Political Correctness at the Olympics

The hypocrisy of the IOC in refusing to allow a minute of silence for the murdered Israeli athletes has been well covered elsewhere. But what shocked me about last night's ceremony was that there was clearly plenty of opportunity to insert a tribute without having to get into a debate with the IOC about a minute of silence. When the ceremony included a 'moment of reflection where we remember those who are no longer with us' I thought that at least now we were going to see some acknowledgement in front of the world. But what we got were simply hundreds of pictures of unspecified people (who apparently were dead relatives of spectators along with victims of the London bombings). Why those dead people are more relevant to the Olympic games than athletes actually murdered at the Games I do not know. And, contrary to the previous claim that there was no time for a tribute to the murdered Israelis, I reckon that this 'wall of reflection',  together with the singing of 'Abide with me' that followed lasted about 7 minutes.

There was also a second opportunity at the end to acknowledge the dead Israelis by including, among the people selected to hold the Olympic flag at the climax, Ankie Spitzer (wife of murdered athlete and campaigner for Olympics remembrance). Instead - to fit in with the political correctness of the whole event - we got a selection of people who are supposed to have 'worked against racism'. All - apart from - the ludicrous Ban ki-Moon (the totally useless UN president) and Daniel Barenboim (more of him below) were black and they included the truly bizarre choices of: Shami Chakrabarti (President of 'Liberty') who is best known for her opposition to any attempts to limit the free movement of known Jihadist terrorists, and Doreen Lawrence who is the mother of a murdered black teenager who fought to get his white murderers convicted. Doreen Lawrence is, no doubt, a decent woman but why her attempt to get justice for her murdered loved one is more important or relevant than Ankie Spitzer's - or indeed than hundreds of other mother's of murdered teenagers in the UK I do not know. No doubt a mother of a white murdered teenager who fights to get his black murderers convicted would be called a racist rather than a promoter of anti-racism. The choice of Daniel Barenboim was the ultimate insult to the Israelis. Here is an 'Israeli Jew' who hates Israel so much that he has taken on Palestinian citizenship.

Ultimately, therefore, the blame for the failure to insert some remembrance to the murdered athletes last night  goes not to the anti-Semites of the IOC but to the British organisers of the ceremony. If David Cameron truly wanted the memorial to the Israelis - as he has claimed - and if Danny Boyle truly was the obsessive anti-racist campaigner that he claims to be, then how comes their conviction failed to produce even the tiniest acknowledgement in a ceremony which they - and not the IOC - had total control over?  All it would have taken was a single image on that large screen showing the faces of the 11 murdered Israelis and the words "Israeli athletes murdered at Olympic Games 1972".

But of course, like most left-wing 'anti-racists' there are some forms of racism that Danny Boyle is blind to and that is racism against the Jews (the other is racism by Muslims against anybody).

p.s. on a completely separate note regarding the political correctness of the ceremony it was interesting that the centrepiece was a Soviet style tribute to the National Health Service. As Andrew Gilligan comments today:

The idea of the Health Service as a beacon for the world is, bluntly, a national self-delusion. Most other Western European countries have better state healthcare systems – and healthier people – than we do.

And far superior medical treatment is available in the US where there is only very limited 'public' funding (at least until Obama gets his way to make the American system as bad as the British).

The Left has a real problem with Islam - and we have to pay

I found out from an excellent article here that the (unelected) European Commissioner for Home Affairs is a Swedish socialist called Cecilia Malmström. This led me to discover a speech printed in full on the EU website that this unelected official made at Harvard University on 30 April 2012.

Anybody worried about the increasing impact of the EU on our lives should read this article. If I were to write a parody of what an insane Socialist would say to a bunch of left-wing American academics then it would be something like this article. Sadly it is not a joke. It actually is a statement of official EU policy in response to the 'Arab Spring' and it is one of the most frightening and ignorant things I have ever read. It is not just incredible that this policy has been pushed through by an unelected clique, but that nothing has been said about it in the main stream media.

The policy, in a nutshell, is as follows:

1. We think the Arab Spring is a fantastic move to democracy but to make sure everything turns out fine we are going to transfer massive amounts of money and other favours to the Arab countries involved. For example Malmström says "we are seriously stepping up our financial assistance (1 billion € extra on top of the 5.7 billion already available)". There is no mention of how the EU can afford this at a time when many of its countries are facing financial collapse.
2. The EU has an ageing population and a lack of "skilled and talented" workers, which together means the EU will eventually collapse unless we invite millions of Arabs to emigrate to the EU, especially those from the 'Arab spring' countries. For example, Malmström says "we will promote the mobility of people between these countries and the EU, including by issuing multi-entry visas ...Right now we are negotiating a so-called security and mobility partnership with Tunisia and Morocco". There is no  attempt to explain how such a policy squares with the fact that all EU countries are facing mass unemployment. There is also no recogntion of the fact that Arab countries are the last place any sensible person would go looking for "skilled and talented" workers.

But the wierdest thing is that this buffoon (and presumably the entire Western leftist elite) fail to see the obvious contradiction/paradox in the above two policies. If we truly want to ensure the 'Arab spring works out well'  then surely the last thing we should be doing is demanding that all their 'skilled and talented' people leave immediately to come to the EU to fulfill our needs. In fact isn't this rather racist?  By failing to spot such an obvious contradiction we are left to conclude that these leftists deep down believe that the Arabs are never going to build nice democratic societies and that the only way to keep them stable is to ensure they receive continued mass hand-outs from the West. Hence, contrary to Malmström's assertions in the speech that people who oppose mass Muslim immigration are right wing xenophones, it appears the true Islamaphobes are the leftists themselves. 

A truly remarkable video

Elder of Ziyon has a video - translated by MEMRI - from Egypt's version of Candid Camera where famous actors are told they would be interviewed by a German TV station but then they "discover" during the interview that it is really "an Israeli" TV station. It is remakable in so many ways. The key things to note:

• Actors are assumed to be 'liberal' in their views, but these all express pathological violent, anti-Semitism. If this is how they behave to people they think are Jews just imagine what the 'uneducated' masses think.
• When the 'joke' is revealed at the end the actors are genuinely congratulated on their anti-Semitism. As the female 'interviewer' says (despite being assaulted by one actor): "I didn’t know that there could be such patriotism, but it exists in every Egyptian who breathes the air of this country." 
• The Egyptians were in no way ashamed to show this on TV, but were rather pround of it.

If MEMRI was not such a reliable source, I would have assumed that this simply had to be a spoof. i.e that this was an Israeli spoof of an Egyptian show. But it has been confirmed that the program was broadcast on Egypt’s Al-Nahar channel and that these are very well known actors in Egypt. There can be no better piece of evidence of why any attempt to make real peace with Egypt (and indeed any Arab country) is a waste of time. Forget all the political articles and analyses, if people just watch this video it will explain all they need to know about the Middle East. Just think if Obama and Cameron spent the 10 minutes watching it their eyes would finally be opened to reality.

And to think, many Jews - and Israelis - still holiday in Egypt.

Update: someone posted the video to a very popular American pop culture blog. The response of the brainwashed America respondent sis almost as bad as the video, with almost universal hatred being directed against the person who posted the video. Avery typical response was "I don't need to watch a video to know that this is another example of you bringing your raging racist and ethnic hatred of Muslims to ONTD."

Daily Telegraph declares the Galilee Judenfrei....

The following letter I just wrote to the Daily Telegraph is self-explanatory:

The full page article on Syria (by Richard Spencer) that appears on page 25 of the Telegraph (20 July 2012) contains the following statement in the opening paragraph about Syria's neighbours:

...sweeping down towards Lake Galilee and the surrounding plain, beloved of the religious, of tourists and of its Israeli Arab occupants.

I  think we are entitled to an explanation as to why Richard Spencer wants his readers to believe that either there are no Israeli Jews in the Galilee region of Israel or, the ones that are there do not love their homeland like the Arab citizens. In fact, while the population of the Galilee region as a whole is about 50% Jewish according to most recent census figures, the region around Lake Galilee is almost 100% Jewish.

I do not believe that Richard Spencer is an anti-Semite, but it is clear he has fallen casually into the trap of deligitimization of Israel which is being ruthlessly pursued by people who are pure anti-Semites.  A core part of the agenda of these anti-Semites is to construct a narrative in which Jews never had any physical attachment to the land of Israel and that only Arabs are the 'true' citizens. 

On a related note, Daniel Greenfield has an outstanding article deconstructing the myth of Israeli 'settlements'.

Writing Jews out of history

It is commonly (and accurately) stated that for the Jews of Europe during the holocaust the world was divided into two:

The places they could not stay and the places they could not go.  

Post-1948 the Jews of Arab lands were similarly forced from their homes, but at least they had a place to go, with some one million eventually going to Israel. These Jewish communities had in most cases long pre-dated their Muslim Arab hosts; some - like the Jewish community of Baghdad - numbered in the hundreds of thousands. With the exception of tiny surviving communities in Morroco (2000), Tunisia (1500)  and Yemen (where three out of the remaining 110 have been murdered in the last two years) there are barely a handful of Jews remaining in the whole of the Arab world.

The story of the destruction of Arab Jewry is almost unknown in the West because it does not fit the standard pro-Palestinian narrative. That is why anti-Israel commentators perpetuate the myth that all Israelis are 'European colonists'.  Increasingly the Arabs themselves are trying to rewrite history not just to deny the ancient link of Jews to Israel, but even to deny the history of Jews in Arab lands. 
The culmination of this is now that the Jordanians (see Elder of Ziyon's report here) are claiming that there was never such a thing as 'Jewish refugees from Arab countries'.  As Elder comments "If no Jews were forced out of Arab countries in the 1940s through 1960s, I guess they must all have been indigenous to Israel, right?" In fact, we now have the situation whereby for Jews from Arab lands living in Israel, the Arab narrative divides the world into two:

The place they cannot stay and the places they never came from.  

Indeed, why bother to dehumanize people when you can simply argue that they do not even exist.