Reality to Feminists: Give up, go home, stay close to the marital bed and the kitchen.

According to this report, tens of thousands of Western women are converting to Islam because they long to submit themselves  - to a husband and to Allah. It comes from Radical Islam, by Abigail R. Esman:

The first thing the Dutch girl did once she’d converted to Islam was change her name – to Soumaya, she says, because “she was the first martyr. She was prepared to die for Allah.”

Soumaya …  is one of a wave of tens of thousands of Westerners who convert to Islam every year, more than 75 percent of whom, astonishingly, are women. Equally surprising is the fact that most of these women gravitate to conservative Islamic groups – the more misogynistic and oppressive ones – insisting all the while that they feel “liberated” and “free.”

Reading through dozens of stories of such women, one can’t help but notice the similarities among them. All claim to have embraced Islam of their own free will; yet an overwhelming majority, like Soumaya (whose story was profiled in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool), converted only after dating (or wedding) a Muslim man, usually – interestingly enough – a Moroccan (even in countries like England, where Moroccans do not form the majority Muslim population).

Others speak of “finding themselves” after years of wild drink and drugs – a pattern similar to that found in male prison converts, who often are convinced by other Muslim inmates to seek salvation through Allah. They repeat, as if by rote, the same rhetoric about escaping the sexual objectification of women by adopting the hijab or full-body abaya …

Hilariously, Soumaya, along with all the other young women profiled, appears photographed in hijab and a full face of makeup – which, of course, is what women wear in order to appear more beautiful to men. In so doing, they ignore … the very essence of what such coverings in fact represent: The notion that a woman is nothing but a sexual object, and therefore must be kept hidden … 

Young female converts speak of wanting to be a good Muslim and a good wife; the two become equated, acted out in a life of feminine submission, first to her husband and then, by extension, to Allah.

It’s probably from Christianity that Socialism derives the idea that it’s virtuous to abase oneself. Sociological thinking and the leftist collectivist ideal of leveling require self-abasement.

Sometimes we come across statements or practices by leftist ideologues that sample for us all that is repulsive, anti-human, narrow and dumb about the Left.

Here for instance is a report, by Kyle Olson at Townhall, of just such a sample. It is about education officials prescribing self-abasement for Whites – as St. Paul did for Christians.

Wisconsin Education Officials Want Students to Wear “White Privilege” Wristbands.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction runs several programs that heavily emphasize racial issues in public schools …

Some feel that one of those programs – an Americorps operation called VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) – may go a bit overboard by encouraging white students to wear a white wristband “as a reminder about your (white) privilege.”  …

A  Gloria Steinem quote on the top of VISTA’s Facebook page reads ominously:

 “The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”

The webpage also offers a series of suggestions for high schools students to become more racially sensitive. They include:

Wear a white wristband as a reminder about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband.

Confess, confess. Confess to being white. Hang your head and be ashamed. Make amends by abasing yourself.

Set aside sections of the day to critically examine how privilege is working.

Put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege.

Examine your conscience. Repent being white.

The Wisconsin DPI also sponsors several similar programs, including CREATE Wisconsin, an on-going “cultural sensitivity” teacher training program which focuses largely on “whiteness” and “white privilege.”

Hating whitey sessions? After which the teachers will be better able to educate the children of Wisconsin?

An opposite way of thinking about race may be found in a column by the wise and great Thomas Sowell. He writes:

There are so many fallacies about race that it would be hard to say which is the most ridiculous. However, one fallacy behind many other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about different races being unequally represented in various institutions, careers or at different income or achievement levels.

A hundred years ago, the fact that people from different racial backgrounds had very different rates of success in education, in the economy and in other endeavors, was taken as proof that some races were genetically superior to others.

Some races were considered to be so genetically inferior that eugenics was proposed to reduce their reproduction, and Francis Galton urged [in tune with Marx and Engels - ed] “the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”

It was not a bunch of fringe cranks who said things like this. Many held Ph.D.s from the leading universities, taught at the leading universities and were internationally renowned.

Presidents of Stanford University and of MIT were among the many academic advocates of theories of racial inferiority — applied mostly to people from Eastern and Southern Europe, since it was just blithely assumed in passing that blacks were inferior.

This was not a left-right issue. The leading crusaders for theories of genetic superiority and inferiority were iconic figures on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic.

John Maynard Keynes helped create the Cambridge Eugenics Society. Fabian socialist intellectuals H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were among many other leftist supporters of eugenics.

It was much the same story on this side of the Atlantic. President Woodrow Wilson, like many other Progressives, was solidly behind notions of racial superiority and inferiority. He showed the movie “Birth of a Nation,” glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House, and invited various dignitaries to view it with him. …

Now, instead of genes being the overriding reason for differences in outcomes, racism [has become] the one-size-fits-all explanation …  [for]  the same false premise — namely, that there is something unusual about different racial and ethnic groups having different achievements. …

Not only different racial and ethnic groups, but whole nations and civilizations, have had very different achievements for centuries. China in the 15th century was more advanced than any country in Europe. Eventually Europeans overtook the Chinese — and there is no evidence of changes in the genes of either of them.

Among the many reasons for different levels of achievement is something as simple as age. The median age in Germany and Japan is over 40, while the median age in Afghanistan and Yemen is under 20. Even if the people in all four of these countries had the same mental potential, the same history, the same culture — and the countries themselves had the same geographic features — the fact that people in some countries have 20 years more experience than people in other countries would still be enough to make equal economic and other outcomes virtually impossible.

Add the fact that different races evolved in different geographic settings, presenting very different opportunities and constraints on their development, and the same conclusion follows.

Yet the idea that differences in outcomes are odd, if not sinister, has been repeated mindlessly from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court.

*

Here’s Thomas Sowell, with Peter Robinson, talking good sense on race, racism, and discrimination

The Christian Gnostics of the early centuries CE reversed the moral judgment of their inherited civilization, decreeing that what was commonly considered good was evil, and vice versa.

Planets, even the earth, can flip their poles, north becoming  south, south north.

In the twentieth century the Russian empire was communist, America capitalist. In the twenty-first, Russia is capitalist, while America … well, you’ve got the point.

Now women are becoming men, and men women. Not just individually, which has become quite common and adds to the gaiety of nations, but en masse. This has to happen because women want to be soldiers, so men must be feminized.

Diana West puts it best:

And so it came, the coup de grace. The final “barrier” to “opportunities” for women in combat is no more. With a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role is off-limits to the female sex. The defense secretary and the general thus liberated mothers, daughters, sisters and wives to kill and be killed in the infantry, commando raids, even in Obama administration “overseas contingency operations.” In so doing, they also slashed away at that last institutional protection for the space that separates men and women, where civilization once grew.

It (civilization) has been struggling there for decades, as social engineers and radical feminists — all heirs to Marx — have been cutting away at elemental human instinct, social grace, language and thought itself. This overhaul of manners and mores, the family structure and marriage — even private aspects of the relationship between men and women — has been successful to a point where the cultural argument against women in combat (women in the military being a lost cause) is rarely voiced, not even on the right. …

We are left to make only the utilitarian arguments — body strength and speed, unit cohesion, even urinary tract infections and other hazards that front-line deployment pose to females. These are compellingly logical points, but they are unlikely to reverse an ideological juggernaut. When the secretary of defense says putting women in combat is about “making our military … and America stronger” and no one says he’s lying to further a Marxian ideal via social engineering, the cultural argument is lost, and the culture it comes from is bound and gagged, hostage to what we know as “political correctness.” 

I still see threads of the cultural argument in emails and some blog responses to the Pentagon’s latest whack at creating “gender neutrality.” It erupts like a reflex against the conditioning to deny differences defined, at their essence, by muscle mass and womb. Such conditioning erodes the male protective instinct — which, surely, is what war is supposed to arise from — and the female nurturing instinct, which surely is what a civilization depends on.

No more. Women with wombs and without manly muscle mass now count as Pentagon-approved “warriors,” modern-day knights in Kevlar, soon to be humping 80-pound packs over mountain and desert.

Or maybe not. Didn’t Gen. Dempsey indicate that dropping some of those old-fashioned strength and speed requirements might be in order? “If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it,” Dempsey said last week, “the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?” Of course not! Why train Navy SEALs when Navy OTTERs will do as well?

And what about their children, when these front-line warriors bear them? And their pregnancies, when they decide it’s better for their mission, for their country, to terminate them? Don’t think Daddy Government, once again, won’t be a steady provider to his womenfolk. …

This penultimate shift at the Pentagon (will the NFL be next?) is just the tail end of something, not the beginning — the rewiring of the human spirit. In other words, the whole movement in the name of “equal rights” has no more to do with women being legally able to apply for a credit card and other aspects of equality before the law than ordering women into combat is about making the military and America stronger.

No, it’s about behavioral manipulation and transformation — the Equal Rights Amendment by executive fiat. These changes have been a long time coming. In my lifetime, I have watched even post-1960s standards of femininity, for example, plunge to a point where female tendencies toward privacy, intimacy and modesty have given way to norms of clinical-style revelation and numbing brazenness — and I’m talking about today’s “nice” girls, the ones who soon will be considered eligible for Selective Service.

Yes, I know, only 15 percent of our all-volunteer military is female — even after decades of active government courtship to woo women into the ranks and make “a force that looks like America” (not Obama’s Cabinet), as Bill Clinton has put it. But don’t think this “opportunity” for the few comes without strings to the many. As Army Col. Ellen Haring pointed out on “PBS NewsHour” last week, “With full rights come full responsibilities.”

And then what? Will gender-neutral raw recruits soon be brawling outside the bar (with the man “beating the snot” out of the woman, as one Iraq veteran recently suggested to me in an email)? Will gender-neutral male soldiers be trained out of their protective instinct toward women? Do we want to live with the results?

One senior officer with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan wrote this to me: “I would never want my mother, sisters, wife or daughter to have to experience the ravages of combat or, worse, become a prisoner of war. It goes against every fiber of my being.”

Yesterday’s man. For a better tomorrow, we need more like him.

*

Here’s a sad old English verse by that prolific poet Anonymous:

A girl in the Army

Longed for a baby

She took her father’s greyhound

And laid it in the cradle

“Long legs hast thou

And were it not for thy cold snout

I’d kiss thee, now-now!”

First, there is the UN resolution  called “Agenda 21″. It’s a plan – among Greens, Marxists, world-government enthusiasts and similar ideologues such as animal rights champions, specimens of which may be viewed weekdays in Turtle Bay – to put an end to single family homes. (Family housing is  ”non-sustainable” according to the authors.) Adults will live singly in small compact  - ie  cramped – units, with uniform provision of all the needs the Agenda bureaucrats allow you: a single bed, limited storage for approved clothes and a few other licensed things; facilities for washing and excreting (though the water supply, like heating and lighting, will be  tightly controlled), a table or desk, a chair, TV, personal computer maybe (but monitored and sometimes censored) … Communal space  for bicycles but not for private cars.

Anyway, that’s our visualization of the plan, based on what we know of Agenda 21 and observation of our City Council’s housing developments going up along the railway track near the station. Readers can torment their own imaginations with their personal take on the collectivization program.

For more about it, put “Agenda 21″ into our search slot. Also go here to read  how New York is implementing Agenda 21′s  ”micro-apartment” or “stack ‘em and pack ‘em” housing policy.

But to come to the point: The sole occupier of a micro-apartment will be the Single Adult (defined as over 18 or perhaps younger). Copious copulation will be promoted with free condoms et cetera, but reproduction will be discouraged. If children are conceived, the unfortunate “mother” will be advised and helped to have an abortion. Indeed, the child she has conceived can be got rid of at any time up to some days, weeks, months, or even years after it is born (length of time in which killing will be permitted – or ordered – is yet to be determined). If the “mother” persists in giving birth to a child and keeping it alive, the state will take it over – though just when is no doubt a question being studied at vast expense by a panel of idiots even as we speak – and raise it with other children, none being advantaged over the others by any special treatment. (Stop that hugging and kissing!)

In the unlikely circumstance that the state will need more children than have been born,  in vitro babies transplanted into synthetic “wombs” will be scheduled.

Plainly, mothering will simply not be needed. Mothers will be redundant to requirement. Fathers too, for that matter.

What to do about marriage? Fortunately (for the Agenda) it is a dying institution. There was hope that the practice of getting married would have died out completely in our town by the time our local micro-apartment blocks were ready for occupation, but those who hoped are now reconciled to disappointment on that score.

What happened to “save”  the institution was the legalization of gay marriage.

For a story about an opponent of same-sex marriage being brought round to accepting it because to him any marriage is better than none, see an opinion piece by Kathleen Parker here in the Washington Post. Such views are not those of the Agenda, but can be accommodated because  …

After some hesitation, and a lot of sotto voce grumbling, the Agenda planners suddenly came down unanimously in favor of gay marriage on the grounds that such marriages are by their nature barren.

Again no mothers, you see. So all’s well.

“No mothers here” is the policy. “Scrap Mom” is the pithy slogan. You’ll see it soon on T-shirts.

The time will come when the word “mother” will be used only as an insult. Not surprisingly, the necessary attitude to this campaign, the Abolition of Mother, is preponderant among those who use the word “mother” as half a noun, the other half being an obscenity, and who apply it indiscriminately to any of the twenty-three genders now officially listed in the Handbook of Political Correctness. (No kidding with that number, by the way.)

Next, with the homemaking mothering woman abolished, there is the question of what to do with women - of whatever gender. The popular answer to that question, among Agenda 21 fans – is:  put them in the Army. They can be sent abroad. They can be put in harm’s way. They can do what men – of whatever gender – are doing. And do it of course for equal pay – for as long as there will be wages rather than money-rationing equal for all regardless of occupation, or none.

In some states, the phasing out of families is already well underway. (As Victor Davis Hanson points out in an article we quoted yesterday: “California now has an enormous number of single-person households, childless couples, and one-child families.”) In Europe only very uncool persons have kids. And Muslims.

Will the Agenda 21 bureaucrats get round to discouraging Muslims from marrying and reproducing? Or will they shirk it? We wait with a not entirely innocent curiosity to find out. Of course Muslims  will have to be moved eventually into micro-apartments – with the addition of a prayer mat and an arrow pointing to Mecca – if the great objective is to be achieved.

The great objective? A world of orphans.

And not too many of them. Humans – the Agenda people teach us – are bad for the earth. And Gaia is a jealous goddess.

This is from Reason,  February 27, 2008:

“I share about 90 percent of the views of most libertarians.”

So said the famous conservative William F. Buckley in a 1983 discussion when he “sat down with reason to discuss, among other subjects, libertarianism, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and the decriminalization of marijuana.”

The interview, which must have been interesting, is now hard to find. However, all we need from it is Buckley’s statement that he “shared about 90% of the views of most libertarians”, because we do too. But, like him, we still describe ourselves as conservatives.

Buckley was influenced by Albert Jay Nock, “whose elegant criticism of statism seems to grow more relevant with each passing day”, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in an essay on Nock in the National Review in 2009. Here are some extracts from it:

Albert Jay Nock … was one of the great men of letters of the 20th century. He counted among his friends and admirers H. L. Mencken, Charles Beard, Dwight Macdonald, Oswald Garrison Villard, Frank Chodorov, William F. Buckley Jr., and William Jennings Bryan (for whom he did some work as a special envoy when Bryan was secretary of state). …  [He] was born in 1870 …  in Scranton, Pa., and raised in Brooklyn, Nock was an autodidact who mastered numerous languages, including French, Latin, and Greek. He spent a good deal of his youth in a small town in upstate New York, where he imbibed from the wellspring of American individualism and gained an enduring appreciation for the power and magisterially ennobling competence of what we would today call civil society (he used the word “society” or “social power” to denote the good and decent realm of life not corrupted or coerced by the state). In 1887 he went to St. Stephen’s College (now Bard), where he was later a professor.

After college he attended divinity school, and he became a minister in the Episcopal Church in 1897. A dozen years later he quit the clergy and became a full-time journalist and editor, first at American Magazine and then at The Nation (which was still a classically liberal publication). In 1920 he became the co-editor of the original Freeman magazine, which, in its four-year run, managed to inspire the men who would one day launch National Review and the second incarnation of The Freeman, run by Nock’s disciple Frank Chodorov. …

He wrote a few books, including biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Rabelais. His most famous and successful works were Our Enemy the Stateand Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. But he was not prolific. As Chodorov put it, he “had a rare gift of editing his ideas so that he wrote only when he had something to say and he said it with dispatch.”   …

Among virtually all of the political writers of the Left and the Right in the 1920s and 1930s, Nock shines brightest for seeing from the outset that the differences between the various collectivist schemes then circulating amounted to differences in branding. “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism,” he wrote in his Memoirs, “are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.” …

A cold river of anarchism runs across the landscape of Nock’s work, but … he was not an anarchist, as many fans claim. … Nock understood that the state is not the “proper agency for social welfare, and never will be, for exactly the same reason that an ivory paper-knife is nothing to shave with.” Government intrusions “on the individual should be purely negative in character. It should attend to national defense, safeguard the individual in his civil rights, maintain outward order and decency, enforce the obligations of contract, punish crimes belonging in the order of malum in se [evil in itself] and make justice cheap and easily available.” Such a regime would amount to a government by and for the people, not a state in which the citizens are mere instruments of the statists. …

He denied that the state was the proper object of hope or a worthwhile agent of change. Moreover, he had contempt for the vast bulk of humanity, the “Neolithic mass” and those who spoke to them. In the dark, or at least darkening, age in which he believed himself to live (Nock died two weeks after Hiroshima), he cared only for the Remnant — a tiny slice of humanity he could describe but not locate. …  the Remnant was his audience. At times, the idea of the Remnant is unapologetically elitist, but in a thoroughly Jeffersonian way. The Remnant were not the “best and brightest,” the most successful, the richest. Rather, they were those occupying the “substratum of right thinking and well doing” (in Matthew Arnold’s words). “Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness.”

And it is here that we find an explanation for why Nock is so admired by liberals such as The New Republic’s Franklin Foer and the New York Times’s Sam Tanenhaus: He openly embraced the idea that he couldn’t change anything. History was driven by forces too large to be affected by politics or punditry. Any revolution would result only in a new crop of exploiters and scoundrels eager to pick up where the deposed ones left off. So, Nock figured, why bother with politics? Now what more could today’s liberals ask for from a conservative pundit?  …

He was wrong about many things, and his formulations were often too simple. … He bravely dissented from the overwhelming consensus that collectivism was the most desirable form of social organization. But he in effect surrendered to the same consensus that it was the “wave of the future.”  …

He was wrong that statism was inevitable, partly because he was right about the need to speak to the Remnant. Buckley, Chodorov, and countless others took inspiration from Nock or from Nockian ideas, but they did not write for their desk drawers. They shared Nock’s fatalism at times — standing athwart history yelling Stop, and all that — but they actually yelled Stop. Nock did not believe in anything so crude as yelling, even in purely literary terms. His successors did, because they shared Burke’s understanding that “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Likewise, when bad ideas seem good, men who know otherwise must say so, lest society slip under their spell. That was the key lesson the disparate righteous took from Nock the Prophet as they associated to form the modern conservative and libertarian movements — even if, as Nock fully understood, they didn’t know where their ideas came from, or that Nock’s fingerprints were upon many of them. …

And that is why the Right is in so much better shape than it was during Nock’s time, even as liberals are mounting a statist revival. Yes, statism is on the march again, but anti-statism isn’t an amusing pursuit for cape-wearing exotics like Nock anymore; it is the animating spirit of institutions launched and nourished by lovers of liberty.

We are fascinated by this piece of history, glad to learn that “the disparate righteous … associated to form the modern conservative and libertarian movements”.

But is statism not the “wave of the future”?

With the re-election of Obama and the apparent weakness of the Republican Party now, we cannot be confident that statism is a passing phase.

Jonah Goldberg remains full of optimism. Here he is again with a cheerful view. We quote from an article of his at Townhall today:

American conservatism began as a kind of intellectual hobbyist’s group with little hope of changing the broader society. Albert Jay Nock, the cape-wearing libertarian intellectual … who inspired a very young William F. Buckley Jr., argued that political change was impossible because the masses were rubes, goons, fools or sheep, victims of the eternal tendency of the powerful to exploit the powerless.

Buckley, who rightly admired Nock for many things, rightly disagreed on this point. Buckley trusted the people more than the intellectuals …  [and believed that] it is possible to rally the public to your cause.

It took time. In an age when conservative books make millions, it’s hard to imagine how difficult it once was to get a right-of-center book published. Henry L. Regnery, the founder of the publishing house that bears his name, started his venture to break the wall of groupthink censorship surrounding the publishing industry. With a few exceptions, Regnery was the only game in town for decades.

That’s hardly the case anymore. While there’s a higher bar for conservative authors at mainstream publishers (which remain overwhelmingly liberal), profit tends to trump ideology.

And publishing is a lagging indicator. In cable news, think tanks, talk radio and, of course, the Internet, conservatives have at least rough parity with, and often superiority to, liberals. It’s only in the legacy institutions — newspapers, the broadcast networks and most especially academia and Hollywood — where conservatism is still largely frozen out. Nonetheless, conservatism is a mass-market enterprise these days, for good and for ill.

The good is obvious. The ill is less understood. For starters, the movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can only come with persuading the unconverted.

We have a sinking feeling that we are among the “hucksters … stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can only come with persuading the unconverted”, though we don’t make money out of it, and we would very much like to achieve real political success.

A conservative journalist or activist can now make a decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people only what they want to hear has become a vocation. Worse, it’s possible to be a rank-and-file conservative without once being exposed to a good liberal argument.

We are amply exposed to liberal arguments, but have yet to hear a good one.

Many liberals lived in such an ideological cocoon for decades, which is one reason conservatives won so many arguments early on. Having the right emulate that echo chamber helps no one.

Ironically, the institution in which conservatives had their greatest success is the one most besieged by conservatives today: the Republican Party. To listen to many grassroots conservatives, the GOP establishment is a cabal of weak-kneed sellouts …

Well, yes. That is how we think of the GOP right now.

It’s not that the GOP isn’t conservative enough, it’s that it isn’t tactically smart or persuasive enough to move the rest of the nation in a more conservative direction. Moreover, thanks in part to the myth that all that stands between conservatives and total victory is a philosophically pure GOP, party leaders suffer from a debilitating lack of trust — some of it well earned — from the rank and file.

But politics is about persuasion, and a party consumed by the need to prove its purity to its base is going to have a very hard time proving anything else to the rest of the country.

We applaud – and often quote – conservative and libertarian writers who attract millions of readers and may be persuading them.

And eagerly – though full of misgiving – we await their success: await the defeat of collectivist statism; the fall from power of the now far left Democratic Party; the final disappointment of the world government fans and the Big Green fanatics; the enlightenment of feminists and pacifists; the stopping of the Islamic onslaught on the West.

And the regeneration of the GOP.

“A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn is not so much a history, more a compendium of complaint. And (therefore) of every Leftist issue you could think of.

(We have written about Zinn before. See our post Zinn writes histories, December 11, 2009.)

The “People” in Zinn’s mind are a totally different species from the “fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government” and so wrote the Constitution and founded the Union. Those same fifty-five privileged white males of a species different from the People have continued to pursue their selfish material interests ever since at the expense of downtrodden masses. These masses, this vast victimized majority (he quotes Shelley at them: “Ye are many; they are few!”), consists of subordinated races, females, persons of minority sexual preferences (he doesn’t call them that), and people who would like to be rich but do not manage to become so (he doesn’t call them that).

Zinn milks pity from his readers (or tries to). He would have you feel bad if you are white, if you are male, if you are “privileged” (ie not poor), and if you are American; but implies over some 700 pages that you can redeem yourself from your badness if you will beat your breast frequently, cry ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!” every day of your life,  and join with the complainers in bringing down those fifty-five imperial villains by becoming a violent radical socialist revolutionary or, more comfortably – well, he doesn’t say so in the book because it was published before the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged, but he would have said, by joining it.

Thomas Sowell writes at Townhall:

Schools were once thought of as places where a society’s knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation. But, about a hundred years ago, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University came up with a very different conception of education — one that has spread through American schools of education, and even influenced education in countries overseas.

John Dewey saw the role of the teacher, not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change — someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.

Or to put it another way: indoctrinate students to believe that a much better society – even a perfect one – could be planned and is only not being planned because “corporate interests” (a euphemism for the fifty-five immortals who founded the USA) will not allow it.

A century later, we are seeing schools across America indoctrinating students to believe in all sorts of politically correct notions. The history that is taught in too many of our schools is a history that emphasizes everything that has gone bad, or can be made to look bad, in America — and that gives little, if any, attention to the great achievements of this country.

If you think that is an exaggeration, get a copy of “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn and read it. As someone who used to read translations of official Communist newspapers in the days of the Soviet Union, I know that those papers’ attempts to degrade the United States did not sink quite as low as Howard Zinn’s book.

That book has sold millions of copies, poisoning the minds of millions of students in schools and colleges against their own country. But this book is one of many things that enable teachers to think of themselves as “agents of change,” without having the slightest accountability for whether that change turns out to be for the better or for the worse — or, indeed, utterly catastrophic.

This misuse of schools to undermine one’s own society is not something confined to the United States or even to our own time. It is common in Western countries for educators, the media and the intelligentsia in general, to single out Western civilization for special condemnation for sins that have been common to the human race, in all parts of the world, for thousands of years.

Meanwhile, all sorts of fictitious virtues are attributed to non-Western societies, and their worst crimes are often passed over in silence, or at least shrugged off by saying some such thing as “Who are we to judge?”

Even in the face of mortal dangers, political correctness forbids us to use words like “terrorist” when the approved euphemism is “militant.” Milder terms such as “illegal alien” likewise cannot pass the political correctness test, so it must be replaced by another euphemism, “undocumented worker.”

Some think that we must tiptoe around in our own country, lest some foreigners living here or visiting here be offended by the sight of an American flag or a Christmas tree in some institutions. …

American schools today are … undermining American society as one unworthy of defending, either domestically or internationally.

Which reminds us of what happened to Rome when it took on Christianity, the first Mea Culpa creed in history.

A three-ring circus has been erected around the false video narrative, with the Petraeus/Rice/Clapper follies detracting attention from the three essential issues: the Obama administration’s disastrous Libya policy, the president’s dereliction of duty on September 11, 2012, and the troubling goings-on at the Benghazi consulate that wasn’t a consulate. 

We quote from Andrew McCarthy’s astute analysis of the devious political distractions from the main issues of Benghazigate being spun by the administration and the media.

CBS News is reporting that it was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that purged references to “al Qaeda” and “terrorism” from talking points given to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Rice used those talking points to promote the lie that the Benghazi massacre resulted from a spontaneous mob protest rather than a planned terrorist attack. CBS adds that the CIA and FBI signed off on this false version of events.

This is all farce, of course. There being no more honor among con-men than among thieves, there comes a time in all busted conspiracies when the conspirators start pointing fingers at each other.

To pause briefly over details of the farce:

When the subject of Ms. Rice’s fitness to be secretary of state arose during last week’s press conference, the president summoned up some faux bravado, daring two Rice critics, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to “go after me,” not the gracious Madame Ambassador, if they wanted a fight. …

If Susan Rice is a weak little woman who needs the protection of a big strong male, then she certainly shouldn’t be appointed Secretary of State – or, for that matter, Ambassador to the UN.  It’s absurd to put women who need such protection into jobs that expose them to the storm winds of international conflict.

For decades now administrations both elephantine and asinine have appointed women as legates to Arab states – to Muslim states that despise women and regard them as obscene walking sex-organs that need to be covered up to the eyeballs – with disastrous results.  It was a woman ambassador, April Glaspie, sent by President George H. W. Bush to Iraq, who blunderingly gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990.

Now to return to the nub of the matter:

With their guy safely reelected, this spectacle has finally drawn the Obamedia’s attention to the president’s Benghazi travesty. Let’s not get lost here. It is critical to step back and bear two things in mind:

(a) All of the players here, including Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (both of whom the CBS report purports to absolve), are guilty of conspiracy — in this case, to mislead Americans about the cause of the attack and to aid the administration’s Islamist allies, whose objective is to impose sharia blasphemy standards on our country (a project on which the Obama administration has been colluding with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation since 2009). It was not for their own benefit that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Rice were, respectively, doctoring talking points and using them to create a false impression. Obama was the intended beneficiary. Patently the White House — which pitched Rice to the Sunday shows because Obama wanted to get the Mohammed-movie talking points publicly aired — was in the loop.

(b) Given that the conspiracy is a cover-up, there is the more salient matter of what is being covered up? The brain-dead mantra in Washington is always — all together now — “The cover-up is worse than the crime.” That is not true here. …

What is bad, very bad, is:

Four Americans were killed in Benghazi as a direct result of President Obama’s unprovoked and … unconstitutional war in Libya. This foolish gambit had the easily foreseeable result of empowering Islamists, very much including violent jihadists who now have access to much of the Qaddafi arsenal, in addition to other arms and training they received from the U.S. and NATO in the mission to overthrow Qaddafi (then, an American ally).

That was the first wrong step, whether a mistake or (as we suspect) action intended to promote revolutionary Islam.

Then what it led to:

The jihadist siege against the American installation in Benghazi lasted for over seven hours. The commander-in-chief knew the attack was underway while it was happening — which is obviously why he won’t answer questions about when and how he learned of it. He had military assets in proximity to Benghazi that could have come to the aid of the besieged Americans. Yet, Obama failed to take meaningful military action, an inexcusable dereliction of duty. Then, he told the American people he had done all he could do to protect those who were killed and wounded, an inexcusable betrayal of trust. Both counts of malfeasance are impeachable offenses. Rice’s false statements, Clapper’s purge, and Petraeus’s contradictory statements to Congress do not erase any of that. Obama has far more to answer for than anyone else in this debacle, and it is imperative that he be held accountable.

No help reached the beleaguered ambassador. So either Obama gave the order to go to their aid as he says he did and it was not obeyed, in which case he is ineffectual and his officials rebellious; or he did not give the order, in which case he is lying.

Andrew McCarthy goes on to discuss just what scandalous facts the cover-up is trying to conceal: Was the CIA station in Benghazi being used, without authority, to detain terrorist prisoners? Or was it gathering arms for shipment to Syria in whose civil war the policy is not to interfere? Or was it something even worse?

It’s the answers to those questions that we wait to hear, not who changed the wording of talking-points given to the little lady who parroted what she was told on TV in order to conceal shameful secret enterprises in the Arab world by the Obama conspiracy. What were those shameful secret enterprises?

Or as Andrew McCarthy puts it:

The cover-up here is not worse than the crime. Congress must not allow itself to get sidetracked. What matters most is what the administration is hiding — not the fact that the administration is hiding it.

So those 72 virgins that heaven provides for good Muslim men when they “pass on” are nine years old?

Frank Crimi writes at Front Page:

As Iranian lawmakers now seek to lower the legal age of marriage for girls to nine-years-old, the number of Iranian brides already under 10 years of age is sharply rising.

The Iranian decision to allow nine-year-old girls the legal opportunity to be married to fully grown men was announced by Mohammad Ali Isfenani, chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee.

Isfenani called Iran’s current civil legislation, which sets the minimum legal age of marriage for girls at 13-years-old, “un-Islamic and illegal,” saying, “We must regard nine as being the appropriate age for a girl to have reached puberty and qualified to get married. To do otherwise would be to contradict and challenge Islamic Sharia law.”

Isenfani’s clarion call for prepubescent marriage comes at the same moment a new report from the Union for the Protection of Children’s Rights (UPCR) found 75 Iranian girls less than 10-years-old were forced to marry in the past two months, part of a sharp rise in the overall number of Iranian child brides under the age of 10.

According to UPCR, of the 342,000 Iranian marriages among girls under 18-years-old registered in 2010, at least 713 marriages involved girls under 10-years-old, more than twice as many as were registered in the prior three years. Moreover, of these underage marriages, 42,000 involved girls between the ages of 10 to 14.

There are now more than 50 million child brides, a number that is growing by 10 million each year and which is expected to reach 100 million young victims over the next decade. …

These unfortunate children are married off for a bevy of cultural and religious reasons, ranging from ensuring familial alliances to economic necessities, such as settling debts or overcoming natural disasters to ensure a family’s survival. …

Drought-stricken Africa has witnessed the emergence of so-called “drought brides” who are being sold for as little as $170. …

While the reasons behind these human transactions may vary, the one commonality is that the younger the girl, the better the deal. Specifically, it is important that these girls be sold off at a young enough age to better ensure their virginity, thus increasing their economic value and protecting the honor of their families.

Not surprisingly, once handed-off, these child brides are then consigned to a terrifyingly nasty, brutish and short-lived existence … The life expectancy of their frightful existence is likely to be cut exceedingly short given the multitude of health risks inherent in being a child bride, not the least of which is the high mortality rate from childbirth injuries, where an estimated 70,000 girls under 15 die each year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth. …

Most of these child marriages take place in predominantly Islamic countries spread throughout the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.

The deeply rooted Islamic attachment to prepubescent marriage finds religious justification in the [fictitious*] Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a six-year-old child bride, a marriage consummated when she was nine-years-old …

While most would find it hard to believe that a 15-year-old-girl, let alone a nine-year-old girl, is physically or emotionally ready to start engaging in sexual activity and carrying a child, others think that girls barely removed from the womb are more than fully capable of handling those activities. That enlightened attitude was on display in January when one of Saudi Arabia’s most influential clerics, Sheik Saleh al-Fawzan, issued a fatwa allowing fathers to arrange marriages for their daughters “even if they are in the cradle.”

However, lest anyone think a man would actually engage in sex with such a young infant, al-Fawzan was quick to add that it wasn’t “permissible for their husbands to have sex with them unless they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the men.”

You don’t want to crush your baby bride, do you? Not when you’ve paid for her?

Given that, it’s not surprising that many believe that underage marriage is little more than legally permissible and religiously sanctioned pedophilia. Yet, some defenders of the horrid practice argue that critics have no moral or ethical qualms about child marriage but are instead driven by less than pure concerns.  One such person is Yemeni Sheik Mohammed Hamzi, an imam and official of the Islamist Yemeni opposition party, Islaah. Hamzi had been asked his opinion in reaction to international complaints to the death of a 13-year-old Yemeni child bride who bled to death after being tied down and forced to have sex with her 23-year-old husband.

Should we still call it “making love”?

Hamzi simply ascribed their dissatisfaction to the fact [sic] that “No one wants to marry these women’s-rights activists anyway. They’re just depressed and jealous that they are not married.”

We are surprised to learn that there are any “women’s-rights activists”, married or single, who are trying to save little girls from being legally raped to death in accordance with Islamic law.

We listened hard and long for the voices of Western feminists raised en bloc against the plight of Muslim women and girls, but have given up hope of ever hearing them.

* See also our post “The Prophet Muhammad” did not exist, August 26, 2012.

AP reports:

Pakistani acid attack victim Fakhra Younus had endured more than three dozen surgeries over more than a decade to repair her severely damaged face and body when she finally decided life was no longer worth living. … [She] jumped from the sixth floor of a building in Rome, where she had been living and receiving treatment. …

She had been a dancer. Her husband, Bilal Khar, a “law-maker”, poured the acid over her.

It must have been excruciatingly painful, and it hideously disfigured her.

Bilal Khar was brought to trial and acquitted.

“Many believe he used his connections to escape the law’s grip –  a common occurrence in Pakistan.”

His father was Ghulam Mustafa Khar, who had been governor of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab.

The couple was married for three years, but Younus eventually left him because he …  physically and verbally abused her….

He came to her mother’s house, found her lying asleep and “poured acid all over her”.

He will suffer no punishment. He walks a free man.

More than 8,500 acid attacks, forced marriages and other forms of violence against women were reported in Pakistan in 2011 … The figure is likely an undercount…

This is from Creeping Sharia.

Beat a camel, beat a wife.

The duty of a Muslim wife is to “lick pus and blood from her husband’s nose” – 0r be beaten.

Comments by feminists are invited but not expected.