Religious Hate:

• Palestinian suicide bombings continued last month (or as security-council sitting, veto-wielding China put out through their state press, "Israel provokes violence to disrupt Palestinian elections"). Suicide bombers attacked a Netanya mall and a West Bank checkpoint. The destination of the latter bomber was to be a children's party. Only the bravery of slain Lieutenant Uri Binamo prevented a catastrophic atrocity.
  Watching Palestinians joyfully march in the streets after savage murders should, even today, still be enough to shock and disgust. Forget the daily, political back and forth of border crossings and parliamentary elections and textbooks and incitement. These are people who embrace a deeply pathological culture that celebrates murder for murder's sake - and the world treats them as gentle and innocent victims.

• Islamist groups also committed religiously-inspired murders against civilians in India, Iraq, and Bangladesh.

• We take it as axiomatic that arguing that five million Jews should be wiped off the map is anti-Semitic. It is anti-Semitic whether the call appears in an Irish newspaper, at a Ukranian university, or on the stage of a United Nations event attended by Secretary General Kofi Annan.

• Not so long ago, Sartre famously diagnosed anti-Semitism as a pathology that affects the very body of the anti-Semite. For the true anti-Semite, there is something inherently dirty about Jewish people and Judaism. In the same way that homophobes are viscerally disgusted by seeing two men kissing, the anti-Semite is disgusted by the thought of seeing or coming into contact with anything Judaism. And so when a Lebanese actor risks his career and financial well-being by breaking a contract to play a Jewish role because he can't tolerate even pretending to be a Jewish villain, it should be taken as a symptom of just how deep the anti-Semitic rot has descended in Arab society.

• Fred Phelps is the execrable leader of the Westboro Baptist Church. The man and his followers are beneath contempt - in the past, they have protested the funerals of gay victims of AIDS and of Matthew Sheppard, screeching that the deceased were in hell. They have recently taken to protesting the funerals of fallen American soldiers. They joyfully celebrate those deaths with signs that proclaim that God killed the soldiers to punish America for its tolerance toward homosexuality. Homosexuals in his home town of Topeka, Kansas used to dress up for Halloween in Phelps costumes, with tire tracks running down the front, and walk around holding hands. We don't know if they do that any more, but it'd be a pity if the practice has been totally abandoned.

• Isolating and describing anti-Semitic rhetoric is not always straight-forward. When the Washington Post's Susan Schmidt and James Grimaldi write an article portraying Jack Abramoff as a beard growing, yarmulke wearing Jew who uses money to corrupt people's loyalty while converting a nice Christian girl to Judaism, that at least smacks of anti-Semitic. But when British cartoonists portray Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a naked savage who eats babies, that's almost certainly anti-Semitic. And now there is a London art shows to prove it.

• Anti-Semitic violence in Australia is 10 percent above average:

  The Herald Sun said that incidents recorded during the past year included arson attacks on synagogues, vandalism and Nazi graffiti on private property belonging to Jewish Australians, assaults on Jewish people, and anti-Semitic vandalism of Jewish schools and synagogues.

  The average, taken from figures starting in 1989, is 301 anti-Jewish attacks per year. In 2005 there were 445 attacks.

• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is totally batshit crazy:

  Ahmadinejad's comments were reported by the official IRNA news agency. "Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw them in jail... Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, we ask the Europeans: Is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem... If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe - like in Germany, Austria or other countries -- to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it"

  Best part of this story: Iran demanding tolerance for their Holocaust denial in the spirit of multiculturalism.
  Under the threat of a nuclear-armed lunatic that half the world has armed while the other half issued pro-forma condemnations, Israeli newspapers have taken to openly mocking his ambitions to become a successful real estate agent. But maybe Europe is right - maybe more condemnations will do the trick.

• More Ahmadinejad wackiness: no more Western music in Iran. We were going to make a Britney Spears and K-Fed joke here and let the whole thing pass, but Daniel Pipes explains why this is a serious development in a link-rich post.

• Holocaust denial also appeared prominently in an Egyptian government outlet. Egypt, incidentally, is treaty-bound not to demonize Jews. And by "treaty-bound", we mean "largely able to do what they want because the international community expects nothing better".

• Hezbollah TV aired a children's cartoon depicting Jews turning into monkeys and pigs before being cast off into the sea - pathological, genocidal hatred being drilled into Muslim children at the youngest age. Years from now, we expect that Western liberals will look at Lebanese students like these and say that they only want to "burn Jews like Hitler" because of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians.

• Among the most consistent and tragic victims of Islamism are the women forced to live in societies either explicitly bound by sharia law or steeped in similar sensibilities. We're talking about a culture where it seems reasonable for religious authorities at the highest levels to blame tsunamis on women who don't wear headscarves. Just yesterday, the AP ran a story about Nazir Ahmed, who slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor".
  Meanwhile, virtually independent Islamist cultures exist today in the hearts of Old Europe. Seemingly every month we learn that an entire family has conspired to kill a daughter or a sister because of some imagined slight that tarnished their honor. And as the murders become more and more common, they of necessity become less and less shocking:

  On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed on her way to a bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and upper body, fired at point-blank range... three of her five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the prosecutor, the oldest of them (25) acquired the weapon, the middle brother (24) lured his sister to the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot her... it is generally the youngest who are chosen by the family council to carry out such murders... German juvenile law sets a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for murder, and the offender has the prospect of being released after serving two-thirds of the sentence...
  Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But... [there are] cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters...The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering. By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother's life - her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage.

  The cultural situation in Europe is even more dire - if not more tragic - than the personal one:

  Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu's capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a statement to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped wearing her head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that she had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle of friends."

  In addition to being criminal and disgusting, these murders thus also serve a pernicious cultural design. They are the tangible enforcement mechanisms for a self-sustaining, rejectionist culture seeking to violently resist any kind of European assimilation.
  Even in Israel, where the understanding of Arab culture is significantly more advanced than in Europe - where Jewish and Arab citizens might live apart at night but often work side by side during the day - at least nine honor killings occurred in 2005. Jonathan Edelstein argues that the problem is compounded by the lack of female Arab leaders, but more influential Arab women might be of little help given the evidence of mothers' involvement in European honor killings.

Idiotarian Seethings:

• Part of the role of HateWatch briefings is to create a sort of topology of idiotarianism - we seek to identify and describe the distinct psychological dynamics that undergird various kinds of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism. Since 9/11 and especially since the Iraq War, we have often seen an idiotarianism made up of equal parts myopia and hypocrisy - gay rights groups marching against Israel and in favor of Palestinian groups that brutally murder gays, feminist groups marching against US democratization efforts and in favor of Islamists that treat women as chattel, etc. But this shrill hypocrisy - subsuming one's progressive goals under vulgar anti-Americanism - is a relatively new phenomenon on the Left. Traditionally, rather than subsuming their goals, the Western Left has been prone to ignoring the risks of trying to achieve those goals at all costs - witness Western Leftists who embraced Stalin and dismissed evidence of his atrocities. This old fashioned kind of ideological myopia still crops up in idiotarian discourse: seemingly every month, a Leftist outlet can be trusted to celebrate Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. We point this out both as a theoretical exercise in categorizing idiotarianism and because Chavez is an anti-Semitic lunatic that is actually destroying Venezuela...

• Not to worry however: the new idiotarianism is alive and well. Witness Howard Dean's endorsement of Code Pink. Code Pink is an anti-war feminist organization so extreme that they pretty regularly flirt with open terrorist sympathizing. Because Islamists are so good to women.

• Perhaps it's too much to suggest that there's something revelatory about how eagerly the media and certain bloggers picked up the totally and completely fake story about Homeland Security officials interviewing a Massachusetts student for trying to acquire a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. Or maybe there is something to the idea that the Left, deprived of an actual dark night of fascism that it can bravely resist, has taken to making one up. Even the hollowest nut still wants to be cracked.

• The resentful ugliness of the Left on display: celebrating Dame Thatcher's failing health.

• Harold Pinter is an idiotarian:

  "Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it."
  Pinter mentioned Saddam only twice in his speech, once in such vague terms as to make you wonder if Pinter really thinks that the torture, rape, and murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis under Hussein’s rule mattered.

  ScrappleFace has the only reaction Pinter deserves, while Brendan O'Neill does the meta on the anti-Americanism of prominent literary figures:

  I reckon the reason why some commentators in the West seem drawn to bin Laden's prose is because at times - and I'm not going to beat around the bush here - he sounds an awful lot like them. Seriously, it is uncanny. What comes across most clearly in this 10 years' worth of rants is the extent to which bin Laden borrows and steals from Western media coverage to justify his nihilistic actions.

• German archaeologist Susanne Ostroff was kidnapped and held by Iraqi terrorists, yet afterwards she announced to everyone that she's on the terrorists' side. She did this because she is a lunatic.

• Cindy Sheehan insisted that she really believes that she received unfairly negative coverage from the media. She did this because she is a lunatic.

• When pathetic, therapeutic self-affirmation substitutes for a political ideology, you get children's books titled "Why Mommy is a Democrat". Turns out, Mommy is a Democrat because "Democrats make sure we all share our toys", because "Democrats always make sure we are safe", and because "Democrats make sure children can go to school". Republicans might argue that this proves that Democrats want the government to redistribute wealth, ban cigarettes, and lock children up in failing public schools. But then again, Republicans don't have talking squirrels on their side.
  
• No, no, no: Katrina was not the Holocaust. And if you needed to know why, Michelle Malkin has a race-based breakdown. Also: no gas chambers in the Convention Center.

• Once upon a time, an impotent academic Left tried to convince itself of its own importance by throwing around phrases like 'textual resistance is genuine resistance'. Much ostensibly intellectual sweat was expended trying to explain why the moral exhibitionism of graduate students sneering at conservatives in a seminar was the same thing as genuine political action. Today, it is largely agreed upon that this period was, on the whole, pretty stupid. But at St. Mary's college, fount of self-importance Ray Beldner has taught an entire course on culture-jamming. We want to avoid getting overly academic regarding the culture jamming debate (even though this game is a lot more fun when you strike a faux pose and nasally celebrate 'the fluid subject positions opened up by Foucauldian micro-resistance'). Suffice to say that culture jamming largely reduces to that scene in the South Park movie where the boys, thinking that the planned execution of Terrance and Phillip really "sucks," plan to "prank call a bunch of policemen [and]... have pizzas sent to them that they didn't order". That the entire existence of the South Park boys reduces to being 10 year olds that curse is also not immaterial to this analogy.

• It's almost comforting in its predictability - Leftist protesters reliably rioted at a WTO meeting. The lack of puppets on stilts was kind of disappointing though. It's almost like their hearts aren't in it any more.

• Though we live in an era when referencing psychoanalysis induces eye-rolling, it is still quite well accepted that the words and phrases that people rely on reveal much about their underlying ideology. Certainly, at least some thought should be given to the fact that John Kerry seems comfortable rhetorically equating American troops with terrorists.

• We think that creating an office in the Department of State to monitor and combat anti-Semitism is like setting a fox to watch a hen-house. Actually it's more like setting a fox's appeasing, oil-soaked, bureaucratized animal-buddy to watch a hen-house, but there's no tired and hackneyed metaphor for that. Regardless, we certainly don't think that it's a "threat to the Liberty (sic) of every American" like this far right group thinks it is. Another special comment from these boards: "aka Israeli-occupied U.S. Government, aka Neoconservativism, aka Dominionism, aka Zionism, aka Trotskyism, aka Communism". We don't even know what that means.

• Steven Spielberg's Munich: factually incorrect, terrorist sympathizing, moral equivocating garbage.

Race and Culture:

• War on Christmas: we don't care. We're not for, we're not against. We don't care. To ACLU-linked partisans: Christmas lights don't burn holes in your retinas, and rays from the sun bouncing off scenes of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus in a manger aren't more likely to give you cancer than other kinds of radiation. To our Fox News friends: no one is trying to take away your Christmas. We promise.
  There are a nuanced discussions to be had here: about the differences between the social sphere in which uncertainty and a little contradiction must be the norm and the legal sphere in which bright lines must be established; about the consequences of political communities constituted as pure opposition; about the depoliticizing of public deliberation; about the way that rhetorical tropes from the science wars are mapped on to the culture wars; and so on. But really, we don't care. Please just stop.

• New reports show that our friends the Saudis have radicalized 80% of US mosques:

  Before the 1970s, [Yehudit Barsky, an expert on terrorism at the American Jewish Committee] explained, "Muslim immigrants who came to the United States would build a store-front mosque somewhere... since the 1970s, the Saudis have been approaching these mosques and telling them it wasn't proper for the glory of Islam to build such small mosques."...
  For each mosque they invested in, the Saudis sent along their own imam... "These [immigrants] were not interested in this [Wahhabi] ideology, and suddenly they have a Saudi imam coming in and telling them they're not praying properly and not practicing Shari'a [Islamic law] properly."... this means that "the people now in control of teaching religion [to American Muslims] are extremists. Who teaches the mainstream moderate non-Saudi Islam that people used to have? It's in the homes, but there's no infrastructure. Eighty percent of the infrastructure is controlled by these extremists."
  The same is true, Barsky said, of many of the mainstream Muslim organizations in America. Many of them are "pro-Saudi and pro-Muslim Brotherhood organizations."

  There are undoubtedly strains of Islam that are peaceful and can comfortably exist within robust, diverse, secular democracies. Apparently they're not the ones being preached in most American mosques.

• Radical Islam has reached Sweden, and the authorities there are just as clueless and just as disabled by banal multiculturalism as the rest of Europe.

• In Saudi Arabia, a court has ruled that an Indian migrant worker is to have his eye gouged out because of a fight with a customer. Charming.

• Sectarian race riots rock Australia. There seem to be no good guys in this one - members of a certain religion attacked white life-guards on a beach, and white youth retaliated by attacking innocent members of a certain religion. Not to give away the ending, but fundamentalist Quakers were largely uninvolved.
  In France, meanwhile, more Muslim rioting remains a constant threat.

• Proving that the Left doesn't have a monopoly on seething, disgusting anti-Americanism, white supremacist Michael Crook has proudly confessed to sending a particularly ugly card to wounded American soldier Joshua Sparling.

• Professional hatemonger David Duke gave an interview to Al Jazeera in which he denied the Holocaust and insisted that neo-conservative Jews manipulated the United States into Gulf War II. Snark is left mostly as an exercise for the reader. Except to say this: the statement "Israel Makes the Nazi State Look Very Moderate" makes little sense when you consider that Palestinians have started two domestic insurgencies and that Israel has responded by taking inordinate steps to shield their civilian populations from retribution (and more recently, has provided them with land for a state). Israel lost a soldier yesterday because he stopped a taxi he strongly suspected contained a suicide bomber. When the suicide bomber was asked to step out of the car, he blew himself up and killed the soldier. All this was done by the Israelis in an effort not to punish innocent Palestinians - even the ones in a car carrying a suicide bomber. The Nazis would have blown up the car as the bomber approached, and then liquidated the town from which he came. But David Duke's hyperbole as an exercise in demonization is given prominent play and respect throughout the Muslim world.

• The execution of Crips founder and multiple murderer Tookie Williams resulted in celebrations of his legacy in neighborhoods throughout America. Hollywood stars whose only contact with street life is when they caricature it on screen rushed to pontificate on various aspects of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's inhumanity.

A Hopeful Note:

• The true consequences of Middle East democratization are neither as largely irrelevant as some on the Left of the blogosphere imply nor as unconditionally positive as some on the Right of the blogosphere insist. The specter of "one man, one vote, one time" - of Middle East populations voting themselves into Islamofacism - remains a real threat. Nonetheless, it would be churlish to deny the outpouring of humanity and freedom that accompanied the parliamentary elections in Iraq and the parliamentary activity in Afghanistan.

• Britain's new Tory leader David Cameron knows that anti-Semitism is bad. So that's reassuring. If Britain wasn't a hotbed of intellectualized anti-Semitism, it would be even more reassuring. But c'est la vie.

• Ukraine's President Yuschenko knows that anti-Semitism is bad. So that's reassuring. If Ukraine wasn't a hotbed of violent anti-Semitism, it would be even more reassuring. But you take what you can get.

• We always have problems deciding whether to use these stories as punch lines to "Religious Hate" blurbs or to post them as legitimate "A Hopeful Note" bullet-points. This initiative actually seems genuine and so here it is:

  Leaders at the biggest-ever Muslim summit on terrorism vowed Thursday to fight extremist ideology, saying they would reform textbooks, rein in the issuing of religious edicts and crack down on terror financing. Kings, heads of states and ministers from more than 50 Muslim countries closed a two-day summit held in Islam's holiest city, Mecca, that had been convened in a bid to address terrorism that has increasingly confronted their own governments and to counter criticism that the Islamic world has been doing to little to confront extremism.

• Many of the most astute commentators on the war against global Islamism believe that Old Europe is lost. Germany is at least sometimes making an effort not to let that happen all at once.

• It's easy to mock Saudi Arabia's grandiose concession to think about maybe letting women drive (we certainly did at the time). But positive change comes slowly to insulated society and this is positive change.