Would anyone care to explain to Mr. Bookworm the difference between an extremist sect breaking its country’s laws by discriminating against women, and a country that has as an integral part of its law and culture murderous attacks on women, “witches,” children and gays?

He professes to be bewildered.

L’affaire DSK is all the rage in France.

On my recent visit to France, you might say I was somewhat surprised that nobody asked me about the U.S. economy, the Euro’s impending collapse or Obama. Rather, the first question out of their mouths was “what do Americans think about the DSK affair?”. They were, of course, referring to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the recently deposed head of the International Monetary Fund and French President wannabee. DSK had been arrested in New York in somewhat dubious circumstances involving alleged transgressions with a chamber maid (think “Paula Jones”).

The reason that the DSK affair was on peoples’ minds, I think, is because it jolted the French to an awareness that there was something very wrong in their society’s treatment of women in the workplace and elsewhere. It’s about time.

During my visit, I spoke with a woman that had enjoyed a fabulous career in finance and who, as a university student, had been taught by DSK. “He was truly brilliant,” she said, “But…”. Another woman, a retired Air France flight attendent, described how she and her colleagues would beg and bribe their cabin mates in order to be reassigned out of First Class whenever certain French politicians were traveling. But then, on the flip side, I heard a few men talk about how such things should be expected of powerful men, you know, “droit du seigneur” and all. These men were the exceptions, not the rule.

But then, I listened to one man I know, an elderly, world-renown attorney who easily straddles both sides of the Atlantic, tell me how his law firm hires only women attorneys today. “We interview both men and women, but inevitably the women prove to be the better attorneys”. He got it. He was profoundly embarrassed and angry about the DSK affair. In his view, the grandstanding New York City prosecutor did a complete hack job on the case and DSK deserved to be completely discredited and set-up for a civil suit “even if his guilt can’t be proven in court” (for the record, I completely disagree with this premise on the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”).

I can’t say anything about DSK’s innocence or guilt. What I do know is that France is having a major conversation with itself on the proper treatment of women and that this is a good thing. The conversation is moving them in the right direction.

I bring this up this narrative up with regard to the reports of misogyny emanating from our White House. I don’t know if they are true or not, but I suspect this isn’t the last we’ve heard of them. Our MSM press will cover it up, no doubt, just as they did with JFK and LBJ, but eventually the truth will out. We lost a lot of ground during the Clinton Administration (Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Juanita Broderick, etc.) and I would hate to think that workplace misogyny will again become the new norm.

Perhaps we, too, need a national conversation.

Back in September 2009, I posted about Obama’s obsession with getting women into burqas which is, to my mind, a very misogynistic approach to women.  I’m therefore entirely unsurprised to learn that those women who have worked in the White House claim that it’s a hostile environment to women, and that this hostility comes from the top.

Obama always signals things:  his dislike for Jews and Israel (all his pro-Palestinian friends and advisors were the giveaway), his love for socialist economic fallacies (his Chicago organizer background, his Ivy League education, and all his socialist friends), and his misogyny (that burqa obsession).   Patting myself on the back, I consistently predicted who and what this man would be, something that was pretty easy if one paid attention to what he said and did.

From whence does the viciousness in the Leftwing soul emanate?

I know that most if not all of us in the Bookworm circle have seen this horrific video below. I post it because we need to see this again and again. We need to look into their eyes to recognize what this is. I view this with fascination, much as I would were I an anthropologist viewing South Pacific cannibals at the village feast…with morbid horror at the depths of human depravity:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have never, never experienced such hatred and vileness emanating from any group of conservatives that I know. Not even close. When I have observed rank racism, misogyny or homophobia, it has almost always emanated from people of the Left. It’s as if by incanting a few pat phrases of Liberal/Left orthodoxy or voting for a half-black man (speaking of race, not culture) as President, they feel they get a pass at spewing such vileness (as in, “I can’t be racist, I just voted for Obama”).

I like to use my own Leftwing /Liberal brothers-in-law as my own anthropological laboratory. A couple are happy cheerful people who don’t have a mean bone in their bodies. OK, they are clueless, but that is another story. There is one, however, who projects a portly, kindly exterior that absolutely seeths with venom underneath (his Facebook postings make my skin crawl).

Perhaps one clue is that he is also a man very much disappointed with his choices in life. I also don’t know if he is able to see himself as others see him. Similarly, we have the wife of a close family friend…outwardly, she is a very kind and considerate person. She talks the talk, anyway. But if you get her on the subject of George Bush or Sarah Palin, she transforms into a writhing, spitting demon (to her credit, she is at least aware of this and admits it as a character flaw).

Frankly, these people scare me. I feel that, should they ever be given the power to act out what they verbalize, they would unleash great evil on humanity.

What’s going on with such people? What goes on in their hearts and minds?

Does any budding psychiatrist within our discussion group have insights to share?

I meant to post this yesterday, but time got away from me:  many, many, many congratulations to the Marines and their Afghan allies for the Marjah victory.  I never doubted that they would win, but I certainly understood that each Marine and Afghan soldier faced the risk that he would make the ultimate sacrifice for that victory.

Naturally, the Times, rather than celebrating a great military feat, is already trying to set up new (and in Times-land, almost certainly insurmountable) hurdles for our troops.  I have no doubt that our troops will do just fine.

For a reminder about what out-of-control, murderous troops really look like, read this story of the way in which Soviet soldiers raped the women who found themselves in the soldiers’ path during WWII.  There are no, and I mean no, stories like that about our American troops, whether one is looking at WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan.  (Indeed, I bet I could say the same for American troops going back to the Revolutionary War.)  Sure, there are always renegade men who go off and do bad things, but these same men appear periodically in our cities and towns too.  Bad guys exist, but American troops have proven definitively that they are part of a good institution, one that does not use rape as a weapon.

Drifting a little further afield, the fact that American men are not rapists even when they have the power of the military behind them, is also a useful reminder about what a misanthropic religion Islam is.  (And no, I didn’t get confused and substitute misanthropic for misogynistic.)  While it’s certainly true that one of Islam’s most glaring deficiencies is its desperate desire to subjugate women out of fear of their sexuality, it’s quite obvious that the Islamists hide from feminine sexuality because they believe men to be inherently weak.  In the Islamic world, the theory goes, any man, upon seeing a woman, will be incapable of refraining from raping her.  That is a scathing indictment of men.

In stark contrast, American men are civilized creatures.  Sure, they might leave the toilet seats up, scratch their crotches in public, and belch at inappropriate times, but when push comes to shove, they are models of self-control.

So, in thinking it through, congratulations are due to our Marines, not only for being great warriors, but also for being great human beings.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

One of the defining features of Islam is its obsession with sex.  Every rule regarding women is based upon a driving need to control their sexuality.  They are married off as children, sequestered, dressed in clothes that rob them of any hint of femininity, deprived of any opportunities to function outside the reproductive sphere, and fearfully abused, with stonings, hangings, beheadings and beatings if they transgress in any way Islamic rules regarding their sexual or even merely feminine behavior.

A large part of the Islamic world’s hatred for America specifically, and the West generally, is premised upon the fact that the West gives women sexual freedom.  And by sexual freedom, I don’t simply mean the freedom to have sex.  I mean the freedom to be feminine in public.

The fearful degradation directed at women has two extremely ugly manifestations.  The first is pedophilia, and the second is an obsession with pornography.  (You’ll recall that both the 9/11 and Fort Hood terrorists spent their last days on earth visiting strip clubs.)

Now, word is coming out of Afghanistan that an Af/Pak warlord, both to feed his lust (which includes both pedophilia and rape) and to fund his war chest, arranged to have local women raped, with the rapes filmed and distributed for profit.  When word leaked out that he was involved, he responded by murdering the participants, both the men who carried out the raping and filming, and the innocent young girls who were brutalized.  He also destroyed all the videos, or so he thought.  In fact, a video landed in the hands of one Imam who actually has a conscience and prepared a video speaking out against these loathsome moral transgressions.  Author Brad Thor got a hold of the video, and you can now read the whole sordid story and see the video at The Jawa Report.  I should warn you that the video is very graphic, and that’s despite the fact that much of it is edited out.

Because the video and the story behind it so perfectly illustrate the dangerous pathologies that drive radical Islam, Rusty would like his post to go viral.  (He actually asked that the video go viral, but I think his post is a sufficiently important backdrop that you really shouldn’t have one without the other.)  So, I’m doing my bit, and I hope that you do yours.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The Emperor of Japan is not a totalitarian dictator, thank goodness.  Indeed, he seems like a very sweet little man.  But what in heaven’s name is up with our president going around the world bowing?

We’re Americans!  We show respect, but we don’t bow.  And there’s something really weird, too, about the most arrogant person on earth (that would be the guy on the left) turning into a gelatinous substance before male royal figures.  As you recall, he didn’t bow to Queen Elizabeth.  I thought that this had to do with his anti-British animus, which I still believe, but I’m ready to add his misogyny into the mix of reasons he didn’t fold at the middle.

With the trigger being Obama’s obsession with niqabs and hijabs, I did a lengthy post about my belief that Obama fundamentally does not like women.  He depends on strong women (his wife, Valerie Jarrett), but he doesn’t like them.  In fact, I’m willing to bet that his dependence on them only increases that dislike.  I’ll add here that male narcissists are often the product of genuinely unloving mothers and that a strong dislike for women is an intregral part of their make-up.  (And consider how frequently Obama’s mother abandoned him throughout his young life, when she wasn’t dragging him around like an old anchor.)

Others are catching on to Obama’s fraught relationship with women.  The trigger isn’t anything so deep as his desire to see women veiled.  Instead, it’s those all male golf courses.  Obama’s desire to get his recreation in all male environments (golf, basketball, etc.) has Bonnie Erbe, at U.S. News and World Reports, thinking:

Whether it was his treatment of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail (as in his condescending remark that she was “likeable enough”) or his clearly career-oriented mate who has been toned down and remorphed into a Stepford Wife, I just don’t get the impression this man is comfortable with women. Nor do I believe he cares about them beyond needing women’s votes. It’s an act and a thoroughly see-through, amateur one at that.

As you know, I was all over that condescending remark to Hillary, but I saw it more as a sign of the man’s arrogance, than his innate misogyny.  Put it together with the other stuff, though, and Erbe may well be on to something.

One more thing:  Erbe can’t resist in her post being nasty about the old Southern politician Jesse Helms.  But I think there’s a difference between, on the one hand, old guys who never got it with women’s lib, but who still fundamentally liked women (and I don’t think Helms ever showed dislike for women) and, on the other hand, a true misogynist, who really hates women at a fundamental level that goes far beyond societal beliefs about women’s roles.

Didn’t Obama bow to the king?

A Saudi court on Saturday convicted a female journalist for her involvement in a TV show, in which a Saudi man publicly talked about sex, and sentenced her to 60 lashes.

Rozanna al-Yami is believed to be the first Saudi woman journalist to be given such a punishment. The charges against her included involvement in the preparation of the program and advertising the segment on the Internet.

Abdul-Rahman al-Hazza, the spokesman of the Ministry of Culture and Information, told The Associated Press he had no details of the sentencing and could not comment on it.

In the program, which aired in July on the Lebanese LBC satellite channel, Mazen Abdul-Jawad appears to describe an active sex life and shows sex toys that were blurred by the station. The same court sentenced Abdul-Jawad earlier this month to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes.

One thing I have to give credit to Barack Obama for being is a complete pragmatist, even if that pragmatism operates to the exclusion of moral decency.  Witness his decision to jettison Israel entirely (something Elliott Abrams explains carefully here) in order to placate the Muslim world.  Many think that Obama’s affinity for the Muslim world has a lot to do with his upbringing, although that’s mere speculation.  (I wouldn’t doubt it, but it’s still speculative.)

Much more likely, though, because it’s been an oft expressed sentiment on the Left for years, is that Obama is animated by the pragmatic belief that the Muslim world hates us because we support Israel and, if we’d just stop that support, they’d stop hating us.  If this theory is correct, the benefits that would flow from sacrificing Israel would be obvious:  cheap oil and no suicide bombers.  If you’re goal driven, it’s a worthwhile experiment.  After all, Jews have died before and they’ll die again, but peace in the Middle East is a once in a lifetime experience.  (And who cares if its the kind of peace only Tacitus would recognize?  Atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.)

The problem with this type of bottom-line pragmatism is that you have to sell your soul to achieve it.  Aside from running the risk of exposing a liberal democratic nation to nuclear annihilation (or just good old-fashioned machete slaughter), you also find yourself sending almost a billion dollars in aid to people who espouse values you might find just a little bit, just a wee bit, antithetical to your own.  We know about the misogyny, the homophobia, the antisemitism, and the anti-Christianity that characterize the Muslim world.

(Thinking about it, we ought to find new words than ones I used to describe Middle Eastern Muslim culture.  In America, those words lack punch, because in practice, they involve saying mean things about woman or gays or Jews or Christians, or depriving them of jobs or housing or, very, very occasionally, physical attacks.  In the Muslim world, the word “misogyny” means women have no legal rights, suffer regular physical abuse, including genital mutilation, and are regular victims of honor killings; homophobia means that gays are tortured and executed; “antisemitism” means a cultural press for total genocide; and anti-Christianity means that Christians are dispossessed, expelled and killed.  You know a culture is bad when it demands a whole new vocabulary to be intelligible.  But as is often the case, I digress.)

But if you thought those were the only things that need change in a culture that Obama proposes become our ally against the Jews, you’re wrong.  At Brutally Honest, Rick exposes yet another stomach churning aspect of Muslim culture.

In the culture of alcohol and drug abuse, a well recognized person in the game of addiction is the enabler:

An enabler in most definitions is a person who through his or her actions allows someone else to achieve something. Most often the term enabler is associated with people who allow loved ones to behave in ways that are destructive. For example, an enabler wife of an alcoholic might continue to provide the husband with alcohol. A person might be an enabler of a gambler or compulsive spender by lending them money to get out of debt.

The West has always been a Muslim enabler, whether it’s by buying Muslim oil (which we admittedly have needed, especially because we refuse to produce our own), or by funding to the tune of billions of dollars the most corrupt, hate-filled governments on planet earth.  Barack Obama is taking it to a new level.  Voters need to look inside themselves and see whether they want to take a gamble on pragmatism that sees them supporting these same governments, or if they want to continue to exist on the side of greater truth and morality.  I know where I fall.  Sadly, I also know where my president falls.

UPDATE:  Rick cautions that the video to which he linked might not be as it seems.  Nevertheless, I stand by everything else I said, and the possibility that Rick’s video isn’t as bad as it looks doesn’t change the basic tenor of my post.

UPDATE II:  Today, it’s a story out of Sudan regarding the misogynistic cruelty committed in Islam’s name.  And just reflexively, I’ll ask:  Where’s NOW now?