Jonathan Kay, on “the building next door”*;

Ironically, the censorship regime that well-meaning Jewish intellectuals helped put in place to fight anti-Semitism a generation ago is now being applied to prosecute the pundits blowing the whistle on the one truly genuine existential threat that Jews are facing worldwide: militant Islam.
[…]
The ongoing sniping match between Levant and the Jewish establishment, petty as it may seem to some, is essentially a proxy battle in a larger struggle for the political soul of the Jewish community. It is a fight between those Jews who support free speech, and those who support censorship; between those focused on the new threat of militant Islam, and those still worried about neo-Nazi kooks; between those who want Jews to take a vocal leadership role in the defining ideological battle of our time, and those who see themselves as passive victims who require protection from a nanny state.

“… the French police were chasing a criminal who fled into a building in Paris. Their first thought was that they would surround the building. But then they realized that the building was so large, and had so many exits, that they didn’t have enough policemen on the scene to do that. So they surrounded the building next door, which was smaller and had fewer exits.”

In the case of the Canadian Jewish Congress, “white supremacists” are “the building next door”.
h/t.

If you think freedom is dispensable, let’s remove yours. Your convenience is more important than someone else’s, let’s show you what real life is like outside of the bubble of a First World liberal democracy.

“It’s not about P.R. It’s about teaching people not to screw with you.”
Coincidentally – Today Danish papers have reprinted Muhammad cartoons.
Update – Oh, good grief…

CBC’s coverage of the Motoons story just started a few minute ago. The dhimis at the Ceeb pixelated the drawings while showing the papers on camera!
What a bunch of knobs!!

Pete Vere, Sootoday.com;

The MP wasn’t Prime Minister Stephen Harper, or even Conservative. Despite the current high-profile cases against Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant and Alphonse de Valk, the government has been silent.
No, taking the lead in defense of our traditional freedoms was Liberal MP Dr. Keith Martin, a visible minority with a strong record of promoting human rights. It’s too bad he’s also a minority among MPs when it comes to defending the fundamental right to free expression. Dr. Martin has introduced a private member’s motion to repeal the section of the Canadian Human Rights Act that is allowing a quasi-judicial government agency to censor not only the media, but the average Canadian.
“This is a question of freedom of speech,” Dr. Martin said. “As a citizen of a free country, I am deeply concerned and disturbed by the fact that the bar of freedom of speech has been moved, quite significantly, in a way that is a serious violation in a serious democracy. People fought through two world wars to give us freedom of speech.”

Audio at the link.
Contrast this with the yellow journalism on display in this Canadian Press item. (Contact info)
The email for the Senior Supervising Editor Patti Tasko appears to be ptasko@cp.org

… that we had Universal Auto Care in Canada.

But if we’re going to keep this notion that everybody’s entitled to have whatever they want medically paid for by their neighbors, then we are finished. We are finished as a country; we are finished as a society. You can talk about my wealth, but let me tell you something, sir. I don’t depend on anybody else for anything, and it was one of my objectives when I grew up. I didn’t want to be obligated. I didn’t want to be dependent. I didn’t want to owe anybody. I don’t buy into insurance plans because it’s a hassle! Now, I know a lot of people don’t have that freedom. I used to not have that freedom, either. But I do now because I worked for it — and if I can do it, a lot more people can do it than think they can, and that’s conservatism again. People are much better than they know. They have much more potential than they know. But when you’ve got a Democrat Party and a movement telling them they suck, telling them they can’t get anywhere because the deck is stacked against them and the people stacking the deck are Republicans and so forth, then you are diminishing the country; you’re diminishing the future, and you’re destroying people’s lives.
……
The health care problem in this country is getting worse, while people are voting on for people who are making it worse because they hear these people saying, “I’m going to fix it.” Well, the people in charge of fixing it have no interest in it getting fixed, because if it gets fixed, you don’t need them. You can rely on yourself. This health care debate is one of the most infuriating things I witness every day, because I get so sick and tired of people buying hook, line, and sinker a lie. “I’m going to get everybody covered. I’m going to make sure everybody gets health insurance in this country. We’re going to make sure it’s not just the rich.” It doesn’t happen, does it? When you have government telling private industry how to operate, this is exactly what you get, and it’s going to happen in energy. It’s already happening in a number of other industries, too. It’s happening in the auto industry…

How long do you think the “new set of radials” waiting lists would be?

Now, after Barack Obama’s tremendous surge,

… the ugly assassination theme has quickly resurfaced, although this time it’s being expressed as concern over the candidate’s safety rather than as active wishing for his demise, which is at least an improvement, but this fixation on assassination is still interesting. In Obama’s case, the issue is being raised by a writer at The Huffington Post who – for reasons I cannot discern – seems to think Halliburton or Blackwater or someone connected somehow with the Bush White House will try to kill Obama. I can’t figure out the reasoning, but to people for whom every evil in the world begins and ends with George W. Bush, on whom all bad things must be blamed, I guess it makes some sort of sense.
I don’t know if some folks have yet figured out that George W. Bush is not running for president in ‘08, but eventually they’re going to find themselves deprived of their Hate Doll. Where they’ll put all that energy when he is off the world stage is anyone’s guess. It will have to go somewhere.

Related – The more things change…

“But isn’t it a bit odd that the leading candidate for ‘change’ is a Chicago Democrat? […] Not only is Sen. Barack Obama a Chicago Democrat, but he started his career by having all of his Democratic primary opponents — including the incumbent — thrown off the ballot in a race for an Illinois Senate seat in 1996.“

Dinesh D’Souza debates Christopher Hitchens.
(mwv)

Heh.

…. that in the end asks, “Who will bell the cat”.
Who was it who decided that children were an option for the lazy and the stupid?
Who was it decided that the God of our fathers shall have no dominion over me?
Who was it decided we shall hide our lights under a bushel basket?
Which mental midget amongst us sits bestride the backs of giants and dares imagine, we are loftier than they?
We have sown the breeze and are now reaping the whirlwind should we be surprised?
Its not the Muslim’s fault. They are but the whet stone being used to hone us that we might actually stand for something and do something and be someone who matters.
Don’t try to reform them. We must try reform ourselves and having done so see how quickly they fall.
The Islamic faith is one that dwells in fear loathing and ignorance. We only strengthen it when we deal in the same.

Thank you, Joe. It’s comments like this that make the blogging effort worthwhile.

I’m not going to bother with exerpts from either one. Just read both in their entirety – Michael Coren and Salim Mansur.

A Conservative cabinet minister says the Canadian Islamic Congress is attempting to undermine basic Charter freedoms by filing complaints against a journalist who wrote a book on the Muslim world.
Jason Kenney, the secretary of state for multiculturalism, weighed in Wednesday on the controversy surrounding columnist Mark Steyn’s bestseller America Alone. The Canadian Islamic Congress has filed complaints with federal and provincial human rights commissions based on an excerpt of Steyn’s book that appeared in Maclean’s Magazine in October.
“To be attacking opinions expressed by a columnist in a major magazine is a pretty bold attack on the basic Canadian value of freedom of the press and freedom of expression,” Kenney said in an interview. “I think all Canadians would reject that kind of effort to undermine one of our basic freedoms.”

I note that the CBC can’t bring themselves to write an original report. This one’s borrowed from the Canadian Press. But they’re hardly alone – a search on Google news suggests that virtually no Canadian media have reported on it at all.

Patrick S Lasswell meets a shotgun armed drug dealer – outside his home; (link fixed)

While running around in my PJ’s armed exclusively with a flashlight, telephone, and civic virtue, my libertarian interest in keeping the police from having military weapons died of exposure. When the the kook drove by and kept pointing his lights at my position, I was all for the 911 operator getting access to laser armed satellites or police helicopters with precision guided munitions. The notion that patrol cars might have AR-15 rifles onboard seemed prudent, not an infringement. All apologies to Glenn Reynolds, but I wouldn’t choose to face deranged shotgun toting citizens armed only with a pistol, why should the cops?

Today I will take my children to the Remembrance Day ceremonies, just like my father used to take me to the remembrance ceremonies in The Netherlands where I grew up as a child. The memories of those are vivid: a sober ceremony, some music, a speech by the mayor, veterans and survivors placing some wreaths in front of the statue on the square and a silence of two minutes followed by the national anthem. But as opposed to Canadians, our day of remembrance is May 4, the day marking the eve of liberation day; the day Canadian troops liberated the North and West of The Netherlands sixty-two years ago. But there is another more major difference between these two days of remembrance: most of the victims we commemorated weren’t military, but civilian.

Bravo!

Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender.
She represented a movement. She was its head. She was great figure, a person in history, and she was a woman. She was in it for serious reasons, not to advance the claims of a gender but to reclaim for England its economic freedom, and return its political culture to common sense. Her rise wasn’t symbolic but actual.
[…]
The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don’t use what they are. They don’t hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he’s not criticizing me, he’s criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.

SDA flashback.

Hugh Hewitt with Victor Davis Hansen on Pakistan;

VDH: Yeah, but we got Ramzi Youssef. That’s true. We did. And we killed a couple of people with Predators inside Pakistan. But we haven’t got a lot of traction as far…and see, the problem is we don’t know to what degree there’s any popular support for us to get anybody, because as you saw that latest Pew poll, I think it was conducted in May, the two countries with the highest anti-American sentiment were Turkey and Pakistan. So if we were to get a constitutional government under Bhutto or whoever would be elected, I’m not sure there would be much difference, except that they could argue that it’s legitimate. What we kind of get the worst…it reminds me of the Greek colonels in the 70’s. They kept saying to us if you don’t back us, you’re going to get communist and Marxist. And yet, they played us every way possible with aid, and then they would tell their own people, you better support us, because we’re the only guys who can get American aid. And Musharraf talks out of both sides of his mouth.
HH: But the Greek colonels turned out pretty well, didn’t they, Victor?
VDH: I don’t think so.

Victor Davis Hanson;

We don’t know what the future will bring, but so far the period between May and November 2007 ranks as one of the most dramatic changes in the perception of a war that we’ve experienced.
And if the past is any guide, there will be fundamental political adjustments from the trivial of pundits repositioning themselves by simple silence about the war, or suggestions they were never really anti-war, or that the improvements came only because of their principled criticism — to the fundamental of having the entire leadership of the Democratic either ignore Iraq, claim the victory was not worth the commensurate cost of the last four plus years, or take proprietorship over Gen. Petraeus’s success — anything other than demanding a timetable for complete withdrawal with an admission of de facto defeat in the manner of the now infamous NY Times editorial.

Where were they then? – AJStrata takes a look back at the Champions Of Defeat.
Don Surber – “Blaming the media for victory”. That’s one you don’t hear very often.

Life will not improve for Cubans under their current system of government. It will not improve by exchanging one dictator for another. It will not improve if we seek accommodation with a new tyranny in the interests of “stability.” America will have no part in giving oxygen to a criminal regime victimizing its own people. We will not support the old way with new faces, the old system held together by new chains. The operative word in our future dealings with Cuba is not “stability.” The operative word is “freedom.”

“It wasn’t long before Ron Evans (Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba First Nations)…

… … reverted to form. Aboriginal kids need to connect with their culture. Blah blah. Poverty is the root cause of crime. Blah blah. Tougher anti-gun, anti-gang, anti-crime laws aren’t needed.
“How is a tough crime bill going to help people to change?” said Evans. “Many of our people are caught in the cycle. They’re stuck.”
And to prove how stuck he is in his own go-nowhere cycle…

John Bolton – on Iran, North Korea and the UN.