“McCarthyism” is sometimes defined as “the use of unfair
investigatory or accusatory methods in order to suppress opposition.”
Some would claim that this describes very well how critics of Muslim
immigration in the West have been demonized during the previous
generation, especially by Leftists. Carl I. Hagen, leader of the
right-wing Progress Party, was for several decades virtually the only
Norwegian politician of some stature that warned against the madness of
the current immigration policies. And he was hated for it by the
establishment, denounced as a racist pig, Nazi and subject to every insult
in the dictionary. During the 1990s, when there were still many people who
took the “Oslo Peace Process” seriously, he went in demonstrations in
support of Israel and with the slogan “No money for Arafat.” The
public now understands that he was right, which is why his party has grown
from being a tiny protest party to being at the brink of replacing the
Labor Party as the largest political party in Norway, for the first time
in 80 years. Why doesn’t Mr. Clooney or other Hollywood personalities
make a movie about Carl I. Hagen, Pia Kjærsgaard of the Danish People’s
Party, Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or
others that have been warning against the madness of Muslim immigration?
They are the real victims of the “new McCarthyism.”
Glorification of anti-democratic fanatics has penetrated Western popular
culture in other ways than movies. Che
Guevara’s face is cropping up everywhere, from posters to t-shirts.
Che is famous for helping Fidel Castro shape the Cuban revolution. Later,
he was in charge of La Cabana prison, where he oversaw a military tribunal
which condemned scores of counterrevolutionaries to death without trial.
“Hatred,” he said, is important. It makes you, he reflected, “into
an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.” He
helped set up a police state in Cuba, and negotiated the stationing of
Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuba in 1962. He later became furious when
Moscow removed them following the Cuba Crisis. “If the rockets had
remained, we would have used them all...” He spoke of “unimaginable
destructiveness to defend a principle.” Yet this murderer and symbol of
an ideology that killed 100 million people during the 20th century is
treated as a pop icon in the democratic West.
Michel Foucault is one of the best known and most widely read
philosophers of our time, familiar to hundreds of thousands of Western
University students. During and after the 1978-79 revolution, Foucault
visited Iran twice and also met with Khomeini in Paris. Much of
Foucault’s work is grounded in the problems of modernity in Europe. Thus
he became fascinated with the Iranian revolution because it “challenged
the Western model of progress.” He wasn’t the only Western
intellectual who was seduced by the “revolutionary energy” displayed
in Iran. The age of marriage for girls was reduced to 9 years, tens of
thousands of political opponents were arrested, tortured and killed, young
women were raped in prisons as a matter of routine to prevent them from
entering Paradise as virgins, and barbaric, medieval laws were re-enacted
for tens of millions of people. Apparently, for some Western
intellectuals, anything is excusable as long as you are anti-Western and
have a “revolutionary cause.”
Phyllis
Chesler writes about the Culture War in academia, where both Western
leftists and Islamists employ a systematic misuse of language, writing
about “insurgents,” not “terrorists,” whom they describe as
“martyrs,” not “killers, and as “freedom fighters,” not as
“well educated evil men.” Meanwhile, hateful anti-American and
anti-Israel demonstrators are described as “peace activists. She
believes that Western academy has been “utterly Palestinianized.” Our
Islamist opponents have turned out this propaganda non-stop around the
world. As propagandists, they are “far more sophisticated than Goebbels,
and far more patient.”
Yale University in the US admitted a former Taliban
spokesman, Rahmatullah Hashemi, as student. He was the chief
translator for Mullah Omar in Afghanistan. Female Afghan parliamentarian
Malalai Joya said Hashemi was one of the Taliban’s top propagandists and
called his status as a student at Yale “disgusting” and an
“unforgivable insult.” Yet people at Yale fired back and said it was
the critics of Yale and Rahmatullah Hashemi who were the real
Taliban, and that excluding him would “ takes us one step closer
into the Taliban-like suppression of views that challenge the party
line.”
Robert Fisk is a veteran British foreign correspondent. During a visit
to Australia, Fisk said: “I see this immense world of injustice . . .
and I must say given our constant interference in the Middle East, I’m
amazed that Muslims have been so restrained.” In fact, so
“restrained” are they that Fisk wasn’t sure how much they can be
blamed even for the terror attacks of 9/11. He often spoke in the US, he
said, and “more and more people in the audience believe the American
administration had some kind of involvement”. “ …the worst I can
envisage is that they know something was coming and they preferred it to
happen so that their strategy could be put into place.”
Ironically, it seems as if some of the chief defenders of democracy and
Western civilization now are immigrants. Britain’s first black
Archbishop made a powerful attack on multiculturalism, urging English
people to reclaim their national identity. The Ugandan-born Archbishop of
York, Dr
John Sentamu, said “that too many people were embarrassed about
being English.” “Multiculturalism has seemed to imply, wrongly for me,
let other cultures be allowed to express themselves but do not let the
majority culture at all tell us its glories, its struggles, its joys, its
pains,” he said. He said that the failure of England to rediscover its
culture afresh would lead only to greater political extremism. “What is
it to be English? It is a very serious question,” he said. “When you
ask a lot of people in this country, ‘What is English culture?’, they
are very vague. It is a culture that whether we like it or not has given
us parliamentary democracy. It is the mother of it.”
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