The voiceover man

At last. I have found the name of the guy who does the voiceovers of film trailers, the one with the deep, smokey voice that does action, zany comedy and lovin' 'n' carin' and always sounds like he's about to begin a session of coitus uninterruptus. His name is Don LaFontaine. It's not that I really wish ill upon him or his family in a deeply personal sense (I do realise it is just the use that he is put to), but couldn't he be asked to voiceover a bust of Mohammad, or do the commentary on Submission 2, and have a fatwa hurled at him and be hunted out of circulation by some local rent-a-jihadi?



I found this out thanks to Ninme who shows this ad, which, despite all the above, I quite liked.

The Holocaust's Arab Heroes

From an article by Robert Satloff in the Washington Post.

From June 1940 to May 1943, the Nazis, their Vichy French collaborators and their Italian fascist allies applied in Arab lands many of the precursors to the Final Solution. These included not only laws depriving Jews of property, education, livelihood, residence and free movement, but also torture, slave labor, deportation and execution.The Arabs in these lands were not too different from Europeans: With war waging around them, most stood by and did nothing; many participated fully and willingly in the persecution of Jews; and a brave few even helped save Jews.

Arabs welcomed Jews into their homes, guarded Jews' valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, shared with Jews their meager rations and warned Jewish leaders of coming SS raids. The sultan of Morocco and the bey of Tunis provided moral support and, at times, practical help to Jewish subjects. In Vichy-controlled Algiers, mosque preachers gave Friday sermons forbidding believers from serving as conservators of confiscated Jewish property. In the words of Yaacov Zrivy, from a small town near Sfax, Tunisia, "The Arabs watched over the Jews."

I found remarkable stories of rescue, too. In the rolling hills west of Tunis, 60 Jewish internees escaped from an Axis labor camp and banged on the farm door of a man named Si Ali Sakkat, who courageously hid them until liberation by the Allies. In the Tunisian coastal town of Mahdia, a dashing local notable named Khaled Abdelwahhab scooped up several families in the middle of the night and whisked them to his countryside estate to protect one of the women from the predations of a German officer bent on rape.

And there is strong evidence that the most influential Arab in Europe -- Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris -- saved as many as 100 Jews by having the mosque's administrative personnel give them certificates of Muslim identity, with which they could evade arrest and deportation. These men, and others, were true heroes.

According to the Koran: "Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world." This passage echoes the Talmud's injunction, "If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world."

Arabs need to hear these stories -- both of heroes and of villains. They especially need to hear them from their own teachers, preachers and leaders.

(via Harry's Place)

Interview with Bassam Tibi

Excerpts from an interview with Bassam Tibi, 62, born in Damascus, a German citizen since 1967.

SPIEGEL: The administrator of one of Berlin's opera houses, the Deutsche Oper, has cancelled the Mozart Opera "Idomeneo" out of fear of an Islamist reaction. Is this the first sign of Germany bowing down to Islam?

Tibi: It's not the first sign, but rather a repeated one. Recently we have been seeing more and more acts of submission, the most recent case being the Pope's apology. When it comes to Islam, there is no freedom of the press nor freedom of opinion in Germany.


SPIEGEL: Many Germans believe that communities should live together peacefully without any parallel societies. Is it therefore right to compromise in order to avoid antagonizing Muslims unnecessarily?

Tibi: Quite the opposite. The Islamic officials who live here are very intelligent and view this as weakness. Muslims stand by their religion entirely. It is a sort of religious absolutism. While Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization. They confuse tolerance with relativism.

SPIEGEL: When something insults Muslims, we often tend to just back off -- doesn't this help defuse the conflict?

Tibi: No. That is simply giving up. And the weaker the partner is viewed by the Muslims, then the greater the anger which they express. And this anger is often carefully staged.


Tibi: Pluralism and tolerance are pillars of modern society. That has to be accepted. But pluralism doesn't just mean diversity. It means that we share the same rules and values, and are still nevertheless different. Islam doesn't have this idea. And Islam also has no tradition of tolerance. In Islam tolerance means that Christians and Jews are allowed to live under the protection of Muslims but never as citizens with the same rights. What Muslims call tolerance is nothing other than discrimination.


SPIEGEL: But what is astounding is that you see yourself also as an example of failed integration. You have been working for 30 years at a German university, you have written 26 books in German and have been awarded the Federal Cross of Merit. Why, out of anyone, are you not integrated?

Tibi: It's more to do with a feeling of belonging. In Germany it is not a contradiction to say, Mr. Tibi is Syrian and has a German passport. In France however it is. And in America it would be a reason to take someone to court, as you are excluding them from American society. Even after 40 years here, I'm still not German. I also believe that I have not progressed higher as a professor here because I am a foreigner. When I retire I will be leaving Germany and going to Cornell university...America's strength is that it is capable of accepting people into its communities.

There's that ineluctable sign of rot again: emigration.

(via Harry's Place)

Lies, damn lies and the quiet life

It has always struck me as peculiarly innocent that people should be shocked and outraged when it is discovered, or claimed, that a politician has been slippery with the truth. Yet I can't see how a politician can be squeeky clean. Aside from any personal motives of shame or ambition, just dealing with the daily realities of political life means his relations with fact and fiction are always going to be extremely promiscuous and conducted through the back door.

An illustative case is that of Tony 'Bliar'. His mendacity was thus immortalised because he told 'the British parliament and people' that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat, a man armed with frightening weapons of mass destruction which the tyrant would not hesitate to use. There follows invasion, search of the high and the low, creased brows and admission of the non-existence of said armaments. Ipso facto, he is exposed to all as a liar.

However, you are a liar if at the time of speaking, you are aware of the lie. In fact, at the time of speaking, Tony 'Bliar' was merely repeating what all and sundry believed to be true. All and sundry in this case includes the secret services of France, Russia and Germany and even, it seems, the generals in Saddam's own army. That everyone thought Saddam had WMD was the consequence of Saddam's previous behaviour, no effective infiltration of Iraq so that hard intelligence could be obtained and Saddam's dissimulation. Blair might have been wrong, but he wasn't lying.

Yet there was a deception, one of omission. The search for WMD was the least of the reasons for going to war. It was just the only feasable one to bring before the court of public opinion and the United Nations. Well above that were the desirability of regime change, the remapping of the Middle East and the need to shake up some of the regimes there. All very good reasons both for us and for them. But not good enough for the public either here or abroad.

So what do you do? In the 1930s Winston Churchill knowingly exaggerated the threat from Germany because he could see where it was going and needed to convince people of its gravity. He failed, not because he was being untruthful, but because people just didn't want to know. Blair believed that Saddam was dangerous to us all, not imminently but eventually. He had believed that at least since 1997. September the 11th was the jolt that set the train moving.

But people here, and in the US, France, Germany, do not want to think of a world in which we have to fight and kill to protect ourselves. That's cowboy thinking; we're beyond that now. Aren't our societies built to avoid just that? Yes. Ours are. Others aren't. But we've been born, brought up, educated to and inculcated with peace; we're not ready to be yanked back to the frontier. So what does he do?

According to Callaghan, democracy was a system that led societies to the edge of ungovernability, and that was the best place to be for an advanced human society. In such a system, lies could push society over the edge.

And, yet, the advanced Western democracies have lived, and continue to live, with some basic lies - lies that electorate likes to hear. The former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok had a nice formula: the entire welfare state was based on the lie that the same guilder could be spent many times over.

Whatever lies Blair told about Iraq were far less damaging than the ones we tell ourselve about the world and our place in it. His lies do him honour. Ours do us shame.

YouTube Goes Dhimmi 2

Dinocrat shows a couple of the videos that YouTube leave up and running at the same time as they censor Michelle Malkin.

I feel the earth move

Jack Straw seems to have received wide popular support for coming out and saying that faces blotted out by the niqab make him feel ill-at-ease and that he requests (not demands) that the women remove it. The issue is not just a question of personal discomfort on his part, but of the "implications of separateness" that the niqab raises. The force of the positive response to his comments on the part of the non-Muslim majority was matched by the negative response by some Muslims.

On both sides there would seem to be an over-reaction. Yet perhaps it is because we all feel the ground moving under our feet, and this slight tremor is just a fore-taste of what is to come. For what Straw's comments undermine in a very small way is the notion that all cultures are, in every context and in every way, equally valid. This vision of the multi-cultural society that does away with any hierarchy of values has come into question here since the July 7th bombings. In its spiritual home, Holland, the doubts go deeper and the reaction against it is stronger and bitterer. The death of Theo van Gogh and the controversial departure of Ayaan Hirsi Ali are just the two outstanding milestones in the decline of Dutch multi-culturalism. People there are reacting with their feet to this utopian folly gone sour, and getting out.

It could never have worked. But the reaction to it may be worse than the folly itself. A few commentators have reminded us that it is not the 'British way' to tell people how to dress. They're right. While it is necessary that immigrant cultures recognise the primacy of the culture that gives them the freedom to worship as they wish, it would be self-defeating for the 'centre' to impose itelf too heavily. The primacy of the centre must be assumed, rather than continually asserted. It would be too easy to erect an icon of British culture and at first pretend and then insist that it must be maintained as is forever and at all costs. We would all suffer from that.

Guantanamo

Claudia Rosett on philly.com

Since the United States began bringing suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives there more than four years ago, Guantanamo has hosted visits by more than 1,000 members of the media, from more than 500 news organizations - including Qatar's Al-Jazeera, Egyptian TV, and such Arabic-language newspapers as Al Sharq al Aswat and Al Hayat. More than 300 lawyers have descended, many offering pro bono services to the detainees.

Humanitarian groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have come to view the military commissions that review individual cases. Official emissaries have dropped by from Europe. Four times a year, delegates arrive from the International Committee of the Red Cross, spending a month each time to talk privately with the detainees, check their condition, and offer them a chance to contact their families.

(via Instpundit)

Stoning or 100 lashes?

Under the headline "Stand Against Women Stoned to Death You Apathetic Monsters", Ali Eteraz appeals for help in the case of seven Iranian women who are about to be stoned to death for 'adultery'.

In another post, he explains the scriptural justification for this law and then makes a campaign pitch. Evidently, the Koran decrees a punishment of 100 lashes for this crime. It is only in a hadith that the stoning comes in, though most Muslim jurists maintain that the hadith abrogates the Koran. Ali Eteraz shows himself to be a true pragmatist because he takes the position that a campaign should be waged for the 100 lashes. While he acknowledges that the effect (death) would be the same, the idea is that this sentence would become the most severe and that campaigners could then concentrate on getting it reduced to zero lashes.

He writes very engagingly and not only knows his Islam, but knows other things too. Long may he prosper.

By-the-by, evidently Ahmedinejad's approval rating has sunk to Bush-like levels. What the significance of this may be, I have no idea. But it's the sort of thing you don't hear too often.

(via Harry's Place)

Agitprop

Oliver Kamm on the myths of Cable Street.

[Robert Skidelsky writes] "It is partly true the opposition stopped Mosley from marching, but the reality is that he was asked to call it off, he gained support as a result of it, and he wanted to call it off anyway as he had an engagement in Berlin [to secretly marry Diana Guinness at Goebbels's house] the next day. It was all a bit less heroic than it seemed."

Mosley's support in the area increased after the Battle of Cable Street, as did anti-Jewish violence. The so-called Pogrom of Mile End, in which Jews and their properties were attacked, took place a week afterwards. The anti-fascist protests were, on the evidence of one participant (my great-aunt, Margaret Kamm, who spoke to me about it many years later), politically hobbled and hijacked by the Communist Party. There is a longstanding mythology on the far Left of direct action whereby fascism was stopped. In fact Cable Street had little to do with Mosley's increasing isolation and defeat. The British party system, in which all the main parties (Labour and the Liberals included, contrary to modern selective interpretations) made horrendous misjudgements about the gravity of the threat from Nazism, proved resilient against both political extremism and the forces of economic depression. Mosley was a sinister and repugnant figure, all right, but his bombastic absurdity - attempting to transplant the symbols of fascism to an altogether different political culture - along with the vicious sectarianism of extremist politics were the main influences in undermining his superficial appeal. By the time of his internment in 1940, he was an utterly discredited figure.

The main attraction of the myth of Cable Street is for parties that stress the politics of the street and revile parliamentary democracy. Their celebration is doubly inapt, first because it wasn't street protest that defeated Mosley, and secondly because the forces of bigotry are not ones that those parties oppose. The fact that the area is now represented in Parliament by a blustering demagogue, George Galloway, who is supported by an unequivocally antisemitic organisation, the Socialist Workers' Party (for which the Respect 'Coalition' is an electoral front), is an irony too obvious to comment on.

John Howard once again

John Howard once again says what needs to be said.

Mr Howard said the left had a history of denigrating the nation and was now doing the same with the war in Iraq, describing Islamic terrorism as the new tyranny.

He said Australian universities were still breeding leftists and described pro-communists of decades past as “ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests”, Fairfax reports today.

Mr Howard said the left was wrong in its view that the Cold War was an equal struggle between the ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union.

“It became the height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship,” Mr Howard said in his speech.

(via Ninme)

Further

Today, free and open societies face a new tyranny, the tyranny of Islamist terrorism. One with at least a family resemblance to the great struggles against forces of totalitarianism in the past. A Czech writer once wrote with great prescience that: ‘You can’t build utopia without terror, and before long terror is all that’s left’.