As you already know, I’m sure, the Ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem are fighting hard to segregate men and women in public spaces in Jerusalem.  I posted about the fact that Mr. Bookworm analogized this small group, which is fighting against a democratic, egalitarian government, to the sharia law that exists across large segments of the Muslim world.  I doubt Mr. Bookworm arrived at this thought by himself.  I haven’t been reading the New York Times lately, nor listening to NPR, but I’m willing to bet that their coverage implies that this comparison is real and valid.

Today, the AP managed to state outright that the Ultra-Orthodox are aping the Nazis.  Here’s the AP headline:

Ultra-Orthodox Jews use Nazi images in protest

The implication, of course, is that the Ultra-Orthodox Jews outfitted themselves in swastikas and jackboots.  What the Ultra-Orthodox really did was to dress themselves up in concentration camp garb, thereby sending the message that they are helpless prisoners of a Nazi-style Jewish government:

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered Saturday night in Jerusalem to protest what they say is a nationwide campaign directed against their lifestyle. The protesters called Israeli police officers Nazis, wore yellow Star of David patches with the word “Jude” – German for Jew – dressed their children in striped black-and-white uniforms associated with Nazi concentration camps and transported them in the back of a truck.

The Ultra-Orthodox’s stunt was tacky, offensive, ugly, distasteful, and inappropriate.  But the more correct description of this tasteless bit of street theater would be that “Ultra-Orthodox Jews use Holocaust-era Images in Protest.”  For the AP to have implied otherwise adds one more layer of indecency to the whole protest — and, worse, it’s a layer of indecency that dovetails perfectly with the Leftist (especially the European Leftist) effort to paint Jews as Nazis.  It’s bad enough when radical Jews describe each other as Nazis, without having the media pile on too.

UPDATE:  Somehow, this post seems apropos, insofar as it explains that the OWS add-on to the Rose Bowl Parade relied on Nazi imagery to depict the Jews’ alleged influence on world finances.

I’m noticing signs of “Occupy” ennui.  Even those who were enthusiastic about the movement at first seem to be getting bored.  On the “real me” facebook, there’s been (at a guess) a 75% drop-off in posts from limousine liberals applauding the 1%.

Was it the endless, self-serving demands that the government write off student loans, meaning that the yuppified liberals I know would bear the burden?  Was it the escalating number of rapes?  Was it the rampant drug use?  The feces and vomit?  The crazy people?  The riots?  The hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of dollars in law enforcement overtime, all of which the limousine liberals will ultimately fund?  The formerly supportive local businesses that have been trashed or simply destroyed economically?  The short attention span that characterizes the American people?  I don’t know the reason, but I’m getting the feeling that Occupy is wearing out its welcome.

I’ll certainly be sorry to see Occupy go.  I love the way Occupy exposes people to the core selfishness of the Left.  It’s the Left that has, for years — nay, decades — characterized conservatives as greedy, selfish, racist, violent, etc.  The implication, of course, is that Leftists are the poster children of altruism, selflessness, brotherhood and peace.  It’s been truly inspiring to see the demands for a free ride, the segregation at Occupy encampments, the riots, and so forth.  Few things are more pleasant than seeing a Fifth Column unmasked.

I’m also enjoying what I perceive as the ripple effect.  For example, CrossFit OneWorld is a fitness blog.  Its readership doesn’t go there for politics, it goes there to learn how to maximize strength, stamina and overall fitness.  (All of which are very good things.)  Three days ago, though, the readership got an insight into the glories of Occupy Oakland, because one of the regular bloggers got the opportunity to play backup to Oakland law enforcement as it confronted the product-toting young’uns protesting violently against commercialism.  By way of apologizing for missing out on an exercise update, this same blogger explained to his presumably apolitical readers precisely what kind of foolishness prevented him from getting on with his life.  It’s this kind of trickle-down information, from ordinary people inconvenienced by or exposed to Occupy, that’s going to make disinterested Americans aware of the real ugliness behind the Occupy movement.

One more thing, which is a kind of Darwinian one that makes me look like a nihilistic b***h, but I’ll say it anyway:  I don’t feel compassion for these young people.  Yes, they are certainly misguided and it’s our obeisance to Leftist culture over the past 40 years that has created all these little Frankstein’s monsters.  But knowing that there are root causes, or even feeling somewhat responsible for the root causes, doesn’t mean that we can allow the fruit of the poisonous tree to lie on the ground, spreading the rot ever further.

If you ever watch WWII documentaries, what you’ll see is that, by the end of the war, whether on the Western or Eastern fronts, the Germans were throwing 16 and 17 year old boys into the front lines.  Had today’s Leftists been in charge of the War back then, they would have called an immediate ceasefire, since these youthful products of more than a decade of Nazi indoctrination knew not what they did.  Of course, had that happened, those youthful Nazi enthusiasts would have claimed victory, and gone on their merry way, enslaving and slaughtering ever larger numbers of innocents.  The tragic fact is that, when a culture becomes completely corrupted, there is no more room for compassion.  Compassion is for the time after victory.  You cannot let it prevent you from achieving victory.

Ted Bromund is worried that Obama, by going to both Buchenwald and Dresden in the same trip is about to do something symbolically awful.  Buchenwald, of course, was one of the infamous Nazi labor camps located right in Germany itself.  It was not a death camp, and was not used specifically to exterminate Jews, but it had an appalling death rate.  Those who died were political prisoners and the “unfit”.  Pardon this lengthy Wikipedia quotation, but I think it’s important to put it here.  (You can go to the Wikipedia article for the missing footnotes and hyperlinks):

Although Buchenwald technically was not an extermination camp, it was a site of an extraordinary number of deaths.

A primary cause of the deaths was illness due to harsh camp conditions, and hunger was also prevalent. Malnourished and suffering from disease, many were literally “worked to death”, as inmates had only the choice between slave labour or inevitable execution. Many inmates died as a result of human experimentations or fell victim to arbitrary acts perpetrated by the SS guards, and yet other prisoners were simply murdered—the two primary methods of execution were shooting and hanging. At one point, the ashes of dead prisoners would be returned to their families in a sheet metal box—postage due, to be paid by the family. This practice was eventually stopped as more and more prisoners died. [citation needed]

Summary executions of Soviet POWs were also carried out at Buchenwald. At least 1,000 Soviet POWs were selected in 1941–2 by a task force of three Dresden Gestapo officers and sent to the camp for immediate liquidation by a gunshot to the back of the neck, the infamous Genickschuss, using a purpose-built facility.

The camp was also a site of large-scale trials for vaccines against epidemic typhus in 1942 and 1943. In all 729 inmates were used as test subjects, with 280 of them dying as a result. Because of their long association in cramped quarters in Block 46, the typhus killed more people and infections lasted longer than would have been the case had healthy adults been infected with the disease.

Number of deaths

The SS left behind accounts of the number of prisoners and people coming to and leaving the camp, categorizing those leaving them by release, transfer, or death. These accounts are one of the sources of estimates for the number of deaths in Buchenwald. According to SS documents, 33,462 died in Buchenwald. These documents were not, however, necessarily accurate: Among those executed before 1944 many were listed as “transferred to the Gestapo”. Furthermore, from 1941 forward Soviet POWs were executed in mass killings. Arriving prisoners selected for execution were not entered into the camp register and therefore were not among the 33,462 dead listed in SS documents.[4]

One former Buchenwald prisoner, Armin Walter, calculated the number of executions by shooting in the back of the head. His job at Buchenwald was to set up and care for a radio installation at the facility where people were executed and counted the numbers, which arrived by telex, and hid the information. He says that 8,483 Soviet prisoners of war were shot in this manner.[5]

According to the same source, the total number of deaths at Buchenwald is estimated at 56,545.[6] This number is the sum of:

* Deaths according to material left behind by SS: 33,462[7]
* Executions by shooting: 8,483
* Executions by hanging (estimate): 1,100
* Deaths during evacuation transports: 13,500[8]

This total (56,545) corresponds to a death rate of 24 percent assuming that the number of persons passing through the camp according to documents left by the SS, 238,380 prisoners, is accurate.[9]

So, just to be clear, in that one camp alone, Germans used and slaughtered almost 60,000 civilian prisoners (Jews, Communists, gays, royalty, intellectuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, priests, etc.)

People died at Dresden too.  If you ask your reasonably well-informed person about Dresden, that person will tell you (a) that Dresden had no military importance; (b) that it held only a priceless art collection that was destroyed; and, most horribly of all (c) that 250,000 people died in a single night.  (Which would make it worse than Hiroshima’s initial impact.)

As Bromund details in another article, however, the Dresden story we all know is propaganda from the master himself, Josef Goebbels.  Yes, there were air raids.  Yes, there was a fire.  Yes, people died.  And yes, art and old buildings were destroyed.  Bromund explains, however, that the Dresden bombing was no worse that that the Allies visited on other cities; that they were substantially less than the bombings the Germans made on London, Plymouth, Poland, Rotterdam and Belgrade; that Dresden was in fact a City of major military importance, with an important railway depot and more than a hundred factories working for the war effort; and (and this is the big one) that Goebbels increased by as much as a factor of ten the number killed in the bombing in order to inflame people’s sensibilities.

That was then.  This is now.  And now you know — you just know — that Obama is going to find an equivalence between Buchenwald and Dresden.  In rounded pontifical tones, he’ll casually conflate the Nazi’s deliberate slaughter of millions of innocent people with a strategic wartime attack on a significant military target.  And then he’ll apologize.

UPDATE: Not only do Nazi lies linger, but the list of Obama lies grows. Turns out that Obama’s reasons for going to Buchenwald have nothing to do with a celebration of his uncle’s role in the camp’s liberation, and everything to do with cold, hard politics.  Leo Rennert thinks that, just as such a political trip didn’t work for Reagan, it won’t work for Obama but, sadly, I think Rennert’s wrong.  The difference is the media.  The media loathed Reagan and played up the political angle of his trip.  Here in American you have to turn to a German publication to start discovering the truth about Obama’s lie.

Charles, at LGF, is concerned that the “extreme right white supremacist” (his phrase) BNP party in England is gaining political ground.  If you check out the party’s blog, though, racial purity a la the Nazis or the KKK is not part of the party’s platform.  As far as I can tell, it wants to close Britain’s open borders, back off from European union control, and clamp down on out-of-control multiculturalism.  All of these seem like reasonable positions.  After all, under current British policies, traditional Britain is truly vanishing.  The place is ground zero for antisemitism, its Muslim influx is unending, Britain is ceding all political control to the EU, and the nation is effectively committing “we hate ourselves” suicide.  Wanting to turn back that tide doesn’t strike me as being the same as being Neo-Nazis:  desiring a totalitarian state dedicated to world domination and the eradication and enslavement of all inferior races.

Charles’ fight with the European far right is totally valid insofar as he is fighting the true neo-Nazis.  The problem seems to me to be the Orwellian one, with the degradation of language pushing people into positions that do not match the facts on the ground.

You see, thanks to the Left, words no longer mean what they used to mean, but the change is often so gradual, we don’t realize it. (That happens without politics, too, with the very old Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane in London morphing into the word “bedlam.”)

Because the Left consciously controls language (“man caused disasters” anyone?), things can get confusing. The easiest example is the way in which Nazis are defined. As their full name establishes (“National SOCIALISTS”), the Nazis were a socialist (i.e., Leftist) political organization. Nowadays, however, they are routinely referred to on the Left as “rightist” so as to conflate them with the Left’s political enemies. In fact, like the Left, they were statists. Unlike the average Lefty, however, they added to their garden-variety belief in state control a poisonous measure of racial hatred.

Linguistically, things are very confusing in Europe, where even the “rightist” political parties (say, the Tories) are to the Left of the American middle. Add to that the fact that, in Europe, there are both genuine neo-Nazis, who want to replicate the Nazis vision of racial purity, AND are concerned moderates who don’t like the political control being ceded to multicultural pro-Islamists, and you’ve got word soup.

For that reason, it would be useful if people who use the phrase “far right” with regard to European politics would define that term.  Technically, “far right,” if we’re measuring it against “far left,” simply means less government, not more. After all, if Marxist-style Leftism is the party that seeks total government control, than its opposite — “Rightism” — must be veering into pure anarchy, without any government control at all. That’s clearly not what Charles means when he speaks of the Right, though.

I think that, by saying “far right,” Charles is stating that the BNP party is racist, a la the Nazis or the KKK (and with visions of lynchings and ovens dancing in its political brain).  The website, however, indicates that it is only “racist” as the Left would define it, meaning anyone who doesn’t like Obama or is concerned about sharia.

Given the abuse language undergoes daily, the way in which words are folded, spindled and mutilated in ways that take them in the opposite direction from their original meanings, it’s entire possible that a lot of the intellectual fights on the conservative side arise because people THINK they mean the same thing, but they actually don’t. As Dennis Prager says, “I prefer clarity to agreement,” and as I’ve noted listening to his show, clarity often brings agreement.

I loath the stench of truly racists politics (e.g., KKK and Adolf worship blended with a desire to have a strong government making these deadly dreams a reality). However, I do think there needs to be a political home for Europeans who are worried about the Islamification of their nations. And as long as governments in Europe hew Left (even those that are called right), I suspect that the governments and their media outlets are going to tar all anti-Sharia people with the same ugly “far Right” brush.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

UPDATE:  Two comments I want to bring up to the post itself:

1. Poosh

   Hi, I’m a British euroasian (halfbreed!!!!!!!!) and I just wanted to inform you of how badly wrong this post is in regard directly to the BNP. Firstly a racist party that actually wants seats in the UK is NOT going to blurt out its true motives on its public website ffs! The BNP are well known here to be VERY racist and Charles is perfectly right (for once) to be concerned about this. They are not against multi-culturalism, they are against non-whites. It is actually illegal for you to join the police force here in the UK if you are a member of the BNP (I don’t agree with this in principle but it is a disgusting thought that a member of the BNP could be in the police force all the same). There have been hidden-camera footage revealed as well displaying the party’s racism and so forth. It is WELL KNOWN in britan that this is a NAZI party.

   The are, like the Nazi Party however, NOT RIGHT WING. They are left wing – socialists. You need read their manifesto to see them as socialists. The BNP is made up of mostly working class chumps who are looking for a scape goat due to their lowly lott in life – and non-whites are there main scape-goat. I could not believe I was reading the above post, sorry. The BNP’s website is NOT somewhere to see their true colours – as if they’d broadcast their racist doctrines on it! lol. It would only take you mere minutes to see the BNP’s true colours. For example the BNP is a WHITES-ONLY party ffs.

2. Bookworm

   Thank you, Poosh. That’s precisely the type of information I’m seeking. That leaves a question open, though: Where the heck are moderate Europeans and British supposed to go to challenge unlimited immigration (as opposed to more controlled immigration); unbridled political correctness (as opposed to respect for others); the handing over of British sovereignty to the EU; and all the other stuff moderates are reasonable to oppose? The major political parties are joined together in a race to the bottom, and the moderates have nothing to hold onto. That had better change quickly, or the moderates will become radicalized and swell the ranks of the BNP and other racist parties.

UPDATE II: From Mike Devx, who actually did the research:

Well, I downloaded the BNP’s Constitution.  If you want to take a look it’s at the link below on their site.  It’s formatted to be assembled as a booklet, so you have to jump around from page to page on the web…

http://www.bnp.org.uk/Constitution%209th%20Ed%20Sep%202005.pdf

Section 2 – Membership – is clearly racial.  ’Nuff said, for me.  I’ve got no use for a political party that restricts its membership based on race solely to Caucasians of variously described “British descent”.

Seeking to preserve culture is one thing.  You can recognize that your beloved culture is disappearing and resolve to fight to retain it.  That’s legitimate, especially when all of your current political leadership in power is doing nothing, at best, to preserve it.  But these guys have clearly defined a racial component within their own Constitution by allowing only native Caucasian British to be members of the party.

Their activities and statements ceased to be overtly racist at about 2001, it appears.  Having seen the Stealth Candidate Obama succeed at his own deception of an entire country – well, enough of a deception to fool 53% of the people – it’s entirely possible that the BNP remains as virulently racist as their relatively distant past would indicate.

I can’t say I agree with Poosh’s virulent hatred of the <b>current</b> BNP.  Speaking for myself, though, I’ve seen enough to indicate that I would never associate myself with them in any form whatsoever.

Hopefully the BNP is not the only organized party in Great Britain to actively promote and value their traditional culture and values.  If so… then where else are the British people to turn?  They certainly won’t be willing to simply surrender…

That’s good enough for me too.  But I’ll go back to my original point, which is that the mainstream political parties have closed the doors on moderate Brits who are opposed to the fundamental change in the nature of English, from a Christian country tied to traditional British values, to a multiculturalist society with a rapidly growing, and increasingly vocal and powerful, extreme Islamist population.  These people are going to flock to the BNP, despite its ugly racist ideology, because it’s the only game in town.

My 9 year old son was looking at his book about fighter planes through history.  That triggered this question and answer session:

Son:  Why were the Germans so bad?

Me:  Humans have always fought.  It’s part of the human condition.  They’ve also always killed their enemies, including destroying whole villages, or cities, or even countries, and then enslaving and killing all the people.  The Germans, however, did this on a bigger scale than ever before.  Also, the Germans were the only people in history who decided in advance that whole groups of people needed to be exterminated, hunted these people down everywhere they could reach, and built huge factories to kill them.  They took evil to a level never seen before.

Son:  Why did the Germans do that?

Me:  That’s one of the big questions.  Up until the Nazis, the Germans had been considered the most civilized nation in the world.  They had the smartest scientists, their people composed the best music, they wrote poetry (Beethoven and Mozart came from Germanic countries), and their towns and cities were beautiful.  Yet they abandoned all that civilization to become the most evil people in the world.

Son (after a moment’s contemplation):  Was Hitler crazy that he did all this?

Me:  Another good question, but it wasn’t just Hitler.  Hitler’s ideas were evil, but he didn’t act alone.  After all, did the German and Austrian people lock him up in an insane asylum or did they make him leader of their countries?

Son:  They made him leader?  But why did they do that?

Me:  That’s another good….

Son:  Maybe he was like Obama.  He gave really good speeches, and the people who listened to him stopped thinking.

My son scares me sometimes.  He’s smarter than the whole Democratic party put together.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

I carpooled to a soccer game today.  The driver, who is someone I don’t know very well, is a very charming man who is quite obviously a potential Obama voter.  He wasn’t quite sure about me and, since he was a very civil individual, he never came out and either insulted McCain or lauded Obama.  He did say, though, that he thought it was the government’s responsibility to provide medical care.  He also characterized Vietnam as a complete disaster.  That gave me an interesting opportunity to explain to him a few historic facts he didn’t know — because very few people know them.

I started out by reminding him of something that most people forget:  the Vietnam War was a Democratic War.  Kennedy started it and Johnson expanded it.  (Nixon, the Republican, ended it.)  I didn’t say this in the spirit of accusation, because I wasn’t being partisan.  I said it to give historical context to a larger discussion about freedom versus statism.

I noted that, in the 1930s — and, again, most people have forgotten this — the major battle in Europe was between two Leftist ideologies:  Communism and Fascism.  When he looked a little blank, I pointed out that the Nazis were a socialist party, a fact he readily conceded.   I also reminded him that, in the 1930s, given that Stalin was killing millions of his countrymen, and that Hitler hadn’t yet started his killing spree, Fascism actually looked like the better deal.  World War II demonstrated that both ideologies — both of which vested all power in the State — were equally murderous.

Men of the Kennedy/Johnson generation, I said, saw their role in WWII as freeing Europe from the Nazi version of socialism.  When that job ended, they saw themselves in a continuing war to bring an end to the Communist version of socialism.  Again, they were reacting to overwhelming statism.

Thus, to them, it was all a single battle with America upholding the banner, not of freedom, but of individualism. They knew that America couldn’t necessarily make people free or bring them a democratic form of government, but that it could try to protect people from an all-powerful state.  That’s always been an integral part of American identity.  He agreed with everything I said.

I then moved to the issue of socialized medicine, which I pointed out, again, gives the state all the power.  The state, I said, has no conscience, and it will start doling out medical care based on its determining of which classes of individual are valuable, and which are less valuable, to the state. My friend didn’t know, for example, that Baroness Warnock of Britain, who is considered one of Britain’s leading moralists, announced that demented old people have a “duty to die” because they are a burden on the state.

A few more examples like that, and we agreed that the problem wasn’t too little government when it comes to medicine, but too much. Health insurer companies operating in California are constrained by something like 1,600 state and federal regulations.  I suggested that, rather than give the government more control over the medical bureaucracy, we take most of it away.  He conceded that this was probably a good idea.

Lastly, I reminded him what happens when government steps in as the <span style=”font-style: italic;”>pater familias</span>.  He didn’t know that, up until Johnson’s Great Society, African-Americans were ever so slowly “making it.”  As a result of the Civil Rights movement, opportunities were opening for Northern Blacks, and they — meaning the men — were beginning to make more money.  The African-American family was nuclear and starting to thrive.

This upward economic trend collapsed in the mid-1960s, and its collapse coincided absolutely to the minute with government social workers fanning out to black communities and telling them that the government would henceforth provide.  Since it seemed stupid to work when you could get paid not to work, black men stopped working.  They also stopped caring about their families, or even getting married, since unmarried mothers did even better under welfare than intact families.  In a few short years, not only did African-Americans as a group collapse economically, their family structure collapsed too.  Men were redundant.  The state would provide.  Again, my friend nodded his head in agreement.

The ride ended at that point but, as he was dropping me off, my friend told me (and I think he was speaking from his heart), that it was an incredibly interesting ride.  And I bet it was, because I gave him real food for thought in the form of facts and ideas that fall outside of the orthodoxy that characterizes our ultra-liberal community.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and McCain-Palin 2008.

In a comment to my earlier post about talk with an ideological foe being dangerous, Gringo mentioned a classic anti-Nazi piece of Hollywood propaganda (made when Hollywood viewed America as the ally, not the enemy).  I found it at YouTube (of course), and share it with you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And for those of you who are I Love Lucy fans, I think you’ll enjoy William Frawley assuring Americans that they will win the war:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The accepted wisdom is that the intense hatred the Palestinians feel for Jews is a direct result of Jewish annexation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 War. Of course, as with most propaganda, this is false. Aside from conveniently ignoring the 1956 and 1948 Wars, not to mention the Koran itself, this view ignores the fact that it was a Nazi/Arab alliance that helped fuel the virulence of modern Arab antisemitism. Indeed, it was this alliance, as much as the oil in Arab lands, that caused the British, who had been fairly philosemitic since Cromwell’s days because of their commitment to the Old Testament, to swing around and become extremely hostile to the movement for a Jewish state. (As to the long-dead philosemitism, I highly recommend Barbara Tuchman’s Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour .)

Mike Devx was kind enough to send me to a great video illustrating the tight ties the Nazis forged with the Arabs as part of their assault on British interests in the Middle East (for British interests, read “oil” and if you’re really interested in how the need to control oil was a driving force in WWII, read Daniel Yergin’s exellent The Prize : The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.)

Click here to view the embedded video.