42% of Americans Think 58% of Americans Need to Pay More Attention

Have you been noticing lately you hear fewer and fewer media accusations about America’s widespread Islamophobia? I think that must be part of the reason CAIR-MI is reduced to junk hijab lawsuits to help create some ruckus.

Today’s Detroit News had an article reporting a Pew survey that shows “Americans” having “more favorable views about Muslims” since 9/11, while at the same time we also “believe Muslims in the United States face more discrimination than any other major religious group.” (“Poll: 58% believe Muslims face discrimination”).

The only group that gets treatedworse, in the opinions of those surveyed, are homosexuals, “with almost two-thirds of Americans saying homosexuals are discriminated against a lot.”

I’d say CAIR has some work to do if they want Muslims to be Number One Victim. Here’s a brainstorm. How about a Triangle-CAIR coalition? Man, those guys would be the Victims from Hell.

This Pew survey doesn’t measure objective facts, just what Americans perceive. And what many Americans perceive, especially Americans who rely on sound bites and/or reports of sound bites from friends and family, is what the media repeats most often.

For instance, for five straight years the media, led by the New York Times, repeated day in and day out that the detention camp at Gitmo was a combination Stalinist gulag and Hitler death camp. Then after five years surveys showed the American people had a negative perception of Gitmo. Now where do you suppose they got that idea?

Then there’s the Duke “rape” case. Valerie Plame. Katrina. Millions of my fellow Americans, God bless their souls, still think that the Democrats freed the slaves and America fought a war in the 1940s to free the world from the Republican Party.

This blog has had to respond to repeated news articles that led off with unsubstantiated declarations, reported as historical truth, that there was a post-9/11 “surge of hate crimes”, violence, discrimination and “profiling” against American Muslims, who as likely as not would be kidnapped and renditioned into the Bush gulag as make it to work on any given morning.

Dawud Walid, leader of Michigan CAIR, stated simply, repeatedly, and falsely: “Our community has been under siege since 9/11.”

In January 2008, I wrote:

How prosaic and ineffective it feels to write, simply, that there is no “siege” against the Arab community in Dearborn, not since 9/11, nor ever. The very suggestion is an insult to every resident of the area, Arab, Muslim, or non-Muslim.

If you don’t agree, don’t bother calling me names if you aren’t going to show up with facts to the contrary.

Since 9/11 Americans have been told two things about Islam more or less without letup in the news, in popular shows, and by their lesser informed spiritual leaders: 1) that Islam is a religion of peace being “hijacked” by a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy few hundred guys called “terrorists” and 2) that Muslims face a hailstorm of hate crimes every time they leave their houses.

Then we get a guy elected to be President who was saying during his campaign speeches things like, "If there is an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney, it threatens my civil liberties."

So why would it be surprising that after eight years of hearing this Americans have a more favorable view of Muslims (they’re peaceful!), and believe they face a lot of discrimination (they’re under siege)? And on top of which, thanks to George W. Bush, we haven’t had a repeat of 9/11, and have been allowed to forget about Mohamed Atta and Osama bin Ladin, and all that unpleasant stuff about jihad?

Not surprising, the media has been reporting since as far back as the early 1980s that homosexuals, (statistically among the highest-paid, best-educated, and best-postured (males, anyway) people in the country), have been suffering unceasing discrimination, hate, and “intolerance.”

Hollywood has been forcing harmless gay characters on us since Billy Crystal was in “Soap,” all the while telling us that the only thing Bubba and his NRA buddies would rather be doing than shooting Bambi is beating the brains out of some guy in a turtleneck with a ball bat. Is it any wonder Americans “perceive” that homosexuals are even worse sufferers of discrimination than Muslims? Look at the head start they've had! (Oh, it makes me so mad I could just spit!)

Dawud Walid’s response to the survey, (or maybe it's just his automatic response to being approached by a reporter), was to say, “Discrimination towards Muslims has steadily increased according to our own study. It seems Islam-phobia has drastically increased.”

That really isn't what the survey said, but then, Dawud's always saying shit like that.

It’s a living, I guess.

Just Wait Until the Next One

Now there’s going to be plenty of talk about Sonia Sotomayor, so anything I can add can wait, or be skipped all together. But I will make just one single prediction.

Selecting her for the Supreme Court is President Obama’s way of ticking off two emblems of his American Victims constituency, (ethnics, women). The aim is populating the court not with top jurists, but representatives of American victim groups whose voices need to be embroidered into, or over, the Constitution.

Except with Judge Sotomayor, Obama's already running out of identity groups. That's why I'm convinced his next choice for Supreme Court is going to be a homosexual. A fully out, practicing homosexual, naturally, so we won't fail to get the full benefit of his (or her) rich experiences.

All the rhetoric now about Judge Sotomayor the Latina woman judicial pioneer can just as well be applied to a queer nominee: the compelling life story, the rich experience, (eeeeeww) how America's finally turning a page, how the nominee's "community" has a long history of discrimination -- even Chuck Schumer's shirty (brownshirty, that is) threats that anyone who criticizes the choice will do so at his own peril. All the stuff we've learned to love about being silenced by the gay rights movement.

With that in mind, I suppose President Obama could select a Muslim, too, for all the same reasons. Not that there's anything unConstitutional about selecting a Muslim, (what can I say, with all those Catholics on the bench?). Any more than there's anything wrong with selecting a Latina, or a woman. What I don't like is choices based on the Supreme Court as a representative political body making policy instead of a deliberative juridical body safeguarding the Constitution with good old abstract legal theories and a pithy footnote in a casebook or two.

Heroes in Unexpected Places

And here you thought all that talk about how homosexuality wasn’t a choice, meant it wasn’t a choice for the homosexuals!

Brent Bozell nicely captures the moral dimension, the heroism, of what Ms. California did in giving a straight answer to Perez Hilton’s demand she endorse “gay marriages” for all fifty states:

Miss California was a little surprised to be thrown this curveball. Did any other contestant get a question like this? No. She stumbled into an answer: "I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage." But then, still thinking aloud, she made a decision. She decided to take a stand for traditional values. More to the point, she decided to stay true to her principles: "You know what, in my country and in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman -- no offense to anyone out there -- but that's how I was raised, and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman."

Boom! The dream was dead. Carrie Prejean had proclaimed she would rather be "biblically correct" than politically correct. There is now a religion test for Miss USA: Christians need not apply.

Hilton, who laid this trap for Ms. Prejean, then "marched over to a camera to record a rant for the Internet. "She lost, not because she doesn't believe in gay marriage, Miss California lost because she's a dumb [B-word], OK?" The next day on MSNBC, Hilton issued a fake apology: "I was thinking the c-word, and I didn't say it," he said, laughing."

Obviously, Hilton is the dumb bitch, not Ms. California. But if Hilton weren’t queer, but a normal (that’s right—a normal) male, there isn’t a chance in hell he’d be allowed to get away with saying this about any woman, not even Sarah Palin. That is the advantage of homo-immunity, and he knows it.

The only advantage Prejean had was her faith.

There is only one reason why America is standing by and watching this happen to people instead of being up in arms about it: fear. Americans haven’t really changed their minds about whether the homosexual lifestyle is wrong. They’ve changed their minds about what will happen if they voice that opinion out loud.

This isn’t about persuasion, but force. Grandmothers aren’t attending their grandson’s queer weddings because they’ve learned in old age to appreciate the true beauty of fisting and the pipe. They’re doing it because it’s either that or be driven out of the family into the woods—because gays have rights that grandmas don’t—starting with the right to hold the whole family up for blackmail. You can bet any queer bold enough to demand his family attend his gay wedding has been threatening for years to out them as “homophobes.” (“We have a gay son and we’re just as proud of him as all our children!”).

People don’t act like Perez Hilton because they want power. They act that way because they already have it, and they know they have it--a cowed society is giving it to them. Giving them the power of knowing that, whatever they may say or do, or demand, or how they misbehave, society will rip to shreds anyone who dares to criticize them. Freedom to act without consequences is the ultimate power.

I actually don’t get that emotional about the whole gay-rights thing. My main interest is the role it's played degrading free speech rights, which has been profound.

The bullying and intimidation tactics developed by gay-rights activists and their hey-boys in the media were already honed and perfected and easily adapted by the Islamists who grabbed them up and started wielding them after 9/11. All that Queer Nation/Act Up yelling and blackmail in the eighties and nineties had trained Americans to duck and cover reflexively at the sound of the suffix "phobe," as in, "homophobes." But the now strictly-enforced cultural taboo forbidding criticism that it took years for homosexual activists to achieve was won by Islamists within only a few months after the World Trade Center attacks. Once the first charges of "Islamophobia" were flung, we Americans were already trained in what to do: go along and keep your mouth shut, except maybe you might volunteer something harmless like, "Terrorism no more represents Islam than the KKK represents Christianity."

Thought control ends up controlling thoughts but it starts by controlling words, which is much easier. And it doesn’t start out telling you what you must say, but what you cannot say. That's 90% of it. Control the words, and even if people think what you don't want them to, it stays bottled up where it isn't going to hurt anything. Once everybody has stopped saying something the controllers don't want said, that leaves the forum quiet for the sort of one-sided arguments that are the only kind the bullies and activists and blackmailers can ever win. That's how come Al Gore has to spend so much time repeating that the scientific inquiries about global warming are closed, and those who dissent are equivalent to moon-landing deniers.

The alternatives are stark. It’s either, agree with us, or you’re stupid; agree with us, or you’re an evil bigot.

This Is What We're Up Against

Last Sunday a Lansing church was disrupted by a gang of homosexual anarchists, pulling fire alarms, yelling at parishioners that "Jesus was gay!", and shouting prfanities and blasphemies. According to the journalist from the Lansing City Pulse who was recruited by the gang to document the event, no arrests were made though Eaton County Sheriff's deputies did eventually arrive. (Gay anarchist action hits church).

According to Nick De Leeuw at RightMichigan, (Michigan liberals attack Lansing congregation in the middle of Sunday worship):

Prayer had just finished when men and women stood up in pockets across the congregation, on the main floor and in the balcony. "Jesus was gay," they shouted among other profanities and blasphemies as they rushed the stage. Some forced their way through rows of women and kids to try to hang a profane banner from the balcony while others began tossing fliers into the air. Two women made their way to the pulpit and began to kiss.

Their other props? I'll let them tell you in their own words... from another of their liberal blogs:

"(A) video camera, a megaphone, noise makers, condoms, glitter by the bucket load, confetti, pink fabric...yeh."

WorldNet Daily reports that

In a statement posted on the Internet, Bash Back confirmed its "operatives" were in the service, "stood up, declared themselves fags, and began screaming loudly. … Another group threw over a thousand fliers to the entire … congregation. The fire alarm was pulled. Queers began making out in front of the pastor. And within a matter of minutes, everyone had evaded the guards and made their escapes."

The statement continued, "Let is be known: So long as bigots kill us in the streets, this pack of wolves will continue to BASH BACK!" ("Lesbians, condoms go wild in attack on Christian church").

This ugly business follows up an incident in Southern California last week in which a lone old lady protesting gay marriage was shouted down and her cross taken away from her and stomped by violent pro-tolerance demonstrators. The video is available here.

The story of the attack on the Lansing church received almost zero national coverage. The Detroit Free Press mentioned it briefly, ("Pro-gay protest disrupts Lansing-area church's servicesPro-gay protest disrupts Lansing-area church's services"), characterizing the demonstration as "raucous."

Ad hoc assemblies of idiots like these do not make me fear for the safety of my home and kin. What I find disturbing in all this is the dangerous mixture of tantrum-throwing hatred by one segment of society with the supine response of the media in refusing to notice it on the other. It's become so tiresome for me to hear posed and reposed the endless forms of the question, "what if this had been done by conservative Christians in a gay church, etc.," that I almost never pose the issue that way myself.

But it's true just the same. The double standard is glaring. And as we know, it isn't only queers who are being protected.

As the political tables have turned, and as America embarks on this historic presidency, (historic not because Obama is black, but because he is the first president popularly elected to be a world messiah), the need for outlets for free speech is only going to be greater. The Left senses that its side is stronger today, and incidents like these are evidence of their new-found sense of security that they can act like this without public (i.e., media-enhanced) outcry.

As Nick Leeuw remarks in his post, this is what we're up against.

Ahmadinejad We Can Handle--It's Those Students Who Keep Me Awake Nights

It’s been more than a week now since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his historic appearance at Columbia University for the sake of academic freedom. The Republic seems to have survived so far.

I hated that Columbia gave him this forum. But overall I don’t think the little president did anything much that was the least bit startling, or even memorable. We expected him to lie, and he lied. We expected him to equivocate over destroying Israel, and he did so, in utterly unmemorable language. Except, of course, for his remark about homosexuals in Iran, which at least was interesting.



Otherwise, no one was fooled by him during his visit who hadn’t already committed to being fooled by him before he got here. Now he’s back in Iran, no more, and no less, dangerous than he was before. And it will go with him as Allah has ordained, or the mullahs decide.

So I’m no more disturbed by Ahmadinejad now than I was before last week. But what I do find to be disturbed about are the Columbia students who clearly were so thrilled with him. As Ann Coulter describes the essence of that encounter (“Tase Him Bro!”):

At Ahmadinejad's speech, every vicious anti-Western civilization remark was cheered wildly. It was like watching an episode of HBO'S "Real Time With Bill Maher."

Ahmadinejad complained that the U.S. and a few other "monopolistic powers, selfish powers" were trying to deny Iranians their "right" to develop nukes.

Wild applause.

Ahmadinejad repeatedly refused to answer whether he seeks the destruction of the state of Israel.

Wild applause.

He accused the U.S. of supporting terrorism.

Wild applause.

Only when Ahmadinejad failed to endorse sodomy did he receive the single incident of booing throughout his speech.

Which signifies exactly this: the Columbia U students represented by this cross-section of cheering fans can wildly applaud the little president’s anti-Western attacks because they don’t see themselves as Westerners, they know even less than Ahmadinejad does about what the West, and especially the religious West, is all about, and the whole concept of being Western has no reality for them. Consquently, being Western is nothing of value to them.

They can wildly applaud their own country being accused of being “monopolistic,” and cheer the supposed "right" of a deranged terrorist theocracy to have the bomb, because the grave danger to the Middle East, to Israel, and even to themselves has absolutely no reality to them, and has no value in their eyes.

They can applaud wildly Ahmadinejad’s transparent refusal to answer questions about his oft-stated intention of destroying Israel, understanding completely that he is in fact endorsing the threat by refusing to deny it, because what Israel is, why it exists, what it faces in order to survive, and especially that Israel is one of our strongest allies, means absolutely nothing to them, and has no reality to them, and preventing a second Jewish genocide and standing by a worthy ally against implacably evil enemies is not a value to them.

They can cheer wildly when the little president accuses their country of “supporting terrorism,” because their ignorance of what terrorism is, and which nations wholesale in it, and which nations, like their own, don’t ever deserve to be called such a thing, is so far beyond their moral aptitude that the term “terrorism” is nothing more than an insult, like calling someone a “bitch,” a “control freak,” or a “Nazi.”. The idea of becoming indignant when a lying Persian rat tells them to their faces that their country is the real evil of the globe is just not something that they care about.

But it turns out what they absolutely care about is protecting one of the central myths of gay rights dogma. This is what morality is to them. College students will cheer what they don’t understand and don’t really believe where there is some perverse antagonistic pleasure to be derived from it. But booing has to come from the heart.

Actually, the students didn’t boo the little president right away, and they didn’t boo him for the reasons people seem to think they did. First they jeered and laughed at him for daring to suggest that there were no homosexuals in Iran. Why was that funny? Because, as every sexually educated Columbia U student can tell you, homosexuality is ubiquitous in every age and nation, and we in our country only admit to the low 10% estimate because we’re so homophobic that the rest of the poor buggers have to stay hidden in the closet.

One of the bedrock tenets of the gay-rights movement is its vastly inflated estimate of the percentage of the species who are homosexual, a myth essential for achieving the illusions of normalcy and moral equality with heterosexuals. So to suggest that there is anyplace, anywhere, anytime, that has not got its requisite assignment of queers, lesbians, transgendered persons, dikes, and drag queens only proves that the speaker is a fool. Informed laughter must result.

Although within minutes pundits and cartoonists were pointing out that Iran’s lack of homosexuals may be related to its policy of executing them, that fact, and that irony, had nothing to do with why the students were jeering and laughing in that particular moment. They were just laughing because heterodox opinions about homosexuality hit them right where they live, and it was so unexpectedly ridiculous, they couldn’t help but laugh.

(Remember that no one at a podium had ever said something like that to them in all their years of American education!)

And only when Ahmadinejad stuck to his guns did they boo. They booed for the same reasons evangelicals would boo if Christopher Hitchens crashed their church services and told them there was no God. They booed because this man was insulting one of their dearest personal dogmas.

How many gays there are, surviving, in Iran, I have no way of knowing. That’s not my point.

My point is, why didn’t the students laugh when Ahamdinejad tried to claim his backwards, seventh-century world was superior to the modern West, Europe, America, and Columbia University?

Why didn’t they laugh when he told them Iran had a right to nuclear weapons?

Why didn’t they laugh when the president of the leading terrorist-supporting government on Earth said it was the United States that supports terrorism?

All these statements were every bit as false, and even more so, and certainly more ridiculous than what he said about Iran having no gays.

My point is that Ahmadinejad’s unintended foo-poo about Iran’s gays inadvertently illuminated the moral priorities of these American students--casting into relief not what they’ll cheer for, but what they’ll boo. An incinerated Israel, a subjugated America, a nuclear Iran, Who cares? But how dare that little twerp try to come in here and tell us there are no Homo-Iranians? Snap!

I believe that when Ahmadinejad returned to Tehran, and was debriefed by the military planners of the Iranian Military Guard, it went something like this:

“Will they fight, Mr. President? Will these Americans fight us over the bomb? Will they fight us if we attack Israel? Will these infidels fight to defend their own blasphemous country?”

“Not a chance, boys. I don’t want to be uncharitable, but these infidels are a joke. We’ll get our bomb, okay. We’ll roast Israel without too much trouble, and I tell you the people of the Great Satan will tear each other to pieces before they’ll ever retaliate. But there is one thing I'm kind of concerned about.”

“What’s that, boss?”

“The American homosexuals. The infidels are clearly quite loyal to them. And they can be really vicious!”