LILEKS (James) Screedblog

Friday, February 03 2006

Godwin’s Law says you’ve lost the argument the moment you invoke Hitler. Example: “I love my dog.” Response: “Well, so did Hitler.”
Ergo you’re a Nazi. Godwinizing the debate should always be avoided, and no doubt eyes rolled when some commentators equated Hamas’ electoral victory with Hitler’s ascendance. Sure, they both have a thing about wiping out the Jews, but other than that, it’s just Godwinian over-simplification. One small problem: in the recent Palestinian elections, there was a candidate named . . . Hitler.
And he won! As the New York Times put it: “The candidate's name is Jamal Abu Roub, but everyone here calls him Hitler because, well, that is the name he has answered to quite comfortably since he was a teenager.” Wonder why. His distinctive moustache and plastered-down hair, no doubt. Maybe he sat around the coffeehouse all day demanding the remilitarization of the Rhineland. Mr. Hitler ran on the sclerotic corrupt Fatah ticket, not the dynamic hunka-hunka-burnin’ hate Hamas ticket, but he won anyway. No doubt commentators would opine that Mr. Hitler must now moderate in order to lead, and perhaps would change his name to Albert Speer.

If the election proves anything, it’s that Hitler can win and people still won’t see the parallels to the last big batch of professional Jew-haters – no matter how crazy they get. The election was barely over, and the celebratory bullets hadn’t all pattered to earth, when the demands began. Israeli National News quoted Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar on the key issue of the day: the insulting affront presented by the Israeli flag. "Israel must remove the two blue stripes from its national flag", said Zahar. “The stripes on the flag are symbols of occupation. They signify Israel's borders stretching from the River Euphrates to the River Nile."

Yes, indeed. And the fifty stars on the American flag symbolize this nation’s desire to occupy and annex the Milky Way. European diplomats will shrug off Zahar’s demands, just as the Iranian president’s pearls of wisdom are dismissed: he’s only playing to his base. Perhaps, but what does that say about the base? Nothing! They elected Hamas because they were fed up with the corruption of Fatah, just as Americans, tired of Nixon’s skullduggery, voted in the Birch-Klan-Commie Axis in ’74. Or something like that.

In any case, Hamas will have to govern now, the apologists say. Collect the trash. Or, more like, blame Zionist jets for strafing the garbage trucks. They might well “improve” the schools, but since they’ve already announced they’ll will impose Sharia, this might not sit well with secular Palestinians. (Helpful note to angry emailers: this is where you point out that some Christians want to teach Intelligent Design in Kansas, which of course is exactly the same thing as segregating students by sex and teaching the girls why driving is a sin.)

This should surprise no one, really. And if you don’t think it has any bearing on anything outside Gaza, consider this: last September a Danish newspaper published some satirical cartoons about Mohammed, which simply isn’t done. Compared to the illos you find in the Arab press, which could be described as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for Dummies,” the cartoons were mild – but some people will brook no dissent. In Gaza, armed men stormed an EU office to protest the cartoons, and a group called “Holy War” demanded all Nordic-types leave in 48 hours. Odd how quickly tolerated enlightened Europeans can descend to US status, eh? It’s almost as if support for those anti-Israel UN resolutions counted for nothing.

Former President Clinton, in full weathervane-mode in Qatar, denounced the cartoons as “appalling” and “totally outrageous.” “So now what are we going to do?” he asked. “Replace the anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice? . . . In Europe, most of the struggles we've had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism," he said. We? Bill Clinton now speaks for Europe? He continued: "Because people see headlines that they don't like (they will) apply that to a whole religion, a whole faith, a whole region and a whole people?" he asked.

No. Just the ones who vote for Hitler.

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Thursday, February 02 2006

No comment.

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Tuesday, January 31 2006

I read stories like this, and the very first paragraph makes me tired.

A UNIVERSITY Christian Union has been suspended and had its bank account frozen after refusing to open its membership to people of all religions.

I could understand a University turning a cold narrow eye to a group that declared, in its charter, that nonbelievers and sodomites alike would be cast into the lake of fire on Judgment day - and to prepare them for that event they would be set alight should they attempt to attend a meeting of the Christian Union. But:

Members claim the actions have been taken against them after they refused on religious grounds to make “politically correct” changes to their charitable constitution, including explicitly mentioning people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered.

Personally, I suspect that the organization would welcome anyone who showed up for services, and not inquire too closely about what they wish to do with whom. But the Union isn’t in trouble for excluding people. They’re in trouble for not rewriting their constitution to “explicitly mention” some noisy people who, one suspects, are less interested in access to this particular group than enforcing the use of a wide bland smear of magic words that somehow insulates them from exclusion. It gets richer:

The Christian Union was advised that the use of the words “men” and “women” in the constitution were causing concern because they could be seen as excluding transsexual and transgendered people.

So apparently the “Men” and “Women” sign on lavatory doors will be the new “Whites” and “Coloreds.” It’s a parallel world, these places, but they’re also a preview of coming attractions. Not that Wal-Marts in Oklahoma will have bathrooms next year whose doors say “YOUR CALL.” But somewhere in Oklahoma they will have this same tired argument at some point, and the end result will a setback for gay rights, no matter how it goes, and a setback for those sympathetic to gay-rights issues. Including, if I may be presumptuous, many gays. I suspect that the number of gay people who have a vested interest in exploding the concepts of “men” and “women” into a big happy smear of genderless pod-folk with no discernible gender identity is rather small. There’s gender-blending going on in the G and L communities, of course, but you could say the same thing about heterosexuals; look at any celebrity mags and you find the gamut - girly-girls to strapping Amazons, waif-lads to burly bulked-up heroes. No reason that shouldn’t show up in other sexual orientations. But there’s still a line; there’s still Men and there’s still Women. Obviously, if you know what I mean. If the movement becomes dedicating to insisting that there’s just Societal Constructs having a rave in the middle of a Venn Diagram, the entire movement becomes easily dismissible on the grounds that it has lost its fargin’ mind and advocated a species that consists entirely of Mobys with full-body Brazilians and fuzzy pixel-mosiacs in the groinal area. Like they use on COPS when they don’t want to show the faces of someone who hasn’t signed the release form.

This seems a rather reasonable observation, but I’m sure it strikes some as a demand we return to the old days when drag queens were sent to institutions and forcibly lobotomized.

It’s not hate speech to assert that there are, in fact, such things as “men” and “women,” but it will be. Only in places where nothing really matters, granted. But these things have a way of changing discourse, changing language itself – the way “sex” has become “gender,” a word that carries a faint but pungent whiff of all the gender-study courses that regard the suburban rambler as Dachau for Women. (Note to anyone who stumbled across this without any context: I am a stay-at-home dad with a lawyer wife, and I am raising my daughter to be a painter-mathematician-astronaut. Don’t even try.) It’s possible that “men” will gradually turn into “males,” which seems more anatomical, and hence nothing for which you can blame anyone; penises happen. “Men” sounds almost Shakespearean nowadays; “men” is a word you’d use to raise the troops’ morale, bind them to history: Men of the West! We Stand Today For Glory and Freedom and Mead! Somehow an Army of Men sounds more fierce than an Army of Males. “Men” connotes a group, a closed circle, a bond. “Males” could be showroom dummies lined up in a row, or leaned against a wall in a warehouse.

Words mean something, as people always say when they’re annoyed by words that now mean something else. A strange example was in our paper today. A vegan boutique has opened in St. Paul, and was given a nice-sized story in today’s paper, complete with photo. Spot the phrase in the next excerpt that made me sigh:

Living in Los Angeles in 2003, Jon found vegan boutiques in San Diego, San Francisco and Ventura, Calif. He said that others exist in New York City, but that his is the only 100 percent cruelty-free vegan boutique in Minnesota.

“Cruelty-free,” eh. I wish the paper had used quote marks as I just did; it’s one of those phrases that needs to be set off as a matter of opinion. Because frankly, it makes the paper look as though it believes that non-vegan items are, well, cruel, and the matter is not in dispute. Unfortunately, two of the examples given in the piece are honey and silk. Yes, honey is cruel. So many bes coming home to an empty comb: WTF? And Brother Silkworm is cooked to make silk ties, 3000 per cravat. Apparently it is cruel to boil worms. If that’s the case, then I should stop giving my dogs those pills that poison the innocent li’l parasites in his gut. I enjoyed this:

To usher in a Hempy Valentine's Day, for example, you can get a free organic lip balm with a trade-in of lip salve made with petroleum or lanolin -- a fatty substance that comes from sheep glands.

Am I to assume that petroleum-based lip balms are cruel, because plankton died to form the petrochemical deposits?

I have no problem with anyone who wishes to go vegan; we all have our dietary quirks for reasons great and small. But “Cruelty-free” is not a term we should let pass without quote marks. Small thing, I know. As one copy desk editor explained, the term comes in a paraphrase of the fellow’s remarks, so you could say we weren’t passing along the term without comment, but it’s debatable – and it certainly didn’t seem that way to me. All it takes is a few stories like this, a few examples where people get used to “cruelty-free” living large without the shackles of quote marks, and the term becomes shorthand for a truth.

Eventually, the world is finally set right; men are Males, Christian groups don’t use bad exclusionary words like “Christian,” hemp socks are cruelty free, and conversation has the nice smooth sound of lowing beasts, neither giving offense nor taking it. All is well.

Fine. Good. Now. What next shall we fix?

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