The HHH – Hamas/Hezbollah Huggers on the Left, LGBT Rights Deniers on the Right

Between the Hamas and Hezbollah Huggers on the left and the gay haters on the right, it can get lonely.

Let’s call the Hamas/Hezbollah Huggers the “HHH”. And, then, there are the “gay haters” on the religious right? Are they merely strong “dislikers” of The Gay and LGBT in general?

OK, these gay “dislikers” claim they don’t hate, they just think the Gay is a “lifestyle” that can be cured or prayed into non-existence. Good luck with that.

I’m not always inclined to eschew hyperbole, but in political discourse a person must tread carefully, if he or she wishes to communicate and not simply engage in rhetorical grandstanding. But, it is hard having to hear nonsense about LGBT people on one hand, and on the other – to hear the most radically hateful torturers of gay and lesbian, and sometimes trans people lauded, often by LGBT people themselves.

But let’s start with the facts. The Christians who are anti-LGBT are easy targets. Which isn’t to say they aren’t dangerous or at least — very irritating, but they are sitting duck targets. Call them stupid, hateful and misinformed and you’ve won the day. Not only because you are right as per their views on LGBT rights and people, but also because they are now becoming easy pickings. Even prominent conservative Republicans are beginning to see that gay people have rights and can’t be prayed to straight salvation. I mean Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Rob Portman, and of course, the fighter for gay marriage — Ted Olson. So, it is easier now, with the tide turning, to ridicule the conservatives who cling to gay hating, and you can kick their imagined or real Hillbilly ways and government funded wheelchairs, as in this post:
When your godless Marxist president and his thuggish fascist cabinet officers and his entire godless liberty-hating socialist democrat party and sicko sycophant complicit leftist mainstream media and the god-hating, constitution-twisting black-robed socialist liberal activist judges continue conspiring to promote homosexualism and perversion as not only normal but a healthy, wholesome, desirable activity and way of life and then force it into the curriculum of even our youngest school children, that is tyranny!

You can, poke fun at their perceived inability to distinguish Hitler from Stalin, as some commenters on the above rant do. Certainly this will prove that you are very smart…right? But then, what do you do with the LGBT activists who are often unable to distinguish Hamas from the NAACP?

In the universe of left wing Hamas huggers, anyone who would chide Hamas and deign to point out that women in Gaza are being jailed for having out of wedlock babies, and that people who smoke Hashish are being executed, after a year in prison, are simply being “racist. Hamas and Hezbollah don’t want simple peace and a beneficial co-existence with Israel; they want Israel’s complete and utter destruction. You don’t even want to know how they kill gay people. Let’s leave it at that. These left wing sophisticates seem to want to ignore willfully, that Islam is not a race, and that the radical Islam of Hamas is anti-woman’s rights, and very much anti-gay rights. In fact, it is anti-human rights, and so anti-equality. The concept of “human rights” appears to be missing altogether from the Hamas charter; the idea that every last Jew on earth must be killed, is not.

But I can already hear the cries, the Hamas and Hezbollah Huggers screaming, “But, what about the horrible Christians!” It is true, of course, that there are indeed “horrible Christians” walking amongst us, or at least, Christians who are against gay marriage, or possibly — against even any semblance of gay rights. Most extremely, again, there are Christians who believe that lesbians and gays are “perverse”, and can be prayed to a “cure”, their numbers are dwindling, but they are around. I won’t deny it. These same Christians are most likely not friendly with transsexual people either, or transgender. They are a problem in my universe, don’t get me wrong, I have real issues with this particular Jesus fandom.

However, it is also true that some of these Christians while having reprehensible or just plain mistaken beliefs about LGBT people are otherwise, decent and good people. I know at least one online, and I have known a few in passing, I am related to a few.

Hamas and Hezbollah hugging (“HHH”) left-wingers may also otherwise be decent, intelligent and even – “educated”. Take for example, the well known and influential Hamas/Hezbollah hugger Judith Butler! That woman is obviously “educated”, she now teaches gender performativity at Columbia, but apparently still can’t distinguish Hamas/Hezbollah from social movements that are part of the progressive left. Here:

“Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. “

Below, a nuanced and fair denouement of Butler’s views by Michael Totten. The entire statement from Butler above is quoted and put in context, and her latter statements are also considered. Totten points out that to her credit, Butler has stated she is not in favor of violence, although, as he also points out, violence is certainly being used by the most un-socially liberal Hamas and Hezbollah to accomplish their stated goal of erasing Israel. There is no other way to eradicate a country. And, how Butler can conflate Hamas or Hezbollah with social progress is an obscure point indeed.

Anti-Imperialism Fools

Butler later attempted a facile and smug de-construction of her statements with her usual rhetorical slight of hand, but I can’t help but feel cynical about her smug quibbling. To be fair, she may be denouncing violence, but she is not denouncing Hamas or Hezbollah, and she must if she is to come out on the righteous end of human history. And it is impossible to separate these two organizations from violence. Here a very good assessment of Butler’s inability to tell the good guys from the bad guys, here from writer Petra Marquardt:

“Unsurprisingly, Butler has reacted to criticism of her views regarding Hamas and Hezbollah by complaining that her remarks “have been taken out of context.” Butler mainly emphasizes now that she has “always been in favor of non-violent political action” and explicitly declares: “I do not endorse practices of violent resistance and neither do I endorse state violence, cannot, and never have.”

But it is arguably revealing that Butler chose the Mondoweiss website to publish her most recent rebuttal. Surely an academic of her standing had many other choices and did not have to turn to a site that has often been criticized for posts and as well as antisemitic cartoons? On such a site, it is somewhat strange to read Butler’s lament:

“For those of us who are descendants of European Jews who were destroyed in the Nazi genocide (my grandmother’s family was destroyed in a small village south of Budapest), it is the most painful insult and injury to be called complicitous with the hatred of Jews or to be called self-hating.”

And how come that somebody who evokes such a family history has nothing to say about the Jew-hatred espoused by Hamas and Hezbollah, and their acknowledged ideological sponsors, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime?”

Butler is not alone. There are more than a few Big Q – Queers who welcome Hamas into their bag of lefty tricks, and I regard them with as much opprobrium and bewildered angst as I regard the religious, conservative anti-LGBT right. Big Q Queers are, after all, more than simply LGBT, they regard their mission not as gay marriage or gay soldiering, but as a queer transformation of society, an in-your-face adolescent attitude that is as much uptight curmudgeon/snob and disdain of the ordinary or “normal” as it is visionary or leading edge. While I certainly believe it is important and life affirming to always be leading to the future from a place of new possibilities, the facts often lead just as often to older certainties. Sometimes Queer is a posture and a pose and not about leading us all to a better world. But again, let us distinguish between big Q Queers who wish to abolish marriage altogether, and those lesbians and gays who want the option to get married and have legal recognitions, responsibilities and rights — and who wish to lead productive lives, whether or not these lives are perceived as “in your face” or – well, normal. We can’t all be naked and polymorphous perverse in happy communes and not all of us want to be. I, for one, hate long meetings. Some of us are resigned to an LGBT normalcy that is not trend following, but often, profoundly satisfying to live. As a trans guy, I’m mostly just a normal dude. You wouldn’t think twice if you saw me on the street, and that suits me fine.

So, possibly, since they are “in your face” and hate to think of themselves as anything other than special and trendy, it is only logical that the far left Queer contingent would feign a friendly comradely relationship with the extreme and violently queer hating Hamas/Hezbollah. I mean, Hamas and Hezbollah both hate Amerikkka, and maybe, that’s enough.

Even so, I have always expected more discernment from high riding lesbians like Butler and Sarah Schulman. Schulman has been described thus by Daniel Greenfield… (she) was declaring that gay rights in Israel were part of a conspiracy to “pinkwash” the evil Zionist entity.

Sarah Schulman, a gay rights activist, had to make the confusing argument that gay rights activists should support anti-gay Islamists over Israel. And Schulman was predictably incoherent in trying to make that case. While Sarah Schulman accused pro-Israel advocates of pinkwashing Israel, Schulman was the one actually pinkwashing Hamas.

Butler, Sarah Schulman and other high visibility left wing Hamas huggers are a disappointment, a profound one. As a leftist in my not so distant past, I always had expected them to come down on the right side of human rights. But, possibly I was happily deluded. In fact, I now know for sure that I was. I mean, really now, when has the far left ever come down on the humane side of human rights? I don’t mean the moderate left of center of the Democrat party, I mean the far socialist left, and that’s why Jim from the first blog is not confabulating or confused, when he conjoins Hitler, Mussolini, Mao and Stalin – fascists and communists both in an alignment of tyrants, he’s actually absolutely correct. We can thank Jonah Goldberg’s book
Liberal Fascism for his uncovering of this similarity and conjoinment at the waist of Fascism and Communism. In hindsight, one can certain see the family resemblance.

Conflating the tyranny of National Socialism and Communism is not the sign of an uneducated, drooling rube, but of someone with more than a little common sense and possibly even, some historical acumen. If nothing else, it indicates that a person has a bedrock understanding that liberty, fascism and communism, are not bedfellows. Liberty is not aligned with communism or – fascism. Unfortunately, this simple, straightforward and utterly reasonable understanding does not extend to some of the most politically prominent if not actually astute, LGBT intellectuals. Possibly this is because ultimately, liberty is not their chief concern? It is not a core value. I think the same people who are now making positive, warm-feeling statements about Hamas would have been the same people making positive statements about Stalin. They would have declaimed Stalin as an important part of the “social movements” of the “progressive left”.

Now, this is odd, since you would think that Hamas/Hezbollah and the Christian religious right would make good bedfellows, since they are both not exactly queer friendly, however, obviously — this has not proven to be the case. I have found it confounding that the religious right hates Hamas as much as the queer left appears to embrace it. Even though Hamas and Hezbollah would happily make sure that gays are not only unmarried, but also not alive. This gave me pause; did this mean that our own religious, socially conservative right was different from what I come to believe? Well, yes, and also – no. There is a spectrum… some on that side are only critical of the use of the word “marriage” but would grant civil unions, and while not super keen on gayness or trans people are nevertheless of the understanding that LGBT people are not inherently deranged, evil or bad. Some conservatives are fine with gay people, but these cannot be understood as strict social conservatives. However, on the other hand, there are those on the religious right who don’t give two hoots about gay or trans people, make no mistake. They don’t understand us, they don’t like us, they clearly would rather we did not exist, however, they won’t join with Hamas and Hezbollah to kill us. The story is always more complicated, and in this blog I will attempt to shed the light I’ve found.

Certainly I have come to know, with some painful recognition, that the far left was different than what I had always believed. . Although there are also nuances on that side, and complications.

Complications, nuances, and deconstructions aside – the cold fact remains. Many, if not all, on the socially conservative and religious right are still in opposition to basic LGBT civil rights. The far left is infested with the HHH, Hamas/Hezbollah Huggers, who are oblivious to facts and apparently to basic human rights and liberty. Folks like me who see liberty as extending to all, and who believe in individual rights as bedrock to that fundamental liberty — have an issue. For me, neither the Hamas/Hezbollah hugging left, nor the social conservative religious right, are comfortable places to be. I remain an outlander, an outlier, and an outsider… I think both sides are nuts. And, I can’t decide which is more dangerous to my own personal mental health and peace of mind.

The Coming Muslim Reich | FrontPage Magazine

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted although I have been thinking of posting nearly every day. I mean, nearly every day I see news and read articles that disturb or enlighten. And, this is election season. There is so much to say, and I will attempt to make up for at least some lost time, in the coming weeks. In any event, first, from Front Page, a disturbing video showcasing the emerging threat from Egypt toward Israel.

Phyllis Chesler speaks out against Israeli Apartheid Week and other Academic Delusions

So-called “Israeli Apartheid Week” happened last week at University of Toronto. There are other universities and places worldwide now where it’s also occurring. I don’t want to give the thing more publicity here, so you can look it up on your own if you wish. There’s plenty online about the week of anti-Israel panels and “cultural work”, what it is, and why it is. I’ve certainly taken a good long look and listen. I’ve listened to more than a few panels online and even watched Judith Butler’s keynote at University of Toronto on youtube. You can’t say I don’t pay attention to the side I despise, although I must admit, sometimes — I wonder why I make myself sit through these things. Well, I’ve always been attracted to those I perceive to be adversaries, I’m eternally curious about the opposition, particularly since not too long ago, all things left were mostly not the opposition. Or, so I thought…

I have always been a bit queasy about Israel bashers though, even in my past. I have noticed an escalation of anti-Israel sentiment in the past few years and this has further pushed me away from some of my former comfort zones politically.

One of the people I started reading a few years ago who I have found immensely inspiring on this issue is Phyllis Chesler. I’ve read some of her work online and books, but never heard her speak. I figure since I’d listened to Butler, I should give Chesler her time, and of course, I was moved by her speech and informed. She’s been through a lot in her political feminist journey and if I have even half her courage, I’ll have a lot. She’s lost most of her feminist friends along the way, even being snubbed at funerals of friends in common who have passed away. She is privy to whispered calls from closeted Israel supporters who are also leftist feminists, who can’t dare to risk or give up the things that she has. And, what has Chesler lost? Not only almost all her friends but also grants and publishers and speaking engagements — and some sense of safety when she is actually invited and able to speak at public events. She now has body guards at speaking events due to real physical threats. Her friends now? Besides a few good and very, very few lingering friends from her more orthodox leftist past, she mentions here that she has Christian friends now, and Orthodox Jews. Yes, Christian… And ironically, she works mainly now with dissident Islamic feminists and not western feminists. All her values are absolutely as they always have been: freedom, human rights and women’s rights — but these she believes are no longer served predominantly by the left. And, unfortunately, I must agree.

Her speech here, more eloquent than anything I might say here, and well worth listening to inside this link to her site. An antidote to the Israel Apartheid week cant:

The New Anti-Semitism
When Middle East Politics Invade Campus

Note: The site has an audio recording and a video recording, and I found the audio recording more reliable and less glitchy. Although, YMMV.

Destroy Israel – Egyptian Protestors are hopeful

“Destroy Israel” watch these Egyptian protestors talk of destroying Israel.

Time will tell, what all of this comes to and means. This sentiment, does not bode well.

From here, and thank Pamela Geller as usual for her fearless reporting: Egyptian Protestors

I’ve been watching all of this with ah, great interest. Have some other posts to put up as well.

Feminism and Sharia

The silence of most feminists in the west regarding the treatment of women in many Islamic countries, or the actual rationalization of that treatment, has exasperated me. A closer look reveals the emptiness of feminism’s promise to women, all women, of gender equality. Like many movements on the left, feminism has another agenda beyond the equality of women and the loosening of restrictions concerning gender roles. I think that Caroline Glick in this excellent article, “The Feminist Deception”, connects the dots. She writes:

Nowhere is fraud at heart of feminist movement more apparent than in silence of inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law.

Making the rounds on YouTube these days is a film of a group of manly looking women preparing for and conducting a “flash dance” in a Philadelphia food store. The crew of ladies, dressed in tight black clothes and sequined accessories, arrives at The Fresh Grocer supermarket, breaks into a preplanned chant ordering shoppers not to buy Sabra and Tribe hummus and telling them to oppose Israeli “apartheid” and support “Palestine.”

From their attire and attitude, it is fairly clear that the participants in the video would congratulate themselves on their commitment to the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth suffering under the jackboot of the powerful. They would likely all also describe themselves as feminists.

But if being a human rights activist means attacking the only country in the Middle East that defends human rights, then that means that at the very basic level, the term “human rights activist” is at best an empty term. And if being a feminist means attacking the only country in the Middle East where women enjoy freedom and equal rights, then feminism too, has become at best, a meaningless term. Indeed, if these anti-Israel female protesters are feminists, then feminism is dead.

IN 1995, then first lady Hillary Clinton spoke at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. There Clinton seemed to embrace the role of championing the rights of women and human rights worldwide when she proclaimed, “It is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights…If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”

Yet as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton – like her fellow self-described feminists – has chosen to single Israel out for opprobrium while keeping nearly mum on the institutionalized, structural oppression of women and girls throughout the Muslim world. In so acting, Clinton is of course, loyally representing the views of the Obama administration she serves. She is also representing the views of the ideological Left in which Clinton, US President Barack Obama, the human rights and feminist movements are all deeply rooted.

Since the height of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, non-leftist women in the West and Israel have been hard-pressed to answer the question of whether or not we are feminists. Non-leftist women are opposed to the oppression of women. Certainly, we are no less opposed to the oppression of women than leftist women are.

But at its most basic level, the feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been about advancing the Left’s social and political agenda against Western societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal rights and protections as “structurally” discriminatory against women in order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those societies. That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women’s rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women.

So to a large degree, the feminist movement itself is a deception.

The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law. If feminism weren’t a hollow term, then prominent feminists should be the leaders of the anti-jihad movement.

Gloria Steinem and her sisters should be leading to call for the overthrow of the antifemale mullocracy in Iran and the end of gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia.

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The entire article here, and it is well worth reading in its entirety. The Feminist Deception

Happy Hanukkah and tips on divestment

Happy Hanukkah!

I’m sure most of you have heard of the drive to divest from Israel. Well, here are some tips to help you do so!

WWIII – Iran and the Bomb

This is the kind of thing I do for “fun” on a rainy San Francisco day, watch videos about the beginning of WWIII and what will happen if and when Iran gets the bomb. This is a video of a speech by American/Israeli Caroline Glick and it is directed to Jews in particular, she spoke at the Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Synogogue in Baltimore, Maryland — but it applies to the security of all liberal democracies and of the west in general, and to the world at large.

http://www.youtube.com/v/2VDNupft_oI?fs=1&hl=en_US

Sobering and terrifying…

Academics anti-Israel but not really anti-wife beating

Why do you think I left, the ah – left? Not only this, but things like this, pure and simple. (and yes, my story is – I left the left)

Here…

“Prof. Fred Gottheil told Front Page Magazine that he compiled a list of 675 email addresses from 900 signatures on a 2009 petition authored by Dr. David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of Southern California, urging the U.S. to abandon its ally, Israel. Prof. Gottheil discovered that six of the signers, who hailed from more than 150 college campuses, were members of his own faculty.

“Would these same 900 sign onto a statement expressing concern about human rights violations in the Muslim Middle East, such as honor killing, wife beating, female genital mutilation, and violence against gays and lesbians?” he wondered. “I felt it was worth a try.”

The results? “Almost non existent,” he told Front Page editor Jamie Glazov. Only 27 of the 675 “self-described social-justice seeking academics” agreed to sign Gottheil’s Statement of Concern – less than 5 percent of the total who had publicly called for the censure of Israel for human rights violations.

The refusal of women’s studies professors to publicly condemn honor killings, or academic advocates of gay rights to speak out against the treatment of homosexuals in Muslim countries, is just about as hypocritical as it gets. Their loathing (dare we call it hate?) of the UN-created Jewish state is so deep that it “trump[s] their professional interests,” leading them into a “ideologically discriminatory trap of their own making,” Prof. Gottheil added.
“The academic Left may be just a little more sophisticated [than the non-academic Left] in their loathing of Israel, but scratch the surface and it’s all the same…It turns out that with all their professing of principle, they are sanctimonious bigots at heart.”

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Read more at the Washington Examiner: Prof Calls Fellow Academics Sanctimonious Bigots

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Possibly, it is not so much that they are “sanctimonious bigots” but simply — cowards. And, unable for whatever reason, to stand up for the values they profess that would condemn horrific violence against women. Or, could it be that these lefty professors are that anti-semitic? I honestly don’t know. But, I got tired of hoping the answer was one that I could live with.

Ahmadinejad at the UN – anti-Free Market

Possibly, it is not altogether surprising that the far left finds common cause with totalitarian leaders like Ahmadinejad, even if most of them, with their often unconventional or libertine lives, would be entirely unacceptable in an Islamic Fundamentalist regime. Apparently, they do find things in common nonetheless, since after all, he is also aligned against free market economics as well as Israel… Here, from Libertarian Republican

“Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a speech to the United Nations this morning in New York City, specifically singled out free market capitalism for special criticism. And sounding like an old Soviet Union aparatchik he vowed that capitalism will eventually be defeated.

He stated at a speech in front of the U.N.:
United Nations (CNN) — Attending a United Nations session on alleviating world poverty Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed capitalism for the world’s woes.

“The demanding liberal capitalism (see below) and transnational corporations have caused the suffering of countless women, men and children in so many countries,” Ahmadinejad said at a U.N. General Assembly session on the Millennium Development Goals.

“It is my firm belief that in the new millennium, we need to revert to the divine mindset, to our true nature for which man was created and, indeed, to the just and fair governance,” he said.

At past global conferences, Ahmadinejad’s strong words against Israel have prompted world leaders to walk out. But the hard-line Iranian leader’s comments Tuesday were relatively tempered.

“”Now that the discriminatory order of capitalism and the hegemonic approaches are facing defeat and are getting close to their end, all-out participation in upholding justice and prosperous interrelations is essential,” he said.

Strange bedfellows indeed – the far left and Islamic Fascist extremism. And everyone tippy-toeing to not offend Muslim sensibilities. It’s enough to make you want to become, a – Republican! And, a libertarian leaning one at that. Hah.

Johnny Rotten Neocon Punk Rocker?

While many singers and bands boycott Israel, often under enormous left wing pressure, Mr. Lydon (aka Rotten) is decidedly not going along with the herd.
I really resent the presumption that I’m going there to play to right-wing Nazi jews [sic]. If Elvis-f-ing-Costello wants to pull out of a gig in Israel because he’s suddenly got this compassion for Palestinians, then good on him. But I have absolutely one rule, right? Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won’t understand how anyone can have a problem with how they’re treated.

And, this video from ’77:

And, I would remiss if I didn’t give credit to Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, who is battling “hate speech” charges from the Canadian government. She posted this earlier in the week, August 21st, on her always provocative and often, funny blog: Five Feet of Fury