How to Fight Blood Libel

This is a must read, for every one of us. If any of you were bothered by the accusations thrown at the 'right' after the Norway shootings, or the silly Giffords "bullseye" campaign, then do yourself a favor and check out this article from Sultan Knish.
And if you weren't, check it out anyway!

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It's a long way from Arizona to Oslo to Tel Aviv, but all three places have been the sites of major blood libels against the right. And a reminder of what to do in these situations.

2011 has seen the launch of two major blood libels aimed at the American and European right. The Breivik shootings and the Giffords bullseye. In both cases, the left tried to politicize an unstable man's shooting spree to silence and intimidate the political opposition. But my own experience goes back to the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. A blood libel on an epic scale. There are common lessons to be drawn from all these events.

Each event played out in three phases. Shock media coverage that splattered the full details everywhere, followed by calls for the right to accept moral responsibility for the killer's actions. In the final phase, the right atones by practicing self-censorship so that, "nothing like this can ever happen again."

But let's follow a different path instead. A guide to how to handle these situations.


1. Avoid Panic and Self-Doubt

Panic is a natural response to suddenly being accused of being part of a movement of murderers. Non-stop coverage of every gory detail is upsetting even when you aren't being held responsible for it. It's far more upsetting when you are.

Self-doubt sets in. "Did my words help cause this?" or "If I had known this was going to happen, I would have been more careful." This too is natural. Sane human beings are built to take responsibility. And we make sense of larger events by connecting them to ourselves. Additionally political activists often have an element of grandiosity in their character, which in such situations works against them.

As natural as these responses are, they have to be shut down. In normal events, they are part of the process. It's normal to think, "If I had done this or that differently..." in just about any crisis. But in this event, your emotions are being manipulated.

Your self-doubt is the product of a carefully orchestrated media campaign. Its goal is to silence you and then enlist you into a campaign to silence others. It will use your human emotions against you. It will exploit your morality and your sense of responsibility, your grief and your shock, to take away your rights and turn you into a foot soldier in their cause... if you let it.

Conservatives are hit harder by the sight of internecine violence than liberals. Most conservatives want a stable and harmonious society. The left doesn't. It is not particularly bothered by the sight of Americans killing Americans, Israelis killing Israelis or Norwegians killing Norwegians. Their revolutionary cause is trans-national and political violence is proof of radical sincerity. But to conservatives, acts of domestic terror are devastating and make them question everything they are working for. The left knows this-- and it knows how to use this.

Don't get tricked into participating in a circular firing squad. Remember you are not responsible for an individual's acts of violence. Not unless you encouraged him to act. The media will draw specious connections, which will not hold up for long even to the general public.

That's the paradox. The average Israeli was not convinced that the right killed Rabin. The average American did not believe that Sarah Palin's map or talk radio caused a shooting in Arizona. But some on the right did believe it and and began seeking penance for a crime that no one outside the left believed they were guilty of.

Why did some on the right believe what the general public did not? Emotional manipulation. When you're close to an event, your emotions cloud your judgement. The blame seeking propaganda of the left is more effective against the right, in such situations, than against the general public whose emotional involvement diminishes rapidly after the first few days. This is why it's important not to let your emotions be manipulated...

[Read the rest at Sultan Knish]

How Four Influential Socialist Anti-Semites Shaped the Left

Everybody knows the left can't possibly be anti-Semitic. It's just anti-Israel, and anti-Nationalist, and anti-Jewish, and anti-Semitic.
Because of this truth, here's an article by Daniel Greenfield, who shows, yet again, that leftists wishes only to help Jews, by making sure they'd be gone forever.
How thoughtful!

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1. Karl Marx

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist… The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”

Marx’s influence on the socialist movement and its various streams cannot be underestimated, and neither can the extent to which his view of Jews as the embodiment of capitalism became embedded on the left.

In a handful of sentences, Marx depicted Jews as the anti-thesis of Socialism, a theme that he was to repeatedly revisit, and more poisonously in such essays as “The Russian Loan”, where he implicitly suggested that war would continue for as long as the Jews existed.

“Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew… In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.”

Coded forms of this thinking can still be found among leftists who blame wars on Wall Street and assemble Jewish neo-con war conspiracies. The linkage of capital, war and the Jews made Anti-Semitism a permanent part of Socialist thought. Since the Holocaust its expressions have become more coded, but the essence remains.

While Marx did not invent Socialist Anti-Semitism, he helped grant intellectual legitimacy to left-wing populists who merged worker’s rights rhetoric with bigotry. But Marx’s formulation implicitly set the elimination of the Jews as a necessary step to the end of war and capitalism.

2. H.G. Wells

“And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community.”

While H.G. Wells is best remembered today for a handful of futuristic novels, some of his more significant work of the time envisioned the creation of a utopian, yet totalitarian socialist state. And arguably the European left has followed his plan a little too closely.

Wells follows Marx’s linkage between Jews, capital and war. The elimination of the Jews as a separate people is necessary for Wells’ modern world state to come into being. So while in “The Shape of Things To Come”, he disposes of Christianity in a single paragraph, and Islam in another (Wells supposed that Islam would disappear as Arabic fell into disuse), but several paragraphs are devoted to the elimination of the Jews.

The hostility toward Israel is manifestly there. The Jews are described as abandoning the Socialist cause of creating the world state, preoccupied instead with “the dream of a fantastic independent state all of their own”. “Only a psycho-analyst could begin to tell for what they wanted this Zionist state,” Wells sneers.

Wells’ solution to Marx’s Jewish Question was to wipe out the Jews as a distinct people, without engaging in physical extermination. But religion, state and even a distinct ethnic identity had to go.

Even as the Nazi Holocaust had begun, H.G. Wells wrote in The New World Order (1940);

“The hostile reaction to the cult of the Chosen People is spreading about the entire world to-day… there has never been such a world-wide—I will not use the word anti-Semitism because of the Arab—I will say anti-Judaism… it is becoming world-wide and simultaneous… Until they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify.”

It was a more elegant phrasing of a Julius Streicher quote from that same year, “The time is near when a machine will go into motion which is going to prepare a grave for the world’s criminal – Judah – from which there will be no resurrection.” ...

Click here for the full article

The Kushnerites and the Whiny Left

"Long after McCarthy's death, the left is still battling McCarthyism everywhere it finds it. Whenever an 'artiste' is called to account for supporting mass murderers, there the left rises in outrage against the latest manifestation of the scourge of decency. The insulting and outrageous idea that the cultural elite should be held accountable in some public way for the human consequences of their radical causes. To hold a leftist morally accountable for Stalin, Mao or Castro is McCarthyism. And the left's swarm against any such effort is Kushnerism."

Personally, I am constantly disgusted with the cowardly hypocrisy of 'artists' in Israel, who can be trusted to steadfastly stand by whatever narrative is the most hateful and detrimental to their own people.
In their own minds, they are 'courageous' and 'sane', while in reality they are nothing but common, indoctrinated traitors, who choose to blindly follow the propaganda of their enemies, and mask it with second grade, self-serving moralist nonsense.

Daniel Greenfield dismembers one such American (and I use this term very, very loosely) hypocrite, Tony Kushner, who cries 'foul' over the rather timid response to his shameless support of the terrorist regimes in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.
A must read article for anyone who despises the pseudo-cultured elites, and their pathetic attempt to satisfy their sense of self by attacking those who don't fight back.

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McCarthyism is is one of the favorite words in the dictionary of the left. "McCarthyites" are awful people who get "brilliant and talented artists" who happen to sympathize with mass murderers fired from lucrative positions. The 'victims' of McCarthyism sympathized with Communist regimes where dissenting artists were tortured, imprisoned and executed. The victims of these victims went to the gulags. And the 'victims' lost out on a few movie deals.

Long after McCarthy's death, the left is still battling McCarthyism everywhere it finds it. Whenever an 'artiste' is called to account for supporting mass murderers, there the left rises in outrage against the latest manifestation of the scourge of decency. The insulting and outrageous idea that the cultural elite should be held accountable in some public way for the human consequences of their radical causes. To hold a leftist morally accountable for Stalin, Mao or Castro is McCarthyism. And the left's swarm against any such effort is Kushnerism.

Tony Kushner is the latest victim of McCarthyism, suffering the awful indignity of being briefly denied an honorary CUNY degree, after being caught supporting a terrorist regime whose victims, men, women and children lie in the hospitals and the cold dead ground. A moral reckoning that would seem petty to men, women and children murdered by the terrorist regime he supports..A brief delay for the reward of a lifetime of writing plays in which actors shriek at each other about Capitalism, AIDS and McCarthyism in between chardonnay breaks.

Poor Tony, with all his Tony awards, his Pulitzer, and his marriage to an Entertainment Weekly editor, forced to wait a few extra days to add a sixteenth honorary degree to his shelf. He may be the man that Steven Spielberg chose to rewrite the Munich Massacre into a morality play about the futility of fighting terrorism, he may be dubbed a "brilliant and talented artist" and the moral voice of Fire Island, but he almost lost out on an honorary degree from an institution known in New York to be just like home, because when you go there, they have to take you in

What is so remarkably pathetic about Kushner and his comrades on the whiny left is that they have the moral sense of a child who cries when he's called a name, yet draws no conclusions about the wrongness of his own namecalling.

To hear Kushner and his supporters tell it, when he endorsed a boycott of people who happen to live in the town of Ariel, that was a courageous act, but when CUNY trustees boycotted him, that was McCarthyism. It's one thing to punish people for where they happen to live, but another to punish him for punishing people for where they happen to live. That's just wrong.

Artists shouldn't be boycotted for boycotting others. They shouldn't be criticized for slandering others. Respecting their artistic vision means giving them a monopoly on the persecution of others. And recognizing their genius for how brilliantly talented their persecution of people who happen to live in the wrong place is. That's the difference between McCarthyism and Kushnerism. McCarthyites persecute the artists. Kushnerites persecute the people, until someone cries foul, and then they cry McCarthyism.

It's not enough to be a "brilliant and talented artist", attend events like the Communist Mannifestivity celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, in the company of other "brilliant and talented artists" like Amiri Baraka, who too fell victim to a Hebraic McCarthyism when he was evicted from the post of Poet Laureate of New Jersey after writing a poem that claimed the Jews were behind 9/11 and serve the devil. It's not enough to push the edge, when you are denied the trophies from such renowned institutions of higher learning as Brandeis or CUNY. It's not really about the degree, it's about the degree of the drama. What's life for a playwright without a little drama. A chance to climb up on the cross of McCarthyism and belt out your victimhood to the back rows.

With all his awards and trophies, Tony Kushner has become mainstream. A terrible fate for a man whose only talent was a gift for wrapping his radicalism in pretentious clothing, biblical metaphors, discourses on civilization and the occasional Hershey bar. The creativity of radicalism is validated by how many people you shock and offend. But Épater la bourgeoisie is harder to manage when the bourgeoisie cheer and applaud all your plays. And then before you know it, you are the bourgeoisie, managing your stock portfolio, buying instant coffee and wearing brand name workout clothes, and then the bourgeoisie have to find someone else to shock them.

Kushner's work isn't as shocking in the eleventh year of the new millennium, as it was during the Reagan Administration. And critics are allowing themselves to admit that they begin to nod off a little during the fourth hour of one of his productions. Or during the fourth sentence of the title of one of his productions which read like they were badly translated from the Welsh.

AIDS and gay rights stopped being cutting edge around the time Kushner and his life partner got their wedding to appear in the Vows section of the New York Times. Blasphemy is as shocking to Manhattan theater goers as Seinfeld reruns. And attacks on capitalism and Western civilization are casual after dinner conversation among the type of people who actually patronize Broadway when the Rockettes aren't in town. It's hard to shock and offend audiences who have no more values left. Short of joining the Republican party, there isn't much he could do that would summon more than a yawn from a crowd that goes to his plays because they're important in some indefinable way.

McCarthyism is the best tonic to revive the flagging career of a playwright. It is testimony that the bourgeoisie have been shocked. The 'artiste' is being persecuted by the ignorant mob for telling the truth. And that just goes to show his greatness. To be a victim of McCarthyism is a far greater tribute than a CUNY honorary degree. It is the highest honor on the left, rendered as it is by those to the right of them.

The left manufactures its own persecution because it validates its own radicalism. The Kushnerites pick an unfair fight and then climb up on the cross of McCarthyism when the blowback comes. And the flurry of letters flying in from Park Slope, the Upper East Side and Berkeley sung to the tune of labor anthems and marching songs from the Spanish civil war give them the rush of fighting the establishment long enough to block out the awareness that they are the establishment. That they are not being persecuted, but that they are the persecutors. And to prove it, they find more fights to pick.

The truly cutting edge have already marched past J Street and Peace Now for being insufficiently committed to jumping all over the Jewish state until it is just little bits and pieces, and gone right to Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization known for its boycotts and wink-wink nudge-nudge support for destroying Israel. Kushner sits on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, alongside such luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Ed Asner, Wallace Shawn and Robert Meeropol, the younger son of the Rosenberg Atom Bomb traitors. (The Rosenberg's spawn was the also the one who nominated Kushner for his honorary degree.) If there were a Jewish version of the abominable jury convened in The Devil and Daniel Webster, the JVP board would fit the role nicely.

L'affaire Kushner has given the pro-terrorist left another stage to trot out its victimhood fantasies. But that stage is a narrow place. It has no room for the victims of terrorism or the people who were censored and suppressed for their opposition to terrorism. Like Thomas Klocek or Lennart Eriksson, men who lost out on a lot more than an honorary degree for their courageous and principled opposition to Terrorism and Kushnerism. And what does one make of the postmodern Kristalnachts of broken glass in Ahava stores. The boycotts of Israeli professors for the crime of being born.

The left makes war in the name of peace. Progressive boycotts, liberal doses of censorship and democratic socialist bricks hurled through Jewish windows. But the moment the shoe is on the other foot, they gasp in outrage that someone would dare stand up to them. The Kushnerites are not meant to be under fire for their views. Only their targets are. Like most bullies, they can dish it out, but they can't take it.

The left wants to have it both ways. They want to storm the barricades and then break off for a meal at a five star restaurant. They want to be radicals, but they don't want to be inconvenienced.

If Kushner wants people to suffer for the place they happen to live, shouldn't he be willing to suffer for his views? But the Kushnerites confuse suffering with whining. Their entitlement leads them to act like the Wicked Son at the Seder, but then demand to be treated like the Good Son anyway. Punch them in the teeth and they cry for a lollipop and a signed statement that from now on they will have a monopoly on the punching. They channel their inner Cain and then wonder why they must wander the earth to and fro instead of receiving their honorary degrees.

Tony Kushner could concede that this is a political disagreement, but instead he cries that he's been slandered. Which is easy enough to do when Kushner's own views on Israel are nearly as convoluted and disingenuous as one of his own plays. He sits on Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization best known for its program of boycotting Israel, but claims that he doesn't endorse their program. He's only there because he has the ability "to tolerate and even value disagreement". An impressive superpower certainly, but then he could just as easily sit on the board of AFSI or Z Street, his ability to tolerate and value disagreement would find plenty of use there. But no one sits on the board of an organization that they disagree with. Sometimes they sit on the boards of organizations they're afraid to fully agree with.

Kushner gratuitously bashes an entire country and then when called on it cries that it was taken out of context. His screed claims that he is against Israel because he opposes ethnic and religious involvement in government. But for some reason he isn't on the warpath against England and eagerly supports the creation of a Palestinian state whose law is Islam. Every time the anti-Israel left reaches for principles, they discover they aren't there. Their positions lack consistent principles. Their rage is selective. As is their logic. The roots of the problem are not in the Middle East, but in their own minds.

Tony Kushner accuses Jeffrey Wiesenfeld of being a bully, but then what do you call a celebrity who gathers together his friends for an assault on the board member of a publicly funded college in order to extract an honorary degree for himself. It's behavior that would make most bullies hang their heads in shame.

Marxist heroine Barbara Ehrenreich and Communist apologist Ellen Schrecker have announced that they will be returning their degrees. This left CUNY's Honorary Degrees for Commies program in a jam. the wheels quickly spun into motion to get Kushner his degree, alongside such notables as a disgraced governor's father, a former schools chancellor, a former mayor and a former chief state judge. It's not hard to see why. Without Kushner's red card, the CUNY honorary degrees begin to look like a sop to former city and state officials, with a successful radical or two in the deck.

Kushner boasts that he has 15 honorary degrees. Now he will have 16. Eventually he may have so many that he can dive into them and swim around in them like some bohemian Scrooge McDuck.And the man who believes that Israel's existence is a mistake, but the creation of a terrorist state on top of it isn't, will receive an honorary degree in time for Israel's Independence Day. A shot in the name for the career of a fading radical waiting around for someone to denounce him, so he can climb up on his three legged stool of moral superiority. Another victory for Kushnerism.

Give Me Ten Dollars and I'll Tell You Why Capitalism is Evil

I'm sure our readers are aware of Michael Moore on some level, even if they didn't watch any of his films. Personally, I've seen one about gun control, and the commercials to another about the healthcare system. Until now I've merely thought of the man as a cheap sensationalist pandering in fear and propaganda, but there's more to him than that. Michael Moore is a grade-A hypocrite who promotes himself by bashing the same system he uses to make money.
More on that in the article below.

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The advance promotion and interviews for Michael Moore's latest agitprop movie, Capitalism: A Love Story are well underway. The message of the movie, produced and distributed by the millionaire capitalists at Paramount, the Weinstein Company and TCI cable company spinoff Overture Films has as its message, what else but the evils of capitalism. Capitalism you see is bad, except when it's good.


The Weinstein Company, the production company behind Capitalism: A Love Story, does have its reasons to be down on capitalism. After leaving behind Miramax, the company they sold for a cool 70 million to Disney, the Weinstein Company has not been faring too well in the free market. Capitalism requires actually getting people to give you money in exchange for your products and services. And the Weinstein Company's biggest success up until this year was another Michael Moore screed against free market health care, Sicko. Now the Weinsteins are hoping to cash in with Capitalism: A Love Story in order to bring in new investors so that their company can continue its capitalistic existence.

It's of course easy enough to point out the irony of millionaire businessmen and entertainers preaching against capitalism as if they were radicals squatting in abandoned basements, not living in Moore's Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. And Michael Moore climbing up on his high horse to contend that "Capitalism is evil" and that it has to be replaced, is particularly ironic when you consider the message comes from a man who made millions hypocritically preaching slogans just like that to college students, while using the money to build up a portfolio of Haliburton, pharmaceutical, defense and oil company stocks.

What is particularly wonderful about Michael Moore's portfolio is that there is hardly a corporate field that he hasn't inveighed against... and invested in; thus letting him make money from condemning defense companies, Haliburton and the pharmaceutical industry, and earn money from investing in them at the same time. In the corporate world this sort of thing used to be called, synergy. Michael Moore can rant about the evils of war, free market health care and oil companies... and then invest the millions made from box office and book sales into those same companies. Because Michael Moore in the end is one thing above all else, a capitalist.

When Michael Moore shouts that the wealthy want all our money, he does know what he's talking about. After all the writers who worked on his TV show have gone into detail about how Michael Moore tried to deny them Writer's Guild standing and residuals, demonstrating that Moore put all his research into union busting to good use in the office. But that is par for the course for Moore, who denounces the rich for making money, sending their children to private schools and oppressing the workers-- only to make money, send his own children to private school and oppress his own workers.

When Michael Moore travels around the world with a team of bodyguards delivering paid lectures on the evils of making money,the obvious question becomes, is Michael Moore a self-hating capitalist or a hypocrite? The answer, like most of the left, is a little of both.

The left's anti-capitalist rhetoric after all is based on capitalism. Can anyone imagine the modern left without Woodstock, the Ford Foundation or George Soros? When you shove aside the populist distractions the roots of the left are just as corporate as anyone. Even the Communist Part of the United States has its investments and stock portfolios. And as the Obama Administration's corruption reminds us, the left is certainly not a non-profit organization.

It's possible to debate whether or not Al Gore believes in his own global warming alarmism, but he certainly doesn't live it. Instead his lifestyle of jet plane trips around the world and his hefty mansion are just the tip of the iceberg of a huge fortune, most of it made from turning his global warming cause into corporate bucks, Cap and Trade is the very embodiment of how the left fuses anti-capitalism with capitalism, making money trading futures created by penalizing people and companies who produce carbon emissions.

Similarly Michael Moore may talk about "dividing the pie equally", but his actual charitable contributions have been scant at best. And Michael Moore isn't about to share the proceeds of his films alike with the editors, grips and staffers and hundreds of other people involved in bringing his movies to theaters. Instead Moore pocketed half the gross for Sicko himself, in an upfront deal worthy of a true capitalist. And it's safe to assume that he has just as good a deal this time around, or an even better deal, in which he stages scenes with sympathetic or unsympathetic people, ladles the carefully edited result out for the public at 10 dollars a head, and pockets the profits.

Capitalism: A Love Story will be making money for Moore, the Weinsteins, John Malone of Liberty Media's Overture Films (who ironically enough sits on the board of the meta-capitalist Cato Institute) and Paramount's executives and stockholders. It will make that money by selling anti-capitalist sloganeering to leftists, college students and people too stupid to know any better... by a man who plays a radical on the big screen, and a traditional bloodsucking profiteer off it.

But the underlying story behind Capitalism: A Love Story is about far more than Wall Street, it's about the way that the left profits from slamming capitalism. Moore, like his former employer Ralph Nader, follows in the great tradition of demagogues who rise to fame by claiming to stand up for "the little guy". For the left such demagoguery can be a reliable way of making money while retaining their radical cred. And even more so for the left, anti-capitalist regulations is a get rich scheme for lawyers, bureaucrats and their corporate friends, who are always ready to hitch something like Cap and Trade to the anti-capitalist wagon.

Michael Moore's form of capitalism is Leftonomics, in which money is made not from success, but from denouncing the success of others. Moore is the court jester of the Democratic party, acting out a working class charade in a party of limousine liberals insecure about their own wealth, providing the propaganda tools to connect their agenda with the manufactured working class outrage peddled by a grotesquely obese millionaire, who without the flannel and lazy grooming could easily pose for the moneybags toting capitalist villain of a 19th century socialist cartoon. And the cause he agitates for, government regulation and centralization, continues the process his career has been built on, taking from the sons and daughters of the middle class to give to the progressive rich. Capitalism you see is bad, except when it's good for enriching the left.

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The Original Article.