The Melbourne-based journalist and television commentator Andrew Bolt is celebrated and reviled by all the right (i.e., all the left) people throughout his native land. He’s been threatened, sued, and otherwise harassed by the politically correct establishment that, despite the great Tony Abbott in the prime minister’s seat, holds sway in Oz. Along with the writers associated with Quadrant magazine in Sydney, Bolt is one of only a handful of people who have effectively challenged the sclerotic orthodoxy of establishment opinion on all matter of issues, from the Aborigines and immigration to the virtues of free-market economics to the cesspool of hatred that is the ideology of radical Islam.
There has been an enormous amount of sentimental posturing in the wake of the massacre of 10 journalists and 2 policemen at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last week. Even now tearful crowds are parading across France holding up placards reading “Je Suis Charlie.” The whole production is slightly nauseating in its fakeness, its self-aggrandizing narcissism, and its essential mendacity.
In As We Were, his charming memoir about Victorian England, E.F. Benson tells the story of the pompus classics don O.B. Browning presenting himself before Tennyson at a party. “I’m Browning,” said O.B. Tennyson looked him up and down and replied, “No you’re not.”
It’s the same here. Those skirling throngs are not Charlie, not at all. And that is the point of Andrew Bolt’s superlative column in yesterday’s the Herald Sun. “Are we really Charlie?” he asks. “No, and shamefully no.” “They lie,” Bolt writes.
The Islamist terrorists are winning, and the coordinated attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and kosher shop will be just one more success. One more step to our gutless surrender.
Al-Qaeda in Yemen didn’t attack Charlie Hebdo because we are all Charlie Hebdo.
The opposite. It sent in the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi because Charlie Hebdo was almost alone.
Yes, that’s right, almost alone, despite the hundreds of thousands marching with their “Je Suis Charlie” placards. The more you think about it, the more you can understand why the surviving journalists at Charlie Hebdo regard all their new “friends” with scorn and contempt. “We vomit on these people who suddenly say they are our friends,” said one of the magazine’s cartoonists.
“Almost alone,” Bolt said. Even the Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that originally published the cartoons that provided Muslims with a pretext for mayhem and murder, even that paper has declined to republish anything that might be “offensive” to Muslims because, they said, “violence works.”
I’ll have more to say about this and related issues in the coming days. For now, I want to call my readers’ attention to Andrew Bolt’s incisive column. Let me recommend in particular his phrase “our gutless surrender.”
“Our gutless surrender.” Remember that, please, the next time a Muslim goes on a shooting rampage at a U.S. military installation, killing thirteen while shouting “Allabu Akbar.” Islamic terrorism or just, as the Obama administration insisted, mere “workplace violence”? Remember it the next time a mullah in Tehran calls upon the faithful to murder a novelist because said mullah decided that the book “insulted” Islam, Mohammed, or his aunt Nellie. Remember it the next time that a marathon race in Boston is bombed by young Muslims, or a subway in London is bombed by Muslims, or some coffee shop patrons in Sydney are killed, or some skyscrapers in New York are destroyed by Muslims. Islam is a religion of peace, President Bush said after 9/11. A United States consular facility in Benghazi was overrun by al Qaeda-trained terrorists on September 11, 2012, and four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya, were murdered. Response? The United States says that regrettable event was a “spontaneous uprising” sparked by a sophomoric internet video making fun of Mohammed. We can’t even acknowledge what really happened. When Boko Haram jihadists kidnapped nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, Bolt reminds us, “forcing them to convert to Islam and selling them to be raped, Islamist apologist and terrorism lecturer Waleed Aly refused even to acknowledge on Channel 10 that Boko Haram actually had an Islamist agenda, describing it merely as a group of vigilantes.”
“Our gutless surrender.” It’s not merely capitulation to external intimidation. Self-surrender, self-censorship is also part of the agenda. Australian journalists, Bolt reports, “haven’t really needed a muzzle. They have been only too eager to shut themselves up rather than call out the growing threat of jihadism, brought to us by insanely stupid programs of mass immigration from the Third World.”
Quite right. Voltaire famously remarked that “Qui plume a, guerre a,” who has a pen has a war. The pen, we are told, is mightier than the sword. But Bolt points out that the journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo last week had a fistful of pens. They were no match for two Kalashnikovs.
“We are all Charlie?” Bolt asks.
Bull. Absolute self-serving rubish. The sell-outs are everywhere and will grow stronger.
The West’s political leaders have already told Muslim leaders they agree that mocking Islam is a sin, and have even passed laws — in France, too — making it unlawful.
They have attacked the very few journalists and politicians who dared warn against the Islamist threat.
Some now back Muslim demands for a boycott of Israel or at least greater recognition for the terrorists who run large parts of Palestinian territory.
Anything for peace, even if it means submission.
And for all the protests this past week, submission is what you must expect.
Think he is wrong?
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