists,
then John Pilger's way of thinking is necessary for terrorism to work."
He describes it as hopeful that Hizbollah are fighting Israel:
"But there is hope. After all these years of terrorising an occupied people,
eventually driving them to the despair of having to commit their own atrocities,
the rogue regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv may,
... just may, have met their match."
He claims that Palestinians were driven to suicide bombing Jewish women and children
by oppression,
rather than by Islamist Jew-hatred.
His weasel words about Hizbollah deliberately targeting civilians,
as if this is some unfortunate collateral damage
rather than the intended target itself:
"The resistance to rapacious power, to epic crimes of invasion
... is humanity at its noblest; yet the paradox
warns us that no resistance is pretty;
that each adds its own form of violence in order to expel an invader
(such as the civilians killed by Hizbollah rockets)"
Hizbollah are
Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying,
fanatical religious reactionaries.
Anyone who supports them has no moral compass.
Now do you understand,
Jose Ramos Horta?
John Pilger only supported East Timor because Indonesia was
a western ally.
If Indonesia had been an enemy of the west,
he would never have supported you.
Now do you understand?
Anyone who has ever supported the Iraqi "resistance", even on realpolitik grounds
(e.g. because they are constraining America),
cannot ever again be taken seriously as a moral thinker.
George Monbiot gets an inkling that everything he believes is wrong
- and then the darkness comes over once again.
"While I was speaking, the words died in my mouth, as it struck me with horrible clarity that as long as incentives to cheat exist (and they always will) none of our alternatives could be applied universally without totalitarianism."
This may be news to Monbiot,
but some of us understood this before the age of 20.
But it's hopeful.
Maybe he'll get there some day.
What am I thinking!
Monbiot
doesn't even believe in prosperity."In this age of diamond saucepans, only a recession makes sense.
...
Economic growth is a political sedative, snuffing out protest as it drives inequality. It is time we gave it up.
...
If you are of a sensitive disposition, I advise you to turn the page now. I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises."
Not really a taboo, George,
just a sign that someone is nuts.
And we are not shocked. We just conclude that you are a loony
who should not be listened to on economics (or anything, I guess).
Brendan O'Neill, 15 Mar 2013, spots that Monbiot has completely reversed himself now the Tories are in power.
He used to call for a recession and "austerity" to save the planet.
And now he is railing about Tory austerity
and complaining about the recession!
Nice to know he admits all the "save the planet" stuff was just bullshit:
Monbiot in 2007:
"I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises."
Monbiot in 2012:
"The cuts, the coalition promised, would hurt but work. They hurt all right - and have pushed us into a double-dip recession."
Monbiot in 2004:
"People don't riot for austerity; they riot because they want more, not less. We have to riot for less."
Monbiot in 2012:
"Austerity programmes are extending the crises they were meant to solve,
yet governments refuse to abandon them."
Ken Livingstone.
Pro-Islamist, pro-Iran, anti-American, anti-Israel.
One of the very worst people in British politics.
IRA violence was the fault of Britain:
During the NI conflict,
Livingstone had a
long sympathy for the IRA terrorists
who were bombing his own country.
He did not support the attacks themselves,
but ran defence for SF-IRA,
saying the attacks were caused by British policy.
Later, he used the same line with Islamic attacks on the West,
saying they are caused by Western policy.
Islamic violence is the fault of Britain:
Livingstone was Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008.
Strangely, Livingstone came out against the bombing of London.
Strange because he was a long-time
defender
of Islamic fascist
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi,
who supports identical suicide attacks in Israel.
Nick Cohen
on Ken Livingstone's support for Al Qaradawi:
"The 'socialist' mayor of London
[is] rushing to defend the reputation of a murderous queer basher."
Ken Livingstone, 2009,
works for Iranian state TV.
Iran has helped kill hundreds of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ken Livingstone, May 2011, says that future Islamic attacks on London will be caused, not by Islamism, but by ... people celebrating the death of Bin Laden!
"Mr Livingstone warned that the scenes of jubilation across the US would "heighten" the threat of another terror attack on London
...
"I just looked at it and realised that it would increase the likelihood of a terror attack on London ...
it's a very dangerous time at the moment.""
Ken Livingstone spews the propaganda of the 7/7 bombers, Question Time, BBC, Nov 2015.
Livingstone says that the 7/7 bombings are Britain's fault:
"they did those killings because of our invasion of Iraq.
...
They gave their lives, they said what they believed.
They took Londoners' lives in protest against the invasion of Iraq.
...
If we hadn't invaded Iraq, those four men would not have gone out and killed 52 Londoners."
In protest against a war?
Hundreds of thousands of Brits protested the Iraq War.
But not by slaughtering innocent Brits!
What kind of psycho protests a war by bombing the tube?
What a revolting man Ken Livingstone is.
It's crap history, anyway.
The 7/7 leader
Mohammad Sidique Khan was not "radicalised" by the Iraq War.
He was already an Islamic terrorist before 9/11.
He was at a
terrorist training camp in Afghanistan in 2001,
long before the Iraq War.
Ten moments from Tony Benn by Oliver Kamm,
sums up this foolish man,
who never got smarter as he got older.
"No moral compass" is what comes to mind when I think of Tony Benn.
In his diaries, Tony Benn wrote the following in 1996:
"Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy - a very charming man called Liao Dong
- and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century."
In 1997,
Tony Benn sent fraternal greetings to North Korea's Kim Jong Il,
who put families in concentration camps.
In 2001,
Benn defended people who supported Stalin.
Benn claimed
that no one knew Stalin had killed tens of millions in the 1930s and 1940s until
Khrushchev announced it in a speech in
1956!
Benn said:
"the charge that [the British Communist party]
uncritically supported all the excesses during the Stalinist period conveniently ignores the fact
that those excesses were not widely known, even in the Soviet Union, until Khrushchev's famous speech which disclosed them."
As
Oliver Kamm
points out,
"Every reader of the Reader's Digest was familiar in the 1930s with the reality of Soviet tyranny."
Benn attacked John Bolton for his government's liberation of Iraq.
He declared
"it's a war crime that's been committed in Iraq
...
there is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber".
What a total hypocrite.
Benn served in the RAF in WW2.
So by his own logic there is no difference between him and a suicide bomber.
I liked
one comment
on this debate:
"The best QT for months. We finally have a mature and grown-up debate about Iraq
...
John Bolton was a breath of fresh air compared to Tony Benn's infantile left-wing anti-Americanism and Israel bashing."
Speaking on enemy Iranian TV
(Iran kills both Jews and British troops) he said:
"We should tell the Israeli airlines EL Al that until they abide by the United Nations' decisions, no Israeli aircraft would be allowed to fly into any British airport. We should tell the British ambassador to withdraw from Israel, and the Israeli ambassador to withdraw from here."
He says nothing should be done:
"to assist the Israelis in their determination to destroy Hamas
... Hamas must be seen as the agent of the Palestinian people."
Great comment expresses
how I feel about people giving him respect just because he is old:
"No he's an old fool. He was once a young fool. But always a fool."
Former KGB agent
Oleg Gordievsky
says that
Tony Benn was friendly with the Soviets and was considered as a source,
but dismissed as too stupid:
"He was not intelligence material. ...
He was an unnecessary simpleton, who told left-wing fairytales and falsified stories".
Gordievsky claims that Michael Foot,
the Labour leader in 1980-83,
worked for the Russians.
See discussion.
Tony Benn had these 5 questions for the powerful.
As
Oliver Kamm
points out, when Benn
met the genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein
in 2003,
here is the kind of thing he actually asked him:
"I have 10 grandchildren ... and for me politics is about their future, their survival. And I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?"
Saddam the war-mongering butcher was happy to oblige the foolish old man
with his puffball questions.
Saddam replied:
"First of all we admire the development of the peace movement around the world in the last few years.
We pray to God to empower all those working against war and for the cause of peace".
As Kamm says:
"The five questions didn't come up."
The liberal, left-wing Muslim
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
was rescued from the black racist Idi Amin
by the tolerant, anti-racist UK,
and given a wonderful, free, wealthy life that she could never have had in Uganda.
Sadly, she did not learn the correct lesson
- that we should broadly support countries like the UK, Israel and the US,
and spend all our time attacking people like Idi Amin.
"What incensed me was Alibhai-Brown's assertion that she knew what life was like in Baghdad, and that I was using 'emotional blackmail' by telling what I knew. She should be grateful that as an Asian immigrant she has a British passport and not an Iraqi one.
No human being on this Earth should have to witness what I have witnessed."
Alibhai-Brown should be grateful, that is the bottom line.
But gratitude is one of the hardest of all feelings to express.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown provides a refreshing insight into the mind of the modern left.
She utters the thoughts that so many have but hide:
Apr 2004
- "I've been against the war and part of you begins to... you know, it's horrible how your mind works. You think 'Good!', you wake up thinking 'Good, there's all this mess'. And then you have to question your own self, saying what kind of a human being are you, that you want this mess?"
June 2004
- "I am ashamed to admit that there have been times when I wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson. On Monday I found myself again hoping that this handover proves a failure because it has been orchestrated by the Americans."
Bless her honesty, at least.
She does recognise her darker impulses, and struggles against them.
But whatever happened to the left?
What happened to the left that is supposed to stand for democracy and human rights everywhere?
Why has it degenerated into this bitter anti-American cul-de-sac?
Why am I becoming allergic to the word "left",
even though my belief in democracy and human rights is as strong as ever?
William Dalrymple
is an India-based historian and writer, who often talks about politics.
For him the West, not the Islamic world, seems always to be at fault.
This is a review of the book
Celsius 7/7
by Michael Gove.
Dalrymple attacks "the idea that the Islamists are motivated by a deep hatred of freedom",
He says:
"as Bin Laden noted in his 2004 broadcast, if that was so, 'Why did we not attack Sweden?'"
I tend not to list actors and musicians
on this page,
or on my page on
the left's long history of praise for tyrants
and hostility to democracies.
Certainly, one could make a long list of stupid things said by
actors and musicians from the 1960s to today.
But what is the point?
Probably most people
think actors and musicians are fairly lightweight thinkers anyway,
not to be taken seriously.
Anyway, here's a few bits and pieces, but no exhaustive list.
Oliver Stone is
the man who perhaps more than any other has provided us with a distorted,
negative, anti-military, anti-American
image of the Vietnam War:
Sean Penn on Cuba
absurdly
claims that:
"in a free and open election in Cuba today, the ruling Communist Party would win 80 percent of the electorate."
So why not hold an election then?
Cuba has not held an election since 1948.
The actress Vanessa Redgrave was a leading member of the
Workers Revolutionary Party
in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Workers Revolutionary Party
supported the PLO, Gaddafi's Libya
and Saddam's Iraq.
It collected information for Libyan Intelligence.
It spied for Saddam Hussein.
From 1979 on, it provided Saddam with intelligence on dissident Iraqis living in Britain.
It sent photos of Iraqi dissidents to Saddam's secret police.
Hollywood vs. Our Leaders
by Cindy Osborne, Mar 26, 2003, lists the education records of members of the Bush administration,
and the education records of some of the Hollywood anti-war left.
"Does Sean Penn fancy himself a Diplomat, in going to Iraq when we are just weeks
away from war? Does he believe that his High School Diploma gives him the knowledge (and the right) to go to a country that is
controlled by a maniacal dictator, and speak on behalf of the American people?"
Michael Moore,
Martin Sheen, Sean Penn,
Barbra Streisand, Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin,
George Clooney, Matt Damon
- not one of them
has even a basic undergraduate degree.
Just high school.
Whereas Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice
- all of them have postgraduate degrees.
Rice has a PhD.
Of course they could still be wrong, and the
uneducated celebrities
could be right.
But you'd think they'd be cautious about calling the Bush administration
"idiots" and "morons".
Not In Our Name:
A Statement of Conscience
- American writers, actors and academics
(including Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Howard Zinn)
sign a statement against war
to liberate Iraq, June 2002.
The brave Iraqi blogger
and democracy pioneer
"Iraq the Model"
does a magnificent fisking of this
after the liberation
he is so grateful for:
We say Don't free them, NOT IN OUR NAME.
We extend a hand to those around the world suffering from these policies;
we will show our solidarity in word and deed,
but excuse us if we can't come closer to you because frankly, WE DON'T GIVE A SHIT.
Instead, let the world hear our pledge: we will resist the machinery of war
.. and rally others to do everything possible to stop it
and we will offer no alternatives, as it's not our business!
Join your voices to ours and let's DO NOTHING.
Sean Penn's character in
Team America: World Police
(jump to 0:42 here)
captures the world of the leftist, "anti-war" celebrity:
"Last year, I went to Iraq. Before Team America showed up, it was a happy place.
They had flowery meadows and rainbow skies and,
and rivers made of chocolate where the children danced and laughed
and played with gumdrop smiles."
Artists performing for dictators
Bruce Bawer, 27 Dec 2013, lists some artists who have performed special shows for dictators:
Mariah Carey
performed for Gaddafi in Libya in 2008
for a fee of $1 m.
Jan 2010:
Jennifer Lopez slags off Fox News and Sarah Palin.
June 2013: Jennifer Lopez sings Happy Birthday to the brutal dictator of
Turkmenistan
for a fee of $1.4 m.
Much-loved Hollywood actors
People like Matt Damon, George Clooney, John Cusack, Sean Penn and Oliver Stone are well known for radical leftism.
You know what you're getting with them.
But then there are much-loved actors like Tom Hanks
and Morgan Freeman.
For years they seemed perfectly reasonable.
And then they come out with some stuff that makes you realise what is going on inside their heads.
I like Tom Hanks, but then you are forced to recall he's an actor, not a thinker.
This is incredible:
As if that wasn't bad enough, he then idiotically says:
"Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today?"
John Nolte replies with great restraint:
"to answer Hanks's question:
No - annihilating people who are different sounds NOTHING like what's going on today."
Hanks says it again:
"'The Pacific' now is coming out, where
it represents a war that was of racism and terror,
and where it seemed as though the only way to complete one of these battles
in these small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere
was to, I'm sorry, kill them all.
And does that sound familiar to what we might be going through today?"
Um, no, it doesn't.
Hanks says it again, March 14, 2010:
"It was fighting that was based on racism, and a war waged through terror. Horrible things were done on both sides to human beings both dead and alive. It was a case of 'We hate these people' - not 'We're going to liberate this island'. ... It was like a large industrial version of what all future wars were going to be like - between different-coloured peoples with different theologies they thought were the absolute truth."
What an idiot.
Morgan Freeman, Sept 2011, is shocked that Republicans want a Democrat President to only serve one term. He says it must be racist!
What the hell does he expect? That the Republicans will support a Democrat to be re-elected?
Saying the Tea Party is "racist" is pathetic and boring.
23 percent of tea partiers are something other than white Anglos.
(Whereas 25 percent of Americans are something other than white Anglos.)
When asked to explain exactly what is wrong with the Tea Party, he is completely incoherent:
"It just shows the weak, dark, underside of America. We're supposed to be better than that. We really are. That's why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president."
What is he on about?
Is he drunk?
It turns out that the wise and noble Morgan Freeman - the voice of
Mandela
and the American President
and the noble prisoner
and God
and God -
is a political idiot.
See transcript.
In contrast to useful idiots like Sean Penn,
Jude Law
understands what this struggle is all about.
He visits Afghanistan and complains about the media's
reporting:
"It stuns me and appalls me that the media in the west only report bloodshed, murder, the violence.
Because I met people over there, reconstructing, with incredible pride and hope.
And little girls who had been shot at by Taliban going to school the next day because they wanted to, to be teachers and doctors.
That's really, really moving stuff and real stuff and that should be reported."
Good for him.
How unusual in Hollywood.
Gary Sinise
also understands the war.
He co-founded Operation Iraqi Children, which helps
the U.S. military distribute school supplies in Iraq.
He formed a band, the "Lt. Dan Band", to entertain the troops in Iraq.
He visits them, speaks to them, and tells them he supports their mission.
On a typical encounter in Iraq:
"It was hot, Iraq hot when we stopped at a check point
...
Gary began speaking with a soldier through the window and soon we were all standing outside so he could have his picture taken with him and a few of his buddies. Soon there were at least fifty guys around him and he greets each one as he always does.
...
As we are about to get into the vehicle we hear the guys yelling and in the distance is one more soldier. He is dressed in full battle-rattle humping as fast as he can in this unbearable heat to get to Gary before he leaves.
...
Gary without hesitation stopped and waited and he greeted this young man as if he was the first man in line, full of enthusiasm and appreciation.
When we did finally get into the vehicle I mentioned to Gary how I observe how he makes each and every man or woman feel special and appreciated, he paused in thought before answering, as he often does, and then says with a heavy heart, 'It's because we don't know what the next hour holds for them. As tired as I might get sometimes, and I do, it is nothing compared to what they go through day-after-day with the price they are so readily willing to pay.'"