ANOTHER CASE WHERE THE "ANTI-ZIONIST" MASK SLIPS

Rod Liddle knows antisemitism when he sees it

Sometimes things are altogether more simple than we wish them to be. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the eminent chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, recently refused to attend the Holocaust memorial day. When asked why this was so, he muttered something about how lots of people had been killed all over the place, not least the poor Palestinians and why shouldn't we remember them, etc., etc. In the liberal press, extravagant excuses were made for Sacranie and his ludicrous chef de cabinet, Inayat Bunglawala. But I suspect that the simple answer, the one we didn't want to hear, is the most accurate: Sacranie and Mr Bunglawala don't like Jews. They are both unequivocal anti-Semites. You do not refuse to grieve for one bunch of people because another, much smaller, bunch of people have been murdered as well. Nor should you automatically equate Jews with the right-wing Zionism of Ariel Sharon: that would be like equating all black Zimbabweans with Robert Mugabe.

It's a racist thesis, isn't it? Those people who are opposed to Israel's policies are usually at pains to point out that they are not being anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist. It is not the Jews to whom we are opposed, they say - it's the Zionists. In which case you'd expect them to be happy to spend two minutes in silence commemorating those six million Jews, those non-Israeli citizens by definition, murdered by the Nazis. But Sacranie and Bunglawala wouldn't even cross the road to attend such a memorial. It wasn't because there are altogether too many of these sorts of commemoration these days, to the extent that they have become almost meaningless. It was because the commemoration was for the Jews; ergo, in my book, they're anti-Semitic. They're Jew-haters. I thought as much at the time and think it even more so now.

(Article originally here. Reprinted here and here)

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ELSEWHERE

German wisdom: "You won't believe this: In an article in Frankfurter Rundschau, a leading left-wing daily, Germany's environmental minister Juergen Trittin holds U.S. president George Bush responsible for hurricane Katrina. Yes, that's right. The hurricane Katrina that killed dozens of people, that destroyed countless homes, flooded parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, that left millions without electricity - it's all Bush's fault, according to a leading member of the German green party, who happens to be environmental minister in chancellor Schroeder's cabinet. Never mind that statistics don't show any particular increase in the frequency of hurricanes in the U.S. in the last decades."

More on Wal-Mart: "Yet the fear that an enormous corporation like Wal-Mart could send smaller retail stores out of business while creating a hostile, anti-competitive environment is enough to mobilize union labor against an unfair, working environment. Yet at the end of the day, consumers still flock to Wal-Mart by the millions to buy merchandise that is considerably cheaper, regardless of how much better the store down the street treats their workers. So far regulators have been able to prevent Wal-Mart from acquiring banks or industrial loan corporations. Perhaps if you do not shop regularly at Wal-Mart you may one day be able to open up a banking account with them, or apply for a credit card with a low interest rate that you can go use somewhere else. The future is anyone's guess."

"Poverty line" is all a matter of definition: "Census Bureau tomorrow will release the latest statistics on poverty in the United States, the income level of an average household and the number of Americans still lacking health insurance. ... Perhaps no statistic has more critics than the poverty rate, which in 2003 stood at 12.5 percent, the latest Census data available. University of Chicago economist Robert T. Michael, who chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel tasked to update poverty statistics a decade ago, called the current poverty data "truly awful."... Officially, the poverty rate has drifted upward since 2000, from 11.3 percent to 12.5 percent in 2003. But a more sophisticated measurement that the Census also publishes, which accounts for variable costs of living, rising medical expenditures and more accurate price inflation, shows the official rate has consistently understated poverty. By that alternative measure, the percentage of Americans below the poverty line has risen from 12.8 percent in 2000 to 14.2 percent in 2003. Using such measurements, last year the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee found poverty rates nearing 16 percent in the late 1980s".

Interesting snippet here (from "Playboy", of all places) about the improper use of dogs by police to sniff out drugs. There is a good article on the civil liberties implications of the matter here

Do-gooder ethics: "Federal authorities are investiing records to find out if some of the Medicaid identification numbers that D.C.-based Voice of Social Concern Association Inc. submitted to the government for payment belonged to recipients who were deceased, records obtained by The Washington Times show. In addition, documents filed in U.S. District Court show authorities are questioning a pattern of billing for rides that coincided with major holidays and with a three-day stretch in February 2003 when blizzardlike conditions paralyzed the D.C. area."

The French "social model" at work: "Should we stick a nightstick in their faces and force les femmes to ride ze bus? That's one bus company's basic idea. The company is taking some former passengers to court. Why? Because those commuters got off the bus and started taking a car. See, it's a car-sharing 'scheme.' A nefarious plot. And the court has set a date to hear this case. It's France. Who's doing the suing? Transports Schiocchet Excursions ... let's call it TSE so you don't have to hear what passes for my French any more. TSE has a route from France to Luxembourg, which is where a group of French cleaning ladies works. TSE says the cleaning ladies are guilty of -- hold on, let me double-check to make sure I'm getting this right -- ah yes, 'an act of unfair and parasitical competition.'"

Mark Kleiman has a stinging rejoinder to the attempted defence of himself by the contemptible Prof Juan Cole -- whom I have already mentioned a couple of times.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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