Hatewatch Briefing 2005-10-21

Welcome! This briefing will be looking hard at the dark places the mainstream media sometimes seem determined to look away from, to better understand our declared enemies on their own terms and without illusions. Our goal is to bring you some of the top jihadi rants, idiotarian seething, and old-school Jew-hatred from around the world, leaving you more informed, more aware, and pretty disgusted every month. This Winds of Change.NET HateWatch briefing is brought to you by Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric. Past briefings and posts on related topics can be found here.

HIGHLIGHTED TOPICS

• Religious Hate: UK poetry schoolbook celebrates the Holocaust; Terrorists celebrate Ramadan with more murder; Islamists threaten Danish newspaper because of cartoons; Swedish Radio Islam director insists Jews run the world; Anti-Semitism in Russia; British Islamists declare war on the West

• Idiotarian Seethings: Mugabe: Bush = Hitler; Democratic Underground: Buth = Hitler; ISM tours the United States; Today Show fakes canoe ride to embarrass Bush; Berkeley cancels Veteran's Day parade; Harriet Miers reax

• Race and Culture: Harold Pinter wins Nobel Prize for Literature; New Orleans cops beat African-American; Neo-Nazi march in Toledo triggers riot; NBA accused of racism for new dress code; Louis Farrakhan returns with Million More March; Islamic fundamentalism used as legal defense for gang rape

• A Hopeful Note: Documentary on 9-11 debunks anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; Namibian paper to apologize for celebrating Simon Wiesenthal's death; Demands for reform gain steam in Saudi Arabia

Religious Hate:

• The degree to which even the most vulgar anti-Semitism is now within the spectrum of acceptable discussion in the UK just boggles the mind:

  A poem which praises the murder of Jews by the Nazis has been included in a book of children’s poetry to be distributed amongst schools in the UK... The entry by the 14-year-old Gideon Taylor is apparently written from the viewpoint of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
  It includes the lines "Jews are here, Jews are there, Jews are almost everywhere, filling up the darkest places, evil looks upon their faces." Another part reads: "Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races, on their way to a gas chamber, where they will sleep in their manger... I'll be happy Jews have died."

• Ramadan celebrations continue for radical Islamists with religiously-inspired murders in the Philippines, Russia, and Thailand. Meanwhile, Jordanian TV is airing a special Ramadan series depicting a "global Jewish government" and portraying Jews slaughtering a Christian child to use his blood for Passover matzos.

• Sometimes, as in Denmark, fundamentalist Muslims don't like cartoons. Sometimes, as in Denmark, they don't like those cartoons so much that they threaten to kill newspaper publishers, writers, artists, etc.

• The director of Swedish Radio Islam is pretty anti-Semitic:

  In a September 30, 2005 interview on Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV, Ahmad Rami, director of "Radio Islam" in Sweden, stated that the Jews had, via the media and politics, completely occupied the West and the entire world, that "the Jews in Sweden, Germany, France, and America have rights that even the citizens of those countries do not have," and that "Judaism is not a religion, [but] a criminal and dangerous mafia."

  Europe continues to refuse to put Hezbollah on their terrorism list. Possible explanation: they don't want to discomfort the Islamist radio station directors coming from the vast, unassimilated Muslim populations in the hearts of their cities.

• Anti-Semitism in Russia threatens to spiral out of control.

• British Islamists have declared a new Jihad against the West because "the kuffar wants to force their own homosexuality on the Muslims."

Idiotarian Seethings:

• President Mugabe of Zimbabwe spoke to applause at a United Nations meeting, repeatedly comparing President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to Hitler and Mussolini. We would question how Mugabe - a fascist who maintains his power by creating and manipulating racial and anti-Semitic animus - can get away with comparing anyone to Nazis and fascists... but if Hitler himself came back and, speaking on the floor of the UN, compared Bush to Hitler, we're not sure that everyone would see the irony.

• Democratic Underground denizens spent two or three days trying to justify the kind of knee-jerk "Bush = Hitler" analogies that Mugabe used with such aplomb. See, inter alia,

  when someone complains about comparing bu$h to Hitler... I come back with maybe he should stop doing Hitler like things

  They respect Hitler enough to capitalize his name, but President Bush isn't afforded the same deference. In the most rigorous academic sense, this argument is quote-unquote really, really dumb. Usually, the argument that "Hitler wore pants, you wear pants, ergo you're Hitler" is used at the end of a slope down which you accuse your opponent's arguments of slipping. But on this thread the very first response on the very first thread is:

  "Bush is the new hitler. 91101 was reichstag. Iraq was Poland. Iraqis are Jews. Gitmo is Dachau. (no ovens? oh well, there are still too many parables).

  Except Bush wasn't involved in 9/11 like the Nazis were involved in the burning of the Reichstag; except Hitler never urged the Poles to form their own army and vote on their own Constitution like Bush has done in Iraq; except it's disgusting to state that a place where deference to Islam extends to handling the Koran with clean gloves and two hands "in a manner signaling respect and reverence" and where prisoners are served gourmet food "is" Dachau, a place where Jews were humiliated, starved, gassed, and burned for being Jewish.
  There comparisons would be silly if they weren't so pervasive and nefarious - Democratic Underground writers and readers might not be the base of the anti-war Left, but they certainly have aspirations to that effect.
  In fairness, one poster said:

  Hitler... seems to be the friend of the lazy arguer, who wants to make their points on a grand scale but lacks the energy or time to actually expand their ideas till they fit on that scale.

  and another one pointed out:

  I don't think anyone's forgetting Hitler or saying that it could never happen again but, rather, that the comparison is entirely inappropriate.

  They were shouted down as naive.

• The International Solidarity Movement is embarking on a national speaking tour to preach nonviolence. As far as we can tell, sometimes ISM activists are violent and sometimes they just stand there - as nonviolent human shields for terrorists.

• Preceding a segment declaring that the Administration "staged" an impromptu talk between soldiers and President Bush - a claim that has turned out to be somewhat difficult to maintain - the Today Show went and just thoroughly humiliated themselves:

  A preceding segment focused on the incessant rains and ensuing flooding in the northeast. For days now... reporter Michelle Kosinski has been on the scene for Today in New Jersey, working the story. In an apparent effort to draw attention to herself, in yesterday's segment she turned up in hip waders, standing thigh-deep in the flood waters. Taking her act one step further, this morning she appeared on a suburban street... paddling a canoe. There was one small problem. Just as the segment came on the air, two men waded in front of Kosinki... and the water barely covered their shoe tops... Kosinski's canoe was in no more than four to six inches of water!

  This new trend of soaked, emoting newscasters has to stop.

• This is why the Right often finds the Left's "we support the troops but oppose the war" mantras somewhat disingenuous:

  Berkeley's Veterans Day ceremony, scheduled for Nov. 11, was abruptly canceled on Monday because the volunteer organizing committee split over the political content. At issue was a proposal by the chairman, singer/songwriter Country Joe McDonald, to have Bill Mitchell, a co-founder of Cindy Sheehan's organization, Gold Star Families for Peace, as the keynote speaker.

• Harriet Miers: conservative opponents way too angry, liberal opponents way too crazy. Conservative supporters just kind of silly. Some people have been trying to elevate the level of debate, but it's the blogging equivalent of trying to turn back a hurricane with a fan.

Race and Culture:

• Maybe he's a good choice and maybe he's even a very good choice, but awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Harold Pinter still seems like the confirmation of a trend. There's just something about him that makes him seem like all the other recent laureates (bonus: in addition to being rabidly anti-American, he's also a total lunatic when it comes to Israel).

• New Orleans cops severly beat an African-American man. Not for nothing, but we're guessing that, when considered in conjunction with the NOPD's disgraceful performance during the Katrina aftermath, this isn't good.

• Local residents in Toledo, Ohio took strong exception to a planned neo-Nazi march through a predominantly black neighborhood. Now, people obviously shouldn't use violence to stop other people from expressing opinions - but on the other hand, a healthy society is practically defined by what is de facto excluded from public deliberation and what is within the range of things a person is willing to say out loud. So while in general one should always be against hecklers' vetoes, in very, very specific circumstances we're willing to just kind of shrug. On the other hand, this doesn't seem to be one of those times.

• NBA Indiana Pacers guard Stephen Jackson is claiming that a new ban on chains worn over clothing is "a racist statement" from the NBA. The League says that they're just trying to make their athletes look professional. We're not sure it's racist to ban chains - but we are pretty sure that if it was racist, then the excuse of "professionalism" would beg the question of who counts as a professional and whether that standard is racially unequal.

• Charging America with criminal neglect, Louis Farrakhan returned to the public scene with the Millions More March on Washington. Both the ADL and Wonkette still think he's kind of anti-Semitic. Wonkette is much funnier about it.

• When people on the Right point out that fundamentalist Islamic cultures are nothing short of barbaric to women, it's "cultural imperialism" or "racism". When slimy lawyers in the Anglosphere say the same things in defense of violent Pakistani gang rapists, it's "a spirited legal defense":

  A violent gang rapist should have been given a lesser sentence partly because he was a "cultural time bomb" whose attacks were inevitable, as he had emigrated from a country with traditional views of women, his barrister has argued. MSK, who, with his three Pakistani brothers, raped several girls at their Ashfield family home over six months in 2002, was affected by "cultural conditioning... in the context of intoxification", Stephen Odgers, SC, told the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal yesterday.

A Hopeful Note:

• Filmmaker Marc Levin's new documentary, "Protocols of Zion," seeks to debunk the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories swirling around 9/11. Joshua Neuman thinks the humor of the documentary will be effective - then again, Neuman is the editor and publisher of Heeb magazine, so he's got more than a little invested in the idea that irreverent comedy which sounds a lot like anti-Semitism can help combat anti-Semitism.

• The Namibian newspaper which ran an ad celebrating the death of "the big monster" Simon Wiesenthal has come under intense and extended criticism. It now intends to issue an apology.

• MEMRI covers demands for political reform in Saudi Arabia.