Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Daphne Anson

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Tuesday, March 08, 2016

“Ánti-Semitism: A Wrong Name for a Wrong Thing” (Daphne Anson)

Item One: An article under the above heading, carried by a provincial Scottish newspaper, the Dumfries and Galloway Standard (25 February 1939) observed:

‘The term “Anti-Semitism” should, on the face of it, mean opposition to Semites in general. The Arabs are as Semitic as the Jews, both claiming descent from Abraham, and thus from Shem. But our pure-blooded Nordic does not seem to have any quarrel with the Bedouin. What is usually meant by the word is a hostile attitude on the part of Aryans towards Jews, both socially and commercially. For lack of a more exact term we shall have to use it in this narrow sense….’

(The article then gave examples from across the centuries, dating back to Biblical times, of antipathy towards Jews.)

Item Two. On 29 January 2014 in the heavily Orthodox Jewish district of Stamford Hill, in London, a certain Mr Rashal Miah indulged in a spate of road rage against the Orthodox Jewish driver of a school bus filled with young children. To quote from tweets by the Jewish self-help/neighbourhood watch organisation Shomrim, which assisted the victim, Miah – at the wheel of a Mercedes – “was on the wrong side of the road attempting to overtake congested traffic” when the bus driver asked him to reverse his vehicle. ‘Mr Miah exited his car … and said “Shut the f**k up, you f**king Jew, I will slit your throat.”’ Miah ‘referred to the victim as “Yehudi” (Jew) and said “I’m going to kill all Jews.”’

Two years later, and Uber driver Miah’s got his come-uppance.

“I hope it doesn’t indicate some underlying prejudice. If this was the other way round and Muslims were being insulted I have a good feeling you would feel strongly. You need to understand that before you open your mouth.” With these words, it’s reported elsewhere, a Crown Court judge last week rebuked Miah before passing sentence on him: a 26-week prison term, suspended, plus 15 days of anger management classes and 100 hours of community service.

The bus driver was satisfied with the verdict, Shomrim tweeting: ‘Victim: "I welcome the sentence, it sends out a strong message to anti-semites that Prejudice and Bigotry is not acceptable"’.

Item Three. The current issue (4 March 2016) of the Australian Jewish News reports:

‘Holocaust denial reared its ugly head on campus on the first day of the new university semester on Monday. Flyers claiming that “Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud” were placed on hundreds of cars in the University of Melbourne’s University Square carpark. The flyer said that the Holocaust was “the greatest swindle of all time” and that “in war, truth is the first casualty” before pointing people to an Australian website that is rife with Holocaust denial content…

B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abramovich [who’s an academic at the university, by the way] said that the flyers are “utterly sickening”, “repugnant” and “nothing more than anti-Semitic tracts” that sought to target and poison the minds of students on the first day of semester. This is an alarming escalation in anti-Jewish hostility and is a cause for concern,” Abramovich said….’

Question: What have these three items in common, aside from the fact that they deal with instances of antisemitism?

Answer: They all spell antisemitism (and its derivative adjective) with a hyphen. One of the examples cited writes of “anti-semites” while the other two write of “Anti-Semitism”/“anti-Semitism”.

Further question: Does that matter?

Answer: Yes, it most certainly does. It implies that there is an entity or movement called “Semitism” that it is feasible to be antipathetic to – rather like “Islamism”, say, which certainly justifies opposition of an “anti-Islamist” kind – when there is, in fact, no such thing.

Back in 1989 – fifty years after my first example above – in the Newsletter of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Shmuel Almog wrote a persuasive piece headed “What’s in a Hyphen?” in which he pointed out that the terms “Semitic” and “Aryan” were originally coined to describe linguistic groups, and that the extension of those words to supposed genetic groups is mistaken and unconscionable. Inter alia, he wrote:

‘A seemingly minor point crops up from time to time but grows in importance the more you reflect upon it. Should one write “anti-Semitism” with a hyphen or “antisemitism” as one word? What is the importance of such a technical question and why should anyone, apart from type-setters and proof-readers, worry about it?....

Let me start at the beginning: When did the word 'antisemitism' make its first appearance? It is generally attributed to Wilhelm Marr, who was called by the Israeli historian Moshe Zimmermann "The Patriarch of Antisemitism". Marr coined the term in the 1870s to distinguish between old-time Jew-hatred and modern, political, ethnic, or racial opposition to the Jews. This term made great advances and soon became common usage in many languages. So much so, that it applied not just to the modern brand of Jew-hatred but – against all logic – was attached to all kinds of enmity toward Jews, past and present.

Thus we now say “antisemitism”, even when we talk about remote periods in the past, when one had no inkling of this modern usage. Purists no longer cry out in dismay against such anachronistic practice; it is currently established procedure to use “antisemitism'” for all types of Jew-hatred.

Let's go back to the hyphen then. What's the difference? If you use the hyphenated form, you consider the words “Semitism”, “Semite”, “Semitic”as meaningful…

It is obvious then that “anti-Semitism” is a non-term, because it is not directed against so-called “Semitism”. If there is any substance to the term, it is only to denote a specifically anti-Jewish movement. Antisemitism is a generic term which signifies a singular attitude to a particular group of people. As the late philosopher Zvi Diesendruck pointed out, "There has never been coined a standing term for the merely negative attitude" to any other people in history. Only antisemitism; only against Jews.

So the hyphen, or rather its omission, conveys a message; if you hyphenate your “anti-Semitism”, you attach some credence to the very foundation on which the whole thing rests. Strike out the hyphen and you will treat antisemitism for what it really is – a generic name for modern Jew-hatred which now embraces this phenomenon as a whole, past, present and – I am afraid – future as well. ‘

Yes, a persuasive piece. It certainly made me drop the hyphen, as did numerous other individuals, and organisations too.

Persuading publishers is another thing: it is disheartening to submit a manuscript in which antisemitism is spelled the “Almog way” only to find the hyphen inserted in the proofs. Arguing with publishers is usually to no avail: publishing houses have their style guides, and they generally stick to them.

Try spelling antisemitism and derivatives without a hyphen in a Microsoft Word document and a lack of uniformity applies: anti-Semite (that’s Microsoft Word changing what I’ve just typed); Antisemitism (that spelling got through unscathed!); antisemitism (ditto); anti-Semites (Microsoft Word meddling again!); antisemitic (that’s been dealt an underscore “wavy line” implying a misspelling).

They, like publishers and the general public, need to be politely educated.

But how is such education to be effected when we see even Jewish journals – the Australian Jewish News is just one case in point – steadfastly clinging to the hyphen, and invariably changing “antisemitism” in readers’ letters and op-eds to “anti-Semitism”. That upper case S is especially grating; it appears to emphasise the validity of the absurd non-existent “Semitism”.

And, as Item One above unconsciously foreshadowed, it plays into the hands of antisemites.

Time and again, “anti-Zionists” on social media and elsewhere love to taunt Jews and supporters of Israel with the observation that Jews are misusing the term antisemitism, abrogating it to themselves when it is just as descriptive of Arabs/Palestinians, because – so the by now familiar theme runs – they are Semites too (optional addition, depending on how anti-Jewish the writer is: and as a matter of fact the Arabs/Palestinians are far more justified in calling themselves Semites than the Eastern European invaders who as everybody knows are really Khazars and have no links to Palestine at all.) And of course the corollary to this is: How can the Arabs/Palestinians be antisemitic when they are Semites too?

Jews and other “Zionists” – even Israelis themselves – have long since undermined the pro-Israel cause by accepting the term “Palestinians” when “Palestinian Arab” would do just as well as a nod to those who, until that wily old villain Arafat and his mates got sly and slick over rebranding, were generally known as Arabs.

It’s too late to turn back the clock and consign the term “antisemitism,” with its propensity for mischief, to the dustbin. Nevertheless, employing the term “Jew-hatred” more often, along with “Jew-hater”, “Jew-haters” and (as Dvir Abramovich does above) “anti-Jewish” would help to take the wind out of the antisemites’ sails.

Antisemitism and antisemites will, alas, always be with us – but at least drop their hyphens!

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Harold Soref: An Anglo-Jewish Prophet Vindicated (Daphne Anson)

Harold Benjamin Soref was a British businessman, polemicist, and politician notable for his forcefully expressed right-wing views. “Pudgy, grumpy, brisk, Jewish” is how the journalist Andrew Roth, in Parliamentary Profiles, summed him up. It was an apt description.

Born in London on 18 December 1916, Harold Soref was the youngest child and only son (there were also two daughters) of Romanian-born Rhodesian pioneer Paul Soref, co-founder of Soref Brothers, South African shippers, and the former Zelma Goodman, English-born of German-Jewish ancestry. Brought up in leafy Hampstead, Harold attended the Hall School (a local preparatory school) before going on to one of Britain’s best-known public schools, St Paul’s School, where he was a day boy. There, with right-wing political sensibilities that awakened early, he was president of the Chesterton Society – the writer G.K. Chesterton, who died in 1936, was a former pupil of the school – and editor of its magazine. In 1934 Soref attended Oswald Mosley’s Olympia Rally as a standard bearer for the Junior Imperial League. When, however, he heckled an antisemitic speaker he was manhandled by Blackshirt thugs, and evicted.

During the Second World War he served briefly in the Royal Scots and then in the Intelligence Corps, based for much of the time in southern Africa, a region he grew to know exceedingly well: although his paternal grandparents had remained in Romania his father had family members in Bulawayo.

Soref read history at Queen’s College, Oxford, but did not stay the course, so did not obtain a degree. Nevertheless, a deep interest in history was innately ingrained in him, and he went on to contribute a number of well-researched and well-written articles on aspects of Anglo-Jewish history to various periodicals, and was very much involved, in 1956, in the commemorative celebrations of the resettlement of Jews in England. He was a close friend of the great Anglo-Jewish historian Cecil Roth.

From 1947 until 1951 he edited the Anglo-Jewish Association’s organ The Jewish Monthly. The AJA, to give the Association its accepted abbreviation, consisted of latter day “Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion” and their attitude to political Zionism reflected that fact. Some of what Soref wrote during his years as editor now sounds reprehensible – perverse is perhaps a better word – but, with another future MP, Neville Sandelson, he visited Israel soon after its foundation, had pro-Zionist relatives, and to his credit eventually adopted a pro-Israel position. His initial opposition to the Zionist cause had as much to do with perceptions that the Jewish State would be an instrument of the Soviet Union as with his old-fashioned fears of the spectre of “dual loyalties” and all that that entailed for the comfort and status of Diaspora communities like his own.

"Some There Are Who Believe Palestine to be an Accursed Land" (Daphne Anson)

Colonel George Gawler (1795-1865), a British soldier who served as governor of South Australia, 1838-41, was, as is well-known, a Christian Zionist. He wrote The Tranquillization of Syria and the East (1845) and in 1849 visited the Holy Land. With the Bohemian-born Anglo-Jewish scholar and editor Dr Abraham Benisch (1811-78) and others, he founded, in 1852, the Association for Promoting Jewish Settlement in Palestine. This body aimed at establishing a self-administering Jewish agricultural colony between the sacred cities of Safed and Tiberias, with cattle, sheep, horses, seeds, cuttings of useful vegetation, boats, fishing nets and building materials funded by public subscription. They hoped that the colony would eventually spread out to incorporate neighbouring lands, with "well-regulated rights of export at Acre and Haifa". In seeking public support, they remarked that “whilst Palestine has such significance in the eyes of the Christians, with how much greater interest must it be regarded by the Jew? … towards it he yet gravitates as to his natural centre”.

In 1853 Gawler's lecture in the English Midlands town of Derby regarding the Association's vision was printed as a pamphlet, heartily recommended in an editorial in the local newspaper, the Derbyshire Advertiser (22 April 1853): "The great subject which is its theme must have interest alike for Jew and Gentile; for the politician and the student of prophecy; and demands at the present day ... attentive consideration. Commencing with some striking remarks on the past history of Syria, Colonel Gawler exhibits, in forcible and graphic language, the destinies of the country in the immediate future."

The paper printed extracts from the pamphlet that showed what Jews had already achieved in their ancient homeland, and how their return to Zion was beneficial not only to themselves but to Great Britain.

Thus, first, a letter from a happy and enthusiastic agriculturalist, written in the summer of 1852:

"This year we had delightful latter rain at the end of April and beginning of May, a thing unknown for years before. Some there are who believe Palestine to be an accursed land, incapable of producing any crop but stones and salt and sulphur. Let them come and see two crops a year produced by the poorest land we have. Let them behold quince trees groaning under the burden of 400 quinces, each one larger than the largest apples of England; vines with a hundred bunches of grapes, each bunch three feet long, each grape three-and-a-quarter inches in circumference; a citron tree bearing 510 ibs. weight of fruit; half-grown broad beans ... the pod thirteen inches long, and six clustering stems from each plant: Indian corn, eleven feet high, on ground from which, four weeks before, a similar crop had been taken; water melons, twenty, thirty, and forty pounds weight."

Thus, secondly, Colonel Gawler on the dovetailing of Jewish and British interests:

"What Religion Do The Majority of Natives Follow?" (Daphne Anson)

I've happened to stumble across an account of a public meeting that took place in Dundee (George Galloway's old stomping ground) in March 1893, deploring the persecution of the Jews of Tsarist Russia. Addressing the meeting, R. Scott Moncrieff, described as Commissioner of the Society for the Relief of Persecuted Jews, made some remarks regarding a visit he made to Ottoman Palestine in August 1891 that might be of interest :

"The question was often asked how many Jews there were in Palestine, and that question he had endeavoured to find an answer to. In Palestine he found after much inquiry ̶ although he had considerable difficulty in getting reliable facts ̶ that there were at least 75,000 Jews, young and old. The great bulk ̶ much more than half ̶ of the Jews were in Jerusalem. After inquiring at different Rabbis and at Christian residenters [sic; Scots for 'residents'], he was led to conclude that there must be at least 45,000 Jews in and around Jerusalem." (Dundee Advertiser, 31 March 1893.)

Later in 1893 an Arab Christian visited Britain to give a series of public lectures on the condition of Ottoman Palestine. Described a few years earlier, when he had made a similar visit, as "the Bible illustrator from the East" and "son of the sheikh of Ramallah' (Morpeth Herald, 12 January, 30 March 1889), he was Yusuf Audi, described in the South Wales Daily News (31 October 1893) as having "recently succeeded his father as chief of the Dahr Awad tribe" and as follows in the Western Mail (3 November 1893): 'The Arab sheikh, Joseph Audi, who is lecturing this week at Cardiff and Abercarn, is a lineal descendant of Jonadab, the son of Rechab, spoken of in the thirty-fifth chapter of Jeremiah. The largest section of his tribe still "dwell in tents and drink wine," as there recorded. '

Two days earlier the Western Mail carried an interview with him, headed "An Arab Chief in Cardiff":

'Mr Audi, the Arab chief who on Monday delivered the first of a course of lectures dealing with life in Palestine, was interviewed on Tuesday evening by a Western Mail reporter.

"This is your first visit to this country, is it not,?" said our representative, after introducing himself.

"Oh, no; I was in England about four years ago, and I have been already five months lecturing in London."

"Then you like England and the English?"

"Yes, I think it a grand place, and the people have always been most kind to me."

"What characteristics of the people have you been most impressed with?"

"Well, I can hardly say, but perhaps what has struck me more than anything is your inventive genius. The English are never content. That is the great difference between my own nation and yours. The Arabs are contented. Although they are taxed and oppressed by the Sultan, yet they do not complain, and are content to live and die as their fathers did, knowing little, but being peaceful and happy."

"What is their chief employment?"

"The cultivation of their land and the cultivation of their vines and olive trees. They have no manufactures whatever,"

"Are the people well-educated?"

"No; hardly anyone is able to read or write. Each tribe has a man, called a Gothern. who is specially employed in reading any letters which the people of the village may receive and writing answers for them. There are no newspapers. "

"No newspapers! However do you get on without them?"

"At different times of the year messengers are sent out from each tribe to Jaffa, Shechem, Jerusalem, and other large towns to collect all the news. On their return all the tribes assemble to hear them recount what they have heard."

"What religion do the majority of natives follow?"

"The Jews, who number 35,000, are in a majority, and all the remainder are either Mohammedans or Christians, there being about 20,000 of each."

"I suppose that the Arabs have not yet learned to play our English games?"

"No. Football would hardly suit the peaceful mind of an Arab," answered Mr Audi, with a smile, "but they amuse themselves by playing a game very similar to draughts. Shooting is also a favourite pastime among the Arabs, there being pheasants and gazelles in abundance. No, the English recreations have not spread to Palestine yet, but I remember once seeing a man upon a bicycle in Jerusalem."

"What a joke!"

"It wasn't for the man on the machine, for the people took him for a devil, and he had to seek refuge in a mosque."

Mr Audi, in conclusion, said that at the beginning of next week he would go to London to fulfil an engagement which will last till Christmas. Next year he hopes to visit Cardiff again, and also make a tour of South Wales."

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A Taste of Western Barbary (Daphne Anson)

Reginald Neale Shutte (1829-92) was a Cambridge-educated Anglican clergyman who spent some time in Morocco, whence so many of north-western Europe's present day young male immigrants derive, contributing his impressions (distinctly unfavourable ) to the local newspaper in Exeter, Devon, where he had spent ten years as rector of St Mary's Church. His six "Letters from Western Barbary" appeared in the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette over half a dozen consecutive issues during 1865. I happened to stumble across them, and thought the following extracts might interest Elder's readers.

'.... A few years ago a Ramadan was not considered complete unless a Christian, or at least a Jew, was murdered by the frantic population. I am happy to say that this custom has fallen into disuse.* But though motives of policy restrain the murderous propensities of the Moslems, their tempers suffer a good deal from the fast .... I have seen more fights during this first week of Ramadan than during the whole of my residence in Barbary.... The fast certainly gets into the head of these people, and it is well to carry a thick stick, or give them a wide berth, particularly when they happen to be "saints" ...

They ["saints"] tramp about in rags which are odoriferous beyond all belief, and demand alms pretty much in the fashion of Dick Turpin [a notorious eighteenth-century British highwayman]....

..... "Saints" in Barbary are of two kinds. The first are those who, by frequent acts of devotion and extraordinary asceticism, have acquired a reputation for special holiness. These ever may be known for their filth, emaciation, and insolence.... The second class are idiots and madmen, who are supposed to be under the special influence of Heaven. As there are no lunatic asylums in this country, where madness is very common, protection is in this way ensured to those poor wretches. who would otherwise be treated with great cruelty.

.... Occasionally they strip off all their clothes and run about the streets, assaulting everyone they meet. A friend of mine saw one of these saints split his own head open with an axe. Knowing the peculiarities of these people, it is just as well to keep one's eyes upon them when out for a ramble....

.... When a man wants a wife he goes to his mother, or, if he is dead, to the nearest female relative, and declares his intention of marrying .... Off this good lady goes to all her friends ... and enquires among them for the most eligible lass. The age selection ranges from 9 to 15. At 25 a woman is old, and at 30 she is utterly unpresentable. Long before this age she has usually made way for another and more attractive wife, and quietly subsides into the condition of a servant....

When the happy day has been fixed, an ox is killed before the bridegroom's door, and another before that of the bride ....

This slaughtering of animals on the public streets is a very nasty operation. The gutters run with blood ... to say nothing of the quivering victim lying all across the [narrow] street... The Moors regard the sight very complacently, and seem to take pleasure in the sufferings of all kinds of animals....

.... The four days of feasting being ended, the man goes to fetch his bride. She is placed in a box about three feet high by two-and-three-quarters wide ̶ just large enough, in fact, to allow of her being huddled together all of a heap inside. The box is covered with gaudy muslin and is surmounted by pieces of coloured silk. When the bride has been snugly caged, she is placed in her box upon a mule, the nearest male relatives walking on either side and holding her on....

She cannot see much, I should fancy, through the muslin ... these poor creatures remain in the box for several hours, and it need hardly be added, are often taken out more dead than alive....

.... Let is suppose the bride not to have been absolutely frightened out of her senses, or to have arrived in safety at the house of her future husband. The box is taken down from the mule's back, and deposited in one of the rooms... The male relatives retire, and the lady friends take the bride out of her box. Her husband is not permitted to see her until four days afterwards.... Nothing can exceed the strictness with which the Moors guard their women. To be seen on the streets without permission of their lord would be followed by instant divorce....

The days of feasting being over, the husband makes his appearance, and sees his wife for the first time, and henceforward she becomes first a plaything and then a household drudge. The old age of these poor creatures is something tremendous. It makes one's heart bleed to see the poor rejected wives, no longer veiled, but ragged and dirty, carrying loads of wood from the country, large enough to make a donkey groan. Such is matrimony in Morocco.'

*'An old Moorish proverb runs "To the hook with the Christian, to the spit with the Jew" ̶ a principle which has not been put into practice, at any rate not these many years.'

Dundee Evening Telegraph, 8 September 1908.

(Note Reuter's Telegram, Aberdeen Journal , Tuesday, 17 November 1903: 'Marnia [Maghnia](Algeria) Monday. Moorish Jews from Taza state that the Sultan's troops during their occupation of the town, massacred a large number of Jews, violated women and girls.)

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Richard Dawkins, Freedom of Speech, and the Sisters Strangelove (Daphne Anson)

As most of Elder’s readers will be aware, a week or so ago the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) rescinded its invitation to Professor Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist and high-profile atheist, to address it this year. His offence in its eyes was “his approving retweeting of a highly offensive video”. The video in question is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecJUqhm2g08, entitled “Feminists Love Islamists”. Apparently, when Professor Dawkins posted it, he was unaware (as I was, too, when, quite coincidentally, I linked to it on my blog) that the feminist caricature depicted in the animation is based on an actual American activist who claims to have suffered harassment over the depiction. When he was apprised of that fact, Professor Dawkins did the gentlemanly thing and took it down.

However, the NECSS were determined to exact condign punishment, advising in a purse-lipped little statement (http://necss.org/2016/01/27/a-statement-concerning-richard-dawkins/):

“We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views. However, unnecessarily divisive, counterproductive, and even hateful speech runs contrary to our mission and the environment we wish to foster at NECSS. The sentiments expressed in the video do not represent the values of NECSS or its sponsoring organizations.”

When one Twitter user demanded to know what precisely is wrong with the video he got fobbed off (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sceptics-drop-atheist-richard-dawkins-retweeting-video-mocking-feminists-islamists-1540729):

‘I have specifically challenged the people in NECSS to explain exactly what their issue is with the video ("which line exactly and what's your issue with it?"). They responded that it was inappropriate because the woman had received abuse, so Dawkins was promoting her further abuse.
So then i asked them to come on the record here and now that Dawkins has never received any abuse for being in the spotlight. They refused.
Then, I pointed out that Dawkins was currently being mobbed on twitter due to their actions. "So you've inspired his abuse. Explain the difference in logical terms please."
They never replied.’

I say “fobbed off” because the NECSS statement quoted does not appear to be referring to the perceived insult to the women’s movement activist on whom the video is based (and now that I know who she is and what she looks like I see that it’s obviously meant to be her: she’s much prettier, by the way, if she’ll forgive me for saying so). The statement, despite its avowed espousal of freedom of speech, is condemning the sentiments expressed in the video as “divisive, counterproductive … hate speech” and distancing itself and its “sponsoring organizations” from those views.

I don’t know what, if anything, the activist depicted in the video has had to say regarding Islam and the Quran, but I do know that there’s a video in the public domain that shows she doesn’t mince words when expressing her robust contempt for Christianity and the Bible. However, it appears that the NECSS, for all its adherence to scepticism and what I suppose I may call “the rational,” is too afraid of offending Islam to be seen to support scepticism and – er – rational criticism of it, or to tolerate commentary on the irony of Western “feminist” fondness for an ideology that believes women are inferior to men and must be appropriately subordinate to men.

Such hypocrisy, such Orwellian doublespeak, such claptrap, as appears in the NECSS’s statement are par for the course among leftists, of course. For instance, this is how that politically correct Israel-bashing British newspaper The Independent (home to such delightful types as Robert Fisk) reported matters (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-vdeo-twitter-necss-event-feminism-a6841161.html):

‘The video … was shared by Dawkins on [January 27], alongside the explainer: “Obviously doesn’t apply to vast majority of feminists, among whom I count myself. But the minority are pernicious.”. Dawkins later deleted the tweet but the NECSS shared a screengrab of it. The distasteful video, which compares Islamists to feminists and shows two cartoon characters singing about having things in common, was deleted by Dawkins after he apparently learnt the ‘feminist’ character in the song was based on a real person who was subsequently “threatened with violence”. Additionally, he later attempted to defend his post by telling a Twitter user the video was a "joke song satirising the alliance between radical Islamism and radical feminism".’

Now, I’m not an atheist and I’m no fan of Professor Dawkins’ atheistic stance, but his views regarding the strange love that many of today’s “feminists” have towards Islamism are hard for anyone except a perverse blinkered leftist/”pernicious feminists” to fault. On Twitter Dawkins has fought his corner convincingly, and includes this very pertinent tweet (video of Islamists disrupting a speech by an Iranian-born British feminist in the linked article):

Dear @NECSS this is the kind of thing being satirised by the "Feminists Love Islamists" vid for which you banned me

As for that strange love that “pernicious feminists” the Western world over have for the Muslim abusers of their sex, here’s the correct response, hurled by the genuine feminist Ann-Marie Waters of the UK-based Mothers against Sharia at a bunch of foolish Danish women in Copenhagen who were there to heckle her speech that warned of the burgeoning encroachments of Islam on the culture and polity of Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTVpyCOmcKY

And the incredible excuses some Western women make for the perpetrators of the “Rape Jihad” seen on New Year’s Eve in Cologne and elsewhere? Consider this obscenity, made by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/08/cologne-attacks-hard-questions-new-years-eve):

‘Young German women thankfully enjoy historically unprecedented economic and sexual freedom, with their expensive smartphones and their right to celebrate New Year’s Eve however they want. The same isn’t always true of young male migrants exchanging life under repressive regimes, where they may at least have enjoyed superiority over women, for scraping by at the bottom of Europe’s social and economic food chain. It is not madness to ask if this has anything to do with attacks that render confident, seemingly lucky young women humiliated and powerless. But even if it does, the answer wouldn’t be to halt immigration …’

And compare it with this excuse for domestic violence, made very recently by a former Australian Labor politician, Mark Latham (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-22/mark-latham-under-fire-for-triple-m-podcast-domestic-violence/7107650):

"The patriarchy argument is that men beat up women in some cases because they hate women. But I don't think it is about how men look at women, it is about how men look at themselves. They have lost their self-esteem, their job, are welfare-dependent, on drugs or alcohol in their life. They use domestic violence as a coping mechanism to get over all the other crap they have in their lives. Demonising men and making them feel worse about themselves is not going to solve the problem."

No prizes for guessing that the distaff side of the Islam-loving (anti-Israel) Australian Greens/Left Alliance, as silent concerning the attacks by Muslim gangs on women in Europe as they are vociferous in condemning the “patriarchal attitudes” and “misogyny”of white culture, have been down on Latham like the proverbial ton of bricks.

But back to Europe. Lawyer, writer and blogger Phillip Mark McGough has written as incisive a commentary on the situation there as I have ever read (http://quillette.com/2016/01/18/after-cologne-feminism-is-dead/). Inter alia, he observes:

‘[O]ne of the few tragi-comic chapters in the horror story of Nazism concerns a strange little organization called the Association of German National Jews. They were a pro-National Socialist Jewish group whose membership not only welcomed Hitler’s accession but actively promoted the self-eradication of Jewish identity and its absorption into the new, heroic, master-culture represented by the Nazis (it was said of them, tongue only partly in cheek, that their motto was “down with us”). In 1935, predictably and forcibly, the group was disbanded. Whereas Stalin had his useful idiots, for Hitler there could be no useful Jews.

With the above in mind, Marx needs revision. History repeats itself: First as farce, then as tragedy. No longer the unofficial motto of a handful of obscure pre-war self-hating Jews, Down With Us has latterly been adopted (or so it seems) as an official article of policy by the German government itself. Here is a country whose improvident approach to Near Eastern immigration these past few months is quite literally threatening its future as a liberal, progressive, democratically-viable European nation-state. It wouldn’t take an especially imaginative political cartoonist to show Frau Merkel as Frankenstein-throwing levers and blowing fuses as she botches an attempt to graft a million (and counting) Muslim refugees onto the body politic of an increasingly mutilated society. In politics as in cheap Gothic literature, such experiments breed monsters.

Some of us are old enough to remember when refugees consisted almost entirely (and by definition) of the most vulnerable members of any given country in crisis: Women, children, the elderly, and so forth. Today, on the other hand, most of the Muslims arriving in Europe from the Near East seem to be young men of fighting age: Young men whose views regarding Jews, gays, and of course women are completely at odds with Europe’s liberal tradition as it’s evolved these past few centuries; a liberal tradition which Germany, for obvious reasons, has sought to reify in its approach to domestic and international affairs ever since the end of the war. But thanks in no small measure to mass Muslim immigration, antisemitism in its most predatory incarnation is once again the norm on German streets, while misogyny is more or less accepted, even expected. It is to choke on the irony of it all. In the name of a long-cherished tradition of tolerance, Germany is becoming savagely intolerant: Totally unsafe for Jews who dare to display their Judaism in public, and increasingly unsafe for women who dare even to go out in public at all after nightfall (or use a swimming pool; or attend a carnival; or do pretty much anything short of redacting their identity behind a hijab and never leaving the house again)….

We now know that law-enforcement authorities throughout Europe have been conniving for some time in similarly clumsy attempts to neutralize news of the scale of the violence (particularly sexual violence against women) at large within certain sections of newly-arrived migrant communities. Across Europe, citizens are being asked by their own governments to accept that complicity in a conspiracy of silence is the highest form of tolerance. Fortunately, most people aren’t buying into it. Sadly, however, some people are: And, oddly enough, not a few of them are women….’

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“1001 [Islamic] Inventions” (Daphne Anson)

1001 Inventions is a travelling exhibit of 1001 scientific inventions and discoveries allegedly made in the Islamic world down the ages. Much hyped, and praised by various political leaders as well as Prince Charles, it has been on temporary display at a range of the world’s most prestigious science museums, including the National Geographic Museum in London and the Science Museum in the same city, the New York Hall of Science, and the California Science Center (where it was opened by Hillary Clinton). Since 2005 some 150,000,000 people around the world have viewed it.

Apart from the so-called “Arabic numerals” in universal use today (including the supremely important device of the zero, unknown to the Greeks and Romans), that Muslims produced any significant invention or discovery must surprise the average visitor to the exhibit. The total of 1001, a number that evokes the like number of fantasies comprising The Arabian Nights, such as Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, must astound, and suitably impress, them. (I know it has impressed and delighted anti-Israel leftists, who’ve triumphantly trumpeted the inventions on social media.)

However, “Arabic numerals” were actually invented in India around 500 AD (or CE if you will), before Mohammed was born and well before he made his impact. There seems to be a much stronger claim to be made about the Islamic origin of algebra, a term coined by the great Baghdad-based mathematician Al-Khwarizmi around 800 AD; nevertheless, there are indications that this remarkable man of Persian family may have been of Zoroastrian background.

Beyond this, however, even the most erudite of visitors to the exhibit must surely have been hard-pressed to name a single invention or discovery made by a Muslim scholar or inventor before viewing that collection of 1001.

Although there are over one billion Muslims in the world, only three Muslims have won a Nobel Prize for science – a Pakistani, an Egyptian American, and a Turk. By contrast, over 150 Jews have done so. Virtually all of the world’s greatest inventions – from the telescope, the microscope, and the steam engine to the computer – were created by Europeans or persons of European descent outside Europe, especially in the United States. It’s safe to say that 95 per cent of the world’s significant inventions of the last 1000 years were devised by such persons, with nearly all the rest originating in China (including gunpowder).

The Islamic contribution to the list of great inventions is in all likelihood very strictly limited.

So how does one go about putting together an exhibit of 1001 Muslim inventions? The blunt answer is “by sleight of hand,” as many reviewers of this farcical exhibit have in effect pointed out [see some examples cited at the end of this account https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Inventions].

The exhibit claims that Muslims invented the camera. This, of course, is pure malarkey. The first photograph was taken about 1826 by the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce. By “camera” the exhibit means a camera obscura, a box with a hole in it on which an image is projected. But even here the exhibit tells whoppers, since the camera obscura was known to the ancient Chinese and Greeks, and was described by Aristotle and Euclid.

Visitors to the exhibit learn that “the first person who tried to fly” was Abbas ibn Firnas, who “leapt from the minaret of the Great Mosque in Cordoba” with some kind of primitive kite-like glider. Yet the concept of human flight had occurred to the ancient Greeks, as seen in their legend of Icarus, who tried the same thing 2000 years earlier than ibn Firnas with unfortunate results.

And so on.

These tales about Islamic inventions are reminiscent, of course, of similar claims made under Stalin as to how Russians invented everything, from the airplane to baseball.

The exhibit was accompanied by a propagandistic film “produced in association with the Jameel Foundation” starring the great actor Sir Ben Kingsley (who is not a Muslim though of part-Muslim descent). (There’s a copy on YouTube marked “Not for Reproduction”.) Presumably Sir Ben, who plays a magical Muslim inventor wowing a group of British schoolchildren with his insights into the wonders wrought by “Muslim civilisation,” doesn’t work for free, and this raises the question of just who paid for an exhibit which toured the world. Its website [http://www.1001inventions.com/] includes a long list of “partners and collaborators,” including the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, Saudi Arabia; the Abu Dhabi Education Council; and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science. Who actually signed the cheques remains, however, opaque.

An even more basis question is: Why is this codswallop of an exhibit, with its obvious political agenda, displayed by any reputable institution?

Political correctness?

Or does money talk?

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That Which Should Be Crystal Clear (Daphne Anson)

On Sunday 17^th January the populist British newspaper the Daily Mail, in an article headed “Terrifying echoes of Kristallnacht,” reported that Burkhard Jung, Mayor of Leipzig,

“has condemned the 'naked violence that took place' after doner kebab fast food restaurants were destroyed, cars were set ablaze and shop windows were smashed by around 250 hooligans of LEGIDA [Leipzig’s branch of the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement]”.

The paper (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3395246/Hundreds-far-right-protesters-rampage-German-town-Leipzig-destroying-ethnic-restaurants-takeaways-latest-anti-migrant-demonstrations.html) then engaged in some ludicrous hyperbole foreshadowed by its heading.

Readers were informed:

“The rampage in Leipzig evoked memories of the wave of violence against Jews that erupted across Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9, 1938.”

To bolster this nonsensical interpretation of events in Leipzig, more particularly the immigrant neighbourhood of Connewitz where the damage took place, the article contained photos of the “Night of the Broken Glass” pogrom in Germany interposed with photos of damage to shops in Connewitz.

Obviously, the damage in Connewitz was unconscionable and deserving of condemnation, but the comparison of events with Kristallnacht is unjustified, and even somewhat obscene.

The damage in Connewitz was done by rogue hotheads who broke off from the main LEGIDA demonstration in Leipzig, an orderly enough rally protesting the multiple sex assaults on German women by mobs of young male newcomers from North Africa and the Middle East who have brought their culture’s odious misogynistic attitude towards women with them.

The damage on Kristallnacht, immeasurably vaster in its scale, its violence, its wickedness, and its aftermath, was unleashed by SA (Storm Trooper) and Hitler Youth units (many of whom wore civilian clothes to give the impression that it was unplanned) upon the Reich’s Jews by order of Nazi Party officials taking their cue from Goebbels and Heydrich upon a highly assimilated, peaceable and patriotic section of German society for no other reason than that it consisted of Jews.

To quote a reputable online source (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005201):

‘Violence began to erupt in various parts of the Reich throughout the late evening and early morning hours of November 9–10…. Despite the outward appearance of spontaneous violence, and the local cast which the pogrom took on in various regions throughout the Reich, the central orders Heydrich relayed gave specific instructions: the "spontaneous" rioters were to take no measures endangering non-Jewish German life or property; they were not to subject foreigners (even Jewish foreigners) to violence; and they were to remove all synagogue archives prior to vandalizing synagogues and other properties of the Jewish communities, and to transfer that archival material to the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD). The orders also indicated that police officials should arrest as many Jews as local jails could hold, preferably young, healthy men.
The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Many synagogues burned throughout the night in full view of the public and of local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. SA and Hitler Youth members across the country shattered the shop windows of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial establishments and looted their wares. Jewish cemeteries became a particular object of desecration in many regions.
The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna, home to the two largest Jewish communities in the German Reich. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking Jews in their houses and forcing Jews they encountered to perform acts of public humiliation. Although murder did not figure in the central directives, Kristallnacht claimed the lives of at least 91 Jews between 9 and 10 November. Police records of the period document a high number of rapes and of suicides in the aftermath of the violence.
As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo (Secret State Police), following Heydrich's instructions, arrested up to 30,000 Jewish males, and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps.
Significantly, Kristallnacht marks the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity. Hundreds died in the camps as a result of the brutal treatment they endured. Most did obtain release over the next three months on the condition that they begin the process of emigration from Germany. Indeed, the effects of Kristallnacht would serve as a spur to the emigration of Jews from Germany in the months to come….’

The Daily Mail nonsense is another brick in that increasingly sturdy edifice which likens today’s so-called “Islamophobia” to historic European antisemitism.

It’s an edifice with very frail foundations, since today’s antipathy towards Muslim immigration on the part of growing numbers of Europeans is due to Islamist violence and the ongoing terror threat, to the extremist statements of certain imams and others justifying wife-beating and calling for the implementation of sharia law in the nations that have taken them in, to the de facto tolerance of polygamy among Muslims by weak and hypocritical Western states, and to displays of aggression and misogyny such as “honour” killings, to the importation (and non-prosecution) of female genital mutilation by some Muslim communities, and the vile assaults on women that were witnessed in Cologne and elsewhere on Christmas Eve.

It is precisely this sort of conduct on the immigrants’ part that feeds the establishment of groups like PEGIDA. A crystal clear indication of this can be seen in the video dating to early this month of the launch before press cameras of PEGIDA UK, led by Paul Weston of Liberty GB along with Tommy Robinson and women’s rights advocate Anne-Marie Waters in reaction to the continuing stupor of the political elites towards what may be the most pressing problem confronting Britain and the West in the 21^st century.

In launching their movement Weston, Robinson and Ms Waters are at pains to disavow the “far right” label; they vigorously deny the “racist” epithet; they insist that their movement is one in which “ordinary, decent British people” (as Ms Waters puts it) can demonstrate their concerns regarding the perceived threats to Western democracies, to the Western way of life, and to the equality of women and girls if demographic trends continue as they are.

But they emphasis, too, the presence of numerous “moderate” Muslims in Britain, maintaining that such persons are afraid to speak out against the extremists, and say that they hope that in time their movement will provide those moderates with a vehicle in which to voice their condemnation of extremism and their support for British values. “We are not spreading hate, we are responding to hate,” stresses Ms Waters with feeling.

Whether you are inclined to love the trio in the video or loathe them, they make some very pertinent points. I hold no brief for PEGIDA, but please take a look.

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