The Little Zionist

http://www.jonathanfreedland.com/articles/archives/000329.html

Banal senseless fluff from Jonathan Freedland. My favourite bits:

“their desire to have what we Jews yearned for so long, a homeland of our own where we might govern ourselves — is nothing more than a collective plot to deny Jewish suffering. So those Palestinians living under curfew and hemmed in by checkpoints aren’t angry about this hardship or desperate to throw off a 40-year occupation.” This ancient people is indeed desperate to throw off the shackles of the Zionist oppression and return to its natural state as a self-governing, politically distinct entity.

“They snap up copies of her book Londonistan, in which Britain — a rotting, decayed island awash with amorality — is on the brink of an Islamist takeover.” ‘Look at crazy old Mel’, says Freedland incisively.

“London is not the Warsaw ghetto, that Europe is not an inferno and that there is no need for the big US bodies to come to Anglo-Jewry’s rescue.” This country is indeed a fantastic place to be Jewish, just as tolerant as America.

“They have also had to explain that the US method of doing business — offering heavy financial help to pro-Israel MPs, for example — would not play well here.” The Jews are rich people who use their money to garner political support. This is bad.

I really struggle to believe that Freedland could happily publish this banal article under his own name. How can he not find it humiliating that people are reading his dull dull dull rubbish?

I’ve just been sent this link. Thank God we still control the rest of the media.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Zionist

Yesterday I edited a Wikipedia article for the first time. I looked up Melanie Phillips, thinking that I could remove anything nasty and untrue put up by Melaniephillipswatch types. I’d had a conversation in that glorious Cambridge establishment The Maypole a week or so ago about the Phillips article, and it was mentioned that Phillips’ Jewishness had been emphasised rather too much. The friend who mentioned this to me said he had removed ‘Of [[Jewish]] descent’ as he thought the information to be of spurious relevance. So when I looked up Mad Mel yesterday, this phrase had reappeared as the first sentence in the ‘Education and career as a journalist’ section - before the actually relevant information that she ‘read English at St Anne’s, Oxford, before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo’ etc. etc.

Someone obviously thinks that the information is so important, and relevant to MP’s education and journalistic career, that they have reinserted the same phrase several times - I’m currently on my second edit of the page.

I also removed ‘and Puritanical’ from the bulletpoint - She is socially conservative (to be found under Poltical Views). And added this sentence and link ‘Melanie Phillips offers a cogent argument that the ‘liberal’ left that regards her as essentially right-wing and illiberal has been perverted, and has come to represent libertarian rather than truly liberal thinking. In this important article Phillips declares that she is a ‘progressive’ and defender of liberal democracy. The article is available here.’

Since this story remains bizzarely underreported, here is a link for anyone who is silly enough not to read Melanie Phillips

clever mad Mel

BBC - Mayor is suspended over Nazi jibe

Funny how these little fascists always seem to align themselves with ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom of speech’ these days. Ken Livingstone reckons that the decision to suspend him from office for four weeks “strikes at the heart of democracy.” It wasn’t Livingstone’s comparison of a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, but his refusal to see anything wrong with the remark, that landed him the four week suspension. He stands by his comment, claiming that “he was expressing his honestly-held political view of Associated Newspapers, but he had not meant to offend the Jewish community.” This seems rather odd to me. I know the horror of the Holocaust is being eroded daily by abusive comparisons to Israelis, and the hijacking of Holocaust memorial day etc. etc. etc., but surely it has not been so stripped of meaning that comparisons with Evening Standard journalists are now seen as legitimate and “honest”.

I found this on Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch site. On first reading I was confused, now I am rather uneasy. The guy who wrote it just seems to take too much pleasure and amusement from what he’s writing. I am worried that I’ve completely misunderstood, and am just not getting the joke.

Here’s the link

I must confess that I am taking very much pleasure in Mr. Galloway’s self-inflicted humiliation, and (hopefully) imminent downfall. Here is a link to a picture of his pretending to be a cat, and sipping milk from some actress’ hand. Oh, if only I had a television.

I read this and it made me sad…

Death Toll Rises to 345 in Hajj Stampede

The annual hajj stampede story is usually not on topic for this site. However, the fact that the British sent an observer to Saudi Arabia this year to study how the Saudis manage to control hajj crowds so well makes this a prime Dhimmi Watch item.

Do you think that Jawaid Akhtar, assistant chief constable with West Yorkshire Police (WYP), is thinking today that he wasted his time studying Saudi crowd control techniques? Somehow I doubt that he is.

Now, I won’t bother adding a link, as this is the whole article. 345 people die and a few sarcastic lines are the response provided by Dhimmi Watch, the blog section of Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch website. As far as I can see this post serves no purpose; it does not amuse, or provide information, or do anything other than make a disgusting joke. How can you claim the moral highground in the battle against anti-west, anti-Israel terrorists, and take pleasure or amusement from what happened in Mina? This is morally equivalent to the Schadenfreude exhibited by many Palestinians when Ariel Sharon was taken ill.

Sometimes I read Melanie Phillips and think she is too conservative even for me..

From her diary (11th Jan.)

I’m all for civil partnerships. I do, though, worry what the psycholgical implications of being brought up by a same-sex couple would be for a child. But on the whole I’m all for it. It seems ludicrous to me to deny people in committed relationships the rights that are exended to others in similar committed relationships. So anyway, I was a bit upset when I read the first lines of her 11th January article on this subject; Mrs Phillips claims to have found “Further evidence that the Civil Partnerships Act, which bestows the contractual and legal benefits of marriage on same-sex couples, is part of an agenda to destroy marriage altogether”. Paranoid, I thought. Perhaps she had earned her moniker Mad Mel. It seems, however, that she’s not some paranoid fantasist…

register offices have been instructed to purge the words ‘marriage’ and ‘wedding’ from signs inside their buildings. They are being forced to remove signs directing couples and guests to ‘marriage’ or ‘wedding suites’. References to marriage will be retained only where they are a legal requirement

My faith in Mrs Phillips: restored. My faith in the government’s Women and Equality Unit: certainly knocked, if not shaken. I mean damage done to the ailing institution of marriage aside, it is just a bit silly. I’m very glad that political correctness stops people going around saying ‘ dirty Arabs’, and telling me I really ought to be learning to sew and getting married and knocked up, er, i mean pregnant. But, God, why can’t everybody just be sensible. And get along.

While hanging around the Experimental Psychology library looking for interesting reading material last term, I found a pile of blue ‘Psychologist’ magazines about 3 months past their sell-by date. I picked up one in order to avoid doing any of my work; you cannot resist the opportunity for some instant edification when it is packaged so shinily and bluely. Sadly, I realised that the magazine’s articles ran the full gammut of rubbishness, just a lot of discursive tosh for the psychlogy student. So, standing strong in my quest not to conjugate any Hebrew verbs, I turned my attention from the pursuit of edification, to the pursuit of puerile entertainment.
Once I’d finished reading about the evolution of couple therapy, I read a psychologist’s response to the public’s reaction to the July bombings. It seems that fear, obviously the most immediate reaction, produces a desire to regain some control of the situation. This is in turn translated into avoidance or anger (an emotion that is apprently easier to deal with and control). So you either get on your bike, or defiantely head for your local tube station the next morning. To me this all seems pretty obvious, and hardly worth couching in the pseudo-scientific terms favoured by the ‘CJ’ who signed his initials at the end of this article.
CJ did put forward some interesting information, though; a study by Dr. Jennifer Lerner, a social psychologist at Carnegie Mellon universtiy in the US, showed that both the anger and fear responses were easily intensified. The anger response by, for example, watching a video of Arabs in Iraq celebrating the attacks. The intensification of anger was shown to trigger a more optimistic outlook, and a decrease in feelings of fear and wariness.
The study concluded, fairly predictably, that taking participants who were already judged to be reacting with fear, and showing them a video warning about the dangers of a possible anthrax attack made them even more scared.
If the media wants to produce the kind of courage - or bravado - that makes the public ride the tube the day after an attack, its power to do so is clear. This kind of defiant response is what disarms terrorists; if we really are not afraid, then we can deny them the effectiveness of their human weapons, and we can formulate our response to terrorism rationally.
The obvious responsilities born by a media that can so manipulate our feelings aside, there is a crucially important judgement call to be made when covering terrorist attacks in a country so unused to them. Fearlessness, when faced with a second attack, can wilt into fear. Politicians claiming that we must carry on with our lives, and defy the terrorists are essentially saying that they have the situation under control. As soon as there is a second attack, the public’s confidence in this control and in their leaders’ judgements can be shattered, leading to more widespread fear. In order to disarm terrorists, we do need to carry on as normal, and words such as Ken Livingstone’s ‘Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail’, can play an important role in inspiring the public to do so. However, we must be so careful that this bravado does not work against those who preach it, and shatter into fear the next time we are attacked. As for me, I think my anger response was pretty much set in stone from the minute I heard the news.