The Balloonist's View

From Magic City Morning Star
Michael DevolinThe Balloonist's ViewBy Michael DevolinJun 12, 2007 - 7:57:21 AM
I was admonished recently by a seasoned writer who told me that confessing to a friendship with Jews in my articles would surely preclude them from publication. Ironically, the article in question was all about the absurdity and imprudence of political correctness. I had remarked, basically, that Islam and the Muslim are making headway in the Western media, free from censorship or excoriation, saying the nastiest things imaginable about Jews and the State of Israel while simultaneously their Islamist brothers and sisters are attempting to blow every corner of the world to hell and gone. Judaism and the Jew, in contrast, despite their slandered dead and wounded, are banished to far-flung blogs and obscure periodicals as mere afterthoughts and journalistic flip-flops.
What should be apparent to all who assume the defence of rational thought and traditional Western jurisprudence is that we, the rational and the sane, are losing a propaganda war while Islam and their unctuous advocates in the media are winning it. Those who think that being prudent and perceptive will win the day should think again.
For example, Jews, whose religion [Judaism] has always advocated mercy and truth, virtues adopted by Christianity (but apparently beyond the grasp of Islam), have now been transmogrified by major news outlets as seemingly strange and fringe elements of Western societies. Conversely, Muslim terrorists and their apologists are continually portrayed as deserving of our pity and, even worse, our tax dollars. We have politicians about, like Jack Layton and Stephen Dion in Canada, who voice more their fears of Canadian soldiers mistreating Muslim Taliban prisoners than they do their objections to Muslim Taliban terrorists exploding roadside bombs in the midst of our soldiers and Afghanistan's innocent Muslim civilians. How perverse it that?
The media talking-heads and academia that effect this transmutation of basic logic do so with the condescending attitude of grade-school teachers who believe the rest of mankind, parent and child alike, will never learn grammar and will surely never truly appreciate Catcher in the Rye. These self-aggrandized protagonists assure us that we are altogether wrong about what is most obvious, like the attendant violence of veridical Islam - the only Islam the world will ever know and not the dressed-up and theoretical version.
Canadians, for example, are enchanted into believing that Muslims from the foreigner-forbidden Arab Middle East working at a nuclear reactor in the middle of McMaster University's campus in Hamilton, Ontario is not an immediate problem. Americans, to use another example, are told not to be nonplussed about Keith Ellison, a Democrat, rubbing elbows with the leaders of the Muslim American Society, a group whose history is connected to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization responsible for creating such shining examples of Islam as Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Egyptian Jihad. Such arrogance and imprudence reminds me of something H.L. Mencken wrote about those who believe they are enabled to see more than others below them, "Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them."
Written by Michael Devolin© Copyright 2002-2007 by Magic City Morning Star

From Magic City Morning Star
Michael DevolinGaza: Another of Islam's Reality ShowsBy Michael DevolinJun 20, 2007 - 8:26:25 AM
Islam has no moderates. Islam represents only Muslims, which includes those who are transiting away from that congenital humanity they inherited through nascency-a humanity that, properly motivated, defies the insensate culture bequeathed them from the Koran-and those who have already protruded beyond that humanity, having made the journey to veridical Islam, which now includes the blood-for-blood reality show presently being played out in Gaza by Muslim terrorists belonging to Hamas and Fatah.
I remember that but a few days ago, the media were comparing Hamas and Fatah, describing Fatah as "secular" and "the more moderate" of the two. Fatah, in my opinion, is nothing more than a terrorist group driven by the lure of billions in "foreign aid" currencies, directed by a senior citizen terrorist who now adapts, as an imposed prerequisite to receiving these same billions, the cavil of statecraft. And now Abbas' Fatah gunmen, in a public display of what has evolved as Islam's peculiar avant-garde statecraft, are killing Hamas supporters in the streets. Where is the moderation in that? And how is this behaviour any different from that of Hamas' gunmen who, not to be outdone, are killing Fatah gunmen in the streets? Islam has given a whole new meaning to the term "vicious circle."
And please, can anyone enlighten me as to what is "secularism" in Gaza, because every time I watch TV news casts about either of these two Islamic killing fraternities, whether Hamas or Fatah, I see men with an AK47 in one hand and a Koran in the other? It seems to me that in the context of Gaza and the so-called Palestinians, both secularism and Islam are neither indicative nor portentous of any sort of denouement to the obsession these people seem to have with killing each other whenever they are not busy killing Israeli Jews. These people are ready to govern a "Palestinian state" contiguous to Israel? I don't think so. Such a state, whether governed by Fatah or Hamas, would be, to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "an absurdity, a noble failure, or something in between."
And what relevance does secularism have within the bounds of the so-called Palestinian struggle anyway? After all, this is the same populace that voted in the Muslim zealots of Hamas and rejected "the more moderate" Fatah. What pertinence, therefore, has Fatah's miasmic secularism in a religious setting as autocratic as Islam's? None.
After all is said and done, whether within or without Gaza, the hemorrhaging of whatever frail unity previously existed between Fatah and Hamas is nothing more than the sectarian violence that follows Islam around the globe. Yesterday it was Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia. Today it's Gaza: another of Islam's reality shows.
Written by Michael Devolin© Copyright 2002-2007 by Magic City Morning Star