The superiority of the Western Left

[steevo]

This article shows the perverse double standard well understood by many of us who scrutinize the media. It points to the racism and bigotry of the Left justifying the hate of Islamic racism and bigotry (fair-minded and multicultural of course ).

In Gaza some Palestinians greeted news of Ariel Sharon’s stroke with the “V” for victory sign, gunfire into the air, and pastries.

Schadenfreude is a recurring motif of Palestinian life. Some cheered the 9/11 attacks, passing out candy on that occasion as well. Many Palestinians have celebrated suicide bombings, including even mothers rejoicing in the deaths of their own children.

In most places and times throughout history one who loves death has been considered at very least unbalanced.

This kind of inconsistency demonstrates that world opinion demands a higher moral accountability from the West than it does from the Islamic world. Were Americans or Israelis to hand out pastries and fire guns in the air at the illness or death of a Muslim leader, international opprobrium would be swift and sure -- particularly from the Leftist spokesmen who view all conflicts between the Islamic world and the West as having been caused by Western outrages.

There is an unacknowledged layer of ethnocentrism in this. The international media and governing bodies seem to assume that Palestinians and other Muslims are simply not capable of hewing to the moral and civilizational standards to which Westerners are held.

No one seems concerned about the fact that by tolerating joy at Sharon’s illness among Palestinians and the culture of death in general, international authorities are postponing, perhaps forever, any chance for so many Palestinians and Muslims to adopt the moral and ethical standards held by the rest of the world. By continuing to expect less from them, the West ensures that it will receive less from them. As a result, the global conflict, fueled as it is by the hatred that is spread so energetically among Muslims today, will doubtless not only continue to grow, but to escalate.

www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=11038

[Teddy Bear]

I must admit, I was quite pleased to hear of Arafat's demise, and I hope wherever he is, he's still suffering.
There was a story circulating after the 6 day war, that the Egyptian leader, Abdul Nasser, went to a fortune teller who foresaw his death. Nasser asked him when, and the psychic told him "on a Jewish holiday". "Which one?", asked Nasser, to which the seer replied, "I don't know, but whichever day you die, it will be a Jewish holiday".

I think the writer above, makes valid points, but the fact of enemies of Sharon feeling and demonstrating their glee over his illness, is minor compared to the more major social differences that are largely ignored by the mainstream media, especially the liberal left media, who would rather pretend it doesn't exist, otherwise their slant doesn't have the same kind of force.
Here's an article today from The Times, which highlights this:

Tsunami was God's revenge for your wicked ways, women told

From Nick Meo in Aceh
Religious extremists are using last year’s storm to oppress the survivors



MARLUDDIN JALIL, a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women for not wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: “The tsunami was because of the sins of the people of Aceh.”



Thundering into a microphone at a gathering of wives, he made clear where he felt the fault lay: “The Holy Koran says that if women are good, then a country is good.”

A year after the disaster which many see as a divine punishment, emboldened Islamic hardliners are doing their best to eradicate sin — and women are their prime targets.

With reconstruction slow, irrational fears of a second tsunami high, and nearly 500,000 still homeless along 500 miles of coastline, the stern message falls on fertile ground. A Sharia police force modelled on Saudi moral enforcers enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers for public humiliation.

The Wilayatul Hisbah, which loosely translates as “Control Team”, has arrested women, lopped off their hair, and paraded them in tears through the streets while broadcasting their sins over a megaphone.

More than 100 gamblers and drinkers — men and women — have been caned in public and some clerics are calling for thieves’ hands to be amputated.

The Islamic law introduced without popular enthusiasm in 2002 has been implemented rigorously since the tsunami, especially in towns such as Lhokseumawe, where Fatimah Syam, of Indonesian Women for Legal Justice, knows of 20 women who have fallen foul of it.

She said: “They seek out women without headscarves or unmarried girls meeting boys in private and parade them through the streets in an open car. I’ve seen the police laughing and boasting, and the girls in tears. The Sharia police say the tsunami happened because women ignored religion. We never heard of this parading before the tsunami.”

The poor, powerless and female have borne the brunt of the moral enforcers’ righteousness. Mrs Syam claimed the wife of an official caught without a headscarf on a scooter was let off last month and a prostitute who was paraded through the town won the sympathy of passers-by because of the hypocrisy of her persecutors: the woman’s client was allowed quietly to disappear.

The religious police have not always had it their own way. In one incident on the island of Sabang, attempts to humiliate a bareheaded girl backfired when angry villagers turned on them. By the time the civil police arrived to rescue the enforcers they were surrounded by an angry mob flicking lighted cigarettes at them.

But such setbacks and public unease have not dampened the zeal of Dr Jalil, a small, neat man with a trimmed moustache whose particular concerns are headscarves, gambling, alcohol, and girls meeting boys. “Sin starts small and gets bigger,” he said. His next target is a displaced persons’ camp outside Lhokseumawe where he has heard of young men and women freely mixing.

“Another tsunami is possible,” he said. “The Holy Koran says that if humans don’t listen to Allah they will be punished.”

He was not sure whether there was more or less sin since the disaster although he believes that the Acehnese are more God-fearing now. In the tent camps and temporary wooden barracks where desperate survivors endure grim conditions, Dr Jalil’s views are often well received. There are 67,000 survivors still living in tents and a further 75,000 are in the slum barracks, which are taking on a semipermanent air. Only half of those who lost their jobs in the disaster are back at work and drug abuse among the young is growing.

Although Aceh province is now a giant building site, the sheer scale of destruction has slowed work. A third of government servants died and 1,000 miles of roads were wiped out, making the logistics of recovery extremely difficult.

The Government says it has built 12,000 of the 80,000 permanent homes it aims for and that housing will be its top priority next year. But some aid workers think there could still be families under canvas in three years’ time.

Surnyati Alian, five months pregnant, is a typical survivor, squeezed with her family of four into a 12ft square tent beside a stinking ditch among the ruins of Meulaboh on the west coast. Like many Acehnese women she is desperate for a new family. Her four-year-old daughter was torn from her grasp as the wave crashed down on them. The child’s body was never found. Now she faces the prospect of nursing a new baby in a tent that is black with mould.

In such conditions wild theories about the tsunami thrive. In a version of Pop Idol organised by the American and Indonesian Red Cross in Barak Lampaseh camp in Banda Aceh, the winner was 12-year-old Sheila Mentari, whose song told how God sent the wave as punishment for sin. She said her father, who died in the wave, would have approved.

A fellow villager Marzuki Lidan, 46, who lost his wife and children, was among the enthusiastic audience. He said: “The Sharia police are good Muslims doing an excellent job. We must listen to them and follow God’s rules. Otherwise the tsunami will happen again.”

Care to guess whether anything like this story will appear on the BBC website, or news?

[Teddy Bear]

Here's another example of ignoring differences that create a duplicity of expectations. For example, if Israel treated a journalist in the same way that Syria has, in this example, the leftwing media would have a field day with it.
Condemn Syria now

Thursday, December 15, 2005

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Posted: December 15, 2005 By Joseph Farah
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© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

It has been exactly one week since the Syrian government denied entry to their country to a Jewish-American reporter because of his faith.

To date:

There has been no official U.S. government condemnation of the action;

There has been no effort by the U.S. State Department even to seek clarification about the incident from Damascus;

There has been no coverage of the action by major international media other than WND.

To review the incident, last Thursday, Aaron Klein, WND's Jerusalem bureau chief, attempted to secure a visa to travel from Jordan to Syria as part of a long-planned tour of Middle East countries. A week earlier, the Syrian Embassy in Washington had given verbal approval of a trip by ABC Radio talk-host John Batchelor, his producer Lee Mason and Klein to enter the country together on the specified date.

However, right from the start, there were indications the Syrian government was uncomfortable with the idea of permitting Klein in the country. On Monday, Dec. 5, Ammar al-Arsan, the press attache for the Syrian Embassy in Washington, suggested to Mason there might be a problem with Klein's visa. Mason asked if it was because Klein was Jewish and al-Arsan reportedly said yes. Eventually, al-Arsan said all three applications for visas were approved.

Then last Thursday, when the three traveling companions attempted to secure their visas to enter Damascus, Eyad Alarfi, assistant to the Syrian consul general in Amman, indicted there was a problem with just one of the three visas – Klein's. He could provide no information about the holdup.

By telephone, Klein spoke to an official from the Syrian Ministry of Information in Damascus who declined to provide his name. At first he refused to suggest why Klein had been singled out and prevented from entering the country. Later, however, he asked: "What religion are you?"

Klein said he refused to answer.

The official then said: "You know what you are."

Just to be certain about the reason for Klein's denial, WND gave the Syrian government two more opportunities to review and clarify its decision. In a letter to the Syrian ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, we asked again that Klein be admitted entry. If not, we asked for a written reason for the denial. The Syrian Embassy declined to respond to our inquiry. Then, Batchelor persuaded the Moustapha to be interviewed on his nationally syndicated radio program, where he was asked again why Klein was barred. He refused to answer. Asked if Klein would be permitted to enter the country in the future, Moustapha refused to answer.

It is crystal clear why Klein was banned from Syria. It's because he is a Jew.

But Aaron Klein is also an American and a journalist. And I am disappointed and puzzled by the lack of support he has received from his government and his colleagues in the news media.

This is an important story because it demonstrates once again that Syria is a human-rights violator, a rogue state, a racist government and an anti-Jewish nation – not just anti-Israeli.

The U.S. State Department has said there is nothing it can do about another nation's policies on issuing visas. Not true. The U.S. State Department has a right and a duty to seek clarification on the denial of visas to its citizens. It also has the right and the duty to condemn discriminatory, anti-Jewish policies of foreign countries.

The White House has taken a different tack. When asked Tuesday in a White House briefing about the incident, press secretary Scott McClellan said he has not discussed the matter with the president. He should. The president sets the nation's foreign policy. He should review the matter carefully and condemn Syria's blatantly discriminatory, anti-Jewish policies quickly and publicly. He, too, has the right and duty to speak out.

[steevo]

Yup, its pervasive and never-ending - everything from the Left. They claim to be for women's rights; children's rights; ad nauseum. So PC and so completely duplicitous and hypocritical. Always holding traditional Western values under the spotlight, discrediting... with malicious scrutiny.

Oh, I was glad to hear of Arafat's demise too.